Paul Whitehouse and Harry Enfield star as Galton & Simpson on Radio 4
- One-off audio comedy drama sees Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse playing comedy writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson
- When Alan Met Ray will be broadcast on Radio 4 on Wednesday 12th February at 2:15pm
- The plot focuses on when the Steptoe And Son writers met in hospital and formed a sketch show together
Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse have reunited to play legendary comedy writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson in one-off Radio 4 comedy drama When Alan Met Ray.
Due to be broadcast at 2:15pm on Wednesday 12th February, the 45 minute programme is set in 1948 in Milford Tuberculosis Sanatorium, which is where the Hancock's Half Hour and Steptoe And Son writers first met.
Enfield will play Galton, with Whitehouse as Simpson. The cast list also features Don Gilet and Lee Ross as younger versions of the writers, with Tony Gardner as Dr Ducaine, Mika Simmons as Sylvia and Simon Greenall as Harry.
Phil Cornwell takes on the character Wally, Toby Longworth plays Dr Franklin, Ian Pearce is a junior doctor and Karen Bartke portrays Alan's mum.
The script for the Radio 4 drama has been written by Andrew McGibbon and Ian Pearce. Together they have previously worked on the 2018 audio production Looking For Oil Drum Lane, which weaved archive interview material from Galton & Simpson with newly written scenes, to follow the tortuous search for Oil Drum Lane, the fictional address of Steptoe & Son.
McGibbon, who also plays Mac Maguire in When Alan Met Ray, has produced and directed the show for production company Curtains For Radio. The episode was recorded at Little Ossington House, which is close by to Orme Court where Associated London Scripts - the agency via which Galton & Simpson worked - were based.
The description for When Alan Met Ray explains: "Told he has only six weeks to live, 18-year-old Ray begins painful treatment to limit the spread of the infection. By chance he meets Alan - the same age - who has just been given last rites following a severe haemorrhage. Striking up a friendship, they discover shared interests - football, girls, watching comedy films and listening to the hospital radio.
"Set against the banal routine of sanitorium imprisonment, where rules are strictly enforced, the play's production and sound design recreate the intense loneliness, horror and abandonment experienced by both young men in the prime of their youth, alongside the camaraderie, happy times and the lasting friendship between Alan and Ray, forged in such a challenging environment.
"Alan and Ray are surrounded by a range of characters trapped in this regulated environment; fellow patients, compassionate nurses and an unempathetic head doctor who enforces the rules for all patients.
"Alan and Ray start writing comedy sketches which they aim to perform on the sanatorium hospital radio. But first they have to get past the notorious radio committee headed of course by the Chief Physician and the presenter of the dismal hospital radio service, Alastair 'Mac' McGuire.
"Alan and Ray battle for the right to broadcast their programmes to the patients. They manage to gain the support of their listeners and with the help of a sympathetic nurse, win over the radio committee, producing a satire aimed at the hospital hierarchy. The sketch show, Have You Ever Wondered?, broadcasting from a broom cupboard they call the mini-BBC, is a hit with patients.
"Ultimately, When Alan Met Ray is a story about two young men, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, stricken with TB, looking at more than three years of incarceration in the grinding tedium of sanatorium life yet finding a purpose and direction out of the mundane bleakness of their unwanted hospital sojourn; a purpose that would in time provide millions of radio listeners and TV viewers joy and delight as the writers of the shows Hancock and Steptoe And Son."
Alan Simpson passed away in 2017 and Ray Galton died in 2019. The story of how they met was previously dramatised in Get Well Soon, a 1997 sitcom by Galton and John Antrobus.
Enfield and Whitehouse, who came to fame via Harry Enfield's Television Programme in the 1990s, last collaborated together on 2022 TV sketch special The Lovebox In Your Living Room.