Best known for Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe & Son,
Galton and Simpson are arguably the greatest comedy writing duo of the
twentieth century. The aged Alan Simpson, is also the President of Hampton and
Richmond Borough Football Club. Dulwich Hamlet beat them in the FA Cup today
and have a further two encounters in the Ryman Premier League in the next six
weeks.
Alan Simpson, Tony Hancock and Ray Galton.
I spotted Mr Simpson at half time and had a very brief chat
with him. I read somewhere that he played for Dulwich Hamlet after the war, and
I asked him if this was the case. Sort of, it was the Hamlet’s Junior team, the
under 18s, that he turned out for. And it was only actually one match. “It was
Boxing Day morning 1946.” He told me. “We lost the game 8-3 and I was in goal.”
His services were not required after that.
Perhaps it was for the best. Whilst recovering from tuberculosis
in a Surrey sanatorium a few months later, he met Ray Galton, another inmate at
the hospital, and the pair hit it off instantly. The staff even allowed them to
perform some of their early comedy ideas on the hospital radio station. And
thus began a lengthy writing partnership that brought them great acclaim.
At sixteen I was studying my CSEs at Peckham Manor School.
Among our English reading material – Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger, Of Mice
And Men by John Steinbeck, etc., – was Galton and Simpson’s Steptoe & Son
television scripts. Being something of a mimic, I was always asked by our
teacher to read aloud one of the parts during our English lessons. I could ‘do’
both characters, Harold and his
‘dirty old man’ Albert. One time I was called
upon to read both parts.
Around the same time I had a number of friends who were
hooked on Tony Hancock. We used to sit in cars and rooms laughing our heads
off, and pass around cassettes and LPs of these famous radio and television shows
from the fifties starring the man himself alongside Sid James, Kenneth
Williams, Hattie Jacques and Bill Kerr. Even today, forty years later, we still
find ourselves quoting lines from Hancock’s Half Hour.
I thanked Mr Simpson for giving us Hancock and Steptoe. The latter
is still one of my favourite ever television comedies. He seemed to genuinely appreciate
the thanks and patted me on the shoulder. Then I left him to himself to enjoy
the match. It was end to end stuff, but Dulwich scraped a victory at the death,
an Ashley Carew converted penalty after which he picked up the ball and blasted
it into the crowd, and straight into a woman’s face! “Oh dear!” I thought. Words
echoing what Ray Galton and Alan Simpson wrote for Tony Hancock in the
SundayAfternoon at Home episode: “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh, dear me.”
Jack McInroy, 12 September 2015
