When the radio and television scriptwriting star-duo of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson finished chronicling the ambitions and disappointments of Britain's finest comedian, Anthony Aloysius St. John Hancock, they shifted mood from pathos to bathos, and invaded the private life of father-and-son rag and bone men, Steptoe and Son.
The BBC commissioned eight series' of Steptoe and Son between 1962 and 1974, with the final four series' made in colour. This DVD, The Best of Steptoe and Son Volume 2, brings us four episodes from 1973 and one from 1963, and such was the genius of Galton and Simpson that the 1973 scripts seem as fresh as that of 11 years earlier.
Galton and Simpson found the perfect cast in Harry H. Corbett as Harold, the young Steptoe, who is always so agonisingly thwarted in his attempts to move out from the junkyard of his life, to bring some class into the slum he lives in.
And could anyone have been such a convincing Dirty Old Man as his dad Albert, played by the quintessential dirty old man, Wilfred Brambell? He is probably most familiar today as Paul's "very clean" grandad in A Hard Day's Night. He looks the same, he acts the same... he is the same. He's just swapped Liverpool for Shepherd's Bush.
I always found Steptoe Senior intensely irritating - which was, of course, Galton and Simpson's intention - and it was amazing to read recently that Wilfred Brambell and Harry Corbett loathed each other.
Harry Corbett, according to recent chronicling, regarded himself as a 'serious' actor, who hated what he saw as Brambell's unprofessionalism. Wilfred Brambell, we're told, really was a Dirty Old Man. He was mean and vicious, and a raging drunk. With that in mind, no wonder the show was such a runaway success!
I wouldn't place this in the absolute top-drawer of British comedies, a place reserved for such shows as Peter Cook and Dudley Moore's Not Only But Also, Dad's Army, The Young Ones, French and Saunders, The Goodies (why aren't they on DVD?) and, of course, the immortal Hancock's Half Hour.
But Steptoe and Son has certainly earned its place in television history and it is good to have it chronicled, at least in part, on DVD.
The four episodes from 1974 are very similar in quality. It's a fine video image, although the colour is somewhat bleached. Given the BBC's terrible reputation for saving classic television material, it is a minor miracle that it's presented this well.
We move into a different world with the single episode from 1963. This was the worst era of television vandalism by the BBC, with no care given to preservation of what was to become our history. This looks like a video of a video; it's almost as bad as the old kinetiscopes which were the earliest television archival method - just pointing a movie camera at a television screen and hoping for the best...
Four out of five are therefore acceptable viewing; the fifth is definitely here for historical interest only.