Most writers meet as writers but neither Ray nor I had written before we met so we only ever knew how to do it together. I did the typing and we didn't put anything down until we'd agreed the line, rewriting as we went without doing drafts. For a while we shared an office with Eric Sykes and Spike Milligan. Eric used to write by hand in enormous letters, with three sentences to a page. Spike didn't have the patience to think of the right line so just wrote non-stop. When he couldn't think of a line he'd just write "Fuck it" and keep going. Then he'd go back and do draft after draft until he'd taken out all the "Fuck its". Galton and Simpson met in 1948, while being treated for tuberculosis at the
Milford Hospital near
Godalming in Surrey. The partnership's break in comedy writing came with the
Derek Roy vehicle
Happy Go Lucky. They had been writing gags for Roy at five shillings a time but when the main writers were sacked the pair took over writing the scripts. Tony Hancock was in the show but featured in a sketch written by two Australian writers. They met at a rehearsal and Hancock subsequently asked the pair to write a piece for another radio show he was booked to appear on. They continued to work with Hancock and from 1954 to 1959 they wrote ''
Hancock's Half Hour'' on radio; a series that also ran on television between 1956 and 1961. In October that year Hancock ended his professional relationship with the writers, and with
Beryl Vertue who worked with the writers' at their agency
Associated London Scripts. This writers' co-operative had been founded by
Eric Sykes and
Spike Milligan, with others involved, including Hancock for a time. After their association with Hancock had ended, they wrote a series of
Comedy Playhouse (1961–62), ten one-off half-hour plays for the
BBC. One play in the series,
The Offer, was well received, and from this emerged
Steptoe and Son (1962–74), about two
rag and bone men, father and son, who live together in a squalid house in West London. This was the basis for the American series
Sanford and Son, the Dutch series
Stiefbeen en Zoon and the Swedish series
Albert & Herbert. Their comedy is characterised by a bleak and somewhat fatalistic tone.
Steptoe and Son in particular is, at times, extremely
black comedy, and close in tone to
social realist drama. Both the character played by Tony Hancock in ''Hancock's Half Hour'' and Harold Steptoe (
Harry H. Corbett) are pretentious, would-be intellectuals who find themselves trapped by the squalor of their lives. while Galton collaborated in several projects with
Johnny Speight. In 1996 and 1997, comedian
Paul Merton revived several ''Hancock's Half Hour'' and other Galton and Simpson scripts for
ITV to a mixed reception. Ray Galton's
Get Well Soon, based on his and Simpson's early sanatorium experiences, was broadcast by the BBC in 1997. In October 2005, Galton and
John Antrobus premiered their play
Steptoe and Son in Murder at Oil Drum Lane at the Theatre Royal, York. The play is set in the present day and relates the events that lead to Harold killing his father, and their eventual meeting thirty years later (Albert appearing as a ghost). A series of old plays updated for modern times, entitled ''Galton and Simpson's Half Hour'', was broadcast on
BBC Radio 2 in 2009. The series of four episodes was made to celebrate the duo's 60-year anniversary, and the cast consists of
Frank Skinner,
Mitchell and Webb,
Rik Mayall,
June Whitfield and
Paul Merton. The successful Scandinavian television series
Fleksnes Fataliteter and
Albert & Herbert were based on ''Hancock's Half Hour
and Steptoe and Son''. ==Awards==