Harry H Corbett interview
Created | Updated Aug 24, 2002
Watching Tuesday nights Channel 4 programme “When Steptoe met son” brought back vivid memories of the day when, armed with my portable tape recorder, I recorded an interview with Harry H. Corbett at his home in St Johns Wood.
Here was a man, seemingly trapped forever in a character so alien to his talents, who could have turned his back on interviews, and hidden behind one word answers and retreated into a netherworld of “no comment.”
It may have been because our interview was primarily for broadcast on the Taunton Hospital radio network, but this was certainly one occasion when Harry decided to open up, and talk freely about things other than “Steptoe.”
Much of our conversation was of course topical and interesting only at the time, but the extracts I have chosen to relate to you are "timeless" illustrations of the mind of a great character actor.
In fact, it was my reluctance to even get around to the subject of “Harold Steptoe” that pleased Harry the most. From the start I sensed that there were so many important moments in his life other than this, so I concentrated on these things, letting him tell it “his way”
He started, where I wanted him to, at the beginning.
“I was born in Rangoon,” he said, as his wife handed me a very large mug of steaming tea.
”My dad was an officer in the Army out there, and I actually came to England when I was just 2 years old. The event is not one which I remember much about. I have been told that I sulked all the way over because my orange rolled overboard !”
“At 17 I joined the marines, and I do remember one vivid moment from those days. I had gone back home on leave to Manchester, and when the time came to leave again, Manchester decided to oblige with its’ usual dose of fog.”
“I was stuck on the station for about 3 hours, cold and very miserable, so I said to myself ‘to hell with this – I am going home.’ Unfortunately when I did eventually get back to Plymouth, I found that my ship had been given urgent sailing orders and had shoved off without me. This got me locked up in the strongbox as we called it – absent without leave and banged to rights.”
Acting was destined to be his life from then on, but to him it had to be “acting with a purpose.”
“I joined the Theatre Workshop. This is a name which implies that it was a place to try out new ideas and beliefs, but it was so much more than that. Around this time in the fifties I found that they still wrote plays where working men had big red spotted handkerchiefs and all the maids had adenoids.”
"We were playing to an audience who actually believed all this, and I got fed up with it. What I actually wanted to do was to go out and build not necessarily a working class theatre, but a theatre which would show a little more truthfully the differences between people.”
“As you know, Steptoe began as a one-off programme called ‘The offer,’ which was part of the Comedy Playhouse series. Every writer has within themselves something which they like to write, which is useless from the point of view of development, marvellous ideas, but ideas which will only go that once.”
“Comedy Playhouse gave the excuses for these vignettes, but I am afraid that modern television now dictates that everything is turned into a series. You therefore no longer see the weird and the wonderful creations that writers have.”
“Despite all I have said about one-off ideas, Steptoe was the exception to the rule, and after months of deliberations the writers Galton and Simpson were persuaded to write a series.”
“The writers – what can I say about them – two brilliant men. Galton and Simpson are what I would call fully rounded and finished men. They do not write from their youth or their youthful knowledge alone.”
“They have bought themselves a Rolls Royce and had that period, they can write about investments and bucket shops, they know about wine, etc etc. It has been possible for them to fit into an advancing society.”
Harry gave me a quick tour of his house, and my attention was immediately drawn to his collection of military items and pictures on his walls.
“These are just cavalry swords and pictures of the Indian army - at a certain point in the history of that country,” he said.
“As you know, my father was in the Indian army, and I began my being anti everything that my father and people like him had stood for. I thought that we had taken India as far as it could go. I felt that it was now time for us to leave. Now that we have lost India, I have re-examined the situation, and changed my mind.”
“You can now actually see what wonderful work these men did. They took out a set of values at the time which were the best ones for settling arguments between the warring chieftains.”
“See – this picture here, it is a very famous picture of the last survivor from Kabul. These boys were taken from all over the country, from Taunton, Liverpool and places like that, and the first town that they would actually see would be Bombay.”
“They went berserk. They did not know where the hell they were. It is frightening – these boys were marched all the way to Kabul over something they knew nothing about, and only one man out of 30,000 came out of it alive.”
“It is horrible – but you have got to appreciate that it is part of our heritage.”
It was time to say our goodbyes, but not before I was asked to shake paws with his dog – “the master of the house” as Harry called him.
The Channel 4 documentary tended to focus on the problems which beset actor Wilfred Brambell. After meeting Harry I can quite understand that the eccentric and uncouth behaviour of Brambell would have left him totally at a loss.
I shall always remember the hospitality which both Harry and his wife showed me that day, and will remember him as both a gentleman, and an ultra professional who cared deeply about his craft.
Here was a man, seemingly trapped forever in a character so alien to his talents, who could have turned his back on interviews, and hidden behind one word answers and retreated into a netherworld of “no comment.”
It may have been because our interview was primarily for broadcast on the Taunton Hospital radio network, but this was certainly one occasion when Harry decided to open up, and talk freely about things other than “Steptoe.”
Much of our conversation was of course topical and interesting only at the time, but the extracts I have chosen to relate to you are "timeless" illustrations of the mind of a great character actor.
In fact, it was my reluctance to even get around to the subject of “Harold Steptoe” that pleased Harry the most. From the start I sensed that there were so many important moments in his life other than this, so I concentrated on these things, letting him tell it “his way”
He started, where I wanted him to, at the beginning.
“I was born in Rangoon,” he said, as his wife handed me a very large mug of steaming tea.
”My dad was an officer in the Army out there, and I actually came to England when I was just 2 years old. The event is not one which I remember much about. I have been told that I sulked all the way over because my orange rolled overboard !”
“At 17 I joined the marines, and I do remember one vivid moment from those days. I had gone back home on leave to Manchester, and when the time came to leave again, Manchester decided to oblige with its’ usual dose of fog.”
“I was stuck on the station for about 3 hours, cold and very miserable, so I said to myself ‘to hell with this – I am going home.’ Unfortunately when I did eventually get back to Plymouth, I found that my ship had been given urgent sailing orders and had shoved off without me. This got me locked up in the strongbox as we called it – absent without leave and banged to rights.”
Acting was destined to be his life from then on, but to him it had to be “acting with a purpose.”
“I joined the Theatre Workshop. This is a name which implies that it was a place to try out new ideas and beliefs, but it was so much more than that. Around this time in the fifties I found that they still wrote plays where working men had big red spotted handkerchiefs and all the maids had adenoids.”
"We were playing to an audience who actually believed all this, and I got fed up with it. What I actually wanted to do was to go out and build not necessarily a working class theatre, but a theatre which would show a little more truthfully the differences between people.”
“As you know, Steptoe began as a one-off programme called ‘The offer,’ which was part of the Comedy Playhouse series. Every writer has within themselves something which they like to write, which is useless from the point of view of development, marvellous ideas, but ideas which will only go that once.”
“Comedy Playhouse gave the excuses for these vignettes, but I am afraid that modern television now dictates that everything is turned into a series. You therefore no longer see the weird and the wonderful creations that writers have.”
“Despite all I have said about one-off ideas, Steptoe was the exception to the rule, and after months of deliberations the writers Galton and Simpson were persuaded to write a series.”
“The writers – what can I say about them – two brilliant men. Galton and Simpson are what I would call fully rounded and finished men. They do not write from their youth or their youthful knowledge alone.”
“They have bought themselves a Rolls Royce and had that period, they can write about investments and bucket shops, they know about wine, etc etc. It has been possible for them to fit into an advancing society.”
Harry gave me a quick tour of his house, and my attention was immediately drawn to his collection of military items and pictures on his walls.
“These are just cavalry swords and pictures of the Indian army - at a certain point in the history of that country,” he said.
“As you know, my father was in the Indian army, and I began my being anti everything that my father and people like him had stood for. I thought that we had taken India as far as it could go. I felt that it was now time for us to leave. Now that we have lost India, I have re-examined the situation, and changed my mind.”
“You can now actually see what wonderful work these men did. They took out a set of values at the time which were the best ones for settling arguments between the warring chieftains.”
“See – this picture here, it is a very famous picture of the last survivor from Kabul. These boys were taken from all over the country, from Taunton, Liverpool and places like that, and the first town that they would actually see would be Bombay.”
“They went berserk. They did not know where the hell they were. It is frightening – these boys were marched all the way to Kabul over something they knew nothing about, and only one man out of 30,000 came out of it alive.”
“It is horrible – but you have got to appreciate that it is part of our heritage.”
It was time to say our goodbyes, but not before I was asked to shake paws with his dog – “the master of the house” as Harry called him.
The Channel 4 documentary tended to focus on the problems which beset actor Wilfred Brambell. After meeting Harry I can quite understand that the eccentric and uncouth behaviour of Brambell would have left him totally at a loss.
I shall always remember the hospitality which both Harry and his wife showed me that day, and will remember him as both a gentleman, and an ultra professional who cared deeply about his craft.
