Steptoe & Son: Series 3 & 4
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  • Published: 2 March 2017
  • ISBN: 9781785295775
  • Imprint: BBC DL
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 8 hr 0 min
  • Narrators: Harry H. Corbett, Wilfrid Brambell
Categories:

Steptoe & Son: Series 3 & 4

16 episodes of the classic BBC radio sitcom

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Collected together for the first time, 16 episodes of the radio episodes based on the TV series.

The complete third and fourth series of the classic radio sitcom starring Harry H Corbett and Wilfrid Brambell, adapted from the much-loved TV series.

Steptoe and Son ran for eight series on BBC TV and even spawned two feature films. Such was the series’ popularity in the mid-1960s that the cast specially recorded numerous episodes for BBC radio.

Here, collected together for the first time, are all the episodes from the third and fourth radio series, scripted and adapted for radio by Hancock’s Half Hour creators Ray Galton and Alan Simpson. In these hilarious episodes, Harold breaks some sad news to Albert; introduces his fiancée to his father; meets his older half-brother and receives some unexpected news from a visitor. Plus, a group of card sharks fleece Albert; Harold and Albert argue over their lack of money; Harold’s wedding day doesn’t go quite to plan and Albert is worried about an offer made to Harold.

The episodes included are A Death in the Family, Two’s Company, Tea for Two, TB or not TB, Without Prejudice, Cuckoo in the Nest, Steptoe and Son – and Son!, Robbery with Violence, Full House, Is That Your Horse Outside?, The Lodger, A Box in Town, The Three Feathers, The Colour Problem, And Afterwards At… and Any Old Iron. Also included is a selection of trailers prepared for overseas radio broadcast.
  • Published: 2 March 2017
  • ISBN: 9781785295775
  • Imprint: BBC DL
  • Format: Audio Download
  • Length: 8 hr 0 min
  • Narrators: Harry H. Corbett, Wilfrid Brambell
Categories:

About the authors

Ray Galton

Ray Galton and Alan Simpson met in a sanatorium in Surrey, where they were both being treated for TB. Ray Galton remembers noticing the six-foot-four Simpson and thinking he looked surprisingly large - ‘you expect everyone in a sanatorium to be thin and weedy, and he was the biggest guy I’d ever seen’. During two years in the same ward, they listened to comedy shows together and also wrote a series of their own, creating a radio room in a linen cupboard.

Having left the sanatorium within a few months of each other, they decided to get a professional opinion of their work and sent a sketch they had written called The Pirate Sketch to the BBC. They were asked to go in for an interview, and soon found themselves writing for the sketch show Happy Go Lucky. Over the next two years they continued to write sketches for a number of big names, before coming up with the idea for Hancock’s Half Hour. Although the BBC took some persuading, eventually the show was scheduled, initially for radio but later as a television series. A phenomenally successful ten years later, Galton and Simpson were themselves very well known names.

After Hancock’s Half Hour they wrote Comedy Playhouse for the BBC, out of which came their second huge television and radio hit, Steptoe & Son. In 1977 they wrote The Galton & Simpson Playhouse, produced by Yorkshire Television for ITV.

Praise for Steptoe & Son: Series 3 & 4

A masterpiece: command of the word, mastery of construct, the ability to stimulate all the senses of the reader.

La Reppublica

Judas is a rich and thrilling novel, one of the most interesting books published this year.

Haaretz

Amos Oz belongs to the great authors of world literature

Suddeutsche Zeitung

Judas is deeply humane, touching and loving. Incredible literature

TROUW

Once again, Amos Oz has given us an absolute, necessary masterpiece

Alberto Manguel

Judas is a great novel that only Oz could have written.perhaps his finest work.

Standpoint

Judas is many-layered, thought-provoking and - in its love story - delicate as a chrysalis, this is an old-fashioned novel of ideas that is strikingly and compellingly modern.

Peter Stanford, Observer

This book is compassionate as well as painfully provocative, a contribution to some sort of deeper listening to the dissonances emerging from deep within the politics and theology of Israel and Palestine.

Rowan Williams, New Statesman

A very absorbing addition to his remarkable oeuvre

Andrew Motion, Guardian

challenging, complex and strangely compelling. The ideas at the novel's centre have great vitality and force. The philosophical passages bristle with linguistic energy, scriptural references and dense detail, vividly conveyed in Nicholas de Lange's translation.

Eva Hoffman, Spectator

He'll no doubt be overlooked for the Nobel Prize yet again next month - this novel shows just how ludicrous that is.

Hephzibah Anderson, Mail on Sunday

It is rich in material to grapple with. Oz engages with urgent questions while retaining his right as a novelist to fight shy of answers: it's a mark of his achievement that the result isn't frustrating but tantalising.

Anthony Cummins, Daily Telegraph

After almost two dozen books that track changes in both heart and state with untiring strength and subtlety, the Israeli master has delivered one of the boldest of all his works. Nicholas de Lange, Oz's distinguished translator, steers these virtuoso transitions between debate and domesticity with unerring skill. Oz can imagine, and inhabit, treachery of every stripe. But he keeps faith with the art of fiction.

Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times

A big, beautiful novel. Funny, wise and provoking.

Kate Saunders, The Times

[Judas is] quietly provocative. Aided by Nicholas de Lange's lucid translation from the Hebrew, it challenges you to think afresh about stories and histories whose interpretations can seem chiseled in stone.

Wall Street Journal (Europe)

Utterly spellbinding ... an especially urgent and profoundly universal work ...Judas is a stately but thoroughly entertaining work, brimming with intricate storylines and characters who are brilliantly alive and get under one's skin. Oz has written one of the most triumphant novels of his career

Ranen Omer-Sherman, Forward

A heart-breaking meditation on roads not taken, and collisions yet to come.

Clive Sinclair, Times Literary Supplement, Book of the Year

It is a tribute to the author's gifts (and to those of his long-time translator Nicholas de Lange) that the novel is so fluid and evocative, at once intellectually stimulating and brimming with humanity. [Oz's] empathy for human weakness, which has always marked his writing, saturates this extraordinary, rich novel.

Natasha Lehrer, Times Literary Supplement

Judas deepens the reader's understanding of conflicts that arguably seem more irresolvable today than they did in 1960. In Lange's lively translation, the sense of place and period is powerful.

Max Liu

Oz has written so well for so long, the craft shows. Judas reads quickly, and gracefully, without a superfluous page.

Ben Judah, Prospect

Vintage Oz, very atmospheric, and heavy on authentic detail. Enjoy reading the book, and then enjoy peeling back the layers.

Max Blackston, Birmingham Jewish Record

Regarded as a potential Nobel laureate. Oz is always worth heeding. It is an important work and as ever Oz's translator Nicholas de Lange attends to the power, intensity and nuance Oz brings to every idea.

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

Judas is yet another accomplished work by a master comfortable in his game. accessibly profound as well as deeply thought-provoking. A must for anyone interested in Christianity, politics, and the meaning of friendship. Otherwise, Judas is a great way to meet one of the most important writers in the 21st century at his best.

Yoojung Chun, Oxford Student

A novel that grapples with mankind's most indelible anxieties, from the nature of damnation to the smaller but no less urgent details of tea-making, Judas is an intelligent and hypnotic novel.

Brad Davies, Independent