Steptoe and Son

- Season 8

(1974)

A photographer and his agent come to the yard asking if they can use it as a backdrop for a model shoot. Harold sees it as a chance to make some cash and agrees, sporting a velvet smoking-jacket and shades when the company arrive. The model girls assume he is blind and start to change in front of him, calling Harold a pervert when it is revealed that he can see. Harold suggests that he might pose with the girls to add atmosphere but once again he ends up getting upstaged by his father.

Harold invites convict's wife Marcia Wigley back for sex and they have to wait until Albert goes to bed. Harold's bed collapses after Marcia has fled pursued by a bed bug. He goes to the Bayswater Bedorama and spends two hundred pounds on an erotic water-bed but unfortunately he trusts Albert to plug it in in time for his next session with Marcia. He ends up, quite literally, having his ardour dampened.

Harold is excited to have found an old What the Butler Saw machine, complete with film reel. Unfortunately the nude couple in the film, made in the 1920s, are Albert and his sister-in-law, who were consequently arrested. The vicar arrives, looking for contributions for the church jumble sale, and Harold gives him the machine, minus the film. The Steptoes arrive at the jumble sale to find the What the Butler Saw machine is a roaring success since some boy scouts discovered another old film,which is drawing the crowds. Albert becomes an instant celebrity, since he ...

Local gangster Frankie Barrow is running a protection racket and demands money from the Steptoes. Harold believes they need someone to defend them like in that film 'The Seven'... 'The Seven Year Itch?' suggests Albert. No, 'The Seven Samurai'. Albert assembles Shepherd's Bush's own answer to the Seven Samurai. They might be ancient but they see off Barrow and his heavies all right.

Albert has done his back in and the doctor orders bed-rest since it's not serious enough to warrant hospital admission. Harold is run ragged, climbing up and down the stairs to wait on him and carrying him to the toilet. When Albert's back clicks back into place he maintains the illusion of illness, but Harold has noticed beer and sweets have gone missing, lays a trap to expose Albert, and gets his revenge via the dreaded blanket bath.

Albert comes in late one night having got involved with séances and local medium Madame Fontana, who communicates with the dead via her spirit guide Geronimo. Harold is sceptical and messes about when Albert produces a Ouija board. However Madame Fontana comes to the house to give a séance, along with Dorothy, a widow Albert hopes to marry. Through Madame Fontana the old couple discover that their late spouses want them to marry. Harold's cynicism leads to the discovery that Albert has told Dorothy he is very well off and the medium is actually her daughter working a ...

Harold wants to go to Switzerland for Christmas whilst Albert, as usual, prefers Bognor, though he is persuaded to go provided they sail, rather than fly. However he has no passport and when Harold finds his birth-certificate in order to get him one, it turns out that Albert is the illegitimate son of the muffin man and the picture of his supposed father is really Gladstone. At customs Albert's new passport is accepted but Harold's is a year out of date, so Albert happily goes on the holiday alone, unaware that Harold has actually cooked a scheme allowing him to spend...