humanities Article Cringe Histories: Harold Pinter and the Steptoes Jonathan Bignell   Citation: Bignell, Jonathan. 2021. Cringe Histories: Harold Pinter and the Steptoes. Humanities 10: 83. https://doi.org/10.3390/h10020083 Received: 15 May 2021 Accepted: 11 June 2021 Published: 16 June 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Film, Theatre & Television, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6BT, UK; J.Bignell@reading.ac.uk Abstract: This article argues that cringe humour in British television had begun at least by the early 1960s and derived from a theatre history in which conventions of Naturalism were modified by emergent British writers working with European avant-garde motifs. The article makes the case by analysing the importance of cringe to the BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son, tracing its form and themes back to the ‘comedy of menace’ and ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ emblematised by the early work of playwright Harold Pinter. The article links the play that made Pinter’s reputation, The Birthday Party, to dramatic tropes and social commentary identified in Steptoe and Son and in other British sitcoms with cringe elements. The analysis not only discusses relationships between the different dramatic works on stage and screen but also pursues some of the other connections between sitcom and Pinter’s drama via networks of actors and contemporaneous discourses of critical commentary. It assesses the political stakes of cringe as a comic form, particularly the failure of cringe to impel political activism, and places this in the context of the repeated broadcast of Pinter’s plays and episodes of Steptoe and Son over an extended period. Keywords: television; comedy; sitcom; cringe; theatre; Britain; Harold Pinter; Steptoe and Son; history 1. Introduction Cringe comedies make up a significant body of work in British television situation comedy, with examples including I’m Alan Partridge (Baynham et al. 2002–2003), The Office (Gervais and Merchant 2005), and Nighty Night (Davies 2012). In addition to transfers of British cringe sitcom formats to other territories, such as the US series The Office (Daniels et al. 2019) or Veep (Iannucci et al. 2020), and original programmes devised outside the UK such as Curb Your Enthusiasm (David 2020), the form is evident in other media such as cinema and stand-up comedy performance. Cringe can be defined in a range of ways and has a spectrum of related instantiations, including comedy of embarrassment, gross- out comedy, and awkward comedy (Schwanebeck 2015, pp. 107–11). However, as the examples cited here show, it is a phenomenon most identified with programmes (or films and other works) produced in the twenty-first century. The importance of this article is its historicization of cringe television sitcom, looking at how it emerged in a British context that shaped its main formal properties, social concerns, and modes of address to its audiences. This article shows how a strand of dark, troubling but also comic drama on the theatre stage, spearheaded by the playwright Harold Pinter, laid the foundations for cringe. The article links Pinter’s high-profile stage works to the emergent British sitcom forms represented by the work of the screenwriters Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, especially the BBC sitcom Steptoe and Son (Galton and Simpson 2011). It concludes that some of the critical debates around cringe, especially its political role, can be better understood by tracing its histories. 2. Results Cringe humour in British television had begun at least by the early 1960s and derived from a theatre history. It adopted and blended several components. One was the Natural- ism dominant in 1950s British theatre, underpinning the mainstream dramas of London’s West End, touring repertory theatre, and also the new realist dramas that followed Look Back Humanities 2021, 10, 83. https://doi.org/10.3390/h10020083 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities