Sitcom star's secret HK affair

Legendary Hong Kong broadcaster Ralph Pixton had a gay affair with BBC sitcom actor Wilfrid Brambell, according to a documentary airing in Britain tonight.

The affair apparently took place during the early 1970s when Brambell was at the height of his fame playing the cantankerous old rag-and-bone man, Albert Steptoe, in the hit BBC comedy Steptoe And Son, and Pixton - who ultimately spent 38 years at RTHK - was Hong Kong's premier English-language broadcaster.

The press at the time characterised the two chums as 'lads about town' and featured photographs of the safari-suited pair flirting with young women. The truth, according to the Channel Four documentary however, is that both men were desperate to keep their sexuality secret.

'Wilfrid Brambell was gay and an alcoholic, notorious for his outrageous behaviour,' film-maker David Barrie wrote in the Guardian newspaper yesterday. 'Fearful of his fans' reaction in a less permissive time, he worked hard to keep his sexuality a secret. Once or twice a year, he disappeared to Hong Kong to party with [Pixton] whom many believed were lovers.'

However, any relationship was certainly not exclusive. Making the most of Hong Kong's famed capacity for looking the other way, both men cut a raucous swathe through the territory and - according to anecdotal evidence at least - enjoyed numerous sexual partners.

On one occasion, Barrie alleges, Brambell (above right, with Pixton and businesswoman Jo Mayfield) returned to London with a Malaysian man he introduced to people as his 'valet'. On another, a very drunk Brambell was thrown off a London-bound plane at Singapore after he urinated in the captain's cabin, thinking it was the toilet.