[3] The Steptoes have retired their horse Hercules due to lameness, and plan to buy a new one with Albert's life savings of £80, putting £9 away for "emergencies".

Harold returns several hours later from Southall Market, drunk, and introduces Hercules the Second, a short sighted racing greyhound.

Later on, the gangsters turn up to collect the outstanding debt, but after some intimidation Harold manages to stave them off when he shows them that Albert has "died" and they will get their money when the insurance policy pays out.

Knowing that the coffin is actually full of scrap metal, Harold makes the excuse that his father's face is all distorted because of a difficult visit to the lavatory which is what caused him to die.

Back home, the Steptoes discover that the insurance claim would have paid out to Harold after all, due to a clause that Albert had put in the policy if his mistress ever married.

The tone is thus set early on for the second Steptoe film, which – like the first – retains the trappings but none of the subtlety or intimacy of the original TV series. ...

[Galton and Simpson's] original wit, their gift for dialogue (spoken and unspoken), their sharp observation of middle-class behaviour, and their genius for barely perceptible exaggeration of character and situation, have all been sacrificed to the demands of the basic British screen comedy with its emphasis on lavatories, booze, breasts and (curiously enough) the hilarity of death.

Harry H. Corbett and Wilfrid Brambell, willing as they are to keep the characters alive, can do little within these confines to revive the complex, tragi-comic love/hate relationship of father and son which sustained their slim television anecdotes, and it takes Milo O'Shea, as a tipsy, myopic GP, to demonstrate what can be done, even with debased material, to dredge up a few laughs.

Peter Sykes has at least tried to direct the whole enterprise as a film rather than as a blown-up Comedy Playhouse, and one happy result is a lively, ghoulish climax which almost comes off.

Apart from the unnecessary crudeness of its humour, the main problem here is the dilution of the intense, disappointed fondness that made the pair's TV relationship so engaging.