An obscure flight of steps leading to a fish quay on the banks of the Tyne was the unlikely inspiration for one of the greatest comedy scenes in cinema history, according to a new television documentary.
In 1932, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy won an Oscar for their 30-minute movie The Music Box, whose plot centres on their inept attempts to shift a piano to a house at the top of a painfully high hill.
The film was shot on a straight run of 131 steps in the Silverlake area of Los Angeles, where Sons of the Desert (the official Laurel and Hardy society) has since erected a commemorative plaque.
But the documentary's makers claim its origins go back to 52 narrow steps in North Shields. The programme, to be shown in the Granada and Tyne-Tees regions today and in the Border region next week, suggests that, when the screenplay was written, Stan Laurel was thinking back to his childhood.
Laurel was born, as Stanley Jefferson, in Ulverston (then in Lancashire, now in Cumbria) in 1890, but moved to Tyneside as a boy when his father established a chain of music halls. He lived in Dockwray Square, North Shields, from the age of seven to 11, and later said: "I wasn't born here, but I feel I belong here."
There he became familiar with a flight of steps running down to the fish quay. AJ Marriott, author of Laurel and Hardy - the British Tours, claims in the documentary that Laurel imagined a scene in which removal men cart furniture to an address at the top of the Dockwray steps, only to realise that they could have taken an easier route to the top via a convenient road.
Mr Marriott suggests Laurel remembered this scenario in 1928, when he and Hardy made Hats Off (now lost) on the same Los Angeles steps, a short about two men struggling with a washing machine.
They returned to the scene for The Music Box, with the washing machine transformed into a piano.
In the film, the Laurel and Hardy Transfer Co (comprising Stan, Ollie, a cart and Susie the horse) arrive to deliver the instrument to Prof von Schwarzenhoffen, who lives on top of the hill.
Halfway up, and after many cries of "Heave ho!", they meet a nanny with a pram, move out of her way, and see the piano slide back down the steps.
When they eventually get to the top and find the road, they take the piano back down the steps, load it on the cart and drive up the hill.
"We wanted to show that Stan's art and craft was matured in the tradition of the English music hall," said John Mapplebeck of Bewick Films, the documentary's producer.
