As the brave new millennium dawned, we felt the urge to turn again to the challenges of comedy drama. We had started the Nineties with Love Hurts. Could we replicate this success? A genre we had always enjoyed as viewers was the Rockford Files style of light-hearted private eye fiction. Our show was called Dirty Work - about an ex-cop trying to make a living as a private eye in Cardiff. We created the show with Sam Lawrence, a scriptwriter and crime-novelist, with the excellent Neil Pearson in the lead. Unfortunately, the series that emerged didn't really match the series that was playing in our minds' viewing room; budgetary limitations often reduced the impact of the action sequences, and sadly, audiences were underwhelmed.
Our last hurrah for Alomo Productions saw us reunited with Rik Mayall. ITV were keen for us to revive The New Statesman, but Rik didn't want to return as Alan B'Stard. Instead we ventured into the world of academe with Believe Nothing. Rik played triple professor Adonis C'nut, the most brilliant and sexy Nobel prize winner on the planet. Adonis was also a member of the mysterious organisation that secretly controls everything that happens in the world. Viewers took this organisation to be a fiction. The fools. Believe Nothing aired in 2002. We thought it was hysterical, but viewing figures were disappointing; the public simply didn't understand the searingly sophisticated subtext of this post modern masterpiece - or something.
The end of 2001 saw the expiry of our exclusive Fremantle (Pearson) contract. After 13 years intense involvement with our own production company, Alomo, we went back to being 'writers for hire'. Several other production companies were interested in working with us, and over the next few years we were involved in developing projects for Carlton Television, Celador and Sony. Carlton, who held the London ITV weekday franchise, made us an eye-wateringly generous offer to create new shows for them, but before we could bite their hand off they were taken over by Granada, who were buying up all the ITV regional companies to mould them into one ITV. Our deal evaporated.
Instead we signed up to work with Celador, where Humphrey Barclay, our old friend from our London Weekend Television days, was Head of Comedy. There we developed a fantasy comedy project by the name of My Blue Heaven. It told the story of a grey little man who is offered a job by... his childhood imaginary friend, who is large, fluffy and blue. We staged a reading for ITV's big cheeses, who laughed uproariously and then said they couldn't see how to make a comedy show in which half the characters were covered in blue fur. We realised that the only place that this concept would work was radio, and happily Radio 4 snapped it up.
We hadn't worked in radio since the early days with Frankie Howerd, but My Blue Heaven rekindled a passion for radio that continues to the present day. The show, starring Matthew Kelly and Chris Langham, was eventually transmitted in 2006. BBC Radio 4 liked it so much that they commissioned two further instalments, which were transmitted in 2007 and 2009.
Perhaps the most important event of the Noughties occurred in 2003, when Laurence met Sir Alan Ayckbourn, our greatest living dramatist. Invited by the Sunday Times Literary Editor to a dinner to honour Alan Ayckbourn, Laurence found himself seated next to the Great Man himself. Laurence was amazed and flattered when he learned that Sir Alan was a fan of our work. Alan, as we are now permitted to call him, asked whether we had ever been tempted to write for the theatre? Laurence said we had tried, without any success. Alan said that next time we tried we should show it to him.
If ever there was an incentive this was it. We'd been thinking of attempting a play about an overbearing celebrity, and what his friends really think about him. This vague idea transmogrified into Playing God, a comedy about a dying rock star who wants to control the lives of his wife and friends, even after his death.
Alan was extraordinarily generous with his time, inviting us to Scarborough on several occasions, where he gave us a rapid series of masterclasses, during which he modestly said "There is little I can teach you about making an audience laugh, and there is little I can teach you about creating believable characters. What I can teach you is how to get the buggers on and off the stage."
Of course he taught us much more than that. When we met him we were more or less clueless about the specific challenges of theatre; two years later in 2005 Playing God had its premiere at the Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough (artistic director, Sir Alan Ayckbourn). We could now claim to be "men of the theatre".
We had kept in touch with Greg Dyke after he had left Pearson to run the BBC. In January 2004 the BBC's reporting of the Iraq crisis incensed the Blair government, and Greg was forced to resign, despite his huge popularity inside the Corporation. We decided to show our support by taking him out for lunch. We found him in surprisingly good spirits. He had several other irons in the fire, literally, in the case of the golf club he owned. He was also now on the board of the Ambassador Theatre Group, which owns or manages many of Britain's most famous theatres. Furthermore, he was Chancellor of the University of York - and we were wondering how he was filling the empty hours.
Over lunch Greg casually wondered whether we would be prepared to lodge our "archive" at the University of York, where they were building up a significant collection of writers' work. We were extremely flattered. It was also a very timely offer for we were about to downsize our office and hadn't worked out what we were going to do with 25 years of scripts, press cuttings, letters, and video tapes.
Over coffee Greg came up with another suggestion. Ambassador Theatre Group were interested in developing stage projects for television, and vice versa. He wondered whether any of our television series might transfer to the stage? Without having to discuss it, we both realised The New Statesman would work brilliantly... as long as we could persuade Rik Mayall to reprise his role as Alan B'Stard. When we told Rik that Alan was no longer a Tory, but was now the puppet master behind the Blair government, he signed up immediately.
The New Statesman play, entitled The Blair-B'Stard Project, ran from April to August 2006, to astonishingly good reviews, then transferred to the West End in December. Rik as Alan B'Stard had lost none of his appeal or bite and the audiences loved our vicious vilification of New Labour. Tony Blair then got his own back on us by resigning as Prime Minister, and we were forced to rewrite the play for its 2007 run, with Gordon Brown as Alan's new fall guy.
Not long after our lunch with Greg, we met the faculty of Theatre, Television and Film at the University of York. We told them we would be thrilled for them to have and use our archive as a teaching tool. In return what we wanted was an active involvement with the university, which it seemed to us would be interesting and fulfilling. They were delighted by our suggestion, and since then we have been visiting lecturers at the university. Several of our radio plays have had early workshop readings by the students, from which we have probably benefited more than they.
In 2007 our old partner, Allan McKeown came to us with a proposal for a new television comedy series. It was to be set in an Indian call centre, which were very much in the news at the time, and entitled Mumbai Calling. (We preferred Hello Delhi, but the powers that be at ITV feared this was insufficiently PC) The ensuing pilot, co-written by and starring Sanjeev Bhaskar, was shot amidst the fascinating chaos of Mumbai. We enjoyed India and Sanjeev, but were unenthusiastic at the prospect of returning for the months it would take to shoot a whole series. When ITV ultimately ordered the series, they wanted the show to develop in a very different direction to the pilot, and we were only too happy to retire gracefully to the tranquility of our Cotswolds homes.
Apart from Mumbai Calling we were focusing most of our energy on radio and theatre. In both those realms there seemed to us to be a great deal more respect for "the writer's vision." In the same year as Mumbai Calling we wrote an ambitious play for BBC Radio 4, going by the unlikely title Dr Freud Will See You Now, Mrs Hitler. The play, in brief, considered what would have transpired if Hitler had become a patient of the great Viennese psychiatrist.
The seed of "Hitler/Freud" was planted many years earlier, when Laurence discovered a slim memoir by a childhood friend of Hitler's. We learned that the infant Hitler was referred to a Viennese clinic for child mental disorders. Hitler's father refused permission, which was a pity, since the only such clinic in Vienna was run by a certain Professor Freud - who could have done Hitler some good. Our play wondered what might have ensued if Mrs Hitler had been allowed to take her son to Vienna.
Originally we had entertained the ambition of writing this idea as a screenplay, and HBO showed real interest. But at that time we were still running Alomo, and it proved impossible to resolve rights issues between our company and the giant American cable network. The idea went into our bottom drawer for over a decade, until a BBC radio producer asked us if we had any ideas for a Saturday afternoon play.
Dr Freud Will See You made a great impression on the listening public, and even better, on the Controller of Radio 4, Mark Damazer. He even bought us lunch, an almost unheard of extravagance in radio terms. He asked us whether we had further plays to offer Radio 4. We had, but we told him our new idea demanded a ninety minute slot - an almost unheard of length, normally reserved for dead playwrights and Sir Tom Stoppard - as we wanted to use his radio channel to 'dry run' our new play for the theatre. Mark kindly agreed, and we wrote Von Ribbentrop's Watch, which was transmitted in 2008, and became a stage play two years later, at the Oxford Playhouse.
Our third major radio play, Love Me Do, was recorded in July 2012, to be transmitted in October. This is a love story played out against the life and death backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis. October 2012 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of a confrontation that almost led to the destruction of our planet. Once again we hope to adapt Love Me Do (the Beatles' first single was released in the week of the crisis) into a stage play in the near future.
By far the most unexpected twist out of many such in our long career is our recent joyous diversion into the colourful world of stage musicals. Always lovers of pop music, which played an important part in many of our television series (note their titles), we had long felt that Goodnight Sweetheart would make a wonderful musical, particularly as Gary, the central character, passes himself off as a great songwriter and lays claim to some of the best loved tunes of the modern day.
We spoke to a number of theatre producers, trying to interest them in Goodnight Sweetheart - The Musical, but none of them seemed inclined to invest the several million pounds required to realise the project. However, one of these producers, Laurie Mansfield, seemed very much on our wavelength and we spent an enjoyable afternoon with him discussing our shared musical loves. We didn't know - how could we - that Laurie was involved in the production of a musical to be called Dreamboats and Petticoats.
Dreamboats was already a hugely successful compilation CD, masterminded by Brian Berg of Universal Records. Brian persuaded Laurie, and Laurie's frequent production partner Bill Kenwright, that there was a Mama Mia style jukebox musical to be based on the Dreamboats CD. We didn't realise that Laurie had been auditioning us as potential writers of a Dreamboats script.
We all agreed that the musical, to be set in the early1960s, should be light-hearted and happy, and offer audiences an escape from the gloomy economic realities of the present day. We must have done something right because the show rapidly became the hit of the touring circuit, and has been playing major regional theatres almost continuously since February 2009. Even more amazingly, in July 2009, Dreamboats moved into the Savoy Theatre in the Strand, and then transferred to the Playhouse Theatre, just around the corner. It stayed at the Playhouse for a further thirty months, and was nominated for an Olivier Awards as one of the best new musicals of 2010. We never saw that coming.
By this time our long term agent, Linda Seifert, had moved to live permanently in California, where her children and grandchildren now reside. We felt we needed a UK based agent, and asked Laurie who he would recommend. In our ignorance, we hadn't realised he was a top agent as well as a top producer. When he offered to take us on, we were more than delighted to say yes. Happily, we have remained the best of friends with Linda, who remains a wise and knowledgeable presence in our lives.
In 2011 Laurie and Bill asked us if we would like to try to repeat the success of Dreamboats, and provide the script for their new jukebox musical project, Save The Last Dance For Me. Naturally we said yes, and the first national tour took place in 2012. Save The Last Dance For Me differs from Dreamboats and Petticoats in being largely based on the music of one composing team - Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman. Pomus and Shuman wrote numerous hits for Elvis Presley and the Drifters, amongst many others. But for Bill and Laurie this was also a sentimental journey - they had been good friends with the late Mort Shuman when he came to live in England in the Sixties, and had long talked about dedicating a musical to their friend.
The power of the theatre should never be underestimated. 2012 saw the return of Birds of a Feather as a riotously successful touring production. We'd been approached in 2010 by the Comedy Theatre Company, who asked us if we would be interested in writing a stage version of Birds. We agreed, although we felt the show would be unlikely to fly without the original cast, whom we doubted would want to undertake an exhausting theatre tour.
To our surprise, Linda, Pauline and Lesley were interested in "returning to Chigwell", and theatres were booked for the spring of 2012. However, contractual complications meant we started running out of time to write the script. Luckily, our old friends and Birds of a Feather writers, Gary Lawson and John Phelps, came on board to co-write the show. The result was a record breaking tour. We realised, as we watched the girls receive standing ovations, that we had four stage productions playing simultaneously around the country.
Can it get any better than this? Who knows?