With five half–hour episodes to write, we realized we couldn’t do justice to our first TV series unless we gave up our day jobs. It wasn’t such a difficult decision for Laurence. As a journalist, he knew he could always return to his chosen profession. However, Maurice was a civil servant. If he quit his safe pensionable post, there was no going back. He did take the liberty of asking if he could have six months unpaid leave to see how things went. His boss said, “If you take six months off to write comedy, everyone will want six months off to write comedy.” Maurice had no choice but to close his eyes and jump.
We knew that the money from Holding the Fort wouldn’t keep us forever, and were already developing other TV projects. One of them was called Roots, about a dentist. To be precise it was about a Jewish dentist who dreams of being a film director, despite his over–protective, over–bearing parents. This was our attempt to emulate very early Woody Allen, and to indulge our adolescent angst against our own blameless families.
We took Roots to ATV, another of the big commercial TV companies, where Ronnie Taylor, a veteran comedy writer, was the in–house guru. Like Barry Took, Ronnie gave us invaluable guidance and advice, and as a result ATV commissioned a pilot script. Sadly, Ronnie died suddenly. before the script was completed.
In March 1980 we started our new lives as full–time writers, in the tiny spare bedroom of Laurence’s north London terraced house, bashing out scripts on our new state–of–the–art electric typewriter. Holding the Fort was a ratings success, and Michael Grade benevolently commissioned a second series.
ATV, meanwhile, had asked for a series of Roots, on the strength of the sample script. We were elated. With two series to our names we couldn’t be dismissed as mere flashes in the pan. Unfortunately, Roots rapidly turned out to be a disaster. The director/producer seemed to be out of his depth, and many of the cast had little or no experience of playing in front of a live studio audience.
After the first recording we were so despondent we begged Charles Denton, ATV’s Programme Controller, to cancel the series. He thought we were mad. But when Roots hit the screen, the ratings and reviews were so mediocre that within weeks the show was taken off the air. The last few episodes were later allowed out on Sunday mornings, not normally considered prime sit–com scheduling.
We should have been devastated by this debacle, but we had already moved onto our next project, Shine On Harvey Moon, of which we have always been enormously proud. Harvey Moon was the story of a service–man who comes home from the Second World War to no job, no home, and a wife who no longer wanted him. The series was inspired by a famous Life magazine cover, showing a returning soldier running into the arms of his loving wife, waiting with his family outside their brand new prefab. Our comic instincts begged the question, suppose she secretly thinking, “Oh bollocks, I thought he was dead!”
Harvey’s wife, Rita, had had the time of her life during the war – carousing with allied soldiers “Up–West”, never short of nylons and black market luxuries. She’d been exposed to experiences she couldn’t have dreamed of when she married Harvey, and she doesn’t want him back. Harvey has to go and live with his warm hearted martinet of a mum, and try and build a new life.
Nevertheless, he has hope for the future, and a belief that Clement Attlee’s Labour Party will sort the country out. We wanted to contrast this post war optimism, despite the rationing and shortages, with the depressed, angry and uncertain Britain of 1981. We took the idea for Harvey Moon to the BBC. The Head of Comedy was interested, and asked us if we would like to write a “treatment.”
Then our agent told us that Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, the writers of Porridge and The Likely Lads, were starting their own production company, to make comedy series for ATV. We didn’t know what a production company was, but we did know that Dick and Ian were among our comedy heroes. Their new company, Witzend, was run by Tony Charles, an agent turned producer. Tony liked our idea too, but unlike the BBC he offered us £500 to develop the project and every penny counted. Thus Harvey Moon became a Witzend production, and marked the beginning of a life–long creative relationship with Tony, Dick and Ian, and Allan McKeown, the business brain of the company.
Tony assembled a brilliant cast, led by Kenneth Cranham, Maggie Steed and Elizabeth Spriggs, all actors with heavyweight theatrical pedigrees. The show was recorded without a studio audience, and Allan was somewhat concerned that some of the viewers might not know they were watching a comedy. But even before the series was aired, the vibes inside ATV were very positive. Michael Grade had seen the as yet un–transmitted pilot and phoned us to say he thought we had a “massive hit” on our hands…and he was right.
The un–transmitted episodes also impressed ATV’s Controller of Drama, Margaret Matheson, so much that she asked if we could write further episodes of an hour’s length. Although we had never attempted writing ‘drama’, we were keen to see if we could conquer this new realm. We realized that there was more to writing an hour–long episode than gluing two half–hours together. We decided to build the longer episodes around the themes that dominated the reconstruction of post–war Britain, such as health, housing and education.
Dick and Ian were asked to oversee the series. As they were based in Los Angeles, concentrating on the American market, we were flown out at the end of 1981, to work in the adjacent office. Barely two years after quitting our jobs, we were living the dream – staying in Hollywood, driving huge cars, eating huge hamburgers, and playing tennis in January while Britain suffered an onslaught of blizzards.
Thus we were six thousand miles from home when the first episode of Shine on Harvey Moon hit Britain’s TV screens. With the nation snowed in, the audience was massive – the first episode was watched by almost eighteen million people. The press response was gratifyingly enthusiastic too, The Sun calling it “Almost perfect.” Roots was safely buried.
Meanwhile, the third and final series of Holding the Fort, went out in summer 1982, just before the second series of Shine On Harvey Moon aired, coincidentally. LWT’s Head of Comedy, Humphrey Barclay, asked if we had an idea to succeed Holding The Fort. We told him we wanted to ‘spin–off’ one of Holding the Fort’s characters, Fitz, the likeable scruff played by Matthew Kelly. Humphrey was very encouraging. However, Michael Grade had moved to Hollywood to run an American studio, and his successor as LWT Controller of Programmes, John Birt, seemed a very serious fellow with little interest in our new comedy idea.
Luckily for our project, Humphrey decided it was time to leave LWT and start his own production company. He took Fitz – renamed Relative Strangers – and sold it to the brand new Channel 4. As we were also writing hour–long episodes of Harvey Moon, we felt we couldn’t single–handedly deliver twelve slices of Relative Strangers that Humphrey had persuaded Channel 4 to commission. Aware that the best American sitcoms used writing teams, Humphrey and we assembled our own squad. Some of these writers are still colleagues and friends, thirty years later.
Relative Strangers was a huge ratings success for Channel 4, partly through clever scheduling, partly because Matthew Kelly had become a big star through his involvement in Game For A Laugh – one of the first shows to involve the general public in stunts, games and humiliation. The first series of Relative Strangers peaked at nearly nine million viewers, still a comedy record for Channel 4. Our stock rose higher.
Our friends at Witzend were also looking for new shows. We came up with Roll Over Beethoven, the story of a prim piano teacher who falls for a reclusive rock star, when he comes to her house for music lessons. This show, like much of our work, grew out of a serious idea. We wanted to write about the sort of woman who sacrifices her life to look after an invalid parent. What might happen to someone like that to enable them to find love?
Always big music fans, each week we included an original song – written by top composers rather than ourselves. Lisa Goddard, married in real life to pop star Alvin Stardust, was a convincing and sympathetic spinster, opposite Nigel Planer’s confused yet likeable rock recluse. We were privileged to get Richard Vernon, for many decades a leading character actor, to play the crotchety father.
Thus by 1984, we found ourselves responsible for three hit TV series. By 1985 things had changed radically. A new regime at ATV (now renamed Central Television) severed their deal with Witzend, and Harvey Moon and Roll Over Beethoven were no more. At Channel 4 the decision makers declared that Relative Strangers was simply too mainstream and popular for their cutting edge schedule. Suddenly our horizon was work–free.
At this point Hollywood called. To be exact an enthusiastic American agent by the name of Melinda Jason came to England to try and recruit new clients. Our English agent, Linda Seifert, felt it would do us good to work in the USA, so she effected the introduction over tea and dainty pastries at the Dorchester Hotel. Days later we flew to Los Angeles, took two dozen high level meetings, and were hired onto a new comedy series called Mr. Sunshine, at what seemed to us to be stunningly generous rates of pay.
It’s a cliché to say working in Hollywood amounted to a culture shock, only because it is so true. Comedy writing in Britain was a cottage industry, in the USA it was more like working in a factory. We were expected virtually to clock on and off. At home we were used to working on several projects at different stages of development; in America we were expected to devote every moment to servicing one show. It was normal to work way beyond midnight before a studio recording, obsessively tinkering with every line of the script. Quite soon we both were counting the days to the end of our contracts, as if we were prisoners. Yet during our six month ‘incarceration” at the legendary Paramount Studios we learned most of what made our next fifteen years so successful. The American way of team writing was revelatory, as was the serious and hard–working attitude of everybody in the industry.
We left America feeling rather deflated, but back home we were greeted like conquering heroes. Philip Jones, Head of Comedy at Thames Television, (another of ITV’s Big Five) invited us to take the stage at an important conference on the future of TV comedy, where we spoke about our American experiences and how they could be applied at home. We talked about the importance of longer–running series, written by writing teams. Most of our audience smiled in patronizing disbelief.
Among the delegates was a young actor called Rik Mayall, famous for co–writing and starring in The Young Ones. Rik asked us if we would consider creating a series for him? As Rik was wearing a Homburg hat and an astrakhan coat at the time, indoors, as a tribute to Tony Hancock, we brushed him off. But when a few months later we were invited onto the Terry Wogan chat show, to our embarrassment Rik was on the show too. When he asked us why we hadn’t been in touch as promised, we had no choice but to agree to have lunch with him. He turned up to that lunch in a smart suit, and we realised for the first time that he was a charming, handsome adult.
Over coffee (us) and large brandies (Rik) we asked him what sort of character he envisaged playing. Rik told us he was drawn to exhibiting what he considered to be his own worst traits – cowardice, cruelty, depravity and greed. It was 1986, the apogee of Thatcherism, and we realized Rik had just described a composite Thatcherite backbencher. Thus was born Alan B’Stard, the member with the biggest majority in Parliament.
We pitched the project to Vernon Lawrence, Head of Comedy at Yorkshire Television. We had met the affable Vernon at that same Cheltenham conference, and knew he was a big fan of Rik’s. Vernon loved the idea and bought it almost immediately. We then exercised our constitutional rights and asked our local Tory MP, Michael Portillo, to show us around Parliament. This he did, willingly and charmingly. We became friends, even though he was an arch–Thatcherite.
However, several other Tory MPs were publicly hostile, so much so that before the series even aired, we found ourselves on BBC radio, debating the programme with some angry political ‘Rent–a–Quotes’ who we knew hadn’t even seen the show they were condemning. The New Statesman was transmitted at 10pm on Sunday nights, already established by Spitting Image as ITV’s “satire slot.” Audiences seemed to like this late night dose of establishment bashing. The press got the joke too. A few weeks into the first series, the Daily Mirror exposed a philandering Tory MP with the front page headline “What a B’Stard”. Alarmingly, quite quickly certain young Tory wannabes started emulating Alan B’Stard’s Savile Row image.
The New Statesman ran to four seasons, and was awarded an International Emmy. There was also a feature length special, which won us a ‘Best Comedy’ BAFTA in the UK. In the 21st century Alan still refuses to lie down. So far he has returned as a West End stage play, and a national newspaper columnist. Who knows what he’s planning next.
We enjoyed working at Yorkshire Television so much that we took them another project, Snakes and Ladders. This had started life as a feature film screenplay, which, like most screenplays, never got produced. It was a futuristic project, set in the 21st century, when Britain’s North–South divide would be reinforced by a Berlin–style Wall across the middle of the country. Our story concerned two young men with almost identical surnames, whose identities were swapped by a faulty computer. The series went out rather late on Channel 4, and was seen by a small enough audience to qualify as a cult comedy.
We were on location with Snakes and Ladders in Yorkshire (shooting a scene in a prison for the politically unreliable, with Ken Livingstone guesting as himself), when our agent, called to tell us film director Michael Winner wanted to discuss a movie project. We hurried back to London to meet the legendarily irascible Mr Winner at his magnificent West London mansion. Michael announced that he was about to start shooting a feature film, Bullseye, starring Michael Caine and Roger Moore, and the script needed work. Would we be interested in undertaking a rewrite?
We were very excited. This looked like our chance to break into big time Hollywood screen writing. However, the Bullseye script we were asked to fix was based upon a somewhat unlikely premise; Caine and Moore were two conmen who are the identical doubles of two nuclear scientists. We pointed out that the odds against this double coincidence ran into billions to one, but it was too late in the pre–production process to change the idea. We did our best with this resistant material, and were well remunerated. The film, however, bombed. Michael remains a friend, even though most critics include Bullseye in their “bottom ten” lists of worst movies ever made. It remains our sole feature film credit.
Towards the end of the decade the television industry started to come under political pressure. Mrs. Thatcher decided that television was too dominated by the major channels, with consequently over–strong unions. The government decided to liberalise the industry, and order the broadcasters to buy a significant percentage of their programmes from independent production companies.
Although we were hardly fans of the government – in The New Statesman we attacked them with gusto – we were attracted to the idea of owning, and profiting from, our own production company. We had remained good friends with Allan McKeown, the entrepreneur who had started Witzend with Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. He was interested in backing us, and so was born Alomo Productions – Al for Allan, Lo for Laurence, and Mo for Maurice.
We persuaded Esta Charkham, a brilliant casting director turned producer, to come on board as our managing director, even though there were no employees as yet to manage or direct. But by the end of 1988 we had an office and one or two staff. All we needed was a hit TV show. Then Maurice took his family to a Kensington Hotel for Christmas lunch. His eye was caught by two rather over–dressed ladies, who seemed to him rather like gangster’s molls. At least he thought their husbands looked extremely dodgy.
Maurice spun himself a fantasy around these almost certainly innocent couples, based on the observation that one of the men was quite pale while the other was very sun–tanned. He imagined that the two of them had once robbed a bank; the pale one had been caught and sent to prison; the other – the bronzed one – had escaped to Marbella with the loot. When the first one was released, his partner in crime had sneaked back into England to give the other his share of the proceeds.
When we met up again after Christmas, Maurice shared this fairy story with Laurence. Immediately Laurence realized it could form the basis of a comedy series, to star Linda Robson and Pauline Quirke. Linda and Pauline had both featured in Shine On Harvey Moon, and we always knew that if we found the right sitcom project, they could become big stars.
We pitched the idea to the BBC. We had never written for them since the days of Marti Caine, but we considered the BBC the home of situation comedy, and we wanted to have access to their terrific facilities and staff. Despite having no recognized stars – we wanted stage actress Lesley Joseph to complete the cast – the idea appealed to Head of Comedy, Gareth Gwenlan, so much that he commissioned a series on the strength of the first draft of the pilot script, a draft he was only shown by mistake.
Linda and Pauline were brilliant together. Friends since infants’ school, they really did have a sisterly empathy. Lesley provided contrast and more laughter as their man–eating neighbour. But when the first episode of Birds of a Feather was broadcast there was uproar. Birds was raunchier than any previous pre–watershed show, and what was deemed worse, we had women talking candidly about sex. The BBC switchboard was inundated with complaints.
We were summoned to appear the next morning on breakfast TV to defend our work, amid gloomy threats of cancellation. But when we went on TV, amazingly nearly all the calls were from women defending the show as a breath of fresh air. Perhaps some of the calls were from friends of the cast, but surely not all.
Birds of a Feather received a temporary reprieve, which quickly became permanent when the viewing figures revealed we had been watched by over twelve million people. A week later Gareth asked us if we could write and produce a Christmas Special. Although it was already November, of course we said yes.