The 1990s were the most intense and productive years of our career as TV writers, and probably the most satisfying. Birds of a Feather had been an instant hit for the BBC, and they quickly ordered a second season for 1990. We had long wanted to make series in longer runs than the conventional six or seven, and the BBC showed their confidence in the show by asking for fifteen episodes!
We set up a writing team, recruiting several writers we had worked with previously on Relative Strangers and Roll Over Beethoven. We also decided to give several new writers “a break” on Birds – with mixed results. Some of the new writers developed into mainstays of the Alomo team. Others didn’t quite make it, and the process of making series two of Birds was sometimes rather stressful.
Nevertheless the second run was even more popular than series one. It established Birds of a Feather as a key BBC comedy show, and Alomo as a major comedy producer. By the end of the decade we made over a hundred episodes, including a Christmas special nearly every year. “Birds” was always among the highest rated programmes of the year – at times attracting an audience of almost twenty million.
Alomo had a transatlantic relationship with Fox Studios in Hollywood, and Fox Studios bought the US rights to Birds of a Feather. We didn’t feel experienced enough to try to write an American pilot. Instead we went to LA to watch, and try to influence, our format being changed into the American show Stand By Your Man. The pilot, which starred Rosie O’Donnell in the Pauline Quirke role, was made by Fox for the CBS network. However, CBS decided not to order a series.
Undaunted, Fox Studios sold the idea to their sister company, The Fox Network, and remade the pilot. The network bosses liked the pilot but decided that the cast wasn’t quite right. Yet another pilot was made, at great expense, with Rosie still in the lead. We didn’t think that the third pilot was anything like as good as the second pilot, but Fox Network commissioned a series, nonetheless.
By now we felt mere bemused onlookers of an increasingly surreal process. It seemed clear that the American writers didn’t really want the British originators cramping their style, or indeed, even inhabiting the same city. In any case, we had to return to England to make a new series – number three – of The New Statesman. When we got home, however, the taxi driver greeted us with the glorious news that Mrs Thatcher had resigned. Normally we would have cheered, but instead we were horrified. Her political demise had thrown our new scripts into confusion, and possibly the bin. Luckily, Rik sacrificed himself to the cause. He managed to fall downstairs at a party, broke his arm, the recording dates had to be postponed, and we were able to rewrite.
While we were rewriting series three, the feature length special we had made earlier in the year was transmitted. Lavishly produced by Yorkshire TV, and brilliantly directed by Jeffrey Sax, Who Shot Alan B’Stard led to our winning the 1990 Bafta Award for best comedy.
A few weeks later we were contacted by Alan Field, an old friend who was now Adam Faith’s agent. Adam had been a major pop star in the Fifties and Sixties, who in the Seventies reinvented himself as a TV star in Budgie, a comedy drama about a hapless petty criminal. We’d met Adam nearly ten years earlier, when he’d accepted the lead in Shine On Harvey Moon, only to pull out (a silly decision, Adam agreed later), to be replaced by the perfect Ken Cranham.
Alan asked us if we’d be interested in writing for Adam – again. To Adam’s delight we said “no hard feelings”. Adam had reinvented himself again, this time as a financial journalist and guru, so he was ideal for a project we had been mulling over; Love Hurts, a romantic comedy–drama about a venture capitalist who’s never been in love, who falls for a charity executive determined never to fall in love again.
We pitched the idea to Jonathan Powell, the Controller of BBC1. Jonathan “got it” straight away. (One of the keys to our success at the BBC was our terrific relationship with Jonathan. We liked him enormously – not only because of his wonderful taste in writers). We needed to find the right woman to play opposite Adam in this romantic comedy drama. Then Laurence went to see Arthur Miller’s Crucible at the National Theatre. It happened to star Zoe Wannamaker. The next day Laurence was enthusiastically certain that she was the girl for us.
The BBC ordered a first run of ten episodes, so we gathered a new writing team, and an accomplished producer in Guy Slater, and set to. The first season of Love Hurts was broadcast in 1992, and was a hit with critics and audiences alike. We went on to make three series – thirty episodes in all – and are delighted at how many people still have fond memories of the show.
As Zoe’s character ran an international charity, much of series one was shot in West Africa. Series two saw Frank and Tessa in Russia, witnessing the implosion of the Communist system, while season three took them to Israel. Unfortunately, we were so busy writing episodes of Love Hurts – and overseeing Birds of a Feather – that most of the time we had to stay at home in England.
It may be no coincidence that the year Love Hurts premiered saw us receive another Bafta, this time the prestigious Writers’ Award. No longer were we perceived within the television industry as “merely” comedy writers. The list of the previous recipients of the Writers’ Award includes the names of almost every TV writer we had ever admired, and it was an incredible pleasure to receive this honour just a dozen years after leaving our day jobs.
Alomo really hit its stride with Love Hurts. For the rest of the decade we were one of Britain’s most successful independent production houses. We created a system to turn out large numbers of quality TV episodes, using the so–called “American” method of teams of writers, backed up by some of the best production staff in the country.
Alongside our Marks and Gran shows, we also produced work by other writers. One of the best was Paul Makin. As well as contributing episodes to several of our series, he created and wrote the blackly comic Nightingales, starring Robert Lindsay, David Threlfall and James Ellis, which became a cult classic on Channel 4.
Allan McKeown – the Al of Alomo – was also Chief Executive of Alomo’s parent company, SelecTV, which in 1991 was part of a consortium that bid successfully for Meridian, the ITV franchise for the South of England. SelecTV’s minority shareholding in a regional ITV broadcaster helped underpin Alomo in the expensive business of running and developing a TV production company.
In the midst of all of this, Jonathan Powell told us he was keen for us to offer the BBC all our comedy ideas. Consequently, we signed an “output deal” to develop at least one new show for BBC1 each year, which they in their turn were obliged to broadcast. At the time this seemed a modest proposal, though with hindsight it feels wildly ambitious. However, we did have an idea for a new show – rather a foolhardy idea. We wanted to make a comedy about the problems of Northern Ireland, and we decided that the only way we could find humour in the Catholic–Protestant impasse was to approach the conflict from the point of view of Belfast’s tiny Jewish community.
The new show, So You Think You’ve Got Troubles, starred the brilliant Warren Mitchell as Ivan Fox, a Jewish factory manager who had lost both his wife and his faith. When Ivan gets transferred to Belfast, a local Jewish businessman discovers his origins and insists on dragging him out of his lonely shell and into the synagogue.
Though we had confidence in our idea, we didn’t know Northern Ireland the way we knew North London, and so we recruited two fine Irish writers to help us with the series. Unfortunately they couldn’t echo our style, and in the end we had to disconnect the phones, abolish weekends, and write the last four episodes ourselves, in twenty one days. Despite this, “Troubles” was praised for its content as well as its courage, and was well received, especially in Northern Ireland, where it was a ratings topper.
The six episodes of Troubles told a self–contained story, and we realized there couldn’t be a series two. Instead we turned our attention to the economic slump that was overtaking the country in 1992, and came up with Get Back, a series about the tribulations of Martin Sweet, (married to Loretta). Martin owns a smart menswear shop that goes spectacularly bust. He can’t pay the mortgage on his big detached house, and has no choice but to move his family into his father’s recently vacated council flat. We have always been Beatles fans, so as well as borrowing a Beatles song title for our series’ name, we looked to their songs for the names of every episode and all the characters. (‘Sweet Loretta Martin’ features, of course, in the Beatles’ song “Get Back.”)
Get Back ran for two years, but though it was well reviewed, it wasn’t a huge hit. We realised that during a recession people didn’t want to watch a comedy about a recession. We had great fun, though, working with a cast that featured, amongst others, Ray Winstone in the starring role, and an already impressive sixteen year old Kate Winslett as one of his daughters.
During this period we came to look upon the BBC as a sort of playground. Everybody there seemed responsive to our ideas, so we pitched a one–off crime drama for Screen One, BBC1’s TV movie strand. As “secular” Jews we had long been fascinated by the ultra–orthodox Chassidic community of North London, and a documentary about this introspective sect inspired Wall of Silence, a murder mystery set inside this secretive world. The film was transmitted despite fundamentalist outrage and the odd death threat, and re–united us with Warren Mitchell, who was mesmeric as the (spoiler alert) murderous rabbi in the centre of the story.
Although we found the making of Wall of Silence fascinating – and were privileged to work with multi–BAFTA winning director Philip Saville – we were never allowed to forget (especially by business partner Allan McKeown) that the raison d’etre of Alomo Productions was to make long–running hit comedy series. In any case, we were keen to write a new comedy show, especially as we had no idea how long–lived Birds of a Feather would turn out to be.
Luckily, while we were writing Love Hurts, Laurence had made a stray observation to the effect that there were streets in the East End of London which looked as if they were still locked into the 1940s. This, for some reason, inspired Maurice to say, “That’s a series.” And so it transpired. That chance remark led to our writing Goodnight Sweetheart, the story of Gary Sparrow, a married TV repairman who wanders down an East End alleyway and finds himself back in the Blitz, where he falls in love with Phoebe, a young barmaid with a husband away in the army. When we pitched the idea to the BBC’s new head of comedy, mild–mannered Martin Fisher, we facetiously said “it’s the tale of a man who’s in love with two women, one of whom is probably dead.” Martin said, “I don’t really understand it, but is it going to be funny?” We assured him it would be, and he gave us the go–ahead.
We knew that we needed an extremely sympathetic actor to play the part of Gary, who was, after all, an adulterer. Nicholas Lyndhurst was number one on a short list of one for the role, and happily he too saw the potential in the idea. Goodnight Sweetheart wasn’t an overnight success, but after some judiciously timed repeats of series one, the show suddenly took off and became one of the BBC’s biggest comedies of the decade.
Birds of a Feather and Goodnight Sweetheart kept us busy and fulfilled for the next few years, but on the corporate front there were massive changes afoot. In 1995 SelecTV became part of another consortium, this time bidding to run Channel 5, a new national commercial TV channel. Although our bid was the biggest, and the government had decreed that the biggest bid would win, the regulators decided that our consortium contained too many non–British investors. Instead Channel 5 was awarded to the massive Pearson Group.
This outcome led to a crisis for SelecTV. The government had laid down that “independent” production companies should be entitled to make a quota of programmes for the big broadcasters. But since SelecTV owned 15% of Meridian – a broadcaster – the company was no longer considered an “independent”. We were too big to benefit from being a small company, and too small to benefit from being a big company. It was clear to Allan that the time had come to sell the business.
Ironically, it was Pearson Television who seemed most interested in a takeover. Pearson was run by Greg Dyke, previously Controller of London Weekend TV, We knew Greg quite well, and liked him a lot. When he said he was interested in acquiring us, we were delighted. Greg was fun, spirited, and in no way a typical corporate operator. He loved making programmes, and he loved comedy.
In March 1996 Pearson TV formally acquired SelecTV, our library of programmes, and us. For a few months we enjoyed a wonderful honeymoon. The main change to our lives was that Greg was a keen football fan, and organized a number of corporate jollies to watch England at Wembley during Euro ’96.
1996 also saw us embark upon one of our most ambitious projects. We had long wanted to produce, rather than write, a drama about Sir Oswald Mosley, the 1930s leader of Britain’s black–shirted Fascists. His political journey from Conservative new boy, via Labour rising–star to would be Fuhrer fascinated and repelled us. But several writers whom we approached had told us that the subject was too hot to handle, even sixty years after the war. Instead, one of them pointed out that as Jewish writers we had a better chance of writing about Mosley, without being accused of fascist sympathies. Logical deduction suggested that the best place to take the idea was Channel 4, where both Peter Ansorge, Head of Drama, and Chief Executive Michael Grade (a long time supporter of our work) were Jewish, and unafraid to make waves.
Our deduction was correct. Channel 4 quickly commissioned our proposal for a four hour mini–series. We sought – and were fortunate to get – the support and co–operation of Nicholas Mosley, Oswald’s son. Nicholas was a highly acclaimed novelist, a decorated war hero, and a man who had had to deal with the burden of being the son of his father, with whom he vehemently disagreed, but whom he never stopped loving.
Mosley was hugely satisfying for us – we enjoyed the research almost as much as the actual writing – and audiences found the series engrossing. There was enormous media interest, and a certain amount of censure that we would even dare approach the subject – being Jewish didn’t entirely protect us from the predicted criticism that we were Fascist sympathizers. The bile subsided after our lawyers forced a respected broadsheet to issue a front page apology (and pay our costs) after they published a libelous attack on us.
It had been some time since we had written a new comedy. Then in 1997 we happened upon a newspaper article – not in the paper we’d sued – about divorced couples who had subsequently re–married each other. This seemed to us a simple and captivating idea for what we hoped would be a sophisticated comedy of modern manners. We dubbed it Unfinished Business, and we were so enamoured with the subject matter that we decided that for once we would write all the episodes ourselves.
We had the great good luck to persuade two of the country’s finest actors – Henry Goodman and Harriet Walter – to star in this new show. Both of them had glittering theatrical careers, and they brought their special stage energy to their TV work, garnering superb reviews. We produced two seasons, by the end of which we felt we had told our story. However, working with Henry and Harriet kindled within us the desire to write for the theatre – an ambition we managed to fulfill in the subsequent century.
Apart from our writing, April 1997 was memorable for two of the most unexpected requests in our shared lives as writers. The first was to be asked if we would deliver the keynote MacTaggart Lecture at August’s Edinburgh International Television Festival. We were overwhelmed. The lecture, named after the late and much respected documentary maker, was invariably given by the most important people in the industry: previous lecturers included Rupert Murdoch, Michael Grade, Greg Dyke and Dennis Potter. We had never considered ourselves to be part of this exalted caste, but we seized the opportunity to share with the cream of the TV industry our increasing concerns that the industry under–valued the role and contribution of the creative community.
The second surprise emanated from Melvyn Bragg’s South Bank Show, which wanted to make a film about us and our career. Rather like the MacTaggart Lecture, the South Bank Show featured artists of the highest calibre; we still have no idea how we stumbled into that company.
Consequently, for much of that spring and summer we were either researching, writing and polishing our MacTaggart lecture, or being interviewed and filmed for the South Bank Show. The latter production involved an enjoyably bizarre return to Los Angeles, where the director thought it would be amusing to film us pumping iron at an outdoor gym, surrounded by bronzed and oiled body builders of questionable sexual orientation. In the editing suite he then superimposed the ogling figures of Tracey, Sharon and Dorien.
By the end of 1997 it seemed we were perceived within and beyond the TV industry as spokesmen and opinion formers. We started receiving invitations onto TV and radio programmes, and being asked to express our views in national newspapers. We couldn’t help but enjoy all this attention, whilst realising it was all rather odd and unreal. In the meantime our production company, Alomo, was starting to struggle within the rather restrictive corporate embrace of Pearson Television. Greg Dyke had left the company to become Director General of the BBC, and we felt Alomo was becoming just a small cog in the giant Pearson machine.
We also knew that both Birds of a Feather and Goodnight Sweetheart were reaching the end of their long lives. It was getting harder to sell new situation comedy shows, as comedy slots were being usurped by cheaper “reality” shows and extra editions of soaps. But we had a new sitcom idea that we felt would grab an audience. It was called Starting Out, and was about an ordinary young couple who meet, fall in love, and live recognisable lives; ‘first love’, in other words. The show was also a chance to channel our irritation with the miserabilism of soaps, especially Eastenders.
Feeling we were getting too old to write about young love, we gathered a group of exciting new writers to create the bulk of the scripts. But sadly, the series didn’t get the sort of viewing figures the BBC was looking for, as cable and Satellite channels were starting to nibble at BBC’s and ITV’s audience shares.
Traditionally, the BBC had always given new comedy shows the benefit of the doubt; it was accepted that few sitcoms are hits first time around and need to be nurtured. Sadly, nurturing was going out of fashion. The BBC chose not to recommission Starting Out, and we faced the Millennium feeling a little jaundiced with Pearson, the BBC, and television in general.