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WRITERS ON WRITING COMEDY
by DAVID BRADBURY & JOE McGRATH

Spike Milligan,
Keith Waterhouse,Barry Cryer,

Michael Palin,
VictoriaWood, Paul
Merton, Graham Linehan
& Arthur Mathews,
Caroline Aherne, John
“forton, |
— f 2 & _
* echel
2
From The Goon Show through Monty
Python’s Flying Circusto Father Ted, comic
writingfor radio, and television filmhas

been fullof high pointsof hilarity.
In this book of interviewsDavid Bradbury

and Joe McGrath speak to some of the
legendary geniusesof the comedy trade,
questioning them on justhow they go
about the taskof writing something funny.
They explorethe worldof jokes, sketches,
plotsand characters.‘They talk about how
to surviveina businessfull of periland
burn-out.And each a reveals sideof
himself and herselfwhich willbe new to
audiences,
The writersand writer/performers

interviewed includethe A-listof the
comedy world: Denis Norden, Spike
Milligan,Johnny Speight,Ray & Galton Alan
Simpson, Keith Waterhouse,Barry Cryer,
Eddie Braben, Michael Palin,John Sullivan,
Richard Curtis, VictoriaWood, Paul Merton,
lan Pattison,Graham & Linehan Arthur
Mathews, Charlie Higson, ArabellaWeir,
Caroline Aherne,John Morton, Chris Evans,
Danny Baker& Will Macdonald.
£12.99
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Now That’s Funny!
Conversations
with
Comedy Writers
David Bradbury
and Joe McGrath
Drawings by Joe McGrath
METHUEN
8
First publishedin the United Kingdom in 1998 by
Methuen Publishing Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA
13579108642
Random House Australia (Pty) Limited

20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney, New South Wales 2061, Australia
Random House New Zealand Limited
18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Random House South Africa (Pty) Limited
Endulini, 5a Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa
Copyright © David Bradbury and Joe McGrath 1998

Drawings © Joe McGrath
The rightof David Bradbury and Joe McGrath to be identifiedas the

authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
Methuen Publishing Limited Reg. No. 3543167
A CIP catalogue record for this book

is availablefrom the British Library
ISBN 0 413 72520 0
Typeset by SX Composing DTP, Rayleigh, Essex

Printed and bound in Great Britainby
The Bath Press, Bath
This original paperback editionis sold subjectto the condition that it

shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or
otherwise circulatedin any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition, including this
condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Papers used by Methuen Publishing Limited are natural, recyclable

products made from wood grown in sustainable forests.The
manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulationsof
the country of origin.
9
From Joe for P. J. McGrath,
also known as Jimmy Jay, Principal Comedian
From David to Jane
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11
Contents
Introduction
Two notes and some acknowledgements
Denis Norden — Always have one secret
Spike Milligan— A fingerof God somewhere
Johnny Speight — Treading on everyone’s toes
Ray Galton and Alan Simpson — Two guys who are
still friendly
Keith Waterhouse — Living in compartments
Barry Cryer — A performer’s temperament
Eddie Braben — Chipping granite with a spoon
Michael Palin— Fish are funny, for some reason
John - Sullivan Always tryingto be different
Richard Curtis— A slow-motion career
Victoria Wood — You have to write from the heart 109
Paul Merton — As seriousas any art form

Ian — Pattison Better than a nine-to-fivejob
Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews — You try and
amuse each other
Charlie Higson — Just keep itdistilling down
Arabella Weir — Standing in the corner
Caroline Aherne — People just saying funny things
John Morton — Less 1s more
Chris Evans, Danny Baker and Will Macdonald —
The currencyof seduction
15
Introduction
The men and women interviewedin this book are among the most
distinguishedand original creatorsof comedy in Britain during the
past half-century.Not only have they kept this nation— and others
— laughing with their inventions: many of them have also created
charactersand catch-phrases which have become part of our culture
and language. Yet in comparison with their creations they are in
many cases hardly known to the public, whose attentionis firston
the characters, then on the performers who bring them to life and
only after that on the writers who imagined them in the first place.
We think of Alf Garnett, then Warren Mitchell, then Johnny
Speight; of Del Trotter, then David Jason, then John Sullivan. Some
viewers, seeing Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise once more greet
André Previn, may not be aware that the scene was written at all,
let alone that it was painstakingly conceived and typed by a
Liverpudlian called Eddie Braben. Only in comparatively recent
years have the professionsof writer and performer largely merged
into one, and the originatorsof the fun been able to share in the
applause.
We hope these conversations with master craftsmen and
craftswomen will help to enlighten readers about an extraordinarily
demanding and difficult trade, much of it carriedon alone and in a
virtual vacuum as the writer faces the frightening question: Is this
funny? The test comes later, usuallyat a read-through or rehearsal,
when the materialis first seen by the performers. This is not often an
occasion for unrestrained hilaritybut for serious, sober professional
assessment. Eric Morecambe used to signal his highest praise for a
lineor an idea not by breaking into laughterbut by peering solemnly
over his spectaclesand declaring firmly: “Now that’s funny! We can
use that.’
16
Xl Now THAT’s FUNNY!
Very small numbers of people,in the scores rather than the hun-
dreds, earn their livingsby creating jokes— so small that the scarcity
value of comedy writers means that their livingsare good ones — but
even so there are too many of them to fit inside this book. So this
selectionis our personal choice, though most people will agree with
a great deal of it.We were not able to speak to all the writers we
would have liked to interview, and there will certainlybe writers
emerging into the business whose names we have not heard. We
hope thatwe have spoken to a selection which, although it cannot be
in a representative profession made up of such
individualists,never-
theless shows their remarkable variety.
This book concentrateson the performing arts, which are at pre-
sent dominated by sotelevision, that is largely the medium under
discussion,and all the people in this book have written for it. But
many of them have also written films, novels, journalism, songs,
plays, stand-up comedy and performance pieces, commercials and
promotions, and radio— a still medium where ideas can be developed
at little financial risk.
Radio and cinema were the dominant media when our writers
pick up the story: Take It From Here, written by Frank Muir and
Denis Norden, started its first series in 1948. The transition to tele-
vision may have been easier than it now looks: one pioneer, Eric
Sykes, advised Galton and Simpson on the essential difference
between radio and TV. On radio, he said, you use the line: ‘Pick up
that bucket!’ On TV the line is: “Pick that up!’
Audiences have not always been ready for innovation:The Goon
Show, in particular, divided families,in those days when a typical
home contained one Bakelite-cased three-waveband five-valve
superheterodyne mains receiver, because it was incomprehensible
to anyone aged over thirty.And there will be those today who are
baffledor even shocked by the ideas of the TF Friday writers—
Chris Evans, Danny Baker and Will Macdonald — on what con-
stitutes comedy.
The growth of television seems now to have been predictable:
why stand in a cinema queue in the rain to buy a ticket and a choc-
ice when you can siton your own sofa with a knife-and-fork supper
on your lap,or at a least pot noodle in your mitt? But surely nobody
could have foreseen the revivalof the stand-up comic, who had
apparently been buried under the rubble of the Metropolitan,
Edgware Road, and the Ardwick Empire, but popped up again in
Soho at the Comedy Store twenty years ago? So there is no attempt
in these pages to see far into the future.
Our interviews were informal; although we had a basic list of
17
INTRODUCTION Xlil
questions, we did not ask them of every writer and their main pur-
pose was to serve as prompts in case a writer’s train of thought
should run into the buffers.We wanted to hear what the writers
themselves wanted to talk about, given the opportunity, rather than
make points ourselves. Nevertheless, we did speak up from time to
time, rather more often than would appear from this book; in edit-
ing the transcriptof our tapes we have assumed that the reader will
be more eager to learn the writers’ opinion than ours. The interviews
have been edited to remove the usual hesitationsand false startsof
unrehearsed conversation,and to bring more coherence to discus-
sions which leaped freely from subject to subject;we have often
altered the sequence in which subjects were raised.
Throughout we have had the pleasureof meeting people who
were variously friends, heroes, legends, stars and complete strangers.
They were unfailingly polite and generous with their time, and a
nicer bunch of people you could not hope to meet. We left every
interview upliftedby an encounter with talent.
Although all the writers in the book take comedy seriously, that
does not mean that they are solemn. Nobody tries to builda mau-
soleum of theory about how comedy works, perhaps warned off by
the famous story about Frank Muir and Denis Norden, appointed
Advisers and Consultantson Comedy to the BBC Television Light
Entertainment Department. On a talent-hunting visitto New York
in the Fifties,they were introduced in their exalted roles to Mel
Brooks, who gazed at them in awe and breathed: “You mean you
know?’
David Bradbury and Joe McGrath
June 1998
18
Two notes and some
acknowledgements
Practitionersmake a distinction between film and tape in the pro-

duction of sketch shows and sitcoms. Typically, exterior scenes used
to be photographed on 16 mm or 35 mm film, using one camera,
with the actors repeatingthe scene if it needed to be photographed
from a second or third angle. The same technique is still used,
though generally with videotape and a lightweight portable video
camera. People nevertheless refer to this as ‘filming’. Studio
sequences are as a rule recorded on videotape through a number of
TV cameras, which are generally heavy devices mounted on wheels
— ‘Daleks’was Victoria Wood’s name for them. The studio has to be
lit from above for all cameras operating simultaneously: the result of
this top-lightingis usuallya flat, characterless picture.The director
chooses shots for recording on tape by watching a group of moni-
tors and ‘mixing’ from one camera to another; in effect,he edits the
performance while itis in progress.Any ‘filmed’ insertsare screened
at their appropriate places in the show for the studio audience to
watch (and their laughterto be recorded).Most writers dislike being
at the mercy of the speed at which the director or his vision-mixer
can think, and some shows, such as Roger Roger in Britain and The
Larry Sanders Show in the United States,are now being made in the
studio with a single camera and without a studio audience. For
others, such as TFI Friday, the bulky studio cameras have been sup-
plemented by hand-held video cameras which provide atflexibility
the cost of a less stable picture than that of the pedestal-mounted
models.
There are several references in the interviews to Dennis Main

Wilson,a name which is familiarto comedy people but is less well
19
TWO NOTES AND SOME ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS XV
known to the general public. Wilson was the most influentialand

rebelliousBBC producer-directorin a particularly creative period
which began in radio afterhe was demobbed in 1945. For the BBC
Home Service he produced the first seriesof The Goon Show. For
televisionhe produced and directed Till Death Us Do Part, Citizen
Smith and Only Fools and Horses. After retiringhe claimed to be
writing his autobiography,to be titled Incest with Auntie. Sadly,it
was unfinishedat his death in 1997.
We owe a debt of gratitudeto Samantha Hill, who transcribedthe

great bulk of the interviews, painstakingly listeningto hour after
hour of tape, much of it interruptedby laughter.Any errorsin the
final version are, of course, due to us, not to her. We are also deeply
indebted, for his support and encouragement,to our publisherat
Methuen, Michael Earley, and his team, particularly David Salmo
and Judy Collins.
Among the many people who assistedin the making of this book
we wish particularlyto acknowledge the help of Jack Bell, Lisa
Clark, Melanie Coupland, Norma Farnes, Roger Hancock,
Christopher Kenworthy, Tessa Le Bars, Daniel McGrath, Peter
McKay, Tim Mack, Ann Miles, Shelagh Milligan, Mike Molloy, Jan
Murphy, John Pilger, Piers Pottinger, the late Dennis Selinger, and
Nick Storey and his staffat the Savile Club. Our thanks to them and
to those who also helped but preferto be anonymous. Our apolo-
gies to anyone we have inadvertentlyleft out.
21
Denis Norden
Always have one secret
From the loose-limbed way Denis Norden lopes around his flat and
officein Soho it is hard to believe that halfa century has passed since
he and Frank Muir began to write one of the funniest and best-
remembered comedy shows on radio, Take It From Here. When
ITMA, which had cheered Britainup throughout the war, ended in
1949 with the death of its star, Tommy Handley, T/FH took its
place at the centre of comedy broadcasting with an appeal to listen-
ers that did not halt at class barriers.In 1950 Muir and Norden
launched the show’s most enduring element,a weekly situation
comedy about a prototype dysfunctional family,the Glums: the dis-
reputable Mr Glum, played by Jimmy Edwards, his moronic son
Ron, played by Dick Bentley, Ron’s genteel fiancée,Eth, played by
June Whitfield,and the disembodied howling of Mrs Glum, pro-
vided by the show’s singer, Alma Cogan.
Muir and Norden moved into televisionwith Whack-O/ starring
Edwards as a beer-guzzling headmaster with a predilectionfor can-
ing small boys, a character which Nineties writers might find diffi-
cultto fit into a comedy. When the partnership ended amicably— its
working methods are described in Muir’s A autobiography, Kentish
Lad — Norden concentratedon film scriptsand also forgeda new
careeras a ofwriter-presenter compilations such as Looks Familiar
and It'llBe Alrighton the Night, while appearing alongside Muir in
the panel games My Word! and My Music. My Word! exploited their
mastery of the extended pun, in which they are rivalled only by
Myles na Gopaleen and his talesof Keats and Chapman. Out of sight
of the general public, Denis Norden also writes scriptsfor sales con-
ferencesin associationwith Europe’s largest company in the fieldof
“industrial theatre’.He had this conversation with us a few weeks
before Frank Muir’s death: at Denis’s request we have kept
22
2 Now THAT’s FUNNY!
referencesto Frank as he made them, in the present tense. After

making coffeein the kitchen, Denis seatedus around a big desk in a
work-room lined with books, filesand playbills.
DENIS NORDEN: What’s the most difficult part of writing

comedy? Two things,I suppose. One is beginning. Always begin-
ning: Fred Allen, who was a great American comedian, used to say:
~ ‘Dirty the paper.’ In other words, while that paper is white, it’s vir-
gin and it’sin charge. Once you’ve dirtiedit, you’ve taken its vir-
ginity and you’re in charge of the paper. So I would always say,
begin. And the other difficult thing, when you’re writinga series,1s
that you have to get intoa frame of mind where there’s something
working at the back of your head the whole time. For example,
when I do an Alright on the Night it takes seven months to prepare
it,to find the material,to look through literally thousands upon
thousands of clips,of which at least ninety-nine per cent are just
boring crap, but you get a gleam of gold somewhere.
So at the back of your mind, all day and all night for the seven
months, you want something, thinking: Suppose I did a compilation
about old ladies?or, Suppose I did a compilation about timing? and
it’s churning the whole time. You then write the script, do the show;
and then the difficultpart is to change that frame of reference you’ve
set up in your mind, so that you don’t go to the next job thinking in
the same way.
Other than that, the difficult thing about writing comedy is
toothache. Toothache’s difficult.That’s the great part about collab-
oration:it lets you have toothache in comfort and luxury;it makes
toothachea pleasure when you’ve got somebody else there.
This desk here is the one that Frank and I used to write at, way
back in the Fifties.It’s what they calla partners’ desk, in that it has
knee-holes both sides and drawers both sides, and it was scruffy
when we bought it. After working at it for about five years we
decided things were going well enough that we could geta new desk.
So we went down New Oxford Street, which was then the street for
office furniture, and we went into showroom after showroom and
they didn’t have a partner’s desk with the drawers both sides and
knee-holes.We finally ended up at some place way down by the
British Museum where we describedit and the guy said: ‘Yes, you
won't, you won’t get one. That partner’s desk,’he said, ‘they don’t
make them any more — because, you see, there aren’tthe number of
partners today. There just isn’tthe trust about.’ And that became a
kind of little private code between Frank and me: There just isn’tthe
23
DENIS NORDEN 3
trust about.
As for equipment, I work on a word processor . . . Is this the kind
of thing you want?
DB: Well, it’s interestingto people who are trying to write.

DENIS NORDEN: We used to write in longhand and then push the
pages in to the secretary,who then typed them out — which was very
good, because the script takes on a sort of different character when
it’s typed. And then Frank and I split,and it’s very difficult,after
eleven years of writing in tandem, to write on your own. When
you're if collaborating, two of you thinka lineor a set-upor
a situ-
ation is funny, then the odds are somebody else will. When you
write by yourself, you’re suddenly faced with the situation that you
may be the only person in the world who thinks that’s funny. So I
used to do all sorts of terribly shameful things for reassurance. Like
I would take the hand-written pages in to the secretaryand leave
them with her and then I would lurk outside the door. If I heard a
sniggerI would rush in and say: ‘What was that? Which line was
that?’Or if she wasn’t thereI would read it to the lift man.
But then of course along came the word processor, which has just
changed my way of life— it’s one of those great life-changinggad-
gets.I distrustedit untilI had a particular job to do, a script which
had to be handed in at midday on a Tuesday, and I leftit on the
Monday evening. It needed to be twelve pages. I’d done ten and a
half pages and I came in here in the morning to do the last one and a
half pages.I knew where I was going, but at about ten o’clock sud-
denly all the lights went out and there was an electrician working
I outside. said: ‘What have you done?’ He said: ‘I don’t know. I just
threw the mains switch...’I said: “You couldn’t. . .” and I went to
the screen and it was blank. And I thought: It’s gone. Everything’s
gone. And I have two options:I can cry and have hysterics,or I can
try to remember. It’s about half past ten, I’ve got an hour anda half
... Pll try to remember as much of it as I can. I remembered the first
sentence. And so I typed in the first sentence, and suddenlya little
message came on the bottom of the screen, and it said: “This existsin
back-up. Do you want it?’ And I typed ‘Y’ for yes, and it leapton
the screen and I involuntarily threw my arms around the computer
and I said: ‘You beauty!’ And I suddenly realised:I’m alone in an
officeand I’m embracinga machine .. . But that did it, that cemented
our relationship.
So now, no I secretary, work on my own, and always in this room.
I’ve always believedin a parachute descent between work and home,
office and home. I keep office hours, and I work five days a week,
24
4 Now THAT’sS FUNNY!
or, when we’re on a project,six or seven days a week. I set myselfa

target to finishand I work on until half past five.But ifI haven’t hit
the target,I stay untilI get there, and then — well, the best advice ever
was Hemingway’s: ‘Always stop, knowing what your first sentence
is going to be next day.’So afterI finish the I target, work out the
next sentence, then pack it in.
jmcc: Do you preferto work alone or with a partner?

DENIS NORDEN: When I was working with a partnerI liked work-
ing with a partner.We splitnot through any rancour or anything:we
split because we accepteda spellas consultantsand advisersto the
BBC Television Light Entertainment Department, and I hated that.
I felt trapped within an organisation.I’m a kind of congenital free-
lance and I wasn’t very good at being an executive. Frank (a) liked it,
(b) was excellentat it.So it came to a point where we said: What do
we do? Frank wanted to carry on, I couldn’t wait to get out, so the
sensible thing was to part. And everybody thinks,if people split up,
then there’s some ill will, and they treat it like a divorce, and they
say, ‘Well, who’s doing your laundry?’ But it wasn’t in any way like
that and in fact we speak to each other at least three times a week,
and, if anything, we’re sort of closer now.
Collaborationisa funny thing, actually.We used to sit across this
desk, as I say, and two human beings weren’t really meant to gaze at
each other for that number of hours across such a small space.I
worked with Melvin Frank for two years and he had a long collab-
oration with Norman Panama — they wrote some of the Bob Hope-
Bing Crosby Road films— and he said that collaborationin some
cases bears the seeds of its own destruction, and that we were wise
to go our ways before rottennessset in. Frank’s my closest friend
and I’m his, and, you know, you should be able to collaborate and
you should be able to work on your own. Alan Simpson and Ray
Galton are wonderful at it,but like Frank and me they don’t seea lot
of each other outside their work. You find that people who are in
each other’s pockets don’t tend to last as long.
Frank and I, really we only met when we were here in an office,
and because we’re two entirely different people— you know, it’s ter-
rible,this interview,it’s like being in a health farm. The whole pur-
pose of a health farm is that it allows you to go up to strangersand
say: ‘I lost three pounds today and I’m a feeling lot better.’It’s a
licenceto talk about yourself non-stop— just like this kind of book.
Anyway, Frank and I had entirely different ideas about what
comedy is. It’s probablya reflectionof the people we are: Frank
thinks all the best comedy is essentially kindly;I think all comedy,
25
DENIS NORDEN 5
all jokes, all laughter isa way of saying “Thank God that wasn’t me’.
In other words, it’s essentially selfish.So who is right? You can’t lay
down the law, but those are the two poles.
People laugh at different things. I’ve always been attractedto
comedians who are untrustworthy, who play characters who are
treacherous.I mean people like W. C. Fields, Larry Sanders,
Groucho, Tony Hancock: you could never trust them, could you?
As distinct from the lovables, the adorables.
A lot of people say that it must have been very difficult, writing
comedy for radio, where you weren’t allowed to mention sex, reli-
gion or politics,which are the very stuff of what comedy consistsof
today. And my answer is: “Yes, but think how many thingswe could
talk about that you can’t talk about today,’ meaning that our audi-
ence then was homogeneous — they all had the same references, the
same allusions, the same kind of education.We could do jokes about
specific poems, about Picasso, ballet. . . and everybody, while they
may not have been experts, knew — you could rely on their knowing
— what our referencesand allusions were about. There was a sort of
common popular culture.
Nowadays, everything is much more fragmented.It may not be as
compartmentalisedby class,but the laddish group and the non-lad-
dish group are just as wide apart as any ‘classes’were, and there’sno
cultural cement that binds the football and lager-drinking jokers to
the non. The country is divided, it’s multi-cultural. Whereas in the
past we could make references to names, to attitudes, that people
shared.To films, for instance.We did so much about movies: every
Take It From Here had a pastiche of a movie at the end of it. They
have television today, but nothing in televisionis as much an event
as a big Hollywood movie used to be. Everybody in the nation knew
about it, they’d been to it,or they were going, whereas some of
today’s people will never watch BBC 2; there are even some who
will never watch BBC at all— their set is jammed on ITV.
That kind of thing used to bind a whole community together,you
see. It’s subdivided so much now. So we didn’t miss not writing
about sex; in fact, we did write about it, but you had to do it inge-
niously.The great one was Spike Milligan— what he got away with,
with his allusions. But those ingenuity muscles that he had to exer-
cise stood him in good stead;he then had them developed for the rest
of his life.
I think most comedy needs a framework of common references
and allusions. Comedy works very well when there are agreed social
conventions and prohibitionsit can butt its head against.Many great
novels and plays are based on adulteryand people doing the morally
26
6 Now THAT’s FuNNY!
wrong thing. Most farces work on a common agreement that it

would be just awful if, for instance, this guy’s wife finds out he’s
spending the afternoon with a young lady at a hotel. Well, now that
it’sno longer the wrong thing, how can you be really funny about
it? You can use words, words such as ‘bonk’ and ‘fuck’, but they
don’t replace the ‘heavy’,the authority figure:the policeman knock-
ing at the door who’s going to find out that the maid is in bed with
the master. And because you haven’t got those powerful figures any
more, it’s difficultfor the comedian to register fright, dismay, the
very stuffof comedy.
The Glums? What they were about to a great extent was that at
that time engaged couples didn’t do it. So Ron and Eth being
engaged allowed us to make all sorts of comparisons, such as: ‘It’s
like drivinga car with one foot on the acceleratorand another foot
on the brake’ or ‘It’s like being given a Christmas present but you
mustn’t open it until — Easter’ those kind of things. People have for-
gotten that convention, that engaged people didn’tdo it, they waited
uncomfortably until they were married. And as this was in the
Fifties going on the Sixties, when change was in the air, Eth had all
those passions boiling within which she couldn’t articulate,she
didn’t even know what they were... And that was our ‘secret’ about
her.
That’s another good thing we learned, and I forget who we
learnedit from: ‘Always have one secret about your sitcom charac-
ters that you never reveal to the audience in so many words’. Never
utter it, but if you keep it in your mind you can make a sitcom char-
acter behave in ways that are not completely — predictable which is
the bane of sitcom. For example, in Whack-O!, Pettigrew, the assis-
tant master, loved Jimmy Edwards; he was in love with Jimmy phys-
ically— true homosexual love. That was our secret;we knew it, but
we never revealed it in any way. But it motivated him, that physical
devotion to Jimmy. And it always helped us.
JMcG: What about Eth? What was her secret?

DENIS NORDEN: Well, her secret was that she was boilingto do it.
Without realising it, she was, as they say today, ‘gagging for it’,but
she couldn’t say it in so many words. Whereas Ron, he was a lump,
he had no fires aflame down there.If you know that’s what’s hap-
pening in their heads, but you don’t say it in words (not that the
words existed back in those days), then you can kindle some
humour. That ‘Oh, Ron’ was really,she was as horny as... But it
was unsaid. The audience catch something of it, but they can’t be
sure,so it just becomes different. That’s all.
27
DENIS NORDEN 7
DB: What are you working on at present?

DENIS NORDEN: They’re just negotiating another contract with
LWT for a further two years, and at this stage I’m looking at clips.
Every show thatI do, I inspect every clip that comes into the office.
Then I do other things— conference work, for example, and that’s
great because it has an immediacy like televisionhas. Films, as you
know, can break your heart: it’s hope deferred the whole time; you
get paid, but you write things that don’t get made. Whereas in tele-
vision what you do gets made and with conferences you’ve even got
a ‘box office’ because you have a client.And the client says: ‘Yes,we
liked that and we did business,’ or, ‘No, we’ll never use you again,’
or, ‘We won’t pay.’ And not only does conference work put you in
touch with a different group of people, the sketches you write get
cast up to the top level.You geta top star cast,you get music, Gillian
Lynne used to do the choreography, and you pick for yourself the
ones where you end up in Rio de Janeiroor the South of France.
When we did these conferences, the sketches I’d write were often
about some new product they were launching. One I remember was
a food product to go into all the supermarkets,and the head of the
company was watching the rehearsalof a sketch and I was standing
about nearby. And he came up and said: ‘Are you sure thisis funny?’
I said: ‘IfI was sure that anything was funny, you would be work-
ing for me, not me for you.’ There is no way comedy can ever be
anything but a risk venture, you can never know for sure. Noel
Coward said: “Write what pleases you. When it ceasesto pleasean
audience, get out of show business.’So all you do is you hope that if
you find it funny, other people will.
It’s impossibleto convince anybody else, particularly somebody
in authority over you, thata thing is funny if he thinksit isn’t. There
is no rationale,no logic you can use. What you’ve got to learnto do
is cut it, and write something else,or hope that someday you'll get
to a position where you can say to him: ‘Listen mate, it’s funny, and
we do it.’But in most cases you should never waste energy and stress
up the situationby tryingto convince somebody who doesn’t think
it’s funny that it really is. Particularlyif it’sa comedian who tells
you: ‘I don’t like that line.’If he doesn’t like it,he won’t do it right,
so give it away. Write another one.
pB: Do you keep them and use them again?

DENIS NORDEN: Oh, yes. They never notice. No, never throw
anything away. We were into conservation long before the
Government hit on the idea.
28
ps: Are there any rules for comedy?

DENIS NORDEN: Robert Benchley said: ‘We must understand that
all sentences that begin with a W are funny.’In The Sunshine Boys,
one of the characters says: ‘Words that have a K in them are funny.’
Now, because there are no rules for comedy, those two rules are as
good as any.
The only other rule that I found is that audiences don’t laugh
when it’s hot. A cold audience, they’llsit there shiveringand they'll
warm themselves with laughter.But if it’s hot, something physio-
logical happens. It’s like sex,I guess: it’s easierto be horny when
you’re very cold than when it’s ‘Too Darn Hot’, as Cole Porter said.
I do think a there’s case for saying that there’stoo much comedy
around, that one advantagewe had back then was that there wasn’t
a lot of comedy to be had, whereas today every bloody thing is
funny. You pick up a matchbox, it’sgot something funny on it. You
go to a greetings card shop, you can geta funny condolence card,or
Best of Luck With Your Gangrene. And so a there’s certain laughter
overload, or laughter exhaustion. Years ago, comedy was an event.
There was only BBC on television,so if something like Whack-O!
came on, they had no choice. They watched it and they were hungry
fora laugh.
jmcG: Is there anybody you rate highly now?

DENIS NORDEN: Oh, lots of people. Paul Merton. Strange, com-
plex sort of performer.I think he’d make any writer’s mouth water
because there’s something there yet to be brought out — that quality
that emerges when he’s ad-libbing,and you think: How can you trap
that? Josie Lawrence is another one who I think is a magnificent
comedienne, reallyone of the great comediennes.
I think with this new stand-up thing— as a kind of generalisation
— that their material is better than they are. They are essentially
writers, they don’t have the ‘fun’ quality. When you think of a
Jimmy James, or a Sid Field or a Ken Dodd, they are funny people.
Pm not talking about the comic actors but the real comedians, the
performers who brought funniness along with them. Stand-ups are
as good as their material,and their materialis very good, but, on the
whole, they don’t add very much to it by their performance.
jmcG: Which writersdo you admire?

DENIS NORDEN: Alan and Ray, I think, are head and shoulders
above every writer who was around back then. Now that Harold
Pinter’s plays are set for O levelsand A I levels, think they’d do as
well setting Galton and Simpson’s scripts, because they show the
29
DENIS NORDEN 9
same grasp of the rhythms and the poetry of ordinary speech. And
their pauses are equally as powerful. Today there’s John Sullivan,
who I think is a tremendous writer.He has all the old-fashioned
virtues, creates a world that is completely true to itself all the time.
Paul Whitehouse, I think, is a good good-ideas man, and full of
quirkiness.
Victoria Wood stands head and shoulders above other solo come-
diennes. She ploughs her own furrow. The brand-name thing that
she does has never been handled betterby anybody. She does what
Cole Porter did with lyrics.
Now that’s another thing with writing. The amount of time that
you waste on details like names, particularly in a collaboration.
You'd say: “We'll call him Paul.’ ‘I don’t like that.I don’t see him as
a Paul.’It doesn’t matter, but you spend hours . . . When Frank
wrote his autobiography,the first thingI said to him was: ‘At least
you'll have no trouble findinga name for the principal character.’
jmcG: Is there something that you really want to do now?

DENIS NORDEN: In my line of country,if you really want to do
something it comes out somehow in what you’re working on. When
I did Looks Familiar, the actual topicI was pursuing was ‘middle
age’.I was older than middle age at that time, but ‘middle-aged’ was
as funny to me as ‘engaged’ had been. It’s practicallythe same, in a
way. You've got all the ‘want to’, but not so much of the ‘can do’. So
I did loads and loads of stuff about that. These days ‘old’ is fruitful.
I had to do a radio programme for the Queen’s seventieth birthday,
and as I’d just gone seventy myself,I took a line about the ‘consola-
tions’ of being that old. One is that you need only four hours’ sleep.
Trouble is, you need it about three times a day. I suddenly thought,
Right, now there’s another area, and it’s now what that engine at the
back of the head is dedicated to. It goes into the scripts thatI write
now; the jokes about the absurdity of old age emerge willy-nilly.
I’m not a writer, though. To my mind, a writeris somebody who
createsa novel, or who writesa play. I’m more likea journalistwith
his own special subjects. You feel you’rea writer, though, when you
start earning your livingby putting words down, and that began
fairly early on afterI left the RAF and started writing monologues
for comedians on radio— Workers’ Playtime, Variety Bandbox, that
kind of thing. They all used to finish with a song for which they were
given plug money by the publishersand that was the cash they gave
me for writing their scripts. Which meant that ifI wrote for Issy
Bonn, who was what they’d calla ‘big plug’— in other words, if he
sang a song it would sell umpteen sheet-music copies— I earned
30
more money than ifI wrote for Harold Berens, who was not con-
sidered much of a plug by the I publishers. had to write for a hellof
a lot of comics. One of them was Bill Waddington — Percy Sugden
in Coronation Street.He used to be a North-country comic — well,
he is still North-country, but in those days he was a very fast-talking
comedian. And a hard taskmaster.
The purpose of comedy? Well, other people may have different
views on it, but I think itis simply to cheer people up. That’s all any-
body has to do, in spite of all the claims made for satire,or for the
way comedy can change the course of history. Which it never has
done, incidentally ...
One quintessential writers’ story?I was chairman of the Writers’
Guild for a time, and there was an agent called Charles Tucker, an
American, who lived over here for something like twenty-five years
and drove a big car. But if he was ever stopped by the police for
speeding, he would say: ‘Is that right, officer? I’ve just arrivedin
your beautiful country.’ He was almosta caricatureof an agent.
Well, somebody once got in touch with him and said: “Our local
Scouts put ona show twicea year in the Scout hut, which is so funny
and it’s written by a fellow who’s a railway clerk in Clapham
Junction, and I really think you should see these shows because the
writingis very, very good.’ So Charlie Tucker went along to one of
these Scout shows, and it was excellent, all about a Cockney family
called the Larkins.
So he went round and found that the writer was a man called Fred
Robinson who, sure enough, worked as a railway clerk,in the ticket
office,and he said to him: ‘Could I have a look at as many of those
scriptsas you’ve written?’So Fred gave him, I think it was eight,and
he read them that night, took them to the BBC next morning and
said: ‘I havea great seriesfor you.’ They came straight back to him
and said: ‘Yes, certainly, we’ll do these.’ And they cast David
Kossoff, and so on, and offered £125 per script— the going price in
those days. Whereupon Charlie Tucker goes back to Fred Robinson
and says: ‘I’ve read your stuff and I don’t know. But, look, I’m a
gambling man and I’m prepared to take a chance on you. What I’ll
do, I'llpay you £75 for each of these episodes.If I can sell ’em, I keep
what I sell ’em for; ifI can’t, all right, I’m a gambler, I’ll lose.’ And,
remember, he’s already sold them. So not only did he make fifty
quid on each episode,but he charged Fred £7.50 commission on each
£75.
Now, the Writers’ Guild got to hear about it, and I rang Fred up
and I said: “Have you got a moment, because there’s something I’d
like to tell you about.’ This, incidentally,was when Frank and I had
31
DENIS NORDEN 11
an officein Conduit Street.So he came up — nice, ordinary-looking

guy — and we explained: “You’re being taken for a ride. But the
Writers’ Guild will go to bat for you, because you’re entitledto the
whole £125. All right, pay him £12.50 commission, but that’s all.’
And he said: ‘ButI don’t want it all.I’m already getting more money
than I’ve ever had in my I life. don’t even know how to spend £67.50
a week.’ So that was that.
They then booked a second seriesand in the middle of it we geta
phone call from Fred Robinson: ‘Could I come up and see you?’
Comes up, and he’s wearing a camel-hair overcoat, with the belt —
you know, one of those long belts— and he says: ‘I'd liketo take you
out to lunch.’ I said: ‘Oh, that’s very nice.’He said: ‘I’ve booked a
table at Verrey’s’— remember Verrey’s in Regent Street?— ‘because
there’s something I'd like to discuss with you.’ So I said: ‘All right,
it’s only round the corner.’ So Frank and I go down with him in the
liftand as we’re walking there he says: ‘What are you going to eat?I
know what I’m going to have.’I say: “What’s that?’He says:
‘Scampi.’Now in those days, you see, scampi was the big luxury.He
says: ‘I have it all the time.’ When we sat down he said: ‘Now,
remember you kindly offered to intervene for me with Charlie
Tucker? Well, it would be a help now. The money doesn’t seem to
be going as far, and I wonder if you could get me up to the £125.’ So
we said: ‘Certainly, Fred, no problem,’ had a word with Charlie
Tucker and he said: “Oh, all right.’ And he paid the money.
The lesson we drew from that, Frank and I privately, was that
when you hear talk about people who have tastedof the tree of
knowledge and were corrupted, the tree of knowledge at that time
was scampi. We worked out that there was a scampi line. Beneath it
were the people who had never eaten scampi and above it were the
people who had it all the time. And once you’d got into that group,
that was it for evermore. He died, Fred Robinson, soon after-
wards...
33
Spike Milligan
A finger of God somewhere
The anarchic tendency in British comedy was represented in the

Fiftiesby The Goon Show. It drew a generation into a fantasy world
which excluded parents, schoolteachersand older workmates, to
whom the cult— as it would be called now — was incomprehensible
and irritating, particularly when whole classrooms of adolescents
combined in mass mimicry of Bluebottle. Spike Milligan was the
Goons’ chief author, co-ordinatingthe apparent chaos generatedby
himself, Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and, initially, Michael
Bentine. Part of the delight which young rebels took in the Goons
was in their irreverence towards the most respected institutions
of the post-war era and such idolised figures as Churchill,
Montgomery and Auntie BBC. Spike’s scripts even subverted the
announcer — for most of the show’s run the pompous-sounding
Wallace Greenslade— into reading out spurious credits such as:
‘Scriptby Spike Milligan and Hugh Jampton.’ The Goons eventu-
ally fragmented, Sellers’s multiple talents taking him towards
Hollywood and Secombe a finding seriesof niches for his ebullient
personalityand blowtorch tenor voice.
Milligan took on television with A Show Called Fred, and the Q
series which followed it, the fearless innovations of which were
watched attentivelyby the fledgeling writers who later combined
to create Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Alongside his writing
Milligan developed a career as a performer of other writers’ work,
includinga major West End success in Son of Oblomov which
benefited from his own improvisatory powers, and appearances as
William McGonagall, Poet and Tragedian. He also established
himself as a best-selling author with a novel, Puckoon, several
volumes of verse, and a hilarious series of wartime memoirs
beginning with Adolf Hitler:My Part in His Downfall. Harry
34
Edgington, mentioned in the interview, was a comrade in the

Royal Artillery.
Spike and his wife, Shelagh, have their home in East Sussex, where
he isa living local treasure: mentioning just the name of his villageat
a shop in the nearest town brought the question: “Are you going to
see Spike, then?’On a wintry day the stone walls of the house gave
ita grim, grey look. But Spike letus in and ushered us through to a
warm, comfortable sitting-roomat the rear of the house with a
panoramic view of the Channel and the shipping.He startedby talk-
ing about his earliest influences.
SPIKE MILLIGAN: My early influences were Edward Lear,

Beachcomber, the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields. They were the
I start. used to laugh at them. I suppose the joke that set me off was
in a Marx Brothers film. Groucho was in a room with Margaret
Dumont, singing ‘I love you, my dear’, when suddenly there’sa
knock at the door. And she says: “Oh, it’s my husband!’ Groucho
says: I ‘What’ll do?’ She said: ‘Duck behind the couch.’So he went
behind the couch and the husband came in and Groucho stood up
and said: “There’s no duck behind this couch!’I thought that was
marvellous. That set me off on abstract comedy.
After that time my first sort of intimationof writing funny was in
the army. Harry Edgington and I used to be on signals duty and
we'd write sort of Beachcomber stuff. Then we went overseas and it
stopped.I wrote one comic limerick,the firstof my poems. There
was a chap in our regiment called Edser. It went:
There was a young man called Edser,

When wanted was always in bed, sir,
One day at one,
They fired the gun,
And Edser, in bed, sir, was dead, sir.
That was the first comic verse I ever wrote...

I stayed neutral then until about 1947 when I heard a comic called
Michael Howard. He never made me laugh, except one joke.He said
there was an old woman who’d never seen the sea. So he took her
there and she watched it and she said, ‘Is that allit does?’I thought
that was wonderful. So I started to write for him. And it must have
been terrible stuffI wrote, because he paid me but then he borrowed
£5. With interest, that’s now about £110. Alas, he’s dead. Well, they
buried him, so he must have been.
35
SPIKE MILLIGAN 15
Then there was a very early crazy show, no audience, that influ-
enced me. Men at Work, it was called, and that used to make me
laugh. I think Max Kester used to write some of it. Then I left the
musical trioI was playing with because they weren’t doing anything
— different the same thing every night.So I decided to leave and the
violinist said: “Yew’ll nevah fahkin’ work agin.’ Well, he was wrong.
I went to work as a barman at Jimmy Grafton’s pub. He was cur-
rently writing for the world’s unfunniest comedian, Derek .. . what
was his name now?
DB: Derek Roy?

SPIKE MILLIGAN: Derek Roy: he was on radio, Variety Bandbox,
and when he came to the punch linehe put a funny wig on to geta
laugh.
JMcG: On radio?
SPIKE MILLIGAN: Yeah. I wrote a show with Jimmy Grafton and I
realised Jimmy really wasn’t,he was not really funny.I put some of
my jokes in, which Derek Roy delivered,so they were certain death
and I didn’t think I was funny at all. Then I met up with Harry
Secombe again and Peter Sellersand Bentine.We used to clown
about and come up with these abstract jokes. Peter Sellershad an in
at the BBC — it was Pat Dixon, he was a very avant-garde producer,
he did Breakfast with Braden. | had somehow a written script and
he took a chance and said: ‘Yes, we’ll do a show,’ and the BBC,
masters of the obvious, calledit Crazy People. That meant they
didn’t think it was funny. They still don’t. Anyhow, they broadcast
Crazy People, which made the band laugh— thank God — and one of
the jokes, which was Harry’s, was: ‘I’ve played the Palladium!’and
Peter said: ‘I’ve never heard it played better!’That was one of the
jokes. So we went on. Eventually we had an audience that were
tuned in to this type of humour. Larry Stephens, who wasn’t really
a funny writer, who was writing it with me, he died in my arms in a
restaurant.So I was obligedto write it myself.
jJMcG: He died?
SPIKE MILLIGAN: Well, he had high blood pressure and he used to
take these blood-pressure pillsin a glassof brandy.I said to him:
“You'llbe the firstto go, you know’... and I remember him look-
ing at me, a horrible stare.
So I startedto write on my own andI startedto write full-length
stories which I can only say were . . inspirational . I don’t know
where it came from. I had to get away from my little daughter,who
36
would come in and stop me, so I got an office with Eric Sykes.I felt
I could get better, and I did improve all the time. I used to take a long
time to write them. That was the worst part of it.I used to go and get
on a train about nine o’clock, the Tube, and go to Shepherd’s Bush,
and I’d work, maybe till midnight, and sometimes there was no
transportand I had to phone Peter Sellersto pick me up to take me
home. So it was a hard slog and then I had this nervous breakdown
and the AA towed me away. So I don’t know, Joe, where it came
from. No more than Van Gogh knew where his paintings came
from. There’s a finger of God in there . . . somewhere . . . The hun-
dred and what-ty odd shows I wrote, I cannot tell you, Joe, how. I
have no idea.It was inspiration,but I know not from where. I sup-
pose it’sme really,but I can’t take credit for it... Where the ideas
came from, I don’t know.
JMcG: You inventeda complete world.

SPIKE MILLIGAN: Do you know, to my amazement, I'd forgotten
about it. I’ve never been very good at I praise. haven’ta very big ego,
but when my son was twelve he said: “‘What’sall these Goon Shows?’
So I said: “Well, Pve got some on a reel here.’ So Saturday morning
in this hut at the bottom of my garden, he used to get all his mates,
and I heard this howling laughterof schoolboys.He said: “That’s
very, very funny, Dad.’ It reoriented my thinking about it and now
apparentlyI get two or three hundred pounds a year from these
tapes — released I don’t know whether they’re released by or they
escape from — the BBC. They’re going to put six on near Christmas.
I don’t know why they’re so fucking stupid. It’s one of the funniest
shows ever and they’ve got it sittingon a shelf. And they won’t
repeat Q, which was the most...
ymcG: Which we did together.

SPIKE MILLIGAN: It was a breakthrough in comedy. And Monty
Python copied it. Mind you, I had some very talented performers in
The Goon Show, Peter especially. Bentine, yes, we had him playing
a part as Osric Pureheart, the inventor of the lead violin and the per-
manently submergible submarine, which was active until the crew
died. And the Giant Bombardon ~ a it’s huge tuba — which could fire
a cannonball...
And then . . .very — disappointing not many people know this. .
.
then Michael Bentine said to Peter — Sellers and Peter recounted
exactly what he said— he said: ‘Look, we don’t need Spike. He’s not
funny.’ And that has stuck in my mind ever since.
37
SPIKE MILLIGAN 17
JMcG: You were one of the very few people that I ever knew who
could give Peter a Sellers reading of a line,and he would take it.
SPIKE MILLIGAN: He used to do it wrong sometimes.I had to cor-
rect him. Well, he was a very close friend. But the Clouseau films...
except for ‘zee aksant’.He only did previous stunts from comedy
films.He was much funnier in The Goon Show. As for Bentine...
Harry thinks he’s wonderful.I went to his memorial service,and
they all eulogised this bastard— whereas, he only bluffed his way. I
went off him when he told me that his mother, sittingat a table, had
levitatedin a chair,and gone across the table and gone down on the
other side.I just couldn’t take that.
I was a very good friend of his;I used to adulate him and I publi-
cised him, being brilliant with that funny look. He was not a comic
or a clown, he was that extraordinary thing calleda droll...He went
on mixing up his act with spiritualismand jokes.
When I firstsaw Harry Secombe, in Italy,he used to speak at 100
miles an hour. Very young, and a Welsh I accent. honestly thought
he was a Polish count. He was the greatest straightman in comedy.
He played Neddy Seagoon superbly.He was perfectfor it; that cut-
ting voice.
jmMcc: And you did some characters, like Little Jim.

SPIKE MILLIGAN: ‘That line came from my father— “He’s fallenin
the water!’We were ona liner coming back from India and the crew
had rigged up a canvas swimming pool. My brother,who was about
six or seven, couldn’t swim. But there was a rope which he used to
swing across, dangle his feetin the pool and go to the other side.One
time he missed and he went under and this littlegirl said to some-
body: ‘He’s fallen in the water!’ and my dad came and pulled him
out.
DB: Do you have a work routine?

SPIKE MILLIGAN: I get up in the morning, and I start to write and
I work until the afternoon. Then I come down and have dinner.
Watch some telly.Then I go to bed. Pretty routine, author’s routine.
ps: Do you decide that you’re going to do, say, a thousand

words?
SPIKE MILLIGAN: No, I don’t I anticipate.do as many as I can. ’m
strugglingto make Treasure Island funny, but there reallyis no
room for puttingin the comedy. It’sall to difficult me, all very dif-
ficultto write funny. What I do is,I bowdlerise great classicslike
Wuthering Heights and my current book is Frankensteinand the
38
next one is The Homosexual Hound of the Baskervilles.
Owooo0000h, wow, woof, woof! They wouldn’t accept it, because

it was too short. Well, the original story is very short by Conan
Doyle and it’sthe worst bloody story he’s ever written; not plaus-
ible. Finally,my manager said: ‘Look, just sellit cheaper.’ “Oh, that’s
a good idea,’ said they. So insteadof sellingit for nine ninety-nine,
they sold it for seven ninety-nine. Thank God they accepted it. Jack
Hobbs used to write books with me. He would egg me on and laugh
at what I'd written.
ps: Is that how collaboratorsare helpfulto you?

SPIKE MILLIGAN: Yes, yes, yes. I would be inspired by his laughter
... Yes, we wrote, I forget, McGonagall meets Gershwin, or some-
thing.
ymcc: You must tell David the story about when Jack Hobbs
was going back in the train...
SPIKE MILLIGAN: Yeah. Actually, he went to Cyprus for a holiday
and he got the squits when he was out there, and when he came back
home from his holiday he stillhad the squits, but he went to work
and, suddenly, in the middle of the afternoon, these fucking things
come on again, and he says: I ‘Christ, can’tgo on the train like this.’
So he went to a shop in Queensway and he said to the man at the
counter: ‘Could I have a pair of trousers,34 waist, and a pair of
jockey pants?’ The chap said: ‘Right, sir.’ He was gettinga bit
strong,so he went outside and walked about a bit. Then he went
back in, chap gave him a plasticbag with the thingsin and he got to
King’s Cross, but, alas, the rush hour had started. He thought, I
can’t sitin a carriage like this— I’llgo to the toilet, and he locked the
door, and then he took off these terrible trousers and the underpants
and threw them out of the window. Think of the poor blokes on the
line! Blonge! So he opened the bag and all that was in it was a lady’s
pink cardigan.So he... he had no option. . . he startedto put his
legs through the arms and he pulled them up his body, like this,and
forgot where the neck was, and all his lunch was hanging out. So he
got his trilbyhat and he tucked it all around the insides,so it looked
likea giant hernia.Now when he got off, typicalof the English, they
don’t comment on the obvious. They all went past him, never saida
word. Except the ticket collector:he said, ‘Ah, you’ve been on holi-
day, Mr Hobbs.’
JmcG: That is Jack Hobbs in a nutshell.If anything was going to

go wrong...
39
SPIKE MILLIGAN 19
SPIKE MILLIGAN: Yeah. But it didn’t happen to him. It happened

to his friend, who was with him.
DB: Do you see yourself as different people doing different

things as a writer for radio, for TV or for books or poetry?
SPIKE MILLIGAN: I suppose basicallyI’m very talented,but I’m
not personally aware of that. No, but that’s what I am. I’m very glad
thatI can do it.I wrote a funny poem last week. I’lldo it now.
I’ve got a three-leggeddog,

His name is Rover.
Whenever he barks
He falls over.
The first ‘I say,I say’ joke I heard was: I said,‘I want to join the
Navy.’ ‘You go to the bos’n at the British Museum at three o’clock
on I Saturday.’ went there.I said, ‘I want to join the Navy.’ He
said,
‘Can you swim?’ I said, ‘Why? Haven’t you got ships?’ It’s very
funny, isn’tit?
I like Irish jokes, because they just aren’t factual.My favourite(I
used it in my act on the stage)is: An Irishman goes to a fish-and-chip
shop, says, ‘Fish and chips twice.’The guy says,‘I heard you the first
time!’
Irishman goes to an optician. ‘What’s wrong?’ “Can’t see.’ ‘Can’t
see?’ ‘No!’ ‘Right. Come outsidein the garden. Look up.’ ‘Yes, yes.’
‘Ah now, can you see the sun?’ ‘Yes!’ “How bloody far do you want
to see?’ There’sa sort of abstraction about it.
Another abstract one:A drunk goes to a Dublin pub; the barman
sees he’s got this wonderful coloured parrot on his shoulder, says,
‘Jaysus! Where did you get that?’And the bloke says: “Ah, the trees
are full of them.’ Fucking marvellous jokes! Aren’t they wonderful?
Just abstract.
There’s an Irish diver on a wreck at the bottom of the sea. Voice
from the ship says: ‘Are you down there, Mick?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Come up
right away!’ ‘Why?’ “The ship’s sinking!’
jmcc: You used to go to Twickenham when Ireland were playing.

SPIKE MILLIGAN: Ireland always lose. There’sa lovely Irish story
about when they were very good about six years ago. They won the
Triple Crown and decided to give the team a new captain, Ciaran
Fitzgerald,an army officer.He a called meeting of the team and they
said: ‘Aw Jeez, Ciaran, come in. Have ajar.’He said: “No, lads. First
things So first’. he opened an Adidas bag and he took outa ball:
40
‘Now, this thing here is a Rugby ball.”And a voice said: ‘Jaysus.

You’re going too fast for us.’ Isn’t that marvellous? Only the Irish.
My father was Irish.He used to do an act.He was a bloody good
clown. He told me about when he was a boy in Sligo. Very poor. The
whole area was poverty-stricken.They'd go to church on a Sunday
and the plate would go round and they’d give it to the priest, Father’
McCartney. He’d say: ‘Jaysus!The number of buttons in this plate,
it’sa wonder your clothes aren’t droppin’ off!’ True story.
My father woke me up at three o’clock one morning and said:
‘Son, I’ve never shot a tiger.’‘Oh, why do you have to tell me?’ He
said: ‘I’ve got to tell somebody.’ Maybe that’s where it started.
41
Johnny Speight
Treading on everyone’s toes
Johnny Speight brought to the television screen a contemporary

comic character to rank with Mr Pooter and Lord Emsworth,
though without their sweet-tempered natures.Alf Garnett,as bril-
liantly brought to life by Warren Mitchell,was so accurate,if exag-
gerated,a ofpersonification the dark side of the British character
that some people just could not see the joke; many of them took
him to be their spokesman. The result was that every episode of
Till Death Us Do Part seemed to leap on to the front page as the
self-appointed advocates of various brands of self-righteousness
whipped themselvesup intoa public rage over some sentiment Alf
had expressedor the words he had used to express it.A brilliantcast,
with Mitchell backed up, or, rather, challenged, by Dandy Nichols,
Una Stubbs and Tony Booth, was skilfully directedby Dennis Main
Wilson into intense comedy: Alf’s frustrated rages were like thun-
derstorms in an armchair. The idea was exported to the United
States for a sentimentalised version,All in the Family, with Carroll
O’Connor as Archie Bunker. Johnny continued Alf’s saga with In
Sicknessand in Health, and collaboratedon other sitcoms: with Ray
Galton on Spooner’s Patch, about a police station, and with Eric
Sykes on The 19th Hole, about a golf club (he was a member of
several). Sadly, Johnny died while this book was in A preparation.
few months earlier,he came from his home in Hertfordshire to meet
us in the West End — ina private room at the Savile Club.
jmcc: Tell us something about the problems of writing for a

half-hour slot.
JOHNNY SPEIGHT: You haven’t got time for anything except get-
ting down to the bones of it. It’s not a half-hour, even, more like
42
twenty-seven minutes on the BBC, and if a it’s good one and you get
— ‘spread’ where the audience laugh their heads off— you might have
to cut some of the dialogue.We had eight minutes cut out of one
show at the Beeb because it spread. Don’t cut the dialogue,cut the
laughs— otherwise the listeners don’t know what the studio audi-
ence are laughing at.
Years and years and years ago I was writing a Frankie Howerd
show for radio and for some reason during the recording Gladys
Morgan, the comedienne on the show, came out dressed up in some
funny clothes, which made the audience laugh. Immediately Billy
Ternant, the bandleader, rolled up his trousers and put something
likea model battleshipon his head. Then Frank came on and
couldn’t resist:he startedto arse about too. Now we went for about
seven minutes of radio without a word being spoken — it was all this
pantomime. I thought, Well, the producer, Alistair Scott Johnson,
will obviously cut the seven minutes out for the broadcast.But when
I heard it broadcast,it was all there:no dialogue,but screams of hys-
terical laughter! Monday morning I get a phone call from Jimmy
Davidson, who was head of radio varietyin those days — used to
wear a green visor and his shirt-sleeves rolledup like an old-fash-
ioned city editor— and he calledme up to see him, and I thought,
Well, I’m not taking the blame for it.I mean, I’m not going to be the
fall guy on this, I’m going to put the blame where it belongs; it
belongs to the producer:he should have cut it out. So I walked into
his officeand he looked at me and he said: ‘You’rea I genius.’ said:
“What, Jim?’ He said: “You made radio history. You’re a genius and
that’s allI want to say, Johnny. Keep it up!’ I walked out, thinking:
I’m ina madhouse.
After thatI put in one script: “Minute of silence. Suggest this could
be recorded.’Got a phone call from Alistair Scott Johnson, saying:
“This minute of silence .. .’ and I thought he’d seen the joke, but he
said: ‘It’s very difficultto record.’I said: ‘Is it?? He said: ‘Yes,
because we’re getting I atmospherics.’ said: ‘What kind of tape are
you using?’ Pause. Then he said: ‘I’ve just had a brilliant idea. ll
throw this idea at you, Johnny. What I suggest we do is:no one
speaks for a minute; that will give you the silenceyou need.’I said:
‘Brilliant.That’s great. That is it.” When we came to do the show,
Frank said: “What’s this bloody minute of silence?”And that was the
end of that.
The way we’re going on, with increasing repeats and more chan-
nels, we'll end up with a lot of television shows made by people who
are long dead, and the audience that were laughing willbe long dead.
I’ve heard some of our laughteron other shows. It’s distinctive
43
JOHNNY SPEIGHT 23
laughter; you'llbe able to say: ‘That’s Auntie Elsie laughing, that is
— laughing on a show that she would never laugh at,or never got to
see, and they’re using her laughter unpaid.’
I’m sure that some of the shows now have no audience at all.You
can hear canned laughter:it cuts off. Real laughter dies out... it
doesn’t stop dead. You have to speak the next line and you have to
be careful you don’t tread on a laugh; you have to really manoeuvre
around the laughter. Treading on a laugh has always been a crime in
comedy —I mean speaking the line while they’re still laughing. Half-
hour comedy shows are live. You record them but they are live,
because you’ve got an audience there and once they’ve heard the
joke or seen the scene they’re never going to laugh the second time
like they did the first time and if you go for a third time the spon-
taneity goes out of it completely.I always say that if the scene is
going well,if the rhythm’s going well, even if the actors are making
little mistakes, unless it’sa complete disasteryou play the scene right
through and then patch up afterwards.But immature directors say,
“Oops, stop, cut and start again’;it throws the actors and they worry
that they’ll never get the same laugh again and so that makes them
less real than they would have been.
All the work is done in the rehearsal room and one of the big dan-
gers is leaving the show in the rehearsal room. A good director will
know exactly when to say, ‘Let’s leave it, let’s go.’I always go to
rehearsals; Warren Mitchell wouldn’t work unless I was there. The
script you take in is reallya blueprint.Even the greatest play in the
world isa blueprint untilit gets to the actors and then it’s a still blue-
print when it goes to the audience, becausea play is nevera play until
it meets an audience. Then you can testit out on various audiences
to find out how a scene goes. You can find out very fast with an audi-
ence reaction.I mean, if it’s nothing, you can’t say, ‘Well, they’re
thick up in Macclesfield,’ you have to find out why they didn’t
laugh. Because they’re the same in Macclesfieldas they are in bloody
London: if it’s funny, they know it’s funny. As long as it’s in the
same language, it’s got to play anywhere where people are living
under the same A conditions. very funny Neil Simon play set in
New York will work in London, because people are livingin
roughly the same conditions,in a block of flats,all the same things
happen... the plumbing goes wrong ... all those things happen and
they are recognisableas sufferingsof people.
jmMcc: You wrote a lot for Peter Sellersin the early days of ITV,
didn’t you?
JOHNNY SPEIGHT: It was for ATV, as it was then, and, God, when
44
24 Now THarT’s FUNNY!
I think about it now, it was thirty-odd shows on the trot, live, one
after the other.It started with The Winifred Atwell Show, starring
Morecambe and Wise, and that was followed by The Dickie
Valentine Show, starring Peter Sellers, because Sellers had seen what
I'd done with Eric and Ernie and asked if I’d write for him. By the
end of that he was going on with his own show, called The Peter
Sellers Show, and I wrote that as well. It’s horrifying, isn’t it, when
you think of doing that now?
Peter was a very intelligent person and people were after him just
for himself. They weren’t concerned about the scriptor anything
else— get Peter Sellersand you’d got a film— and he was leftto worry
about the script. Films have always been like that: not by the script
but by the stars. Unfortunatelyit makes a lot of sense because the
public are like that.
ps: Are there any special subjects for comedy?

JOHNNY SPEIGHT: Great comedy is about the sufferingsof people,
and the audience recognise them as their own sufferings, and you
show the funny side of it and they laugh at it. The great writers have
always written for the masses. I’ll give you an example: my father
had never read Bernard Shaw or seena Shaw play, he’d just heard me
talk about him. One day I went to the place where he was livingin
east London and he said:‘I saw that mate of yours you’re always
talking about, Bernard Shaw. One of his plays was on the box the
other night. Very funny; liked it.” He would never go to see a
Bernard Shaw play in the theatre. Wild horses wouldn’t have
dragged him there. Max Wall he’d go and see at a theatre.
Art should be able to go out into the marketplace and earn its
keep. If it’sart it should affectthe whole people. Shakespeare did it
properly, in front of real people. All the emotions in Shakespeare
would affect everyone; the only thing that would be off-puttingto
some people is the fact that it’sin blank verse. Modern people
haven’t acclimatised their ears to it.It doesn’t make complete sense
to them immediately, but the thoughts are great. The myth is that
Shakespeareis only correct when it is spoken in the upper-middle-
class English voice. Why did they snigger when Brando did
Shakespeare? Brando isa great actor. The reason why he wrote all
those soliloquies, Shakespeare,was to give the groundlingsa chance
to take aim with the orange peel.
bp: Are you still using a typewriter?

JOHNNY SPEIGHT: I use a computer now, because it gets rid of the
longest walk of the day to the typewriter and the blank sheet of
45
JOHNNY SPEIGHT 25
paper. You know that cliché you get in films: the writer puts the
sheet of paper in the typewriter,then tearsit out and crumples it up
and throws it into the wastepaper basket ... Well, with a computer
you don’t have that, because you can just start writing knowing that
if you don’t likeit you can wipe it off or remodel it.
Writing, and observing people, I fortunately get paid for it as well;
it’sa fascinationand a hobby thatI can’t stay away from for long.
All the other hobbies bore me aftera while. The English languageis
a fascinationand I’m still learningit. People ask me have I ever learnt
any other language.I say it takes me allmy time to learn English.
I don’t go anywhere else where they don’t speak it. If they haven’t
got the energy or the brainsto learn EnglishI don’t want to know
about them. It’s all right taking the short cut and using these cheap
and inferior languages,but the greatest language in the world is the
English language and it dominates the world now.
ymcG: Before Alf, you wrote The Arthur Haynes Show...

JOHNNY SPEIGHT: I had a Silver Dawn Rolls-Royce that I was
very proud of and I was drivingit to the BBC. At Hanger Lane then
there was no underpass, just traffic lights,and I stopped at the lights
and the door of the Rolls opened and some old tramp got in, and the
lights changed to green and I had to move forward.I looked at him
and after quitea time he said to me: ‘Rolls-Royce, innit, Guv’nor?’
I said Yeah and he said,‘I prefer them. You get a better classof
people entirelyin these.’He said: ‘I’ve had a couple of cars go by,
but I thought, No, [ll wait for something decent, and you come
along.’ And he started tellingme his life story and about going to
Southend to see his wife.We were getting down towards the BBC.
He said: ‘Now, keep straight on,’ and I said: ‘No, I’m going right
here.’He said: ‘No, keep straight. I’m going to Southend.’I said:
‘I’m not taking you to Southend.’ He said: “Well,a pound, eh ? How
would that go?’ So I said: ‘Oh, all I right.’ dropped him off and gave
him the quid, and as soon as I got to the phone I rang up Arthur and
I said: ‘I’ve found this most marvellous character.’
The Arthur Haynes tramp character wore a lot of medals, but he
had nothing to do with military I service. mean, I don’t think a
tramp would want to go into military I service. wouldn’t think the
Army would necessarilywant him either,one of those people who
would spend all their time in the glasshouse. There’s a strange
morality about tramps, they’rea kind of outsider, which always fas-
cinated me.
There’s one saying, you want to get in jailfor Christmas because
of the hard weather: out on the streetsin summer, but come cold
46
January, like, you’re better off inside. It’s always, you know, allmy
Christmas cards’llbe in there, my Christmas pudding and my
Christmas dinner is in there. And it’sa fear you have a long time.
The prison system is unfair in that it’sa worse punishment for a
middle-class person to go into prison than it is for someone further
down the scale.For a middle-class person the actual factof being in
thereis terrible punishment and what he has left outside,but certain
people go in there and it’s justa part of their lives.
[’ve got medals like I Arthur’s: had to go to France in the end, but
I went on D-Day plus, Thomas Cook were there when I got there.
Alf Garnett was in a reserved occupation, on the docks, but talked
about the war as if he’d been in it.He talked about it more than the
ones that did go, in general.His get-out was No, Winston Churchill
says I’ve got to stay here. I’m more important here, behind the lines,
than I'd be at the front.
I grew up with Alf and people like him. They were all round me
in the East End of London. Still are. In all the golf clubs and every-
where you go, you find all the sods, wearing different suits and dif-
ferent accents,you know. In fact years ago Robert Morley wanted
me to write a sort of upper-class Alf and he wanted to play it. But
people would have believedit more, accepted it more convention-
ally, with the upper class talking that way and it would have been
more respectable. The rhythms of the language are very important,
and with a character like Alf Garnett you have to capture the rhythm
of the way he would speak, the kind of words he would use, and if
he used certain words he wouldn’t use them I correctly. don’t use
phonetics: Warren Mitchell knows the voice and he knows how to
say them. It’s the way people talk, even the upper classes,they do
not speak in complete sentences.
Dandy Nichols was marvellous—I mean a marvellous woman-— she
was great,and for the show so was Anthony Booth; and so was Una
Stubbs: she really played that suffering daughter marvellously,you
know. But Alf can stand on his own really, because he convicts him-
self out of his own mouth; he doesn’t really need people around him.
jmcG: Why did you make Alf Garnett a Tory?

JOHNNY SPEIGHT: It was because he lived among the working
class all his life and knew there wasn’t much they could do, so he
went for the ones who had money, and he didn’t realise they knew
no better either.H. G. Wells said that he was fortunate that his
mother was a domestic help in a big house so he lived below stairs
and realised from a very early age that above stairs weren’t very
bright.So he got rid of all that thing very early, this reverence— like
47
JOHNNY SPEIGHT 27,
being brought up to respect your betters, this reverence for people

above you — which carried this country,or muddled it along for a
long time.
In the war we were made aware that other people’s mistakes could
cost you a lot, and it made you very wary, and you lost reverence for
leaders and realised that they were making some bloody awful mis-
takes, and some of them should not have been anywhere near leader-
ship. You were in the hands of idiots.One of the worst things about
it was having an idiot corporal, just made up, tellingyou things you
knew were stupid and you had to say, ‘Yes, corporal,’ and do it.
From the very beginning the officer class that descended upon us
knew damn all.In politics today, you see the big mistakes they’re
making, they’re like doctors, they bury their mistakes.
JMcG: Can you tell us about your latest screenplay about Alf?
JOHNNY SPEIGHT: The question is: What happened to Alf’s grand-
child? Well, the daughter and her husband, they left, they couldn’t
stand living with Alf any longer, and he persuaded her to go back to
Liverpool with him. Aftera few years he left her and the last time we
observe him he’s teaching Marxism to the Aborigines.
So the son, the grandchild, grows up ina single-parent family,
because she can’t go back, she can’t stand Alf and his ways. He goes
to school, he’s quite good, she helps him, grammar school and all
that; he passes his exams and his A levels or whatever. He goes to
Cambridge, and up there he joins the Labour party because of his
background — his mother struggling, Liverpool, that kind of thing.
He’s full of ideas,and he comes down from Cambridge and becomes
an MP, becomes the Labour party leader, all unbeknown to Alf, and
the election comes up and he becomes Prime Minister.As the film
startsyou see the election starting; there’s picturesin the paper of the
Armani-dressed, champagne-swilling littlegit from nowhere. Alf
hates him.
After the electionthe unions have startedto attack the leaderon
the grounds that he has no real working-class roots,and he’s talking
to the spin doctors and saying, ‘What are they talking about? I was
brought up in a single-parent family’.And they say, “Well,go on
televisionand talk to the people. Let them know you’re one of
them.’ So he tellsone of the TV presenters, Frost or someone: “My
mother and father, they were so poor they couldn’t even afford their
own home, and they had to share my grandfather’s house.’ And
Frost says, ‘Where was that?’And he says, “Wapping, in Wapping.’
Alf’s in the local pub and it’s on television while he’s drinking
with his cronies. Frost says: ‘What was the family name?’ And he
48
says, ‘Garnett. Garnett was the name. Garnett.’ It’s like in a

Western: all the drinks go down, and every eye turns and looks at
Alf, who just can’t believeit. It’s like when the gunman comes in and
everyone stops: what’s going to happen now?
Some people might see it as an attackon New Labour. It’s not; if
anything, it’san attackon all politicians.Alf treads on everyone's
toes, you know: you think he’s on your side for the moment. . . The
Liberals thought that at one time, but suddenly found out that he
was attacking.What he does is he takes their beliefsto their logical
conclusion and they’re hoist by their own petard, sort of thing.
ps: What does Alf think of New Labour?

JOHNNY SPEIGHT: He would prefer the original,not the copy. I
mean, how do they get away with it? We put up with it;we put up
with it all the time.I think we should persuade the British public not
to vote at all for anyone. It must be a joke around the rest of the
world. If elections changed anything, they’d make them illegal.You
know what happens in an election:a lot of the public vote Labour, a
lot more than vote Tory, and the next day nothing’s changed: the
same poor people livein the same poor houses, and the rich people
live in the same rich houses, and Labour’s own MPs get better
houses for themselves, better cars, and the restof us go on the same
as we ever did.
The political situation makes it difficultfor you to get comedy on.
Because they don’t like reality, they don’t like the truth being
pointed out and laughed at.I had a comedy for Eric Sykes, called
The 19th Hole, about golf clubs, and that was taken off because it
wasn’t politically correct.How you can write about a golf club in
politically correct terms, P’ll never know, because they treat their
own wives as second-class citizens.It seems to me they don’t want
anything realisticon the — television especially if you’re making
jokes, serious jokes, about the people who are supposed to be run-
ning the country.
If we all knew we were going to liveto 500 years, 600, 700 years
old, our plan would be a lot different,but the public now has never
been really keen on socialism,or Christianityfor that matter, because
it means looking after others; and no one really has got much time or
toinclination look after others until they’ve got a lot of time on their
hands, and then they’llpoke their noses in for the wrong reason, and
start looking after you in the way you don’t want them to. But if we
all knew we'd stillbe here in 700 years’ time, we’d allbe much more
aware of things happening on our planet because we’d know we'd be
here to face the possible resultsof our own actions.
49
Ray Galton and
Alan Simpson
Two guys who are still friendly

Comedy seems to be haunted by the troubled spirit of Tony
Hancock, who was given his special place in the affectionof the pub-
licby the characterso superbly moulded for him by Ray Galton and
Alan Simpson: Anthony Aloysius Hancock, unemployable actor
and layabout, residing in seedy atself-delusion Railway Cuttings,
East Cheam — an instantly ridiculous location which could hardly
have suggested itselfto anyone but two South Londoners. Galton
and Simpson are the first writers in this book too young to have
served in the Second World War and, in fact, were not well enough
to be conscripted into National Service: they met and began to col-
laborateat a sanatorium for tuberculosisin Surrey. After taking
Hancock to stardom on radio and television, Galton and Simpson
were offered carte blanche to write half a dozen thirty-minute
comedies, aseffectively pilots for possible sitcom series, under the
title Comedy Playhouse. One of them, The Offer, gave the first
glimpse of the war in the junkyard that was the background to
Steptoe and Son. The series starred Wilfrid Brambell as the father,
cheerfully wallowing in the gutter,and Harry H. Corbett as the son,
Harold, wistfully gazing at the stars. Galton and Simpson also
worked for the movies — the British film industry was then in one of
its periodsof — non-recession on such picturesas The Wrong Arm of
the Law. In private life,they became gourmets and connoisseursof
wine. Alan retired,to become chairman of his local Hampton
Football Club — now promoted to the Football League — and take
gastronomic journeys to France. Ray continues to write and has
lately used his encounter with Alan in the sanatoriumas the basis for
50
a sitcom, Get Well Soon, in collaboration with John Antrobus. They

travelled together from their homes near each other in Surrey to talk
with us at the Savile Club.
jmcc: Didn’t you start your career by sendinga letterto Frank

Muir and Denis Norden when they were writing Take It From
iiere:
ALAN SIMPSON: They wrote back and said: “The best advicewe can
give you is to writea script and send it to Gale Pedrick at the BBC
script department, who we know are avid for new . writers’ . . avid.
RAY GALTON: We had to look that word up, avid.
ALAN SIMPSON: So we wrote to Gale Pedrick and his letter was

sent to my house and I immediately got on a bus and went over to
Ray’s house — we didn’t have a phone...
RAY GALTON: We had a bus, but we didn’t have a phone.
ALAN SIMPSON: [| remember running down to his house and wav-

ing the letter like Chamberlain did the paper — you know, Look,
look, look, look! Because it was British Broadcasting Corporation
and it said ‘Dear Mr Galton and Mr Simpson’ - this is from Gale
Pedrick— ‘We read your script and we were highly amused by the
content.Do not read more into this than appears on the surface but
we would liketo meet you .. . and make an appointment with my
secretary.’And we went out and got pissed.
RAY GALTON: Legless.
ALAN SIMPSON: Because even if we had gone nowhere furtherwe

had a letter from the BBC saying that they found it amusing, and it’s
like winning a medal at the Olympic Games, isn’t it? At least when
you are tryingto pulla bird you can say, “Ere, look. Read that!’
RAY GALTON: ‘I’m not rubbish, you know.’
ALAN SIMPSON: ‘You're not dealing with a wanker here; look, I

gota letterfrom the BBC!’ We phoned up Gale Pedrick and went up
to the meeting at Aeolian Hall and he was charming,a lovely man.
RAY GALTON: In Bond Street, just around the corner from here.
51
Ray GALTON AND ALAN SIMPSON 31
ALAN SIMPSON: He took us under his wing. He told us lovely

stories about how in 1930 he got a job with The Times earning £20 a
week. He had a flat in the West End, dined out at Café Royal every
night, you know, on £20 a week.
RAY GALTON: Well, actually,he was getting twelve guineasa week

and this was for the BBC before the war and he livedin Mayfair.
ALAN SIMPSON: Anyway, he gave us a lovely interview and took

the script we’d written and put it around the department.It was a
pirate sketch for Take It From Here about Henry Morgan.
RAY GALTON: Captain Henry Morgan.
ALAN SIMPSON: Captain Henry Morgan. Jimmy Edwards played

him, and Dick Bentley was... I don’t know who; Joy Nichols was
the girl stowaway or whatever. Jokes like: ‘I will drive!’ “No, you
can’t; you’ve not drivena boat before.’ ‘ButI insiston driving!’ ‘See,
you ve run the ship aground.I told you to practise what you beach!’
All puns. The entire scriptwas fullof puns.
RAY GALTON: There was one good joke.
ALAN SIMPSON:- There was one good joke, which was the only
joke that was ever used out of that. I'lllet my colleague tell it.
RAY GALTON: It could stillbe used today! It was about the crew
below, playing Jane Russell pontoon. He says: ‘Jane Russell pon-
toon? What is Jane Russell pontoon?’ ‘It’sthe same as ordinary pon-
toon only you need forty-eightto bust!’ “Now look here... !’
ALAN SIMPSON: That was the only joke that was ever used.
Another was: he says, “The side of the ship ...’ ‘Sides of ships are
bulwarks!’ ‘Bulwarks to you, too!’ That one was never used.
RAY GALTON: We still haven’t got a better joke than that one,
forty-eightto bust.It was Pedrick’sjob to find new writers.
ALAN SIMPSON: To the day he died, Gale always used to be so
proud of Ray and meas reallythe only ones he ever found. We were
the ones who justified his existence. Writers were hardly heard of in
those days. There were about a dozen of them in radio. The kings
were Frank Muir and Denis Norden — they were the governors— and
52
then you had Sid Colin, Eric Sykes, obviously, with Educating
Archie, George Wadmore, Spike Milligan. ..Bob Monkhouse and
Denis Goodwin. Ray and I sort of got in on the ground floor when
we were twenty, twenty-one.
RAY GALTON: George Wadmore was the lead writer on Ray’s a

Laugh. He used to sitin his tiny car behind the Aeolian Hall with
his portable typewriter, knocking out the ‘wheezes’ for Ray’s a
Laugh. You’d say to him: ‘How are you going, George?’ He’d say:
‘I’m knocking out a few wheezes.’ Dennis Main Wilson really gave
us our first break — he said:‘I want these two to write the show.’
ALAN SIMPSON: It was Happy Go Lucky, with Derek Roy. Roy

Spear, the producer, had a nervous breakdown and Dennis Main
Wilson took over.
RAY GALTON: It was in the basement of the Playhouse Theatre.

Jim Davidson, who was the Billy Cotton of Australia, came to the
BBC and took over variety and all that crap.He assembled the cast
at the Playhouse and delivered a Hollywood speech: ‘OK, kids,
we've got a turkey on our hands, but you’re all troupers and we’re
going to turn it round.’ All their shoulders went back and they did
it. We thought: Hey, thisis show business. Next week we were sum-
moned to Derek Roy’s lounge— we’d never been allowed in before
—and we were introduced to Dennis Main Wilson. He said: ‘Are you
writers? You will write the next series.’ The entire show had col-
lapsed. Derek Roy and his wife had a lot of transcriptionsof
American radio shows sent over from the States and they couldn’t
see any reason why they shouldn’t just use them as they were, whole
chunks of them — Ozzie and Harriet, Allen’s Alley. They just didn’t
work with a British audience.
When we first took Steptoe and Son to the States,CBS said they
had problems because everyone in it was from a different ethnic
background. So we suggested they do it black. When CBS dropped
out three years later Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin said could they
do it black, and we said yeah, course you can.
ALAN SIMPSON: ‘They cast Redd Foxx,a great comic,a really filthy
comic, againsta young actor; it didn’t have the balance that Wilfrid
Brambell and Harry H. Corbett had. So they had to builda group
around Redd Foxx and make ita quite different show.
RAY GALTON: Jack Benny wanted to do the show at first,but he
53
decided he was too old: He said:‘I won’t last halfway through the
first series.’
ALAN SIMPSON: He suggested Mickey Rooney for the Brambell

part. Benny kept ringingup to offer ideas.
RAY GALTON: The heart of the BBC was the BBC Club. It was the
greatest place in the world. There were people doing everything in
different groups in the same room — Z Cars over here, Not Only But
Also over there... :
ALAN SIMPSON: They wanted Eric Maschwitz — he wrote ‘A

Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ - to take over Light
Entertainment, and they took him all round the BBC, and then said:
‘Let’s talk salary.’And Eric said:‘I don’t want any salary. I’ll just
take the franchiseon the BBC Club!’
jJMcG: I remember that in the Sixtiesyou were writing films for

Peter Sellers,like The Wrong Arm of the Law.
RAY GALTON: Peter kept changing his mind about what part he
should play.I mean, he was going to be the policeman and then he
went back to being Pearly Gates, the crook. Halfway through the
first week he just said to Lionel Jeffries:‘I’ve got the wrong part
here, Lionel.’ He said: ‘It’s your film, but I’ll do my best for you.’
ALAN SIMPSON: He said: “This is your film’,and he just played to

Lionel.
RAY GALTON: When Peter came back from Hollywood with that
massive heart attack and was down at Elstead...
ALAN SIMPSON: First thing he did was marry Britt Ekland.
RAY GALTON: Bill Wills, who was Peter’s money man, he got on
to us and said Peter would like to make a film, an English film,a
domestic English film, nothing too...
ALAN SIMPSON: Strenuous.
RAY GALTON: ... strenuous. So we said, ‘Right.’ Well, funnily

enough, we were beginning to writea film then and Peter might be
ideal for it. It was The Spy with a Cold Nose.
54
ALAN SIMPSON: We finished the screenplay.
RAY GALTON: And we took it down to Peter and he could only

read it in sections because he was rolling about on the floor. There
he was, just died thirteen times on the operating table, and he was
rolling about with hysterical laughter and I thought, Christ, we're
going to kill him.
ALAN SIMPSON: Peter said: ‘We'll make it ourselves.We don’t

want to bring in any studio; we'll hire the studio and we'll use your
company name.’
RAY GALTON: We said: ‘Look, are you sure, Pete, that you are not
tiedup in any way?’
ALAN SIMPSON: | He said: ‘I can do what I like,do what I like.’
RAY GALTON: ‘No, no, no, I can do exactly what I like.’
ALAN SIMPSON: He said: ‘We'll get Lionel to play the policeman.

Tl play the vet.’
RAY GALTON: At that moment he just wanted to work.
ALAN SIMPSON: Well, we thought, Hello, here we go! and we

were just waiting for the call and suddenly, about three or four
weeks later,we got a phone call from Bill Wills: Will we go up to
a meeting in Soho to discuss the Peter Sellers movie? So we think:
Here we go, now it’s starting up. And Peter wasn’t there, of
course. Anyway, the thing was now, the problem is that Peter is
under contract to do a film in Paris called What’s New, Pussycat?
written by Woody Allen, so to cut a long story short he can’t do
yours, ducky, and that’s basically what it is and thank you very
much, good night.So we made the film with Larry Harvey and
Lionel.
jmcG: All these years laterI can tell you why he couldn’t do it:
he told me that no company would insure him to do a movie
because of his bad health. Then Charlie Feldman, who produced
What’s New, Pussycat?, insured him personally.And after Peter
got through that,he became insurable again.
ALAN SIMPSON: Well, Joe, I wish I’d known that, because for years
we've been saying he was totally unreliable.We thought it was
55
another example of Peter’s capriciousnessand waywardness. I’m

glad we came, now.
ps: Tell us about working together again, adapting Hancock

and Comedy Playhouse scriptsfor Paul Merton.
ALAN SIMPSON: We were very pleased with Paul Merton — work-
ing with him, you know, great. The first thing we said was, ‘It’s
your career,’ which he thought was quite funny. We warned him
right at the beginning that it was dangerous, because of the
Hancock fans and people who identify with the show. But every-
body went into it with their eyes open and I think ina way it’s done
Paul good.
One problem is that the shows are for ITV, which means twenty-
two minutes of materialin each half-hour show. When you do a
BBC show it’s twenty-seven minutes of material.Now five minutes
in half an hour isa long, long time. That’sa lot of development,a lot
of a characterisation, lot of plot, which you have the
luxury of in a
BBC half-hour.The biggest problem that Ray and I have in adapt-
ing for Paul Merton is the BBC half-hours where you have to take
five minutes out. Taking five minutes out of any of the Hancock
shows is surgery, major surgery.
DB: Some of the later Hancock shows are disturbing because

Hancock’s eye-lineis all over the place, looking for the cue-cards.
RAY GALTON: When some of the radio stuff was re-createdfor a
record because the BBC realised they had a fortune on their hands,
Tony’s timing, which was his great asset,was completely gone, and
we were ten minutes over.
ALAN SIMPSON: This was in 64 when Tony was really gone, and
Ray and I went into the studio and edited the performance down to
half an hour by taking out the pauses which shouldn’t have been
there in the first place. Tony had been the greatest timer ever. That
is very sad.
ps: It’s interesting that they should revive your shows rather
than commission new ones.
ALAN SIMPSON: _ If Ray and I were writing together now we would
stand more chance of getting it on than two unknowns. Because we
are Ray Galton and Alan Simpson and they don’t want to take
chances— you know: it must be good because Galton and Simpson
did it.
56
RAY GALTON: I don’t know, there’s another thing.In all the years
since Steptoe and Son finished, the BBC never asked me —and I don’t
know if they knew Alan had — retired they’ve never asked me or us
jointly whether we would like to write any more, and that’s going
through all their ups and downs and everything else. Never asked us
whether you are aliveor dead or whether you would like to write.
Nothing, not a word. The only reasonI can think of is the same sit-
uation exists as existed in the BBC in 1945, 46, 47, when all the
people in charge of the BBC were just out of the war and so were all
the comedians and writers probably and it was all new, young and
new, the broom was sweeping through the corridors.The new gen-
eration I started, suppose, with the Footlightsat Cambridge, Beyond
the Fringe and all that,so there weren’t just new artists, there were
new producers, new directors,and they were employing their own,
I suppose.
ymcG: Ray, you and John Antrobus have now done Get Well
Soon,a sitcom based on how you and Alan met in a TB sanatorium
in 1947. What sort of thing were you and Alan writing at that time?
RAY GALTON: Inthe sanatorium I was ina ward, a two-bed ward,
and half the room was taken up with engineering equipment that
belonged to the other fellow— you’ve got to bear in mind that
people are there for three years, not two weeks; virtually it’s your
home. Also this guy had an RAF radio receiverout of a Lancaster
bomber, a very powerful thing,so he threw an aerialup and con-
nected it to six or seven cubiclesso that we could all listento
American Forces Network, great jazz and comedies broadcast from
Bavaria. And then the guy, in a dressing gown and pyjamas, and me
on absolute rest,not supposed to be doing anything,we covered the
whole sanatorium with a secondary radio network, climbing all
over the women’s quarters and everywhere, and builta radio room
in a linen cupboard, where Alan and I first started writing. We
wrote halfa dozen...
ALAN SIMPSON: Supposed to write six and we ran out of ideas,

dried up. We contracted for six quarter-of-an-hour shows. For
Radio Milford at the sanatorium.
RAY GALTON: I got extra mince at lunchtime. That was the deal,I
think.
ALAN SIMPSON: We performed it— never get Ray on a stage now,

but in those days he was working away likea good ’un.It was called
57
RAY GALTON AND ALAN SIMPSON 37
Have You Ever Wondered? and it was a satire on sanatorium life

about nurses and doctors...
RAY GALTON: What they really do when the door shuts.
ALAN SIMPSON: Have you ever wondered what would happen

if... if the patients ran the sanatorium? That sort of thing. Only
Ray and I and a couple of our friends were doing the voices, hand
mikes, had a sound-effects man, you know; it was all done very
professionally.
RAY GALTON: This is where we started.It was a couple of years

later, after we were out, that we wrote to Muir and Norden. I had a
job and Ray was on National Assistance.
DB: You shared an office to write in later?

ALAN SIMPSON: I used to do the typing because in between the
sanatorium and becoming a writer I was a shipping clerk,so I
learned how to type. Ray had no reason to learn.
RAY GALTON: Stillno reason to.
ALAN SIMPSON: So we used to work all the time, but he used to

look to see what I was typing.If I did dagga, dagga, dagga, dagga on
the keys, he’d say: ‘What, what, what? What’s that?’
The only reasonI packed up is becauseI thought:I cannot spend
the rest of my life doing this. If I didn’t have the money Id stillbe
doing it. My wife died and I suddenly I realised had enough money,
with no children,to live the restof my life. After-dinner I
speaking,
would do that till the cows come home. You, on the other hand,
carry on writing.Ray is different.Ray is prepared to spend the rest
of his life doing it because that’s what he likes. That’s what Ray
wants to do with his lifeand in that case why do anything else?
RAY GALTON: Can’t puta shelf up at home, you know, but...

ALAN SIMPSON: No, but every three days away from the work on
holiday,he feels guilty. When was the last time you went on holi-
day?
RAY GALTON: I don’t know.
ALAN SIMPSON: Twenty years, thirty years and dragged by his
58
38 Now THAT’S FUNNY!
wife or his daughter saying, “You’ve got to go...’ But can’t wait to
get back to working.
RAY GALTON: Alan and I never put a word down that wasn’t
agreed between us. In the same room. I mean I would come in and
say: ‘Oh, I had a good idea . . . you know, out with the dogs this
morning, you know...’
ALAN SIMPSON: When we shared an officeI was never angry if Ray

wasn’t there, becauseI knew I wouldn’t have to work. In the early
days he was always firstand I was always later.We could go two or
three days without talkingto each other. We'd never say it was crap,
we'd just grunt. If one said something and the other said nothing,
then you knew you were wrong. If we were in good nick we'd talk
about things, but I can remember going four days without saying
anything.
RAY GALTON: Although I love Alan and he loves me there was

some — hostility something to do with who said the last thing.It
could last for days. I’'d say: ‘Are you going to say something?’
ALAN SIMPSON: I will always give way to Ray. If he’d said we’re
not going to do this today, we wouldn’t be doing it.
RAY GALTON: I don’t know how Alan puts up with me —I thought

I wasn’t very nice to him. He was always the pussycat, he’d never
say: ‘Where have you been?’
ALAN SIMPSON: _ I didn’t mind where he’d been. If he wasn’t there,

I didn’t have to work.
RAY GALTON: I'd be waiting for him to say something that would
advance the script.So I thought: It’s not up to me to say something.
Pve done my bit. Well, fuck it.I don’t know how we survived as two
guys who are still friendly.It’s a marriage.I was perfectly horrible
to you —I don’t know how we did it.
ALAN SIMPSON: If I’'d behaved to you the same way you’d have
thought it was totally indefensible.But as it was, I thought it was
great. He’d make some excuse, and he’d be gone. If I’d been latehe
would have wanted to kill me. I just thought:I don’t have to work —
lovely!
59
RAY GALTON AND ALAN SIMPSON 39
RAY GALTON: You see,my wife didn’t understand thatI could go
to Christine Keeler’s flat and just talk to her.
ALAN SIMPSON: Neither did I.
RAY GALTON: Alan was never interested in the demi-monde.
ALAN SIMPSON: Im not the slightest bit interested in show busi-

ness as such. The best six years of my life were the ones between
1979 and ’85 when I wasn’t working and the world was my oyster.
RAY GALTON: Now I see him every Monday. His cleaning lady
chucks him out of the house.
ALAN SIMPSON: I found out he was getting upset.
RAY GALTON: He brings his own sandwiches and my daughter

makes him meals to take away.
60
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61
Keith Waterhouse
Living in compartments
Keith Waterhouse became master of the Fleet Street columnist’s

trade when it was highly competitive and an unwritten agreement
restricted popular newspapers to one star each — women, political
editors, gossip-writersand sports journalistsnot counting for the
purpose of the treaty. Now, of course, the floodgates have been
opened to scour the papers’ pages clean of costly news, and Keith is
up to his ankles in column-mongers. He smiles with genuine
approval on some promising ones; but his oblong, as he once
described it, stays impregnable, though not in the same place.He has
compared himself to an act on the variety stage: if the Holborn
Empire no longer offered the appropriate environment for the act,
he would move it to the Palladium.So Maxwellisation brought the
transfer from the Daily Mirror to the Daily Mail. But the column is
only one aspect of Waterhouse: there isa steady flow of novels, with
Billy Liar alreadya modern classic, and of plays: Billy Liar once
again, making starsof its firsttwo leads, Albert Finney and Tom
Courtney, and Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, which brought Peter
O’Toole a West End triumph. And, with or without his long-term
collaborator Willis Hall, there have been movies, musicals, televi-
sion series,and two books which show that Keith is, more than most
writers, consciousof his craft and the need to pass on its skillsto a
new generationof practitioners, Newspaper English and English
Our English.He has described his progress from south Leeds to the
West End in two volumes of memoirs, City Lights and Streets
Ahead. Keith is gregarious, making friends wherever he goes, but
generally hides from the limelight.We talked at the Savile Club,
starting with his daily routine.
62
42 Now THarT’s FUNNY!
KEITH WATERHOUSE: I just start,and I go on until I’ve done a

thousand words and then I stop. That’s my routine.And coming to
the humorous side of it, if ’ve drafted a sentence that isn’t funny,
then I try to make it funny, if it’s apposite that it should be. To give
you a concrete example, in one column I was talking about privacy,
about how Prince William survived with a girlon a Greek island and
there were thirty photographersup a tree. Well, originallyP'd writ-
ten ‘and the Press are there in force’, which doesn’t create any kind
of image. Thirty photographersup a tree isn’t particularly funny,
but you get an image of something, don’t you? So I alter stuff all
along on that I basis. reallyuse humour as a narrative tool more than
anything else, justto help the flow, help the words along. Also you
can say things humorously that you can’t say seriously.It’s a kind
of anaesthetic, isn’t it? You can get away with more if you write
humorously.I hate that word, humorously.
The aim isn’t comedy. The aim is simply to be read, and the
humour, I think, makes it easierto read it, propels it in some way. ’m
always conscious that the thing has got to have flow, that it’s got to
move along, and this method of narrationis the best one I know. I
don’t think I’m capable of writing in any other way. My mentor was
Wodehouse. I never laugh very much at other I writers; just look at the
technique, at the craft, and from the earliestage I was really studying
Wodehouse and how he gets his laughs and the superb craftmanship
in those books — how he gets people in and out of doors and whatnot:
it’s because he was working in the theatre all the time, of course.
DB: When you worked with Willis Hall, did you test lines on
each other?
KEITH WATERHOUSE: What we always did was speak.I thinka lot
of duo writers work this way: one of us would sitat the typewriter,
the other would pace the room. We’d just dictate to one another and
improve each other’s lines.We revisedas we went along. I’ve always
revised as I go along.
jmcG: Did you laugha lot?

KEITH WATERHOUSE: Nota lot. Chortle, perhaps:we would per-
mit ourselves a chortle. Willis is a craftsman too, and interested in
how it’s done, rather than the effect it’s going to have. You presume
the effect,and if you don’t know what effect it’s going to have you
shouldn’tbe in the business. Which is not to say on stage-work that
the expected laugh sometimes doesn’t come, as you know...
DB: Do you think that there is some sure-fireway of predicting
63
KEITH WATERHOUSE 43
‘this will score’?

KEITH WATERHOUSE: There are situations where, ‘Well, if this
doesn’t get a laugh, I’m just going to go out and hang myself,’ but,
again, you cannot utterly depend on it.
DB: Do you think that anyone knows? For sure?

KEITH WATERHOUSE: I think that formula gag writers know —
those massive teams of American writers, when there are more of
them than a bloody Rugby side— they know that the one-liners will
work, I suppose because they laugh among themselves anyway,
through gritted teeth: ‘Oh, you’ve got a funny line there.’
I spenda lot of time at rehearsals,under the impression that I’m
working — I’m just skiving really— but I continue to put odd bitsin
because you can just remove a word or add a comma and, again, it’s
flow, and suddenly an unfunny line will become funny or I funnier.
follow Kingsley Amis’s dictum that the best written English is
spoken English— write as you speak.
DB: What are your methods for differentiating between one

character and another, to give a different tone? Apart from just
thinking about it.
KEITH WATERHOUSE: You do hear voices in your head; in fact,I
go around with my lips moving when I’m writinga novel, just short
of directing trafficin Tottenham Court Road. I don’t like giving
people very superficial characteristics,likea stutter,or chain-smok-
ing, or whatever.I think you’ve just got to hear a voice, you’ve got
to hear a real person. If they’re not real you're in big trouble,so I
sometimes do use a gimmicky thing.In the book I’m writing now
I’ve got a woman who never finishes her sentences, like a lot of
people don’t. But in general, wait until you’ve got a voice for some-
body and just let them speak. A book may be writtenin the third
person, but I see the whole narrative through one person’s eyes.So
I’ve got to have that person invented before the story’s invented.
jmcc: And writing a novel from a woman’s point of view, how

does that affect you?
KEITH WATERHOUSE: Change of sex, yes, I’ve done that three
times now. Again, a it’s matter of getting someone in your head, isn’t
it?I don’t go around watching women or anything like that.
jmcc: Do you mentally put different clothes on?

KEITH WATERHOUSE: Yes, I’m wearing a polka-dot dress at the
moment.
64
44 Now THaArT’s FUNNY!
pB: How do you do research?

KEITH WATERHOUSE: I doa lot of change-janglingand mooching
round.I start with some vague idea of what the book is going to be
about, or who it’s going to be about, where he lives,or where his
travelsare going to take him. And I like to do my thinking on loca-
tion,so to speak...
Having fixeda venue for an imaginary suburb, I will pick on the
real suburb and just go wandering about there. For example,I wrote
some years ago a book called Jn the Mood, about adolescence in a
small suburb of a small northern town. I couldn’tgo up North every
time I wanted to think about things,so I just fixed on Hornchurch.
I used to take the Tube out to Hornchurch, and wander about and
come back with whole scenes of the thing.So I need to be able to see
something...
The present one I’ve set in leafy south London, and gettingto
fucking Forest Hill is very, very difficult indeed. It’s not too I late,
can make this Wimbledon. It’s fixed on Forest Hill now.
The people are more or less made up, or they’re sometimes based
on real people, but you put them through the blender and they
become fictitious people.
DB: What do you find most indifficult writing?

KEITH WATERHOUSE: Thinking of the storyline.I’m not very
interested in stories, I’m far more interested in characters, but I’ve
a realised book has to havea story in it somewhere.
DB: You seem to imply that even if you’re writing a piece of

drama, you're thinking of it as a book.
KEITH WATERHOUSE: No, it’sthe other way round: if I’m writing
a book I may be thinkingof it as a drama. The one I’ve just done,
Good Grief:| thought of it as a play right from the start,but wrote
it firstas a novel, and then I’ve writtenit as a play.
ps: That’s the one you were doing simultaneously,is it?

KEITH WATERHOUSE: Yes, except I didn’t.I started to do, but one
obviously takes over — the novel.I did the novel and then I wrote the
play, but that mode of thinking, that you’re thinking in one charac-
ter,is of course very useful for the stage, because you find you’ve
writtena stonking good part for somebody.
DB: Do you find you have written not such good parts for
everybody else?
KEITH WATERHOUSE: No, becauseI go with the Wodehouse dic-
65
KEITH WATERHOUSE 45
tum which is in his memoirs somewhere, when he says that you’ve

got to think of a book as a musical,or as a stage production. It’sno
use giving the Earl of Uxbridge a jolly good scene in Chapter One,
and then you don’t see him again, because what’s he doing? He’s sit-
ting in his dressing room, he’s being paid, he’s got to work. So I try
to give all except the most subsidiary characters good parts in the
book.
DB: You can separate the novel from the play?

KEITH WATERHOUSE: Yes. I live in compartments anyway,
becauseI write the column one day, the book the next. It’sa matter
of waking up saying: ‘Who am I?’ Most people say ‘Where am I?’,
but I say ‘Who am I?’ If it’s Wednesday or Sunday, it’s column
morning, so I put the columnist’s head on, I think as a columnist, put
everything else out of my mind until that’s done; and the next day
Pve my novelist’shead on, or some other head on, but it is literally
a matter of deciding which compartment I’m going to live out of on
that particularday. It’sa very crafty substitute for work avoidance—
what every writer wants to do and that’sput off the work that’sgot
to be done — so that in putting it off you do some other piece of
work, so it’s constructive work avoidance, I suppose.
ps: Are you still going to sit down at the typewriter, whatever
you do, about the same time?
KEITH WATERHOUSE: At the same time. Morning, which I call
prime time, when I don’t answer the phone, don’t read letters,and
work until lunchtime. I used to start about seven, but I’m at the
machine by about nine these days, and I work until one. Then I have
my bath. I’m unshaven and filthy:I’m more likea bloody tramp all
morning. One I o’clock, wash it all off and I go for lunch.
pB: Presumably you didn’t work like that when you were work-
ing in a partnership.
KEITH WATERHOUSE: Yes, we used to work until lunchtime, and
go out and get pissed,or not work until lunchtime,as the case may
be. Play Scrabble until lunchtime.
pB: Do you miss working in a partnership?Or are you happier

on your own?
KEITH WATERHOUSE: You get more done not working in a
partnership.If we’d broken up as many partnershipsdo, like mar-
riages do, then I think I would miss it, but I talk to Willis nearly
every day and we chew the fat, and ring one another up for, we
66
wouldn’t presume to callit advice, but ‘to pick your brains’ is the
phrase we’ve always used.
He livesin Ilkley now and in Malta and I’m in London and in
Bath. We’ve always done our own work separately,and a it’s hellof
a slog working in tandem, as you know: it’s much slower, every-
thing’sgot to be argued out. Not that we’ve ever had real arguments.
We used to argue about the most stupid things. One will say: “He
goes out through the door,’ and the other one will say: “Of course he
goes out through the fucking door. He doesn’t go out through the
window.’ ‘Well, I’ve put it down.’ ‘ Well, take it out.’ And it goes
out. That kind of discussion. Meaningful.
ps: You’ve worked with other people consistently,as well.

KEITH WATERHOUSE: On the stage I always work with Ned
I Sherrin. wouldn’t feel comfortable with anybody else by now. I
think friendshipis very important,I would find it impossible to
work with someone I didn’t I like. think it’sgot to start with respect.
jMcG: Tell us how you go about getting the words on to the

stage with Ned as director.
KEITH WATERHOUSE: Well, I write the thing, and then we have
what we call the Jackson Fréres session. Jackson Fréres is Mr
Pooter’s champagne, and when I wrote Mr and Mrs Nobody by
splicingThe Diary of a Nobody and Mrs Pooter’s Diary I had some
champagne bottles made up with a label which I had printed,of
‘Jackson Fréres, Female Penitentiary Road, Holloway, N, Runner-
Up, Gold Medal’ — all that kind of nonsense. The play was far too
long, so Ned and I had to cut it between us, and it took three bottles
of champagne before we were satisfied.Ever since then, we’ve
always said, when I present Ned with a play, ‘Oh, this looks likea
three-bottle problem.’We get on the Jackson Fréres, and it’s very
much testing lines, and I will insiston some lines remaining, and let
other lines go.
Ned always creativelyadds something of great value.On Jeffrey
Bernard is Unwell, the idea of a pissed set was his, having it at a
drunken angle— marvellous bloody idea actually,and a great contri-
bution to the successof the thing. And also having that laughing
shutter, where people do one-liners.I’d thought of it as a six-hander,
and he wanted to do it as a four-hander,so that people were dashing
around madly round the bloody set, coming on putting hats on and
this kind of thing, and that freneticism really worked. So, he’sa very
creative director, but won’t touch the words. That’s the kind of
I director like.By requestI will touch the words, ifI think they need
67
KEITH WATERHOUSE 47
doing. I can be very touchy, ifI find actors have just altered my lines
without a by-your-leave,but if anyone has a better line,and puts it
to me, I will say: ‘ Yes, mark it.’
jmMcG: What’s the discipline like on Ned’s set,in rehearsal with

you?
KEITH WATERHOUSE: It appears to be very relaxed,he always
startsthe morning by telling halfa dozen anecdotes, tellingus what
he saw last night. You begin to think: ‘Oh, fuck it, come on, Ned, get
on with it.’But in his own good time he does get on with it and you
find you’re rehearsingand the thing is moving along at quitea rate.
He’s very experienced, Ned, and he never loses his cool, ever. I was
with him in Australia when we were doing Jeffrey Bernard in Perth,
and he was doing his Loose Ends live from there.At the final dress
rehearsal there was some trouble with the curtain,and just hoisting
the bloody thing up and gettingit down took about five minutes.
Ned finally glanced at his watch and said:‘I hope we get this right
soon. I’m on air in seven minutes.’ He had a car waiting. He said:
“You’d better stop by the wine shop. Mr Waterhouse can’t be
expected to sit through my programme with a dry mouth.’ As we
got in to the studio and he thrust the bottle into my hand, he said:‘I
do apologise, you’ll have to open the bottle yourself.I’m on in one
minute.’He goes in, he puts the muffs on, he picks up a script he’d
never seen in his life before, and he starts the show.
JMcG: You’ve written movies; do you see any difference between

writing for a movie, the stage, or whatever?
KEITH WATERHOUSE: ‘The substantial differenceis that in movies
the director and the producer are in charge. It’s their production,
you're only the hired help as a writer.I think the only satisfactory
way to work on a movie is to direct it. We’ve done some very suc-
cessful movies, but a it’s different world. By the time you’ve written
the scenes in a movie, there’sno going back. I’ve felt waves of trep-
idation when a there’s ten-line scene, and you see men hammering a
set of a pub together; it’s costing thousands of pounds, and you’re
thinkingto yourself: Actually, this scene isn’t necessaryat all.
You’ve got more controlof your own work on television.These
days I only write for my shelfin the BBC. I’ve thought of offering
them rent because they’ve got so much of my work there. It’s
remarkable that with so much television now, it’s harder and harder
to get the bloody product on, in particularly the BBC.
People complain about writers’ conditionsin Britain,but condi-
tions in America are terrible.I once worked with CBS, who were
68
doing an American versionof a I series did called The Upchat File

with John Alderton, and it was meetings, everything was meetings.
We were sittingat a long table,and my Los Angeles agent was there,
and there was the producer and the chap that in the unlikely event
that the series was ever made, which of course it wasn’t, would have
been the director,and there was a humourless young man right at
the end of the table, and we asked who he was and word came back:
that he was a ‘Humour Consultant Trainee’ and he was sitting-in
learning humour. That’s what he was doing at this script conference
— you can imagine it, can’t you? He’s probably giving the thumbs-
down to series himself by now.
ps: When did you feel that you had been accepted as a writer?
KEITH WATERHOUSE: When I started writing, which is now,
bloody hell, forty years ago sincemy first book was I published, was
working on the Daily Mirror and, life being snootier then, they
found it peculiar that anyone who worked for a tabloid could write
a half-decent novel. But I think Billy Liar battered the buggers
down. There comes a point when you’re just accepted as what you
are and what you do.
ps: When were you able to dictate terms and walk out if you
didn’t like projects?
KEITH WATERHOUSE: Well, I think it was in the Sixties, when I
started working with Willis, when there was so much work around
that you could sell film rights in a bus ticket.The heady Sixties;we
had a film industry,we had a television industry and everything.The
emerging writer now would go about thingsa different way; he
would turn himself intoa production company and he would make
his own stuff.We were just too early for that. It’s what we should
have done, in retrospect.
jMcG: Is there something that you still really want to write?

KEITH WATERHOUSE: I would love to writea successful musical.
Willis and I wrote the book for The Card, which was done with Jim
Dale, and it was revivedin the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatrea
couple of years ago. But I’m talking crash hit here . . . I’m talking
about running seven years in Japan...
JMcG: You're not going to tellus what it is - or perhaps you

don’t have an idea?
KEITH WATERHOUSE: Yes, I do. But as you say, I’m not going to
tell you.
69
Barry Cryer
A performer’s temperament
Barry Cryer is the king of the one-linersand has written for the roy-
altyof internationalshow business:his jokes have been used by Jack
Benny, Bob Hope, George Burns, Phil Silvers, Phyllis Diller,
Richard Pryor, Tommy Cooper, Stanley Baxter, Morecambe and
Wise, Dick Emery, Dave Allen, Frankie Howerd, Les Dawson, the
Two Ronnies, Mike Yarwood, Bruce Forsyth, Billy Connolly, Russ
Abbot, Bobby Davro, Rory Bremner, Jasper Carrott, Les Dennis
and Clive Anderson. He dispenses gags in person at awards cere-
monies and other semi-public occasionsas well as on televisionand
the long-running radio panel game I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue.
William Rushton, his fellow-panellistand stage partnerin the tour-
ing show Two Old Farts in the Night, had died a few months before
our conversation. Barry told us how he left his native Leeds under
the guidance of David Nixon, the magician whose trademarks were
a hesitant manner and a bald head, and eventually found a niche in
television writing with David Frost, which brought him eventually
into a writing partnership with Graham Chapman. They collab-
orated on TV sitcoms for Barry’s former cabaret colleague, Ronnie
Corbett (one of them with Eric Idle as co-writer), and Barry used his
own material on televisionin the quick-firegag show Jokers Wild
and the impersonation series Who Do You Do? Barry asked us
round to his workroom overlooking the Grand Union Canal in
north London.
BARRY CRYER: I hardly ever write alone,I write in — partnerships

that’s what I enjoy. But it is bloody hard work, we all know that,and
I’m not saying performing isn’t,but I prefer performing, becauseI
startedas a performer and I’ve got a performer’s temperament rather
70
than a writer’s temperament.I always felta bit of a fraud, which I

was, I was a performer fallen into writingby lucky accident, whereas
with David Nobbs, my old partner, who’s a novelistand everything,
I thought, Ah, that’sa real writer.I was always quite good at dia-
logue and lines, whereas I wasn’t very good at plot and structure,so
I ideally likedto work with a partner who was good at construction.
But once you got the characters into a I situation was quite good at
writing for them. I liked working with somebody like Peter Vincent
I’ve written with for years. Graham Chapman and I wrote over fifty
sitcoms I together; wrote more with him than anybody else outside
Python. We wrote sitcoms for Ronnie Corbett and all sorts of
things. Graham was rather good.
I was the writer and Graham would pace about, light his pipe and
twiddle with his sideburns and gaze out of the window and say:
‘Oooh, they’re open!’ in the quaint old days when you waited for
the pub to open. ‘Oooh, shall we have an early one?’ Graham used
to say, and I’d think: Oh, boy, there goes the day.
It was saddening in the I finish. mean, I love the pub as much as
anyone else,but the joy of a pub is when you’ve done a solid belt of
work, and you go to unwind. So I gradually became used to this pat-
tern, and it saddened me, because I loved the man. He’d ‘Oooh’
about noon — ‘Oooh, ooh, let’s make it an early one,’ that was his
catch-phrase, and you’d say: “Yeah, an early one’ — day gone, and
you'd stillbe in the pub. And then of course he stopped drinking,
very bravely, because he knew he was killing himself. He had a com-
plete seizure or something one day, and he never had another drink,
to anyone’s knowledge; he was wonderful. But he still loved pubs.
We would go to the Angel in Highgate. Graham liked the ambience
of pubs, and he’d drink his Tab or whatever. Willy Rushton, God
rest him, didn’t drink for the last ten years of his life.But Willy
would come ina pub with you: he enjoyed the company. Diet Coke,
Will, always.I said: “How do you drink that all day long?’ He said:
“You get used to it.’ That was so quick, when Willy went. It was all
over in three days.
ymcG: When you work with somebody, is it great fun?

BARRY CRYER: John Cleese and I just laughed and laughed,
because we tried working together and it wouldn’t work at all,but
it was so funny. We wrote, triedto write,a sketch. Now my attitude
toa sketch is, you takea run at it ina white heat, and then you screw
it up and throw it in the bin and start again. But, oh no, not John.
John wants to start at Page One, and start going line by line, word
by word, and I said, ‘Come on, let’s write this bugger’ — and, very
71
BARRY CRYER 51
amiably and amicably, we never wrote together again.We couldn’t,

because we were two different worlds. John is fastidious(and quite
right too), and bloody good at it, and I’m, Oh, it’s the idea that mat-
ters, we'll sort the lines out, we'll go back on it, but let’s write the
sketch, in a burst of fire, and it’llbe a mess, but hopefully we’ll get
the good tag or whatever, and then we’ll go back over it, then we'll
tidy it up. I liketo takea run at it.
jmMcc: If you’re working with somebody that you’re in sym-

pathy with, if you do come up with a funny line you can laugh for
twenty minutes.
BARRY CRYER: Oh yes. And you do the great unusablesas well,if
it’sa dreary afternoon. Graham and I used to write, ‘It’s morning.
We discover Ronnie wanking,’ and we’d laugh for about half an
hour at the idea. Unfortunately John Cleese and Sheila Staefelwas
not a marriage made in heaven on The Frost Report; they did not hit
it off at all. So John Cleese and Graham Chapman wrote a sketch
that had John and Sheila in, but the heading of their original version
was “The Sketch in which John in No Way Kisses Sheila’and they
thought, Oh, nobody’|I print that up... And it’s printed up. We sat
down for the read-through: imagine Sheila Staefel’s face. Graham
and I used the runnning theme in one of Ronnie Corbett’s series,
script-wise,of “The Goat Has Just Left’. “We see that some of the
sandwiches have been nibbled by The Goat.’ “The Goat is obviously
outsidein the garden.’ Solemn directionin the script.And we turned
up for the last recording and there was The Goat on the set: they’d
got a stuffed goat. It’s just to keep yourself going and have a laugh.
We used to write things like ‘Itis obviously Friday’.
I was really proud when John Junkin and I were writing for
Morecambe and Wise: we followed Eddie Braben — he was the man,
a great original, he was wonderful. And before him Sid Green and
Dick Hills,who became forgotten,but they'd really done great stuff
for them at ATV. Junkin and I were talking about Eric lookingat the
camera, and we did a thing about the dawn patrol,the Royal Flying
Corps in the First World War. Eric was on first— which was
unusual:we changed the formata bit— Eric was on with Pete Murray
or somebody, and they’re waiting for this new recruit.And Ernie
entered wearing the lot— the leather helmet, — everything and Eric
turned into the camera and said: “They’re sending us kids!’I was
very proud of that. And the other lineI was very proud of in that:
‘Where’s Fanshawe?’ ‘He’s outside, servicingthe Camel.’ We had
carefully mentioned the plane earlieron.
72
52 Now T#HAT’s Funny!
ps: How much are you involved in the process of getting the
words on to the screen or the stage? Do you follow it through
rehearsals?
BARRY CRYER: My life’sgone full circle now: I’m almost retiredas
a scriptwriterper se, because the young ’uns write their own, or they
have their self-contained groups, like Python was. So the phone’s
stopped ringing.The tide went out. But having been a performer,
you have a different attitudeas a A writer. lot of writers would say:
‘That idiot’s paid to do this. He’s supposed to be an actor.’ They had
no understanding. And I would say things like, “Well, the door
opens the other way,’ and they’d say: ‘Oh, please, are we dealing
with children?’and I’d say, ‘No, you walk through that door and try
and do that line when you’ve got to turn the other way.’ I had a sort
of ... bit of compassion for these nerks.
Sometimes, of course, performers can do it differently from the
way you wrote it and it’s funny: you can say, ‘No, that’s better.’
Ronnie Corbett was onterrific intonationand things. He’d come up
with something a bit quirky, or one of his hesitationsin the middle
of a line which seemed to break the rule: he made the line much fun-
nier by choking off in the middle of it for some reason,as if he was
too nervous, or whatever: it was called acting, really. Very good
actor, Ronnie — full of nuances. Well, the two Ronnies, I mean: just
immaculate. You knew your stuff was going to get good treatment
with those two. Very relaxed.
yMcG: You worked with them at the club,at Danny La Rue’s...

BARRY CRYER: Well, not Ronnie Barker; Ronnie Corbett was in
Winston’s — it wasn’t Danny’s own club — off Bond Street,in
Clifford Street. That’s where we met up. And then Danny had his
own club in Hanover Square. That was an amazing period.
jmcG: David Frost used to go in there all the time.

BARRY CRYER: That’s how I started on television really,Joe. I’ve
been so lucky with the I accidents: wrote a couple of revues for the
Fortune Theatre, older-style revues, and Danny came in to see one
and invited me to write his night-club shows. The first time I met
Denis Norden, he came to the club, and afterwards he came over and
shook my hand and said:‘I didn’t know there were so many cock
jokes in all the world.’I had prided myself on the wording: there was
no effing, there was no language in any Danny La Rue show. It was
fullof jokes like: ‘What do you think of Michael Foot?’ ‘A wild
exaggeration!” ‘Let’s talk about Edward Heath, and people do, you
know!’ I would shout: ‘Oh, he’s coming from the rooftops! That’sa
73
BARRY CRYER 53
clever trickif you can do it!’You know, all that rubbish.I always
like the words to be innocuous, but the jokes were incredibly dirty:
‘Something here inside says I love you,’ and Danny would look
straight down the crutch and say: ‘It speaks!’ All that...I like there
to be a slight bit of dirty elegance. Julian Clary’s doing jokes that
Danny was doing thirty years ago.
My wife said: “You’re a getting hang-up that you’rea blue writer.’
That was my living then: I was in the show, I wrote it, and I thought:
Oh, thisis what I’lldo for the restof my life probably, writing rude
jokes for night-clubs.Then Frostie came in and asked me to write on
television and my wife said: “There you are! David Frost thinks you
can write other stuff,not just in a night-club.’It was a great school,
it was a wonderful experience.
Frostie invited me — this was after That Was The Week That Was
and Not So Much a Programme — to work on a one-off calledA
Degree of Frost. And then David invitedme on to The Frost Report
and I was off and running. And then if you were a Frost writer, that
started opening doors; as you remember, the whole of Python,
before Python, were on the writing roster on The Frost Report.
That’s where I met them all. Frostie put me and Graham, and
initiallyEric Idle, togetherto write a sitcom for Ronnie Corbett.
And then Eric left after the first series,got something else,so
Graham and I wrote all the remainder of the Ronnie Corbett sit-
coms. Frostie’s great strength was as the entrepreneur,the fixer:he
brings people together.I mean, Graham and I got on from the
moment we met, but you’d not necessarily have said we could write
together, because we seemed to be from two different worlds of
I writing. was jokey, gag, show-bizzy man and he was fey and a doc-
tor, who had a weird sense of humour, but we hit it off and it was a
joy to write with him, until,as I say, the days began to be truncated.
We finished up on about an hour’s writinga day, and it broke my
heart.
ymcG: And Marty Feldman? Did you ever work with Marty?
BARRY CRYER: Marty was officially script editor on The Frost
Report. And the big joke at the time was, we will do a different
theme every week. So at the first meeting we said, “What are we
going to do?’ and Marty said, ‘Holidays,’and disappearedon holi-
day. But he was a joy, Marty, he was a lovely guy. Of course,he was
a performer, you see — he’d been in “Maurice, Marty and Mitch’ in
variety,it was wacky and zany and a lot of props and hitting each
other. Then he turned to scriptwriting,and then he came back, in At
Last, the 1948 Show, as a performer. John and the others said: “He’s
74
funny. Let’s have him in the show,’ and he hadn’t performed for
years.
jmMcc: Writing to order very quickly as you did for Danny La

Rue, what’s that like?
BARRY CRYER: I prefer it.I prefer the deadline, the white heat; the
adrenalin gets going. You know the old saying, “We don’t want it
good, we want it Monday,’ and you hope it’s good and Monday. I
like the pressure. Eric Morecambe used to say: ‘It’sall done on fear,
you know.’ Eric liked the world where you got the scriptson a
Monday morning, sat round a table, and it was pressure, pressure,
and then on Friday you went for it. That really affectedhis health
terribly,but what can you do? There’s a temperament in the man.
But when John Junkin and I were writing for Eric and Ernie at
Thames, he had three months, so of course they could go off stuff,
they would discarda whole show, piece by piece. You’d have to
write the whole show again. Eric had too much time,he didn’t really
like that leisure.He had to do something to fill the time, which was
suddenly to go off the script he’d liked before.
DB: What was it that got you into comedy?

BARRY CRYER: BA Eng. Lit. failed at Leeds University.I went to
universitywith the idea of beinga journalist and of course immedi-
atelyI discovered girlsand booze, and we all wrote and performed
shows, and I gota real taste for it; but ’'d got no showbiz ambitions.
I just thought: ’m enjoying this. Then I got my first-year results,
and they were not good. A guy came up to Leeds to see somebody
else in a student show, and he saw me in our Rag Review in the old
Empire Theatre in Leeds, and offered me work. And I thought: This
is fate.I’m obviously not going down the groves of academe. And I
went off and did six weeks as a comic in strip shows, Strip, Strip,
Hooray or Nudes of the World or whatever it was called,and that
was a false start. Crawled back to Leeds, back to the Empire Theatre,
and got a job as a stage-hand.And I used to empty and fill three bars
in the morning. Ever done that? Empties are heavy,I tell you:
they’reas heavy as fulls,for some strange reason. Then I’d go home
and have a kip, and then at night I would work as a stage-hand, fly-
galleryand everything.
Then David Nixon arrived to do a pantomime, which is a horror
story in itself. Pre-M1 he and his then wife, Paula Marshall, drove up
the Al to Leeds in separate cars, with all the gear for the pantomime,
and she had a heart attackat the wheel and crashed off the road. She
was dead. David actually drove past the crash, not He realising.
75
BARRY CRYER 55
arrived in Leeds, they told him his wife was dead, and he collapsed.
But he said: ‘I’m going on with the pantomime. She would have
wanted it,’and another woman came up from London to replace her
and they started rehearsals.
The manager of the theatre was called Leo Lion,I swear — military
sort, moustache and a carnation and all that.I was regarded as a bit
of an eccentric, this one who’d been kicked out of Leeds University,
working as a stage-hand.He calledme ‘ Toff’. Anyway, he calledme
to his officeand said: ‘Do you want to look afterMr Nixon? Be his
dresser and assistant?’The guy was in an awful state, taking pillsand
sleeping between shows, and we became friends then. And he said:
“You've got to get out of Leeds. Go to London.’ I took him at his
word; got a night train from Leeds immediately after the end of the
pantomime. He took me out to dinner, and introduced me to agents,
and invited me to his radio shows, TV shows.
So that’s how it all started,and then I got the job in the musical,
Expresso Bongo. I played Beast, the leaderof the skiffle group.I had
a scene with Paul Schofield, who had never done a musical, he’s a
great classical Shakespearean actor. Burt Rhodes, the musical direc-
tor, said, ‘He’s practically got perfect pitch for singing,but no sense
of timing,’ which is strange for an actor, and he would get one and a
half bars ahead of the band, and Burt used to cut the whole band and
the pianist would find where Paul was — oh, it was brilliantto watch
—and Burt would givea beat, and the whole band would be: ‘Where
the fuck are we? Oh, right, we’re back!’ It was wonderful. And then
I was off and running,I was quite smug.
jmcG: How do you write? In longhand?

BARRY CRYER: I’m an old scribbler. I’m getting left behind now,
you know — you do really feela dinosaur, because I can work a
processor,but I don’t enjoy working ata I processor. don’t trust the
words I see on the screen:I think they look too neat and beautiful,
and I think it’s probablya load of crap.I can only think with a pen.
I just scrawl and scrawl, and I daren’t leavemy writing for more than
about twenty-four hours beforeI type it up, because P've got my
own form of speed writing,and aftera gap it’s completely illegible
to me*. .
jMcG: Do you know what’s funny?
BARRY CRYER: Joe, how long have we both been around? Nobody
knows. I’ve never, ever said to an actor, or actress or a comic: “This
is funny.’ I’ve said: “We like this.’
76
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77
Eddie Braben
Chipping granite with a spoon
For Merseysiders and Mancunians the equivalentof the French

Riviera is North Wales, and that is where Eddie Braben has settled,
halfway up a mountain, in a house none too easy to find in the dark.
A tall, bespectacled man with a gentle manner, he, more than any-
one, created our memories of Morecambe and Wise, the most uni-
versally loved of all post-war comedians. When he took over writing
Eric and Ernie’s show from Sid Green and Dick Hills, Eddie
adjusted the characters they played to give a new dimension to the
classic double act. His flightsof imagination gave their work a
unique and irreplaceable flavour,and a quite differentone from the
quality Eddie had provided in a long associationwith Ken Dodd. He
created still another fantasy world for the radio series The Worst
Show on the Wireless,on which he had a speaking part.As we dis-
covered as we sat and talked over tea and sandwiches provided by
his wife, Deirdre, there is a performer lurking inside Eddie: his
warm, quiet voice falls naturally and unaffectedly into uncannily
evocative impersonations of the people he is quoting: Dave Morris,
Ken Dodd, Eric Morecambe, Ernie Wise — even Jerry Lewis.
DB: We’re trying to discover what writers think about comedy.

EDDIE BRABEN: What I think now is, “Thank God it’s all over,’
becauseI never liked it. No, I never ever enjoyed writing; it’sso
hard. If anybody said, ‘I’m going to spend this day writing comedy.
Lam looking forward to it,’ I’'d think, Well, there’s an idiot. It’s the
hardest job I’ve ever done, and I’ve done a few. All the manual
labour: I’ve been a brickie’s mate, loaded cratesof cigarettesin
Ogden’s; I was a dishwasher in the RAF when I was doing my
National Service — it’s true, I was... I wanted to be a dishwasher.
78
BecauseI knew that by virtueof being in the cookhouse and doing
the dishes I was excused all duties, because it soaked right through
my overalls, everything, my boots, the lot; it was caked in grease, it

was I rotten, stank.So nobody wanted me to go on parade:no guard
duty, no fire drills, nothing.
I’ve done a varietyof jobs.I was in the police for forty-five
minutes. There’sa big police school in Liverpool: you have to go
there to do so many weeks before you’re a policeman.I went into
this room, and it was a lecture that lasted about twenty minutes, all
standingup at I attention. thought: What’s this? Left right, left right,
left right, down the corridor, left right, left right, left ght... I
thought: Hello. Left right, left right, into this room for twenty
minutes. ‘Stand upright!’ Left right, left right, left right.I thought:
Oh, I don’t like this one little bit. Left right, left right, left right.
Right turn!I went left turn! hup two... and went home.
But writing, that is the most difficult job in the world. It’s like
chipping granite with a spoon, it really is.
jMcG: You said once that you drew a television screen on the
wall and watched it?
EDDIE BRABEN: Yeah. | just did the square on the wall, and I could
act it out on that square.I thought: That looks good. My wife was
delightedto be seeingme drawing a square on the wallpaper,she was
thrilledto I bits. said: “You start to worry when I do it in Cinerama.’
It was in my head, and I’d just visualiseit on this screen, this little
square.I could see it, and I'd go: ‘No, that’s not going to work.’
Sometimes it just looked good, and I thought: Yes, that will work.
ymMcG: Depends who’s directing it.

EDDIE BRABEN: You put your lifein your hands, because other
people take over, don’t they? But I got to the stage where I’d say:
‘There it is, I’ve written it. You can do what the hell you like with
that now.’ I got to that stage where I wasn’t bothered, because it was
so hard. But then if it was easy, everybody would be doing it,
wouldn’t they?
DB: How do you know when it’s funny?

EDDIE BRABEN: They send you a cheque. When the cheques stop
coming, it’s not funny any more. I was, like, at the sharp end of
comedy: doing twelve years with Ken Dodd, you're at the sharp end
because we used to work on about six gagsa minute. He went bang,
bang, bang, bang: “He’s got three children,one of each...’ They
were like that.I can’t remember them untilI hear somebody elsedo
79
EDDIE BRABEN My)
them now. I heard one the other night. Doddy was on ~ it was a clip
—and he said:‘I was at medical school.I was a PhD: Prepares Hot
Dinners... PLJ: Puts Lumps on Judies... Well, I’ll talk to you, sir;
you look sensible.He is sensible:he’s fast asleep ...’ Bang, bang,
bang, and it never stopped,at that rate,and that wore me out.
The Ken Dodd shows were quite successfulon radio, doing two a
week, Sunday and Wednesday, and with Ken Dodd you don’t start
the next one. You do one on Sunday . . . never mind the one you’re
doing on Wednesday, let’s get this Sunday one right.We used to
come back on the trainat midnight, get back to Liverpool at four
o’clockin the morning, and I'd be straight home and straightto the
typewriter, because it was Monday morning by then and it had to be
in by Tuesday morning. I used to write it in eight hours.
But I was able to write gags. You watch a situation comedy, as I
do now, and I’m going: ‘It’s been on now five minutes, and there
hasn’t been a funny line yet.’ ‘It’s been on seven minutes, there
hasn’t been a funny line yet.’I know the machine’s laughing, but
nobody else is. They can’t writea funny line. They geta funny idea
and this carries them through thirty minutes. [’ll exclude things like
Only Fools and Horses — John Sullivan, who’s probably the pick of
the bunch. Now, John’s a very, very fine writer.I think John is the
best at the moment. And where are the stand-up comics? They’re
there, but are we going to see them on television?We’re not, because
there’sno Light Entertainment any more.
You take something like The Morecambe and Wise Show, where
you’d got to have an opening stand-up, two-hander, which is the old
variety thing, two men being funny. Then a quickie, then a five-
minute sketch, then something that'll lasta minute, then something
that’ll last six minutes, then something that’lllast one minute, then
the sketch at the end... So we were doing about nine, ten, separate
comedy items in every programme. That’s the sharp end of comedy,
and it was exhausting, mentally.
From the top, the story is that Bill Cotton rang and said to me —
I'd left Ken Dodd - ‘Do you want to write for Morecambe and
Wise? I would like you to write for Morecambe and Wise.’I said:‘I
can’tdo it.’He said: ‘Why?’ I said: ‘Because I’m not good enough.’
He said: ‘Well,I think you I are.’ thought a lot of Bill: he’sa nice
man. He said: ‘Well, would you come down this week and meet the
boys?’— it was always ‘the boys’.I went down and met them, we got
on well together from the word go, and I said: ‘Look, I couldn’t
write the way you’ve been working all your lives,and the way I’ve
seen you on Ittelevision. will have to be the way I I write. can’t copy
anybody else, because I wouldn’t be able to write anybody else’s
80
style, only my own.’ So Bill said: ‘Well, come back next week and
let’ssee what you’ve got.’I was very I prolific, used to write quick,
so I went down with about twenty, twenty-five, maybe thirty pages
and the first thing Eric said was: ‘Christ! It’s got Erica line, Ernie a
line, me a line, Ernie a line...’ and he said: “All these pages, we've
got lines,it goes right through to the end!’I said: “Yeah — what’s
wrong?’ He said: ‘Well, we’ve never worked like I that!’ said: “How
have you worked in the past?’He said: ‘Well, we’ve just got ideas on
a piece of paper. We all sit down and work on them.’I said: “Oh, I
didn’t know you could get away with it like that.I wish ’'d known.’
Anyway, they read it, and Eric said: ‘Oh, gosh, it’s very funny.
We could never do I this.’ said: ‘Well, it’sthe only way I can write.’
He said: ‘Look, there’sa sketch here, with two of us ina flat. It’s like
a feature-length film. We couldn’t do this.’ Bill said, because he liked
it as well: “This is the new Morecambe and Wise we have never seen
before.I think it will work. Let’sdo two or three on BBC 2. Only a
million or two million people will see it. You won’t destroy your-
selves completely.’So they did that and you know the rest...
jMcG: You changed their characters so that Eric became the

smart guy, not the idiot comedian, and Ernie became the idiot.
EDDIE BRABEN: That’s true toa certain degree. But also they could
be two funny men, or Eric could be a straight man at some times,
because he let Ernie have funny lines,the difference being that Ernie
didn’t realisehe was saying something funny. Like, they’d be in bed,
and Ernie’d be trying to write, and he said— how did the gag go? It
was a good line— Ernie said:‘I could be another George Bernard
Priestley.’Eric said: ‘Shaw.’ Ernie said: ‘Positive.’
Eric said: ‘You’re from Yorkshire, weren’t the Bronté sisters?’
Ernie — he’s supposed to be the writer, you see — said: ‘Don’t Sit
Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me,’ that was one of
their best. Ernie would say something funny without realising it.
I remembered one the other day, it came from a bed sketch. Eric
was getting into bed, Ernie was writing,and a police car went past
and Eric said: ‘He’s not going to sell much ice-cream going at that
I speed.’ had to fight for the bed sketches, because they didn’t want
to do it. For obvious reasons: didn’t want the public to think they
were a couple of homosexuals. Eric said: “They’re very funny, but I
don’t like the idea of two men in pyjamas in bed.’ This was pro-
tracted:it went on over a couple of hours. In the end I said: ‘Well,if
it’s good enough for Laurel and Hardy, it’s good enough for you.’
And Eric said: “That'lldo me.’
So what he did, when they were in the bed, to try and point up the
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EDDIE BRABEN 61
fact that he was masculine, he was male, he had the pipe, in bed. And
he might be reading the Dandy. Ernie’d be reading the plot of his
play.I think it was something about ‘Hank Somebody, Private Eye,
flew into Roma airport and it was his first visitto Amsterdam’. And
Eric just went: “Twenty-four, Ern.’ ‘Twenty-four?’ ‘Cow pies.
Desperate Dan today.’ And everybody loved it.
Pve always said it was a childish humour; I’ve probably under-
mined my own writing, but it was a childish humour. There was
never anything mucky. The nearestwe got was the way Eric would
say: ‘Pardon?’ Ernie would say: ‘I’llgo in the kitchen and have a
look at it now,’ and Eric would say: ‘Pardon?’ ‘The dinner.’But
we'd get a big laugh on ‘Pardon?’If we’d leftit alone,it wouldn’t
have got a laugh: ‘T’lltake it out and havea look at it.’ Pardon?’ ‘T’ll
take it out: the meal.’ ‘Oh...’ We didn’t have to paint lurid pictures.
But the pressures have always been there. That’s why I say I never
enjoyed it, never.I enjoyed the end product. The very firstgag about
Des O’Connor’s singing came because I used to watch Des
O’Connor, and I thought: God, you get on my bloody nerves, you.
You’re so handsome, you’ve got beautiful teeth, you wear lovely
clothes, you’rea good singer,all the women love you. I’m going to
have a go at you. I stuck one linein one week, and the place erupted.
And they’re still doing them, now. We met when Eric’s daughter
was getting married.He said to me: ‘I could never have bought that
publicity.’
One of the first guests was Dame Flora Robson. I remember
thinking to myself:I used to watch her in films with Errol Flynn
when I was a kid! And I’m writing for her! I can’t do this line here,
can I? Well, I'll chance it, and if she objects we'll take it out. It was a
front-of-tabs thing, and she came through wearing the actual
ElizabethI outfit she wore in the film with Errol Flynn. She looked
breathtakingin this dress.She was carryinga football.Eric looked at
his watch. She said: ‘I’m sorry I’m late,but a young man kept asking
me if I’d be fit for Saturday.’Eric said: ‘And will you?’ The audience
loved it, because we’d pricked the bubble, when she did that line
they fell in love with her: ‘Ah, she’s human, she’s like us.’ So I
thought: this insulting people works.
Like André Preview — Mr Preview and Mr Privet.And thena bit
later in the script Eric said: ‘Mr Previn,’and André said: ‘Preview’
... In there is one of my treasured I possessions: had an LP André
Previn Plays My Fair Lady. 1 knocked on his dressing-room door,
and I went in and said: ‘Mr Previn.’He said: ‘No, it’s André.’ I said:
‘Would you sign this?’He said: ‘My God, you’ve got one of these?
It’s an awful long time ago.’He wrote on it, and I didn’t even look
82
62 Now THAT’s FUNNY! 4,
at what he wrote: we just stayed and I talked. went home and looked:
‘With great I admiration.’ thought: This man isa musical genius,he
is aman who at the age of twenty-sixwas the head of music at MGM
music, and he’s writtento me ‘With great I admiration!’ never got
over writing for big star names. I used to say: “Bloody hell! Laurence
Olivier! Yehudi Mehu... Mehudi Yu... Max Jaffa! Wow!’
And some of the lines! Peter Cushing, when he was King Arthur,
and Eric came into the castle,and Peter Cushing said: ‘What news of
Carlisle?’And Eric said: ‘When I left they were winning 2-1!’
pB: What aspect of the job did you find that you had consistent
difficultieswith?
EDDIE BRABEN: It’s probablya cliché,but I think: the first line.
The first I line. have actually gone into that room for a whole day,
and not put one word on paper. I’ve come out at night and I’ve had
to go and shower, because I’ve been saturated,and change my cloth-
ing. That’s, say, on the Monday. On the Tuesday, the same. This 1s
where you’re chipping granite, now. I even remember three days,
not a word. Maybe halfway through the third day, you can’t get the
words on paper quick enough, but only because you’ve sweated for
two and a half days. How many times have you gone into that room,
or in Southfield Park in Liverpool, and found me asleep over the
typewriter?
DEIRDRE BRABEN: When we moved here | used to work in a hotel,

just part-time,and my daughter and I sometimes used to come home
at the same time, about midnight or after, and he’d be fast asleep over
his typewriter.
EDDIE BRABEN: ‘There were occasions when I’ve worked, asI say,
[ve worked all through this day, all through the night, all through
the next day, and just fallen over, literally.That was the — deadlines
the Morecambe and Wise Shows were quick turnarounds. It’s put me
in a hospital couple of times, hasn’t it? Well, once, anyway.
DEIRDRE BRABEN: One night when he’d been working he had a

shower, about nine o’clock, and we couldn’t find him. He was on the
bed and then he disappeared.My daughter was going away, and she
was putting stuff in and out of her car,so I didn’t take much notice
that the front door was banging.We found him fast asleepon the
bench outside.
EDDIE BRABEN: I had my dressing gown and pyjamas on...
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EDDIE BRABEN 63
DEIRDRE BRABEN: Fast asleep. Like a tramp.
EDDIE BRABEN: That was mental exhaustion, which sounds easy,

but it’s not — it’sa terrible thing. I’ve had it two or three times;it
wasn’t very nice.
DEIRDRE BRABEN: Or sometimes he’s been asleep and he just gets

up, he doesn’t know, and he just walks straight into the office and
sitsat the typewriter.
jMcG: For Morecambe and Wise you were writing situation

comedy as well as gags.
EDDIE BRABEN: Nobody realised,and I didn’t realise myself at
first,that I was doing what we calla spot show — the opening, lots
of littlebits —- and the sketch at the end was twenty minutes.So I
was doing situation comedy within the framework of a Light
Entertainment programme. I used to think to myself:I could have
padded that sketch for a half-hour sitcom. The other nightI timed
Coronation Street.Do you know how long we actually got? Twenty
minutes. Dialogue was twenty minutes.
ps: Did you find if you got stuck on the cross-talkyou could
move to the flat sketch and do a bit of that, or did you work
straight through?
EDDIE BRABEN: I had to go from the top, and go through it right
the way as you would see it, in sequence.I may have had the idea for
the final sketch, but that was all.
pB: Within each show, is there a shape: is one item meant to

balance something else?
EDDIE BRABEN: Not knowingly. Maybe I was just fortunate.I
suppose the first show was right: it looked good; the shape was
good. I stayed with it.I didn’t want to change it.
jMcG: The dance routines, were they yours, too?

EDDIE BRABEN: ‘That’s the director, Ernest Maxim — because he’s
a song-and-dance man, and he was the best man in the world for
musical numbers. Whenever it was dialogue, yes, I always did that,
but the actual dance thingsI left alone. Ernest Maxim knew what he
was doing — that Stripper routine was a classic, wasn’t it? In the
kitchen .. . I saw The Stripper again, and Shirley MacLaine was
doing it, at the Montreux Festival.
John Ammonds was the director He originally. had a great track
84
sal
record:he was the sound-effectsman in /TMA. It was done down

the road from here, did you know that? All the big BBC comedy
shows — ITMA, Old Mother Riley— they were all done in Bangor,
which is just down the road here: they took them out of London
during the war. I remember as a kid standing outside the stage door,
getting their autographs. Jack Train gave me his autograph; drew a
little train underneath with smoke coming out. I was evacuated; I

was only eight or nine.I lived in Anglesey for a while.I suppose
that’s when the love affair started. John Ammonds did JTMA, and
he went on to Dave Morris, Ken Platt, and he did Eric and Ernie on
radio. When they got to television that was a plus for them, a man
who really knew comedy, and John did.
jmcc: And he went to Thames, if you remember: after they did

a couple of shows there they got John Ammonds over to Thames.
EDDIE BRABEN: Yeah, but they didn’t get me, though. Didn’t get
me. They’d already signed.I said: ‘Sorry, I’m not going.’I was so
happy at the BBC, and Bill Cotton was there. Mind you, Philip
Jones at Thames, he was a lovely man as well, I loved Philip.I
couldn’t see the reason for moving to Thames — obviously it was
money. And I couldn’t see there was anything in it for me, except
money. But I’ve never been money-orientated. I’ve never had an
agent. I’ve never really appreciated my own value: put it that way.
I used to look at the cheques from the BBC and I’d think, By
God, this is better than being redundant.It was two years before
I went to Thames, but I didn’t like writing for commercial tele-
vision after the BBC.
In fairnessto Eric, it was probably good for him, because his
health wasn’t good then. There were fewer shows and half-hours
where we'd beeen doing forty-five minutes — and the big one at
Christmas. Oh God, that was a nightmare.I can remember Eric
readinga scriptin January for a show we were going to do in two
weeks’ time: “We'll save that for Christmas, that piece there, that’ll
be right for the Christmas show.’ It used to hang over me likea great
big, black bat, that Christmas show... All of a sudden it dawned on
me: twenty million people, week in, and then twenty-six and a half
million people watching it...As Eric said, a ‘It’s million more than
the Queen got.’He said: ‘Well, she’s not very funny, is she? And
have you heard her singing ‘Bring me Sunshine’? She’s got no idea:
she’s tone deaf!’
But I didn’t like it at Thames because it was half an hour, it was
less than half an hour, it was twenty-five minutes. Everything was
pared down to the bone, everythingwas condensed, everythingwas
85
EDDIE BRABEN 65
cut down. I couldn’t spread,I couldn’t expand on anything,I

couldn’tdo the long pauses —I used to love the long pauses.I didn’t
like this break in the middle. Commercials. You didn’t a associate
break in the middle with Eric and Ernie. You’d acceptit with Benny
Hill because he’d been doing it for so long, but not with Eric and
Ernie; it broke the thread.
I was doing a Morecambe and Wise series once, and I had a tele-
phone call from an Alexander Cohen, American producer (I didn’t
know who Alexander Cohen was), and he said, would I be interes-
ted in doing some work for him? He wanted to bring back
Hellzapoppin’on stage with Jerry Lewis. I said: ‘I’m sorry, he’s not
my type of comic. He always reminds me of somebody who’s got
some terrible He illness.’ said: “Have you ever seen him on stage?’I
said: ‘No.’ He said: “Well, how about Friday I night?’ said: ‘OK.’ In
half an hour he called me back and said: ‘OK, I’ve booked the seats,
and the hotel and the plane. He’s opening on Thursday at the
Olympia in I Paris.’ said: ‘Bloody hell,I thought he was in Halifax!’
I thought he was in one of the big working-men’s clubs.
I went over, we saw the show at night, and Jerry Lewis is God in
Paris. Next day I went to his hotel with Alexander Cohen, we had a
talk, and I happened to say that my daughter had been watching him
in a film on TV. He said: “You’ve got to take this picture. P’Il sign it
for her.’It was a big picture,and he wrote all kinds to Jane, and he
brought out this envelope and it had in the top left-hand corner
‘Jerry Lewis Inc., Hollywood’, and underneatha little cartoon of
Jerry Lewis.I said: ‘Jerry,I’ve been in this businessa few years now,
I’ve met a lot of big names, but thisis probably the nicest thing that
anyone’s done for me,’ and I threw it the lengthof the room. He was
on his knees, tears were coming down: ‘I’ve gotta have this guy, I’ve
gotta have this guy!”
He never got this guy, though, becauseI found out I’d have to go
to America. I’ve always detested going away from home. That was
the second offerI refused.The other one was actually Hollywood.I
said: ‘No, thank you. I don’t want any part of I that.’ must have been
pretty hot in those days. The overriding factor was thatI would be
away from my wife and childrenand home. I’ve never been able to
write away from home. I’ve never been able to write in a television
studio or in a hotel room.
jmcG: Where do you write?

EDDIE BRABEN: Well, when I’m here, that little room there. When
I used to livein Liverpool, eventuallywe moved toa rather nice,
large house with a private park.I took the smallest bedroom. I said:
86
‘That’lldo me.’ Any room that’llhold a chair and a desk and a type-
writer, that’sall I need, with things surrounding me that I’m famil-
iar with, thatI like to have around me. In there’sa pigsty, but my
wife daren’tgo in there to clean, she just leavesme in there.
jMcc: You must have made the decisionto change from what
you were doing to be a writer.
EDDIE BRABEN: I left school when I was fourteen, in the south end
of Liverpool — the Dingle, it was then. It’s now known as Croxteth,
I think.I can stillhear the headmaster saying to me: ‘Ill see you ina
few years’ time, Braben, when you come to empty the dustbins.’
Because I was as thick as the leg of a snooker table,I really was, and
I went to work at Ogden’s tobacco factory, knocking nails in boxes,
and I thought, There’s got to be something better than this.But what
it was,I didn’t know. I did my National Service and I was washing all
those greasy dishes,and I thought, There’s got to be something better
than this.I still didn’t know what it was. Then my father investeda
hundred pounds — it was a hellof a lot of money — ina fruit stallin
the Victorian building known as Liverpool St John’s Market: there
were about eight other stallsin this great, big, massive building— it
was likea great railway station.And, God, I hated working on that.
I thought, There’s got to be something better than I this. still didn’t
know what it was, and for some reasonI started writing lineson the
back of brown paper bags, and the fruit was going rotten.I used to
write about five hundred a week. Anybody can write five hundred
lousy jokesa week, but you’ve got to writea great many before you
actually write one that makes sense.I eventually did. I sold it to
Charlie Chester for two-and-six,and the work gradually built up.
DB: That was the one about how Hopalong Cassidy’s mum
knew he’d be a cowboy because he had a ten-gallon nappy...
EDDIE BRABEN: That was the very I first. couldn’t remember the
one I wrote yesterday but I remember the firstone with great affec-
tion. Charlie was justa lovely man. My idol when I was in my teens
was Dave Morris. They talk about surreal humour, but he was well
before his time.He used to have this programme on the radio called
Club Night. It was a working-man’s club in the North; it was a great
setting. Dave Morris was appearing in pantomime at the Royal
Court Theatre in Liverpool, just outside the market, and he came to
my father’s stallfor some meat — my father worked in the market,
too —and my father said how much we admired him, and he brought
him down to me. He had a straw hat on and his first words to me
were: ‘All right, son? Don’t take any wooden money.’
87
EDDIE BRABEN 67
I used to love radio —I couldn’t believe the voices came out of this
box. I thought: I’d love to be on the wireless. That stayed with me,
and I wasn’t satisfied untilI went on the wireless, and that was when
I did The Worst Show on the Wireless in the Seventies.It was me,
Alison Steadman — it was her first break, actually— Bill Pertwee, Eli
Woods.
yMcG: How did you feel about writing for yourself?

EDDIE BRABEN: I enjoyed it.I didn’t have any funny I lines. was
the poor idiotin the middle surrounded by all these other idiots.In
one of them Alison played Mrs Turpin; she brought her son
Precious to audition for the BBC, because he could climb inside a
milk bottle and sing. The BBC man said: ‘You can’t possibly get
insidea milk bottle.’ Precious said:‘I can get insidea milk bottle.
Give mea hand to take me accordion off Tofirst.’ my astonishment,
it won the Best Comedy thing for the year, and I was quite thrilled
with that.
DB: Do you think there’sa Liverpool flavour to your comedy?

EDDIE BRABEN: There’sa bit of disrespectin Liverpool, disrespect
for authority. For pompous people. I’ve never really analysed it.
People say: ‘How do you do it?’ Well, you don’t know. How do you
tell Beethoven how to play in goal? How do you tell Pavarottihow
to do the splits? You don’t, do you? It is a gift, and I don’t wish to
make this sound oregotistical big-headed,but when I livedin this
private park in Liverpool, Southfield Park, it was a beautiful placeto
live.Of course,I didn’t always livein beautiful places— two up and
two down, outside lav. Anyway, in the winter, all the leaves— we
were surrounded by trees,of course— they’d falloff and I could see
right through, two hundred yards, to the main ring road.I used to
start work very earlyin the morning, say half seven, and I could see
buses going past packed tight with people looking I miserable. used
to think, Well, maybe they’re thinking:Oh, good, Morecambe and
Wise are on I tonight. used to think, Well, that’swhy I’ve been given
this gift,for those people.I honestly believe that. I’m not an overly
religious person, but I could relateto those people going to work on
the bus.I feltI owed it to them to do it. And that did help.
I used to have this feeling that one day the telephone would ring,
and this very distant voice would say: “Eddie Braben? It’s all been a
mistake.’ ‘Pardon?’ ‘It’sall been a mistake. We’re going to take it all
back.’ “You’re not, are you?’ “’Fraidso. Bye!’
What are we doing being bloody old? We’ve no rightto be old:we
should be young again.I look in the mirror, and I say: “Look at that!
88
Looks about thirty,that fella. Why are they all saying “Happy birth-
day to you, happy sixty-fifth birthday”? Bloody hell, ’'m not sixty-
five! Look at him: he’s only a lad.’ And the wife says: “You're not
sixty-five,are you?’ Bloody am.
There have been two golden 1 moments. One was Laurel and
Hardy at the Liverpool Empire: it was an enormous theatre,and I'd
never seen it so packed — every seat had gone; standing at the sides,
standing at the back, on all floors.The intervalhad finished,and a
total blackout, just one spot at the side, and then the piccolo started
playing their tune. That’s all it did, and the place erupted. They
hadn’t even walked on the stage, and when they walked on, it was
unbelievable.So much so, Ollie just stood there and cried: the
tears flowed down his face.I thought I’d never see that ever again.
So many years later, in Liverpool again, at the Royal Court
Theatre, first half, interval, then complete darkness, then the band
played ‘Bring Me Sunshine’— and the same thing happened again.
When they walked on, and crossed,I’d never heard applause like it:
they were standing,and they hadn’t said two words.
There’sa golden thread between people like Eric and Ernie and
Laurel and Hardy, between them and the audience. There’s love.It
goes beyond liking an act; there isa love between the two. It isa love
relationship:they love those people. Why they love them, I don’t
really know. I don’t think the audience would look at Eric and
Ernie, or look at Laurel and Hardy and say: “They are two stars.’
They are two very warm human beings. Maybe if it was Sinatraor
Judy Garland, you’d say: ‘Wow!’ But you wouldn’t say ‘Wow!’ to
Eric and Ernie, you’d say: ‘Ah...’ That’s the difference: wow and
ah; that’s allI can say.
89
Michael Palin
Fish are funny, for some reason
Since Monty Python’s Flying Circus burst on to the screen in 1969

and created an international cult, Michael Palin has extended his
range to encompass film for television (Eastof Ipswich) and the cin-
ema, as well as becoming television’s long-distance intraveller series
such as Pole to Pole and a novelist with Hemingway’s Chair.A
product of Brasenose College, Oxford, Michael is one part of the
wave of graduates that swept into comedy writing in the Sixties.
Work on The Frost Report brought him and his writing partner
Terry Jones in touch with a group from Cambridge — John Cleese,
Graham Chapman and Eric Idle.
Michael wrote for The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine, Do Not
Adjust Your Set, The Complete and Utter History of Britain,The
Rutles and Ripping Yarns. He led us through a maze of atstaircases
his north London home intoa well-lit study at the top of the house,
with working surfaces built over filing cabinets, from one of which
he took some red spiral-bound A4 notebooks with the ‘Silvine’
brand name — part of the Python archive.
MICHAEL PALIN: There’sa huge difference between writing on

your own and writing with a partner or in a team. In comedy writing
I nearly always worked with a partner. Didn’t mean in any way that
we wrote each alternateline — we very rarely did that— but it always
meant that there was somebody else there that you trustedto test the
material on, and it seemed very important with comedy. Whereas
with my novel, for instance,I became quite protective of it, and
didn’t read much of it out to anybody else becauseit was a different
sort of I reaction was looking for. Comedy needs .. . the noise of the
laugh, you need to know that it’s made that electrical connection
90
that causes someone to laugh, and for thatI needed a partner.So Pve
always felt that was the difference between my comedy writing and,
say, writing the travel books, which I’ve been able to write on my
own.
When Terry Jones and I wrote together before Python we were
quite disciplined because it was such a joy to be a scriptwriter.One
of my childhood ambitions was to be a scriptwriter because I’d seen
all the comic performers — the Norman Wisdoms, the Hancocks —
and I was really interestedin the writing behind it, and always
looked at the name of the scriptwriter. Galton and Simpson were my
heroes of comedy, possibly even more than the performers.So Terry
and I were really just so pleased to be able to do this rather than
banking, or insurance, or bus driving, so we worked very hard and
took on as much work as we possibly could.
The first thing we did of any substance was The Frost Report in
1966, maybe ’65. Then we worked for Marty Feldman, the Two
Ronnies, all sorts: Broaden Your Mind, which was a thing that the
team that became The Goodies did in 1967-68. We'd write for
absolutely anybody. And Terry was employed at the BBC — he was
on contractin the script department;I wasn’t—so he had to do a cer-
tain amount of work each week: links for The Billy Cotton Band
Show, things like that.
We wrote in quitea structured way and we used to work usually
in the same room all day. As the work-load got slightly heavier and
we had to write longer sketches, we'd work halfa day separately or
sometimes a day separately,and then meet up after that. To start
with we had to get x quota of jokes out, so we’d work either down
at Terry’s (he lives conveniently nine miles away, right through the
centre of London, in Camberwell), or he’d come up here. It went on
like that with the early Python, and then graduallywe began to write
more separately. Sometimes quite long chunks of material would get
written separately,but it was equally importantto meet together and
try the material out before it was then presentedto the rest of the
Python team.
ymcG: And they had been writing on their own, too?

MICHAEL PALIN: Yes, Python was a series of littlesort of villages
which combined into a city. There was Jones-Palin village,and
Chapman-Cleese village, and there was Idle village which had only
Eric in it! And there was Gilliam, who had a suburb of his own, a
crazed ghetto for which he would produce material which no one
else could do. We would get together for a session every three or
four days, or sometimes after a week. There was much more collab-
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MICHAEL PALIN 7\
orationin the early days of Python, in the sense of the group being
together more often, than there was later on.
DB: Were you and Terry Jones writing for you and Terry Jones,
or were you working for a sketch without any particular casting?
MICHAEL PALIN: The idea was that you would write for the group.
Sometimes one would havea very clear idea that one wanted John or
Graham or Eric to be one of the charactersin a sketch, and you
might write it specificallyfor somebody. We would perform the
sketch as we were writing it, and in the actual sessions,the Python
writing sessions,one member of the group would be appointed to
read the material.So John read what Graham and he wrote, and I
used to read what Terry Jones and I wrote — which very often gave
you a good chance of getting that part.If you read it and it worked,
everybody laughed; they’d say: ‘Well, that’s fine!’ Because Eric was
on his own and we all felta bit guilty because he hadn’t got a writing
partner, he was indulged a lot.
John and Terry used to argue over material. They seemed to be the
two separate poles of Monty Python. There was a base of material
which went in straight away because it was very funny. Then there
would be other pieces that you would argue over and it is very hard,
as you know, to argue about comedy. It’sso subjective,it’s imposs-
ible: “This is funny!’ “No, it isn’t!’It’s a silly argument to have, but
then it gets on to: “But it could be funny, if...’ “Maybe it wasn’t read
right, or something. And you were in the kitchen making coffee
when I was reading that end bit of it.’ “But it still isn’t funny!’
So there’dbe these fights and Terry might tend to a theorise little
bit about the feeling of Python and what it should represent.John
wasn’t very good on that sort of thing. Terry would be quite emo-
tional,and John would become very, very cool and detached, and
bait Terry for being Welsh, so Terry would get more and more
Welsh and passionateand bang the table...It was all necessary stuff,
and there was quitea lot of teasingand chiding going on amongst the
group.
ps: With you and Jones having been at Oxford, and Cleese,
Chapman and Idle at Cambridge, was there an Oxford versus
Cambridge contest?
MICHAEL PALIN: Oh, very definitely,yes. That was the area where
we could insult each other. Personal insults were not traded that
much, but the Oxford—Cambridge thing was a very good substitute
for the personal insult. John thought everybody who came from
Oxford was hopelessly woolly, and we all thought people from
92
Cambridge were frightfully neurotic and over-competitiveand gen-
erally rather cold and bitter, persecuted. It was all to do with climate,
I worked it out: because in Cambridge this cold wind is blowing
across the Fens all the time, whereas Oxford is rather pleasant and
balmy and has nice pubs around, nice placesto go to. So the Oxford
people were often divertedby pleasure, which they quite enjoy;
whereas Cambridge people were taught that pleasureis a bad thing,
which only rots the brain and decays your moral values.So we used
to have a few laughs like that, and actuallyyou can see there isa dif-
ference in Python. There’s an edge of cruelty to the Cambridge
material,and there’san edge of whimsy in the Oxford stuff.At best,
both are extremely good ingredients.At worst, the crueltyis just
cruelty and whimsy is just rather sillyand candyfloss-like.
jmcc: Who had overall control of ‘This is what we’ll do’? Was it
Ian McNaughton, the producer?
MICHAEL PALIN: No — in fact,we presented Jan with the material
that we put into each show. The actual judging of the material was
done by us. Obviously if Ian didn’t think something was going to
work or wouldn’t be funny, it would affect our final decision. But,
generally speaking,we took the decision as to what would go intoa
show and scribbled it all down, in these strange notebooks. I sup-
pose the final say was genuinely with the group. We were demo-
craticin that way. We were quite acrimonious sometimes — there
would be very difficult sessions— but in the end, I think we all
respected each other’s judgement more than we did any outsider’s.
DB: Was each series planned as a whole? Did you have six
episodes all worked out, or was some of it leftto the editing?
MICHAEL PALIN: I don’t think, as far as I can remember, that
things were filmed and then put into shows ina different order from
what we had decided. Because we’d all startedas writers we thought
the writer’s prerogativeof choosing material was very important,
and the writer’s listwas Soall-important. it wasn’t reallya question
of directoror producer or anyone else saying:‘I think we need this
weight in this show, or this weight in that show.’ We would block
out six shows in advance, because that’s all we had material for, and
we had to do that because the filming had to be done firstfor all six
shows. Very often some of the links would come a bit later on, but
basicallywe stuck to the order that we worked out.
I remember Pythons being planned in a fairly casual way. That’s
not really fair to the people who actually worked on them, because
they had to work very hard, but decisions were taken sometimes
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MICHAEL PALIN 73
very casually,and in an enormous rush ~ right from the day when

the series began and we hadn’t decided on a title. One department
was callingit one thing, another department was callingit another,
and it was really complicated because people were making costumes
and labelling them for a programme called Bumwackit, Buzzard,
Stubble and Boot and the make-up department would be putting
things together for something called J¢’s, which it was fora while.
DB: Who hit the titlein the end?

MICHAEL PALIN: My memory is that it was Eric and John, actu-
ally,who got the two names together,but we were all tossing names
around to go with Flying Circus. The BBC had run out of patience
with our pathetic attempts to get comic names, and said it had to be
something with Flying Circus. They said: ‘Why don’t you callit John
Cleese’s Flying Circus, or something like that?’ But John, quite
rightly, didn’t want to be stuck with responsibilityfor a show that
might be the biggest disasterof all time.
One attempt was after I’d gone to my mother-in-law’s for the
weekend and she had a Women’s Institute magazine, and in it was a
little round-up of all the various entertainmentsin the Bedfordshire
area. At Little Snetterton parish church there was a talk on, sort of,
rush mats from Brunei, and it was accompanied by so-and-so on the
piano. One of them was a talk accompanied by somebody called
Gwen Dibley on the piano, and I thought Gwen Dibley sounded a
really nice name, and I came back and said: “Why don’t we call the
series Gwen Dibley’s Flying Circus?’ It was just so nice to give some-
one their own series without them knowing, so that the Radio Times
would come through and land on the doormat, and they’d say:
‘Mum! Mum, you’ve got your own series! Saturday nights, 12.15!’
Well, John was very astute, and said: ‘Hang on, hang on! She
could sue us for all we’ve got.’ So Gwen Dibley never got her show,
sadly. It’s funny now that in the sitcom The Vicar of Dibley the
Dibley name comes up. So that was that.
I think it was at a session at John’s flat in Basil Street in
Knightsbridge when we finallygot together Python. Someone sug-
gested ‘Python’ and then someone said, “What’sa good name to go
with Python?’ ‘Monty.’ It just seemed to go very well, and the BBC
were very stony-facedand said: ‘Well, that’s ridiculous.You can call
it Monty Python’s Flying Circus if you want, but it'llbe known as
Flying Circus.’Of course, quite the opposite actually happened.
Wrong! Wrong! Still,it’s not so bad. The problem is not working
with people who are wrong: as long as they consistently think
they’re right,you have someone to play against.
94
ps: How did the break-up of Python come about?

MICHAEL PALIN: It was a group of six people, each coming into it
froma different direction.That was the great thing: well, two writers
never think exactly the same anyway, but everyone had a slightly
different approach, played comedy a slightly different way. What
held us together was an appreciationof each other’s comedy and the
way it all moulded together.You needed an Eric in the group, you
needed a John, you needed a Terry. We feltwe all complemented
each other, but it was likea — what’s the word? — a centrifugal force,
all the time, that was just being held together.It was likean explosion
that had happened, and it couldn’tbe held together for long, and this
was what happened in the end. Even by the middle of the second
series there was a I feeling: think John found writing slightly more
difficultby that time. Maybe he thought about wanting to write
something else, possibly there was a bit of stress between him and
Graham because Graham was leading this wild life and would tend
to arrive rather late. There was a period during the early third series
of Python where Graham was in quite bad shape, and difficultfor
someone who’s as disciplinedand thorough as John to write with.
So all this began to change the balance, and I think by the time we
did the third series John was really thinking of his next move and
doing something else. I’ve never really discussed it thoroughly with
John, what was in his mind, but he just wanted to get out. I think he
felt oppressed by being part of a group. Once that started,it all
began to fall apart, people whizzed off in all directions.Eric went off
to do Rutland Weekend Television,and Terry and I began to do
other stuff.In a way, Terry was the most conscientiousof all the
Pythons, the most concerned in keeping the group I together. think
that Terry could see that there was a potentialto do movies, and
probably Gilliam could as well, and of course thisis what happened.
We wound down the television seriesand then, justby Terry harry-
ing all the rest into the idea of doinga film,we began to get together
and say: ‘Well, what would we write and how would it be?’ and we
came up with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And that gave us a
second life,the films we made after that.
I think that came about largely because the two Terries wanted to
direct,and felt there was something that we could do better than
we'd done on We television. could not only create better pictures
and better images but in the end we would have much more control,
because with the BBC we had to abide by certain rules, like on the
Thursday night or Wednesday night, when we did our recording,we
had only an hour and a halfto do the whole thing, and if we didn’t
do it in that time, that was that.It meant everything was a bit of a
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MICHAEL PALIN. 75
rush, and we used to look at some of those shows and say: “These are
a appalling, mess — wigs on the wrong way round .. . and someone
got the line wrong there...we didn’t have time fora retake...’
By an extraordinary turn-around of taste, those aspectsof Python
now seem to be what people really like!I thought ‘Spanish
Inquisition’, for instance, was a disaster, because I had this hat put
on me just before I went on. It kept coming right down, and my
mind wasn’t in the sketch at I all. kept thinking: I’ve got a fucking
hat on, I can’t see a bloody thing, and no one’s going to be able to
see me, and here I am doing this stuff. . . If you actually look,I keep
trying to push back the hat. And everyone says: ‘Oh, Spanish
Inquisition: legendary.’
We did the Knights of Ni in The Holy Grail, and I was on top of
a ladder and that wasn’t right,and then there was something else and
then it startedto rain, and this helmet came right over, you couldn’t
see anybody in there, and the rule with comedy is you’ve got to see
the eyes: the more you can see of the face, the better it will be... It
was like puttinga bag over your head, playing the Knights Who Say
‘Ni’... I can remember feeling afterwards, at the end of that day’s
filming: God, if only we had the money to do this again the next day,
it would be funny. And yet now people love that. So you can’t really
tell; sometimes things that look rough have that spontaneityto them
which people really like.
DB: Do your plans for a Python reunion includea TV series?
MICHAEL PALIN: There are certainlyno plans for a series. What
there would be is possiblya stage show, which would be a revamped
version of what we did twenty years ago, using that material rather
than new material, but sometimes material that hasn’t been seen on
stage— so we might do ‘Cheese Shop’ rather than “Dead Parrot’.
I think it’sa dangerous thing to do. Not because as you get older
you lose your sense of humour at all,but a there’s danger that people
identifyyou with performing at a certain age, and comedy is so pre-
cise and every single millisecondof performance or every single
word-order mattersso much. You justgo slightly wrong and people
think, Their timing’s gone off. That would be dreadful.
I'd like to think we’d stillbe able to time it. John and I did the
‘Dead Parrot’ sketch on American televisionin January last year as
part of the promotion for Fierce Creaturesand it was OK. But there
is a certain rawness you need when you’re doing material for the
first time. When you’re doing it for the five-hundredthtime it loses
a bit of an edge. But you can only try it and see, really.
96
aN
jMcc: Who wrote the ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch?

MICHAEL PALIN: John and Graham.
jmcc: Things must be going through your mind as the lines are
coming up?
MICHAEL PALIN: Yes, like: ‘Who’s going to interrupt from the
audience?’ That tended to happen on stage, because we played to
very large audiences— seven thousand at the Hollywood Bowl, three
thousand sometimes— and it’s quitea gentle sketch, actually, “Dead
Parrot’.But you’d have to belt it out, and of course people knew the
linesso well. John would do his consummate comedy timing — a 1.e.,
pause of about eight seconds before saying the line, like he does —
and he’s brilliant,John, brilliant pauser. But people would come in,
and get him so ratty:‘I was going to say that!’
It’s not an easy way to play comedy. We’ve tried to make a
stipulationthat if we do the tour we should play, maximum, two-
thousand-seater houses, and of course no one’s interested, because
there’sno money for anybody. They all want you to play Wembley
Stadium, at the very least, nowadays.
bs: Do you think there is a touchstone for what’s funny? Is

there a rule, a set of rules?
MICHAEL PALIN: I really don’t know how you make the rule. It’s
allin the eye of the beholder. It just depends what’s going on in the
mind of the person who’s listeningor watching, and you just hon-
estly don’t know. I think there are certain sure things: timing, of
course,is vitally important. If you’re trying to createa laugh, the
pause and that moment of saying the line, choosing your moment,
getting it clearly out — that’s one of those things that’s obviously
very much part of comedy ...
ymcG: And would you do that in the read-through?

MICHAEL PALIN: Sometimes the things I read worst were the
thingsI really wanted to impress the others with. I’d suddenly get
slightly aware that reading this was very important, whereas the best
things were when you just had a pile of material and you just ran
through them and you felt completely relaxed and you just knew
how to play them. It’s like when you’re a telling joke— not that ’'m
good at telling jokes— but you know when you’ve got your moment,
when it’s flowing, and it just comes out. If you think all the moves
ahead — How am I going to tell this?— you’re lost.So if you start
being self-consciouswhen you’re reading material out, or even
when you're writing it, it’snot going to work so well. That’s what I
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MICHAEL PALIN UL.
love about comedy: it taps that completely imprecise area of inspira-

tion; you don’t know why you’ve written that, where it’s come
from, but you just happen to know that that is funny! Take one
word out or do a slightly different voice,it isn’t funny.
DB: On the page, how many times might you rewritea line to
get that precision?
MICHAEL PALIN: Again, I would say the best work that we did
came out as it eventuallywas written and performed.I suppose there
were certain areas where, yes, you’d play around with a phrase, or
add another phrase. But the best sketchesin Python came out fully
fledged. Something like ‘Dead Parrot’, there was never a word
rewrittenin that. They just read it out and it worked. No one added
anything, because John and Graham were really consummate, bril-
liant writers together,in a very odd way. As John would say, he’d
write ninety-fiveper cent and Graham would write five per cent
some days, but Graham’s five per cent was absolutely essential
because it was truly surreal.It may well have been Graham who sug-
gested its being a Norwegian Blue, which changed it from being an
ordinary parrot.An Amazonian Green or macaw is just not funny,
but a Norwegian Blue, being extremely unlikely, is. And then,
Norway is funnier than a lot of other countries, which one has to
remember...
Like fish are funny, for some reason: haddock, halibut.We used
fisha lot in Python, I don’t know why they’re funny but they are
extremely funny, whereas many of God’s creatures aren’t so much.
Birds weren’t particularlyfunny — we used them every now and then
— but fish were funny.
I think the best sketches just happen. ‘Lumberjack Song’, for
instance, which I remember very well writing, because we'd
struggled all day with this sketch about the barber. We thought the
funniest thing was the sketch about the barber who hada terrible
urge to wound his clients and a terrible fear of haircutting. ‘Cutting,
cutting, cutting,’he used to say, he just couldn’t bear the idea of
cutting.He became pathetic as a barber, and would put on a tape
recording of snipping, and the guy in the chair would be talking,
‘Oh, good match last night,’and all that, and would look round and
there was no one cutting his hair, a there’s guy cracking up!
We thought that was a good, funny idea, and then: how to end it?
Which was never a great problem with Python, because you could
go somewhere else. But we feltwe had to do something, and I
remember purely ad-libbing:‘I don’t want to be a barber, anyway, I
want to be a lumberjack!’ Then that just wrote I itself. can remem-
98
ber we were writing here and it was about quarterto seven at night.
That’s not a good time to be writing comedy, really— the pubs are
open, you’ve worked all day — but finallywe just got on to this riff
about being a lumberjack instead,and it just came out, and the whole
song was writtenby quarter past seven. The next day we rang up
Fred Tomlinson, who did the music — and said: ‘We’ve got this song:
it’sgot to be jolly!’Fred somehow managed to put it together with
music, and that’s how it happened.
We got to a stage where we knew each other’s materialso well that
we would write things in John and Graham’s style, hoping we could
get it through, and we wrote a horoscope sketch. They loved using
the thesaurus (like for ‘Cheese Shop’, they had a book on cheese),
for things like ‘Dead Parrot’— all the thesaurus words on death —
they loved doing that.So we wrote a sketch about astrology,and we
got about forty different words for horoscope. It was really justa
joke, but at the end of it John and Graham said: ‘We like that one;
that’s really good!’
You see, in this notebook, that’s one that didn’t go anywhere:
‘The Party:A field.On a table, drinks are set out with glasses. Host
and wife stand waiting. Speeded-up,a guest appears, then another,
then another, untila party is formed. They all talk at the same time,
then they move in different groups, to a bus stop. Then they get on,
and we see them havinga party at various A places. train goes past
them at a level crossing; perhaps they go into someone’s house. The
people call the police to arrest them, a chase.’ There, that never got
anywhere.
‘Filmingin London: building site, misty, Shepherd’s Bush street,
brackets wife-swapping, doctor with stethoscope .. .’ And we’d
have the Thames symbol — we wanted to do the Thames logo: ‘And
now, a rotten old BBC programme!’ We used to do all those things.
All rather naughty things. Things in the news, or things people had
just been to see:I remember when we'd been to see The Wild Bunch
— every time someone got shot, blood just spurted out. Quite ridicu-
lous sostylisation, someone would write that up. That was as near
as we got to being topical.A lot of it,of course, was done from exist-
ing T'V programmes. TV was showing new stuff all the time, so we
could play around with that.I was hoping some American univer-
sity would come and buy all this lot of notebooks.I don’t want it
here, if it’s going to burn...
pB: The other work that you do — screenplays, — fiction is there

a thread running through it?
MICHAEL PALIN: It tends to be the usual fertile comedy area of ©
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MICHAEL PALIN 79
man againstthe system, the free spiritor the awkward characterwho

always runs up against what I suppose we all see as a very conven-
tional, respectable, responsibleway of life. That’s probably in all the
work that I’ve done. That mischief-making character.
ymcG: Who’s your favourite film comedian?

MICHAEL PALIN: When I was growing up in Sheffield,my
favourite would be Norman Wisdom. Norman Wisdom was doing
all that stuff.. . I loved the fact that there’dbe all these people dis-
cussing D-Day and pushing things on maps around, and he’d be
bringing them a cup of tea and puttingit there, rightin the middle of
the map, and they’d be moving it: ‘No, there!’ When they were talk-
ing about moving troops,he was wondering where they wanted the
cup of tea put. It was in Man of the Moment. And of course Jerry
Lewis, too,I quite liked, because he did some very funny sight gags.
Odd, gawky, strange, out-of-place characterswho didn’t fit in.
Those are the people I’ve always been interestedin. People who
somehow stand at the back and screw up the photograph,or make
the annoying remark when everything’s going very smoothly. It’s
like in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, when Graham appears at the
window stark naked and addresses them all,and says: ‘Don’t be like
this. Make up your own minds, yourre all individuals!’And the
bloke at the back says: ‘I’m not!’ Just things like that,I love that.
jmMcG: Did you contribute much to A Fish Called Wanda, to the

character you played?
MICHAEL PALIN: I had quitea bit of discussion with John exactly
about that character.He just said: ‘I’m going to writea character in
a heist movie who can’t get the words out because he’s got a stam-
mer.’ He knew my father had a stammer and he said: ‘How would
you play this character?’So we talked about it and, yeah,I did add a
lot.I said that normally people have got an awful lot to say: all the
time, they’re trying to say it, but they can’t get it out. It’s not that
they’re taciturn people; sometimes, quite the opposite.We worked
out the idea for Ken that he loves animals because humans have let
him down completely:so all his love is transferredto animals, which
he started killingby accident.This is the frustrationand this helpsto
build up the stammer. So the supreme moment at the end when he’s
the only person who knows where the loot is,he just can’t deal with
the tension of it. Except that Jamie, of course, gets through to him.
There’s that scene where she gives him a kiss, and he immediately
and smoothly comes out with the entire information.So yes,we did
work out all that stuff.
100
The good thing about Wanda, apart from the writing, was that it
was kept to a small group and there was the feeling that they were
trapped in this world, this inner group of people. Whereas Fierce
Creatures could have gone anywhere; there were far more charac-
ters. Once people aren’t trapped ina situation,the tension slackens,
and comedy depends on tension, doesn’t it, really?It depends very
much on the fact that you can’t go anywhere else.
I was watchinga television comedy — I can’t really say it by name
—and there was some very funny material but the crucial moments
were fabricated,they weren’t realistic.They engaged in some action
which was just not real,and then expected the consequences of that
actionto provoke comedy for the next ten or fifteen minutes. But it
doesn’t,if it’s not real in the first place.In really good comedy,
Fawlty Towers or something like that, there are no two ways about
it. Cause and effectare so tight that you can’t have any other way of
doing it. That person cannot possibly have been in another room.
This person has to say this remark at that time. He has to have burnt
the... the kebabs at exactly that moment, and the smoke has to come
through the door just then. John understands that, and that’s why
Fawlty Towers is so good, because there’sno way out and you
cringe, you think: “Oh, God!’
It’s also why one of the best new comic creationsis Alan
Partridge, because Steve Coogan creates this terrible strait-jacketfor
himself and his character. There has to be that tightness, you have to
feel that only he has to be there. That’s why comedy works.
And I really don’t enjoy playing comedy unlessI feel there’s some
sort of character there, even if it’s justa quick moment . . . like the
fish-slapping dance, which is something that John and I do, and
which is one of the silliest things, funniest things, we’ve done in
Python. It’sa very modest thing, but there isa relationship between
the two of them. It isn’t justa tall man hitting another man with a
I fish. liketo think the I character played is slightly prissy; he’s
done
a lot of folk-dancingin the evenings,so he’s absolutely enjoying it,
which is really irritatingJohn. So in the end when he’s hit with the
fishit isn’t justa piece of ritual,it’s John working out exactly what
he feels about this prat of a character. Which gives an edge to it all,
really.So even for thingsas short as that you have to try and writea
character in there. Otherwise, it’s bland.
DB: Do you feel happier writing those characters for performers

that you’re familiar with or can they just be put on the page and
an actor can pick them up?
MICHAEL PALIN: Certain peopleI just know are funny and know
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MICHAEL PALIN 81
how to deal with comic lines. With other people, you hope that they
will act their characterso well that the line will come out. Something
will be made funny by the convictionof the person playing the char-
acter.
JMcG: What’s the difference, when it comes to writing a film

script, from the way Python used to work?
MICHAEL PALIN: Well, the great difference is just in the kind
of comedy. East of Ipswich was comedy of observation which
depended on a I reality. wanted a perfect representationof an
English seaside villagein the 1950s, and in Python we would have
kept that up for a short while and then one of the beach huts would
have blown up, or a man with a cucumber would have appeared in
the frame. You had to be much more disciplinedwith something like
East of Ipswich.
jmMcc: And are you writing comedy at the moment?

MICHAEL PALIN: I’m not really writing comedy at the moment,
no. I’m doing something on Hemingway; it’s his hundredth
anniversary next year.
DB: Does that mean you’re a Hemingway obsessive like the

character in your novel Hemingway’s Chair?
MICHAEL PALIN: No, I had to write the book rather quickly and
chose a story that had been in my head about a mild-mannered man
being obsessed by a legendary bombastic character. Hemingway
was the right man. When I wrote the novel I had to do a lot of
research into him. We’re doing three or four programmes on him,
we're going to Cuba to film.
Going back to comedy, I always think it works best when thereis
uncertainty and complication,and that’swhy Python isa paean to
the hopelessnessof the British, tryingto get themselves together,or
run a television company or an army or a church. Comedy isa way
of coping with situationsthat aren’t right.As soon as people have
perfect situations,it doesn’t work. That’s why the Internetis
uncomical. We should be making jokes about the fact that you have
‘dot com — slash’! a it’s sillyway of communicating when you’ve got
this wonderful language you’ve developed over hundreds of years—
but people don’t because the Internetis seen as a great benefitto
mankind.
103
John Sullivan
Always tryingto be different
The son of a south London plumber, John Sullivan joined the BBC
as a props man to meet the stars,and was immediately ordered to
keep away from them. He managed to geta scriptto Ronnie Barker,
who passed it on to Dennis Main Wilson. A pilotin the Comedy
Playhouse format which had been pioneered by Galton and Simpson
led in 1977 to John’s first sitcom, Citizen Smith, starring Robert
Lindsey as Wolfie Smith, the Che Guevara of south-east London. It
was the firstin a stringof successes that included Only Fools and
Horses, which was immediately recognised as a triumph of charac-
terisationand just as quickly taken to the heart of the public. Just
Good Friends, Dear John and Sitting Pretty were followed by the
innovative Roger Roger. John now has his officein his home, a sub-
stantial house at the end of a gravel drive in the stockbroker region
of Surrey.
jmMcG: Does it help you to know who your cast is, who you’re
writing for?
JOHN SULLIVAN: Oh, yeah.I did the first seriesof Only Fools and
Horses without a pilot,so I wrote six episodes blind, not knowing
who they were. Then we got David Jason and Nick Lyndhurst and
made a few adjustments.Once I’d seen that first I series, was writing
for them. You aim towards the strengthsof the actor. You can hear
the voice, see the face, see David’s eyes, his looks, and Nick’s open
mouth. So a lot of the time Del would say something, and Id just
write: ‘Cut to Rod’, knowing full well Nick would give you the
most wonderful expression and you’d geta great big laugh on it.
jmcc: You put reaction shots into the script?
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84 Now THAT’S FUNNY! —
JOHN SULLIVAN: For those two, yeah. Lots of them. And doing
Roger Roger I put in ‘Cut for a reaction’to someone. There’s a
couple of times in Roger Roger where I didn’t put it in, and then
afterwards thought, God, why didn’twe have it? There’sa natural
reaction there and we didn’t get it, and it’s because it wasn’t there in
the script,so it’smy fault.
jMcG: Directors trained in television wouldn’t cover the

reaction.A director who’s trained in film would.
JOHN SULLIVAN: When I joined the BBC, I never knew how to lay
a script out;I didn’t know what was expected. So the first thingI
wanted was a script,but what I realised years later was thatI had a
director’s script,a shooting script, which had all the reaction,so that
was the habit I got into: ‘Cut to reaction, cut to reaction’. When I
saw other writers’ work I realised they didn’t do it. But that’s how I
write.
DB: Do directors sometimes feel that you’re over-instructing

them?
JOHN SULLIVAN: Dennis Main Wilson was all for it.He was all for
me coming to editing and everything, being heavily involved, and
being on filming,and he talkedto me an awful lot. Ray Butt was less
so. He was protecting his area more. I’ve never had anyone com-
plain, but of course after that | worked with Tony Dow, who then
was an assistant floor manager. He came through slowly and we’d
been mates — I was his best man and all that— so that at the time he
took over directingwe knew each other very well personally. Once
Tony took over I became even more involved.
ymcG: And you write music, don’t you?

JOHN SULLIVAN: I do the music for a lot of them and if I’m not
doing it I’m there in the studio hearing what they’re doing. Music
used well is tremendously emotive. We’ve done some stuff where,
by picking the right song, we brought so much out of the character.
The scene when Rodney got married and Del was left alone,I chose
that Simply Red one, ‘Holding Back the Years’,or ‘Holding Back
the Tears’, whatever it’s called,and people were actually crying in
the audience.We use that in the studio, which isa bit dangerous for
editing afterwards,but we got away with it.
DB: And the songs that you yourself wrote and performed,
when did they start?
JOHN SULLIVAN: As a kid,I was always writing songs, but then
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JOHN SULLIVAN 85
you didn’t have tape recorders,so by tomorrow they’d gone. Then

for Citizen Smith Peter Whitmore actually chose ‘The Red Flag’as
the opening, and as the end thing as well on the pilot.I said to
Dennis Main Wilson: ‘It seems a bit boring, having the same thing.
Can’t we get another song?’ He said: ‘What are you I after?’ said:
‘Well, can anyone have a go?’ So I wrote this thing called “The
Glorious Day’, which Bob Lindsay recorded, and that was the first
thing I’d written and had recorded. After that, for Only Fools and
Horses, the music was in fact the original music that I’d written, but
Ray Butt didn’t particularlylike it,so he got Ronnie Hazelhurstto
do a number. Then David and Nick didn’t like that, so Ray in the
end sent my tape to Chas and Dave, who were then doing the beer
commercials. The way I understand the story— although it may not
be true, because people used to keep me very much in the dark — they
were coming to the studio on a certain date and about three weeks
prior to that they had this massive hit record, called Ain’t No
Pleasing You, which went to No. 1, and suddenly they were off
touring. This is how Ray was — he was a clever sod — he said: ‘Don’t
worry. Come down to the studio we’ve got someone.’ So I’ve gone
to Lime Grove, we’d had a couple of drinks, and I said: “Who is he?’
He said: ‘It’syou, mate.’I said:‘I can’tdo that!’ Anyway, nine lagers
later, I’m in there, and I did it. And I told my wife: ‘Oh, Ray got
some pub singer in.’
When we went to the studio for the show she was in the audience
and she said to me she just froze when she heard my voice and she
couldn’t enjoy the show. Actually, she didn’t realise there was an
end number as well coming . . . So that was a bad night for her.
I got into doing it then. Just Good Friends, because we had Paul
Nicholas,I thought: This would be great; we’ve got a singer. Dear
John, | wanted Lynsey de Paul to do that.I don’t know what went
wrong, but we didn’t get her. I won an award, best TV theme music,
for the American version.
ymcc: What did you think of the difference between the

American version and the British version?
JOHN SULLIVAN: When] first went over,my agent warned me that
when you go in the studio you think you're seeinga different show,
they change it so much. But a week or so beforeI arrived, there was
a writers’ strikein America. The Writers’ Guild let me cross the
picket line outside the studio and it was like déja vu, because they
were just doing my — script just place names changed, and I couldn’t
believeit.
Judd Hirsch played the lead.It worked ever so well. The audience
106
atl
stood up and applauded and the head of NBC came up to me after-

wards and said: ‘You’ve got a It series.’ was the kind of Hollywood
thing you see in films, where you arriveat the airport and a there’s
limousine. Everyone assumes you’re going to move and sends
brochures for the kids’ schools. They just assume we come from a
backwater.I said:‘I don’t want to go to America, I’m happy here.’
But because that script had worked they decided to stick with the
British scripts basicallyfor the first twelve of them, and then the
American writers took over completely. It was fine for a while, but
one day I was over there at rehearsalsand the characters were all
standing round, and one came out with the line: ‘OK, group hug.’I
thought, That’s me out, I’ve gone. That line finishedmy career in
America, really. ‘Group hug’! But I had a lot of good times and they
were very courteous and nice.
DB: Presumably the show would have continued in Britain if

you hadn’t lost your lead, Ralph Bates?
JOHN SULLIVAN: We suddenly realised this wasn’t indigestionor
anything silly,and he was going into I hospital. was up in our bed-
room here when we got the call from his wife on Saturday morning.
He’d had the biopsy and she was phoning to say it was cancer.He
was wonderful, and such a nice man as well.
DB: It’s got a quite different atmosphere from Only Fools and
Horses.
JOHN SULLIVAN: I’m always tryingto be I different. don’t want to
get stuck.
ymMcG: Now in Roger Roger you’ve really got highs and lows of
comedy and drama.
JOHN SULLIVAN: Before I'd even written it everyone was saying
that it must have an audience, and I was sayingI didn’t want one.
There was nothing on paper, and no one knew what I wanted to do.
I just dug in and said: ‘It will not work any other way. I can’t get
stuck with one set,an office set. I’ve got to show people with their
own problems, their own livesand their dreams, and the only way I
can do it is all film, and because of some of the areas I want to touch
I don’t want an audience there.” When I’d written about three or
four scripts, Geoffrey Perkins said:‘I see what you mean. I under-
stand.’
I hope when we do the next series we’re really into swift camera
movement. Rather than using the hard cut, using one camera to do
an awful lot.It gives life, movement . . . I’ve always argued that
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JOHN SULLIVAN 87
where you're in a small set and you want movement, but it’s diffi-
cult to choreograph that with all the actors and cablesin the way —
I’ve always said, well, whenever we can’t actually use real move-
ment, let the camera give us life.Even though actors are basicallysit-
ting down or standing,you geta feelof action.
I want to introducea bit more music into the new series.The com-
pany who did the opening - titles young company called Red
Pepper, young directorsand cameramen — I want them to go out and
film London bits - anything, down-and-outs, beautiful things,
whatever, just film, film, film — and between certain scenes I’d like to
put in a little ten-second bit with a little music across it...
JMcG: Use it as punctuation...

JOHN SULLIVAN: It gives that life. I’ve been told that at times it’s
too slow, but life dictatesthe speed of a scene.So if the actors have
got to pausea bit, let them pause. You can speed it allup by those
little breaks. They do it in NYPD Blue. Now, they do it because
they’re coming back from a commercial.We cut the commercials
out, so suddenly you’ve got a new I style. like that: let’sdo it. You’ve
got to keep your eyes out and see what’s happening all around, if
you’re not actually inventing something new yourself,and don’t be
frightened to borrow something, change it slightly, but use it and
move on, rather than just stay stillfor thirty years.
Roger Roger got criticised.One guy said:‘I can’t really take this
going from high farce to tragedy so quickly.’My argument always
has been that my wife and I can be sittingin here celebrating some-
thing wonderful . . . the champagne’s going . .. and over there, there
could be a death in the family. That’s why I want to use these other
shots, to say whatever’s happening: that poor sod’s still starvingand
these people are still going past in their Rolls-Royce. I’m tryingto
capture as much of it as possible to give different flavoursof what’s
going on in our life,to balance it against what I’m actually writing.
It'llgive ita quite bizarre feel...
Generally what I do is,I write I characters. used a minicab firm
becausea lot of characters come and go, and I can just take all these
people from my head and hang them on the clothes-linefor a while.
That’s allI do: character comedy, character drama, very interesting
people.
ps: Is that your usual method of working? Did you have the
characters for Only Fools and Horses and then discover the black
market as the milieu for it?
JOHN SULLIVAN: They almost came together.Ray Butt, who pro-
108
duced the last lot of Citizen Smith, we knew that was coming to an
end. I did a pilot show, a thing about a football team, which the BBC
said they wanted;I got to episode3 and they killed it.I didn’t know
what elseto write, and I was desperate.We'd just got our first house
and a young baby, and we’d got to pay that mortgage and put the
grocerieson the I table. was in the BBC Club bar with Ray, and in
the past he and I had discovered that we had both worked in mar-
kets. His parents owned a stallin Roman Road and I used to work
in Hilda Street Market, Balham. We discovered that our favourite
characterwas the fly-pitcher.He’s always funny, alwaysa lad, and
he was only there for half an hour, because he had to get away
quickly before the market inspector came. You can have a good
laugh with them, then they’re gone. You barely knew their names
but they seemed like friends.You never seemed to see them any-
where: where do they come from, where do they go? Ray said: “Why
don’t you havea crack at that?’So I took this imaginary guy from
the market where I’d been, and I followed him on an imaginary jour-
ney. In those days I had a lot of mates who lived in tower blocks.
The lifts never worked and you always had to walk up to the seven-
teenth floorto get them to go to football.One of the thingsI wanted
to say in it was: The lifts don’t work in council blocks. Will some-
body do something?
What’s his life like?I knew a couple of guys. One isa fellow who
works for me now, a mate of mine from my old street; he’s got a
brother who’s about twelve years older than he is, and the brother
has naturally guided him and led him and looked after him. And I
knew another set of brothers,the same situation. And my sisteris
fourteen years older than I am, so as a kid she was never likea nor-
mal sister,she was kind of an auntie. It took me untilI was twenty
to really take her as a I sister. thought,I can do it in a way that he’s
got this kid brother: the mother died, and he brought him up. People
will look on him as a hero because he didn’t let the kid go into care
or an orphanage,he brought him up. Even though he’sa bit of a toe-
rag, Del, and he'll sell you an iffy thing,he brought that kid up, so
a that’s great sound basis fora sympathetic man.
DB: For the settings of other shows, do you have a routine of

research?Do you go and hang around in a minicab office?
JOHN SULLIVAN: No, I didn’t do that, because I know so many
minicab drivers. Virtually it’s only myself and the guy who works
for me, out of all that group of friends, that haven’t been a minicab
driverat some point. I’m writing this new comedy, and I’m writing
it with a guy called Steve Glover. I’ve known him for twenty-some-
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JOHN SULLIVAN 89
thing years, and even he was a minicab driver.’ve known so many

so the information and the background to that was pretty easy.
The new thing I’m writing is called Heartburn Hotel. The basic
idea is this guy came out of the army after the Falklands War, with
his army pay-out, and read that Birmingham would be the host for
the 1992 Olympic Games. So he invested all his money in this hotel,
and of course, for reasons best known to the Olympic Committee,
it went to Barcelona, which took him totally by surprise, and his
hotel failed, and now it’sa DSS place, almost. He’s got bed-and-
breakfast and he’s got illegal immigrants; they’re putting everyone
with him. He’s a working-class snob. He should have been a general
in the army, but no one recogniseshis — ability he’s one of that sort.
So he almost blames these poor people for the stateof his life.He
hasn’t been as successfulas he thought he would be, and he’sa rather
angry man, the last man in the world you'd ever have runninga DSS
place.I haven’t been up to Birmingham, but Steve has done various
bits of work in some of these hotels, so he’s seen a bit of it.
jmMcG: How will you work with him as a double act?

JOHN SULLIVAN: We started off tryingto literallysit in the room
and work together.But we’ve got very different I styles. takea long
time thinking about where I’m going to go, I can’t work to a set con-
I struction. have to think for ages. He’s a much faster type — he’s
younger than me — he’s much faster.In the end I had to tell him to
fuck off,I couldn’t stand it any more, because he’d be gettingin my
ear-hole all the time. So we get together for a week or so and we
crash out six possible good ideas. He’ll take his three favourites,he’ll
go away and write them, I’lldo mine and then when we’re ready
he’ll send his to me, and I’ll have a go at his. And we’re there: I’m
just finishing off the last one at the moment, and then we’re just
going to spend a week tidying up, and we start filming in early April.
Steve is some kind of second cousin fourteen times removed from
my wife. That’s how I met him, at various family weddings over the
years, and then one wedding he said:‘I did this thing in a pub. I
wrote some stuff for it.’ Then three or four years after that [there]
suddenly came through the post: “Would you have a read of this,my
firstTV thing?’ What he had was three good characters, crying out
for a place to live. There was no reason for them being there, there
was no background, and aftera whileI said: ‘I’vegot this idea about
a hotel,and I haven’t got anyone livingin it. Why don’t your people
move into my hotel, and we'll see... ? I’m not sure yet if the pro-
ducer realisesit’s hedifferent, seems to be tryingto think of it along
the lines of an ordinary, straight sitcom.We describeit once as
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90 Now THaT’s FUNNY!
Menopausal Mansions on Schizophrenia Street! You’ve got so many

people trapped together with all these problems, it’s going to be
slightly crazy...
Of course I’ve had something like eighteen years writing allon my
own, and suddenly to have somebody elsein the room was at times
likean invasionof my privacy.To get used to the idea of another
writer being there was very difficult,and in the end we had to come
to this other arrangement. Once I’ve done all the thinkingI can write
fast. Sometimes it’s like you’ve got a hole in the head and these ideas
are pouring out and you can’t get them down quick enough. When
I reach the stage where I’m perfectly happy and I know that the logic
is there, that everything actually fits and makes sense, then I can go.
But in that guessing period, I’ve got to do it on my own.
ps: Do you always work in the same room, with the same
equipment?
JOHN SULLIVAN: Because I’m not very good with computers,I
don’t know where elseI could ever go. So I always work here, on a
word processor. Years ago, I’d go into rehearsalsand do rewriteson
an old typewriter.But I can’t take my computer with me and I don’t
know how to do these laptops. But I haven’t got any particular rou-
tine. Most days I go into the office round about seven, and kind of
hope for the best, and if nothing’s happening . . . I can’t be one of
those writers who will sit there all day looking at a blank screen, just
waiting for inspiration.I’d rather just take the dog for a walk or go
to the picturesor something. I give the day up after an hour. But
then,if something happens, if I’m watching something or talking to
someone in the house and it’s eight o’clockin the evening and some-
thing hits me, I’llgo and work from eight until two. Or sometimes
P’ve woken up in the middle of the night, two in the morning, and
something’s happening. I’ll get up and I'll work round until nine,
ten, the following day. So I have no set pattern whatsoever, just how
it comes. And I always find, somethingI hate about myself,I tend to
do my best work when I’m under tremendous pressure. Because I’m
like most writers, quite lazy. You don’t work until you have to. So I
generally find towards the end of a series that I’m working God
knows how many hours — eighteen, nineteena day, and I wish it
wasn’t that way, but the best stuff comes out then. I’d much prefer
the best stuffto come out in a very controlledand civilised manner,
but it doesn’t,and people almost wait for me to be pressuredso they
can get the best, which is sad.
pp: Is there any aspectof writing that you dread having to do?
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JOHN SULLIVAN 91
JOHN SULLIVAN: I don’t look forward to that firstday when you

sit down: We’re off! That’s the worst day of the lot.
JMcG: You’ve made notes before that?

JOHN SULLIVAN: | always mean to. I’ve got so many of these tiny
machines, they’re everywhere, notebooks. And I’llbe ina restaurant
and hear something and go: ‘Oh, yeah that’s great.’So, backs of fag
packets .. . I don’t actually take too many notes, but I know where
I want to get to. I very rarely sit down and go: ‘Page 1.’ I’ll start
somewhere — wherever,in the middle, anywhere,I don’t really care.
Pl go back to the beginning. I’llgo to wherever I feel I’m strongest
just to get going, to get moving, to get those words down, get into it.
That idea of just ‘Page 1’ isa killer,and I advise everyoneI ever talk
to who wants to write,if you starton Page 1 and it’s not working,
well, go to Page 30. Start anywhere. Just start, start a getting flavour,
start gettinga tasteof the thing for yourself.
DB: What are you getting the flavour of, the characters?
JOHN SULLIVAN: Yeah, because they start to change, as you move
along. You start off with an outline, rough idea of a character, and as
you go along you suddenly think: That would be nice, he loves
Abba! Right, great, because a there’s nice gag coming along about
Abba! But if you’d decided he was a Beatles fan you say: ‘I can’t
write that Abba gag, because he’s a Beatles fan. No, sod that,I
haven’t written the Beatles fan bit yet, so I'll change it!’ That’s what
I like: whatever his feelings are, his politics, you can change them as
you go along, until now you ’ve got the person, and then you can go
back and say, ‘Right, I’llgo to Page 1, now I know who he is. We'll
have him walking out of this club, that’show I'll introduce him. And
the car, I know what car he drives now, that says something.’
I’m never really happy with a character untilI can actuallygo
back to where he or she sat at school; it’sa weird thing, his desk.
What did he carve on his desk?I feelI really know them then.
DB: Do you keep notes of these characteristics?

JOHN SULLIVAN: No, they’re in my head. Somebody’s asking me
about Fools and Horses (they’re doing a book on it),and they said:
‘Can we read your I bibliography?’ said: ‘Sorry? You want to
say
that again?’So they have to keep phoning me up: “When did this
happen? How old was Del?’ I’ve got it in my head. It causes prob-
lems at times, with a lot of European countries wanting to do their
versions of Fools and Horses. We’ve done one in Holland, and now
there’sa Scandinavian version apparently going to happen, and
112
German. Of courseI send them copiesof the scripts, but they phone
my agent: ‘Can you send the restof it?’ and I say: “There is no rest
of it. Get mea first-classseat and a nice hotel, and I’ll come over and
talk to you. It’s allup here.’
Lused to read other writers’ stuff, would-be writers’ stuff—I don’t
do it now — and they would actually write down what the character’s
all about. Then you start reading the dialogue and the actual story
and there’sno indicationof the character.They think: I’ve done that.
ps: How did Del get his characteristic phrases?

JOHN SULLIVAN: What, the French phrases? When I started the
first serieswe were slowly gravitating towards Europe, and I noticed
every packet of food, although it’sall in English, when you turn over
there’s French. And I thought: This guy, he likes to impress, he likes
to think he impresses people with his rings; he doesn’t realise that
he’s making the worst possible statement about himself. And I
thought it would be quite nice, because he’s selling stuff that’s com-
ing from Europe, that he would pick up on a few little things, and
suddenly realise he’s impressing Trigger. Anyone can! So we just
introduced these little phrases, such as ‘Fabrique Belgique’, and
they’re all thinking: What a prat!
I’m always wary of actually trying to introduce I catch-
phrases.
think the only one I’ve deliberately introduced was in Sitting Pretty,
where Annie kept saying ‘phenomenal’. That kind of worked. But
you can make a cross for yourself, because halfway through the
second series that catch-phrase becomes quite boring. So you’ve
now got to invent something else, or drop that character. Well, in
reality,if that character said these things, they wouldn’t suddenly
drop them from their life.So if you do geta catch-phraseyou should
be carefulhow many times you use it. Becomes kind of lazy writing
in the end: if you can’t think of anything funny, ‘Oh, I'll chuck that
in.’ That’s the temptation, and if it ever crosses your mind you
should takea long walk.
jMcG: Now you've reached the stage where you go in to the

BBC and say, ‘I want to do this,’but you know how it used to be,
you remember what the BBC used to be like...
JOHN SULLIVAN: I took a pilot of Just Good Friends in to John
Howard Davies and put it on his desk (he wasn’t there).An hour
laterI went into the bar to have a drink, and John came in. He’d read
the pilot and liked it, and asked: ‘Well, how does it develop? I told
him and he just said, ‘We’ll have it.’And it was like that. In the bar,
over a pint. Now you give it to the head, the head gives it to his
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JOHN SULLIVAN 93
reader to read and the reader gives it to a committee, and then

another committee, and you have to write a treatment to go before
an accountants’ committee . . . I don’t know how anything gets
made. It reallyis a long drawn-out process now.
When I did Citizen Smith, they put me on a contract and they
wanted seven Citizen Smiths plusa pilot.You really wanted to write
the pilotsto get that cheque, and nothing ever happened to I pilots.
wrote one pilot called Dear John, to which, again, nothing hap-
pened. Then Fools suddenly took off, and about eight months later
Just Good Friends started.All of a sudden these old pilots were com-
ing off the shelf, weren’t they? Suddenly you were gold dust: you
could do it, you had the touch. So I went away and did Dear John.
That was madness anyway: three seriesa year, eighteen or twenty
a scripts year, was impossible. That’s how it used to be: seven and
one pilot,all the time, for Jimmy Gilbert when he was head of Light
Entertainment. Jimmy’s favourite saying,I don’t know if you
remember, was: “Will they understand it in Wick?’ His family lived
in Wick. He didn’t like the title Only Fools and Horses and he said
to me: ‘Will they understand it in Wick? Can you think of some-
thing else?’So I retitledit Dip Your Wick and, being a Baptist,he
didn’t find it at all amusing.I almost got the sack on that one.
pB: Is there a minimum amount of time between gags, or a

maximum?
JOHN SULLIVAN: It’san a intuition, feel you have. Particularly
with something like Fools and Horses, where you can drop into
drama quite easily, because you know them so well,I can go seven
or eight pages withouta real belly-laugh,just little character things
between them. But when I’ve done thatI liketo come back with a
big laugh ifI possibly can, and it’s quite easy because you get that
big relief laugh: the audience want to laugh.
ps: Is the structure important?

JOHN SULLIVAN: Structure? That’s an odd one, because I always
fight and argue like hell about the structure when people want to
make changes, and I go: ‘No, it upsets the structure; the balance is
gone.’ Then we finish the show and they say: ‘God, we’re ten
minutes too long,’ and immediatelyI go: ‘Oh, we can cut that bit,cut
that out — fuck the structure.’And, sitting talkingto you,I realise
what I do. So the structure’s important until you’re ten minutes too
long.
ps: How do you know that something’s funny?
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94 Now THAaArT’s Funny!
JOHN SULLIVAN: I tend to pace up and down and almost act it;I
talkto myself an awful lot.I actuallygot out of going shopping with
my wife through talkingto myself in Marks & Spencer’s. We've got
a lot of mental homes around here and she started getting worried.
When you go into the read-through you hear it and you know then.
I make marks. If it’s not going to work I put a circle round it and
I apologise. don’t know, you just know.
jmMcc: Are you working to get a reaction from the audience?

JOHN SULLIVAN: _ If you’ve got a studio audience,you write for the
audience. I’d written one Fools and Horses special, called “To Hull
and Back’, and I knew it was all film, so I didn’t write it with the idea
‘T’vegot to put a gag in here to get that I noise’. didn’t need the noise
in the background. Then I did another one, that was supposed to be
on film, but shown to a studio audience, so I was writing it with that
in mind: ‘I’ve got to get that noise around here, get that laughter in.
And Id better leave some kind of gap to get another laugh in.’
Because you can’t crowd laugh on laugh.
Then there were various problems. I’m not sure if it was illnessor
what, but they suddenly said: “We haven’t got time now to show it
to an audience,’so it was done cold. It lacked that noise where you
needed the laugh. David and Nick had been told to act it in the way
you would with an audience.So — thisis not meant to sound insult-
ing— David would come up kind of ifbigger-faced, you know what
I mean. He’d give ita bigger reaction, because it’s going to an audi-
ence soon. Whereas on the one with no audience he gave it a much
more subtle approach. We actually ended up in such desperate
straits,the last scene was filmed in a studioby a camera crew who'd
only ever done horse-racing.We whipped them straight back from
Haydock Park.
If you’ve got no audience,you can crowd two or three laughs.If
they come naturally,you can bang them in because the people at
home are going to get them, but obviously they’re going to go right
overa studio audience. Even if it’s being done live,and the actors can
pause for it, the audience get fed up with repetitious laughter.
The thing I’m doing at the moment, I’d been saying to Steve:
“Take some laughs out! You’ve got one, two, three, four, five... The
audience are going to be fed up: save them!’
ymcG: What do you think are the most satisfying aspectsof your
own work? What are you best at?
JOHN SULLIVAN: Character writing. ’m OK at plots, but what
me satisfies most is a getting good character.Of course, the only test
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JOHN SULLIVAN 95
of that is when the audience have watched it.A lot of people say it
doesn’t matter if the audience don’t particularly like the piece,
you’ve stillgot a good character.But I look at it like the old days:
you take a play and you put it on the stage. If they don’t like it, they
chuck tomatoes at it and you’re off;if they like it, it’llrun. I think
that’s fair. You’re a creating product, you’re puttingit to the public,
they pays their money.
Roger, Roger has never set the ratings — alight 9.30 Tuesday night
against Taggart, it’s not going to — but the reaction from both the
press and the public has been so good that you feel satisfied.You
think, OK, we’re doing six million, which compared with Fools is no
big shakes, but it’s warm and nice and people are enjoying it.The let-
ters are coming in...
At the end of the day it’s those people who go into the post office
and buy a TV — licence they pay my wages, they pay the heatingin
this place. And if I’m not keeping them happy, I’m not doing a good
job,I feel I’m cheating. It’s nice to get that response from them. So
I think, OK, I’m doing a decent job. That’s the most satisfying thing.
116
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117
Richard Curtis
A slow-motion career
Richard Curtis is a beaming presence with a halo of curly blond hair

in a bright, airy workroom with a polished wood floor, part of the
shared office space he has set up for other writers and media people
near the West London house where he lives with the writer-presenter
Emma Freud and their two children. His writing career began at
Oxford in partnership with Rowan Atkinson and he went on to
write for Not the Nine O’Clock News and four seriesof Blackadder,
collaboratingat first with Atkinson and then with Ben Elton.
Blackadder’s wild anachronisms culminate in a darkly affecting
moment as the buffoons who have been amusing us launch them-
selves out of their First World War trench to certain death under
inescapable German fire and the frame freezes in an echo of Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Richard himself turned to movies
and has become Britain’smost successful screenwriter after the phe-
nomenal international box-office results from not only Four
Weddings and a Funeral but also the Mr Bean film. When we visited
him he was busy with a new film, this time starring Julia Roberts
opposite Hugh Grant.
ps: Do you work to a set pattern— always start early in the day,
write on the back of envelopes,or whatever?
RICHARD CURTIS: Things have changeda bit sinceI had a child—
two children,in fact.I had years and years that were spectacularly
as far ill-disciplined as time was I concerned. livedin a little
cottage
in the country all the time we were doing Blackadder and when I
was writing The Tall Guy. L used to be as chaotic and self-indulgent
as writers are allowed to be: watching eightor nine hours’ television
a day, watching Neighbours twice, and often not startingwork until
118
three in the afternoon. But I’m not allowed to do that now, because
I have to leave the house at ten and return in time to give the babies
their bath and stuff like that at It six-thirty. may also be a sign of age
thatI used to have tremendous second wind — I could work until
eight, have an hour’s food and then work from nine in the evening
until three in the morning without battingan eyelid, but I don’t
know thatI can do that any more. My schedule is much more like
someone in an office now. Indeed,I work in an I office: actually
come in here and there are other people and we tend to have a sand-
wich together.
I’ve been working on a computer for about a decade now, and I
quite like the process, because there’sa certain amount of fooling
around you can do in terms of opening files, closing files, moving
things, renaming things and stuff like that which allows you distrac-
tion from doing the actual work. This new computer has a big TV
screenin front of me, which perhaps is why I find it so comforting,
because I like nothing more than watching television, so it’s as
though I’m watching television all day. It’s just rather dull, poorly-
produced television.
I try never to have the famous blank page. I’ve always left myself
notes at the end of one day for the next so that I’ve got a help; the
conversation, as it were, has started by the time I start the next day.
So [ll always say: “These are the ten things you should deal with
tomorrow; this is what you should concentrate on.’I just have one
go at throwing some joke into the ether at the end of one day so that
when I start the next day it’s easier to go on. Actually starting,’m
nice to myself.I don’t torture myself by thinking: Today is the day
that you’ve got to get that beginning done, or the end done. Very
rarely do I do that.
When I’m advising people about writing,I say that the biggest
hurdle you have to get over is how bad your own writing is. What
horrifies people who startit new is that they think, Oh, I’ve got to
do wonderful stuff.Or they read back what they’ve done and it’s
rubbish. After you’ve been writing fora while you know that when
you geta finished film, that’llbe ofone-thirtieth what you wrote on
the subject. Therefore you mustn’t torture yourself with the fact that
most of every day is spent writing stuff that’snot great. It’s basically
all rewriting.Most of the processis to do with rewriting rather than
writing.
jMcG: Do you find that you’ve got some sort of pattern inside
you - the point at which you’ve got the elements of a piece dis-
posed properly?
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RICHARD CurTIS 99
RICHARD CURTIS: You can have that and it turns out not to have
been a true moment; it can turn out to have been infatuation,not
true love. One can be convinced that one’s got a rhythm, that one’s
got an answer to a problem, that everything has gone completely
right. That’s all part of the learningto rewrite,of learningto be fussy
enough, not just saying, “That’sa funny scene,’ or ‘That’s an inter-
esting scene,’ but saying, “That’s the startof a funny scene. How can
I make that better?’By going on and on and on working at it and
being willingto sacrificeit later on, when you realise that another
scene that you’ve written has replaced the need for it. The main thing
you find out at read-throughsis that you have covered the same
ground more than once, and therefore stuff can go. But there are def-
initely good moments when you think it’s right. When I was much
younger and lived in a sort of communal house, I used to judge
things by whether or not I wanted to read them to my friends when
they got home. I never did read them to the friends,but you knew
whether or not you’d done it rightby whether you wanted to tellthe
tale, whether you wanted to tellthe joke to someone else.
[ve been very lucky in that in a way I strong-arm my girlfriends
into this. I’m very lucky now to be witha girl who basicallyis my
script editor and with whom I work really closely and show the stuff
during the day. The real editing process goes into just deciding:
‘Well, will I show her?’I absolutely trust her, and there was another
girlfriend before her who transpiredto be a very fine writer herself,
so perhapsI got lucky there. Emma isa very good critic because she
has no second agenda, and indeed very few personal prejudices.
She’s heard me talk about it, she knows what I’m aiming for, she
knows where I’m letting myself down, where I’ve changed it from
the time before, so it’s really likea second, slightlyless excitableme
who comes in and quietensit down, and criticises.It’s an unbeliev-
ably important part of the working process. She’s now not scaredof
my enthusiasm.So ifI charge downstairs and say, ‘Funniest thing in
the history of writing,’ she’s not scared to go, ‘Oh, oh, oh, not
really.’It’s a fantastic pleasure.
jmcc: You said you had something to say about repetition...

RICHARD CURTIS: It will be spotted, if anyone ever read all my
stuff together, that they’re about the same thing happening again,
but bigger:man gets hit by a smallish piece of wood, followedby a
bigger piece of wood, followed by a huge piece of wood. It’s some-
thing which I startedto do when we were working on Not the Nine
O’Clock News and it has gone on being the first process,or one of
the first processes, thatI do on the seed of any comic idea.So ifI
120
want a chap to have a difficultdate witha girl in a film, then I know

that I’lltry and make him have four difficult dates with girls: have
the firstone and then build it up, have the second one, and then the
third one, and then the fourth one. So with Four Weddings and a
Funeral it’s one wedding, and then it’s: ‘Let’s see what I can do with
the next one,’ and ‘Let’s see what I can do with the next one after
I that.’ actually have quitea simple technique: having thought of one
thing,I just exaggerateand expand and move it around and look at
it —a very simple straight lineof expansion and repetition.
ps: Curious that you’ve hit on four, because many writers

think of a rule of three.
RICHARD CURTIS: Ben and I used to talk about this a lot at
Blackadder, because in that slightly rococo stuff there were a lot of
threes. It would be the Duke of Westminster, the Duke of
Glastonbury, and the Duchess of Nibblepop. Then we said: “That’s
too many. Why do we have the boring second one?’ We went from
the rule of three to what we call the rule of two, where you just have
one straightone and thena silly one. Ben finallygot fed up with that,
he said: “This is a waste of time. Why do we have the Duke of
Westminster?’So we eventually developed the theory of the rule of
one, where you simply say your funny line and get on with it. Like,
eventually,Ben decided that what he was writing were no longer
double entendres at all, they were just single entendres: there was no
possibleway of misinterpretingwhat he’d written.
yMcG: Do you find it difficultto look back on past work?

RICHARD CURTIS: I’ve got different feelings about different things.
We can’t look back on the stage work — that’s just memories of, like,
standing behind stage with Rowan, changing tights.Not the Nine
O’Clock News we never saw for a decade, because it was a topical
programme and it was never re-edited, and it’s quite interesting to
watch that now, becauseI can see thingsI find quite funny in that
still.The major interestin watching Not the Nine O’Clock News is
just seeing how young everybody is. And then the Blackadders:the
first serieswas a bizarre thing, and I likeit whenever I see glimpses
of what we were trying to do and it was so extreme.I haven’t for
years watched the other Blackadders— I have your traditional
double reaction:you can’t believe how bad some of it is. There area
lot of sitcoms where the first eighteen minutes are good, and then
the last twelve you were tryingto get yourself out of the plot, and
you just can’t believehow far you stretchedit.
My theory is basically that no matter how hard you try on sit-
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RICHARD CuRTIS 101
coms, out of six episodes two are good, two are all right and two are
weak. The charms about Blackadder are, one, it’s quite lovely to
look at because it was so lusciously designed and dressed, and, sec-
ondly, it’s very dense, there are more words in it than one would
expect and sometimes those give me pleasure. And I like Four
Weddings and a Funeral a lot because I think it’s a aesthetically
pleasing film. It’s lit beautifully.
I’m very involved in the film production process; that’s perhaps
the oddest thing about me. I think I saw Four Weddings about sixty
times, and the last twenty I obviously didn’t laugh once. In facton
the first night someone sitting next to me complained: ‘You must
have found ome thing in that film funny.’ But I still thought it was
quite lovelyto look at.I don’t mind looking back on old things.
jmcG: What about the disciplineof writinga film, and working

with that sort of people,in comparison with the sort you work
with in television?
RICHARD CURTIS: [ve had a very protected career. I’ve worked
with people I know very well, except, I suppose, on one occasion. So
Pve been lucky in both formats in thatI tend to have been involved
in a very consultative process, and sometimes it’s extremely painful
being consultativeto such a degree, because you have to sacrifice
your independence and you can’t be tyrannical.As we got further
into the Blackadders the number of people who were good at
comedy and in the same room and very strong-willed became hard
to bear, but I’ve never looked at an episode of Blackadder and
thought: It would have been betterif I’d been in charge. For all the
agony of it, the tortureof that poor body of the original script that
went on, the plastic surgery made it I better. hope I never cross the
line into thinking that other people’s contributions will not make a
lot of difference. But a it’s funny old line, because you’ve absolutely
got to hang on to your own theory of why something’s funny and
what was the purpose and never letit go. So what you’ve got to hope
is that you meet people who are close enough in opinion to you that
you can have all those arguments and let them have as much input as
possible without having to sacrificewhat you think is funny.
Film is where that system is meant to break down, but the first
film I did was The Tall Guy. I was working with Mel Smith and
Rowan, both of whom I knew extremely well, and Emma
Thompson and Jeff Goldblum. And Jeff should have been the fly in
the ointment but wasn’t. He’s really sweet. Maybe he’s not when
you get him ona sound stage with dinosaurs,but over here he was
just heaven: he couldn’t have been more interestedin the process,
122
wanting to try things lotsof different ways. Whenever I see Jeff the
thing he’s keenest on is teaching acting, and he was a bit like that
when you were working with him. We were terribly consultativeon
that and always insistedon a read-through ages beforehand.I sit
through all auditions for movies, because that’s the way of finding
out whether or not your script’sany good, and you can listenand
make all the changes while the auditionsare going on, and by going
through the auditioning process you and the director realiseyou
both understand what the character’s meant to be — so there’s not
that awful moment when you suddenly find out that you meant
something differentand no one’s realisedit.
The film which should have been difficult was Four Weddings,
where I was working with Duncan Kenworthy, whom I knew
sociallybut ’d not worked with before, and who is not a comedy
producer, and Mike Newell, who’s not a comedy director.We had
to go right back in Mike’s work to 1968 — when he’d done this won-
derful Jack Rosenthal script called Ready When You Are, Mr
McGill, which was a great masterpiece— to be sure how funny he
was. But, again, the way we worked was by being endlesslyin each
other’s company. We were quite lucky because it was delayed twice;
we lost the finance,so we auditioned the whole film twice and Mike
believedin interviewing very thoroughly for every part in audition-
ing,so by the time we got on to the set there wasn’t that much room
for misunderstanding. I’m there every single minute of every single
day of the shooting and Mike did get cross with me a few times
because I’m so keen to be heard. But that,I think, is all right until I
start telling directors how to direct, which I’ve never done because I
don’t have any opinion on where the camera should go, or how it
should be shot or lit or anything like that. I’ve sometimes got opin-
ions on how the lines should be said.
I don’t know how writers let their work go in the way that they
do, and I’ve never met a person who was glad they had.I suppose the
reason must be sometimes time, nay money. It takes me for ever to
do a film. This new film, when it’s finished, will have been four
years.I know that I’llbe working on this film for the next fourteen
months — and I’ve completely finished it:I could just hand it over to
someone now, and turn up at the premiére. So ’'m making the
choice, insteadof writing two new films,to just stick with this one.
But I think it’s worth it.It means you’re a producer of sorts,for
much more time than you’rea writer. That partly comes from try-
ing to work in I situ: don’t know what it’s like working within an
American system; I’ve made the choice of staying here and working
with Working Title and Polygram, and working with people who
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RICHARD CuRTIS 103
trust me and know me. This new film of mine, ironically, because
I’ve got less energy now that I’ve turned the corner and I’m forty,I
decided to set the film within a hundred yards of where I live, so that
I could get up every morning and walk to work. But they’ve got in
this fantastic designer,who instantly looked at Notting Hill and
thought it wasn’t up to scratchas Notting Hill, and is rebuildingit
in Shepperton. So I’m now going to have to drive an hour every
morning to get to my own front door.
DB: Do you face any particular problems with translating your

work into performance?
RICHARD CuRTIS: There’s one thing that is emerging about the
more naturalisticstuff thatI do, which is not The Vicar of Dibley or
Blackadder but is more Four Weddings and this new film.I haven’t
got to the bottom of thisat all,and it could easilybe that I’m a bad
writer, but I think there are very, very few people who make what
I write I interesting. think there’sa slightnessof
incharacterisation
what I do. Now I’m sure when I’m writing these lines that I
absolutely know the voice that it’s going to have.I know when I’m
writinga line for one character, when I’m writinga line for another
character,I’m not just trying to be funny generally and putting the
name of the character in front of it, ’'m really very sure and I under-
stand the subtletiesand I feelas though I know the I character. feel
I’m doing proper writing. But when we audition people, ninety-
nine per cent of the time nothing comes across. People do the lines
quite well, they don’t seem to be making any mistakes at all, but it’s
not either funny or interesting.And it seems to be that there’s just
a particular type of performance, or character or accuracy which
sings with the way thatI write. It’s not somethinga lot of people
can do, and it doesn’t mean that the people that can do it are neces-
sarily the best actors in the world. With Four Weddings, we inter-
viewed sixty people to do the part that Hugh Grant did, and
I initiallyhad a lot of reservations about him, becauseI was hoping
that the film wouldn’t come across as being too upper-class, and
he’d certainly portrayeda lot of upper-class people before. But he
was the one person who suddenly came in three-dimensional when
he read the lines,and with everyone else there were two dimen-
sions. That is the strange thing about the way the lines thatI write
come out. It requiresa particularkind of .. . I thinkI would callit
exuberant naturalism, someone who by being completely natural
still manages to have a kind of extraordinary extra sparkle about
them which moves them back in the direction of where I started,
which is the heightened performance of people like Rowan. So
124
that’s turned out to be a peculiar thing:I think that my work needs

a lot of very careful casting, otherwise it would just come over as
being plain.
jMcc: You were saying there’sa difference between your televi-

sion work and your movie work...
RICHARD CURTIS: I’m very happy with a kind of heightened
realityin TV. Obviously that was the case with Blackadder because
that was historical.But what we’ve done in The Vicar of Dibley is
what we do in the filmsin reverse,in that we start with big charac-
terisations,people we can’t forget, people who say the same word all
the time, people who are completely stupid, and then we try to add
heart to that.So littleEmma Chambers, she’s playing somebody
completely thick, but she’s such a heartfeltand sweet and affection-
ate performance, and I would entrust any member of my family to
those sweet little arms. I start with the big jokes and the big idea,
whereas what I’ve triedto do with films is the other way round: to
start with natural charactersand then try to make them say lines
which are funnier and closerto the comedy lines thatI used to write
for TV sketches and stuff.I seem, either through cowardice or taste,
to try to write films as a naturalistic medium.
It started becauseI wanted to write about some things where I
absolutely knew what I was writing about. The Tall Guy was not
autobiographical,but pretty closeto it.| wanted it to be not misin-
terpretable,not something that could be taken out of my hands and
turned into something else.I wanted it to be just a small, acute
observationof thingsI absolutely knew, and I think I’ve stayed in
that mode. The other day I did the first draft of a treatment of a
movie of Bewitched, the American sitcom, and I rather enjoyed that,
so I think it’s just by chance that I’ve ended up writing these rather
intimate, personal movies.
This third film, which is also about a guy finding true love, may
be the lastof those thatI do. Partly because I think I’ve found it—
[ve been completely happy with the same person for years now, and
thereforethe next thing that I’m going to write is I’m sure going to
be autobiographical,but a cheat. . . is,in fact, going to be about a
couple rightat the end of their lives,and it will to some extent be
about my parents,but alsoI suspect, secretly, it’llbe about what it’s
liketo live with someone you love, which isa famously dull subject.
I read somewhere that 87 per cent of sex in the movies is for the first
time; they don’t liketo show people who’ve had sex before.If I tried
to writea comedy about a happily married couple per se, that would
be hard. But you can write about a happily married couple, one of
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RICHARD CurRTIS 105
whom is going to die soon, and I think that’s going to be the next
thing I write.
Nowadays, because I’m involved in production and I do Comic
Reliefas well, which takes up about a third of my time, I’ve got a
slow-motion I career. think of quitea lot of ideas, and because it’s
four years untilI eventuallyget writing them, only the ones that are
somehow true to me and the thingsin life thatI find interestingsur-
vive the waiting process. Just as if some people you knew were wait-
ing outside your front door, but only the one who really loved you
would stillbe there if you made them wait four years. This idea
about an older couple:I did the first draftof the firstact — becauseI
think it might be a play — five years ago, and I’m still interestedin the
subject.If I’m going to spend four years on something, there’sgot to
be something at the bottom of it which is of interest.
JMcG: Quite a lot of your work is done with a - collaborator

how does that fit into your working pattern?
RICHARD CURTIS: Ben Elton and I collaboratedon Blackadder.
We were both single men then, we had a deadline and Ben would
write a draft and then send me the disk; I would write a draft,I
would rewrite his draft and send the disk back. We never sat in the
same room, ever... becausewe were far too interestedin pop music.
Put me and Ben in a room, and we were only interestedin Madonna
and Madness and talking about pop and the Beatles.We didn’t care
about comedy enough to waste our time talking about it. Mr Bean
was written with Robin Driscolland The Vicar of Dibley with Paul
Mayhew-Archer, and we did the same sort of process, but I think
people who work with me now know that it’s going to be slow.
ps: What do you find most indifficult writing comedy?

RICHARD CURTIS: When writing Blackadder the most difficult
thing was definitely thinkingof the similes.Ben and I used to put
that off for ever,so Ben would send it to me and the line would say:
“You are as stupid— as my knob.’ That’s what it would always say.
We can’t use ‘my knob’, so I’d have a go at it, and then he’d have
another go at it, and when we got into the rehearsal room everybody
would have a go at it.So that moment when you realise you're nearly
there but you’ve got to make it funnier, that is really tricky. Very
difficult thinkingof titlesif they don’t come straightat you. My new
film’s called The Notting Hill Film because I’ve never thought of the
perfect title, whereas Four Weddings and a Funeral was called that
the day I started writing it. The Americans triedto get us to change
the title,but it was always that as far as we were concerned.
126
106 Now THAT’s FUNNY! Ji
But the hardest bit of writing, the very hardest bit,is when you
suddenly realise that all the lovely little things that you’ve written,
and all the jokes, and all the characters just don’t add up. It isn’t
exciting enough, it isn’t interesting enough, it doesn’t quite make
sense.And that’s when writingis really hard, when you’ve got to use
all your logic and all your to intelligence try and wrench it into a
position where it’ll work. It happens both in films and sitcoms, and
in sitcoms you tend to in the end just fail,you cobble it together.
You know you’ve got twenty minutes of quite funny stuff and you
hope the audience don’t notice there’sa glitch.In films it’s much
harder and much more worrying, because I believe that audiences,
even if they don’t realiseit on the top level,at the bottom level,in
their hearts, they know that something has gone awry.
Beginnings and endings, those are hard. I’ve been quite lucky with
endings, but sometimes you just have to establishso much at the
beginning. Four Weddings was the classic example of a really lucky
break, in that we actually thought of a beginning and it was very
simple and worked. Whereas in The Tall Guy I wanted to lay down
so much — information I wanted to lay down that the guy worked in
a theatre show, that he didn’t like his boss, that he lived in Camden
Town, that he lived with a girl who'd slept with lotsof people, that
he had lots of old — girlfriends and the first fifteen minutes of the
movie reallyis a muddle. Sometimes it’s very hard furnishing all
your information before you can get on with the story, and some-
times it’s unnecessary.
Mr Bean isakind of glitchin my film-writing career— thank God,
because it’s done fine. The joy of Mr Bean is all to do with the
rehearsal process. With Mr Bean Rowan and I and all the people
involved get in a room witha tiny littleidea which was worked out
at home. I would be ina ifstrait-jacket anyone ever saw me work-
ing on the Mr Bean stuff, because you have to do it.I thought of him
meeting the Queen Mum, waiting in a line, so what it involved was
me standingin my room for two and a half hours just looking at my
body, tryingto work out “What can I do with just this body?” We
used to roar with laughteras we worked out the Bean stuff.The film
thereforewas a different kind of writing:we thought of the basic
jokes, but we would work them out in a rehearsal room, so half of
the movie was in a way written in a rehearsal room, the rest was
written in the usual way.
DB: But there are very few sight gags in, say, The Vicar of
Dibley...
RICHARD CuRTIS: I should apply the Mr Bean experience more to
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RICHARD CurRTIS 107
my work than I do, and there’s a scene in Four Weddings when

Hugh gets stuck behind a curtainin a room with two people who are
having sex on their wedding day, and that was an ideaI wrote for Mr
Bean and never used there. It has a different texture in Four
Weddings from the other jokes.
When I’m writingI sit down and I do a whole day on each char-
I acter. spend a whole day pretending I’m one of them and checking
that I’ve got a beginning, middle and end to my story, and that I’ve
got something to say in every scene, which is a way of just making
sure that the characters are thorough. What I never do, which per-
haps I should, is spend a whole day saying: ‘Are there any visual
in possibilities this scene?’So those tend just to be thought of
at the
very last moment when you're rehearsing. It’s words for me and
that’s both a plus and a minus. It’sa minus becauseI don’t therefore
think through the economy of film as well as I should.
At the moment I’m watchinga lot of films and I notice the scenes
are too damned short. People aren’t saying enough. It’snot idiosyn-
cratic enough, it’s all sign language. It’s eight clichés one after
another, and they’re clichés because they’re too rich:the lines are too
well worked out to make it short, so everybody’s expressing exactly
what they mean, there’sno drift in it. You see people giving won-
derful performances off the lines,but their performances are all there
is, and therefore they tend to be generic sad, generic happy, generic
discontented,and not as specificto that film as they should be. So
when I argue with people about leaving lines as they are,it is partly
because you want to go on defining why a it’s differentkind of mis-
understanding,or a different kind of sorrow or a different kind of
joy. The editing process, which is so easy on film, means that you
often cut the lines then. One of the most interesting edits that was
made on Four Weddings was at the second wedding: Hugh meets
Andie again, takes her back to her house, and they sleep with each
other one more time, and there’s no dialogue at all: there was reams
of it, but we cut it, because in the end the richness of the situation
was entirely achievable through their looks and through silence,
whereas I’d written lotsof real clunky dialogue which said all those
things. Definitely picturesare more elegant and subtle and truthful
if they can give you enough detail.
ps: So in that case you’re quite trustfulof the audience...

RICHARD CuRTIS: I assume that the audience are in key with what
I think. The most important thing about comedy writingis that you
don’t think about whether the audience will laugh. You have to
laugh yourself;you have to have a perfected joke you’ve thought of.
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108 Now THAT’s FUNNY! ye
When I first startedin 1978, you know, on Week Ending or some-

thing, you went in and you were told what was funny that week.
You were told, it’s funny that the Chancellor has done this, it’s
funny that British Rail have done that. That was a disastrousway of
writing, because I didn’t find any of the things they mentioned
funny. I only write stuff becauseI like it,I think it’s funny and I
assume people will share that.If I think that I can see something
going on in the scene, then I’m sure the audience can see it as well.
That said,of course,I am tryingto manipulate the audience all the
time, emotionally.
ymcc: I’m taking it you set out to write comedy, that was your
intention...
RICHARD CURTIS: Well, no, I set out to be one of the Beatles!I fell
into comedy writing at I university. thought I was going to be an
actor and I turned out to be an atrocious actor,a very bland actor;I
was always cast as Fabian.So in order to get on stage and perform I
had to start writing comedy and then I teamed up with Rowan. It
turned out to be the thing I most instinctivelydid. I didn’t start
writing poetry;I didn’t start writing short I stories; started writing
jokes.
It turned out to be an extremely lucky profession for making a
livingin. I do feel bad about comedy writers from twenty and thirty
years ago, when you think about how little Galton and Simpson
were allowed to exploit their work. They were just paid like normal
writers,and they are very great writers,and someone like me... we
did Not the Nine O’Clock News and the first album sold 500,000
copies and then suddenly video tape came in; Blackadder video tapes
have sold 10 million. It’s turned out to be a fantastically profitable
and lucky area.
I set out by chance and it’s been a logical route from sketches to
sitcom, from sitcom to film.I don’t know how many more sitcoms
I will write now. There is a specific rhythm about that half-hour
which you can learn. There’sa lovely thing about planting the infor-
mation and then lettingone plot go, and the second, then taking time
off in the middle to be as stupid as you like and then winding it up
and reminding people of something that happened. There seems to
be a rhythm which isa joy.
129
Victoria Wood
You have to write from the heart
The phenomenal Victoria Wood is able to sell out the Albert Hall as
many nights as she likesto perform there, and stillget full houses
wherever she goes on tour with her stand-up comedy and infectious
songs — which her fans recognise from the first bars of the introduc-
tion,as if she were Ella Fitzgerald beginning ‘Manhattan’.She has
also made an unforgettable impact on televisionwith series such as
Victoria Wood — As Seen on TV making use of a brilliant stock com-
pany of comic actors led by Julie Walters, who was her co-starin Pat
and Margaret, the TV film based on Victoria’s script.She has estab-
lished herself firmly in the affectionof the public because her
comedy encourages women to laugh at themselves without feeling
humiliated,and men to join in without feeling threatened.Our con-
versation with her began just after noon one day at the house in
north London where she lives with her husband, the magician
Geoffrey Durham, and their two children.On one side of her work-
room stood an upright piano with a Mozart sonata open on the
music stand; on the opposite wall hung a photograph of Dizzy
Gillespie leaning on a lamp-post at the corner of 52nd Street and
Sixth Avenue.
ps: You’ve written for the stage, and Pat and Margaret for tele-
vision. Are plays in a different compartment from sketches and
stand-up?
VICTORIA woop: I think they’re shades of the same thing. At the
moment I’m writinga comedy series,but there are echoes of what
I’ve done in my drama, and also echoes of what I’ve done in my
I sketches. think you can meet in the middle where you’ve got some
realityand naturalism and you’ve also got the dialogue heightened
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110 Now THAT’s FUNNY! f
enough to get big laughs. To me it’s allon the same spectrum. But
there’s always got to be some link with comedy: I couldn’t get out
of bed ifI wasn’t going to write something funny. I wouldn’t have
any interestin it. But I want it to have some realityas well.
jmcc: You’ve regular interpreters, chiefly Julie Walters. Are

you writing for her specifically?
VICTORIA woop: Yeah. She does things that nobody else can do.
I find thatI can write things for her when I would have difficulty
explainingto anybody else how I wanted it done. I find that with a
lot of the people thatI write for. The thing that ’m writing now,
Julie’s in it, Celia Imrie, Duncan Preston, Anne Reid, Thelma
Barlow — I’m working towards what I know they can do, because
then you can take it up on to a higher level.You just know they can
interpretit. They’re tuned up to do it. We’ve just auditioned and
we've got a couple of girls,and I think they’re going to be good, but
they’re not that experienced. So I’ve crossed out all their big
speeches and given them to me, and given them a bit less!
DB: Do you like to write for yourself? Or would you rather

somebody else performed your words?
VICTORIA WOOD: I’ve been writing this series since January, and
when I wrote the firsttwo episodes my husband said: “You’re not in
it!’ And I said: ‘Well, I am, I’m standing there with the kettle,’and
he said: “You’re not saying anything.’So I had to go back and insert
myself all the way through andI did find it hard to alight on a char-
acter for myself. It’sa temptation when you’re writing to give your-
self all the qualitiesthat you’d like to have in real life. Well, that’s
nothing to do with writing comedy, that’s really another issue alto-
gether,so I had to block that out,I had to write myselfa funny part
and a part that only I could do. It was really quite difficult.I’ve hit
on it now, I think, because I’m on episode number five.I want to be
in it becauseI want to get out of the bloody house!
DB: What’s the most difficult task you face in translating

thought on to the page? Is there something you dread?
VICTORIA Woop: I think it’s having the bottle to startit at all,
because when it’s in your head it’s perfect.And when I write first
drafts they’re really, really bad. They’re really bad, but they’re better
than nothing. There are no jokes in it, there area lot of people plod-
ding about. But at least it’s startingto take a shape. Then I do
another draft, then another draft, and I think: Now I know who
everybody is,I can really get going.I haven’t writtena series for a
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VICTORIA Woop iii
long time, and the last I series wrote were all sketch shows, which are
easy: you just write as many sketchesas you can and put them on the
carpet and divide them into six piles. This is an ongoing story,
episode to episode. It’s only one set. It’s the same people. But I’ve
got to get them in and out — why do people walk about? Where can
they go? What can they do? I found it all quite unmanageable.I was
scared of startingit because I thought: It can’t be as good as it was
when it was just an idea two years ago. So I’m always scaredof just
... bringing it to life.
JMcG: As an idea, was ita story or was ita set of characters?

VICTORIA WOOD: It was a situation.It’s justa group of women in
a factory canteen.I was interestedin how people are when they come
into work. You gather from what they’re saying what their real lives
are about — especiallywith people who do quitea dull job. The focus
is not the job but what is actually going on the rest of the time.
Characters are what appeal to me, I suppose. You have to be inter-
estedin them, you have to have a bond with them on some I level. can
never really cotton on to a comedy that is so bizarreI can’t recognise
anything inrealistic it at all, because then it becomes farceto me and
I’ve never liked farce.I find it very cold: it’sso mechanical.
I put words in people’s mouths that they would never say. And
yet when you overhear people talk they say bizarre things, because
they know what they’re talking about. It’s because we don’t know
what they’re talking about that it sounds odd.
In fact, people do talk in brand names, they talk in half-sentences,
they referto things from their past or from just now, and it’s that
slightlyodd effect that I’m tryingto capture.It is also very natural-
istic.If you takea transcriptof something that somebody’s actually
said and type it out, you can’t read it yourself,you can’t act it out,
because it’sso particular,the way people speak. They ‘um’ and
‘er’and tailoff and repeat themselves.I’m putting in a lot of that,and
cross-conversations,and people saying: ‘Oh, did you see so-and-
so?’ and then five minutes later somebody saying: ‘What did you
say?’ I’m tryingto weave everything together.I’m tryingto make it
real, and I’m trying to develop characters that audiences will care
about . . . I’m just tryingto push it in a I direction haven’t pushed it
before.
I plot out each episode,and I don’t think one episode’syet finished
the way I meant it to I finish. just finishedone at ten to twelve— I was
ina bit of a rush! Just before you came I was desperately trying to get
it done and it went off on another tangent, happily,and I had a good
finishto it, which I hadn’t had before.I’m tryingto surprise myself,
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ri? Now THAT’s FUNNY!
I really. don’t want to just write somethingI know where it’s going
to go. I want it to go off in another direction.
jmMcc: And are there men in it, too?

VICTORIA WOOD: Two men. Which is enough. Five women and
two men. I’m pleased with my men, actually: they’re not just token
men, they’re two really good characters.I’m more interestedin men
now than I was a few years ago. My knowledge is about women,
obviously.I think male writers’ main characters tend to be men.
Women could never have written The Goon Show — that comes from
a masculine environment, from the army. Obviously my main char-
acters will always be women, I think that’s perfectly appropriate,
but that’snot to say I can’t writea decent man’s part once ina while.
pB: What’s the women’s equivalentof the army? What shared

experience do women have?
VICTORIA WOOD: I suppose it’s work — that’s what I’m doing. Pve
got a bunch of women opening tins of beans and frying eggs all day
every day. The equivalent of the army is any situation where you’re
in a bunch and you have somebody in authority over you.
DB: I’m wondering where women learn the common language

of women.
VICTORIA WOOD: Well, you see, women talk; men don’t. Women
communicate when they talk. Men talk to take up space and make a
noise,a lot of the time. Women talk in whatever situation they find
themselves and they link together very easily.Men tend to use talk
more as a sort of territorialthing, to say: “Thisis where I come in the
pecking order.’ ‘I'll tell you this joke and then you'll understand
who Iam.’ Women don’t do that so much; we’re not so hierarchical.
I wouldn’t presume reallyto know how men are when they’reon
their own, because, obviously, that’s not a side I ever see. I know
what it’s liketo be in a mixed group and it’s differentfrom what it’s
liketo be in a group of women. But allI care about, really,is getting
laughs, number one, and people, I care about people, and writing
about people and writing about people’s experiencesand relation-
ships, that’s what I’m interested in. Getting laughs, that’s the most
important thing.
JmcG: Do you find that difficult, constructing the laugh?

VICTORIA WOOD: Not hugely difficult,no. ’'ve worked on it,I
think I’ve refined it over the years, but I clicked into it the day when
I wrote my first sketch, when I found that something had been
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VICTORIA WOOD tile
eluding me before,of how you constructa joke and what’s funny

and what’s not funny. I just fell into it right then, like learningto ride
a bike, really, and so, what’s hard, I think, is finding a really huge
laugh. You can write medium funny and you can see it often in
feeble sitcoms— that they’ve got an idea of what makes a joke and
how a sentence would proceed towards a punch line,but it doesn’t
really get you. What you have to do is to push and push and keep on
and on and on until you get that really funny line. That’s what I’m
interestedin . . . and the bizarre word or the odd thing that nobody
could ever have expected.
DB: Do you assess your own work or do you try it out on any-
one?
VICTORIA WOOD: Try it out on the audience! You can’t testit out.
With this series we had some auditions,so I got a good listenof it,
but it only confirmed what I already thought about some of it and I
was going to change that anyway.
DB: Does the show havea title yet?

VICTORIA WOOD: It’s called Dinnerladiesat the moment. They’re
very keen to put it on BBC 1. I was wanting to slideit on through
the back door of BBC 2. But there’s going to be a bit of press atten-
tion, whatever I do. I can’t sneak it in completely unnoticed.I might
just as well go for broke and have it on BBC 1. At about half past
nine, I think.
jMcG: When can you, in televisionfor instance, step back and

allow a director to do something?
VICTORIA Woop: That is a problem; I don’t know how we're
going to be on the series.The feel thatI want to get is like E.R. and
those things, where people are moving about. The camera’s very
skilfully placed: you always hear what you’re meant to hear, yet
there are always about seventeen people talkingat the same time; it’s
very smooth.
The good thing we’re doing, which has not been done before, is
that we’re recording it twice, like the Americans record their dress
rehearsal. We’re actually going to do it in front of an audience on a
Friday night and do it again on a Saturday night.So we'll get a good
look at it on a Saturday morning and see what’s worked and what
hasn’t worked. Also, if the a timing’s bit off we can cut down the dia-
logue, rather than editingit by actually snipping out bitsof video
tape:we can actually chop the dialogue down. So I’m quite hopeful
about that.
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ps: You come from Bury, north of Manchester ... Do you

think there’sa Northern qualityin comedy?
VICTORIA WOOD: You can’t deny that most of our best comics
have come from the North or Scotland, really. There’s something
about the way people construct language and people’s attitude.It’s
a laconic quality that Lancashire people have — they never get excited
about anything— and it’sa very useful way of getting laughs. And
the word order, everything going back to front, saying: “Did they
not?’ In fact, when I wrote my first sketch, I had a whole thing
where somebody says: “You can’t do that!’ ‘Can I not?’ — “Did I
not?’ I’d never been aware of it untilI found myself writing it.
Lancashire people will never be impressed by anything; they just
take it all on the chin.I was in a chip shop near Morecambe, and
somebody came in and said: ‘The pier’s burned down!’ and this
woman just said: ‘About time!’ That summed it up.
pbB: How did you absorb the dialect?

VICTORIA woop: I had sucha strange upbringing livingin this
house that used to be an anti-aircraftplace up on the hill.We never
had any visitorsat all, becauseI had such strange parents, and allI
did was watch the — television and yet something was going in...
some language was going in.I was the youngest of four but they’d
left home; they were quitea lot older than I was. So I did spenda lot
of time on my own just eating and watching television, but some-
how I absorbed that way of talking.My family were middle-class,
lower-middle-class.My father was an insurance underwriter; my
mother was a teacher. But I tend to write better for working-class
charactersand I don’t know why that should be, because it’snot my
own background. I went to a grammar school. But I have a much
stronger accent than my sisters,so it’s sunk into me somehow. I used
to get told off: somebody would phone me up and my mother would
say: ‘It’sone of her “gorra gerrit” friends.’
DB: We noticed that you admired someone we both knew in

Manchester, Peter Eckersley. .
VICTORIA WOOD: Yeah. His picture’son the wall, there. My first
play, Talent, was on at the Crucible in Sheffield.He went to see it
and bought it for Granada, where he was head of drama, and that’s
when I met him. I started working with him and he commissioned
two more plays after that and then I got my own seriesand we did a
pilot,and the year that we were going to shoota series, Peter died.
We did the series but I think it suffered from the lack of Peter, and I
didn’t work at Granada after that.I didn’t want to — it was working
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VICTORIA Woop 115
with him I was interestedin. I didn’t feelI would be in such good

hands as at the BBC, so I moved over. I found Peter so clever and so
helpful and an inspiration, really encouraging, because I’d not done
a lot until then. My big break was having this play on at Sheffield,
and then Peter buying it— those were the two things that kicked
everything on. I never stopped working.
ymcG: Did he help you with editingas well?

VICTORIA WOOD: Yes, he did — he had a very good sense of what
you didn’t need in the script, which was very usefulto me. I would
slash, and he’d go: ‘No, hang on — don’t take all that out!’ and I’d
say: ‘I will,I will.It needs to be about three pages long!’He never
triedto alter what I’d done, but he had a really good editor’seye, and
an overall sense of what we were working on, and the length of
something and the pace, and he was very tasteful. Really good sense
of humour. Good laugh. Now I work a lot with his wife, Anne Reid,
so a it’s good link with Peter.
jJMccG: So you started basicallyas a writer?

VICTORIA WOOD: Well, I started off as a I singer-
songwriter.
started off in televisionwhen I was twenty and I was at I university.
was a barmaid at a pub in Birmingham, where a lot of the BBC pro-
ducers drank.I was at a party ... I must have been drunk myself to
play the piano in front of all those blokes. One of them said: “That’s
absolutely marvellous.You must come to Pebble Mill and audition.’
The next morning the phone rang and they said: ‘Where are you?
We’re all here!’I never thought people were I serious. went down
and played all the songs I’d written,and one of the guys who did the
opt-out programme at 10.30 ona Friday night said: ‘I use songs, top-
ical stuff,’so I started working. They’d say: “Writea song about
money or about food.’ And I would write one to order: two minutes
ten seconds.I sang at the piano,so that got me an Equity card. Then
I used to do Start the Week on the radio, deadly programme, with
Richard Baker, and That’s Life on television, another deadly pro-
gramme, with Esther Rantzen.
[had a lot of exposure as a singer-songwriterbut I didn’t have any
idea how to make that into a career.I just hoped that somebody
would give me a job and then I’d writea song and go on tellyand do
it and get sixty quid. But it was very stop-and-start. Eventually I'd
been on every programme that ever wanted a topical song — there
weren’t that many in the first place— and it all seemed to grind to a
halt.At the same time as I was doing these programmes at Pebble
Mill, I went on New Faces, which was a high-rated talent show at the
136
time. I won the first heat but I didn’t win any more. ATV did a
comedy series using winners from New Faces- it was probably the
worst show that’s ever been on British television.’ve never met
anyone who saw it— and it had Marti Caine, Lenny Henry and me
and three other people who never made anything of themselves.
I did these odd shows, but I didn’t do live work at all... I wasn’t
I writing; didn’t know what to do with myself, really.| was twenty-
one.I was livingin a bed-siton my own in Birmingham. Id been at
university there, but now all my friends had left: everybody with
any bottle had gone to London. So I was sat in this very large room
in what is now a private hospital, eating mince out of tins.My plan
was to be famous.I thought,I can’tbe in rep or anything like that:I
don’t look right,I don’t sound right, I’ve not been properly trained.
I didn’t know what to do. I suppose I was hoping something would
happen and somebody would say: “We'll make you a star,’ because
that’s what I wanted to be,a star. This went on for a few years and
the people at the dole office were getting reallyfed up with me. They
were saying: ‘We don’t understand: one week you earn a hundred
pounds and then you’re on the dole for twenty-two weeks. We
don’t understand what sort of career this is.’I didn’t really have
much to say in reply.
Then I met my husband, who’s a magician but was then an actor,
and we went to live in a flatin Morecambe because we’d seen an
Alan Bennett play about Morecambe and we thought that would be
funny. Actually,it wasn’t, but we were a bit mad.
Pd met a BBC radio producer, and I wrote a radio comedy and
sent it to him. He wrote back and said it had too many jokes in it,
too many one-liners!God, he should be so lucky! And then he died.
I was getting very, very depressed, now. I felt I’d had so many good
chances and I'd blown them somehow. I’d done a few businessmen’s
cabarets, where they thought I would be blue and glamorous, and I
wasn’t blue and I wore jeans, and I had to get my dad to come and
take me home. Geoff decided to stop being an actor and be a magi-
cian, so he was out of work. So that was two of us eating mince out
of tins and being miserable. . .
Then I met this comedian called John Dowie, who I would say
was the first alternative comic. This was the late Seventies.He didn’t
tell jokes, and he was a bit aggressive;he looked a bit punky and a bit
strange,and he was a lovely bloke. He’s never really got on in tele-
vision, because he doesn’t want to change his material and it’s not
suitablefor He television. was doinga littletour of arts centres
and
things like that,and he asked me to play the piano and do bitsof my
own, so we did a few sketches together,and we took it to Battersea
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VICTORIA Woop 117
Arts Centre in ’78. Dusty Hughes, who was running the Bush
Theatre, was in the audience and he asked me to contribute to a
revue they were writing, called In at the Death, with Snoo Wilson,
writers like that.
I said I would write something but I didn’t want to be in it.I
didn’t want to be in Shepherd’s Bush for three weeks, becauseI
thought it was so horrible,and three weeks in my career was a long
time because I’d only ever worked anywhere for one nighta year,so
I thought: It’sa bit of a commitment, three weeks! We went to a
meeting, I think at Snoo Wilson’s house, and they said: ‘You’ve
got to write four things allto do with the week’s news. And it’s all
got to be about death!’
Well, Guy the gorillahad died,so I wrote a song about Guy the
gorilla, and there’d been a thing in the paper about somebody being
killed joyriding,so I wrote a thing about that. And another piece
about an assisted suicide, so that was three songs. Julie Walters was
at the meeting and I really liked her and I thought, Well, if she’s
going to be in it, maybe it would be quitea good laugh to be in it, so
I said, ‘I’ve changed my mind, I will be in it.’For the fourth piece,I
said to Dusty: ‘I can’t think of any more songs to do. Can I writea
sketch?’And he said: “You can if you want to.’ He didn’t care really:
he was always mending his car. None of the other sketches were
funny — they weren’t meant to be funny: it was a very serious revue,
very hard-hitting,and a bit dreary.I wrote a sketch called ‘Sex’ and
it was the first thing that I’d ever written that really resounded with
me. I thought: Nobody else could have written I this. felt I’d found
my voice in it. It used to go a bomb every night because it had jokes
in it and nothing else had. David Leland, a theatre director who was
doing a season of new plays at the Crucible, said: ‘Why don’t you
writea play?’ So, suddenly, from doing absolutely nothing, I’d writ-
ten a sketch and I sat down and wrote Talent in three weeks. I didn’t
even think about it,it all came pouring out, and we did that at the
Crucible. Peter saw the play, and that’show I got going.So 1978 was
my good year, but I’d had four years of pissing about until then.
ymcc: And you’d done a drama degree?

VICTORIA WOOD: I’d just scraped through.I hadn’t coped at all
well with being at universityand my way of not coping was to
ignore the whole thing. I’d go off and write songs and play the piano.
I couldn’t get involved with what anyone else was doing at all. They
were very discouraging.You were expected to be able to be a
Shakespearean actressor a very good stage manager; there was no
room to be a bit barmy, and be a... struggling writer: that really
138
didn’t come into it. Fair enough, it was an academic I institution.

didn’t deal with it very well. But I got on the telly and I got my
Equity card, so that didn’t really matter. Now you know the
history:it was writing that propelledmy career.
pB: But you hoped to become a comedian: how old were you
when you got the ambition?
~ yIcTORIA woop: About eleven,I suppose, twelve.I was writing
things at the piano, just for my own amusement. I spent a lot of time
on my own, because I didn’t have any friends near where I lived, as
there weren’t any other houses.I was in a youth theatre from when
I was fifteen,so I was always aiming in that direction.
ymcc: Did you do the songs at home for the family? To enter-
tain your relatives?
VICTORIA WOOD: No, I didn’t have any I relatives. lived in this
weird house where we each had a room of our own. I had a room
with a piano in it, and a television, and I sat in there, and my dad was
in his own office writing radio plays. My mother was in another
room, sorting wool into cardboard cups, and my other sisters were
out having a good time. We didn’t eat together,and we didn’t do
anything together afterI was a certain age,so | was on my own. We
were totally dysfunctional.We didn’t work as a family at all.We
were all busy, allin our different rooms.
My dad was great,but he was a very odd person. He was very soli-
tary. He was alone in his office, tapping away. He wanted to be a big
playwright,and he had one play done in the theatre and a few radio
plays on. I suppose he didn’t quite manage to do what he wanted to
do.
Sometimes my dad would come in the room and I’d be watching
television,and he wouldn’t sit down. He’d stand there, as if about to
leave; he could stand there for an hour. My mother never watched
the televisionat all:she didn’t approve of the Ittelevision. had to go
back every summer: we only had it in the winter, then it went back
to the shop.I was devoted to I television. watched it every hour that
I could— there wasn’t that much then, but I must have seen every sit-
com there ever was. Once when I was doing exams, my father
decidedI shouldn’t watch television becauseI was supposed to be
revising,and he wrapped it up in a I raincoat. came in one day and it
was all wrapped up in this bloody mac! He didn’t say anything!
Nobody in my family ever said anything.I just came in and it’sall
done. “What’s happening? Why didn’t you say?”
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VICTORIA. WOOD 119
DB: Can we discuss your music, because that’s where you’re

unique among the writers we’re talking to...
VICTORIA wWooD: I know, I can get off with a song, I’m lucky.I
don’t have to say: ‘My name’s ... thank you very much,’ I can bug-
ger off with a bit of music. It doesn’t loom very large in my life,
music, really.But I find it incredibly useful for the show. My dad
played: he was a semi-pro, and wrote shows when he was in the
navy. My dad was a very nice pianist.He used to take popular songs
and change the words — put in jokes about insurance companies and
sing them at the works do. I can’t remember what I write first, words
or music. If it’s going to be a good song, I’ve usually written the tune
first, because they’re few and far between, good tunes; they don’t
come to me easily.So with the best songs I get the tune and an
inkling of the idea, and one of the key words, and then I’m well
away. The last few songs I wrote for my last show I really enjoyed
writing— I love writing lyrics.Once I’ve got the idea and the tune,I
love just fittingit all together and getting that exact word that’s
going to get a — “‘whoof!’ I adore that. There’s nothing worse to me
when people put the stresson the wrong line, just to fitin with the
tune.
When I first startedas a stand-up comic I was too nervous to stand
up, so I sat at the piano becauseI had a piece of furniture there.And
when I first stood up I would only stand in the crook of the piano,
so I had something to hold on to, and it was ages beforeI could actu-
ally step away from it, and then I would hold on to the microphone.
Now I have a mike in my hair, so I don’t have to touch anything or
hold anything, which is brilliant.But the piano is real security.
DB: You’ve got a mike in your hair?

VICTORIA WOOD: Not now!
jmcc: Do you have a regular working day when you’re

writing?
VICTORIA WOOD: I work from nine until about half three and then
I get my children from school,or they get got,I give them a snack
and then I go back and do a bit more. So nine to five, basically.But
that includes doing the laundry and I things, don’t work continu-
ously.Or ifI go to the gymit’s, like, eleven until five.But I do it five
days a week. I’m getting really tight for time so I’m going to
Yorkshire tonight,and I geta day and a half without the I children.
reckon I might be able to do an episodein that day and a half, which
would be brilliant. BecauseI wrote six and then I put two in the bin,
so that put me back.
140
jmcc: Do you take a laptop, or something?

VICTORIA WooD: I write longhand.I can type, but I don’t. I’ve
tried writing straighton to the computer and it doesn’t seem to work
as well. So I just takea pad of paper. I’m used to the sizeof the paper,
so I know how many pages is half an hour.
ps: And you can write dialogue directlyand it’ll stand?

~ yICTORIA woop: Yeah, a lot of the time it will stand. Most often
[ll do three drafts,but a couple of these episodes are just one draft
— that’s when I’m well up and running: I’ve worked all the charac-
ters out, I’ve had a really good idea, and I don’t write it too quickly.
But because I’ma bit pushed for time, I’m going to try to do, like,
eighteen hours in a day and a half, and I might get it done. I worked
through the night just recently, which caught me up a bit, and I did
three hours this morning before you came. And that finished that
episode,so I’ve only got one to do. If you hadn’t been coming, I
would have taken all day to do it.
JMcG: Do you write the stand-up act in the same way?

VICTORIA WOOD: I don’t write in such good handwriting, because
nobody has to read it except me. Then I work it on stage and it gets
changed, so the handwritten copy bears not much resemblance in
the end to what’s being done on stage.The processis less literaryand
more to do with performance.I often find if I’m working on stage
that I’ve left out a whole chunk of something and that’s because on
some level I’ve known it wouldn’t work: I’ve instinctivelycut it as
Pve gone along. On the page it looked all right, but as a stand-up
comic I| can judge it better.
ps: And does that differ from one night to another?

VICTORIA WOOD: No. Once it’s all fixed,I keep it the same.
Obviously if something happens in the theatre then I’ll improvisea
bit, but I basically have the routine andI stickto it. That’s my way
of working, to refine the performance every night untilit reachesa
certain standard. Then it startsto fall off and you have to pack it in.
Hopefully not until you’ve finishedthe tour!
DB: Have you ever worked with anybody else,as a writing

partner?
VICTORIA Woop: I haven’t ever collaborated with anybody
I really. think with John Dowie we maybe struggledto write a
couple of things together,but I don’t remember thatit worked. I had
an editor on Pat and Margaret, which I found incredibly useful and
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VICTORIA Woop 1A
very helpful: like with Peter, just an outside eye on the overall shape
of something.If you’re writinga screenplay it’s handy if somebody
else says: ‘Suppose they don’t go there, suppose they go to the petrol
station, suppose they go to the hospital.’You think: Oh, yeah! If I
did a screenplay with a great big storyI might work with somebody
else in that regard.I can’t imagine writing dialogue with anybody
else;I just can’t picture it. I’m quite a solitary person, I suppose. I
just come in here and do it and I don’t show it to anybody. My assis-
tant, Cathy, types one while I’m on the next one and then I amend
what she’s typed. So I’ve had to let her see rough drafts and things
like that, which I’ve never done before.I was a bit dubious about it,
but she’s very I tactful. used to have a typist who was about
seventeen years old and I used to give her a piece and she’d say: ‘I
suppose it means something to you.’
jMcG: Everybody - Denis Norden for one — admires your skill

with bringing in referencesto brand names. How did you hit on
that?
VICTORIA WOOD: I don’t think about it; it’s just part of what I do,
I suppose. When I wrote that very first sketch, there was a reference
to Mothercare. I suppose it’s part of my ordinary I life. don’t do it
I deliberately: don’t think, Well, Pll mention a brand name and
that
will strikea chord. In my last show on stage there was more about
people, I think. Because when I went to Australia with it,I had to
go around all the supermarkets changing all the bloody names. I
couldn’t just say Vegemite, I had to find something that is in
Britainas well as Australia,and they’re buggers, they don’t have
Jammy Dodgers and I adore them. One of the punch lines was
Jammy Dodgers and there’s reallyno substitutefor that. ‘Jammy
Dodgers’ is such a funny name, and they don’t bloody have them!
In the end I said: ‘Stop the car. I’ve got to go in this supermarketto
find something that looks likea Jammy Dodger.’ Well, they have
things called Lamington Fingers! That was all right.I coped, but it
was a bit of a I strain. thought: Why do I do this? It’s so particular.
Why can’tI just write about bollocks, like everybody else does,
or sperm? Easier.
ps: Apart from the actual brand names, do you have a struggle
to find the mot justeor does it drop out of thin air?
VICTORIA woop: It’s like most things: sometimes it’s, a like, gift
from God and sometimes you’re having to chew at it to get the right
thing. It’s nice when it lands in your head: ‘Where the hell did that
come from?’
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$22 Now THAT’s FUNNY!
pp: Are there any elements that comedy has to have?

VICTORIA woop: A rhythm; it tends to have a rhythm. There’s a
right rhythm and a wrong rhythm, and if you haven’t got it you just
haven’t got it.
pp: And is there something that you really would like to write
about but the opportunity hasn’t arisen?
VICTORIA woop: No. I’ve been thinking about this series for a
long time and I loved my last tour, but I can’t tour all the time,
because of the children, and also I’m too knackered. I think once this
is over I’ll just take a bit of a breather and see what comes into my
mind. I’ve got a couple of ideas for stage plays.I liketo keep freea
little bit, so if an idea comes in I can follow it through and see, well,
is ita sketch?Is ita play? What is it?
ps: Is therea subject that ought to be tackledin comedy?

VICTORIA woop: I think comedy can take anything on board if
it’s dealt with intelligently.What you can’tdo is just tack an issue on
to a bunch of crappy dialogueto make it hard-hitting.You have to
write from the heart. If you’re not writing from the heart, you have
to give up.
What I see a lot at the moment is very sloppy writing: nobody’s
cut it down, nobody’s refined it, nobody’s worked on it. Not that
I’m harking back to the past as being better, but, say, on Morecambe
and Wise, you knew they had so much rehearsal,and they worked
on all their routines,so they could lift off. There was room to bring
in Peter Cushing or somebody like that and it actually went in a dif-
ferent direction,just because they had been doing it all that time.
There was that rock-solid thing of working on stage all the time.
That’s the only place you learn: on stage, doing it with a live audi-
ence. You don’t learn much from being on television, except how to
be on television.
143
Paul Merton
As seriousas any art form
In private Paul Merton isa less intimidating figure than he appears

on — television bespectacled, smiling,and apparently slimmer— and
his truculenceand tersenessare replaced by a free-wheeling conver-
sational style and a ready laugh. It is as if he put on a matador’s suit
to go on television,and the machismo to go with it. The public Paul
is a character he has created for himself, but one that fits him so well
that it appears quite natural. There is similar careful preparationfor
his part in Have I Got News for You on televisionand Just a Minute
on radio, the kind of preparation that is largely invisibleto the pub-
lic but nevertheless allows him to communicate directly. His rapport
with an audience is very clearly seen in his appearances with the
Comedy Store Playersin London on Sunday evenings, when impro-
visational games give him an opportunity fora sortof instant writing
which can be turned immediately into performance.He takes an
enthusiast’s interestin the comedy of previous generations:as an
example, he introduced himselfto Joe because of his admiration for
the Peter Sellers movie The Magic Christian, which Joe directedand
co-wrote with Terry Southern. Our talk with Paul began in the early
afternoon at the Savile Club, and ended after dark, ranging over
more subjects than comedy.
jmcc: As a writer, what is your relationship with yourselfas a

performer? Do you find yourself saying: “No, he wouldn’t like
that’?
PAUL MERTON: I often write with an old school friend of mine,
John Irwin:we wrote the Channel 4 series together and a radio series
together and there isa on restriction writing for me becausewe can
only write stuff thatI can do. It doesn’t test our range as writers:we
144
now write very well for my style,but that means we can’t writea
scene with two old women sittingin a room talking about something
that happened before the war, or something like that. There’s no
point in putting me in a wig, because I’m not that kind of performer
who would, you know, disappear intoa part that someone like Peter
Sellersor Steve Coogan would. Equally,I can do other stuff that
they can’t do. My personality comes out of the person I am anyway,
but a it’s rather amplified versionof me, a more confident version.If
you’re going to have me as a Cavalier you can put me in the clothes,
but you’re still going to get me.
jmcc: How about writing for characters other than your own?
PAUL MERTON: I’ve written with Julian Clary, for a show called
Sticky Moments which he and I put together years ago. That’s a com-
pletely different styleof writing. Julian’s stuffis basically double
meanings and within ten minutes of talkingto him everybody in the
room is doing them — you can’t help it. The stuffI write with Julianis
not something I’m ever going to go: ‘I wish I had that joke!’ You can
have it: it’s yours, Julian.In generalwe just write something that ?m
not in.As soon as you take me out of it,you can write about anything.
DB: In your experienceas a stand-up comic do you suddenly in

front of a audience discover things that you wouldn’t have
thought of on your own?
PAUL MERTON: Writing a new idea, it never worked the first time
I did it. Second or third time, I knew whether it was worth sticking
with or whether to abandon it, because the audience inform you
what’s funny in the end. You’ve got the funny idea in your head and
you’ve got your set-up over here and your punch line over there and
it’s very funny to you, but the audience don’t know the bit in the
middle. So sometimes you have to break it down a bit and add a bit
of information for them to make the leap that you’ve made. You
don’t want to spell it out word for word, but they need just enough
of a carrot to lead them down the line where they’llget there at the
same time as you do. That isa great feeling.
The only way to shape a stand-up act is to do it in front of an audi-
ence. You have no idea how it will go otherwise, unless, of course,
you stickto some formulaic way of writing where you say, ‘Well,
I'm known for making jokes about fat bus conductors, that’smy
routine,’so you justdo loads of jokes about fat bus conductors.
DB: In your improvisation work with the Comedy Store Players

you have a very intimate relationshipwith the audience— which
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PAUL MERTON 125
is actually providing the material, for one thing. In other work,

do you miss that instant accessto audience reaction?
PAUL MERTON: At the Store you’ve got this huge interactionwith
the audience and their reactionsto what you’re doing can liftyou to
higher levelsof inspiration.But if they’re not laughing it’s like walk-
ing through thick concrete. They sometimes shout out during a
scene, shout outa line that’s occurred to them, and it kills what we’re
doing stone dead. If you’re doing a stand-up gig and somebody
shouts out, you can come away from what you’re doing, put them
down, then come back to the next joke. With the improv thing,
you're concentratingso much on what the other people on stage are
saying that,if suddenly somebody shouts out, your attentionis no
longer on the stage.The audience never sees this but the whole thing
just fallsto the floor and you have to gather it up and get it going
again.
I did one of Galton and Simpson’s TV shows with Josie Lawrence
and there was one linein the script thatI was worried about because
people kept saying: ‘It’s very gentle, isn’t it?’I thought: Gentle? No
laughs, then. But of course we started doing it and the audience were
great. They made ita better show than it might have been. Ray and
Alan’s stuffis so good anyway, and the audience is tellingyou it’s
funny. Even in a TV studio they can lift your work up, as well as in
a live environment.
Film is entirely another thing. In the days of Laurel and Hardy or
Keaton they would have the sneak previews; Harold Lloyd would
have people sittingin the audience with stop-watches timing laughs
and ifa laugh was the wrong kind they went back and reshot it.You
can’tdo that with film now, so you just have to be very certain what
you’re saying, storyboardit and look at it through the lens. But it’s
got to be you in the end who says,‘I think that’s going to be funny’
—and nobody can ever know for sure.
jMccG: You’re talking about some very visual comics. Do you

think the lack of sight gags in TV comes from the fact thata lot
of writers startedin radio?
PAUL MERTON: You could audiotape some shows and listen to
them back and you wouldn’t really miss anything. Funnily enough,
even the people who haven’t done radio still write like that. One
sight gag we did on the Channel 4 thing is my favourite.Very short,
very simple,it was a shot of two people in a roof garden, and there
are two chairs and a table.And the dialogue goes something like:
*You’ve done a very nice job of this, Alan.’ And I say: ‘Yes, I’m very
pleased with it- would you like some tea?’ And as I pour you see
146
insteadof the tea falling straight down from the spout it’s going at
45 degrees,and the camera comes round and you realise you’re actu-
ally on a pitched roof. In the final shot there’sa woman lawn-
mowing; you see her pushing the lawn-mower up this bit of grass
and then disappearing over the top. Now, it was one simple little
joke: you’ve got a roof garden but it’s not a flat roof. It’s 10-15
seconds long and there’sno other point to it.We disguise what’s
happened and then we reveal what’s happened. But, you know, you
quite often look at this sort of thing on the page and it probably
doesn’t mean anything to anybody who can’t reada script.
You occasionally write things you think nobody’s ever going to
laugh at: one we shot anyway because John was very keen on it— I
put the blame on him. It was a shot of somebody by a safe, just turn-
ing the littledial on the safe with a stethoscope, listeningand turn-
ing. Then the bloke stands up and says: “Well, it seems fine to me,’
and the safe gets up and walks out and says: “Thanks, Doc,’ and it’s
got legs and arms. It was worth doing, but the audience didn’t react
at all, and we thought: It’s too much for your general public— it’s
just an idea.
You get interviewedby journalists,and they have no idea of the
process. When we did the first Channel 4 series some guy from
Esquire magazine came along for two days in the rehearsal room to
watch us rehearsing and putting it all together. The tone of his
articlewas that he was amazed how seriouslywe took it. There was
some argument about what was a funnier prop — I can’t remember
what the props were now — was an ostrich with a frying-pan funnier
than a bear with a Coca-Cola bottle? He thought there’sno differ-
ence.In fact,the difficultthing is tryingto concentrateon what that
differenceis.
He imagined you sit around laughing; of course there’sa bit of
that, which is what makes it such a great job. But generally speaking
you’re talking about a particularly thorny problem and it’s as
seriousas any art form. Groucho Marx had the line on it really:he
said that people have no respect for comedy because they think that
it’s easy.If it works and you see something like The Producersit just
seems to be like water flowing. But it’s also the best film that Mel
Brooks has made by a mile and he’s not been able to reproduce the
quality of that film, and not through lack of effort.
DB: Do writers get stretched too thin by the British method

that a show is written by one guy, or two at most?
PAUL MERTON: Somebody told me abouta British writer who sat
in on a Cheers script meeting once, with ten guys round a table.The
147
PAUL MERTON 127
reason why you get such a high burn-out rate among writersin the
States is because it’s very much a young man’s game, young
woman’s game, and you have to just brainstorm your way through
these sessions. Somebody says: Norm comes in through the door of
the bar, he has a joke to get him to the bar. Sam comes out of the
office. What’s the gag between Sam coming out of the officeand Sam
gettingto the bar? What’s the joke for that, what’s the joke for this?
And the best of it when it works, like Cheers,is fantastic.But in my
own heartI prefer the Britishway of doing it.You couldn’t have had
a series like Fawlty Towers unless it was writtenby two people.It
has to be a personal view.
David Renwick, who writes One Foot in the Grave, which has
been sold to the States,was tellingme that Americans are very
— thrilled you know, ‘great, love your show, Bill Cosby’s very up for
it,’and all that sort of stuff. He goes over there, sits around the oblig-
atory swimming pool for a few weeks and comes home and then he
gets this message: ‘We’ve been looking at the scripts,and a it’s bit
depressing that he’s out of work, isn’tit? I think we’re going to lose
that element: he’s going to have a job!’ And of course the whole
premise of the show was that he’s lost his job after so many years and
he doesn’t know what to do with himself any more.
I remember seeing an episode of the American equivalentof
Porridge and, again, they liked the a scripts great deal but just two
people were not enough, him and Richard Beckinsalein the cell,so
they had six people in the cell. They each had a funny walk, they all
had their own personal little quirks, and they’d got Ronnie Barker’s
lines splitup between them. So you’d got five really funny people in
this cell together,and it was nonsense.
jmcG: Who are the successorsto the great comics of the past?
PAUL MERTON: There aren’t people of that stature around any
more. Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock, the Marx
Brothers— people who were considered giants. Peter Cook was one
of the last people really that you could say was likea sort of giantin
the statureof his work. People are very popular and some people
have good careersbut nobody talksof Steve Coogan in the way that
they talkedof Peter Sellers.
I think TV actually reduces of personalities performers.If you
were a Cary Grant fan in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties,the only
place you could see Cary Grant was at the pictures.Cary Grant,
under the old system, would have made two or three filmsa year,so
you go and see Cary about every six months. You might hear Cary
Grant in a radio interviewif you were lucky, but other than that the
148
128 Now THAT’s FuNNy!
only time you ever saw him was on that huge screen, so that gives
him status,it gives him stature...
And everything looks fantasticand his face is 60 foot across and
he’s got a great profile.And also black-and-white has that other-
world quality to it that colour doesn’t have. The Third Man in
colour? Well, you wouldn’t have been able to do half of those shots,
because they reliedon shadow.
So you sat in a cinema laughing witha load of people and said that
was fantastic,you came out, you knew you’d see Cary Grant or
Peter Sellersin a film again in eight months’ time, when he was, you
know, when he was particularly productive in those late Fifties.
There was a sense of occasion. You had to arrange your evening to
go and see it; you didn’t just sitat home. But now if you have a suc-
cessfulTV series then it will be out on video. So if you want me on
Have I Got News for You, it’sas easy as walking into Woolworths
and spending £10 on a tape.I don’t think that people are any less
talented; there’sa lot of talent, but because it’son that small screen
it’s more accessibleand therefore it’s more life-size. Whereas the old
stuff was beyond life:it was . . . heroic, romantic.
It sounds pretentious, but the audience should be taken some-
where other than where they come in. If you go and see Bernard
Manning — and nobody disputeshe tells jokes very well.. . he’s been
doing it forty years,he should be able to time a gag — he’ll do the
Pakis and all that sort of stuff.He is reinforcing people’s prejudices;
he is saying why you live ina shit house and you’ve gota shit job is
because the Pakistanis down the road are doing this, are doing that
and whatever,so he’s just reaffirming people’s small-minded igno-
rance. If you go and seea show, you want to be taken to somewhere
else in an imaginative way so you leave the venue in a slightly dif-
ferent stateof mind from the one you went in with. This all sounds
very crap — you wouldn’t really verbalise this normally — but the
audience should be moved in some way. You tella story where you
can manage to createa marvellous visual image in people’s heads so
they are seeing the same thing that you’re seeing, and you’ve done it
through the power of words and justa body movement — that’sa
life-affirmingthing.
149
Ian Pattison
Better than a nine-to-fivejob
Ian Pattison,the creator of Rab C. Nesbitt,and Joe began by circling

each other as two Govan-born lads were bound to do, establishing
that they were on opposite sides of the Great Glaswegian Divide
between Celtic and Rangers, but settlinginto a friendly truce when
it was clear that they were both too wise to let such sectarian matters
concern them. We had gone to see Ian Pattison on his own patch in
Glasgow where he works in the Comedy Unit, a company spun off
from the BBC and headed by his producer-director Colin Gilbert,
the son of Jimmy Gilbert, the former head of BBC Light
Entertainment.A characteras closely attuned to the Thatcher era
and its aftermath as Alf Garnett was to the Sixties,Rab C. Nesbitt,
as played by Gregor Fisher with the support of a formidable ensem-
ble of actors, transcends his roots in Govan as the thinking man’s
scum. He is an inspired creation based firmly on the material avail-
able in Glasgow’s streets, and probably the first figurein comedy
since Will Rogers to approach the public in philosophical mood.
(Note: his audience throughout Britain have been quick to grasp his
meaning, but some non-Scots might be helped by knowing thata
dookit is a dovecote or pigeon-loft, and the malky is a term for
extreme brutality derived from a notoriously violent individual
whose first name was Malcolm.)
jmcc: How did you discover Rab? You’re political, obviously.

IAN PATTISON: _ It’s implicit,then — if I’m political, it’snot explicit.
It’s based on what I saw around me. The only thing that annoys me
reallyis when criticssay, or the Glasgow culture police say: “Thisis
giving Glasgow a bad name. It shouldn’tbe on,’ and I think, Well,
you can’t take that away from me, because that’smy experience
150
you're talking about. You might not recognise it, but I come from 2
place where that kind of behaviour goes on. OK, it’s sometimes
exaggerated,and sometimes it’s underplayed, funnily enough, but
it’s there, and a it’s piece of fascism to try to take that away from me,
because that’s what I do, that’s what I taught myself. Rab was based,
the spiritof Rab was based, on an uncle of mine who died two years
ago. But he was a good-looking fellow,he was very smart:he didn’t
look like Rab looked. The look was based on what you see around
you — guys who in the Sixtiesand early Seventies would be walking
around on a Saturday afternoon with their vest on, because they’re
keeping their one clean shirt for going out on Saturday night. That’s
where it comes from. And, of course, Gregor. I can’t take credit for
that.I just write the words; he breathes the life into them — so it is
reallya double-act.
We can’t film in Govan any more, because Gregor gets too much
hassle. People either want to ask for his autograph or beat his brains
out. Occasionally both: that’s the way it is. So now we’ve got a
house up in Springburn. But we’re getting hassle there too, because
you’ve got real, live neighbours all around you, who are doing
mental things like eating social workers. So we’ll move out. We built
flats insidea sound stage so we can do all the interiors.
Here in Glasgow they can say ‘Hello’ like a it’s declarationof war.
Once you get through that reserve, it’sOK, people are nice. There is
quite a lot of anti-English hostility from middle-class people. It is
terribly boorish and I feel quite embarrassed when I take some
friends into the pub or somewhere like The Ubiquitous Chip.
Horrible. Working-class folk, saltof the fucking earth, I’ll tell you,
man, no problem.
Ds: Apart from the fact that you’re writing about a Scottish
a subject, Scottish place and a set of Scottish characters,do you
think there’s some special Scottishness about Rab?
IAN PATTISON: I hope not. For me it’s just almost incidental that
it’s set in Scotland. It’s set in Govan because I’m from there, but I
don’t think it would make any differenceif Rab was from Liverpool,
or Manchester or the East End of London. The references would be
slightly To different. me the social conditions create Rabs, and those
social conditions prevailin citiesup and down Britain. I’ve been
through Hulme in Manchester, for example. A friend of mine, a
journalist living down there, she took me through this place, and I
thought: God, if we think Govan’s bad, Govan’s Las Vegas com-
pared with this...
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IAN PATTISON 131
DB: The immediate reaction to Rab in the South was: ‘Can’t

understand what he’s saying.’ Have you reliedon the audience
learning to keep up with him?
IAN PATTISON: Some people stillsay that, but why should we
make concessions?If they see Goodfellas they don’t expect Robert
de Niro to speak in Received Pronunciation,so they’ll make the
concession there.If it’s good, people will get into it the more they
watch it.If we start dilutingit, they will detect that, and we will lose
that quasi-documentary, hand-held thing that runs through it.
We’re not trying to clean it up, we’re trying to make ourselves com-
prehensible. Obviously there are colloquialismsthat we will put in
or not.
DB: Have you invented any of the colloquialisms?

IAN PATTISON: I don’t know any more. Because I would think ‘I
invented that’,and people would say: ‘I remember we used to say
that,’or: ‘My granny used to say that.’
jmMcG: What about something like ‘the malky’?

IAN PATTISON: The malky is a real word, it’sa real term. I was
working in a day-release shipbuilding course when I was sixteen,
with all these Greenock guys talking about getting malkied at the
weekend. So: ‘Excuse me, run that past me one more time?’ The
malky, yeah, it’s just stuck, I’ve regurgitated it. But you place it ina
context— that gives peoplea fighting chance of understandingit. We
had a conversation about the word ‘dookit’. You'll know what a
‘dookit’ is, Joe, but you, David, won’t know what a ‘dookit’ is. We
had this noun at the end of a sentence, and I remember saying: “No,
we can’t have that there, because it doesn’t give ita context.’So we
will always think about where we’re placing it. It enrichesthe collo-
quialism when you hear this kind of patois coming through,so we
try and keep it.
ps: When you’re starting on a new series, do you see it as a

whole?
IAN PATTISON: I don’t know what happens between finishingone
seriesand starting another;it just seems as if instantlythe moment’s
upon me when I have to start again. Usually I’ll have six words, or
three or four words — ‘cancer’or ‘sexual harassment’or something—
and I’lltry and write episodes about them. There are guys who have
written successful series and they will give a producer eight out-
lines,and every scene will be outlined and a there’s ten per cent
imaginativebit builtin justto see if itllgo somewhere else. These
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iN Now THAT’s FUNNY!
guys know exactly what they’re doing, and they will say to him:
‘Pick six out of these eight,’and go away and write them. I could
never do that, because I don’t know until I’ve written it.To me, it’s
like saying to a painter: ‘Show us the painting,and then go away and
paint it.’
jMcG: Do you relateto anything like that, painting or music?

Do you like music?
IAN PATTISON: I like both. I know people say there’sa sense of
music in writing, and, a boy from Govan, I’m very wary about step-
ping down that path. Ballerina, I’m not. But, yes, I think there’sa
sense of rhythm; whether that’sthe same thing as a sense of music,I
don’t know. Ifa script comes out cleanly, it’sas if you can’t take any
creditfor it. You go: ‘I was just there. The lightninghit me.’ It’s the
ones you've got to strugglefor that you think more of. It’sa process
of discoveringthe inevitable. That’s the way it seems to me: it’s
there, and all you’ve got to do is push the shit away to get at that
inevitability.It’s as if the form already I exists. know that’s probably
a philosophical concept.I don’t know which philosopher came up
with it, but certainlyit’s there; it’s justa matter of seeingit and dust-
ing it like an archaeologist almost — although hopefully the jokes
aren’t that old. That’s the rough parallel,Rab and music.
DB: Do you have a method for clearing the shit out of the way
so you can see the thing?
IAN PATTISON: I Basically, let the characters give me the plot —
plot’sa bad word for me, I’m not good on plot— story. Characters
can introduce story. You think: What could they do this series?
Maybe A could have an affair with B — how would C feel about that?
jJMcG: Do you enjoy writing?

IAN PATTISON: I find it a lonely game, and the older I get the
deeper the shelf gets into the sea, and the further out you go, and
that’s the way it seems to me. I come back to what Flaubert said:‘A
writer’s life is a dog’s life but it’sthe only life. . ” I’m addicted.I
couldn’tdo anything else. Anything that isn’t writing is relaxation
to me — paying the gas bill or anything. Writing takes so much of my
emotions that there’snot much left for anything else.So I’m a very
placid I fellow. remember Jilly Cooper, of all people, saying that the
one common factor she’d found about all these guys who were sav-
age on the page was that they were pussycats off it, because they got
rid of all their aggressionson the page.I think I’m one of that cate-
gory. Whether I’m a savage or not,I don’t know.
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IAN PATTISON 188
JMcG: At school did you reveal any talent?

IAN PATTISON: ‘Talent? Do you have a dictionary? If you were
brought up in Govan, you’ll know that there are no precedents for
becoming a comedy writer,or any other kind of writer.I was at
Fairfield Infants— that was Govan’s school— and then there was one
of the clearances that took people out of the slums. Some people
went to Drumchapel, some to I Easterhouse. went to Johnstone,
which was about thirteen miles outside Glasgow. They were build-
ing a new estate four miles outside Paisley.It was like going to the
promised land: trees and grass and stuff.You don’t realisethat there
are more colours in the world than just slate-greyand black. You
don’t feel deprived in any way, but it just seems remarkable when
you see a field.The only thingI could do at school was what they
callup here I ‘compositions’. could write essays, fairly
effortlessly,
but everything else was justa daydream to me. Something happened
after the age of twelve:a daydream set in and it never went away
untilI left school. The only thingI could do and thatI was interested
in was writing these essays, but where do you go with that? Your
teachers live in the same grotty wee town as you do. The only dif-
ference then was that they were the other side of the desk and paid
forty quid a week for livingin the same shit-holethat I was. So, what
could they offerme by way of a bigger horizon? They hadn’t seen it
themselves. Maybe everybody should be educated there, because it
just makes you unhappy and you have to resolve these internal
crises, which is good for writing.
So you have to find your own way, and that can take decades, and
the turning point for me, I suppose, was going to London, having
done dozens of jobs up here and been thoroughly bored and miser-
able. Went down to London and met some people who said that it’s
not sucha reprehensible thing to want to be a writer.It was a bit like
being gay: you didn’t want to admit it.I might as well have said to
my father,‘I want to be a orballerina,’ something.
I was living in bed-sitsand working in A restaurants. friend and I
went down at the age of fifteen.I’d seen this play on telly calledThe
Making of Jericho,by Alan Owen, and that was a turning point for
me. It was all about this shipping clerk who’s thoroughly bored with
his life,and happens to go to this pub where all these artistsare hang-
ing out, and by a strange quirk he becomes an artisttoo. And I really
thought: Fuck, if I go to London, that’ll happen to me! Sadly it
didn’t.
I went down, sleptin gutters,did the stuff that Sixties kids did:
homelessness isn’t new, it’s just more of an industry now than it was
then. Then came back to Glasgow; parents had splitup by this time
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134 Now THarT’s FuNNy!
... I couldn’t keep away, really.When I was in London I felt home-

sick, and when I was in Glasgow I was sick of home: it was that kind
of thing. All my friends were in Glasgow, but all the work was in
London. This is all going back to when I was about I sixteen. can’t
even remember it myself very well. What happened then? What the
fuck happened then? I went to work in a holiday camp at Ayr. I
thought, I’m going to shag myself silly.I’m eighteen and I’m a still
virgin.I thought, This is the life for me; and on the first night I met
the girl who was to become my wife. So I had one shag, basically,the
four months. I think I timed that one wrong. And then I went to
Newcastle and I lived there for about fifteen years, because she was
a Geordie girl.
Ina five-year interim period the two of us, me and my wife-to-be,
went to London and lived in Putney, I remember, and by sheer fluke
there was a fellow downstairs who was living with his girlfriend,and
he was keen to develop my interestin writing.
He was called George Kay. I hope George has done really, really
well.I don’t know what became of him but I remember the two girl-
friends meeting, his and mine, and they were both from Newcastle
it turned out, and they said: ‘Both our boyfriends are closet writers.
Let’s get them together.’We each thought, Fuckin’ hell, this guy’ll
be a boring bastard. And we met and we talked all night,we just got
on so well.
George’s name was George Kazinsky (he was of Polish extrac-
tion),but he called himself Kay. I really wish I did know where he
was. He was a labourer,and he was tryingto write the great novel,
of course, as all labourersdo. You don’t geta job as a labourer unless
you'rea noveliston the side. We all have a George in our I life, sup-
pose. And he said: “You should do this thing: you’re talking about it,
not doing it.’So I triedto write the great British novel,as we alldo
— well,I kicked off in poetry, because it’s shorter,and you think:
You can write ten lines, you’ve got a poem. Then I slid right down
the greasy pole into this skid row of writing gags for telly,and here
IT remain.
I also had all kinds of shitty jobs: anything that didn’t requireme
to think about it or invest anything in it,1 would do. I wanted my
head space free,and I would come home and work on scriptsin the
evenings.The theatrewas the thing for me, but you can spend three
months or six months writinga play: you send it out to the Bush
Theatre, and you get a two-line rejection three months later.The
only encouraging theatre was the Glasgow Citizens’. They were
very encouraging about a play I sent. Didn’t do it, but they were
very encouraging. Anyway, I thought, Fuck it, I’lldo a television
155
IAN PATTISON 135
play.I sent it to BBC Scotland.A woman called Maggie Allen, who

was then script supervisor, says: “Your play’s shit, but you’ve obvi-
ously got some comic talent. Send something to Sean Hardie.’
Sean had just come up to take over as Head of Light
Entertainment at BBC Scotland and he was working then with
Colin Gilbert as his underling, and both of them had worked on Not
the Nine O’Clock News. Sean took me on to his exclusive band of
one million and one freelance writers. Then there was a big bust-up
over a show called Sin on Saturday, which the incoming Director
General, Alistair Milne, took off as a show of strength, and Sean
resignedin protest.And out of the ashes of that explosion came the
Comedy Unit with Colin Gilbert at its head. Colin realised some-
thing had to be, there had to be a platform for Scottish writersif he
was going to encourage local talent,and so he came up with a radio
show called Naked Radio, which was listenedto by three men and a
dog, and about three weeks in,I got a phone call just when I was
about to give up writing.I'd thought, I’m going to be Mr Additional
Material for the rest of my fucking life.If that’sthe case, I’d rather
not do it.
Colin offered me a two-minute commission, so I thought: Well,
that’s all right, that’s twenty quid. It was the commitment that he
was prepared to offerme a commission, however meagre — you can
imagine what radio budgets are like. So I thought, Well, I'll give it
another go, and gradually got more and more stuff on. And then
Colin had to put togethera sketch show for television,and racked
his brains to think of a cast that would be appealingto the Network.
It was only at the last moment that it crossed his mind that: “Waita
moment, I’ve got a sketch show on radio, why aren’t I thinking
about putting those guys on television?’ Answer: because they’re
Scottish, and the Network won’t accept those voices. So, it was with
some trepidationthat he took that step, and out of that came Gregor
Fisher, Elaine Smith, Tony Roper, all the people who are in Nesbitt
now. Elaine Smith, what a great soulful voice she’s got. She’sas good
as Gregor is in that way. She has to be as strong as Gregor, otherwise
it’san unequal contest.
pB: When the Naked Video and Naked Radio shows were going,
were you working in a team, or were you just firing your pieces
in?
IAN PATTISON: That was living in Newcastle, firingodd piecesin
— firing loadsof pieces in. Anybody outside would look at the credits
on a sketch show, and see about ten names and think, That must
be great: there are ten guys round a table,and they’re all havinga
156
great time, knocking gags back and forth. But no, nine of these guys
are all over, up and down the country, working in estate agents’
officesand one thing and another, and there’sone guy who’s a script
editor, working under an assumed name. There’s no bonhomie
about it.
pB: When it comes to actual production of Rab C. Nesbitt, are

you there on the floor?
IAN PATTISON: Well, no. My rule of thumb is, if you trusta
director you don’t have to be on the set, and if you don’t trust him,
you don’t want to be on the set.I think by now Colin can be left to
get on with it. We’ve now got the luxury of the read-through,
would you believe? On the sixth series, we’ve managed to establish
that. Isn’t that astonishing?The lowest, cheapest form of theatre has
that above even the most big-budgeted television piece. They can
hone it, hone it, hone it until they get it right in theatre.In television
it’sgot to work first time. Nobody builds in a provision for dealing
with the script element. They don’t understand how it comes about,
so therefore they can’t legislatefor it. We’ve now got a read-through
for Nesbitt,and a it’s tremendous luxury just to be able to cut and
hone and stitchup and allof that. But after that,it just goes cold
on me. By the time it’s hit the screen, I’m just not interested any
more. There are very few Rabs thatI can enjoy watching. One or
two, perhaps.
DB: What can you watch with pleasure?

IAN PATTISON: If I want pure comedy, if I want a laugh, there’s
very littleI'll tune in for except Harry Enfield; he’s I brilliant. likea
lot of The Fast Show, but I don’t likeit all unreservedly.
jmMcG: What about the American sitcoms?

IAN PATTISON: They’re brilliant, they’re wonderful, but it’s like
overdosing on soufflé: they’reso well-honed and refined.I want
something with a bit of roughage to it. The cartoons they’re doing,
like The Simpsons and King of the Hill, you can imagine the studio
saying: ‘How can we get rid of these highly-paid actors?By series
three, they'llall be wanting triple money. So we’ll use cartoons and
if the guy who’s doing the voice-over says, “Give me more money!”
we'll just tell him to fuck off, and get another voice.’
jmcG: Where do you write?

IAN PATTISON: — BecauseI was brought up in the real world and had
to do real jobs, I’ve got a real work ethic, I’ve got to go out to work.
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IAN PATTISON 137
Sitting at home working — I live alone — is just to wither on the vine

for me; I need the stimulusof other people. Even if I’m a surly bas-
tard who doesn’t talk to them, I like to know they’re around. It’s
nice to hear office noise— fax machines and telephones and all that.
It’s not a I distraction. think it helps. So that’s when I work, and
do
nine to five. Here’s a joke that occurred to me: somebody said to me,
“Why did you become a writer?’ ‘It was better than a nine-to-five
job.’ ‘What hours do you work?’ ‘Nine to five!’
I use a typewriter. I’ve got an Apple Mac that’s been sittingin a
box with a printer for two and half years now. I don’t open it
because I know that way madness lies.At the BBC we're all using
typewriters until suddenly, we went home on Friday, I come back
on Monday and word processors have taken over. The BBC got rid,
overnight,of all the manual typewritersand they stored them allin
a big Portakabin in BBC Scotland.So when Colin Gilbert andI left
to set up the Comedy Unit I managed to persuade them to part with
three or four typewriters,so I’m OK for the next threeor four years.
ps: And the Comedy Unit is your outfit, yours and Colin’s?
IAN PATTISON: Colin’s the senior partner, I’ve got shares in it.We
have ‘creative meetings’ every so often, stuff like new projects.But
I basically just come in, go in a box in the corner, because a it’s
big
open-plan office, go there, write, and go home, and sometimes don’t
speak to anybody all day, but I liketo know they’re around. I’m just
an oddity in there.I just do it, go away, and let them talk business.
158
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159
Graham Linehan and
Arthur Mathews
You try and amuse each other
Like many writers who work closely together, Graham Linehan and
Arthur Mathews havea habit of pickingup each other’s half-spoken
thoughts and continuing them. We met them in their basement office
at a TV production company off Tottenham Court Road the day
their last series of Father Ted was being launched for the press and a
fortnight before the sudden death of Dermot Morgan, the actor who
played Ted himself,at a tragically early age. Later they added this:
‘Father Ted depended so much on Dermot that its success was largely
due to him. He is irreplaceableand we owe him a huge debt.’ Graham
and Arthur contributed sketches to Alas Smith and Jones and The
Fast Show before writing Father Ted. Their current projects when we
spoke were both for the BBC: a sketch show called Big Train and a
new sitcom set in the A Sixties, Bunch of Hippies. We asked them
what they thought of the present state of the sitcom genre.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: There are certain types of sitcom, it’s like

someone suddenly thinks:Do you know what we really miss, do
you know what’s not on TV at the moment? A sitcom about a
family! It’s amazing that hundreds of people have this idea at the
same time, and I just don’t understand what motivates them. We did
a sitcom called Paris with Alexei Sayle which seemed to usa fruitful
ground. Every episode was based on a different aspectof the time:
there was one about the riseof Fascism; another that was about jazz
coming in.I think it didn’t geta second series because the dynamics
of the characters weren’t worked out well enough and that to me,
160
now, is the most important thing in the world.
ARTHUR MATHEWS: No one disagrees with that rule, do they? It

all has to be character-based.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: But after writing Ted I wonder how much of

that is luck, happening upon a bunch of characterswho spark off
each other.
ARTHUR MATHEWS: Plus castas well: we’re very lucky in Ted with
the castwe have.
ps: Did you originally write for those actors?

GRAHAM LINEHAN: Arthur used to do Ted as a stand-up in
Dublin years ago.
ARTHUR MATHEWS: Not in any big way. In a very small way,

actually.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: So Ted was a voice that Arthur could callon

and ifI felt that Arthur could saya line in that voice, then you’d
know the character was working. Dougal came from the name
‘Dougal’, because it was a funny name, we thought. He was origi-
nallya far more intelligentman. Arthur would describe him in the
stand-up: he used to be chased from villagesby angry villagers.Mrs
Doyle — there’s alwaysa housekeeper: there has to be a housekeeper
— probably came from the idea of not accepting ‘No’ for an answer
when she offersa cup of tea. That was the first thing that led to
everything else she’s ever done. And Jack, Jack was interesting
because Jack originally was dead.
ARTHUR MATHEWS: We had writtena spoof documentary about a

priest who goes back to his old seminary and one of the people he
visitsis a priestwho is actually dead, but he doesn’t know: he thinks
he’s just asleep.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: — He’s based ona certain type of priest that you
would hear about — occasionally just the old nasty side of the
Catholic Church. So it’sour one concession to I satire suppose.
People are constantly askingus if thisis going to be the last series.
People don’t actually realise that they’re getting sick of a show.
You'll meet someone out and they'llgo: ‘Oh, I hope you do another
seriesof Ted.’ “Well, it’son tonight.’‘Oh, I forgotto tape it.’ That’s
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GRAHAM LINEHAN AND ARTHUR MATHEWS 141
what we want to avoid.

It’s also possible that you can go to other areasin comedy. People
will be disappointedif our next sitcom doesn’t have a surreal edge to
it, but if we eventually found ourselves getting bored of that,or los-
ing it,we might move into comedy dramas, or films. One of the
reasons why we do want to give up Ted is because the surrealism,
funnily enough, gives you fewer options rather than more. A real-
istic sitcom you can write for ever, but a sitcom that’s surreal...
ARTHUR MATHEWs: Especiallyfor Mrs Doyle and Father Jack and

Dougal, you run out of things. You could write for Ted for ever,
Feally 5
GRAHAM LINEHAN: Ted is inthe real world...
ARTHUR MATHEWS: The other three are kind of caricatures,and

that’s their appeal, their limit.
DB: Do you find any difficultyin translating your words from

page to screen?
GRAHAM LINEHAN: I would say no... Arthur and I seem to have
a very visual imagination. There are certain jokes we write and you
can trust the actors to know where they should be standing, whether
they should be standingor sittingor whatever. But other jokes are
very specific, someone has to be ina certain position,and we always
write them as clearlyas we can into the I script. think it comes from
readinga lot of scripts myself. Before we started I writing, bought
lotsof film scriptsand books of sketches.
ARTHUR MATHEWS: You nearly always want to shorten things,

rather than lengthen things, when you see them performed. When
we were writing for Alas Smith and Jones we used to write sketches
that’d be five pages long, six pages long. But we learned that about a
page and a half long is nearly always long enough.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: We spent about a year writing very closely

with Griff Rhys-Jones and Mel Smith and I think that was where we
really learnt how to do it. The worst thing in a lot of comedy are
jokes that don’t have anything to do with the plot or character,
they’re just gags. And we started kind of losing them and it was
painfulat first,but now I think we both feel it’s actually quite liber-
ating and enjoyable to throw away stuff.
162
ARTHUR MATHEWS: Yeah, once you get over the pain it’sa good
thing to do.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: In the first episode in the second seriesof
Ted, we didn’t want to lose one thing from the first scene. And we
saw it back and the first scene seemed to go on and on, and it just
drives us up the walls now when we watch it.So we've gone the
other way. Now our scenes are really short.I think this comes from
watching Seinfeld.And we’ve become far more plot-driven.
ARTHUR MATHEWS: More things happen.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: We’ve triedto be fairon the actors because

Frank and Pauline in previous series didn’t have as much as they
should have done, and they’re both very funny comic actors,so it’s
great disciplineto writea scene and say: “Oh, Mrs Doyle isn’t in this
scene. How do we get her in without it getting flabby?’
ARTHUR MATHEWS: ‘They’reso sharp: Channel 4 sitcoms are, like,

twenty-three or twenty-four minutes by the time you’ve had the
break and title music and creditsat the end. We had a read-through
of one, and because there’sa lot of stuff on location as well, literally
it’s eleven minutes in the studio, that’s all they have to do.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: But an interesting thing happened when we

did the Christmas special.At the read-throughwe were something
like eight minutes over, and we asked for an extension from Channel
4 and got it. And I wish we hadn’t. I'd love to cut eight minutes out!
I think twenty-four minutes,I think the time we have on Ted, is
enough to do what we’re after.
DB: Do you have a source of material or ideas that you’re con-

scious of?
ARTHUR MATHEWS: Not really ... Just recentlya friend of mine
had these old films from the Sixties made by this Irish language
organisation called Gael Linn, and one of the things was the annual
blessingof the aeroplanesat Dublin airport,with the priest blessing
these big jumbo jets.But better than that was the annual blessingof
the — scooters two hundred mods passingby a priestwho was bless-
ing all the scooters.. . And there’sa great book, Beyond Belief,
mostly about Catholicismin Ireland,but other religionsand all; it’s
just fullof these types of things.
163
GRAHAM LINEHAN: It’s really useful that they’re all priests,

because all the exposition is taken care of by their uniforms.We
don’t have to explain anything about them when they walk through
the door. When we start writingwe think of ‘The Detective Priest’,
‘The Heavy Metal Priest’or whatever, and all they express is their
character.You don’t have to say where they work, or what they do.
They’re celibate,or at least they should be celibate,they believein
God or they should believein God, and there’sall this baggage that
comes with them. That means that we have to do less writing. It’sso
easy: you just put anything in front of the word ‘priest.’
The other useful thing about them all belongingto the priesthood
is that, like any organisationwhen you’re nota part of it,it is vaguely
mysterious.You can make up, you can apply your own interpreta-
tions as to what it is exactly they do. So because the FBI are
mysterious,in Twin Peaks David Lynch was able to claim that they
actually studied the paranormal, and who can disagree with him,
except the FBI? With Ted we can have parties in the Vatican and
priests who do nothing except play Ludo all day because no one
really knows exactly what their days consist of.
ps: And Ireland is exotic to the Brits, because they don’t under-
stand half of what goes on there...
GRAHAM LINEHAN: One of the things which works to our advan-
tage is the one-way trafficof information from England to Ireland.
We’ve grown up with English TV, English comedy shows and
American films and all these influences, but English people know
very little about Ireland. So we can make up stuff about Ireland
that’s nonsense. Like, we were going to do a documentary about
Dublin, with not one fact true: Arthur used to havea thing called
‘Disappearing Dublin’ which is all about landmarks that are gone,
and we were going to get photographs and change them so that we
could have the thatched skyscraper, which blew away, and Hitler’s
cottage— because Ireland was neutral during the war, so Hitler used
to visit, take two weeks off the war. It’s death to comedy writers,
once you know why something is:it ceasesto be funny. But when
people have little information,you can tell them any nonsense...
ARTHUR MATHEWS: But we’re just not conscious that the priests
are Irish or that it’s set in Ireland. We don’t hear Irish accents.We
just forget about that whole area.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: We did have to stop people from puttingon

more Irish accents.~
164
144 Now THAT’s FuNNY!
ARTHUR MATHEWS: Generally our actors are great.A lot of them
are not used to TV — they’rein the Abbey Theatre, they’re used to
doing The Playboy of the Western World, and they presume with
Teds
GRAHAM LINEHAN: We occasionallyhave to stop someone from

going: ‘Hello, there!’ It’s kind of a defence mechanism: it’s easier to
act if you’re not yourself,if you’re putting on a mask. We want a
show where Irish people can be themselves,on an English-produced
show. We don’t want anyone putting ona little green hat. Oh, God,
it would be nice to put a stop to acting. It’s the great scourge of the
world today. It’s strange, it’s this mystery. In America they mystify
it with Method and all that sort of stuff but over here they mystify
it with this kind of RSC performance.
DB: Do you come to work in this room every day?

GRAHAM LINEHAN: Eleven is our starting time and we might not
even start working then;we probably just talk and smoke for half an
hour or an hour, depending on how busy we are, and then we
usually write until about five, half I five. think when you relaxa bit
you actually write more than if you’re worried about blank pages
and so on. It’s disrupted when we’re filming Father Ted.
ARTHUR MATHEWS: Graham directed the location stuff on Ted

this time, and we’re associate producers on it as well, so we’re a lot
more involved than we used to be.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: But we don’t direct the studio, because you

have to be paying attentionto so many things. When you get into the
studio the audiences laugh so much more than when it’son the mon-
itors.You can compose a joke beautifullybut they’ll still laugh
because the actor’sin front of them, just to be nice. They are occa-
sionally useful, though. Sometimes you can have a niggling feeling
about a joke, and the studio audience will confirm it. When you
know a joke is great,and they haven’t got it,it doesn’t matter: they’ll
get it at home. Our biggest problem has been.. .
ARTHUR MATHEWS: Yeah, taking off laughs in the edit.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: We take off loads of laughs, becauseI think

there’s nothing worse than sittingat home and hearinga line get a
laugh and going...
165
ARTHUR MATHEWS: ‘“That’s not funny.’
GRAHAM LINEHAN: Because you start to feel cheated and you

startto feel also it might be canned, so...
JMcG: Do you use any canned?

GRAHAM LINEHAN: No. If we do a scene twice and it doesn’t get
a laugh the second time but it got a huge laugh the first time, we'll
get the laugh from the first time and put it on the second.
ARTHUR MATHEWS: You shouldn’t notice laughter really on
comedy shows. It should justbe like music.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: But there are certain kinds of humour that do

need it:I think Ted really needs a laughter trackto work.
ARTHUR MATHEWS: It’s a sitcom, it’sa standard British studio

audience.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: Because it’s so conventional in certain ways,

it needs that laughter track.I think it would be quite dead without
it. Something like The Larry Sanders Show would be dead with a
laughter track, because the jokes are so subtle and understated.
jmMcG: That has always been the big argument in Britain: with
an audience or without an audience?
ARTHUR MATHEWS: We’ve learned that they’re completely differ-
ent things.You have to write it differently,the gags are different.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: There’sa certain kind of quiet gag that’s great

without an audience.It also requiresa kind of confidencein your
own writing, which I hope we have now, but in the early days we
might not. But it might be interestingto try something now without
laughter.
In sitcoms the Americans have such an advantage over us: they get
to rehearse all week on their set, which we don’t. We have to go toa
rehearsal room. They do it on a Friday night at seven o’clock, after
doing a dress rehearsal which they film, then they film the one in
front of the audience. Then they get the audience out, another audi-
ence in, and they do it again.As the Americans go, it’s such a big
country, and so much money behind it,I don’t think the question is,
‘Why do they make so many good comedies?” it’s “Why don’t they
have more?’ There area lot of bad comedies.
166
ARTHUR MATHEWS: And for such a big country as well, there isa
lack of variety. Apart from, strangely enough, animation: that’s
where they differ, because The Simpsons is really good.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: Animation in the States is where you get the

most satiricaland savage comedy. In America the family isa polit-
ical issue,and for The Simpsons to have a go in the way they do 1s
extraordinary.
ps: You don’t think animation is justa way of saving on actors?

GRAHAM LINEHAN: Possibly...
DB: Just going back to your routine: you’ve got one keyboard
in this room, so one of you is typing, the other one’s walking up
and down?
GRAHAM LINEHAN: Yeah, except we’ve never been so...
ARTHUR MATHEWS: Rigid.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: Rigid,as one is the typist and the other is the
pacer.
ARTHUR MATHEWs: | I had very bad typing at I first. was very slow
off the ground doing my stuff.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: Say, if I come up with an idea, I’ll write two

pages, and get to the point, get to the main joke point or get as far as
I can with it, and then Arthur will come in and read it and edit it and
suggest changes. Or we do it the other way round. But the thing that
we're always doing is, we’re sitting beside each other and I’ll write
something and I’ll go: ‘Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look!’
ARTHUR MATHEWS: Because you try and amuse each other.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: You have to get these instant I reactions. can

actually almost feel Arthur’s eyes passing over the line I’ve written
and if it doesn’t get a laugh, it’s: ‘Oh, shit.’ You see sitcoms on TV
and I can’t seea writer laughingas he writes some of the things. I’ve
seen shows that are ambitious and fall down, like Sunnyside Farm,
which two friendsof ours wrote and they laugh their heads off while
they’re writing.It didn’t quite work, for various reasons,but there
are other shows you see where there’s,say, a cheeky kid who comes
in and saysa few boring Americanised cute phrases,and I just can’t
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GRAHAM LINEHAN AND ARTHUR MATHEWS _ 147
picturea writer being amazed at what he’s written and leaning back
in his chair and roaring his head off.Me and Arthur, a it’s very bad
day if we haven’t been a laughing lot.
jmcc: Do you feel that there are any subjects that are neglected,
even if they’re not things that you want to cover?
ARTHUR MATHEWS: We have these crazy flightsof fancy about
where to set a sitcom, and we had one set in the world of orchestra
leaders, Formula One motor racing and the international tennis
circuit.
GRAHAM LINEHAN: Chess champions...
ARTHUR MATHEWS: Chess masters, yeah...
GRAHAM LINEHAN: There’s definitely something to be done

about chess masters, because they’re all so highly strung. But the
thing is, if we came up witha really good idea, we’d do it. So, I don’t
feel that we’re being ill-servedby the amount of things out at the
moment. I think the only thing that England is missingas a whole is
a good TV animated comedy.
168
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169
Charlie Higson
Just keep itdistilling down
Appropriately for the author of a darkly humorous psychological

thrillerwith a bleak urban background, Charlie Higson — as he
prefers to be called— has a look reminiscentof the young Raymond
Chandler, staringat life with the eye of a disappointed romantic,
perhaps. Charlie was a presence mainly behind the camera in the
first series of The Fast Show, concentratingon his work as producer
but emerging to play Ralph the landowner and Coughing Bob. His
novels — grim, often violent,but also often very funny — are set
among people on the margins of societyin Hackney, a few miles east
of his present home in north London, where we talkedin an upstairs
sitting-room.
DB: Can we talk about how you divide up your work between
the two activitiesfor performance and...
CHARLIE HIGSON: Writing and performance?I started in televi-
sion as a writer, although always in the back of my mind I thought
it would be nice to do some performing as well. I’ve always written
comedy for televisionwith Paul Whitehouse, and the way we start
writing anything is by performing it, and sort of mucking about and
getting the voice and bouncing ideas back and forth. So, even in the
writing in the early stages, there’d been a certain levelof perfor-
mance. But Harry Enfield wasn’t particularly interestedin me as a
performer— he wasn’t particularly interestedin me as a writer,but I
came as a package with Paul so he didn’t have much say in it, because
he wanted Paul. Paul and I had done a couple of seriesof Harry’s
show, and we’d done the Saturday Live and Friday Live stuff with
him, but we’d never intended to be known just as Harry Enfield’s
writers.We wanted to do a thing of our own, which is how The Fast
170
Show came about, and from the startit was always understood that
I would be performing littlebits and pieceson that— although not
that much on the first series, because it was testingthe waters, and
we ended up, almost by accident, producing it as well, which we
hadn’t intended to do. But comedy isa very small world, there are
very few good producers and directors around, and all the producers
we liked were busy on something else.The BBC said: ‘Why don’t
you produce it?’ because we had been involved in other projectsin
semi-producing roles,so we said: ‘Yes.’So on the first seriesof The
Fast Show I was concentrating more on writing and producing.
Particularlywhen we came to the studio recordingsI did very little
performing,so that I could be up in the box keeping an eye on
things.
The way the series tend to work is that Paul and I spend about five
or six months writing it.We do, I suppose, about seventy per cent of
the writing and the other performers write their own bits and pieces.
We write some for them.Then we go through another six months of
production and post-production, during which we’re also acting.
This is why we may be taking a break from The Fast Show for a
while, because a it’s year of your life: normally on a show like that,
the writers would work for four or five months and then they
wouldn’t have anything more to do with the project,so they could
be getting on with other stuff,or writing the next series. There isa
certain levelof frustrationin not having the time to really spend
writing, particularly writing other projects.Paul has been doing Fast
Show and Harry Enfield back to back for nearly five years, with no
break,so he’s pretty fed up with sketch shows.
yMcG: How do you get it down on paper?

CHARLIE HIGSON: I’ve got an office here in the house and we
work about four hours a day, I suppose, five days a week, for how-
ever many months it takes, really.We are quite boring on that level.
Paul’s never got to grips with the technology of word processingso
I sitat the machine and he wanders around throwing out ideas and
we perform littlebits and pieces. Then I tend to structureit and do
the nuts and bolts stuff,and then once the ideas are written up, just
keep rewritingit. We generateas much materialas possible,and then
keep going back to it and working over it— particularlywhen we get
into pre-production,when you’re then approaching it from the
point of view of a producer, and you’re having to say, obviously,
what locations you've got, what things aren’t going to be practical,
so you just keep tighteningit and focusingit and itdistilling down.
The Fast Show is very much a team, and they’re all fairly vocifer-
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CHARLIE HIGSON 151
ous in what they like and don’t like and what they think’s going to
work. So the creative process carries on: I suppose since the whole
industry opened up, since Channel 4 and all the independents,
writers have been alloweda lot more say. Which most of the time is
a good thing, but there are some writers who shouldn’t be allowed
near the production process because they don’t understand it and
they can get very precious about what they’re doing.
DB: At what point do you integrate the other contributors?

CHARLIE HIGSON: Theoretically, whilst we’re working they’re
also writing scripts,but their scripts tend to come in at the last
minute. We have a handful of other writers who are just writers who
also write bits and pieces, and we inevitably get huge pilesof unso-
licited scriptsin, which we try and wade through, but it’s always a
bit dispiriting, although probably in the serieswe would put in four
or five sketchesof unsolicited stuff.
It is nice when you get something completely out of nowhere.
You always think, Wouldn’t it be great to discover this great
comedy talent that no one else has heard of. For the first serieswe
got in two writerswe liked who hadn’t done anything at the time,
Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews; they came up with the char-
acters of Ted and Ralph that we do, and of course since then they’ve
gone on to do Father Ted and various other things,so they’re now
too busy to write for us.
DB: Do you have some overall plan about how each strand of
the show is going to fit?
CHARLIE HIGSON: We try and write as much as possible for all the
characters. For the main characterswe try and get at least six major
sketches,but that may mean that we write ten and only use six. We
don’t sit down with any huge masterplan other than to say: ‘We'll
start writing and we’ll write what we think is funny.’At the end if
there’s one character we haven’t written any sketches for, we'll say:
‘We haven’t got any ideas for that. We'll drop him.’
In the last series we had a major new character we thought was
going to be massive.We filmed about ten sketches with him and it
just didn’t work, it didn’t go in at all.It would have been fatalup
front to plan the whole thing around that. There are certain charac-
ters, like Ted and Ralph, who have more of a storyline, where you
say: “[his one has to go firstand then that one and that one,’ but
that’sas far as it’s structured.You get to the edit and you’ve got God
knows how many hundreds of bits and piecesto put together,and
you startby organising them. You put them into group order and
172
you start building up so each show then startsto come together.In

the editing process it is like a movie, in that you want it to flow.
You’ve got two countryside piecesin a row, so one of them will have
to move. You havea fast one and then a slow one, and you might
have one that’sa bit more downbeat, and you need to put something
a bit up. The editing process is quite fun, and new technology has
really helped that, with digital editing. You’ve got to keep moving
one thing from one show to another, which in turn changes every-
thing in that show and what’s on either side of it. With digital edit-
ing you can keep doing it to your heart’s content.
jmcc: The Ted and Ralph characters,did they come out of a

political attitude?
CHARLIE HIGSON: Well, we’d been down the pub with Graham
and Arthur while we were still putting together the first series,and
they sent in some fully formed ideas, and then just right at the end
of the evening they said, ‘We’ve got this idea. We’re not really sure
about it,’and they sort of acted it, this relationship,and there just
seemed something very charming about it, and different,and it
seemed very funny although you couldn’t put your fingeron why.
It is sort of the love that crosses every boundary of race, age, sex, and
class.
When we first played the charactersto studio audiences, there was
complete silence,they were totally mystified.It was almost touch
and go whether they made it in, but we just felt there was something
there,and people did appreciate them as they watched from week to
week, and now I suppose they are among the most popular charac-
ters on the show. Because there’sa bit of genuine drama and emo-
tion there.
DB: How much are you dependent on the audience?

CHARLIE HIGSON: They’re useful, but they’re not the ultimate
test. Ultimately Paul and I go on what we like, what we think is
strong and what worked well, and what works with the studio audi-
ence is by no means always what works well with the home audi-
ence. Live audience, they quite like big stuff played out, and of
course the more obvious stuff they go for as well, because it’s hard
for them to concentrate, a there’s lot going on. When we make the
show we do about three weeks’ location shooting, and then about
four days in a multi-camera studio without an audience, and four
nights with. So compared with a lot of sketch shows we don’t do
that much with the audience, and the stuffwe do with them tends to
be the more obvious, old-fashioned sketches, like the Suit You
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CHARLIE HIGSON 153
tailors and Chanel 9 Neus and any longer piece that is a more
traditional sketch.
JMcG: Do you think you need an audience for television comedy?

CHARLIE HIGSON: We had big arguments about this on the first
series. Most of the cast didn’t want to do it with an audience. But
people are used to seeing comedy on televisionwith laughter,and it
changes it quite if drastically you don’t have that I laughter. also
find
that it really does help people’s performances when they’ve got an
audience. The ridiculous thing about TV is that when you get the
audience in you've got one shot at it, one night when you’ve got to
get through x amount of stuff and you haven’t got time to keep
going back over it. You may have spent months preparing, and
‘Bash!’ you’re out there, it’sall going ‘Bish! bash! bosh!’ and it’soff
and that’s it! And you think: All this money put into it and we’ve got
this one shot.
I like the American system where they record the same show
twice in one night. You have got a second chance: if something really
just didn’t work, you can fix it;or you can play the same thing to
two different audiences and get completely different reactions.But
it is a very expensive thing to do. And The Fast Show is expensive.
We’ve got a core cast of seven major performers; there’sa lot of loca-
tion work, a lot of a filming, huge number of costumes and wigs, and
about thirty-five different sketches per show. That all adds up.
Whereas if you’ve got a sitcom, you’ve got the same set every week,
the same four actors. I’ve always fancied that as a challenge,to doa
pure sitcom with no location stuff, three sets. They managed it on
the Blackadders after the first series.
ps: Do you think there’sa chance for a fresh spirit coming into
sitcom?
CHARLIE HIGSON: I don’t see why not. At the risk of sounding
arrogant, before we did The Fast Show everyone was saying: ‘Oh,
the sketch show’s dead. We don’t want to do that any more,’ and
since we’ve done it, everyone’s saying: “Let’s make some more
sketch shows!’ It only takesa couple of good writersto come along
and write a good sitcom and suddenly everyone says: “Oh, sitcom’s
a good thing.’At any given moment there are two or three good sit-
coms on, like One Foot in the Grave and Father Ted.
I don’t think any comedy form is inherently dead or unworkable,
it just depends on where the good writers want to work. Recently,
because of the bad feelings that people tend to have about sitcoms—
God knows why —a lot of writers haven’t been interestedin trying
174
to write them. You do get so viciously attackedif you do a sitcom

that doesn’t quite work or isn’t as funny as people hoped. That’s
always mystified me: why comedy gets so much more scrutiny than
any other TV form. You get a bad drama on and you're not saying:
‘How dare these people do a crap drama? Don’t they know that the
drama’s dead, and the Americans do it so much better?’But you put
some little sitcom out, unpretentious little thing, and suddenly it’s
‘My God, what do you think you’re doing?’ If comedy doesn’t
make people laugh, it seems to make them angry.
It takesa couple of series to get things right, and the BBC, in the
past, used to give people the benefit of the doubt, if they liked it, to
make more. I don’t know if that’s happening less now — ITV never
really have done that.
JMcG: What about the difference between the standard of BBC

comedy and ITV comedy?
CHARLIE HIGSON: It’sa much easier environment at the BBC.
You’re talkingto the people who own the channel, basically, and
they could decide.If you go to an ITV company they’re fighting
with all the other companies for the slots. Every couple of years
somebody from ITV turns up and says: “Will you come and do some
comedy for the ITV? There’sa potential slot in two years’ time:
eleven o’clock on a Sunday night. We’re up againsta few other
people, but that’s the slot,’and you think,I can’t work like that.
In The Fast Show’s very early incarnationwe were developing it
with Hat Trick Productions,and they were very keen to break into
ITV. They had very positive meetings at LWT, and a year later
nothing had happened, so we took it away from Hat Trick and away
from ITV and took it to the BBC, and they said: ‘If you bring it in-
house, not via an independent, we’ll commission you now.’ At
LWT, we'd go in and say: “We want to do this new sketch show, and
we want to put togethera team of new faces. Paul Whitehouse’— he
was relativelyknown from working with Harry —‘he’d be about the
biggest name, but everyone else, you won’t have heard of them.’
People would say: “Great, something new!’A month later they come
back: “We really like it,but where are the stars?”You say: ‘Don’t you
remember us saying it’snot a star vehicle? You can’t do a new show
with a new team if it’s all the same old tired faces.’ “Yeah, you’re
right, yeah.’ And a month later:‘We really like it, but where are the
stars?’ That’s what they need on ITV, and it’s got to come out
instantlywith huge ratings.The BBC would nurture talentif they
liked it: the first seriesof The Fast Show was not a resounding rat-
ings success,but they stuck with it.
175
CHARLIE HIGSON 155
You would have to watch two or threeto get the hang of it:we felt
it would be nice not to insult the audience’s intelligenceand that
through repeated watching they would developa relationshipwith
the programme. Enough people did stay with it, and with repeats
and video it builtup a good word of mouth. There’sa lot of stuff you
might miss the first time round and it’s only when you’ve got to
know a character,and you can go back and watch an earlier one, it
would appear to be that much funnier.So we always had in our mind
thata lot of TV in the futureis going to be recycling stuff— video, all
the new cable channels. . . things will be constantly on. So we
thought it would be nice to have something that, rather than getting
boring the more you watched it, would actually get funnier as you
get to know it and you see all the running gags which you maybe
didn’t spot before.
ps: And of course you’ve been able to take that out into
Hammersmith on stage at the Apollo and...
CHARLIE HIGSON: Yeah, we had no idea if that was going to work
or not. It was interestingto see the amount of warmth that people
had for the individual characters:they just loved seeing them and
there were big cheers of recognition.It’s three and a half thousand
seats, and we sold out thirty-two nights. About a hundred and ten
thousand people came in. It’sa very difficultplace to play. It’s big
and cold, but the audience were so up for it.
DB: What do you find personally the most difficultpart about

writing comedy?
CHARLIE HIGSON: I suppose it’s trying not to get bored with what
you’ve written.You have to keep reminding yourself that when you
first wrote it,it made you a laugh.There’s great danger in
comedy
that you keep changing it simply because you’re bored with it— and
you’re not improving it: you’re writing sideways.
jmMcG: What about working on your own?

CHARLIE HIGSON: Well, I write my novels by myself, and Pm
working on a couple of film scripts.It’s a nice change, particularly
writing the books. It’s so differentfrom doing TV comedy.
I never set out to be a comedy I writer. was writing stuff from an
early age, but it was novels, that type of thing. And I ended up doing
the TV comedy by accident, I really. knew Paul,I knew Harry, I
knew Vic Reeves. Harry wanted Paul to start writing stuff for him.
Paul didn’t have a word processor and I did, and Paul wasn’t com-
fortable with the whole idea of being a writer,so we worked
176
together and just found out that we worked very well together, and
we could do it.I kept the novels going becauseI like it, and you can
explore those areas which you can’t reallydo in a TV sketch show.
Maybe it makes you go a bit too far down that route, but I do find
ita nice releaseto get rid of all the pent-up anger and poison that you
develop livingin London . . . that you can squeeze your pus on to
the page or whatever . . . The disciplineis the same, just making
yourselfgo into the officeand sitat the machine and do it. And that’s
the same whether it’sa book or a comedy. The thing about the
comedy is that we disciplineeach other.We make an arrangement.I
think: Paul’s coming round, we’ll have to work; and he’s thinking:
I’ve got to go round. We'll have to work. So even if neither of us
actually wants to do it,we always think the other one does.
I normally would starta book in those periods when Paul isn’t
around, so if he was going off to do Harry’s show I might have a
three-month gap when I could get the book started. Once that start
is under the belt I find it much easier;I can work on it before Paul’s
there and after he’s gone. I don’t know ifI could actually starta
major other project whilst doing The Fast Show or working with
Paul, but I could certainly finish one off.I used to just write at all
hours of the day and night, but since getting married and having two
children that can’tbe done any more so I do sort of try and keep
office hours.
DB: Were you setting out in the novels to build a fictional

Hackney in the same way as Raymond Chandler builta fictional
Los Angeles?
CHARLIE HIGSON: Well, it was Hackney because I was livingin
Hackney when I was writing them and I don’t like doing research,
SO it was easy to set it there.I write the type of books that I like to
read— andI certainlyused to read when I started writing the books
- which were a lot of quite dark American psychological thrillers:
Jim Thompson, Charles Willeford and people like that.So I just
thought: Pl try and write the type of book I like to read, but I obvi-
ously can’t set it in America, so I’llset it in Hackney. In fact in the
last two books there’s been much more comedy than there was in
the earlier ones.I don’t know if that’s startingto spill over from the
comedy writing,or if it’s just I’m a bit more relaxed about things
these days.
177
Arabella Weir
Standing in the corner
Arabella Weir kept one eye on us and the other on her new baby,
Isabella Agnes, who spent most of the interview asleep in a high-tech
cradle but eventually emerged for a feed. We were in the house in
North London which Arabella shares with her partner, Jeremy.
Arabella,a diplomat’s daughter, was befriendedas a child by the
director Karel Reisz and his actress wife, Betsy Blair. Arabella her-
self trainedas an actressbut began to write as well after joining the
cast of Alexei Sayle’s television show. Her roles in The Fast Show
include Insecure Woman, and she suddenly burst into the best-
sellers with a novel using the character’s catch-phraseas its title:
Does My Bum Look Big in This?
jmMcG: Was the idea in The Fast Show to give every charactera
catch-phrase?
ARABELLA WEIR: It’s not how we invented it. But you know so
much about the characters because of what they say every time. It’s
probably easierto write, to think of the catch-phrase that gives you
so much information about that person— ‘I’m I afraid was very, very
drunk’— and then work backwards. But I didn’t work that way with
No Offence or the others.I’d just keep hacking away at it and end
up with the catch-phrasethat I think is best. That I character did in
a couple of the last series, Girl Who Boys Can’t Hear, there’s no
catch-phrase there. She just talks and the men don’t pay any atten-
tion to her, and then they have the idea themselves. Somebody said:
‘Where did you get that character?”And I said: “Working in
comedy.’ First seriesof The Fast Show I could say anything and
everyone would be, like: ‘Right, Simon, what do you think?’And I'd
be, like: ‘Am I in the room?’ I’d written an articlein The Guardian
178
about that character, and several women wrote to me and said: “Oh,
you don’t know, that’s me.’A lot of women can identify with that.
In fact most of the guys could too; most of the guys went: “That’sa
good character.’ Bizarre.
ps: Are you writing for women?

ARABELLA WEIR: I’m not consciously doing it.I hope everybody
will find it funny. After the first seriesa couple of blokes, who in my
view haven’t got a very good sense of humour, said, eitherto friends
or to me: ‘I like that woman who says “Does my bum look big in
this?” but it doesn’t really work because you haven’t got a big bum.’
Or: ‘It doesn’t really work because you don’t see her bum.’ I said:
‘Do you think that you need to seea shot of her big arse for the gag
to work? Well, you don’t get it.’ That’s an offensive Benny Hill type
of thing: look at the big fat woman waddling down the road and
we'll make comments about her arse. This is about every woman’s
generic paranoia; it’sin her mind. It’sto do with her thinking that
she’s outside some special club. Inside that club everyone’s got the
right ear-rings, small arses, fantastic sex-liveswith their lovely hus-
bands, and teach their childrento read and play the violin!I hope
that men find the characters funny. Lots of men likeNo Offence. So
I’m not writing for women specifically,but I don’t mind if guys
don’t get it.
ps: Are there new opportunitiesfor women in writing and per-

forming comedy?
ARABELLA WEIR: No, I don’t think there’s greater opportunity for
women as long as the controllers,the commissioning editors,are
men, and they stillfar and away are the majorityin comedy. At the
BBC, where we all live, they are mainly blokes and they still think
Nick Hancock doing something based on footballis hilarious.
Women will watch something which is very bloke-ish, like Men
Behaving Badly, and go: “That’s just like Johnny! That’s just like
Peter!’But men ~ I’m talking about men as a large group — if they
saw how women reallyare together, would be not only intimidated
by it but slightly repelled.
A group of women will be much more lairy and saucy than men
expect— not only working-class women but middle-class women
now have girls’ nights out and stuff.It has seeped over into all dif-
ferent walks of life and I think men find that threatening.Men
Behaving Badly is to me the quintessential example of a show that
would not be acceptedif it was the other way round, although it
would be equally realistic.Men would feel sorry for the girl who
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ARABELLA WEIR 159
liked the boy upstairs:they wouldn’t be able to see her as a lairy kind
of go-getting girl who just fancies this fit man who lives upstairs.
They would think: Oh, God, she fancies him and he doesn’t seem to
be responding and that makes me feel awful and I feel sorry for her.
Any woman who isn’t fanciedby the objectof her desireis ipso facto
pathetic.You don’t see Neil Morrissey’s characteras pathetic.Men
are uncomfortable with women’s needs, and are so often protected
from them: ‘Don’t worry-about Mummy: she’s fine.’ They’re
brought up with that. If Caroline Quentin’s character was like
Martin Clunes’s and she was behaving as badly as he does, she’d just
be a bitch and a cow; she’d be seen as a ball-breaker.
It’s difficultfor a woman to play somebody who’s badly behaved
because once you’re thirty-plus people expect you to behave prop-
erly. And if you don’t, you’ve either got to be on telly, mad, a witch,
a right old cow, a slag,a tart, or a man-eater. You can’t just be a
woman who’s lots of things and doesn’t behave particularly well,
and lives in a flat with a bunch of other people because she feels
like it.
To be palatableto the BBC, a piece still has to be about Northern
working-class women — it can’t be that they’re women we know.
God forbid that any of them are educated and middle-classor that
it’sa mixture of women. That thing Playing the Field about women
— footballers lotsof unwanted pregnanciesand gritty stuff— the
atti-
tude is: ‘Oh, they’re more lairy because they’re like that up North.’
But if they’re like that down here in the South, then they’re slaggy
types.
jmcG: Is that attitude the reason why so few women do stand-

up comedy?
ARABELLA WEIR: It’s back to that thing about what’s acceptable
from a man and what’s acceptable from a woman. Stand-up is in
itself quite Weaggressive. know blokes shout at you from building
sites and shout at you in bars, but people are uncomfortable with
women talkingin that out-front, lairy way, which is why women
who do stand-up on their own, like Joan Rivers or Jo Brand, are
taking the piss out of themselves. Regrettably, audiences are com-
fortable with that; they’re going: ‘Oh, good, she’s being horrible
about herself,but I don’t want her pointing at us, because that’s not
ladylike. Then she’ll confront me and I'll have to hit her. If a
woman’s rude to me, my machismo willbe Itchallenged.’ was inter-
esting when I did No Offence to the audience at the Hammersmith
Odeon — Labbatt’s Apollo — in the live Fast Show. I'd go to a woman
first,and the gag went: ‘I’m promoting a new lineof perfume for the
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yt
older lady.It might be of some interestto you, my dear.’ The women

would laugh, but the woman in question would laugh as well. Then
I'd pick on another woman and say: ‘Can I give you a few beauty
tips? Women who are desperateto get married, like yourself...’and
the last thing was: “You’ve let yourselfgo in a shocking manner. No
offence.’Big laughs. From her, and all her mates poking her, right?
And then I’d get to a bloke, and I’d say: ‘Can I interestyou in a whiff
of Mel Gibson’s crotch?’ and there was a whole bunch of material
about Mel Gibson’s ‘lineof perfume’, and then Id say: “But you're
probably not interested,are you? Because you look quite tight,
you’re dresseda bit miserly.. ” And, almost without exception, the
blokes would be really chippy, and one bloke I thought was actually
going to get up on stage and whack me.
Of course,I don’t know him, or whether he’s tightor not. But he
felt affronted. And I thought, That is such a stark difference, because
what I was saying to the women was much more offensive: about
repulsive lesbians and stuff. Women were howling, and men howl-
ing — everybody howling.
ps: If there were better outlets for comedy by women, what

would it be like?
ARABELLA WEIR: You could do comedy that was self-deprecating
a la Woody Allen = ‘Look at me, I’m — shit’ that didn’t make people
uncomfortable. It’s only men who are uncomfortable about it.
Loads of women have read my book — I would imagine principally
women — and they go: ‘It’sso funny. That’s just like me. I thought I
was the only person who does that thing of changing her skirt three
times...’ But all the men that have read it, bar one, have gone: ‘Oh,
it’s quite sad! Is she really like that?’
And I explain that that’s like all women — I’llbe saying to a girl-
friend: ‘I looked in the mirror and I thought, Jesus, I’ve turned into
a Kentish Town mother, I’m wearing slip-ons and a caftan,’ and
she'll laugh, and then ’ll be saying, ‘But then I went out and had a
brilliant time.’I won’t be going: ‘I’ve turned into a Kentish Town
mother. Now I'll kill myself.’So I think a there’s market out there:
women are self-deprecatingand that’s what they find funny. They
are generally more able to laugh at themselves because they’ve got
less investmentin being the macho, Ferrari-driving bread-winner.
yMcG: Do you know what’s funny?

ARABELLA WEIR: I know what / think is funny, and if they don’t
think it’s funny they’re just wrong. But I wrote a double act for me
and Alexei Sayle, where Alexei was dressed as a woman, where we
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ARABELLA WEIR 161
were two lesbians runninga bike shop called ‘The Menstrual Cycle’,
and Alexei has a much more surreal sense of comedy than I do and
so he would think gags thatI thought were justOK were brilliant,
and he’d throw out a lot of the stuff that I thought was great.I
remember thinking, You’re wrong. Of course he was right for him.
But that’s what I don’t want to do any more.
With the successof The Fast Show I was asked to write for other
people. Disaster. Cannot do that.I had no interestand no motiva-
tion sittingat my computer if I was writing for somebody else.I
realised there’sno point in me writing the materialfor someone else
because, even if somebody else wants the I material, don’t want them
to do it differentlyfrom how I would do it.I want them to do it
exactly how I would doit and that’s always going to be on a hiding
to nothing because I’m going to be thinking they’re wrong no mat-
ter how good they are.
So that was the first thing thatI discovered, thatI couldn’t write
for anybody else, or that I wouldn’t write for anybody else, and
luckilyso farI haven’t needed to. When I write for myself, for a few
weeks prior to writing the character I’ll have been doing her in my
head and looking round the house and thinking: What would she
think about that? She’d have something unpleasantto say about that
sofa. Then I’llsit at the computer and ‘do’ her; then I’ll read it out
and think: Oh, no, she’s got to speak I differently. probably write as
a performer and when I wrote the book I found the only way I could
check if it was funny or not was ifI read it aloud to myself, because
I think if something reads aloud well, then it'll read well to a reader.
DB: Obviously you’ve got at least one solidly established char-

acter in the Insecure Woman: do you look for material for her, or
do you continue to develop other characters when material pre-
sents itself?
ARABELLA WEIR: The latter.The good thing about Insecure
Woman, and I think the reason she became so popular, is that she
was specifically designed not to be a woman but to be every woman,
which is why in one sketch she’llbe a judge, in anothera police-
woman, in anothera doctor. She’s supposed to be everybody, and
she’s not supposed to be like the other character that had quitea lot
of popularity, which was Different With Boys. She was supposed to
be one specific woman who always behaved like thatin frontof men.
She was one way with women, she was another way with men. I’ve
never had to look for materialfor Insecure Woman, in that every day
presented stuff that an insecure woman would be thinking.
When we were writing the third I series, wanted to do different
182
¢
162 Now THAT’s FuNNyY!
characters.The one calledNo Offence developed out of doing a

South African accent. Paul and Charlie said: “You must do someone
who speaks like I that.’ just happened to see a woman in a depart-
ment store and I thought: That woman’s values are very old-fash-
ioned.I fantasisedthat marriage would be all, even if it was cheesy,
to that woman, and developed her out of that.
ps: Is there stuff floating around which you haven’t yet found
a character to express?
ARABELLA WEIR: I will observe something and my worry will be:
‘Is that universally recognisable enough to make it intoa character?”
That happened with Charlie in the last series.He did a man which
ended up on the cutting-room floor, which has never happened in the
show before. It was something for which you needed a long-term
narrative, likea sitcom or a film. He was called Mid-Life Crisis Man,
and he was a bloke that you saw asa stiff lawyer, and then he was in
leather jeans and a pierced nose with a young Wegirlfriend. see it hap-
pen all the time, but it’snot funny in an instantly recognisableway.
P’ve got a new character that I want to do, and I’m afraid she’d only
be recognisablein upper-classand media circles. She’s the Matron
Wife: you see very public school, effetemen who to all intents and
purposes are gay, but they’re married to jolly-hockey-sticks,often
large, matron types. You think: You’re a poof, and you’ve married
your mum. I’ve been thinking about her for ages now.
jmcG: What’s the thing you find most difficult?

ARABELLA WEIR: Writing a book. Oh, writing, writing’s so hard.
Writing on my own, writing a book, that is hard work. I know a lot
of writers and had a lot of writers in my upbringing, ‘proper’ writers
like John Lahr and Clancy Sigal, and my mother was an English
teacher and she’s writtena lot. People had said to me: ‘If you can
write like you speak, you'll make your fortune.’But what I didn’t
think was ever going to happen - well, how could I have anticipated
this?— was that the performing and the writing would happen at the
same time. I did that book and it was, it zs being, very successful and
then I did a proposal for a second book, but in my fantasy I’d have
all the time in the world to do that. And that went to auction and I
got a fortune to write that and that’sa comic novel, too, but much
more— in my fantasy, it’sa kind of Roddy Doyle. I remember
thinkingmy first book was very, very hard work. But that just seems
likea day at the beach next to this next one. And so I haven’t started
writingit yet and I have no idea how I’m going to be able to... lam
gettinga nanny: the advance made it possibleto hire someone, the
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ARABELLA WEIR 163
most expensive kind of child-care,which is someone coming to the

house and only looking after your kid and I hope that I’llbe able to
write in the morning until Isabella needs a feed at lunchtime.So I’ll
write for three hours in the morning and carry on for three or four
hours in the afternoon and at weekends as well. Don’t know how
Pm going to do anything else.
jmcc: Would that be the same as a pre-baby working stint?

ARABELLA WEIR: A pre-baby working stintwas 9.30 to The World
at One because I’d think: Great, I can go down and listento other
people. IfI was really spoiling myself I’d listento The Archers, but
most of the time I’d wait until the Sunday. Then I’d come back up at
twenty to two and work until about five, six, seven, but if I was on
a roll I’d keep working later.With the first book I had this rule that
whatever happened I had to write a thousand words a day, not
including weekends, but ifI misseda day becauseI had a meeting or
whatever, then I'd have to write two thousand the next or make itup
at the weekend.
A friend gave me a piece of advice: ‘Write everything that’sin
your head, don’t edit yourself. Worry about that later. Don’t get
halfway througha schtick and then go: “Why would anybody care
what she’s doing at Sainsbury’s?”Just get everything out.’ Which I
can’t do with the second book because it needs to be more struc-
tured— so now I’m just panicking about the second book.
DB: So you went through the first book just in one draft and
then you went back over it?
ARABELLA WEIR: I'd write down everythingI was going to write
in the day, and then I’d go back over it the next morning, so I was
editing as I went. When I presentedit to the publishers they didn’t
ask for rewrites, they asked for more: they said they wanted to hear
more about one bit and they wanted stuff fleshed out. Someone said:
‘How does it feel to be successful now?’ and I said: ‘Listen,it doesn’t
feel like anything.I feel like I’ve been at the wretched party for
years, standingin the corner, and everyone’s going: “Oh, not her!”
All of a sudden the boys are queuing up, going: “Can you dance with
me?” And I’m going: “Why didn’t you want to dance with me
fifteen years ago? I’ve been here all the time.” They’re going: “Yeah,
but that was then; now you’re hot.” I’m the same person that I’ve
always been. Obviously I’m more experienced now, but I do feel
like I’ve been standingin the corner for eighteen years going: “What
about me?” and people going: “No, thanks.” Then allof a sudden
they’re going: “You! You!”’
184
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185
Caroline Aherne
People just saying funny things
Caroline Aherne is one of the young writers and performers who

leaped suddenly out of Manchester in the Nineties and somehow hit
on the chat show as both haven and target: Steve Coogan as Alan
Partridge and Caroline as Mrs Merton. Her new show, The Royle
Family, is about a Manchester family, but the name suggests that this
will not be the glamorous, triumphalist Manchester struttingthe
world stage from a base at Old Trafford; instead we are likelyto be
relegated to the wry, often despondent view of the downtrodden
supportersof United’s poor relations, Manchester City — managed
by Joe Royle. Caroline was rather flustered after climbing the four
flightsof stairsto David’s central London flat carrying handfulsof
bags from a morning’s shopping for her mother’s birthday.
CAROLINE AHERNE: I write with two boys, Henry Normal and

Craig Cash; Henry Normal also writes for Steve Coogan, and some
other people as well.We sitin an office,the threeof us, and basically
we think what makes us laugh, and then we see if all threeof us think
it’s funny. Sometimes we vote on things and if two people think it’s
funny, then it’s OK. Well, we’re always voting on everything.The
first time we’ve written dialogue is for the comedy dramas that
we've just filmed for BBC 2, called The Royle Family. Ricky
Tomlinson, Scouse actor,he played my dad, and it’s about a work-
ing-class family. All the action takes place in their . living-room . .
They geta phone billin the first episode and that’sas much actionas
is in it.We wanted to see if we could write something where the
humour just comes from charactersand not events happening.So
nothing much happens; it’s about a family watching telly, basically.
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166 Now THAT’s FunNNy!
ps: Is his name really Henry Normal?

CAROLINE AHERNE: No, he changed it. He’s called Peter Carroll
really— he changed it when he was younger. I think he regretsit
now. We get there about eleven o’clock and me and Craig would just
mess about, but Henry says: ‘Come on, we’ve got to work.’ He’s
always the one who does that, and he also types everything,and then
Craig sits there and doodles on a pad, and I pull this drawer thing
out and prop my legs on the drawer, and we have to do that every
morning, that’sthe way we do it. Then we sit there and think of what
to say at the intro,and then think of sortsof questionsto ask. And
then I might want to make phone callsto people and Henry says no,
and I say: ‘Oh, please, Henry,’ and he says, ‘OK,’ and then Craig’s
allowed to make a phone call,but Henry rules us.
Before we had Henry, me and Craig never used to do anything.
We just used to sometimes have some pizza, because he used to say,
‘I can’t write without pizza,’and then he’d have to have some red
wine — he’d say, ‘I can’t write without red wine’- and then it would
be too late for him to write,he couldn’t think any more. With Henry
it’s great because he’s likea teacher:he makes us work. We actually
go into an office every day and we work from eleven until half four
or, if we’re feeling particularly creative, until five.
I’m probably the best at, like, with The Royle Family I thought up
the idea and what would happen, then Craig’s very good on gags and
dialogue,and Henry’s very good at saying: ‘You’ve used that word
four times.’So the three of us together, it’sthe perfect team.
The Royle Family is set in Manchester and you just seea half-hour
in this family’s life- no other scenes,no time-lapsing. The first
episode the dad getsa phone bill,and a there’s number in it, some-
body’s rung Aberdeen, and he goes on and on about who’s rung
Aberdeen. And I look through the catalogue with my friend from
next door, and — it’s very — childish I say: ‘Close your eyes,’and she
gives mea finger,and then I put it on the men’s dickies,and when she
opens her eyes they’reon the men’s dickiesin the catalogue.The
telly’son the whole time in all six episodes and the dad comments on
it all the time. Like, you can hear Chris Evans’s voice and Dad goes:
‘Look at him on again. He’s all about like shitin a field, him.’ I say:
‘Oh, but he’sa andmillionaire,’ he goes: ‘Don’t care if he’sa million-
aire, he’s stillgot ginger bollocks.’And a there’s pause and the mum
goes: ‘Oh, that reminds me: there’s some tangerinesin me I fridge.’
love it when comedy comes out of people just saying funny things,
rather than things happening.So that’s what we’ve done, which is
quite different,and there’sno laughter track and we did it on film. It’s
sometimes like watching documentary— there’s that sortof edge to it.
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CAROLINE AHERNE 167
JMcG: How did the BBC stand up to you wanting to do it

without an audience?
CAROLINE AHERNE: They rowed and rowed and rowed, then I
cried. When I’d done two series of Mrs Merton they said: ‘We'll tie
you into a deal to do another two series and two Christmas specials
and any other projects you want to do.’ So I said:‘I want to do this
thing about a family in Manchester.’So they said OK. But then they
wanted it with audience laughter,and they wanted it to be filmed in
front of a studio audience.In the end I was very childish,and I said,
‘I’m not doing it, then,’ like that, very childishly,and I think I cried.
I’m so glad I stuck to my guns there, because it would completely
ruin it: it’s just not the kind of thing you need.I am always put off
hearing canned laughter; people should be able to laugh where they
want.
DB: Presumably you watch other shows for comparison and the
one that’s running now very strongly without a laugh-track is
The Larry Sanders Show.
CAROLINE AHERNE: Oh, I love that. But it’s not that kind of a feel.
Because you’re just in one room all the time, and they smoke all the
time.
jJMcG: How about working on film?

CAROLINE AHERNE: We had a brilliant director, Mark Mylod
from The Fast Show, but we were changing stuff all the time. You
see, me and Craig play boyfriend and girlfriend,and both wrote it
and Henry. So we were thinkingof better lines all the time and the
poor actors were getting rewrites every five seconds, but it worked
for the best. When we had the meetings with people at the BBC they
would go: ‘But there’s no plot .. . there’s really no plot. Couldn’t
they go to the pub or something like that?’But people don’t:I don’t
think you need to have stuff happening.I hope I haven’t built thisup
too much for when you watch it, and you say: “Oh, it’sa pile of
shite.’But it zs very different.
ps: What’s your source:is it your family,or the folks next door
OL gies?
CAROLINE AHERNE: It’s the three of us that wrote it— it’sall our
families. We’ve just strung together little things,or little things
people have said that made us laugh,or . . . characters we've strung
that together, rather than going: “This is the beginning, middle and
end.’ People write best when they write what they know.
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168 Now T#HAT’s FUNNY!
pB: What part of Manchester are they in?

CAROLINE AHERNE: We don’t say, but it was set in Wythenshawe,
where I’m from in south Manchester, in a big council estate.We
filmed them allin Manchester — in a studio. It looks brilliant, though:

it looks completely likea front room and a kitchen and everything.
ps: Were the BBC receptiveto the idea of a distinctively provin-

cially-based comedy?
CAROLINE AHERNE: I don’t think that ever bothered them that it
was so Northern: I mean, it reallyis Northern: I think there’sa dif-
ferent way of livingup there. There’s not been a working-class sit-
com for ages.
ps: Do you think there’sa source of comedy in the North?

CAROLINE AHERNE: Yeah, I do, especiallyin Manchester, where
everybody takes the piss out of each other, which I don’t think
London people do. It’sa sort of dry sense of humour that’s special
in the North-West. In Manchester, a it’s real thing amongst people
of my age to take the mickey.
pbs: Will you go on with The Royle Family?

CAROLINE AHERNE: They’ve already commissioned another one.
jmcG: And would you like to write more?

CAROLINE AHERNE: We’re going to doa film next year. A comedy
film.I play a hairdresser who’s learning to drive, and she’sa mobile
hairdresser.Well, she’s not, but she wants to go mobile. I’ve lost the
plot! She wants to go mobile but she keeps failingher test.Me, Craig
and Henry are writing it.I don’t think we could work with anyone
else now, because we don’t mind if one of us tells another of us it’s
complete rubbish. Loads of the time you have to talk rubbish before
something brilliant will come out, and we know each other so well
that we can do it without feeling embarrassed or anything.
pbs: What brought you together?

CAROLINE AHERNE: Me and Craig worked together on a radio
I station: was on from two in the morning till seven in the morning
and Craig was on in the day. We both got sacked on the same day,
so I said: ‘Oh, shallwe write comedy?’ and, because he was a painter
and decorator before he went on the radio, he said: ‘Yeah, but in case
it don’t work out, Pll keep me brush in turps!’I knew Henry
because he was a stand-up and the Manchester comedy circuitwas
tiny. There was only me, Steve Coogan, John Thomson, Henry and
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CAROLINE AHERNE 169
another lad called Bob. I started working on a regional programme,

just doing Mrs Merton as an agony aunt in between, then they
offeredme a pilot. They said: “What would you do if you had a half-
hour?’I said: ‘I’ddo a Mrs Merton chat show.’ Then we got Henry
in because he had a computer, and we didn’t. He was brilliant,and
we did the pilot,and it was about a year later before the BBC said
they would take it.
Now I’ve just moved up to London from Manchester. Craig still
lives in Manchester — he comes up to London — and Henry lives in
Brighton,so we all meet together.We wrote ads and thingsas well,
and my characters in The Fast Show, I write them with Craig and
Henry.
DB: When you are writing for your Fast Show characters,do
you meet the other writers and performers?
CAROLINE AHERNE: Well, I am a bit different from the others in
The Fast Show: I’ve been able to do only a few days with them,
because it’s always coincided with Mrs Merton or, this last time, The
Royle Family. So we think up some things and ring up Charlie’s
house and if Paul answers he always laughs, but Charlie goes, ‘No’
- like that.So we always hope it’s Paul that answers, and then for
ages they ask us to write it down, and I say: ‘Oh, it’sin my head.’
Anyway, we fax it to them. I usuallydo about three days on it and
they do all my bits then.I don’t do the studios becauseI hate per-
forming in front of a live audience, so I just make allmy characters
somewhere on I location. get nervous performing in front of people.
I’d ratherdo everything ina littleroom on my own.
pbs: But Mrs Merton is very much involved in the audience...

CAROLINE AHERNE: Well, they’re near enough the same audience
every week — just the odd people who’ve come . . . We just started
off asking our friends,and our friends’ mums, and my doctor’s
receptionists and my hairdressersand that sort of a thing. The first
few shows they put their coats on before it had finished!You could
just see them behind me, getting their umbrellas and going! We had
to say: ‘Can you stop and take your coats off again?’
My mum’s there, and my aunties and my best friend, and her
mum and her two neighbours. But it is lovely thatI know them all
by name.
ps: And what form do the Mrs Merton scripts take?

CAROLINE AHERNE: We think of things that are funny to ask, but
really the best questions always come off the top of your head. It’s
190
about fiftyper cent ad-lib and fiftyper cent stuff we’ve written and
made us laugh in the office.But the two of them are much ruder than
me, and I have to stop them, because they get very, very rude. And
you couldn’t write things they think up, some of the things.
Horace is one of them I love to go to because he’s just very funny,
and then Ann, I always count on. I just go to the ones I know will
always talk. But when I say: ‘Any questions?’ they all put their
hands up. They’re absolutely brilliant, they’re really, really funny.
jMcG: The appearance of Bernard Manning was amazing — he

came on to open-minded applause, and he went off to hisses.
CAROLINE AHERNE: I think people had thought: Oh, he doesn’t
really mean it; he’s not reallya racist. Richard Wilson was brilliant
with him. I was so trying not to lose my temper with him becauseI
knew ifI lost my temper he’d have won. You could hear a pin drop
in the audience. Usually they’re eating, passing sweets round and
everything,but they weren’t that night. We'd thought up stuff to say
to him, but I couldn’t use any of it. One of the questions was going
to be: ‘So, have you got any advice for any young up-and-coming fat
racist comedians?’ But that would have gone over the heads of the
audience,and they’dbe thinking:Oh, look at her, wanting advice for
young up-and-coming ...! There were so many agendas. The young
part of the audience were shouting awful things to him, and there
were the old biddies who had sort of always liked him but thought
they shouldn’t.The whole night was bizarre, really bizarre...
DB: Everybody’s ready for this, presumably? Richard Wilson is

ready for Bernard — he knows what Bernard’s like?
CAROLINE AHERNE: Usually the guests don’t know who’s on
with them, but we thought in this case we'd better ring Richard up,
and there was no other date he could do. So in the end he said: ‘Fine,
but I'd rather not be sittingon the couch with him,’ but anyway he
did, and...
DB: It looks likea piece of deliberate casting, knowing that

Richard’sa Labour Party supporter...
CAROLINE AHERNE: It really wasn’t. We’re not that clever.We
have such a struggleto get guests that whenever they can do it, we
go, Yeah! It wasn’t deliberateat all. But we couldn’t have had a
better guest with Bernard. Oh, yeah, we’ve had terrible trouble get-
ting people on.
DB: Do guests think the show’s a trap of some kind?
191
CAROLINE AHERNE 171
CAROLINE AHERNE: But it wasn’t ever meant to be like that.

People took it that way. We just wanted a warm, friendly show, with
me dressed up as an old woman because you can ask much cheekier
I questions. always hate it when they callit a spoof chat show: the
guests don’t know the questions, nothing’s rehearsed, so it’s not
spoof.
ymcG: When you put the stuff on, I mean, are you Mrs Merton?
CAROLINE AHERNE: I’m not like that.I forget sometimes, and you
can I tell, always do my own laugh. No, I only do Mrs Merton’s
voice as soon as the camera starts.
jJMcG: And you don’t like having an audience.

CAROLINE AHERNE: Oh, J hate it. I’d be quite happy if the shows
never went out, if it was only me who watched them! I would,
honest to God! If only me and me mum watched them! I don’t mind
if no one ever saw it...
DB: Was the character written for the show or had you used her
before?
CAROLINE AHERNE: No, I already had it.I did her as an agony
aunt on the radio, and I used to make up . letters . . I had loads of
little I characters. used to do a nun, and I did a Country and
Western
singer.
ps: Didn’t you get used to performing in front of audiences

when you worked as a stand-up comic?
CAROLINE AHERNE: Oh, no, I’ve never liked it.I don’t think I
ever stayed ona full thirty minutes. I’d come off and say: ‘How long
was that?’ ‘Eleven minutes.’I won a competition the first time I did
it, so I got a load of gigs from it— that was with the nun. But I never
enjoyed it.
jmMcG: Has a Catholic background affectedyou in any way?

CAROLINE AHERNE: I think it always affects everybody because
you're just riddled with guilt.My two best friends went to a convent
with me and we laugh more at dirty, rude things than anybody. All
three of us are really good girls,but we’ve all got filthy mouths on
us; we’re always saying things,and really killing ourselves laughing.
I suppose because we were brought up where it was so naughty to
say rude thingswe just think it’s dead funny to say them, even at our
age.
192
ymcc: Did you make them laugh in class?

CAROLINE AHERNE: I could always make my mum laugh, by
doing impressionsof my aunties and things,and at one time she had
a hysterectomy and I went to see her in the hospital,and then she
used to love me to do an impressionof her when she’d had the hys-
terectomy.
ymcG: Why? Because she wasn’t supposed to laugh because

she’d had an operation?
CAROLINE AHERNE: Yeah, that was what it was. Then I did drama
at Poly, sol...I did want to go to... I did definitelywant to do
some sort of drama, not necessarily comedy. I thinkI just wanted to
be an actress, but I didn’t...
DB: Didn’t like audiences!

CAROLINE AHERNE: Yeah.
193
John Morton
Less 1s more
The show that crept up on everyone who heard it on Radio 4 is

People Like Us. Denis Norden and Barry Cryer were among those
caught off guard by it, thinking that they were listeningto a radio
feature insteadof a comedy. The insidious scripts were writtenby
John Morton, who may well be the most courageous of all the
writerswe talked to. He told us his story at the Savile Club on his
way between meetings about transferring People Like Us to televi-
sion and work on Kiss Me Kate, a BBC sitcom co-writtenby Chris
Langham, star of People Like Us. We complimented him on the
way People Like Us had taken us by surprise.
JOHN MORTON: That’s something you can do on radio. People are

nearly always doing something else— driving, washing up — so you
can sneak quitea lot of absurd stuff past them, and it only needs one
of those things to finally registerand you get that kind of: “What?
Did I really hear that?’
Radio’s such a simple medium. I was amazed on the first recording
day.I thought I’d be put in a box somewhere and fed sandwiches,but
actuallywe did some read-throughs and then a rehearsalon tape and
then the producer asked, ‘What do you think?’I was able to talkto
actors I’d only ever seen on the screen and I thought: This is fantas-
tic. Radio’s friendlyin the sense that actors don’t have to learn lines,
and they’re havinga reasonably pleasant day, meeting people they’ve
not seen fora while, nobody’s fantastically — egotistical a there’s real
sense of good will. I’ve been amazed how I’ve been consultedon not
just casting,but also rhythm of the scene, that kind of stuff.Of course
on astelevision, I’m now beginningto realise, that’s gone. The higher
the stakes,the more marginalisedyou get as the writer.
194
The stuffI write, it’s not topical, it’s not fashionable, and it’s not
target-drivenat all.I’m not out to have anybody in my A sights. lot
of stuff,on television particularly,not so much in radio, I can see

looked fantasticin proposal form, because the joke is the idea. You
know, ‘Let’s deconstructa sitcom and have a very large person and
a very small person sharinga flat.’The idea is funnier than the work-
ing out of the idea. And you think: That’sa really neat idea, and I can
see why it was commissioned, but I’ve now got to sit through six
half-hours of it.I saw that happening and I thought: I wonder
whether I’ll ever get in because I can’t write that stuff.
ymcG: Where did you start and how did you break in?
JOHN MORTON: I was a teacher— English, the usual thing— in a
sixth-form collegein Winchester. It sounds crazy:I just stopped
teaching and sold my house and started writing. People would say,
‘God, that’s really brave,’and they’d be thinking, That’s really,my
God, you are mad, completely. They’d say, ‘So, are you working on
a commission?’ and I’d say, ‘No, none.’ And they’d go quieter and
quieter.I’m not normally very confident generally,and I’m not very
good at that many things: I’ma safe pair of hands in lotsof areas, but
only good enough to know what it would be liketo be really good.
But in inscriptwriting general,but certainly comedy, I'd often go to
the theatre or listento something on the radio and it would almost
be like being dug in the ribs — I understood how it worked.
Sometimes Id get a feeling that they didn’tdo that quite right, that
a line could have been tweaked. If I watch, say, professional crick-
I eters, get the opposite feeling, which is:My God, I could never do
that. What must it be liketo do that?
DB: You hadn’t written anything?

JOHN MORTON: No, but I also knew that I’d have to write an
awful lot of stuffto chuck at the wall before anything would stickat
all.It was almost wilfully naive. If ’'d thought about it— it was a bit
like looking down when you’re trying to climb up something — I
would have stopped. Thank God for radio, because nobody else is
going to risk hundreds of thousandsof pounds on an unknown, but
on radio they can throwa little bit of money at something and if it
doesn’t work, well, it doesn’t work. Or if it does one pilot and
nothing much happens, then they’ve wasted only a littlebit of
money. I don’t think I’d ever have got going if it weren’t for radio,
so I feel very gratefulfor that.
jMcG: How do you work with a director?Do you stand behind
195
JOHN MORTON 175
him the whole time?

JOHN MORTON: [I’m very lucky, again, because in radio the pro-
ducer is terribly A collaborative. lot of radio producers are
fantast-
ically busy anyway — they’re juggling lotsof — projects and they’re
actually quite pleased if someone says: ‘What about doing it this
way?’ Also Chris Langham, who plays the main character,is very
collaborative,full of ideas, and his sense of timing is very similarto
mine. What tends to happen is that in the read-through everybody’s
giving miles too much. At firstit panicked me because the thing that
kills most comedy for me is that it’stoo obvious.I already know that
I am interestedin directing,in that process of translatingfrom page
to performance, because most actors in my tiny experience are quite
relieved when you say to them: “That performance you just did in
the read-through was very funny and it’s good that you can do that
stuff, like handstands and things, but... try not doing it.’ Also they
tune in because Chris’s timing is so Rolls-Royce,so less-is-moreand
so understated, that eventually everybody comes down toa certain
level,and then the momentum startsto gather.
But it’sa real bugbear of mine,a real bee in my bonnet, that most
of what I see in the TV comedy arena is overplayed and badly
directed.Just as a punter, not as any kind of person I inside, just see
stuff on in the sitcom slot and I think: Why didn’t someone stop
them doing that? With the demarcationof jobs in the industry, there
doesn’t seem to be anybody in television whose job it is to direct
performance. Because it’s such a complex thing, compared with
radio;a director’sgot so much to think about.
We filmeda television pilotof the radio thing which is now going
to telly. You’d watch a scene being set up all morning and many spe-
cificand technical questions solved. Then finally we'd do a take and
the director would say: ‘Yeah, that’s it. We’ve finallygot it right.’
But actuallywe hadn’t got it at all right.It was technically perfect,
but nobody, because the directorwas so busy, there was no person
whose job it was. I found it very stressful because the classic cliché
is the writer who’s a nightmare on the set, and won’t go away. But
then I thought: Well, actually,I do care about this.So I had to kind
of sidle intoa room saying, ‘Yes, what about . . . ?’ But again,so far
so good. People were very, very collaborative.
jmcc: The longer you’re in the business, the more you realise
that the actors save you. If you can get through to them and get
everybody away, they'lldo it.
JOHN MORTON: Chris Langham andI are just writinga sitcom
now for BBC 1 and I keep seeing new sitcoms coming out, trailed
196
and hyped, and I keep thinking: God, it didn’t make me laugh.Is this
what happens? Whatever you put in this end of the machine, does it
always come out that way at the other end?
jmcc: Are you doing it with an audience?

JOHN MORTON: | Yes, because the reason I’ve particularly enjoyed
certain shows is partly to do with the fact there’sa vicarious you
there, people laughingin your stead, especiallyif you’re watching on
televisionjust two of you or one of you. I enjoy the relationship
between a studio audience and actors. And it also allows them to
time jokes perfectly. One thingI never understand is why talented
people make film comedies and then play the tape to an audience and
then tape the laughter.It always goes wrong, because they’re crash-
ing the laughter all the time, and the laughter’s crashing the timing.
I’m sure that the studio audience leads the wider audience because
you can do lots of things when you’ve got an audience there. You
can do jokes which they don’t see coming, but you also get jokes
where the pleasureis that they do see it coming, and an audience will
set off before the line comes.
jMccG: Is therea difference between British and American comedy?

JOHN MORTON: The best of American humour is fantastic. But
when you say ‘the best of American humour’ you’re talking about
Jewish humour, which is fantastically economical.I love the cadence
and rhythm of Jewish comedy. I just wonder whether English
English will do that.At the moment, writing this sitcom,I think:
Can you do this with English English? You can’t. There’s no real
English equivalentof ‘I wish’ which is two words: in English
English you’d have to write about two sentencesto get that across.
Americans at their best seem to know how to underplay; they'll
allow the audience to do more work.
As a punter, one of the thingsI like best is where you get a joke
that’s coming, or a routine that’s coming, and they allow you to
supply one of the beats in the comic argument. Rather than going,
‘Look, here’sa joke coming... here it comes . .. are you sure you’re
ready for this joke? Here it is... did you notice it?” which is like the
British sitcom,I love it when you're given the creditof being able to
share the joke.So I likeit when Chris Langham, in People Like Us
on radio, does this thing where he’s talking,and he just kind of
peters out and goes, “What?’ And nobody’s said anything, but you
allow the audience right in, and they’re there in the kind of comic
experience: “Well, thank you. Thank you for lettingme, for givingus
the credit of being able to, do that bit of work,’ and then of course
197
JOHN MORTON 177
you feel more attached to the show and the characters and the
experience.
With prime-time shows on in England, a there’s kind of paranoia
that an audience won’t get a joke. When we were recording People
Like Us, someone was saying: ‘I’m not sure. That line is so less-is-
more that you may have to...’ and I remember saying, ‘It doesn’t
matter if they don’t get that.’It would be nice to feel that you had
enough jokes there that if one or two go past without people quite
getting on board, well, that’s OK.
JMcG: How do you do it? Is it longhand or a word processor?

JOHN MORTON: A processor. How on earth did people write
scripts in the Goon Show days? Now, if you have an idea for mov-
ing something around when you're doing a rewrite,you do it in ten
minutes, then look at it the other way again, and then you make a
decision. Even if you want to change a character’sname at the last
minute for some silly reason, you can just do it, there and then, with
a computer.
DB: You’ve been working on your own, but now you’re collab-
orating with Chris Langham. What are the differences?
JOHN MORTON: I look forward to having a day in his company,
but the best thing about it is that you don’t get that blank screenor
blank page. You don’t get lonely and self-obsessed.It’s an unhealthy
thing to do, to siton your own in a room for, whatever it is, fiveor
six hours a day, thinking about a world you created. When I first
started this,I thought I’d have lotsof energy.I thought, compared
with teaching, where you just have too much to do and you're run
ragged by the end of the day,I thought, well, now I’m doing what I
want, in my own time, so I’m going to have lots of excess energy.
And I felt,of course, absolutely shattered.At the end of the first year
I got shingles!The doctor said: “That’s quite unusual in a guy your
age. Are you undera lot of stress?Are you working very hard?’ and
I said: ‘No, I’ve never been under less stress.’It was a lesson, because
there’sa kind of energy which I didn’t realiseyou used at all.You
try explaining what you did today: ‘I went to an office with another
guy and we talked for fiveor six hours, then we had some coffee,and
that was it.’I sometimes feel absolutely creased,but more so when
I’m writing on my own.
ps: Apart from fatigue,do you find any aspectof the work par-
ticularly difficult?
JOHN MORTON: I find plottingthe hardest, because I’m betterat
198
dialogue.If somebody said to me, ‘Here’sa situation: two people in

a room. One wants this out of it; one wants that. OK, write the dia-
logue,’I wouldn’t feel threatenedby that. But actually the four or
fiveor six weeks that you spend prior to that are absolutely essen-
tial,I now realise. Because if it’s not set up correctly, and doesn’t
work asa story,if the audience doesn’t want to know what happens
next, there’sno point in committing yourselfto dialogue.I’m trying
to learn not to rush into the dialogue.If you’ve got some ability,you
ought to be able to make something funny. But it’s the bit before
that is really important, and that’s the bit I find I have to make
myself do.
I mentioned my bees in my bonnet, and they’re mainly to do with
— less-is-more that usually the more work you let the audience do,
the funnierit is.So pratfallsare almost always funnier the other side
of the door. In terms of television comedy and radio comedy, I like
to see more jokes per minute. I’d like to think that people had
packed the thing with jokes.I don’t mean just obvious gags. But
because of the way that adverts work in America, they used to have
that thirty-secondbit at the start of Cheers that was nothing to do
with that week’s plot, and there were often more, better-crafted
jokes in that thirty seconds than in some entire British sitcoms.
199
Chris Evans, Danny Baker
and Will Macdonald
The currencyof seduction
The maelstrom which is TFI Friday was reproduced in miniaturein

the Ginger Television Productions officein central London. In Will
Macdonald’s room we sat as Danny Baker, unable to sit still, paced
up and down, occasionally beating out the intro to the EastEnders
title music on an electronicdrum kit. When the galesof Baker blew
themselves out for a few moments, Chris Evans took over with
statements equally forcefulbut less wide-ranging. Will Macdonald
waited judiciouslyfor a break to place his comments.
Danny Baker, born in Deptford, south London, was a rock jour-
nalist before going into television, writing and appearing in such
shows as Win, Lose or Draw and Pets Win Prizes. Chris Evans began
his career sorting mail at a Manchester commercial radio station.He
wrote scriptsfor Jonathan Ross before becoming a national figure
on Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast, followed by Don’t Forget Your
Toothbrush. Will Macdonald was educated at Eton and Brasenose
College, Oxford. We left reeling, overwhelmed by such enthusiasm
and energy.
ymMcG: How do you write it down?

CHRIS EVANS: OK, this is how we put it down. Danny andI are
very I similar, would say — wouldn’t you, Danny? — in putting it
down.
DANNY BAKER: In trying not to overcomplicatethe process, let’s

say.
200
CHRIS EVANS: This is a radio show.
jmcc: What, justa scrap of paper?

CHRIS EVANS: That’s it, yeah. The radio show has titles- memory
pegs — that help us remember certain subjects when we’re writing.
TFI Friday, obviously, because it’s telly, it’s got to be planned out.
We'll bring this listin and [’ll give it to Danny. Danny’ll have a
similar listto this. Then Danny’ll go and write the script, which is
usually about eight pages long. Will, here, will get that script with
Stephen John, the producer, and put it intoa 75-page script which
has got all the camera directions.But that’s how it starts,and it’s
immediate.
DANNY BAKER: The only person I’ve ever found who it works for
is Chris. It’s kind of refreshing,it’s almost the fear that drives you —
I always say you can only write if there’sa bike outside. For a long
time I was intimidated by what I saw as the professional, laser-
printed,way of doing it. But that meant nothing, because it wasn’t
actually very good ... Chris doesn’t find words that important.
Chris is actions. Chris is big pictures,big strokesof the pen...
CHRIS EVANS: Picturesin my head...
DANNY BAKER: I was doing Angus Deayton’s thing at the same

time. That is every dot; that is analysed. That is a way of working
that’s suffocating for me, although I can do it,I like it. But this is the
way I work: ‘Whooosh!’ — that’s it, leave it alone, walk away from it.
Even rehearsal is...
CHRIS EVANS: He rehearsesas littleas we need to...
DANNY BAKER: ... a it’s suffocating process.
CHRIS EVANS: ... so that we can still enjoy the jokes.
ymcG: And how do you feelin the middle of all this?

WILL MACDONALD: Well,I stop them taking their clothes off and
fighting naked in front of the fire, that’s where I stop them! The
interesting thing in what Danny was just saying is that televisionis
quite restrictive,because these two of course do radio...
DANNY BAKER: And that is the underlying thing:we work as close

to radio, which is where we both work best, as possible.And in fact
201
EVANS, BAKER AND MACDONALD 181
some weeks we have said in rehearsal: ‘Come on, everyone, it’s

radio.’ Even down to the point, I don’t know if it’s subconscious or
whatever, where the running joke we’ve got at the moment is drum-
mers, playing under blankets, behind screens. That’s radio.
CHRIS EVANS: The old cliché: the television we do is radio with

pictures.
WILL MACDONALD: The unfortunate factis that in radio you have

a microphone and you have your thoughts and you can do it.
Whereas in television,you have four days, you’ve got to tell the
cameraman, the lighting man...
DANNY BAKER: I had been entirely intimidatedby the television

process:you have to rehearse it; it has to be done this way; you must
stop the tape if something goes wrong, because the option of stop-
ping tape is there.I never had halfof the courage Chris has when he
actually does the presenting. When we started this, we said: ‘We
don’t stop. If there’sa mistake, we’ll get round it.’And we don’t
stop.A couple of times when it’s been literallylike the National
Grid’s gone down, that’sthe only thing that has ever stopped it.And
all of this may seem just nuts and bolts, but the jokes we do on the
show are ‘found’ humour. It is a soufflé:if you examine it, it’llfall
down. We’re saying:If you don’t like that bit of the show, here’s
something else.A lot of the criticism that ve read about the pro-
gramme is: “(hey don’t seem to takea lot of time,’as ifwe should be
creatinga new comedy, insteadof just doing a joke for a joke’s sake.
I do believe that— well, here we go. I knew we’d get round to this
— because of the overwhelming, out-of-all-proportion,public-
school influence on comedy, the working-class contributionto
comedy has been lost. It’s been lostin an insidiousway but in a very
real way, and it’s almost a comedy pogrom.
It took this show to really open my eyes to it. People think a it’s
defence mechanism, or that it’s what you put failure down to, say-
ing: ‘Oh, they’re justa clique.’But they don’t realiseit reallyzs like
that and there isa total distrustof what working-class people find
funny. The whole writer-performer thing isa bit of a curse; it’s like
Pandora’s box. There’s no reason why Ben Elton shouldn’tdo his
own stuff,but Galton and Simpson didn’t want to be Steptoe and
Son; Johnny Speight wasn’t Alf Garnett.
We call the shots, and if we find it funny we don’t care about the
chattering classes,or the whispering network, or the Daily Mail or
the Evening Standard that want to say: “Well, where do you fit in?
202
Oh, he was at Charterhouse .. . Oh, I know him.’ We don’t fit into

that,we don’t socialise with it, I’m a bleeding prat and we’re almost
militant about it, and that is why...
CHRIS EVANS: What do you mean, almost?
DANNY BAKER: The middle-class influence— I’m not talking from

the point of view of hanging them from the lamp-posts— is now
overwhelming: there is no other way. John Sullivan,who is — it’s
— interesting the best and the most productive, seems to be the
last
writer above it. But otherwise it’sin their intereststo make it a
science. I’m not afeared of a middle-class, public-school, university-
graduate influence, but the fact is it has dumbed television down,
because as we know most of the people who spin out of these places
are dizzy Roedean girlsor thick grammar-school boys. And that’s
all there is to it: they are achieving those positions now without any
worth.
WILL MACDONALD: That’s not an attack on me, it’san attack on

the system.I went to the same college as Michael Palin, although to
be mentioned in the same sentence as him...
DANNY BAKER: I’m not talking about university, I’m talking

about influence.
WILL MACDONALD: It’s about influenceand also about them feed-

ing off each other, because that lot are always together,and public-
school people and university people when they work together
always feed off each other.
DANNY BAKER: We don’t have anything to do with anyone else.

We don’t schmooze, we don’t do drugs, we don’t know the univer-
sity system and we do go to pubs. Now, I’ve been doing telly
twenty-two years,so it really a isn’t chip on my shoulder, it’s justa
realisationafter a long time of fucking around and wasting my time.
I fucked around,I wasted my time,I never took anything seriously.
I take this more seriouslythan any other show and yet it’s less hassle
than any other show. Finally you arrivein here, and you think:We
can do this.For the first time,I know what you mean, and you know
what we mean. It’s that coming together.
CHRIS EVANS: Will is exactly the same. We are three so different

characters. Danny and I have got more in common than me and
203
Evans, BAKER AND MACDONALD 183
Will, for example, but Danny’s a completely different animal from

me. He’s a book fiend, he’s a film fiend, he’s a knowledge fiend.I
hate all that shit, right?I love the fact that Danny’s got it and I learn
so much off Danny, every week of my life,and I learnso much off
Will, because he’s got this unbelievable academic educated mind.
And I'd like to think that we all learn something; it’sa real stimulat-
ing atmosphere that we’ve got going. And we have to actuallybe
careful when we see each other, because it’s exhausting. I’m
exhausted after I’ve been out with Danny, mentally and, usually,
physicallyas well.
DANNY BAKER: The cynicism at meeting level and studio level

towards comedy is almost like when comics get together. There’s
nevera laugh, it’s: “‘What’s that bit from? Where do I know that bit
from? Oh, I know what that bit is.” Now, we don’t do that.
The first recordI ever knew was a 10-inch.Max at the Met —- Max
Miller at the Metropolitan, Edgware Road. I always had comedy
albums, and I knew the words all the way through. Long before I
knew Sergeant Pepper, | knew the ‘Sunday Afternoon at Home’
Hancock. I just absorbed it. And also I’m fucking proud of it! Only
when I get to forty do IJ think: Jesus,I was reading Robert Benchley
at twelve? It’s no accident all these books are up there:I know them.
Consequently, when I arrivein media and people are writing
jokes I’m clever enough to adapt the old jokes and present them as
brand new. You can say that is getting away with something, or you
can say that’show comedy has always been. You can go back as far
as you want: Greek comedies, we’re still dressing them up. When I
came to tellingand writing the stuff there was a cynicism towards it.
I know loads of people who get the jokes, but they weren’t ‘clever’
enough, they didn’t pull the right levers for people who hadn’t had
the same background as me.
CHRIS EVANS: Danny is steeped in knowledge. There is not
enough room in his body for what he knows.
DANNY BAKER: But isn’t it interestinghow you interpret it:/

know it;you stealit. What’s that about?
CHRIS EVANS: Because you put the work in to know it, and I
didn’t.
DANNY BAKER: It’s not true.
204
CHRIS EVANS: Oh, it is completely true! You watch Sky Sports

Live and after you’ve watched loads of football matches liveI watch
Match of the Day and Match of the Day is you! I get all the high-
I lights! do the same with Will!I get littlebits of zoology. People
thinkI know about zoology!
_WILLMACDONALD: You area song-thrush, becausea song-thrush

gets all its songs off other birds.
DANNY BAKER: Me and Chris met up, and we did think this stuff
was funny.I believe there is a wonderful innocence about the TF
jokes — which are not allowed to breathe half the time because
people think: They should be doing better. Yeah, we could put more
time in it.We could hone it more, we could... but...
CHRIS EVANS: But the spontaneityand the energy are what wins,I
think, and the naturalness of it. You'll never write a conversation as
good as this one, ever. You'll never write a conversation as good as
being in a pub. Nobody can write dialogue like dialogue writes itself.
We try to re-createreal life, which is very difficult.And you’re start-
ing from the third-place podium, and you’re never going to get to
the first place. So what we try and do is leaveas much room there as
possible, know where we’re going, and, also, we don’t write many
punch lines. More funny things than jokes.
WILL MACDONALD: This is about expectation levels, as well, isn’t

it? You listen to Chris’s radio show and that is, like he says, dia-
logue, thatis conversation. You couldn’t write that stuff.But as soon
as you get to the television show, you take all of the dialogue that
you’ve just said on the radio, but you then say: ‘Well, actually,you
can’tdo that,’and you go away and start analysing it...
CHRIS EVANS: You sanitise it; you want to cut down the risk
because sometimes you have a dull conversation,but by cutting
down the lows you cut down the potentialfor the highs.
DANNY BAKER: Here there’sno constant, which is quite good. As

we say, we'll have a meeting here on Tuesday. I usually write an
show eighty-per-cent-different on the
Wednesday sitting down, and
then when I bring it on the Friday it'll again be re-inventedby
another fiftyper cent when Chris sees it. So there are three versions
we've come up with, and then the show goes on the air and it’syet
more different.
205
CHRIS EVANS: We’re not that bothered, because we know it’s

going to be all right anyway. It just will be all right. You know
straight away when something’s going to work. You just know.
DANNY BAKER: Television is all meetings, and you really don’t

need four days to get a show like ours together.You don’t. It’s the
truth that dare not speak its name. One day. We could come in ona
Friday and do it,we really could. Providing the physical things
could be pulled.
CHRIS EVANS: That’s why we said four-day production, because if

we want a fork-lifttruck they’ve got to go and get one. We come up
with something likea toy and we just leave it there and say: “That’s
it. Look at that.’ Great questions are better than their answers. When
you pose a great question, you don’t really want to know the
answer, because the answer’s not going to be as good as the question,
because it’s probably a reasonable answer, which is dull. We want to
be left with the funny thought...
DANNY BAKER: Why did Kamikaze pilots wear crash helmets?
CHRIS EVANS: Yeah, exactly.
DANNY BAKER: Somebody rang in and said, ‘In factit was for the
I radio.’ said:‘I don’t want to know...’
CHRIS EVANS: I don’t want to know the answer. I’m not interested
in the answer.
DANNY BAKER: Exactly. All we try to do is get that souffléup

there and get it on the air beforeit all falls down. It reallyis just this
hour of stuff that we don’t think about one second after it’s gone off
the air and we trust nobody else does. Yeah, that was good, that was
it, and there we go.
CHRIS EVANS: ‘The nowness of now...
WILL MACDONALD: One of the most exciting things that hap-

pened was when half an hour, twenty minutes, before the show,
Bjérk, who was going to do a ten-minute interview and a song,
turned up, said: ‘I’m in a bad mood. Don’t want to be I interviewed.
still want to do the song.’We said: ‘Don’t do it,’so we stillhad
fifteen minutes of the show to fill...
206
CHRIS EVANS: We told her not to bother doing the song and sent
her home...
WILL MACDONALD: It was genuinely exciting. Nobody was run-

ning around like people normally do in television, going: “Oh, my
God! We can’tdo this! We’ve got time to fill!’ Everyone was going:
_ ‘This is brilliant.We’ve got fifteen minutes. Suddenly we’ve got this
freedom that we don’t normally have, to do things.’
CHRIS EVANS: ‘There’sno better time when you’re doing your job
than when you really start to earn your money. And you don’t earn
that between nine and five: you earn it from probably, one minute a
week, at some point. And that was the bit we got paid for that week.
I thought: Ooh, we’re earning our money.
The way we write the televisionshow is differentfrom the way we
write the radio.We have to do the stuff that we don’t like doing.
Because we don’t like the mechanics of putting it down. When you
got the thought you had the fun in your head, and now you're going
to put it on paper.
DANNY BAKER: You were asking earlieron: how do you get the
thought down? I could do that. Chris can’t.And I think his isa purer
way of working.I actuallycan sit there at a screen and finish some-
thing. Whereas Chris is so impatient: ‘I’ve got it now; that’s in the
bag. Pll come back to that.’And he won’t. He’s done stacksof stuff:
‘T’m in the middle of this thing.’And I know he’s not going to finish
it, and he knows he’s not going to finish it, but it’s that capricious-
ness that startedit in the first place.
CHRIS EVANS: I mean to finish it, but I know I can, and therefore
I just won’t, because I can’t be arsed. I’ve done it.In my head, yeah.
DANNY BAKER: When we sit here and we’ve got to do TFI Friday
we really will say, ‘Let’s just have a quick one,’ and we reallydo
shoot round the corner for a half.We are not, in the old-fashioned
sense, professionallike that.We will not sit here until the job is done.
We will go out and trust something will turn up.
CHRIS EVANS: And it always does.
DANNY BAKER: We really want to do this show four timesa week.

TFI Friday should be a nightly show. It has that Big Breakfast feel:
‘Look, don’t lean on the jokes too much, they’re just here, and here
207
comes another one.’ But the machinations of television and Chris’s

status see to it that it has to be this kind of show.
CHRIS EVANS: Recently Channel 4 said: ‘We want you to come up

with some new shows for us,’ and I said: ‘Well, to be honest, we’re
not a factory and we don’t churn out cars that all look the same.’I
said: “You’ve got a thousand production companies in Britain: they
can all do that for you. What we want to do is the next thing. Not
the next show, the next I thing.’ do think the futureof tellyis shows
that are on five days a week. They’re doing it in America, and their
daily shows are better than our weekly shows. One reason they’re
betteris because your expectationis lower, because a it’s daily show.
And the whole thing about Vic and Bob, for example.I love Vic and
Bob. I think they’re dead funny. And they’ll work towards a new
comedy a series, six-parter,and the expectationis so high, by the
time it gets on the screen it’sgot no fucking chance, you know what
I mean? Because your levelof expectationis just too high.
If only you could get a TV show that people were willing to put
up with for as long as they were willingto put up with a boring foot-
ball match in the hope that in the last minute out of eighty-nine
something might fucking happen . . . those European matches that
get ten or eleven million viewers on ITV. Crap games, right? And
you watch these things, and your girlfriend says,or your wife says:
‘Ts it good?’ “This isa crap game. This is just not good.’ They must
be thinking: Well, why are you fucking watching it? But it’s the
explosivenessof a goal as well.
DANNY BAKER: The people who just get on the mike in comedy
clubs are the worst thing that’s happened to comedy. “Oh, it’s easy.
Anyone can do it.’ No, they fucking can’t. No, they can’t. They
really can’t. The fact is thatI should have been doing this twenty
years ago insteadof doing my own programmes. They should have
said: “You’re one of the best writers around. We’re going to put you
with Chris. You go together.’ But no, it had to be: you do your own
material,he does his own I material, do . . . so consequently there
will never be a—
CHRIS EVANS: Premier League of writers,you mean.
DANNY BAKER: Yeah, we’ll never get there. In the States, of

course, it’s fairly respectedand paid...
CHRIS EVANS: Because they know it works.
208
DANNY BAKER: Here nobody cares who writes jokes. People still
say at TFI: ‘Oh, what are you doing here?’
CHRIS EVANS: And they say that to me, occasionally, which is

more—
DANNY BAKER: But that’s it! Nobody cares. . . The preciousness

of comedy, I find it fascinating.It’s just behind the news department
_ for being puffed up anda little too grand for itself.And, likeI say,
we do the longest run on television with TFI Friday and other
people say: ‘Oh, we’re doing six programmes...”
jmMcG: You’ve never written a sitcom?

DANNY BAKER: No, I’m going to and it willbe extremely quick...
The most complex script I’ve written, something like the Comedy
Awards, I’ll write in an hour and a half, from beginning to end, and
there’llbe some great jokes in there, but it has to be the right hour
and a half. So it is the three weeks walking around, scratching your
arse, thinking,I think I’ll write the Comedy Awards in a minute, is
probably part of that process. But the actual, physical sweat pours
out from under my arms. I sit there— and I can have noise:I can do
it in the middle of Oxford Street— and it will take an hour and a half.
So a sitcom, when it happens, it'll be one of those things I can
yrite .-.:.
I believe that British comedy is as strong as American comedy in
totally different ways. Without I exception believe great British sit-
coms have been grotesques,or I class-based. can’t think of one that
isn’t. There just isn’t one, because we don’t like each other, class-
wise. So you make an upper-class person or a working-class person
a grotesque. They try these things like Friends,but they come across,
still,like ‘Anyone for tennis?’But if you put Friends with a cast from
Surrey, or from Deptford, or from Edinburgh, it wouldn’t be
Friends; that’s what people don’t appreciate.
CHRIS EVANS: The most fun we have and the biggest laughs that
we have are on the Tuesday in the meeting, right? After that,to be
honest,it is downhill, because that is when you think of the joke.
So what we try and do is get that moment on the air. So it’s likea de-
construction kind of thing. So, under-written, everything is under-
written.
DANNY BAKER: You've got to have pretty big boots on to change

comedy. This century there’s only been, like, ten... I do think all
209
the good people, whether it’s Ben Elton or whoever you want to
mention ... Stephen Fry ... all the people know, ‘Look, this stuffis
like dynamite, and it’s wet... That’s wet dynamite, and we don’t
want to touch it. It’s going to blow up on us.’
We always refer to the show as ‘our little monkey show’. And
we mean that we think it’s really good, but we don’t think it’s
come to change the world. The pure brief was to do something
that’sa laugh on Friday night. There’s sniping: ‘Oh: TFI Friday.
Probably whatever Chris and Danny found funny in the pub on
Thursday.’ And I feel like saying: ‘You’re absolutely right. You
know why? Because he’s Chris Evans and I’m Danny Baker. We’re
not two blokes in the pub, going: “Haa, look at her over there!”
No, you’re talking about Chris Evans and Danny Baker. You’re
fucking straight it’s what we find funny in the pub on Thursday.
Slick, absolutely, yeah!’
DB: Does it ever happen that something does go wrong actually

during the performance?
CHRIS EVANS: No, because nothing can . . . If something goes
wrong it can only add to our show. It can never take away from it.
DANNY BAKER: Yeah, I think that’s true. Well, God, we’ve had
stuff that doesn’t work before. That’s all right.But so what?
CHRISEVANS: We still think it’s funny.I can’t remember one thing

out of two years that hasn’t been funny, that hasn’t worked.
DANNY BAKER: But there’s loads of stuff that doesn’t make it from
second rehearsal. We say: ‘Lose that.’ Now, fortunately, we do have
the clout and the budget to say ‘Drop it’, even though it’s costa lot
of money.
ps: Do you learn from what you’ve done, as well? Do you

watch the rerun?
DANNY BAKER: No. Never. Never, ever, ever.
CHRIS EVANS: I don’t watch it.

DANNY BAKER: ‘The only time everI am overruled is by Chris and
the only time he is overruledis by me.
CHRIS EVANS: Will’s part of the whole equation.
210
190 Now THAT’s FUNNY! —re
DANNY BAKER: We are like this, and Will is not like this. That’s
why Will sits there.
CHRIS EVANS: Somebody’s got to put all this down and it ain’t
going to be us two.
WILL_MACDONALD: Yeah, I put it down, fuck it up, whatever you

want.
DANNY BAKER: It must be real hard, because I wouldn’t like to

knock this kind of stuff that we have, this bombast that masks itself
as being right all the time, but nevertheless have to pitch a corner. It
would be murder!
CHRIS EVANS: Also, we cover for each other. If I’m having a bad
day ona Friday (of which I’ve had a few), he ups the ante, and I do
the same.
DANNY BAKER: That’s exactly right, exactly right.
JMcG: So you’re equals?

DANNY BAKER: Without a doubt. I’ve never known a relationship
like it, working with anyone. Usually you sit there, and the script
sits there, and you’re out of the process. You’re never, ever out of
the process on this.
CHRIS EVANS: Come to the rehearsals ... The first rehearsal’s the
best one, because if it goes well we don’t do a dress rehearsal.
WILLMACDONALD: But then also, actually, during the show itself,

we talk about rewriting on a Friday, but that rewriting happens in
the second ad-break, after two parts of the show have already been
done. If we find out we’re three minutes overrunning and we have
to basically rewritea whole part,we do that in the ad-break before
it goes out — and we’re in the middle of a programme, so that process
stillgoes on actually during the programme itself.
DB: Real time, do you mean?

WILL MACDONALD: Yeah, we do the show and record it, but it’s
‘as live’. Basically.
DANNY BAKER: One thing about this show more than any other
programme around, it has very little romance about the craftof
211
writing.I was a victim of it for a long time. I sat upstairs writing
comedy; I tried it on my wife: ‘When a writer looks out of the win-
dow, he’s working . . .’ Every writer tries that once, don’t they?
Oooh, you only try it once, because it doesn’t work in real life.
There is no romance about it because neitherof us have any time...
When someone says: ‘I was in a writers’ meeting,’a lot of people
think: Oh, I’d love to be in that— a writer’s meeting! Tossing ideas
around. Here, there is no writers’ meeting. There’sa bit of shouting
for forty-five minutes, and then we go away and make callsto each
other. Writing is the wrong word for us — it’s talking...
WILL MACDONALD: That’s one of the first thingsI learned from

Chris, because obviously, with the kind of upbringingI had, I was
under a mountain of paper. So when I first sat down and came up
with an idea for Chris, and he said, ‘Come on, let’s write,’I thought
literally:pen, paper, typewriter, keyboard . . . But no, writing is
about the germ of the idea.
DANNY BAKER: There is an arrogance that comes with working in

comedy. It’s puffed up; it’s Masonic, almost...
CHRIS EVANS: But that’s because it’s the currency of seduction,

isn’t it, comedy?
DANNY BAKER: Yeah, yeah, there’s all that side. Close-up magic,
yeah.
CHRIS EVANS: It’s the currency of seduction. If you can make

people laugh, you can get women to bed, you can do business deals,
you become popular.It is the best currency ...
DANNY BAKER: My favourite newspaper headline: “Laugh them

into bed with Eddie Large’— that was it!
CHRIS EVANS: It’s true, though, isn’tit? It’s true.If you can make
people laugh, that is it, mate. The world is your fucking oyster.
DANNY BAKER: It is.
215
David Bradbury,born in Lancashire,was
educatedat Haberdashers’Aske’s
Hampstead Schooland Manchester
Unversity.During a long careerin Fleet
he Street, was editorial executive, television
critic, political reporterand foreign
correspondentbased in Parisand New
York- untilhe was firedby Robert
Maxwell.He now writes comedies with
Joe McGrath.
Joe McGrath, educatedat Glasgow School

of Art and Royal Collegeof Art,has
worked onextensively films, stageand
a astelevision withwriter-director leading
comedy infigures Britainand the United
HeStates. won BAFTA Awardson three
occasions, received the Standard Award
for best film comedy, Rising Damp, and
was ofco-author the Oscar-winning
animated short film Great!.
methuen Aumour
| Jacket & design by photography Gary Day-Ellison
216
Command by performances comic geniuses.
top Britain’s comedy writing talentof the last
half century togetherin one volume:
Denis Norden lan Pattison

Take It From Here Rab C. Nesbitt
Spike Milligan Graham Linehan
The Goon Show & Arthur Mathews
Johnny Speight Father Ted
Till DeathUs Do Part Charlie Higson
Ray & Galton Alan Simpson The Fast Show
Hancock’s Half Hour ArabellaWeir
Keith Waterhouse Does My Bum Look Big in This?
BillyLiar Caroline Aherne
Barry Cryer The Mrs Merton Show
The Kenny EverettShow John Morton
Eddie Braben People LikeUs
The Morecambe & Wise Show Chris Evans,
Michael Palin Danny Baker& Will Macdonald
Monty Python’s Flying Circus TFI Friday
John Sullivan
Only Fools and Horses
Richard Curtis
Four Weddingsand a Funeral
VictoriaWood | 0-413-725
Dinnerladies
Paul Merton
Have I Got News forYou 9 |

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1

by DAVID BRADBURY & JOE McGRATH

Keith Waterhouse,Barry Cryer,

Python’s Flying Circusto Father Ted, comic

writingfor radio, and television filmhas

In this book of interviewsDavid Bradbury

The writersand writer/performers

Drawings by Joe McGrath

Random House Australia (Pty) Limited

Copyright © David Bradbury and Joe McGrath 1998

The rightof David Bradbury and Joe McGrath to be identifiedas the

Methuen Publishing Limited Reg. No. 3543167

A CIP catalogue record for this book

ISBN 0 413 72520 0

Typeset by SX Composing DTP, Rayleigh, Essex

This original paperback editionis sold subjectto the condition that it

Papers used by Methuen Publishing Limited are natural, recyclable

From David to Jane

Paul Merton — As seriousas any art form

David Bradbury and Joe McGrath

Practitionersmake a distinction between film and tape in the pro-

There are several references in the interviews to Dennis Main

known to the general public. Wilson was the most influentialand

We owe a debt of gratitudeto Samantha Hill, who transcribedthe

referencesto Frank as he made them, in the present tense. After

DENIS NORDEN: What’s the most difficult part of writing

DB: Well, it’s interestingto people who are trying to write.

or, when we’re on a project,six or seven days a week. I set myselfa

jmcc: Do you preferto work alone or with a partner?

wrong thing. Most farces work on a common agreement that it

JMcG: What about Eth? What was her secret?

DB: What are you working on at present?

pB: Do you keep them and use them again?

ps: Are there any rules for comedy?

jmcG: Is there anybody you rate highly now?

jmcG: Which writersdo you admire?

jmcG: Is there something that you really want to do now?

an officein Conduit Street.So he came up — nice, ordinary-looking

A finger of God somewhere

The anarchic tendency in British comedy was represented in the

Edgington, mentioned in the interview, was a comrade in the

SPIKE MILLIGAN: My early influences were Edward Lear,

There was a young man called Edser,

That was the first comic verse I ever wrote...

DB: Derek Roy?

JMcG: You inventeda complete world.

ymcG: Which we did together.

jmMcc: And you did some characters, like Little Jim.

DB: Do you have a work routine?

ps: Do you decide that you’re going to do, say, a thousand

next one is The Homosexual Hound of the Baskervilles.

Owooo0000h, wow, woof, woof! They wouldn’t accept it, because

ps: Is that how collaboratorsare helpfulto you?

JmcG: That is Jack Hobbs in a nutshell.If anything was going to

SPIKE MILLIGAN: Yeah. But it didn’t happen to him. It happened

DB: Do you see yourself as different people doing different

I’ve got a three-leggeddog,

jmcc: You used to go to Twickenham when Ireland were playing.

‘Now, this thing here is a Rugby ball.”And a voice said: ‘Jaysus.