Mike Craig was producing a quaint little radio series called Local Tales, which was basically a stand up show by old time comedian and raconteur Tom Mennard. It was very funny stuff. Not exactly cutting edge, but definitely funny. Mike introduced him to Rob and Doug, in the BBC bar, of course.
‘Tom was a naturally funny guy, with a unique and distinct delivery. He was always “on”. But not one of those annoying, not-really-very-funny people who are always straining to get a laugh: he was actually funny. He would play practical jokes constantly, weaving some fantastical story to innocent, hapless bystanders without making them the butt of the joke. I once saw him on his knees outside a closed lift door, shouting “Well how did you get stuck down there?” That kind of thing.’
Mike suggested that Rob and Doug write a sitcom for Tom. ‘It sort of put us in a bit of a spot,’ Rob recalls, ‘On the one hand, we were desperate to cut our sitcom teeth, on the other hand, we wanted to do something new and different. Tom was very much in the vaudeville tradition. It didn’t feel like a good fit. On the other, other hand, we weren’t exactly beating off sitcom offers with a stick.’
They went away and thought about it. In the end, they came up with an idea they thought they could live with. Tom would play the handyman in an Old People’s home, peopled with quirky inmates. But there would be surreal elements. All authority figures, for instance, would be played by musical instruments.
‘I have no idea where that came from, or why anyone ever agreed to it. The home’s matron was played by a violin. The truth is, as I recall, nobody batted an eyelid.’
They wrote a pilot. The plot revolved around Tom inadvertently burying one of the residents in a gardening accident.
Mike cast the show. He’d already recruited Anthea Askey, who was a pal of Tom’s. She was the daughter of comedy legend Arthur Askey, who’d been an incredibly popular performer in the heyday of radio and early days of television.
‘I’m not quite sure why he was so popular,’ Rob admits, ‘I haven’t seen an awful lot of his stuff, but I don’t remember enjoying it as a kid. I think you probably had to be there. He was “of his time”, I guess. He had these catchphrases that made no sense to my generation: “Hello Playmates” and “I thank you”, which was pronounced like: Ah thag yew. When he was on TV he used to wink at the camera. I just didn’t get him.’
In any case, Anthea was part of the package. Rob and Doug had no idea what she could do, comedically, so they wrote her in as the house keeper/cook. Mike had also said he could recruit Ballard Berkeley, who was just fresh from his portrayal of the Major in Fawlty Towers.
‘We were thrilled with the prospect of working with someone who’d been involved in such a classic show, who had probably shared a coffee pot with the great John Cleese himself. It was a poorly thought-through decision. Again, we had no idea what else he could do, so we were sort of forced to cast him as a military type. All these decisions were taken before we’d written the pilot. It was a really arse-about-tit way of putting a cast together.’
The final part wasn’t cast until the script was completed. David Ross was cast as the resident who gets inadvertently buried, Mr. Pettigrew. ‘Mike knew David from heaven-knows-where, but he assured us he was a genuinely funny actor, and he was right.’ David Ross would later go on to play the first incarnation of Kryten in Red Dwarf.
‘This was our first sitcom, remember. It was what we’d been gunning for right from the start. It was thrilling and scary. We recorded it at the BBC theatre in Hulme.
Aaben Cinema, Hulme
Rob recalls: ‘Hulme was a scary place: the original concrete jungle. A high rise planning nightmare, built in the sixties, straight out of Our Friends in the North. There were two wonderful things in Hulme: the Aaben Cinema, which showed some of the more obscure (for Manchester) European movies, and the BBC playhouse theatre, where the live comedy shows were recorded.
‘Doug always used to drag us to the Aaben to see foreign films. Often, they were unfathomable – I’ll never forgive him, for instance, for Claire’s Knee, or Jules et Jim – but often enough, they were stunningly original and life-changing movies. I thought Seven Beauties, by Lina Wertmüller was one of the finest films ever made, though in Rotten Tomatoes, it’s listed as one of the worst. Go figure. Still, you had to balance the experience against the prospect of emerging from the theatre to find your car had been stolen or vandalised, or having the crap kicked out of you by local thugs.
Ron McDonnell once found himself alone in the carpark: the last man leaving after a show. It was a bitterly cold night, and the lock on the driver’s door was frozen. He just couldn’t get his key to turn. A group of rowdy folk started crossing the carpark in his direction, making little secret of their intent to relieve him of his worldly possessions, including, very possibly, his teeth. With commendable self-possession, Ron swiftly unzipped and urinated into the lock. It did the trick. He got into his car just in time to preserve his wallet and his dental work.’
Rob remembers the pilot: ‘I watched the recording from the audience with a weird kind of frozen horror grin on my face, eyes wide open, rictus grin, every sinew in my body stretched to snapping point, willing every line, every inflection, every nuance to get a laugh. Mercifully, that’s pretty much how it went. Tom was splendid, David was hilarious. Even the bloody violin got laughs. Amazing. What a night!’
The show was commissioned by Radio 4 for a series of six.
‘We still didn’t really have a title. The pilot was recorded under the dreadful placeholder name: No Place Like A Home. It was an awful title, a fact which, incidentally did not prevent somebody actually using it for a BBC sitcom a few years later. I think that show featured Martin Clunes’ TV debut. We had a terrible time trying to come up with something better. God’s Waiting Room was mooted, but it seemed a little bleak. Not quite as bleak as Waiting For Death, which was also discussed. Finally, we came up with Wrinkles, which we liked. It sort of referred to the old thing, but suggested quirky plot lines. And we certainly used quirky plotlines.’
Rob remembers working on the show as a lot of fun. ‘They were a nice bunch of people. They always said complimentary things about the scripts, and just being around Tom was a priceless experience.’
For the series, more characters were created. One regular was Gordon Salkilld, who played relentless pessimist Arnold. His laconic, deadpan delivery was probably an influence in the development of Red Dwarf computer, Holly. (Gordon also later appeared in Red Dwarf, as Holly’s chess-playing computer partner).
‘It was a fun, daft series, with one foot in the past and another foot waving insanely in the air. It had a kind of surreal quality to it, I guess. I remember some journalist wrote he had to pull over his car when he was listening to it on the radio, because he found it so disorienting. When it was funny, it was very funny indeed. If you didn’t get it, you probably thought it was the worst thing ever.’
Sadly, most people didn’t get it. The first show achieved the second worst G.E. (General Evaluation score, a sort of audience appreciation index) in the history of radio.
‘I don’t remember the exact score, but it was in the very low twenties (out of a hundred): possibly even less than that. The number 19 actually rings a bell. The only show that ever beat us was a Radio One quiz where they had the wrong answers to the questions. It was a distressing result. Mercifully, we got a letter from the Controller of Radio, David Hatch, who gave the show, and us a massive vote of confidence, which was absolutely wonderful of him, and I began to feel marginally less suicidal. We got a reasonably respectable review from Gillian Reynolds in the Telegraph. It was also, bizarrely, reviewed on a highbrow critical show – Critic’s Forum, I think it was called – on Radio 3 or 4. Half the panel wanted us strung up, but the other half were kinder. There were enough original elements at least to create reasonable doubt, I think. We’d occasionally given Tom ‘thought bubble’ moments, and there was talk about it being comic strip on radio. We survived.’
They did better than survive, in fact. Radio 4 commissioned a second series.
Nick Maloney, from Cliché played a new regular character in series 2: Lewis, a former lighthouse keeper. ‘The premise was: he’d spent so much time alone in his lighthouse, he had no volume control. All he did was shout. He shouted everything. That was his character. I can’t say it worked tremendously well. All of the characters in the show, except Tom, were utterly one-dimensional. I don’t know how good it was for the listeners, but it was fantastic training for us as writers. If characters can only do one thing, it’s hard not to keep them consistent.’
Rob and Doug were beginning to get quite busy.
‘Our workload was starting to build, now. We were working on most of Mike’s shows, we had Cliché in the pot, we had a regular commission on the News Huddlines, we’d started dabbling in TV sketch shows. We were actually very close to making a respectable living from writing. We’d almost reached a level where we didn’t have to engage silent running mode whenever the landlord called round for rent, where we’d all have to duck below window level and make sure we weren’t in the eyeline of the letterbox and freeze until we’d heard the footsteps clanging down the metal stairs. Not a great way to live, frankly. But that was almost behind us. Not quite, but almost.’
As a product of this enhanced workload, some of the scripts were delivered fairly close to the deadest of deadlines.
‘There was one weekend where we had to write an entire show. It was Saturday morning, and the cast were coming in for rehearsals on Sunday at ten. We always recorded two shows an evening. One show was delivered. We had no idea what the second show would be. When we started writing a show, we’d just sit around, smoking endless cigarettes, throwing ideas at each other until something stuck. We had a few ideas that had been hanging around, but nothing we felt particularly confident about. It’s tough to write an idea you don’t have faith in. It’s especially tough if you have to write it insanely quickly. Lunch came and went. The sun went down. Still, we hadn’t settled on a plot idea. In those days, of course, we were using a typewriter. Word processors were still a little way off. I think it was an electronic typewriter, so you could erase the last 30 characters or something like that. How bewitchingly hi-tech that seemed. What that meant was, you were less prepared to try stuff out. If it turned out bad, you couldn’t edit it, you just had to rip the pages up and start again. It definitely affected the way you worked. It was gone midnight, and we still had nothing. We’d had a lot of coffee and cigarettes, and our stomachs were not in great shape. On top of that, we were fighting off panic. All these good people were going to turn up in a few hours, and there’d be no script. Nightmare. It was in the wee small hours when we finally hit on a plot idea we could live with. We wrote the script in about six hours. We were laughing like idiots most of the time, in a kind of sleep-deprived, coffee-induced, panic-laced euphoria. I think you hit a point at about 4 in the morning, where your brain starts making crazy connections. The script we produced seemed hilarious to us. It wasn’t exactly an ingenious story, or anything. Basically, it was Tom doing his nightly rounds, and we got a glimpse of all the residents’ dreams, that was all. Astonishingly, everyone else involved liked it, too. We went through the read-through, and then the rehearsals and then the recordings without even having time to shower or change our clothes. God only knows what we smelled like. It turned out to be my favourite shows of the entire series. Anyway, crisis averted. That was the second quickest half-hour script we ever wrote.’
