Raising Laughter (eBook)

Chapter Two

1971

January

The year kicked off with a show that was only really beginning to establish itself with audiences but would soon become a fixture for the remainder of the decade, The Liver Birds. It also saw the early flowering of one of Britain’s most popular sitcom writers, Carla Lane.

A Liverpudlian housewife, Carla didn’t know she could write comedy. ‘I didn’t know I could write much at all. I just wrote a lot of poetry.’1 It was at a local writers’ club that she met Myra Taylor and together they began coming up with funny little sketches. Never imagining it was possible to become a professional writer, some of these sketches were sent to the BBC and one idea in particular, about two Liverpool girls sharing a bedsit, a sort of female version of The Likely Lads, landed on the desk of Michael Mills.

Produced as a pilot in April 1969, Carla remembers watching it at home. ‘I was embarrassed because I didn’t know whether it was good, bad or indifferent. I was so scared. I liked it because I’d written it and thought a lot about it, but I was really nervous and troubled when the first one came out, but people were so kind about it.’2

Happy with the result, Mills commissioned a series but suggested that Carla and Myra be given a mentor and so an experienced writer was brought in called Lew Schwarz, who’d written for Dick Emery and The Army Game. ‘They gave me someone who taught me the rules of television,’ says Carla. ‘And by the end of that first series I knew exactly what I was doing. It was amazing the things I didn’t know. It was all very exciting, but it was also very frightening. But after a while it just slowly settled upon me that I could do it, you’re a writer, don’t argue against it, just pick up your pen and do another episode.’3

Television at that time was such a male-dominated environment that at meetings and script conferences Carla was usually the only woman in the room. Certainly, she wasn’t involved in things such as casting. ‘I wasn’t important enough. I was very much the shy, quiet writer in the corner, frightened of everybody.’4 Intimidated by everything that was going on, Carla kept a low profile during those early days until one of the actors at rehearsals gave a bad line reading and she found herself putting her hand up. ‘I half expected to get my head bitten off, instead she was so charming and so thoughtful about it and from that time on I knew where I was. I just needed someone to give me the belief that I was reasonably important.’5

With women beginning to enjoy new freedoms at the start of the 1970s, both financially and sexually, The Liver Birds followed the exploits of Dawn and Beryl, played by Pauline Collins and Polly James, their trials and tribulations with boyfriends, work, parents and each other. For Carla the most important thing was for the characters to speak with an authentic voice. ‘I wanted to get it right. I didn’t want to write anything that women wouldn’t say or that men would find trivial.’6

When the show returned in January 1971 for a second series, Collins had joined the cast of ITV’s Upstairs, Downstairs. Fortunately, producer Sydney Lotterby remembered working with Nerys Hughes on an episode of The Likely Lads and offered her the part of Beryl’s new flatmate Sandra. So began the show’s golden era, with Nerys’ more refined character contrasting nicely with the streetwise Beryl. Indeed, much of the reason behind the success of The Liver Birds was due to the chemistry between the two actresses, who became firm friends in real life. ‘We sparked off each other so much,’ recalls Nerys. ‘And we used to improvise a lot, too. Later on, Carla didn’t like that, she wanted the scripts how she had written them. And we thrived on a live audience because what you get from an audience is waves of love. But you don’t play to them as if to a theatre audience because then it comes across as overacting on the telly. You play as if the audience is eavesdropping on your conversation.’7

It was a very friendly company, everyone got on and had fun. Nerys and Polly always threw a party for the cast and the technicians after recording was finished on the Saturday night. ‘Half the time when we were doing the rehearsals, we’d be working out what to give them all to eat,’ recalls Nerys.8

The city of Liverpool itself played an important role in the series. The opening titles, accompanied by a theme song by The Scaffold, a group that included Paul McCartney’s brother, Mike, features the famous waterfront, notably the two sculpted birds perched atop each tower of the Royal Liver Building at Pier Head, from which the series takes its name.

All location shooting was always done first in Liverpool before recording went ahead in the studio. At one point, Nerys gave birth to a son and knew that in the opening episode of the forthcoming series she was going to have to be seen in a bikini. She had something like six weeks to get her weight down and flatten her stomach:

By the third series Myra Taylor left the show and Carla took over main script duties of what was now one of the BBC’s biggest comedy hits. ‘They couldn’t get enough of them. I was amazed at the reception it got. I never got over it.’10 Nerys recalls being recognised everywhere she went, but the reaction was never a negative, it was always genuine and warm. ‘There was no starriness about us, we were ordinary, and so the reaction people had was that they thought they knew us.’11

With a hit show behind her, Carla was now living in a world that she never anticipated and being treated with an importance that was often baffling. ‘People used to say, “Is it alright if I speak to Carla?” Is it alright, I used to think, what are they on about?’12 Something else that turned out to be a surprise was how much value was placed on the writer, and how involved they were throughout the entire process. It got to a point where Carla used to deliberately stay away from the studios sometimes, only to get a phone call, ‘Are you coming in today?’ and she’d say, ‘Well, I decided to give you a break,’ and they’d answer, ‘We don’t need a break, we’d like you to be here, we want to get it right.’13

In 1976, when Polly James left the show, Sydney Lotterby was faced yet again with the challenge of finding another new leading actress to keep the series going. As luck would have it, Nerys Hughes had just seen a new Willy Russell play:

Elizabeth’s feisty, flame-haired Carol also brought along with her an extended and dysfunctional family – the Boswells, clearly the inspiration for Carla Lane’s 1980s series Bread.

While Carla never thought The Liver Birds ever lost its energy or became stale, by series nine in 1978 the time had come to call it a day. ‘I just felt there was somewhere else I had to go. I wanted to be a bit more serious. To be honest, I didn’t want to be a comedy writer to begin with. I like the drama of life. I never can write without putting drama in.’15 By 1978 Carla had already begun work on perhaps her most accomplished sitcom, Butterflies, which beautifully balanced both comedy and drama.

Carla did try to introduce more dramatic elements into The Liver Birds but always found resistance, with the emphasis on it remaining lighthearted. Although she did succeed in bringing in a few realistic scenarios, such as getting the girls to think about longer-term relationships with men and giving Sandra a boyfriend, which provided an early role for future Bergerac star John Nettles.

Nerys, too, felt that the series had come to a natural end:

In 1996, seventeen years after the final episode was broadcast, the BBC revived the series, reuniting Polly’s Beryl and Nerys’ Sandra as they contemplated life after divorce. It was...