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Pen pals - Lawrence Marks and Maurice Gran and The New Statesman

Published Wednesday 19 April 2006 at 11:10 by Tony Cooke

Veteran writers Lawrence Marks and Maurice Gran have brought their most memorable hit, The New Statesman, to the stage. The friends tell Tony Cooke why they have turned their back on TV

B’Stard is back. It’s unlikely many other regional theatre tours could pique the interest of the national press quite like the return of The New Statesman has but then Alan B’Stard is a fully fledged cultural icon. In fact, it is probably the corrupt MP who will remain longest in the public’s memory among creators Lawrence Marks and Maurice Gran’s enviable canon of comedy inventions.

But if the sight of Rik Mayall in that pinstriped suit makes it feel like the clocks have turned back 20 years, underneath things have changed, not least for the two writers themselves.

Taking a break between rehearsals for the 15-date tour, Marks and Gran make it clear that for them this is not about nostalgia, rather the start of a new chapter.

“We didn’t offer it to television. We are now really besotted with theatre,” says Gran, adding: “This is our second play after Playing God last year at Alan Aykbourn’s Stephen Joseph Theatre - and to do something like this every night, we just love it.”

When we speak, the pair are buoyed by early ticket sales in the ‘hot cakes’ league, with four of the week-long stops on the tour already sold out. “They’re talking about nothing else in Stoke-on-Trent,” deadpans Gran but it seems this is genuine vindication for their new choice of direction.

However, it’ll be business as usual for B’Stard on stage, despite a change of political allegiance. Gran comments: “We are running like mad to keep up with New Labour - they are making our lives quite difficult because obviously there are satirists at Number 10 and we’ve got to compete with them.”

The original New Statesman ITV series was part of a purple patch for Marks and Gran, one that stretched over two decades. Marks remembers: “There was never a chance to say, look guys, we are going to do a stage play. Throughout the eighties we were on a very pleasant treadmill of returning TV series after series. Holding the Fort we did three series, Shine on Harvey Moon we did five, Relative Strangers went to about two, Birds of a Feather was… forever and a day.”

The nineties continued in much the same vein, although the pair tended to create hit comedy series, such as Goodnight Sweetheart, then pass them on to other writers while they looked for their next big idea.

The roots of this comedy hit factory lie in a London writers’ group called the Player Playwrights, where the duo started attending weekly sessions in the early seventies. Then in their twenties, they originally met at a boys brigade aged 11 but had never written together before. Gran says attending the group was like “doing a degree in drama” and the regular script critiques knocked their craft into shape.

A chance meeting for Marks with Barry Took in 1978 on a train got them their first proper gig, writing for Frankie Howerd’s radio show. Marks continued working as a crime journalist and Gran in the Department of Employment but the comedy moonlighting took its toll.

Gran recalls: “Writing wasn’t something you could do justice to part-time. You can’t do a job, come home, have your dinner and then at eight o’clock sit down and have to write a ten-minute Frankie Howerd monologue for broadcast the next day. I was really under pressure. I couldn’t eat for a week.”

They impressed enough to get a sitcom commission from LWT, Holding the Fort, and quit the rat race. There was an early wobble with a flop follow-up series set in a dentist’s. “Of course we were upset but we had a pretty good idea going into that all was not well,” says Marks. The grafting paid off - postwar comedy-drama Shine on Harvey Moon in 1982 was a massive hit from the off, with 17.5 million viewers for its first episode. “I don’t think we ever thought we’d fail,” says Marks. Gran agrees: “We were very, very confident. That was based on ignorance, arrogance and stupidity. We didn’t know how thin the line was between success and failure.”

To get them through the times they crossed that line, they were thankful for the trust from senior figures in broadcasting at the time, the like of which they say writers rarely enjoy today. Having conquered the British schedules, Marks and Gran avoided the allure of movies. “It is not a writer’s medium at all,” adds Marks. “The time you wait for the reward you get, for me is not worth it.” But they did jet to LA in 1986 and join the team on US sitcom Mr Sunshine. A useful experience but not one they wanted to repeat.

“The American system only works because it’s such a wealthy industry,” says Gran. “Writers can be so well paid for spending four-fifths of their creative effort working on each others’ shows.”

Their Hollywood experience did, however, sow the seeds of their hugely successful production company Alomo, showing them how to sustain long series runs by farming out writing. With hit shows like Birds of a Feather taking care of themselves, they had the freedom to take on different genres.

“We wanted to do a drama,” recalls Marks. “You need to do drama in order to be accepted by the establishment in television. It was the drama Love Hurts that really won us the writing award at Bafta. I don’t think you’re considered serious enough if you just write comedy, which doesn’t bother me any more but perhaps it might have bothered me then.”

They’re loath to talk about their writing technique but Gran does give an idea of how the two friends bounce off each other: “We are always in the same room and we argue all the time because that way our ideas have to be robust in order to survive. We spend as much time as necessary on story and character. We don’t like to start something when we don’t know how it’s going to end.”

However, they are reflective about whether the place for writers such as themselves in the industry is a viable one today. Gran says: “Most of the time for comedy, there’s only the BBC - it’s like a Marx Brothers film with everyone trying to get through one tiny little doorway. If you’re not a writer-performer today, you’d better be a writer who is pretty well strapped to a performer, because the people who make the decisions seem to find it easier to relate to writer-performers.”

In fact, it seems for a moment that the pair may have turned their back on TV comedy for good. Marks ponders: “What’s left for us to do in TV? Maurice and I have been very fortunate in as much as our work has been seen by 20 million people in one evening - that is never going to happen again.”

But then the renewed energy they’ve found through theatre and a recent radio play seems to have given them fresh vigour. Marks adds: “It’s easy to talk about what isn’t happening. I’d rather talk about what is happening.” They hint that this may include a return to our TV screens of B’Stard after all, if the timing is right.

For now, though, back as “jobbing writers”, they have the task of keeping B’Stard’s three-month stage run topical. Marks enthuses: “In TV, everything ends with making the programme, in the theatre everything starts with the night you open the play.”

• The New Statesman - Episode 2006: The Blair B’Stard Project tours the UK from April 19-July 29

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