Fletch’s advice was: ‘Little victories: that’s what keeps you going in here’
CONSERVATIVE MP Mark Harper cheekily announces: “Delighted to welcome Jacob Rees-Mogg to the Forest of Dean... where he made his incredibly popular debut appearance at the Newent Onion Fayre.”
The politician was in fact publicising a leek impressively arranged to resemble Rees-Mogg reclining across the Commons benches. It was later awarded second place. Jacob himself quips on Twitter: “Thanks shallot.”
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TWO-TIME Bond girl Valerie Leon’s recent appearance on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, when she voiced lively objections to the idea of 007 becoming a woman, met with disapproval in the family ranks.
Journalist Merope Mills, daughter of the screen beauty, pictured in her Bond days, responds on Twitter: “My incredibly brilliant/warm/ funny mother seems to insist on going on Good Morning Britain to side with Piers Morgan to take the anti-feminist position re-a female Bond. I know everyone laments embarrassing parents, but I score pretty highly.”
That next mother-daughter chat may have been lively...
PORRIDGE came about because the BBC commissioned a series called Seven Of One, designed to showcase Ronnie Barker’s talents. We were asked to write two of the comedies that would serve as TV pilots. One was called I’ll Fly You For a Quid, in which he played two roles: the father and grandfather of a gambling-mad Welsh family.
For the other, Ronnie told us he had always wanted to do something set in a jail. So we wrote Prisoner And Escort, about a man going to prison.
The prisoner was, of course, Norman Stanley Fletcher and his escorts were warders Mackay and Barrowclough, brilliantly portrayed by Fulton Mackay and Brian Wilde.
The BBC asked us which one of these shows we’d like to turn into a series. We discussed this with Ronnie over lunch at the rehearsal room canteen in Acton, west London. We tried not to be distracted by the all-girl dance troupe, Pan’s People, sitting in their leotards at the next table.
It wasn’t an easy choice, like deciding which one of your children shows more potential. In the end we thought a series set in prison was the greater challenge.
Accordingly, we went to Wandsworth,
Brixton and Wormwood Scrubs to see what real prisons looked like. This experience thoroughly depressed us.
The main impression we took away was that most of the prisoners carried with them a sense of defeat.
How could we possibly make anything funny out of something so grim? Then, we saw Ronnie making his entrance as Fletcher.
Among his many great qualities is that he brought with him a
COMEDY GENIUS: Ronnie Barker as Slade Prison’s Norman Stanley Fletcher
sense of comedy before he said a word.
Our Fletcher had the attitude of an old lag who’d been there before: “Bide your time and keep your nose clean. Little victories, that’s what keeps you going in here.”
When Ronnie read the scripts he went with our approach right away. The only thing we lacked was a title. They can be tricky, they either come or they don’t.
Ronnie came in one day and announced that he had the perfect one.We had one too.
A heated argument, for about six seconds, ended in a coin toss, won by Ronnie.
“Porridge!” he announced triumphantly. Uncannily, our title too.
We needed a younger character someone to receive the benefit of Fletch’s wisdom and experience. The casting of Richard Beckinsale as naive Lennie Godber was a stroke of genius – not ours but of our director, Syd Lotterby.
When we were writing the first that was