SHOW IS WRITING DREAM FOR DUO

SINCE the early 80s, Maurice Gran has had enough TV comedy success to make sure he’s buried in Highgate Cemetery (near his old school) alongside the likes of Karl Marx and George Michael.

With writing partner Laurence Marks, the pair have fleshed out, debated, argued over and finally agreed on the characters, plot lines and dialogue that emerged as Birds of a Feather, Goodnight Sweetheart and The New Statesman.

But today, Maurice Gran is talking about the pair’s move to theatre writing, a switch which has proved immensely successful with several hits.

Comedy musical Dreamboats and Petticoats, a tale of youth club love and pop star fantasy, is set to play in Glasgow next week.

Maurice maintains the Dream- boats concept came along at the right time.

“When we started writing the show in 2008/9 we were conscious of the world going wrong,” he recalls.

“So we knew we wanted to write something escapist, and we remembered that during the Depression people wanted to watch Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1933.”

Dreamboats features the music of the early 60s, featuring songs by the likes of Eddie Cochrane and Billy Fury, which Gran says defies time and the age of audiences.

“Young kids love it when they hear it for the first time,” he says. “It’s like the music in Grease.”

Were M&G forced to move from TV to theatre? (Birds of A Feather, for example, was dropped by the BBC after nine years, only to fly freely again when ITV picked it up.)

“In the 80s and 90s we had our television production company, Alomo,” Gran reflects. “Then in the early part of the millennium we were taken over by Pearson, and they were very generous, but it became really boring.

“We stopped striving, because we weren’t doing our own thing.

“But then theatre came along. We wrote a play for Alan Aykbourne, which took us two years and made tuppence. But that didn’t matter because writing for theatre really is a labour of love.”

The father-of-two adds, grinning; “I love the line that someone came up with; ‘You can’t make a living in the theatre – but you can make a killing.’”

Marks and Gran had no idea they would go on to make a killing in theatre or television when they met as ten year-old boys in the Jewish Lads Brigade in North London.

Maurice left university and worked for the DSS in Tottenham while Laurence became a journalist.

But when they met again as