A RADIO COMEDY FOR MY GENERATION
Fed up with the way 60-somethings are portrayed on TV and radio, wrote a poignant comedy to tell it how it really is...
ON this New Year’s morning you may be feeling a little fragile after possibly “bringing in” 2018 rather too enthusiastically. Perhaps you had a slight difference of opinion with your other half as the evening wore on. “Haven’t you had enough?”; “Who’s driving home?”; “Why didn’t you kiss me first after midnight instead of vampy Annabel?”
You might even be starting the New Year in frosty silence.
Ah yes, those familiar niggles and oft-visited themes which run through every relationship like a pulled thread, disturbing the surface calm.
To restore peace and harmony may I suggest you tune in to BBC Radio 4 today and listen to my new comedy? The title is selfexplanatory: Conversations From A Long Marriage.
A two-hander, which takes many conversational twists and turns, I wrote it for the luminous Joanna Lumley and was delighted when the magnificent Roger Allam, who plays DCI Thursday in ITV’s Endeavour, accepted the role of her husband. A dream team indeed.
Is it about me? Well I’ve been married for 33 years and in all the comedies I have written with my husband Gavin Petrie, which include Second Thoughts, Faith In The Future, Next Of Kin on television and The Change and The Other Man on Radio 4, what I enjoy most of all is writing dialogue.
It dissects and reflects the minutiae of the way couples talk to each other. Certainly I have drawn on our relationship but also I’ve observed and imagined. Writers do make things up but for me the core is based on a truth.
THROUGHOUT my comedy writing career I’ve aimed to create characters, stories and narrative that I could identify with, but as I get older I am appalled at how my generation is portrayed – on screen and on air.
The “pensioners behaving badly and/or stupidly”; the “let’s laugh at the oldies” reality shows; and the unforgivable crassness of primetime comedies that portray anyone over 60 as bickering, clueless – often spiteful – fools whose only purpose seems to be to misunderstand the obvious or snap bitchy one-liners at each other.
I was tired of the stereotypical “babyboomer” portrayals of those who have “become old” , none of which reflected the “still the same inside” attitude of me and my friends. They are like no one I know or want to know.
Where is the true depiction of my contemporaries? Those of us who grew up on fabulous music such as Bob Dylan and the Stones? Who saw equal rights and Greenham Common, free love and the Pill?
I want to listen to – and watch – comedies about my age group that are about “me”, with characters I can recognise and identify with, about those with lives and attitudes like mine. But I couldn’t find one so I wrote one myself.
My generation of the post-war babyboomers is getting older obviously. But we are like no other 60-somethings before us. In Conversations From A Long Marriage, Joanna and Roger’s characters met in the Summer of Love and somehow have stayed together for more than 40 years.
Children of the 1960s, they’re still free spirits drawn together by their passion for music – and each other. At the Isle of Wight Festival he remembers: “You cooked me breakfast wearing a bikini with flowers in your hair.”
Far from being that stereotypical male of lazy comedy writing, Roger is no downtrodden, useless idiot. He is strong, as is Joanna. They are opinionated equals. Sometimes their honesty with each other is too much. At other times it’s a reminder of their passion. “The first time we made love you read me Kerouac with an American accent,” she says.
We follow their dangling conversations from the café to their kitchen table, taking in her resentment of her new, tri-focal glasses Daily Express Monday January 1 2018 and fury at being lectured to by the dental hygienist. He has a dodgy knee and is on statins, but when they discuss the marriage breakup of their closest friends Sally and Peter there’s jealousy, talk of affairs. She suggests there are advantages to single beds, separate holidays and wants to go clubbing in Ibiza for her imminent “big” birthday.
“When I look in the mirror I want to shout, ‘OK, I know what it looks like on the outside but inside I’m still Dancing In The Street with Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’,” she claims, insisting men aren’t affected in the same way – until he recounts a poignant encounter with a woman on a train.
There is frustration, fury and the fear at the “life-markers” of ageing but this is not about being forever young. They don’t want to look 18 again but the truth is they still feel the same. It’s about the new kind of being old. As musician Iggy Pop said as he hit 70: “I want to look in the mirror and still resemble ‘myself’ – as I feel inside.”
Yes there are domestic discussions but sometimes it becomes dark, painful and poignant. They appear to know each other inside out but reveal vulnerabilities, jealousies and the desire to be seen as still “in the game”.
IWANT to challenge expectations and assumptions of what it is to be old. The unanswered questions, non sequiturs, the need for each other while not always admitting it. My generation is above all passionate and we still have a great deal of life to experience.
The conversations travel over well-trodden ground as Joanna and Roger laugh, bicker, console and cajole, unearthing longheld resentments and sometimes desires. There are frustrations, unsubtle hints and clumsy attempts to prise out a confession, a compliment or promise.
The sins of omission and the habit of asking apparently innocent but dangerously loaded questions will be familiar to every couple with a history.
But it’s not just for those of us with a senior railcard. When we were recording the show one 30-something member of the production team said: “I had this conversation with my girlfriend before I left the house this morning.”
I believe Conversations From A Long Marriage will resonate with couples of any age but especially those who are still dancing in the kitchen, singing in the car and keeping the passion alive.
I’m hoping the bells of empathy will ring in your house. What I want is for listeners to say, “That’s exactly like us/that’s how I feel” – to recognise and laugh. Indeed when Joanna Lumley read the script she told me: “You’ve been listening at my window.”
No writer could receive a greater compliment.
Conversations From A Long Marriage by Jan Etherington will be broadcast today at 11.30am on BBC Radio 4.