Warm, witty and brutally honest, Carla was the Liver bird the BBC never quite knew how to handle
She was one of television’s most successful writers, a comedy powerhouse who created one successful sitcom after another – The Liver Birds, Butterflies, Solo, Bread. But the BBC was never quite sure how to handle Carla Lane.
All her life the fiercely outspoken Liverpudlian, who died yesterday aged 87, smashed the boundaries of what wom en were supposed to say on screen. her characters dared to live alone, dream of affairs, and get divorced. They refused to put up with what life gave them, and took everything they could get instead.
This could have been abrasive television, were it not for the melancholy warmth that infused all of Lane’s writing. her women could be sad and strong at the same time, dealing with depression and loneliness the same way they’d deal with trivial arguments over lost car keys – by making bittersweet jokes.
Like Coronation Street, another show that owes its success to the strength of its female characters, Lane’s best sitcoms revolved around the home, where women ruled and let everyone know it.
her dialogue captured the pungent wit of Manchester and Liverpool, never afraid to speak its mind.
her decidedly Thatcherite comedy Bread, which satirised the Welfare State, was so political and so popular that the Beeb refused to broadcast it on the eve of the 1987 General election, even though the scheduled episode was a repeat.
Lane suspected that the hierarchy at Broadcasting house would be glad to see the back of her – but didn’t dare axe her comedies while they topped the audience ratings.
Bread, about a Liverpool family of chancers and petty criminals, has barely been shown again since it ended in 1991. It ran for seven series, with Jean Boht as matriarch Nellie Boswell, with her feckless, unfaithful husband and five grown-up children.
The show blended hard-edged drama with sentimental comedy and whipsharp one-liners – a combination Lane had been perfecting for 20 years. It appealed both to soap lovers and sitcom fans, and one episode, featuring a Boswell wedding, drew more than 21 million viewers in December 1988.
Success on that scale gave Lane the power to fulfil her dreams, and she bought a 35-room mansion with 25 acres of fields and woodland, near haywards heath in Sussex, as the base for her animal sanctuary and charity, Animaline. It cost £1.5million in 1991, and she poured her fortune into it, housing thousands of rescued dogs, cats, horses and even turkeys. She admitted that heating costs alone exceeded £3,000 a month.
even her wolfhound, Igor, was a vegetarian: he ate bran and bananas.
When the head of the huntingdon Life Sciences labs was awarded the CBe, Lane sent her OBe back in protest at their animal experiments. Lane and animal activist Linda McCartney were good friends, and the pair dreamed of turning the world’s petlovers into a political movement, to overthrow meat-eaters and vivisectionists. Linda’s Beatles husband Paul was also a supporter, and when Animaline started to run out of money in the 2000s, he donated funds and took on the sizeable monthly bill for straw.
She was born Romana Barrack in 1928: her father, DeVinci Barrack, was a merchant seaman who would bring her presents every time he returned on shore leave. her favourites were a Chinese silk headscarf and a tambourine, and her earliest ambition was to run away with these treasures and become a gypsy dancer.
her first comedy success was The Liver Birds ( pronounced Lie-ver, after Merseyside’s Royal Liver Building) and starred Nerys hughes as a sensible, slightly prudish and snobby woman, sharing a flat with the common and raucous Beryl (Polly James). They chased boys, got drunk, threw parties and stuck two fingers up at any man who said they shouldn’t.
Though the show was discovered through the BBC’s own Comedy Playhouse pilot series, Beeb bosses didn’t believe that a woman could maintain the pace or the standard, and imposed male co- writers, including Monty Python’s eric Idle.
But Lane proved she was more than equal to the job when she followed up with Butterflies, starring Wendy Craig as Ria, a disappointed housewife who is burning for love, but trapped with a boring husband. The show was openly based on Lane’s own life: she was married for 22 years to a naval architect called eric Arthur hollins, though she said that for many years before their break-up that she didn’t love him.
‘I was writing about a tragedy I know all about,’ she said. ‘I identify with Ria. She’s torn between loyalty to her husband and the desire to break out of the boredom of her marriage.’
Most viewers assumed the title referred to the insects that Ria’s husband collected and displayed, with their beautiful wings pinned down. Lane revealed that it was even more melancholy than that – her characters were fluttering helplessly, doomed to brief lives, ‘with so much to do and so little time to do it’.
In the end, her divorce from Arthur was acrimonious, and Lane emerged vowing that she would never marry again. In 1981, her next show, Solo, starred Felicity Kendal as Gemma, a woman who thinks she’s content, until her livein boyfriend has an affair with her best friend. Suddenly, Gemma realises that everyone takes her for granted... and she’s not going to stand or it.
But it was Bread that established Lane as a sitcom superstar. Beginning in 1986, it soon had no rivals other than Only Fools And horses – in many ways, the shows mirrored each other, both working class comedies about families fighting the system... one in London, the other in Liverpool.
After Bread ended in 1991, Lane threw herself into her work – ‘I’m only happy when I’m writing,’ she said – and her animal charity. her last show was an update of The Liver Birds in the mid-90s.
Changes in the television world depressed her: ‘I don’t know the people at the BBC any more,’ she complained in 2008. ‘It’s full of young girls with short skirts and big breasts.’
But even in her 80s, she kept pitching sitcoms at the BBC. She sent scripts – one (called Screaming) about dysfunctional families, another about young mothers. The BBC sent them back. They never really did know what to do with the genius of Carla Lane.