The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
FRANKLY AMAZING: THE 1973 BONANZA British comedy’s three-month miracle
In early 1973, the BBC launched six of the greatest sitcoms ever made. Was something funny going on?
Imagine you’re a bounty hunter on a mission to go back in time and destroy the golden age of the British sitcom. Perhaps you come from a future in which nuclear Armageddon has been triggered by a disagreement over “The Germans” episode of Fawlty Towers, or whether Betty Spencer was right to stay married to Frank. There’d be little doubt about your destination. You’d set the coordinates for any date between January 4 and April 1, 1973. A run of 87 days, half a century ago, when the British sitcom industry went into overdrive.
We’re used to celebrating the 1970s as the heyday of multi-camera studio comedy – the decade when Margo and Jerry Leadbetter, the staff of Grace Brothers and the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard rode the laughs under the hot lights of Television Centre. But the first 12 or so weeks of 1973 are almost absurdly auspicious. In this brief span, as VAT was introduced, Britain joined the EEC and the Open University awarded its first degrees, viewers had their first taste of Last of the Summer Wine (January 4), Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (January 9 – a full-colour, nostagic spin-off of the 1960s hit The Likely Lads) and Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em (February 15). It also saw the debuts of Are You Being Served? (March 14), Open All Hours (25 March) and Porridge (April 1). All on BBC One.
How did this happen? What stars were aligned? Some of it, hearteningly, was a product of deliberate policy. Open All Hours and Porridge began life as part of Seven of One, a run of comedy pilots written for Ronnie Barker, each with potential for development into a series. James Gilbert, the BBC’s newish Head of Comedy, put Last of the Summer Wine into production because he wanted to move sitcoms out of the studio and out of London. (The same impulse led him to insist that Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? should take its cameras to Tyneside.)
But history is a series of frail coincidences, and TV history even more so. Are You Being Served? owes its decade of commentary on the condition of Mrs Slocombe’s pussy to the Palestinian terror group Black September. When it caused carnage at the 1972 Munich Olympics, the Games shut down. BBC One filled the gap in the schedule with the freshly taped pilot for a new department store comedy by Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft. It was smuttier than Bill Cotton, Head of Light Entertainment, might have wished, but gags involving an illuminated bra and Captain Peacock’s membership card for the Blue Cinema Club proved a welcome relief from news of atrocity and – when a series of Till Death Us Do Part fell through – Lloyd and Croft were commissioned. Grace Brothers stayed open until 1985.
Porridge was also the product of a delicate chain of events. It began with a diplomatic incident. Ronnie Barker asked Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, creators of The Likely Lads, to devise a half-hour show about a man coming out of prison. But the writers already had a series like this in production at LWT – Thick as Thieves, starring Bob Hoskins as an old lag who returns home to find his wife living with his best friend (John Thaw). So they persuaded Barker that what he really wanted was a sitcom set behind prison walls. The research process, however – particularly a disturbing visit to the inmates of the high-security basement level of HMP Brixton – left the pair begging to ditch the project in favour of I’ll Fly You For a Quid, their other contribution to Seven of One, in which Barker played the dual roles of a Welsh miner and his dying father. Their pleas went unheard. Porridge was served. I’ll Fly You For a Quid remains a forgotten obscurity.
Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, though, was the product of the frailest chain of all. Its creator, Raymond Allen, was sweeping up dropped popcorn at the Regal Cinema, Shanklin, on the Isle of Wight, when his 40th unsolicited script piqued the interest of Michael Mills, Gilbert’s predecessor as Head of Comedy. Allen had recently read an article complaining about the lack of good comedy roles on TV for women. Have a Break, Take a Husband
was his solution – a play about a disastrous honeymoon, in which the bride, Betty Spencer, had most of the lines, and her accident-prone husband, Frank, stayed mainly silent. Rewrites rebalanced that relationship, but Allen’s attempt at a second episode was so poor that Mills threw it straight in the bin. A second draft, however, brought 16 unbroken years of rejection letters to an end for Allen.
Some Mothers seems unimaginable without Michael Crawford, but his presence, too, was the product of circumstance. Crawford’s nascent Hollywood career had been squashed by the flop of Hello, Dolly! (1969), which led to a fallow period spent stuffing floor cushions for his wife’s soft-furnishings business. No Sex Please, We’re British – about a man in receipt of stacks of unsolicited Scandinavian pornography – gave him a chance to play a frantic, acrobatic lead in a West End farce. (The Telegraph’s critic hated the play but saw in Crawford “the alacrity of a frightened bat”.) When Mills’s first choice, Norman Wisdom, sent back Allen’s script asking when the jokes would be put in, Crawford was asked to read for the part. His mannerisms – the worried hand at the mouth, the over-particular speech – were a straight transfer from his performance in No Sex, Please. By the mid-1970s a Frank Spencer impression had become the first resort of every mediocre New Faces contestant.
Here, though, is the principal lesson of the sitcom spring of 1973. It took time for its buds to flower. The
studio audiences at tapings of Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em were so unenthusiastic that Allen found himself commiseratating with Cotton. The Porridge pilot, Prison and Escort, was the lowest-rated of the Seven of One season – only 1.5million viewers tuned in. The first series of Are You Being Served? was scheduled against Coronation Street and made little impact: it grew a following through repeats. Last of the Summer Wine took three years to acquire a substantial audience.
Why was such energy and patience lavished upon these modest productions? Because in the 1970s, the studio sitcom had a cultural salience it would be hard to exaggerate. When one caught light, it blazed. The audience of Are You Being Served? peaked at 22million, Some Mothers at 25million. Figures like this made big-screen transfers routine and profitable. In 1971, Hammer’s film version of On the Buses beat Diamonds Are Forever at the British box-office. Reg Varney made more money for the firm than vampires ever did.
For some, this golden moment proved unrepeatable. Allen never found another Some Mother’s Do ’Ave ’Em. His follow-up, The Dobson Doughnut (1974), with Milo O’Shea as a retiree failing to go on a roundthe-world sailing trip, never made it past the pilot. But at least it was broadcast. Two others – Don’t Move Now (1976), about a removals firm, and Sidney, You’re a Genius (1977), with Maria Aitken and a young Matthew
Kelly, were recorded but never shown. Allen’s final screen credit was the 2016 Sport Relief sketch which put Crawford in Frank Spencer’s mac and beret for the first time since 1978.
Cable TV made Are You Being Served? a surprise cult hit in the States. (On a visit to a maximumsecurity prison in North Carolina in 2016, I was surprised to find the Deputy Governor sharing his enthusiasm for John Inman.) When Sherard Cowper-Coles was Britain’s special envoy to Afghanistan, one of his unofficial duties was to keep President Hamid Karzai supplied with DVD boxsets of Last of the Summer Wine. For the most part, however, the sitcoms that came into the world in the first few months of 1973 have been reserved for domestic consumption.
And they’re still there – on streaming services, and in our cultural conversation. Perhaps they’ll even survive the apocalypse, if it comes. In the Oscar-winning Pixar animation WALL-E (2008), a lone robot trundles through the rubble and trash of human civilisation. When he comes back to his little den, he entertains himself with what we’re invited to believe is the last remaining fragment of human moving-image culture. It’s a few moments of Hello, Dolly! When he switches it on, there on the screen is Crawford. The golden age of the British sitcom endures.
Viewing figures for Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em hit 25 million
Episodes of the pioneering sitcoms of 1973 are available to watch now on UKTV Play; ITVX; BritBox and NOW