A tender writer who gave ordinary women a voice and showed us the humour in human failure
BRITISH television sitcoms were an almost exclusively male preserve throughout the Sixties and Seventies, but one woman broke through to redress the balance. Through popular series such as The Liver Birds and Butterflies, Carla Lane gave ordinary women a voice – and a ripely funny voice at that.
Lane, a former journalist from Liverpool, first came to prominence in 1969 with The Liver Birds, a comedy about two young girls sharing a flat and navigating their way through the pitfalls of the permissive society. The writing was tender and funny, and often delved into serious subject matter. One episode saw the naive Beryl share her fears about spending the night with a man for the first time. The timid way she packed her wash bag for a night of passion was as touchingly truthful as it was hilarious. With work like this, it’s no wonder that Lane went on to become one of Britain’s most highly paid scriptwriters.
It is hard to imagine Lane dancing to anyone else’s tune, but she was a surprisingly successful contributor to ITV’s sitcom “writing teams”, working for such unreconstructed, knockabout series as Bless This House and And Mother Makes Three. On the latter she met Wendy Craig, who went on to be the star of Butterflies, undoubtedly Lane’s finest work. The show, which ran from 1978 to 1983, mined unusual subject matter for comedy. Craig’s Ria was trapped in a tedious marriage to decent but dull Ben (Geoffrey Palmer) and spent several series dreaming of adulterous liaisons with the saturnine Leonard (Bruce Montague). Apparently it took Lane three years to convince the BBC that this could play for laughs – and it really did. Part of Lane’s gift as a writer was in making our inadequacies seem comic.
However, Lane’s biggest ratings winner was cut from a slightly different cloth. Bread (1986-1991) was a raucous affair, focusing on the lives of the Boswells, a working-class family from Liverpool. Still, it was the female characters you remember – in particular Jean Boht’s stern matriarch.
In later years, Lane’s work received a frosty critical reception, but her influence can still be felt. Cold Feet can trace its lineage to Butterflies, while series such as Sharon Horgan’s Pulling owe much to Lane’s combination of emotional frankness and caustic wit.
Lane was hardly queen of the belly laugh, but she did something equally fundamental – teaching us to recognise humour in human failure.