‘Carla Lane looked through our letter-boxes’
Wendy Craig tells Peter Stanford how her role in ‘Butterflies’ told the late writer’s own story – as well as so many other women’s
‘Her greatest gift was that she understood women and wrote the truth about them.” Wendy Craig is recalling her long-time friend Carla Lane and their collaboration on one of TV’s best-remembered series, Butterflies.
Between 1978 and 1983, Craig starred as Ria, a suburban housewife, comfortably married to Ben, a decent but dull dentist, who filled her days first dreaming about and then almost having an affair. “It was never fullblown,” Craig is anxious to point out.
The BBC was, she reports, so nervous about audiences being shocked that initially they tucked it away on BBC2. “That was Carla,” explains 81-year-old Craig. “She spoke about what others didn’t. In the case of Ria, it was all about what was going on inside her – and many other women at the time. I had an awful lot of letters saying, ‘You are telling the story of my
life’, or ‘It is just like you are looking in through our letter-box’.”
Like Butterflies, Lane’s other small-screen credits – including the Seventies staple The Liver Birds,
1981’s Solo and 1985’s The Mistress, both starring Felicity Kendal, and, of course, Bread, her lateEighties/early Nineties tale of the Liverpudlian Boswell family – all featured strong female characters. And often a gallery of hapless men.
“I think I’d describe Carla as a feminist,” reflects Craig, “but that doesn’t mean she didn’t love men. She liked a laugh with the blokes. She just didn’t want women to be tucked away, not listened to.”
Nerys Hughes agrees. As posh Sandra, she was one of the two Liver Birds, flatmates from very different backgrounds whose lives and loves Lane charted with gentle humour and affection for nine prime-time series in the Seventies (Polly James played the more “common” Beryl). “It is easy to forget now,” says the stage and television actress, “but back in 1969, Carla was pretty unusual simply because she was a woman who wrote for television.”
Carla Lane was a pen name. She had been born Romana Barrack in Liverpool in 1928, her father a merchant seaman. Her final report from school praised her humour, not her exam results, and she worked in shops, marrying at 19 and quickly having two sons, Carl and Nigel. She began writing while they slept, later joining a writing club and teaming up there with Myra Taylor. They worked together on the outlines that became The Liver Birds in the café of the Adelphi, Liverpool’s grand hotel.
Lane’s shattering of the glass ceiling went further, though, according to Hughes. “With The
Liver Birds, she wrote a series that starred two women, which was unheard of back then. You had series about husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, even a boy and two girls, but nobody previously had dared write about two young women.”
Hughes is nervous, though, of using the F-word. “I’m not sure we’d even heard the word ‘feminism’ when we were making The Liver Birds.
“What Carla did so well was to show women’s weaknesses as well as their strengths. It wasn’t the sort of strident comedy we have now. We didn’t shout, ‘Men go away, women are better.’ Carla allowed her female characters to put their points of view, show how women think, reveal their weaknesses, and occasionally show their bad side.”
Very few sitcom writers become household names. One reason why Carla Lane did was her success. For almost three decades, she was never off our screens, but after the failure of a Liver Birds reunion series in 1996, commissioning editors shunned her. “That hurt her a lot,” says Craig. “She’d done such amazing work for the BBC, and suddenly a new generation of people there didn’t want to know her. She was heartbroken.”
Another reason she was so wellknown, suggests Hughes, was that Lane refused ever to play the game. “There was always something subversive about her. She was always very softly spoken, very gentle, very floaty in the way she dressed, almost hippyish, but underneath she was very strong, very much her own person.”
And once she was successful, Lane was determined to do it her own way. “In the first
couple of series of The Liver Birds,” says Hughes, “we used to ad lib quite a bit, but as Carla gained in
‘She loved men – she just wanted women to be listened to’
confidence about her writing, she insisted that every word she had written be kept in.”
Perhaps it was because her scripts were always personal. Hughes sees her character, Sandra, and the more down-to-earth Beryl as two sides of Lane’s own character. And in
Butterflies, Craig believes that Ria mirrored her creator.
“Carla’s own marriage [which ended in divorce in 1981] was a bit dull, so she understood Ria. And, like Ria, she had her own two lovely sons. The boys in Butterflies were a version of her two boys. Even Ria’s terrible cooking was a version of Carla. She couldn’t cook at all. She lived on salads.”
Latterly, Lane also stuck in the memory because of her championing of animal rights, often alongside her friend and collaborator, Linda McCartney. “She was so passionate,” says Hughes. “She had this huge house down in Sussex and it was packed with animals. The first floor was full of feral cats. Another bedroom had geese and hens in it and outside there was a field full of calves that she had bought to save them from slaughter. It was costing her a fortune. In the end, Paul McCartney had to help her with the bills because she made herself so broke.”
“But it was an amazing place,” insists Wendy Craig. “She loved her animals so much. She used to say to me, ‘I lie awake at night crying for animals who are suffering terrible things. They are so helpless’. It would make her weep. It might sound odd to some, but Carla was very tender-hearted. She believed that someone had to speak up for animals, just as she believed someone had to speak up for women. And she was never afraid to do it.”
Both old friends lost touch with Lane when, in 2009, she moved back to Liverpool. “I think she felt called back,” says Craig. “Whether she was ill, or just homesick, I don’t know. She rang me from there and said, ‘I’m back where everybody makes me laugh as much as they used to.’ After that, I could never get an address out of her or a phone number. It was as if she wanted to change her life completely.”
The relationship between Liverpudlians and Lane could be complicated. She was loved for celebrating the city in The Liver Birds. For those of us growing up there in the Seventies, it was the first time anyone on the telly had spoken with an accent like ours. But Bread caused more mixed feelings. It may have been her biggest success – running from 1986 to 1991, and attracting audiences of 26 million at its peak – but many on Merseyside criticised it for playing up to outsiders’ negative stereotypes about their city. The devoutly Catholic Boswells were, in such a reading, lippy, work-shy benefit fraudsters, stealing and scamming their way through life.
Lane would have none of it. In a 2013 interview, she said of the city: “It’s where I was born and I understand it best of all.”
The prodigal daughter had come home and was welcomed back into the fold. So much so that her death prompted a glowing tribute from another local legend, Ken Dodd. Lane had, he said, “an amazing observation of the Liverpool sense of humour”.
‘What Carla did so well was to show women’s weaknesses as well as their strengths’ ‘Paul McCartney had to help pay her bills because she was so broke’