Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais interview

Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais have a prolific comedy writing CV. Their hits include The Likely Lads, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet and, of course, Porridge. They've lived in America for the past 40 years but have flown over to the UK to take part in a new Gold documentary series about their sitcom, Porridge: Inside Out.

BCG grabbed them for a chat. Read on to find out how their big break came about, who they've enjoyed working with, the show they are furious that got axed, and their future plans...

Could you start off by telling us a little about the creation of Porridge. The prison setting was Ronnie Barker's idea?

Ian: No.

Dick: Well it sort of was. He'd always wanted to do something set in a prison.

Ian: Oh, yes. But the DNA was ... well, Seven Of One. We wrote two episodes and the BBC basically treated them as pilots. We said we'd do either, so they left it to the three of us - Ronnie, Dick and me - to decide. One was called I'll Fly You For A Quid; one was called Prisoner And Escort. So when we chose Prisoner And Escort, we had the situation where Ronnie Barker was arriving in prison. We chose that one ... but Dick's right, Ronnie had the big ideas of doing something in prison. But not the character we created.

Dick: No, he'd seen something broader. We wrote something... well, we were influenced by going around prisons and seeing how unfunny they were. And we wanted, well what we'd always written, what had started with The Likely Lads, had always been rooted in some kind of reality. We didn't want to be gag writers, we never saw ourselves as gag writers so we wanted to reflect something of the reality of prison whilst still being funny. So we acknowledged that, particularly through Godber's character. He'd say "I hate prison" and "I hate locks on the door" and "I hate being locked up" - just acknowledging that, you know, it isn't just fun.

Many people cite Porridge as their favourite sitcom, and Ronnie a comedy hero thanks in no small part to the show. How does it feel to have made that kind of impact, and who are your own comedy heroes?

Ian: Ronnie, certainly. But Ronnie was a great comic actor, not just a comedian. He talked about it being his best part 'as an actor in a comedy'. Probably because it was the most unusual, that's why he chose it. We're immensely proud to be associated with a programme that is now thought of so highly. Other comedy heroes...

Dick: I'm going to start with Buster Keaton. I didn't see him when he was first doing it, I'm not that old!, but I do remember seeing him at the National Film Theatre. I thought there was something wonderful about Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd in the same era. Coming nearer, I thought Phil Silvers was a great TV comedian; I didn't see much of Sid Caesar at the time -

Ian: No, we've only seen him in re-runs.

Dick: Caught up with him since, and he's brilliant. Hancock, gotta say Hancock. Tony Hancock was a huge influence. Tommy Cooper, completely different, but he always made me smile.

Ian: Morecambe & Wise.

Dick: Morecambe & Wise, definitely.

Ian: We were brought up with radio comedy and variety comedy, so when we first heard The Goon Show it was startling.

Dick: Oh yes, got to put The Goons in there.

Ian: I mean, because it was just so ... absolutely different. And then in the 1960s, Marty Feldman kind of bridged the gap between The Goons and The Pythons. So a lot of that comedy with Morecambe & Wise had come from variety - but Hancock, that was a comic creation. It was the Hancock character that became a hero, not just Tony Hancock the original music hall comedian.

Dick: The Goons, in terms of early influences, The Goons were fantastic.

Ian: They didn't influence our writing at all. Our writing was influenced by Galton & Simpson, who created Steptoe And Son; and then by British 60s movies, which were part of a whole social revolution. We were trying to capture that shifting landscape of the social order, and that begat The Likely Lads - and later Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?. They were working class characters, they weren't drawing room characters.

How did you get The Likely Lads commissioned? You'd met in a pub in Notting Hill?

Dick: Yeah, we did. I was in radio, BBC radio, overseas radio in fact - even more obscure! - and Ian was doing different things. I was vaguely trying to be an actor so I joined the BBC Ariel Players. We did cabaret stuff and the guys I was sharing a flat with, they were part of that cabaret; one or two newsreaders were! Because it was the BBC you could at least get one or two people who had been on TV. But we wrote something for that, which I acted in - and tried to do a very bad impersonation of Albert Finney! Then I got on this directors' course and at the end of it they said "look, here's a studio, here's a little bit of money" (not very much) "make something".

Ian: Like a practical exam.

Dick: So we extended one of the sketches we'd written, which was the best one, and made it 25 minutes instead of 10. And it became The Likely Lads. Who knew? It was just one of those extraordinary things.

Ian: Such a bit of luck.

Dick: It's like in rugby, when somebody gives you the ball and everyone else is over there, and you just pick it up and run with it. Combined with that was the timing. BBC2 was just starting up so they needed new programmes. Suddenly there was a whole new channel to schedule.

Then the other bit of luck: it was going out, but there were only about 16 people who had BBC2, so it was going out but nobody was paying it much attention. Nobody was coming to see the shows, no executives came to see the shows being recorded. I was directing them as well. I felt hurt at the time. In hindsight, when you think now of all the interference you get from a mass of people, it was bliss! We were left alone. But then there was a show called Christmas Night With The Stars and we were asked to do something for it. So we said yeah and recorded a 10 minute sketch for it. That show went out on BBC1, not BBC2, to millions! That was huge.

Ian: And on Christmas night itself. Everything was a sketch, and the best shows - or the most famous people on television - so the whole audience said "What the fuck's this?!" Then the critics picked it up, they were bored with the usual shows, and they said "What was that?"

Dick: So they repeated it on BBC1. Repeat fees! First time we'd heard of repeat fees. So we were getting the minimum you were allowed to get for a script, which was still fine by us because we had nothing to compare it with. But now it's on BBC1, so you know... It got very good audiences. There used to be something called the Reaction Index, the RI. One of the episodes got 83. No one had ever got that. They used to say 67 was good - if you got 72, you know, woah. But we got about 83. It was unheard of. So it had tapped into a vein - all very nice timing.

That quite quickly became a sitcom phenomenon, and then revived even more successfully with Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads?...

Ian: That was the big one. It had been a bit rough and ready, but then four or five years later, whatever it was, suddenly it was a big series - thirteen episodes followed by another thirteen episodes. High production values. And it was about something as well. It was very much part of the zeitgeist of the 1970s: upward mobility and it gave us a theme. It was about Bob's upward mobility compared to Terry's working class entrenchment.

Basically because he couldn't be upwardly mobile. That's the essence of the series, really.

Did Porridge have any bearing on the creation of 1974's Thick As Thieves?

Ian: Oh dear me.

Dick: Not directly.

Ian: Not directly, but it's an interesting story.

Dick: It was the fact that Ronnie said he wanted to do something about a guy just going into prison.

Ian: Or coming out.

Dick: So we started to write Thick As Thieves thinking it might be something for Ronnie. And then we couldn't stop writing! We had such fun with it. We were saying "Is it a movie? Is it a play? Is it a television series?" We didn't know. All we knew was we were having a lot of fun writing it. Eventually it became a series, which was of course not fulfilling the commitment...

Ian: So then we had to go to Ronnie and say "You know that idea about a guy coming out of prison? We think it'd be better if it's about a guy going into prison." And we really were caught in this dilemma - and then ended up selling Thick As Thieves to London Weekend Television.

Dick: And then you start answering awkward questions like "What is it that's made you so obsessed with criminality?" Well, not at all! It's just that we'd finished that, and still owed Ronnie a script. So it was really weird.

Thick As Thieves was before Porridge then?

Dick and Ian: Yeah!

Ian: Yes, it went out and was made after Porridge, but it was written before. It was all fairly bizarre. Not many people know that story! It wasn't quite as smooth, polished, slick as Porridge. Some things were great, and it was lovely being in a rehearsal room with John Thaw and Bob Hoskins - dear Bob, bless his heart.

Dick: We had a lot of laughs.

Ian: John had never done a comedy before. So it's a kind of a forgotten bit of work. But it just wasn't done quite well enough.

We noted that when Bob Hoskins died a few weeks ago, obituaries said his first major break was something in the late 1970s - we thought "Hang on a minute, Thick As Thieves was quite before that!"

Ian: The first time Bob got enormous attention - although this is only in the metropolis - was when he was in a play at the Royal Court - Veterans - a play about making a movie. Really the making of The Charge of the Light Brigade. Gielgud was in it, playing the ac-tor. Hoskins came on as the electrician, and he was hysterical.

Dick: Bernie the Volt was his character's name. With sun-peeling, burnt shoulders. It's the first time I ever heard the word "fuck" on the West End stage.

Ian: Or an accent that Cockney!

Dick: Ronnie Barker said Bob had the purest Cockney he'd ever heard. Ronnie knew what accents he spoke. He said "that's the real thing", he was just impersonating it. He really admired that.

But yeah, Bob had a wonderful bit where he went up to Gielgud and he said "Can I have a word? I've got the rights to Genghis Khan and I've written this screenplay. You'd be great to play it. Could you come round to my place? Only don't come Sunday, 'cause I don't like my Sundays fucked up."

I remember it all these years later. It was hysterical. I immediately saw this guy as somebody we'd love to work with.

Ian: It was a play by Charles Wood. Never been revived!

Dick: No, it could be though, couldn't it? Charles Wood had written the screenplay for The Charge of the Light Brigade so he was writing about the experience he'd had on it. It'd be well worth looking at reviving that actually, wouldn't it?

Ian: Yeah!

Dick: God, it was funny. Very, very funny.

You've worked with a huge array of on-screen talent - but who was your favourite to work with, the easiest to write for?

Dick: Oh, Ronnie. Ronnie was just such a joy to work with. A consummate professional and he had writing skills as well, so he'd occasionally come up with a line here and a suggestion there and they were always great. All of them were fantastic in our shows. But it is Ronnie, isn't it? You can't say it isn't.

Ian: George Clooney? Never worked with him, but I'm sure he's a great guy! Michael Caine was a joy to work with, very professional person. We're working with him at the moment actually.

Dick: Never late.

Ian: Bill Nighy. All the lads from Auf Wiedersehen, Pet; every actor in that. And David Tennant. Fantastic. There are just so many - but now I realise we didn't mention one woman. Let's throw in ... Angelina Jolie. Well, who would be our most...?

Dick: Well there were far more blokes than women.

Ian: We've worked with Anne Bancroft. She was really great, although the show wasn't.

Dick: She was really thrown - she didn't realise she was going to have to do it in front of an audience. So there she was, this fantastic legend, and suddenly the live audience really threw her. She was nervous.

Ian: Yeah, this audience at Thames Television - it was Freddie And Max. In rehearsals of course, she was marvellous. But then for so many actors, it's such a high bridge. They come on and they've got the light and they say their lines, and then people laugh. So the rhythm of the performance changes. Ronnie Barker, absolute master of it, loved the process. Other actors are thrown. John Thaw and Bob Hoskins were thrown at the beginning.

Dick: James Bolam and Rodney Bewes took time. Sometimes it worked perfectly, and sometimes you knew that if it had been a dress rehearsal and they'd had another shot at it, they'd have done it better. But you never quite know how the audience is going to react. I must admit, I think when we did that with Anne Bancroft, they were audiences at Thames Television in Teddington. And they really were not as sophisticated as the Shepherd's Bush BBC audience. They really weren't.

Ian: Well they were in from the Home Counties. Shepherd's Bush were Londoners.

I'll tell you one thing - enormous admission here - we worked for four years on an HBO series with Tracey Ullman and that was a joy [Tracey Takes On...]. That was fun every day. It was the first time we'd ever worked with a team of writers. We were like people who'd been home-schooled and were suddenly sent to a comprehensive. It was a small team, we were also supervising producers. Round-tabling. That was SO much fun. It only took about four months of the year and we looked forward to it every year. Tracey was SO brilliant. She was one of the writers herself and she just kept throwing the voices in, making the whole process... well, she performed as she wrote.

Dick: You'd hear her performance, you might not hear anybody else's, but you'd hear her performance, so you could tell whether it was funny or not. It was great. Totally painless. And never any interference from HBO. We had one note in four years, which was about race. The only time we had a note.

Do you have a particular favourite episode, scene, or whole series that perhaps you'd like to be remembered for, that you think back on as your defining work, your greatest achievement?

Dick: Well, it's interesting how a lot of people always remember the Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads episode about not learning the football score. There's something about that particular episode that remains ... I mean, people talk about having a 'Likely Lads moment'. We're always having them! We live in America, so first thing if anyone calls us up on a Saturday, we say "Don't tell us any football results!" That's the first thing you say before you say "Hello", because you don't want your day buggered up by someone telling you who won and who lost. So that obviously resonates with people.

We actually were at a lounge in Heathrow a couple of years ago, Ian was getting some salad and I heard the two couples at the next table talking about this episode. One of them was an American wife, but the other three knew about it. I sat there going "Shut up, shut up" but in the end I couldn't help it, and I just had to say "Actually, I wrote that - with a bit of help from him over there"! But it was one of those great moments, it was wonderful to feel that something had resonated in that way.

There was another Likely Lads one called Conduct Unbecoming, one of the last ones we did [Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads? Series 2, Episode 12], which we saw again recently and we think is a very funny episode. We love the boxing one in Porridge, called The Harder They Fall [Series 2 Episode 6], that's a really terrific one.

Ian: There's episodes of Auf Wiedersehen... I mean, for a film it's different, you can't really choose scenes from a film. It's a hard question!

Dick: There's another show we did, called Full Stretch, about a limousine driver. Kevin McNally in the lead. He was as good as Ronnie Barker was playing Fletcher. He was wonderful. And we loved that show, we did six hours. But the timing was really off. We thought this was going to be a Minder - we thought it'd be on the air for six or seven years. We just thought it was a terrific idea for a show. Different story every week, about a guy struggling to keep a limousine company together. But it never picked up. It's like a lost sheep, a lost child. We have very fond memories of it. We loved the cast in that as well.

Ian: It was devastating. It was the ITV franchise shuffle of January 1993. It just got lost in the shuffle - we were furious. I mean, we did it with our own company, WitzEnd, like we've done with lots of other stuff we've written, like Lovejoy. We said, "Oh, we're going for another Lovejoy, we're going for four or five years." Never happened. Still upsets us. It really still frustrates me.

Dick: Me too.

Ian: Our guest star in the first episode was David Bowie! Great plot.

What took you away from sitcom and into longer-form comedy dramas, dramas and films?

Ian: Well we've always mingled them up. Everybody wants to do a movie. When we did Auf Wiedersehen, we thought we loved that length. That was the first time we'd ever written television that length.

Dick: We never saw it as a comedy series. We saw it as a drama series. The fact that people think of it as funny is great, but we didn't feel there was the tyranny of "Where's the laugh on page one?" I mean, we were writing movies in the 1960s. We wrote two for Michael Winner. We wrote one called Otley, which I directed, starring Tom Courtenay. It had a hell of a lot of laughs but it was a comedy-thriller. We never wanted to feel pigeon-holed in one genre. We've done a lot of music movies, so it's great jumping out of different boxes rather than doing the same thing over again.

Ian: The BBC used to be very compartmentalised. The BBC bar, you know, over there would be Top Of The Pops, over there Documentaries, then the satirists, and over there's Drama, and over there in the corner, 'Light Entertainment'. We always felt "How can we go over there and get into Drama? All those serious guys with their beards and corduroy trousers."

Dick: But when you went over, they expected you to tell them a joke!

Ian: Yeah, they expected a joke. "Oh here's Dick and Ian!" It was so compartmentalised. People just didn't go from one to the other. Now we're doing documentaries and dramas. Doing a comedy series here is too difficult for us. Living in LA, you just don't have the references; so out of touch with the references of every-day life. We moved over in the mid-70s. We've continued to work here, but sitcoms ... we've edited other peoples', or discovered or helped or mentored...

Dick: It's fun doing period stuff because sometimes you remember it!

Ian: What, like the War of the Roses? But it's just the length of time we've lived in America really. And we love the mini-series, which is now back in vogue again in the States. We've been pitching here and there different things for that length. But we're hopefully going to do a series for the Beeb later this year - but that's drama. Cops.

Dick: And it's period.

Ian: Set in the sixties. 1965. It's about police and gangs; the 'swinging sixties' is like in the background. We're also in pre-production of a movie about The Kinks called You Really Got Me. That's casting. And we have two stage projects we're trying to set up. And then ... stuff over there. You always have to have so much on the go. Most of them never get done.

Dick: We've just written a movie set in America in 1944, it's a World War II story but it's set in America, which is unusual. We think it's great. So you never know what's going to happen, but you just have to keep working.

'Porridge: Inside Out' is on Gold on Wednesdays from the 21st May 2014. Guide

Porridge, Seven Of One, The Likely Lads Collection, Thick As Thieves and Full Stretch are all available on DVD.