Laurence Marks

It was a little discombobulating to see Birds Of A Feather back on our screens after 15 years, albeit transposed from the BBC to ITV. Essex sisters Sharon (Pauline Quirke) and Tracey (Linda Robson) were initially estranged, while maneater Dorien (Lesley Joseph) had hit the big time by writing a 50 Shades-style bonkbuster under the nom de plume "Foxy Cohen". After a series of unfortunate events, they were all reunited under the same roof by the end of the first episode, a housing situation complicated by Sharon's teenage son Travis (played, rather confusingly, by Pauline Quirke's real-life offspring Charlie Quirke) and the late arrival of another sibling, Garth (former Busted heartthrob Matt Willis), with his new Aussie partner and a kid in tow.

Stuffing all these bodies into one Chigwell house is a smart sitcom move, although past masters Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran didn't need proximity and antagonism to craft gags, firing them out willy-nilly from the off. With pointed jabs at Cameron and Osborne, it made me wonder: did the show used to be so politically minded? In performance terms, Robson, Quirke and Joseph had the benefit of a recent theatre tour warm-up, so it seemed very much like busybody-ness as usual. As yet, there have been no references to The Only Way Is Essex, but surely it's only a matter of time.

Birds Of A Feather (ITV), which began in 1989, has been away from our screens for 15 years. The trio of smashing actresses who carry the show - Linda Robson, Pauline Quirke and Lesley Joseph - must have been preserved in aspic, because none of them looks any older than they did in the Nineties.

The big change here is that Birds was always a BBC comedy. After the sitcom's West End stage success, writers Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran approached the corporation and were told, implausibly, that Auntie's policy is never to do revivals.

That makes little sense, when you consider that the BBC's most popular drama, Doctor Who, lay dormant for more than a decade before being revived.

Anyway, it's the Beeb's loss, because Birds was as funny and edgy as ever. Sex-mad Dorian had reinvented herself as an erotic author called Foxey Cohen, Tracy was a single mum again and Sharon was still boiling with working-class indignation.

'Mr Cameron says we're all in this together,' she grumbled, 'so how come I never bump into him down by the bins?'

Birds Of A Feather, which began in 1989, has been away from our screens for 15 years. The trio of smashing actresses who carry the show - Linda Robson, Pauline Quirke and Lesley Joseph - must have been preserved in aspic, because none of them looks any older than they did in the Nineties.

The big change here is that Birds was always a BBC comedy. After the sitcom's West End stage success, writers Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran approached the corporation and were told, implausibly, that Auntie's policy is never to do revivals.

That makes little sense, when you consider that the BBC's most popular drama, Doctor Who, lay dormant for more than a decade before being revived.

Anyway, it's the Beeb's loss, because Birds was as funny and edgy as ever. Sex-mad Dorian had reinvented herself as an erotic author called Foxey Cohen, Tracy was a single mum again and Sharon was still boiling with working-class indignation.

'Mr Cameron says we're all in this together,' she grumbled, 'so how come I never bump into him down by the bins?'

ITV 'banned references to Scousers and Australians'

Laurence Marks says he had a "huge row" with ITV bosses over the use of comedy stereotypes while writing the new series of classic sitcom Birds Of A Feather.

Comedy writing: Planning is everything

I managed to meet one of my comedy heroes - Laurence Marks. I was heartened by something he said. He said they would usually spend at least 75% of their time planning an episode before writing the script.

Paul Jackson, great practical grammarian of British television, on how Alan Simpson and Ray Galton's comedy characters, born on a BBC pilot programme in 1962, ruled the airwaves for 13 years after (with native versions in America, Sweden and Holland) and have influenced other British writers over several generations. Simpson and Galton join him, as do Maurice Gran and Laurence Marks of Birds of a Feather, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor of Red Dwarf, as well as Peter Flannery of Our Friends in the North.

Curb Your Judaism saw David Schneider ponder why Britain's Jewish comics often avoid looking to their religious background for material, unlike their opposite numbers across the pond.

This was a hotchpotch of a documentary with different contributors - among them David Baddiel, Matt Lucas and writers Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran - all offering their thoughts on why Jewish humour has largely stayed in the closet. Could it be the effect of political correctness? The performer's fear of being pigeonholed and not making the mainstream? It wasn't clear whether the programme sufficiently answered any of these questions. Perhaps placing the debate in some kind of historical and/or social context would have helped as well as hearing the thoughts of the American performers mentioned.

Tragedy is easy - it's comedy that's hard

From Ricky Gervais to the Baftas, Britain has long failed to appreciate comedy properly, says award-winning comedy writer Laurence Marks.

There weren't many duff notes in Friends, the slick NBC sitcom that ran and ran from 1994 to 2004 and, for those of us with homes full of teenagers, is still running and running. But one of its duffest notes was the casting of Helen Baxendale to play Ross's British wife, Emily. Nothing against Baxendale, but amid all that sassy American humour, she seemed as flaccidly English as a stale Rich Tea biscuit surrounded by freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies.

In fairness, that was kind of the point; we weren't meant to warm to Emily. And Baxendale, deliberately, didn't get many killer lines. But it wasn't just that; whip-smart, wisecracking American humour just doesn't sound right emerging from a British mouth. For the same reason, Daphne Moon (Jane Leeves) was my least favourite character in the otherwise sublime Frasier. It's not that British actors aren't capable of wonderful TV comedy, just that the dialogue in the best US sitcoms is rooted in New York-Jewish traditions of razor-sharp put-downs and one-liners. Think Woody Allen and Neil Simon. On British television, comic dialogue has a different rhythm.

Anyway, all of this brings me to Episodes, in which Matt LeBlanc (dim, amiable Joey in Friends) plays a heightened version of himself in the latest example of what is rapidly becoming a TV genre all of its own: celebrities indulging in a game of double-bluff with us, playing themselves as slightly more neurotic and prima donna-ish than they actually are, which of course suggests that they're not neurotic prima donnas at all. Steve Coogan did this beautifully in The Trip recently, as did Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. In Episodes, it is LeBlanc's turn. He plays Matt LeBlanc, hugely rich and successful thanks to Friends, who to the horror of married British comedy writers Beverly and Sean (Tamsin Greig and Stephen Mangan) is cast as the lead in the US version of their hit UK show. They wanted their British lead, a fruity RSC type called Julian (Richard Griffiths). But they get LeBlanc.

So far, so good. It's a great idea, with great opening credits: a script flying from London to LA. And there are certainly precedents for television successfully turning a mirror on itself; The Larry Sanders Show of blessed memory did it exquisitely. Moreover, there's something painfully real about British comedy writers being lured to LA by the sweet blandishments of network bosses and the promise of a Spanish-style hacienda in Beverly Hills, only for the semi-detached back in Chiswick to seem even more alluring once the dream starts to sour. You should hear the British writing duo Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, who did the whole hacienda thing, on the subject. Yet I find myself unable to give a fat thumbs-up after the opening Episodes, and the problem lies with Greig and Mangan, or at least with their script. In a British context, they're both terrific comic performers. Greig was pitch-perfect as the hapless heroine in David Renwick's wonderful Love Soup. But here, trading waspish one-liners in the land of Jack Benny and George Burns, they seemed out of place. And although that's the whole point - that they are out of place - they should at least be talking like Brits, not Americans.

Still, it's early days. I have a feeling that Episodes will get better the more LeBlanc gets involved. And there have already been some lovely gags, like the friskiness that gripped Beverly and Sean when they saw that the vast bath in their rented Beverly Hills home could easily accommodate both of them, only for it to wear off while they waited for the damn thing to fill.

Our grey world does not exist except in the imagination of the blue people. A startling statement, perhaps, but to those who heard the first two instalments of Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran's My Blue Heaven trilogy the concept should be familiar. To all others, welcome to the Douglas Adams-esque world of Graham Slater (Stephen Mangan), who is employed by his childhood imaginary friend, Mr Fluffy, a blue creature now known as Lapis Lazuli. He has to rid his friend's dimension of poisonous cash from the toxic debts that caused the global recession. Keeping up? Good, because this is brilliant stuff, full of neat wordplay and wonderful characters: Graham's indomitable mother (Phyllida Law) and her improbable stories; the child-like Mr Fluffy; and the steely, honey-voiced tax officer. Top marks (and Gran, too).