Maurice Gran

Greedy? Pah! Our rotten MPs weren't claiming nearly ENOUGH! says Alan B'Stard

He's one of the vilest comic creations of all time - Alan B'Stard, the venal and lecherous Tory MP played by Rik Mayall in the TV satire The New Statesman. Now, as MPs are finally held to account, Alan is back. In this article (written with a little help from the show's co-creator Maurice Gran), he has a few proposals of his own...

Maurice Gran asks 'Who killed the sitcom?'

We adored Fawlty Towers when it hit the TV screens, even though we were working at the time on a script set in a rundown seaside hotel. It happens.

Mumbai Calling was a pilot for a new sitcom. At this stage, the sit seems promising - but, if there is to be a series, it'll need to work a lot harder on the com part.

Sanjeev Bhaskar plays Kenny Gupta - who, at the start of last night's show, was working in the accounts department of a Jewish family firm in London. (The Jewish element is presumably where Bhaskar's co-writers, Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, come in.) But then the firm's patriarch, who clearly knew a thing or two about how to set up a traditional comedy plot, decided that his dim nephew and his glamorous but spoilt daughter should join Kenny in running the company's new call centre in Mumbai.

So far, the inevitable cultural clashes have been disappointingly, even lazily familiar. The daughter was surprised to discover that Mumbai is a big messy city instead of the spiritual India of her romantic imaginings. As a special treat, the dim nephew tried to serve the workers a beef dinner.

Both Mumbai and the call centre itself could yet make for an interesting and unusual sitcom setting. If so, however, the script will have to get to grips with it in a much more coherent, as well as a funnier way. At the moment, the result just feels like a slightly plodding drama with a few little (and entirely detachable) gags sprinkled on top.

Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, even with four feet between them, find it hard to put one wrong. They wrote Birds Of A Feather and Goodnight Sweetheart, and their new series, Unfinished Business (BBC1), is a wonderful piece of work.

Goodnight Sweetheart was a slowish starter which is now in its second series and lapping other runners. It owes a certain tender debt to Dennis Potter, the first playwright since Noël Coward to realise how potent cheap music is.

I see Marks and Gran as a family firm of scriptwriters. Gran supplying the historical colours which Marks, her grandson of course, is too young to remember. Their Shine On Harvey Moon (Meridian, Sunday) is the sort of warm-hearted, back-to-basics, jolly, argumentative family saga, which did very well once. In the early eighties to be precise.

It suffered, and it deserved to, from following Snakes and Ladders (Yorks), a satiric series set in the near future with John Gordon Sinclair] (son of toil) and Adrian Edmondson (upper class twit). Due to a cock-up, rather literally, on the works computer they get on the wrong escalators. The toiler rises exhilaratingly to the boardroom and the twit sinks to the basement.