Ian La Frenais is doing a zombie impression. “They were comin' towards us like
this,” he says, holding out his arms and groaning as if he were one of the
undead. “And here's me and Jimmy Nail in this f***ing hot-air balloon.
That's when we realised where we had crash-landed - in the grounds of the
Morpeth mental asylum! The patients must have looked up and thought: ‘Bloody
hell, there's Oz comin' out of the sky'.”
It's Monday afternoon and we are in the garden of a relatively modest canyon
home in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles. Which makes it all the stranger that I
am standing here listening to a 71-year-old Geordie as he recounts a
possibly exaggerated tale about a recent ballooning mishap in Northumberland
with the former star of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.
A few yards away, smiling tolerantly, is La Frenais' Essex-born writing
partner of 44 years, Dick Clement. He also turns 71 this year.
It has been more than three decades now since La Frenais and Clement moved to
LA to write an American version of Porridge, their second hugely successful
British sitcom after The Likely Lads and its sequel, Whatever Happened to
the Likely Lads?. And here in LA they have stayed - a little piece of
England amid the 12-lane freeways and the In-N-Out burger joints. Both
married Americans and both live just streets away in the glamorous 90210 zip
code.
The symbiosis between Clement and La Frenais is obvious after only a few
minutes in their company, during which they seamlessly edit each other's
sentences and complete each other's anecdotes. And yet in many ways they're
completely at odds with each other: La Frenais is cheeky, scruffy and
unfailingly off-colour (the “Morpeth mental asylum” is actually St George's
Hospital for Adult Mental Illness), while Clement has the calm, almost
patrician air of an RAF wing commander.
When La Frenais complains of going back to his favourite Newcastle pubs only
to be confronted by “Chilean sea bass and reservations, and no geezers”, you
get the feeling that that is just the way Clement would like it. God only
knows how they spend hour after hour trapped in a second-floor office here
at Clement's house, often working on multiple scripts simultaneously.
I'm here to discuss why the duo have adapted The Likely Lads for stage almost
half a century after they created it. In fact, the sketch that inspired the
sitcom was the first thing that they wrote together after being introduced
by a mutual friend in a Notting Hill pub. At the time Clement was a trainee
BBC producer and La Frenais was doing, well, bugger all. The sketch could
just as easily have been about their own friendship as the fictional one
between the aspirational Bob Ferris (Rodney Bewes) and the defiantly
working-class Terry Collier (James Bolam). The original series aired in
1964, with the sequel following a decade later, in colour. The play will
debut at the £15 million Gala Theatre in Durham on June 11, with David
Nellist and Scott Frazer as Bob and Terry. Fans of the television series
shouldn't expect Bewes and Bolam to turn up, as they haven't spoken for 30
years.
“Jimmy was always very sensitive to being typecast,” La Frenais explains a
little wearily. “Part of him loved doing The Likely Lads and part of him
thought: ‘Every time I go to the newsagents, they're going to call me
Terry.' We would have thought that it would have been rather fun to have
done something that made you that well known. And I think he did worry about
it too much. Rodney, for some reason, loved being Bob. And that was a kind
of conflict. It's not that there was ever a problem on the set; it's just
that they were different.”
The idea for a stage play came from Simon Stallworthy, the Gala's artistic
director. “He did an adaptation based on our scripts,” La Frenais recalls.
“We read it and thought it was funny, but because there was a writers'
strike in Hollywood - me and Dick were walking around in circles all day
outside the Fox studio lot with f***ing picket signs - we decided to do it
ourselves.”
The plot follows that of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?: acts I and II
are condensed versions of each season. Terry has come back from seven years
in the army to find Newcastle changed beyond recognition. Bob is becoming
ever more middle-class, while Terry tries to cling on to his youth through
beer, birds and football. La Frenais says that the play remains set in the
Seventies (“there won't be any mobile phones or Blackberries, none of that
bollocks”) and has endured because “Bob and Terry are now considered part of
the North East's culture”.
And how about Ant and Dec for the West End transfer? "Ant and Dec would be
great," says Clement. "Not up to us, though, as we are not producing the
show."
Clement and La Frenais are as busy as they have ever been after a relatively
dry period during the Nineties, capped by their perhaps unwise decision to
revive Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. And then along came Flushed Away, Goal!, The
Bank Job and Across the Universe, an astonishing run that has turned the duo
into the latest hot new things in Hollywood - if septuagenarians can be
described as such. They are also among the few who can command as much as
$250,000 a week for “script doctoring”.
“It's fantastic,” enthuses La Frenais, asked about the tweaks that they made
to Bad Boys II and Pearl Harbor, “because it takes so long to get your own
things made, and when you are doing a production rewrite you have all that
adrenalin - there are people at the studio already designing sets, people
looking for locations - and that's such a good buzz.”
“When we looked back at some of the old episodes,” Clement says, “they're a
bit talking-headish. Lots of men sitting in pubs. So we had to focus on the
best situations - that's why they call it ‘situation comedy', after all -
and make them a bit more active. We tried to find two or three stories that
really played well. And we added a lot of new stuff.”
Is it the dynamic of their own writing partnership that makes it so easy for
them to write about other male relationships? “It's obviously a comfortable
habitat for us,” Clement acknowledges. “The Commitments, Bank Job, Porridge,
Auf Wiedersehen, Pet - it's all male bonding, isn't it?”
They are fascinated by real-life male pairings: Blair/Brown, Lennon/McCartney.
“Relationships between comedians also interest us,” says La Frenais,
“because, you know, with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Martin couldn't abide
Lewis. And you wonder how they do it, how they go on stage and put the smile
on. Although with British ones, like Morecambe and Wise, they seem to be
truly enduring relationships. They probably bolstered themselves better than
the individual ones, the Sellers and the Hancocks and all the ones that just
self-destructed.”
Perhaps there's an element of bolstering in their own partnership, I suggest.
How do they indulge in writerly procrastination, for example, when there's
someone else in the room? “Football takes up quite a bit of
procrastination,” La Frenais confesses. “That and a bit of news from
England.”
Clement chips in: “It really depends how much you're under the gun.
Procrastination gets progressively less the nearer you get to the end of a
script. The beginning of a script, before pages one, two, three, four, a lot
of it goes on. But with each successive ten pages it gets a little bit less,
and then you're sprinting for the tape and dying to finish the f***ing
thing.”
“Did you ever hear how Billy Wilder went about his work?” La Frenais asks,
grinning. “He'd make the coffee. Then he'd sharpen his pencils. Then he'd
read the trades. Then he'd make some calls. Then he'd make some more coffee.
Then he'd go outside and wait until he saw three cars pass with Indiana
licence plates...”
At this point I'm reminded politely that three script deadlines loom before
the weekend, and that, more importantly, La Frenais has a Chelsea game to
watch. On the way out, I ask if a TV remake of The Likely Lads will follow
the stage version. “No,” Clement says quickly. “You'd be on a hiding to
nothing. We don't really want to do any more situation comedy. People always
start comparing it with your old work, and it's always unfavourable. So why
set yourself up for that? We want to keep jumping out of new boxes.”
Given the use of the word “we”, can it be assumed their working relationship
remains in good humour? “Well, we don't argue much,” Clement says.
“Everything is debated, whether it's the description of a setting or a piece
of dialogue. We've gone our separate ways before [La Frenais adapted
Lovejoy, while Clement went into directing] but right now we're on a roll -
we've had four films out in the past four years with our names on them,
which I don't think anybody else can say, and that's getting us even more
work.”
La Frenais offers a more succinct analysis. “Dick and I,” he says, “are
Hollywood's most succesful couple.”
The Likely Lads opens at the Gala, Durham (0191-332 4041), on June 11
James Bolam replied to me when I asked him if he ever met Richard Wattis, when I was writing my book in 2003 - 2005. The mark of the man.
It was his side kick/co-star from the LIKELY LADS who I never received a reply from, and I am still waiting 4 yrs later actually.
Ian Payne, WALSALL,
Oh what happened to you - whatever happened to me I hope revisiting my 70s favourite will not destroy the memory. I once played pool with James Bolam in a Shepherds bush pub, seemed like a decent no frills human.
Robot, Brisbane, Australia
Welcome back to Dick and Ian. I'm a huge fan of The Likely Lads, which to me redrew the boundaries of sitcom. The programme had reality at its core and was thus a superior piece of social comment, as well as half an hour of laughs. It's just a pity that James Bolam was so sensitive about his role.
Stephen, Glasgow,