TV Writers

Here are some of the TV writers whose work I grew up enjoying, and, as I became more aware, whose names I started looking out for when planning my viewing. That’s why some of them go back as far as they do. (At one point, following a memory thread, I found myself Googling ‘what early 60s tv programme had acker bilks stranger on the shore as theme tune?’ and received the answer Stranger on the Shore. Well, if you don’t ask, you don’t get.) Not that it was ever as calculated as that. A lot of these writers contributed to the many series I regularly liked to watch, so if anything, what I was getting was the impression, unrecognised at first but becoming increasingly obvious, that a decent professional writer could turn his hand to anything. Sure, everyone has their strengths and favourite genres, but almost without exception these gentlemen have done most things well, and this is by way of my humble salute to them all.

I certainly haven’t watched everything every one of them has done – who’s got the time? We all have lives beyond the box, even these guys – but I remember the best stuff, the stuff that sticks.

If there are no women here it’s probably because I tend not to note their names so much. Certainly the stand-outs like Sally Wainwright and Debbie Horsfield and Heidi Thomas are as prolific as anyone, but a lot of women TV writers work on long-running series or produce one-off dramas, usually starring Suranne Jones of Sheridan Smith, which I tend not to watch because they are usually too serious or fraught throughout. No levity. The one element I can usually trust the men here to supply is the occasional proper gag.

Alan Bleasdale

(1946–)

I often think the reason there are so many TV dramas about middle class people (‘adultery among the architect classes’ as someone sourly puts it in Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Thing) is because they need to live in houses big enough to fit the camera crew in. So it’s refreshing occasionally to see a proper left-wing blast of fresh air about something other than hurt feelings or English guilt with the odd nipple thrown in if you’re lucky. Boys from the Blackstuff (1982) may have been raw and funny and memorable, the Cathy Come Home of its day, but I found The Monocled Mutineer (1986) more interesting because it recreated a historical period I had no personal recollection of. Plus I’d recently read the book and the art of adaptation has always intrigued me. What do you leave in, what do you leave out? Do you type with the thing conscientiously open beside you, or do you read the source material once and then just splurge out everything you can remember, like a university essay? It’s a skill I shall probably never acquire at this late stage, but I admire those who can do it so memorably.

Steven Bochco

(1943–2018)

Steven Bochco had worked on such classic seventies cop shows as Ironside and Columbo, but while that scruffy detective always cosily implied all was well by bringing to book the LA high and mighty, Hill Street Blues (1981–1987), co-created with Michael Kozoll and set all the way over on the other side of country (some say Chicago, I say New York), was invariably twenty degrees colder and several rungs down the social scale. The machine-tooled ensemble cast lived lives you recognised, they knew pressure and heartbreak, and they cared – ‘Protect and Serve’ was not just a slogan they sat behind in their broad, flat squad cars as they hit the gritty streets, blues and twos blaring. The only moment of whimsy would come at the end when the MTM kitten logo mewed out at you from under a cartoon policeman’s hat. Bochco went on to create Doogie Howser with David E Kelley, NYPD BLUE with David Milch, and Murder One with Charles H Eglee and Channing Gibson, but his masterpiece was already in the can. He made the cop show real. And we still need to be careful out there.

David Chase

(1945–)

I came to The Sopranos (1999–2007) late, mainly because I didn’t believe it could possibly be as good as everybody said it was. But just like Jaws forty years before, I should have had more faith in the genius behind it which had already bewitched so many critical and discerning people. The episode ‘Pine Barrens’ in series three is probably the best of many – tense and brutal, shocking and funny, it has all the ingredients of that life in abundance, and what an awful life for anyone to lead. While James Gandolfini by all accounts was every bit as nice as everyone said, the character he played was, to my mind, irredeemable, and I hope he really did get bumped off in the final moments of the final episode. It was surely the only appropriate ending for such an evil man. So he was seeing a psychiatrist, so he was trying to better himself. So what? Still killed people who would be living their lives today if he hadn’t come along. Let him and his ilk rot.

Cleese & Booth

John Cleese (1939–) & Connie Booth (1940–)

John Cleese is such a titan in the comedy world that people glibly assumed Basil in Fawlty Towers (1975–1979) was a projection of himself with all his demons writ grotesquely large, while it is (or has since become) common knowledge that the inspiration for the character was a real hotel manager he once encountered while filming on location (in Paignton, not Torquay) with the Pythons. Besides, he was only the co-writer with his then-wife Connie Booth, and how many people have ever wondered whether Sybil was a grotesque version of her? It would be as reasonable to assume that as to assume the other. Or rather, equally preposterous. The genius of the show, in my view, is that Sybil is every bit as bad as Basil in her own way, and to say that he has driven her to be the way she is, is sexist, denying her agency. She can stand up to him, she’s not just the bullied little woman – which is why their relationship is so much more effective – and real – than other married-couple sitcoms like, I don’t know, George and Mildred or Terry and June, where none of the principals will ever surprise you because they are stereotypes. Basil and Sybil may be caricatures, but they are etched with acid, like a Rowlandson cartoon. And they represent the essence of farce – the worst possible combination of events overtaking the worst possible people at the worst possible time. And if, as I hear, some of the tapes have been cleaned up so as not to offend a modern audience – removing some of the language from ‘The Germans’, for instance, or the perceived racism against Manuel – then I can only lament for the delicate sensibilities of the coming generations. Basil’s hand reaching round the door jamb to flick the lovely Luan Peters’s nipple like a light switch is one of those moments that will live long in the memory, not just because it’s simultaneously funny and sexy and outrageous and transgressive and ‘ahead of its time’, whatever that might mean, but because there hasn’t been a show before or since where such an extraordinarily surreal assault could take place and everyone would go along with it because it was all part of the fun. It was 1979. I’d go back in a heartbeat.

Clement & La Frenais

Dick Clement (1937–) & Ian La Frenais (1937)

A classic is something that is not only good for its time, it transcends its time to remain good for good. Nobody is going to get it right every time, but this partnership has had a far greater succession of hits, and at a far higher quality, than most. Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads was an enormous leap forward from its original sixties source sitcom, to be followed not only by Porridge but Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, among the two or three best comedy-dramas TV has ever produced. And for once the big-screen adaptations of the first two were actually worth making, it wasn’t just a case of the ramshackle idiots from the TV series going on holiday together and having an even more miserable time than if they’d all stayed at home. While Clement and La Frenais’s fillums have not always shown them at their best – with perhaps The Commitments as the most honourable exception – they have for decades been providing the much-needed (and invariably anonymous) leavening to any number of big-screen actioners from The Rock to Pearl Harbor and, by several accounts, a few Bonds as well. Their secret, I think, is always to be aware of the comedy in the tragedy, to bring that out, and to celebrate it. Even animals can weep; it’s the laughter that makes us human.

Richard Curtis

(1956–)

I was standing on Temple Meads station in Bristol – must have been the end of the 80s – when I suddenly came face to face with a poster for a new comedy film called The Tall Guy. I recognised the names Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson, but dammit I’d actually known and even acted at university with the other star Rowan Atkinson and the writer Richard Curtis. So a contemporary of mine had written a film starring the Hollywood star Jeff Goldblum and I was standing on the main station in my home town about to go to no job. Life can be funny like that… you have to keep telling yourself. But of course my friend Richard (as I was once able to call him) had already shown his potential in Not the Nine O’Clock News and Blackadder and even greater glories were to come, not the least of which would be his stewardship of Comic Relief which is testament not only to his enormous heart, but also to his bottomless stores of energy and selflessness. While I’d always known he was funny, it was the romantic side that surprised me. But he can do sentiment well not least because he’s not embarrassed by it. It was Richard who wrote the Doctor Who episode featuring Vincent van Gogh with an unforgettable turn by actor Tony Curran. My former mucker just seems to have a knack of appealing to people. And in one of his earliest sketches for one of his earliest shows – Allswellthatendsrock!, Oxford, 1975 – he even came up with a catchphrase that the audience immediately latched on to. His character, a naff actor, eager to please the stoic producer, kept saying “Ebsolutely” in a plummy public schoolboy accent. He told us they all used to say that at Harrow. I wouldn’t know. He would. He wrote what he knew and it worked, memorably. 

Andrew Davies

(1936–)

And here’s someone else with apparently more energy than the rest of us put together. How many of us can honestly put our hands up and say we’ve read such doorstep novels as Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, Doctor Zhivago, Bleak House, War and Peace and Les Misérables? (I’ve read two.) Well, Andrew Davies has not only read them, he’s adapted them all for TV. How much sheer reading must that entail, before you even sit down and put finger to keyboard to type the first page of the script? And then all the rest of the pages after that. And they’re only the famous ones, he also adapted RF Delderfield’s To Serve Them All My Days, Michael Dobbs’s House of Cards, Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, Mary Welsey’s Harnessing Peacocks, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, and John Cleland’s Fanny Hill among others. And not only George Eliot’s Middlemarch but also her Daniel Deronda. And not only Trollope’s The Way We Live Now but also his He Knew He Was Right. Not only Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice but also her Sense and Sensibility. And not only Dickens’s Bleak House but also his Little Dorrit. Not to mention all the other one-offs he’s penned, from such original series as A Very Peculiar Practice to the drama Ball-Trap on the Côte Sauvage, as well as the films Bridget Jones’s Diary, Brideshead Revisited and The Tailor of Panama, to name but a few. And all right, he may get a bit smuttier than he needs to be, but audiences seem to like that sort of thing, and if it gets people keen enough to read the book then that can only be a bonus, can’t it? Yes, TV can be an end in itself, but when it also becomes a conduit, a midwife, an inspiration to other things, then it must be doing something right. I may not always agree with Mr D’s methods, but you can’t argue with his success in capturing the essence of his favourite works of literature.

Ben Elton

(1959–)

Even if I didn’t always feel comfortable with his stand-up, in Saturday Live in the eighties, or The Man From Auntie in the nineties (he always seemed so sure of himself, I wondered what that must feel like), there could be no denying his industry and commitment. Not just the stand-up but the novels; not just the plays but the musicals, and the TV sitcoms. And then there were the films. Well, maybe not the films so much – Maybe Baby was positively mawkish, to my mind, and I couldn’t warm to it, the ever-statuesque Joely Richardson notwithstanding. But it still demonstrated the kind of restless ‘try everything once and then, whether it worked or not, what the hell, try it again’ attitude that I envy and approve of. Blackadder is probably top of the heap of course, not just for the jokes, but we have it on co-writer Richard Curtis’s authority that it was usually Ben who knew the history. And all right, there may be one or two too many knob-gags cropping up throughout the canon, but people seem to like them, and sometimes a well-timed crudity can save the scene or even carry the day if inserted at the right juncture. Bottom line, the man has been at the forefront of his profession for nearly half a century, rightly admired not just for the variety of his work but also its consistent quality. And come to think of it, he’s probably right about the politics as well.

Galton & Simpson

Ray Galton (1930–2018) & Alan Simpson (1929–2017)

It was only when I was older that I began to appreciate Galton and Simpson. Their humour was of a particularly British kind, from a period which I only fully appreciated in hindsight. They were on the cusp of the transition from post-war austerity to swinging sixties modernity, which is perhaps why their stuff still tends to sound black and white in one’s memory. But even if their great comedy creations like Hancock and Steptoe & Son are no more than social documents alone, they would be worth preserving. But of course, they are also a lot more than that. Hancock’s perennially frustrated Walter Mitty character, and the awful self-destructive, self-replicating hell the Steptoes find themselves in, have elements most of us will recognise, and it helps to be able to laugh at others in the same predicament. Visually, the young me always found the squalor of the Steptoes’ environment hard to take – ‘there but for the grace of God’ (or an infant’s version of that notion) was always my reaction. But by the time the episode ‘The Desperate Hours’ turned up in 1972, I was a bit more receptive to how skilful writing, expert plotting and exquisite performances could come together to transcend any poverty of environment. Leonard Rossiter, on the run from prison with an old lag as an accomplice, breaks into Harold and Albert’s Oildrum Lane hovel and orders Harold to empty his pockets. Harold does so. He has three and a half pence on him. Harry H Corbett’s moment of shame and humiliation is as good as Chaplin. The team’s failed attempt to help Hancock go international with a film – The Rebel in 1961 – seemed to suggest that TV was really the medium that suited their themes and scale best.

Mark Gatiss

(1966–)

I only really caught up with Mark Gatiss when he started writing Sherlock with Steven Moffatt, though of course he had been at the top of the tree for some time by then. I had not warmed to The League of Gentlemen because I found the mix of comedy and horror rather queasy. I can’t imagine how any such opposites can possibly be made to sit together, it would be like slathering syrup on bacon, the taste of one is always going to dominate the other to the detriment of both, so why bother? But once I’d recognised his quality I made sure to seek out anything else with his imprimatur, from the documentaries about Dracula to the adaptations of the short stories of Edwardian horror author M R James. An equally distinguished performer, Mr Gatiss made a memorable Bamber Gascoigne in the film Starter for Ten and I’m sure in the National Theatre’s recent The Motive and the Cue he was equally convincing as John Gielgud directing Jonny Flynn as Richard Burton in Hamlet. His other big thing of course is Doctor Who, alas another area in which I do not care to follow him. I remember watching the first episode in 1963 as well as the next old man – that spooky caveman’s shadow falling across the foreground as the Tardis made its first jump through time and space – but the science fiction genre as a whole has never held the slightest appeal for me, and these days I will only ever contemplate it in return for folding spondulicks, and in the absence of anything more to my taste.

David E Kelley

(1956–)

Because of his legal background, he was headhunted by none other than Steven Bochco (see above) to work on L.A. Law  from the mid-eighties on, and thereafter he was involved in creating, writing and/or producing some of the most Emmy-bedecked series on all the major networks in the US: Doogie Howser, Chicago Hope, Ally McBeal, Boston Legal, and the HBO hit The Undoing to name but a few. If he hadn’t been so busy writing for TV he might have written more films, but FWIW, the big crocodile comedy thriller Lake Placid (1999) has always been a family favourite in our house. It’s that intrusion of the comic into something that, if real, should be taken very seriously that seals the deal for me – the absurdity of a golfer killing a swan with a golf ball in L.A. Law (and being gracefully defended in court by Susan Dey’s Grace Van Owen), or the Job-like saga of John’s frog in Ally McBeal who at one point gets flushed down the toilet (“Was it a fresh bowl?”) before – or was it after? – being whacked into a coma by the stall door opening at the wrong moment. Plus, the man seems to know his women, which is perhaps why, on top of all his other success, he even got to marry Michelle Pfeiffer. Some guys have all the luck.

Russell Lewis

(1963–)

Hard to find a decent picture of Mr Lewis so I suppose he prefers to live his life out of the spotlight these days, but the moment I saw his name as the writer of Inspector Morse spin-off Endeavour (2012–2023) –where the hero is far more easy to empathise with – I knew it rang a bell. And I didn’t even need to look him up. In Carl Foreman’s 1972 biopic Young Winston, young Mr Lewis played Young Winston Churchill at the age of seven. It’s surprising how many talented people start off as actors then find a more lucrative career as writers. I understand Lynda La Plante, for instance, was moved to create her 1980s TV hit Widows because she was so frustrated at the quality of scripts she was being offered as an actress, she thought she couldn’t do worse herself. My own namesake Robin Hawdon, he of Val Guest’s unforgettable stone age romp When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970), playing opposite the equally unforgettable Victoria Vetri, became a novelist, an even more successful playwright, and ended up running Bath Theatre Royal. Russell Lewis himself was also one of the writers of Between the Lines, an excellently tense drama series which was a kind of ’90s precursor to Jed Mercurio’s Line of Duty (2012–). I can’t imagine the amount of labour involved in penning an entire series of two-hour episodes on your own, let alone doing it nine times on the trot. If I could summon up a tenth of that energy myself, I might have filled this website years ago…

Jimmy McGovern

(1949–)

The quality of the writing in the first ever episode of Cracker – ‘The Mad Woman in the Attic’ – was so distinctive that I immediately knew Mr M was on to a winner here. It wasn’t just the words of course: Robbie Coltrane inhabited the lead role as if he was born for it, and the main cast of Christopher Ecclestone, Lorcan Cranitch and Geraldine Somerville were unmatched in intensity and commitment. But it was the conception and the execution that grabbed me. You had your underdog, Adrian Dunbar’s gentle and bewildered amnesiac, who might be the culprit after all, DS Jimmy Beck’s tortured bully who convinced himself early doors that he damn well was the murdering bastard he was after, Barbara Flynn’s feisty wife who wasn’t going to put up with this shit anymore, and the altogether unsympathetic but still compelling Fitz, whose dark humour, however self-serving and inappropriate, frequently flashed a brief but welcome light over all the dark doings. I had no idea whether the psychology – or even the psychologist-helps-police set-up – was in any way authentic (and as the series went on these both seemed to become increasingly implausible), but in the context of the drama that didn’t matter. It was an exercise in showing people at the extremes of their tolerance, and the dire consequences that can ensue once they step beyond them. Time has passed now and I’ve noticed some trendy commentators seem to take delight these days in denigrating the passion of writers like Jimmy McGovern and Alan Bleasdale, who make no bones about their political allegiances and craft searing dramas to make their point. The fact that the great and the good and the cosy and the condescending are still around in such numbers that the rest of us need to be reminding sometimes that this isn’t how things have to be, suggests that there is still a need for the kind of drama that seems to have been written in blood and sweat and tears. If they didn’t hit home, there would be no need for such a strong animus towards them.

Sir John Mortimer

(1923–2009)

He is credited with writing Granada’s magnificent 1981 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, though later, when it emerged his scripts were not actually used, he was apparently not as quick as he might have been to deflect the compliments. Never mind, there were still enough series featuring the marvellous Leo McKern as the redoubtable Horace Rumpole to more than prove his worth. Each episode was constructed like a cryptic crossword clue, with the main plot invariably highlighted or given a different slant by a suitably oblique and subtle subplot. It takes the skill of a master craftsman to put together pieces in such a way that you can’t see the join. And that’s even before you consider all the good years Sir John himself put in as a real-life defence barrister.

David Nobbs

(1935–2015)

On the one hand, by his own admission his 1980 sitcom The Sun Trap got the lowest recorded audience for any sitcom in the history of BBC1; on the other, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, based on his own novel (there were about twenty others) became an instant classic of its time, in much the same way as David Renwick’s One Foot in the Grave would do a decade or so later. No surprise: that theme – the over-sensitive individual railing against a senseless and randomly cruel world – must be so universal as to always ring a bell with every generation. (The distaff side of Reggie Perrin might have been Carla Lane’s contemporaneous Butterflies, though perhaps that had a softer, less frantic mood.) I also remember David Nobbs wrote the eighties sitcom Fairly Secret Army, another good vehicle for Geoffrey Palmer who had played a similar version of the same brusquely-spoken soldier in Reggie Perrin. Another of the novels, Cupid’s Darts, was adapted from his own TV play about an elderly professor (Robin Bailey) falling for a darts groupie (Leslie Ash), but to my mind it’s not as strong an idea as his best work; rather, it’s just another variation on the ‘manic pixie dream girl’ genre, whose fetching female character exists mainly to give a sad old man a bit of life before infirmity and death finally close in. It’s the sort of experience Reginald Perrin might have had, if he’d had a bit more luck. But instead he was stuck in the real world, which is why I believe that series was so much stronger and more successful.

Alan Plater

(1935–2010)

One of those thoroughgoing professionals who seemed to be around for decades and who could turn his hand to anything, from originals to series to adaptations. Glancing at his IMDb page I see one of his earliest credits was for Crane, starring Patrick Allen, and even though my age was only in single figures at the time, I remember my mum liking it. (Did I mention gravel-voiced hunk Patrick Allen was in it before he started advertising Barratt homes?) African setting. Some belly dancer? Gun-running was it? But I certainly remember the likes of Z-Cars and Softly Softly, for which Mr P wrote regularly, and then there were the family-friendly series like Flambards and The Beiderbecke Affair as well as regular one-offs featuring such iconic detectives as Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Maigret, Campion, and Lewis, once Inspector Morse had kicked the bucket. He is also credited with ‘additional dialogue’ in the 1974 Richard Lester-directed thriller Juggernaut, which is far better than its reputation would have you believe. The first time I saw it I admit the tension in the climactic bomb-defusing scene was somewhat dissipated for me by the fact that, while the outcome hangs on which colour wire Richard Harris cuts, the red or the blue, I was watching on a black and white set… That’s the kind of moment I think Alan Plater might have written himself, embodying as it does one of those whimsical ironies of life that occasionally plague us all. And then we move on, as long as we haven’t been blown up.

David Renwick

(1951–)

Not only One Foot in the Grave (1990–2001) but Jonathan Creek (1997–2016). The first is genius, the second ingenious. And all those Ronnie Corbett monologues as well. Although he started out in sketch comedy with his writing partner Andrew Marshall, with whom he also created the satirical series Whoops Apocalypse (1982) and Hot Metal (1986), it’s Mr R’s solo work I admire most. Both One Foot and Jonathan Creek stand or fall on the plausibility of their plotting – however fantastical or absurd the premises – and each episode slots together like silken Lego. Victor may not believe the latest mishap to befall him, through no fault of his own, but we do, because the ground has been prepared so subtly but thoroughly that the playing out of the subsequent shenanigans has the inevitability of Laurel and Hardy’s piano falling down a flight of steps on a sunny afternoon in Hollywood. But the comedy would have not nearly so much bite if the reality of Victor’s situation were not always so regularly emphasised. The man feels frustrated and sidelined in a world which no longer has any useful role for him. Plus, as Margaret remarks once, “He is the most sensitive man I know.” That’s his Aristotelian hamartia, and the source of his hilarious tragedy. Oh, and I’ll always have a soft spot for Jonathan Creek as well because it was one of the first series my growing daughter and I used to sit down and watch together. A pity the women in that poor man’s life couldn’t be a bit more forgiving. No Margaret they.

 Aaron Sorkin

(1961–)

His big thing is he hears dialogue like music, so he writes the way Mozart composes, with that same elegance, that same Baroque complexity. I haven’t been able to work out yet the precise function of, and his relationship with, the so-called writers’ room, but even if Aaron Sorkin didn’t strictly write every single word of every single show in the first four series of The West Wing (1999–2006) that he created, he had the overall final say in the shaping and editing. Always seems a good bloke when you watch him being interviewed, quick to give credit to the directors, producers and actors he admires, so he knows it’s not all down to him. But then again, when he himself can take credit for so much top-quality stuff, it’s little wonder he’s got the confidence and generosity to spread a little love around to the people he thinks deserve it. Meanwhile, there’s a little exchange from ‘Game On’, season 4, episode 6, credited (as it happens) to Aaron Sorkin and Paul Redford, which I first saw in 2002 and have been turning over in my mind ever since. Leo is talking to the Qumari ambassador: “You think the President’s afraid that if he admitted complicity in Shareef’s death, he would lose votes in this country? To sweep all fifty states, the President would only need to do two things – blow the Sultan’s brains out in Times Square, then walk across the street to Nathan’s and buy a hot dog” (or ‘hat dawg’ as the marvellous John Spencer pronounces it). Sound familiar? I’m not saying Trump could have stolen the notion of random public execution for one of his most notoriously egregious statements – The West Wing was hardly likely to figure high on his list of favourite TV shows of the noughties – but maybe he had a bright staffer who caught the speech and thought it might make his boss look tough. Like that’s all it took. It obviously never occurred to the orange utan he could perhaps start by trying to make himself a bit more worthy to lick Jed Bartlet’s boots.

John Sullivan

(1946–2011)

Citizen Smith (1977–1980) was hard to love, in my view, because the main character was such a bell-end, it depressed me to think anyone would be so misguided as to believe in such a clay-footed hypocrite and I didn’t want him to succeed. (This was before the 2016 US election, let alone the one in 2024, wherein life imitated art with biblically extreme consequences.) Just Good Friends (1983–1986) was annoying because the smarmy Vince, played so well by Paul Nicholas, didn’t deserve to get so much as a nod or a smile from someone of Jan Francis’s quality (serve him right his name in the show was Vince). But Only Fools and Horses (1981–2003) ticked all the boxes. And all the exteriors were filmed in my home town, even my side of the river. I still have a problem with the idea of people with no other options trying to get ahead by ripping other people off – sometimes the people they rip off are no better off themselves, and end up worse off through their abuser’s selfishness and greed – but maybe that’s just my problem and this is not the place to go into the politics of social privilege and inequality. (I’m the only person I know who wants the coach to go over the cliff at the end of The Italian Job.) Anyhoo, the thing about a John Sullivan script is that it’s always so lean. Every line is leading to the next joke, and that joke is going to be based in character, not just be a funny line for the sake of it. And he can do pathos like the best of them – ‘Holding Back the Years’ playing at the wedding reception as Rodney leaves Del alone in the hall to go off with the dodgy Cassaundrah, for instance. Just as the best drama is immeasurably improved by the occasional moment of levity, usually at the most inappropriate of times (think of Yosser Hughes’s exchange with the priest: “I’m desperate, father. “Call me Dan.” “I’m desperate, Dan.”), so comedy is only made sharper and more believable when it can also make you gulp with sudden tears – not just Blackadder Goes Forth, but most Steptoe and Sons, any Alan Bennett, or, say, A Night In, the perfect half-hour play embedded halfway through Clement and La Frenais’s iconic sitcom Porridge. Life can be as funny as hell – even when life is hell – and all the best writers know this.