Homage to Clement and La Frenais, the writing duo who transformed British comedy

Ray Galton and Alan Simpson remain pre-eminent as writers of television comedy, but their closest rivals Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais — still with us and in their eighties — always possessed more variety. Until I’d wolfed down this genial memoir I’d not known that the script-writing-and-directing duo had adapted Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head for the screen. They also developed Lucky Jim as a television series and found Kingsley Amis pie-eyed, maudlin and testy, ‘jealous of his son’s success’. They wrote The Jokers and Hannibal Brooks for the disgusting Michael Winner (who once told a starlet: ‘What this part does not require is a diploma from Rada. What it does require is a great pair of tits. Let’s have a look at ’em, then.’).

Clement and La Frenais devised the role of a mother-fixated homosexual gangster for Richard Burton in a film called Villain. During pre-production meetings at the Dorchester, Elizabeth Taylor remained locked in the lavatory and was never seen. There was a huge yacht moored on the Thames at Wapping containing her pet dogs, which were not permitted ashore for quarantine reasons. Burton’s favourite viewing was a 16mm print of Carry On Cleo, where Sid James wore Burton’s Mark Antony costume, left over from Cleopatra.

When the writers met Peter Sellers in Vienna to make The Prisoner of Zenda, the Goon reminisced wistfully about his music- hall origins, when he’d enjoyed ‘the occasional skirmish with a chorus girl in some draughty room with a gas meter’. Finding themselves in Russia with Elton John they were amused to hear Elton tell the guide that he had ‘a bigger Fabergé collection than the Kremlin’.

In this easygoing opus, with its randomly dropped anecdotes, no grudges are aired or scores settled. The strongest they get is to tell us that Rodney Bewes enjoyed his fame too much and ‘went through a silly period’.