A Likely Story

I’m off to the BFI Southbank tomorrow evening to see Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais in Conversation at the National Film Theatre. Creators of The Likely Lads, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, and Porridge their success as a comedy writing partnership is probably matched only by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson.


Both now in their seventies, the Essex-born Clement and Newcastle-upon-Tyne-born La Frenais have worked together for 43 years. Equally at home writing, directing and producing comedies and dramas, the pair co-created Auf Wiedersehen, Pet with director Franc Roddam, before adapting The Rotters’ Club and Robert Harris’ Archangel for television.

For the cinema Clement and La Frenais wrote Villain, the gangster drama starring Richard Burton, The Commitments for director Alan Parker, Still Crazy, Aardman Animations’ Flushed Away, and more recently Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe, weaving a narrative around songs by The Beatles, and The Bank Job. The pair were also hired to perform uncredited rewrites of Never Say Never Again and The Rock.

I know it will mean missing Euro 2008’s France v Italy game, or Five's rerun of CSI, but according to the BFI Southbank website* tickets are still available for the event which starts at 8:45pm, NFT1. If you want to write for television, it might be an idea listening to what these guys have to say. Just remember to record the episode of Battlestar Galactica on Sky One, seriously.


* Obviously this is based on the actual time of writing. If you get all excited about it and then discover tickets have since sold out, well whose fault is that?