Brian Beacom

SINCE the early Eighties, Maurice Gran has had enough TV comedy success to make sure he’s buried in Highgate Cemetery (near his old school) alongside the likes of Karl Marx and George Michael.

With writing partner Laurence Marks, the pair have fleshed out, debated, argued over and finally agreed on the characters, plot lines and dialogue that emerged as Birds of a Feather, Goodnight Sweetheart and The New Statesman.

But today, Maurice Gran is talking about the pair’s move to theatre writing, a switch which has proved immensely successful with several hits.

Comedy musical Dreamboats and Petticoats, a tale of youth club love and pop star fantasy, is set to play in Glasgow next week.

Maurice maintains the Dreamboats concept came along at the right time.

“When we started writing the show in 08/09 we were conscious of the world going wrong,” he recalls.

“So we knew we wanted to write something escapist, and we remembered that during the Depression people wanted to watch Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1933.”

Dreamboats features the music of the early Sixties, featuring songs by the likes of Eddie Cochrane and Billy Fury, which Gran says defies time and the age of audiences.

“Young kids love it when they hear it for the first time,” he says. “It’s like the music in Grease.”

Were M&G forced to move from TV to theatre? (Birds of A Feather, for example, was dropped by the BBC after nine years, only to fly freely again when ITV picked it up.)

“In the Eighties and Nineties we had our television production company, Alomo,” Gran reflects. “Then in the early part of the millennium we were taken over by Pearson, and they were very generous, but it became really boring. We stopped striving, because we weren’t doing our own thing.

“But then theatre came along. We wrote a play for Alan Aykbourne, which took us two years and made tuppence. But that didn’t matter because writing for theatre really is a labour of love.”

The father-of-two adds, grinning; “I love the line that someone came up with; ‘You can’t make a living in the theatre – but you can make a killing.’”

Marks and Gran had no idea they would go on to make a killing in theatre or television when they met as ten year-old boys in the Jewish Lads Brigade in North London.

Maurice left university and worked for the DSS in Tottenham while Laurence became a journalist.

But when they met again as teenagers in 1974 they decided to join a writing school to pass the time.

The pair began with TV sketches for the likes of Frankie Howerd. In 1980 their first sitcom baby Holding the Fort arrived but two years later success shone into their writing room with ITV comedy-drama Shine on Harvey Moon.

The pair were truly up and running and in 1985, Gran and chum upped and ran over to Hollywood to join the writing team involved with Mr Sunshine.

But the pair didn’t take to Tinseltown - and vice versa.

“In England, we had worked on shows in which we kept our own hours and suddenly we were thrown into a Henry Ford situation.”

The boys didn’t like the factory.

“We’d write in the morning and then say we were going out now, to buy a radio or whatever we needed. But we didn’t realise we were supposed to go to lunch with the producer.”

One of the producers happened to be Henry Winkler, AKA the Fonz, who was not singing the Happy Days theme tune when he later met up with Marks and Gran.

“There are lots of thin skins out there,” says Maurice, smiling. “And although we weren’t kids, we might as well have been straight out of kindergarten for all we knew.”

We viewers hope the Hollywood writing experience involves pain, if the reward is unalloyed hedonism, fast cars and even faster women?

“Well, you did get all of that because the money the writers were on was ridiculous,” he says, smiling.

“But most of the writers working on the show we were on were in therapy. And if they weren’t on therapy they were on suicide watch.”

He adds, with a wry grin; “Looking back, it (the American adventure) was great. I came back from the Somme with only one leg missing.”

The stint in the comedy trenches had side benefits. “When we came back we were asked to talk about our experiences at the likes of an ITV conference, and that’s where we met Rik Mayall.”

And that’s how the New Statesman came about.”

Maurice reveals he wants to bring back the sitcom, with the bastard offspring of B’stard running the show.

But for the moment, the focus is on theatre writing.

“We’ve had TV audiences of 17m but I can honestly say that seeing theatre audiences watch our shows knocks spots of this. Watching our shows at home is nothing like the experience of theatre, which is unique.

“Here’s why; if you watch a movie such as Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible you know that Tom Cruise won’t die in the making of that movie. It’s history. But theatre is always in the moment.”

The added delight of theatre musicals is the chance to wallow in the music.

“We’re children of the Sixties, very much in the right time for the Beatles, which is a blessing, and I feel for anyone who wasn’t,” Gran deadpans; “I’d hate to have been born to coincide with the time when Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep was the best you could hope for.”

*Dreamboats and Petticoats, the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, June 12 – 17.