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.