Given their track record, you might think that Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais would be spared the struggles that lesser screenwriters go through to see their writing on screen. But this, it turns out, would be naive. Clement and La Frenais may have written some of the best-loved programmes in British television history: Auf Wiedersehen, Pet; Porridge; The Likely Lads; Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? Their CV may contain the huge hit film The Commitments — as well as more recently acclaimed TV dramas like The Rotters’ Club and Archangel. Yet, when I meet Clement on a solo visit to London, the two most striking things about him are how driven he remains at 81, and how driven he apparently needs to be.
‘What Ian and I both have,’ he tells me, ‘is a sense of being hungry, of wanting to get stuff made. An awful lot of time you spend writing stuff that doesn’t, like architects’ plans that never get turned into buildings. And there’s no job satisfaction in that.’
For this reason, he and La Frenais maintain an impressive policy of always having at least seven projects on the go: ‘You really can’t have any fewer than that. Things will sit there for nine months before anybody does anything. So what are you going to do? Play golf?’ (and with those last two words Clement abandons his normal urbanity in favour of incredulous scorn). At the moment, the list includes Jukebox Hero — a musical built, somewhat improbably, around the songs of Foreigner, which opens in Toronto next month; a musical about Alice Cooper; a play about Harpo Marx; and three TV series.
In the meantime, there’s also Chasing Bono — playing in what Clement acknowledges is ‘a tiny little theatre’.
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