Laugh-hate relationship

Six years ago, Ian McKellen was starring in my play The Cut at the Donmar Warehouse. Before the first preview performance, he told me: “I really like to get my laughs. But it’s your play and you must tell me if I’m bending the play out of shape.” I promised that I’d watch out but thought, “If you can find any laughs in The Cut — the most dense, oblique play that I’ve ever written —then good luck to you.” But I also promised myself that, one day, I would write something for Ian that would give him as many laughs as I could possibly write.

Then in 2007 I wrote a series of 20-minute plays for Paines Plough theatre company. One of them was about an elderly gay couple: two men who had been in love for decades but whose relationship still bubbled with antagonism and secrets. When we put the play in front of an audience, first at the Traverse in Edinburgh and then for a few performances in the National Theatre’s Lyttelton auditorium, it struck me that this was something that I’d never seen before on a stage. And yet everyone in the audience seemed to recognise the characters. So why were elderly gay couples invisible on our stages and screens?

I realised that I had a subject for the play in which Ian could get his laughs. But who could I imagine playing his partner? I’d noticed while we were rehearsing The Cut that Ian often spoke of Derek Jacobi with great affection and respect, tinged with a distinct whiff of professional rivalry. At the time Ian was preparing to play King Lear for the RSC, and Derek’s later Donmar version must have been in the offing; I imagined them competing to see who could roar loudest in the storm scene or who had the lightest Cordelia. They would make the perfect pair to carry the play that I had in mind. And without approaching Ian or Derek — I wanted to have something concrete to show them — I set about sketching out the story of an old couple who question their love for each other when a beautiful young man arrives whom they both fall in love with.

It was around this time that I was approached by Gary Reich from a TV production company, Kudos. Did I have an idea for a sitcom? I didn’t think I did until I looked again at my proposal for Ian and Derek and wondered whether this might be the basis ...

I bought box sets of my favourite sitcoms — Carla Lane’s Butterflies and John Sullivan’s Only Fools and Horses — and for several weeks spent my evenings watching them. Both Butterflies and Fools and Horses are beautifully observed, heartfelt pieces of writing. But what makes them perfect sitcom material is that they’re based on “can’t live with you, can’t live without you” relationships. In Butterflies, Ria longs to break free of her husband and kids and have a great romance but can never quite do it. Fools and Horses’ Rodney is in a similar situation: he dreams of cutting loose from brother Del but the family ties always pull him in to one last money-making scheme.

These sort of relationships aren’t the stuff off one-off dramas; they’re a recurring itch from which a thousand stories can be spun. And this is just the sort of relationship I wanted to write about for Ian and Derek.

Of course, there’s no sure-fire formula for a sitcom. Many have followed the “gang show” format of an ensemble of characters — Dad’s Army, Cheers, Are You Being Served? — while others have been about the disasters created by one monstrous individual (David Brent, Basil Fawlty, Alan Partridge). But the two-hander “can’t live with you or without you” format is the one that appeals to me the most, because it allows for great pathos alongside big laughs.

Think of the granddaddy of the genre, Steptoe and Son. Harry H Corbett’s Harold decides in almost every episode to escape Wilfrid Brambell’s “disgusting old man”. Every episode hinges on Harold’s growing realisation that, once again, he’s going to be trapped in the scrapyard with his dad. There are echoes of that same painful parent–child bond in Edina and Saffy’s relationship in Ab Fab. We laugh because we recognise what the characters never realise, that their stories are circular, they’ll never break free. But that’s heartbreaking as well. And great actors (such as McKellen and Jacobi) can tread that treacherous tightrope between broad comedy and pathos.

As interest from ITV grew and Ian and Derek expressed their enthusiasm, I became worried. I’d just been appointed playwright in residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company and I realised that I didn’t have the time — and quite possibly the skill — to write multiple episodes of a show which would work within the strict discipline of a 30-minute, studio-based sitcom. So I was delighted to be introduced to Gary Janetti, one of the writers on Will & Grace (another “can’t live with you or without you” show), who has dedicated his life to the sitcom. He knows about the practicalities of how to get to the laughs while also developing a story and characters, all within a half-hour that includes commercials and credits. He’s run with my initial ideas and is now sitting poolside in Los Angeles (in my imagination, at least; maybe he’s actually in a dingy basement) creating a set of scripts.

The show has the working title Vicious Old Queens and is about a couple who’ve shared a Covent Garden flat for 50 years, with their best friend (played by Frances de La Tour) sharing their bickering and making up. When an attractive young man moves into their building, all three fall for the newcomer.