The Insider Interview with Bob Larbey
A Chat with the Writer of Good Neighbors, As Time Goes By, and Many More
By Garry Berman
Bob Larbey is not a household name, but those who appreciate the finest in British comedy know his work. On his own or with his former partner John Esmonde, Larbey has created and/or written no fewer than 18 sitcoms during his career, dating back to the mid 1960s. His best and most popular series have fortunately been imported to America, and the list is impressive: Good Neighbors (a.k.a. The Good Life in the U.K), A Fine Romance, The Darling Buds of May, Mulberry, and most recently As Time Goes By. He and John Esmonde also created and wrote Man About The House, which became Three's Company here–one of the few examples of a successful American adaptation of a hit Britcom.
Larbey was born in London in 1934. His father loved the theater and aspired to be an actor, but when his children were born he went back to his job as a stage carpenter in order to support his family. He met Esmonde while in school and the pair bonded over a mutual hatred of the menial jobs they found themselves trapped in as well as a similar sense of humor. When Esmonde decided to decrease his workload and move to Spain, Larbey struck out on his own and eventually wrote As Time Goes By.
In an exclusive interview, he speaks with The Insider about his long and illustrious career.
When you sit down to create a series, is there anything in particular you strive to achieve?
I don't think we ever set out with a master plan of what we wanted to write. We just used to think of ideas that we hoped were funny, and hoped that somebody else found them funny. I think a style just naturally evolves, and I think John and I together and me singly tended to concentrate on characters, to make them character comedies as opposed to situation comedies.
I suspect you still get asked about The Good Life more than your other series.
That's absolutely true, yes.
What stands out most in your memory about having done that show?
I think it was a good idea. We started with the premise of somebody reaching his fortieth birthday, in this case the character [Tom Good]. People think of it as one of those milestone ages, the "Oh, God, what have I done with my life? What do I do about it?" That was the premise. Then we added the self-sufficiency, which seemed a good idea. It started slowly–bad reviews and low audiences, and then somewhere in the second series it just took off and flew. And it sort of passed into legend for some reason.
No doubt due to the cast as well as the writing.
Oh, it was a wonderful cast. I think that was a dream cast. Only Richard Briers was known as a comedy actor on television. The others were all fine actors, but mostly on the stage. They'd done television but never sitcoms. So what we got in fact were four leads, including three faces that were new to television comedy viewers, who kept saying, "where did you discover these people?"
The Queen once attended a taping of The Good Life. How did that come about?
I've heard various versions myself. I don't think she wrote in and asked for tickets! I think the BBC felt it would be a good idea for the Queen to actually go to a studio and see a situation comedy recorded. And rumor has it, I don't know whether it's true or not, that The Good Life was her favorite. We were told, panicked, then wrote what was in fact the last-ever episode we recorded.
It was one of two specials we did. We recorded it right at the end of all the others. And the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh came along and sat in the studio, and laughed, and it was wonderful. The episode was called "Anniversary," in which Tom and Barbara's house gets burgled. I remember that evening. I've never seen so many technicians in one studio. I think there were three people for each job!
I don't exaggerate to say that [during the taping of "Anniversary"] people were crying in the studio at the injustice of the Goods being robbed! When we pulled back the curtain and showed that wrecked room, the audience went "Ahh!". Tears all over the place. Nobody was smiling, but it worked extremely well.
You and John Esmonde later collaborated again with Richard Briers for Ever Decreasing Circles.
Yes, we always got on very well with Richard. Apart from being a very good actor, he's a very nice bloke to work with. We had quite a lot in common without ever becoming real close friends. I think we shared quite a lot with Richard. So we did get on well together and that's why we wrote Ever Decreasing Circles. We thought, it's time for another idea for Richard.
How did you and Esmonde write together?
We always wrote together in the same room. I've heard of pairs of writers who do scenes each and then meet up and put them together, but that never appealed to us. We rented a series of disgusting little offices and just used to go to work–sit in the same room, talk a lot, drink a lot of coffee, and ad-lib dialogue. We used to get the story fairly straight first, and then start to ad-lib dialogue. And that was it. Ad-lib it and write it down, and try to remember what you've just been laughing at. That's the hardest part.
About ten years ago, the two of you parted ways. Was it amicable?
It was totally amicable. We were kind of headed in different directions in our personal lives. John had bought a house in Spain, and wanted to cut down on the work and spend more time there–maybe spend six months here and six months in Spain, which was fine by me. At that time, my wife and I were moving house down to the country. We couldn't sell our old house so we got a loan at the bank, which put us into debt. I phoned my agent and said what do I do about this, so she said, "You're a comedy writer, write a comedy." That's what kicked me off my writing alone. Some years afterward John and I just came naturally to the end of our writing together. The last series we tried was a series called Down To Earth, again with Richard Briers [and 'Allo, 'Allo! alumnus Kirsten Cooke]. Unfortunately it didn't work. We didn't write it very well I don't think, so it just ran one series.
One of your early solo projects was adapting The Darling Buds of May for television [starring David Jason], which was very successful.
That was a huge success. I did the first four episodes of that. I adapted two of the books. And, without being mean spirited, I saw some things starting to happen that I didn't particularly want to happen so I quit then. But I did have the advantage of meeting Catherine Zeta-Jones, who played Mariette. I remember the stunned silence as she walked into the rehearsal room!
In the early 1980s, when the "alternative" comedians became popular, did you and writers like yourself become concerned that your style of comedy might have to give way to the more outrageous kind of things that became common on television?
No, I don't think we did. I don't want to sound like Mr. Nice, but I've always thought there's room for just about every kind of comedy. I've laughed at some of the anarchic stuff like The Young Ones just as much as everybody else, and thought yes, it's funny! But I've never regarded it as competition. It's different. Ask the alternative comedians to write the kind of stuff I write and they couldn't. And vice versa. I think there's room for everything as long as a television company like the BBC or any other company doesn't get totally carried away by thinking that one style is now IT, now the word of the day.
There have been so many attempts to take popular British sitcoms and Americanize them here, which usually involves watering down the very aspects that make them so special. One of your series, Man About The House successfully became Three's Company here back in the 70s, but more recent attempts have been fairly disastrous. The supposed American version of One Foot In The Grave, with Bill Cosby, bears no resemblance to the original at all. But the opposite has been true also.
I remember they tried that with The Golden Girls, which was a big hit in the states, but simply didn't work here [as Brighton Belles]. In that case, it was a case of British actresses really saying American scripts, which you can't do, and vice versa. The cadence, the rhythms, it's just naturally all wrong. They didn't sound like British women. I think one or two programs were bought [in America] and then watered down because they were considered a bit too raw or savage. It makes me wonder why American television has actually bothered to buy these shows in the first place!
The most popular program of yours in America at the moment is As Time Goes By. The credits list Colin Bostock-Smith as having conceived the idea for the series. How did it get from his idea to you actually writing each episode?
I knew nothing at all about it until the Theatre of Comedy [production company] asked me if I'd go along and talk about an idea they had. What Colin had done was a synopsis–whether or not they commissioned a script I don't know–but they gave me the synopsis and said see what you think and come back to us. With nothing at all to lose, I told them what I liked about it and what I didn't like about it, and they commissioned a script. I wrote the script, then the series, and it went from there.
Geoffrey Palmer had left the series Executive Stress reportedly because he was getting tired of doing situation comedy. And yet he returned to sitcoms with As Time Goes By.
Geoffrey is a man who has got his life very much in order. He loves fishing, and he doesn't do any work in the fishing season. He doesn't want to do too much. He wants to do what he likes to do. He's very nice about the scripts, but probably most of all he likes working with Judi Dench and the cast–it's a very happy show. It's been an absolute joy. It's the old cliché how everyone gets on, but they really do, and I think he enjoys it.
Since the original premise of the series–the characters of Lionel and Jean "finding" each other again after thirty-eight years–was so compelling, did you personally have any concerns once they decided to stay together that the series might become just another domestic sitcom?
I think I had it in mind that it was a lovely premise, but it was never a premise which in itself was going to last for very long. You can do just so much with two people sort of dancing around each other–and the audience knowing that the outcome was going to be a happy one. I think the reason that I went on was that they were all so good in it and enjoyed it, and I liked the characters that I'd written. It was a happy time, and we said let's go on, let's make it a character comedy.
And you added other facets such as alternating between their home in the city and the one in the country, Lionel's career versus Jean's, so you gave yourself a lot to work with.
I think I had to, to some extent. There are bits in any comedy series that just sort of peter out. Like the bit in Jean's office, the secretarial agency. That featured quite heavily in three or four series, but that was going nowhere just by itself. So I decided to bring Jean out and leave it to the girls. It's not about an office anymore. But we wanted to keep Jenny Funnell in it, who we all love as Sandy.
I'd have to include myself in that!
Yes, it's a long list! She's sweet. And I wanted her in it. But to have her in it as a secretary that you hardly ever saw was never going to work. It's pretty much of a device that they took her under their wing, she's moved in with them, and is now part of the family. People seemed to accept that quite easily.
I would think a lot of people are surprised that, given her enormous success on stage and on the screen, such as winning the Oscar, that Judi Dench still returns to her work on the show. What is her response to people who don't think very highly of sitcoms and ask her why she continues with it considering everything else she's achieved?
I think she likes being on television. Having been in the theatre for much of her life, she's quite tickled by the fact that she's watched by several million people, as opposed to a theatre-full, per evening. We have a good time, it's become sort of like an annual reunion.
The first thing I wrote alone was a series called A Fine Romance, with her and her husband Michael Williams. The producer and I were trying to cast it, and we batted names back and forth, making endless lists with asterisks and question marks, and he said, "In a dream world, who would you like to play it?" And I said Judi Dench, thinking this is a great classical actress, she wouldn't touch a sitcom with a barge pole. He, bless him, said, well let's send her script, she can only send it back. He sent her a script, she phoned him back and said she'd love to do it.
It was quite a breakthrough back then to get an actress of that quality to do a situation comedy. I can't speak for Judi but if you asked her if a sitcom is this little, easy thing to do as opposed to doing a James Bond film or whatever, she would say no. She would say it's very, very difficult to play.
The show has completed eight series. Are there plans for more?
We've all been saying "this must be the last series" for the past four or five years. The BBC want another series, but it's very difficult to get hold of Judi, who wants to do it but is obviously swamped with offers from all sorts of people, as it should be. So it's a question of her finding the proverbial window. If she finds it, we'll do another series.
The Insider, March 2001
Back To Top ‹ Previous Article | Next Article ›
