Clement & La Frenais — The Christmas Gift that keeps on Giving
For some audiences (of a certain vintage), Christmas TV images start with a prison choir attempting to drown out the sound of tunnelling, a drunken husband’s late-night return home on a fork lift and a hostage drama’s botched attempt at spiked coffee.
The fact that all came from the pens of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais is just one further example of their place at the very top table of British comedy writing.
The three ‘Porridge’ and ‘Likely Lads’ Christmas Specials have endured for over 4 and a half decades because of the timelessness of great writing and acting. They’re about more than just laughs although they deliver them by the bucket load of course. They encapsulate their time and our time as viewers. Their evocative familiarity ushers in a feeling of warm poignant sentimentality (that Fletch and Terry would no doubt find objectionable.)
Long ago in a land far away
In fact, before the big three were on the horizon, there was another Likely Lads Christmas. Way back in 1964, Clement and La Frenais produced a short 7.5 minute sketch as a contribution to ‘Christmas Night with the Stars’, a BBC staple which ran from the late 50s to the early 70s. Contributors were generally from the best known comedies and light entertainment shows of the day but at that stage The Likely Lads were not on many people’s radar (in 2019 Clement and La Frenais recalled that “when most of the country watched it they must’ve thought “who the f**k are they?”) Although short, it paints a lovely picture of the lads that we’d later get to know so well (including Terry’s thoughtful present for Aud) and it served to convince the BBC to move the original series from its BBC2 slot to repeats on BBC1. Christmas then may well have played a big part in the very discovery of Bob and Terry.
Ten years later the main events kicked off.
You can come out now Sylvia
By 1974, ‘Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads’ was a firm national favourite and its Christmas Special (although billed only as The Likely Lads) broadcast on Christmas Eve attracted over 16m viewers.
Focused on Bob’s fumbling philandering at a Christmas party, the comedy was broad but the nostalgia and melancholy of the series (the only thing to look forward to’s the past) was never far below any festive frivolity. Having passed his driving test, Terry dreams of European open road adventures in a Juggernaut but has to settle for something more modest; Bob is frustrated by what he sees as a stultifying couple’s domesticity (although he does nothing about it.) It all leads to complications and misunderstandings that would never end well.
Indeed it would prove to be the end of the small screen Likely Lads after 47 episodes (although the big screen film appeared two years later.) Producer Jimmy Gilbert recalled the programme as ‘a social history of England’ and there’s a lot in that. It had charted the changing shape of the country alongside the changing lives of Bob and Terry over 10 years. The constant discussion of sequels and follow ups over the years have been largely based on the potential for that history to be extended but, as the end of a year beckoned, a Christmas party wasn’t a bad place to finish.
Not the coming of our Lord, the going of Tommy Slocombe
A year later on Christmas Eve 1975, we were no longer in the company of Bob and Terry but we were instead invited to visit Slade Prison with Fletch and Lennie. 18.5m of us accepted.
The plot centred on an escape tunnel being dug in a scheme engineered by genial Harry Grout and for which a choir was enlisted to mask the noise. It’s a constant surprise to fans to realise that Grouty appeared in just 3 episodes and yet his presence (expertly and broodingly delivered by Peter Vaughan) casts a menacing shadow over the whole series. In ‘No Way Out’ his scheme threatens to derail any festivities that might mark Christmas out as something different to every other day; Fletch sees and fears the danger of disturbing the equilibrium of prison life and he’s proved right of course.
‘No Way Out’ provided many people’s favourite Porridge line of all time (the answer to the question of how they disposed of the soil…..) but it’s much more than that. It also includes a lovely appearance by Graham Crowden as the long-suffering Doctor dedicated to keeping people out of his infirmary at Christmas (whose line regarding embezzlers and Barclaycard would be my personal contender for best line ever) and one of the best examples of the hapless Mr Barrowclough’s manipulation — this time by a nurse’s legs and a couple of Johnnie Walkers.
I just put me head down and charged towards the glass doors
By Christmas Eve 1976 we may have been sufficiently spoiled to have just expected another classic. Certainly, ‘The Desperate Hours’ had its work cut out to live with the previous two years but needless to say Clement and La Frenais delivered — and then some.
Fletch and Lennie find themselves alongside Mr Barrowclough and Mrs Jamieson (the Governor’s secretary) as hostages — victims, no less, at the hands of a villain. In a series based on close quarters confinement, this special puts a different spin on it — the incarcerated group spanning the sides and the sexes with all that that entails — which goes well beyond two lags in a double cell.
Pathos was never far from Clement’s and La Frenais’ writing and in ‘The Desperate Hours’ it was centre stage. Peter Kay (a long-time fan) has said that one of the reasons that Porridge endures is that it has something that sits underneath the laughs that’s quietly sad’ — here it’s the foundation of a grievance that drives Urwin (with a U — beautifully played by Dudley Sutton) to take such desperate action. Even though the cons are hostages, the underlying ‘us and them’ of prison life nevertheless endures to drive the plot.
It also has tension and drama alongside some cracking lines — including Lennie’s foxtrot lessons and Mr Barrowclough’s vain attempts to have his wife understand the seriousness of his predicament.
After such a hat-trick maybe they should have kept the ball
How would other writers follow that?
The Christmas Special wasn’t born in the 70s (there was Hancock in the 50s and 60s as well as ‘Till Death Us Do Part’ in the 60s for instance) but it was the decade in which it became established so it’s fair to say that Clement and La Frenais were the top of the heap when the competition was at its toughest.
The Special’s extended duration (50% meant an extra 15 minutes in all three cases) provided a writing challenge. How to keep the conciseness of the 30 minute discipline and to resist using it to take the characters somewhere that doesn’t ring true; how to use the festive season as a plot anchor rather than just as an excuse (stick a Christmas tree on the set and off you go……………….) This is a similar dilemma to that faced by writers extending a series into a film and — again — Clement’s and La Frenais’ ventures with both programmes were amongst the best examples of big screen transfers.
Over subsequent decades of sitcom Christmas Specials, there have been some good, many bad and many more ugly examples (for every Del Boy and Rodney as Batman & Robin there’s a Del Boy as a Miami Mafia man.) It’s only writers like Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant with The Office and Caroline Aherne/Craig Cash/Phil Mealey with The Royle Family who really took the format somewhere well beyond a sitcom whilst also remaining one. Those developments were in the noughties which only serves to underline that, for some of us, Clement and La Frenais’ hat-trick stood unchallenged by most for decades. For ‘old school’ sitcom, it still does.
Here’s a raised glass (of the vin ordinaire — although it’s not all that ordinaire) to Messrs Clement and La Frenais. Christmas wouldn’t be the same without them.
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Sources — decades of repeated viewings plus…………………………..British Comedy Guide/’Porridge — The Complete Scripts & Serial Guide’ by Richard Webber, Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais/’Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads’ by Richard Webber, Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais/ ‘More Than Likely’ by Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais/Britain’s Greatest Sit Com, BBC 2004
