Rob and Doug were in the BBC bar one lunchtime, when Mike Craig introduced them to a former Radio Luxembourg/Radio One D.J. named Tony Brandon. ‘Mike was always introducing us to people at the bar. He knew everybody.’ Mike had written a radio sitcom for Brandon called The Family Brandon. It had been phenomenally successful on Radio 2. At the height of its powers, the series had been inexplicably cancelled. The rumour was that the executive responsible for the decision had mistaken it for the Eddie Braben Show, which was an off-the-wall sketch show written and performed by the brilliant Eddie Braben, who had been responsible for scripting the Morecambe and Wise Show in its heyday. His show was certainly bizarre and executive-unfriendly, and even though it had been aired on a completely different channel it was a very credible rumour. In any case, Mike reckoned the BBC should make good its mistake, and asked if Rob and Doug would be interested in writing a pilot for Tony.

   Tony Brandon

Rob recalls: ‘Tony was affable enough, and we got on, but we were never going to become soul mates, and the whole thing sounded a bit too middle of the road for our taste. Our driving ambition when we started out was to rid the world of what I called ‘cardicoms’ – sitcoms about middle class people who wore cardigans. I had made a sort of sacred vow to myself never to write a sitcom with a sofa in it, and even though it was on radio, The Family Brandon definitely had both cardigans and sofas in abundance. We really would rather have been pursuing our own projects. But Mike was very persuasive. He promised faithfully it would only be a question of writing the pilot, and having justice seen to be done. It was a PR exercise, that’s all there was to it. There was no earthly way it would go to series.’

So, reluctantly, they agree to write a pilot. They based the whole thing on a sketch they’d written called The Film Extra, which was about, well, a film extra, who was boasting to his peers that he had a line of dialogue. In fact, the dialogue was the word ‘Arg’ which he is supposed to utter as he’s crushed by a runaway tumbrel. He tries to make more of it:

BRANDON: Perhaps it was the name of his one true love.

EXTRA: His one true love was called ‘Arg’?

BRANDON: No, no. ‘Arg-nes’.

EXTRA: ‘Arg-nes’?

BRANDON: He is being crushed by a runaway tumbrel.

In the end, he destroys the day’s shoot. They recorded the ‘pilot’. It went well on the night. ‘It was a funny show, but definitely a one-off. There was absolutely no chance it could possibly make a series. We’d done the job. Honour was satisfied.’

And then they got an order for a series of eight.

‘It was headless chicken time. We’d written a one-off half hour play. There was no footage in it that we could see. Obviously, Ricky Gervais managed to develop the Extras concept in his own way, but even that series wasn’t really about extras after the first couple of shows. I doubt we could have written a second show, never mind another seven.’

In desperation, they created another vehicle for Brandon. It was about two failed stand up comedians who lived in near-poverty conditions, but still dreamed of success as they toured low-life working men’s clubs. Hmm. ‘Yes, we were writing about our own lives, really. That’s supposed to be the best thing to do.’ The show was called Blue Skies, and co-starred Michael Angelis, the lugubrious bunny-lover from The Liver Birds, and the wonderful Emma Thomson. ‘Just having the opportunity to work with Emma made the whole project bearable. It also put Tony’s relentless bubbliness to good use. We cast him as an indefatigable optimist, putting a positive spin on the bleakest, most desperate situations. It wasn’t hilarious, but it worked fairly well.’

They recorded the first two shows – ‘In radio sitcom, you recorded two episodes a night. There was no physical action, no scenery or cameras to move, and the actors were reading from scripts, so you were unlucky if one episode took an hour to record, even with re-takes.’ – and sent them off to London. Just before they were about to record the second two shows, London got back to them.

‘I don’t know what we were all thinking really. They’d ordered one series, and we’d delivered a completely different show. I suppose we were hoping they’d like it enough not to mind.’

But they did mind. They were furious. Blue Skies was scrapped without ceremony, and Rob and Doug had to create another Brandon vehicle.

‘The big problem we had – one of the big problems we had – was that Tony sounded incredibly like Tony Hancock, the most famous and successful British sitcom star of recent history. We just couldn’t work out how to get round that.’

In the end, they created Wally Who, which was about a man living in penury in a tiny caravan on some wasteland next to a pub. Despite the direness of his straights, he was, again, indefatigably optimistic. It co-starred John Jardine as the pub landlord, Wally’s foil, and had a sort of company of players who would take on various roles each week, including Daphne Oxenford, Chris Ellison, who went on to play DCI Frank Burnside in The Bill, and, occasionally, Nick Maloney from Cliché.

‘Basically, we’d taken the view that we were stuck with it, and we might as well get on with things and do the job to the best of our abilities. We had a lot of fun, actually, writing the shows, and we learnt a lot about sitcom writing, too, as we ploughed along. But no matter what we wrote, Brandon made it sound like Hancock. We tried writing in various styles: a Likely Lads type episode; a Rising Damp type episode and so on, but it always came out sounding like Hancock. Finally we gave up the struggle and just wrote Hancock style episodes.’

Over the course of writing and recording the series, Rob and Doug did move down to London. TV producer Paul Jackson offered them a position on the writing team of a live Saturday night comedy show, which was enough to sponsor the move.

‘We were really snowed under. I remember we’d only sent up one of the scripts for the final recording. We were literally working on the last one on the sleeper train up from London to Manchester. We were sharing the carriage with a rugby team, who were having a party in the corridor. Rugby teams tend not to have sedate parties. Certainly, they didn’t bother with chamber music. We got about eight minutes’ sleep between us.’

When they arrived, on the Sunday morning, they had to type up the script on special copying paper, and then they had to run off copies of it, before everybody arrived at ten a.m.

‘We’d been in the script copying room before, once, but we’d never used the machine there. It was a monstrous, old-fashioned contraption that looked like a cross between a printing press and the torture machine from Kafka’s In A Penal Settlement. It was complicated, there was an entire library of foot thick manuals on how to use it, we weren’t supposed to be in the room, even, and we were sleep-deprived and virtually hallucinating from caffeine overdosing. I hate to think what we smelled like. We did our best, but we just chewed up too many pages. Mercifully, the wonderful and pulchritudinous Christine Burke, Mike’s secretary, came in early, and saved our bacon.’

But there was a problem. Mike had called the head of the network in London, and raged that the scripts hadn’t arrived, and probably never were going to arrive, which stirred up all kinds of bad feeling.

‘We were hurt. We thought Mike ought to have known we’d never have let him down, no matter what, and casting damaging aspersions about our professionalism at that high a level was beyond the Pale, really. I think he was hurt, in turn, that we’d gone off to the bright lights of London and turned our backs on him. The shows were recorded, and they were good, too. But there was a bitter taste about the whole business. That was the last time we worked with Mike. It was a dismal, stupid way to end such a great professional and personal relationship. Mike had really been like a father to us, and we would have crawled across broken glass with our flies undone for him.’

Still, they finished the series, and everyone seemed happy. The debt was paid. It was time to move on.

That should have been the last chapter on the whole enterprise.

And then the BBC ordered another series. This time, they wanted ten.

And this time, they did say ‘no’.

As an interesting footnote, a little while later, Bobby Jay, the Head of Radio Light entertainment arranged a lunch for Rob and Doug with Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, the two writing giants who had created Steptoe and Son and the legendary Hancock’s Half Hour.

‘It was a ridiculously wonderful thing for Bobby to do. Galton and Simpson had been our heroes since we started out, and he knew it. We’d practically memorised the classic Hancock Alone scripts, which was the last series they’d written for him. The Blood Donor, The Radio Ham, The Last Page, The Bowmans … every single show was superb. They say you should never meet your heroes. They’re wrong. We got to ask them all kinds of questions. I asked them how they felt after they’d just finished writing, if they realized they’d written a classic, and Alan Simpson said they’d slapped the script down on their desk and said: “Let ’em pick the bones out of that!”’

But Galton and Simpson did have a bone to pick with Rob and Doug. ‘Apparently, friends had been going up to them and talking about this new show they’d written that was being transmitted. So they listened to Wally Who, and said it took them ten minutes to realise they hadn’t actually written it. They were not pleased. They said they’d heard of ripping off jokes, but never ripping off an entire style. We tried to explain, but it was a very squirmy situation. Mercifully, we moved off the subject fairly quickly and on to more fruitful topics. At the end of the meal, Bobby asked them what he should do with us. They told him he ought to let us do whatever we wanted and broadcast it.

But by then, Rob and Doug had more or less moved on from Radio, and into television, with an element of regret. Rob: ‘Radio was a fantastic medium for comedy: it was cheap – no sets, no costumes. You could be anywhere, literally anywhere at no extra expense. It was intimate, and it was quick: nobody had to learn any lines, and you could record two shows in a night without working up a sweat. Glorious. I miss those days.’