REVIEW: Marks and Gran, JW3

Happenstance is the thread that weaves itself through the lives of comedy greats Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, as they revealed to an audience at JW3 on Sunday.

Launching this year’s Tsitsit festival with An Afternoon with Marks and Gran, the duo held the audience enthralled with tales from more than 30 years of writing award winning comedy, tv shows, plays and films.

Their writing career might never have got off the ground had not Laurence, for the first and only time in his life, overslept. He missed a train to cover a journalistic job in a Manchester. Booked on a later train he happened to be sitting opposite comedy legend Barry Took. Stunned into admiring silence, Laurence finally took the plunge and spoke to Barry. It transpired they were both staying at the same hotel. The next morning, over breakfast, Laurence plucked up the courage to say he and his friend Maurice had written some scripts. Barry offered to read them and this eventually led to the start of the duo’s rise to recognition and fame.

On the day their show Shine on Harvey Moon was to be released, there just happened to be a blizzard in the UK which meant no-one was venturing out in the evening. The show was seen by a staggering 18.3 billion people and went on to be a huge success.

For many fans they are best known for the TV show Birds of a Feather. This too would not have happened had not the fickle finger of fate lent a hand.

On Christmas Day Maurice took his family for lunch at a hotel in Kensington. As he queued to pay the bill, he was standing behind two men, one suntanned and looking healthy, the other thin and pale. They had been sitting with two very flashily-dressed women. As he waited to pay, Maurice mused that they were criminals, one of whom had served time in jail and the other of whom had escaped to sunny Spain. When the suntanned man turned to his friend and actually said he was about to return to Marbella, it sowed a seed of a programme idea.

A week later he told Laurence. They decided the show was to be set in London until Laurence bumped into a police officer contact who told him it had to be in Chigwell. Unusually for its time, this play starred two strong women, and Marks and Gran wanted to create a third female part. Laurence saw Lesley Joseph in a play and knew then that he had found that person. And of course, Lesley went on to create a starring role.

Laurence and Maurice wear their religion very lightly, but there is no doubt they have been unable to resist the inclusion of Jewish characters in many of their other hit shows including Shine on Harvey Moon, Love Hurts, So You Think You’ve Got Troubles, Wall of Silence, and the mini-series Mosley. And throughout it all there have been many instances of events conspiring to make their shows a success and to reach peak audiences.

They are currently writing new work, with a focus on stage performance and have written Moorgate – a play about the young budding journalist Laurence. The play tells the story of his relationship with parents. Laurence’s father died in the Moorgate tube crash that, in a cruel twist of fate, Laurence had been sent to cover as a journalist. The duo are also building on the success of their most recent play about Adolf Hitler and Sigmund Freud – another of their works about someone Jewish – that came about after Laurence just happened to read about Hitler’s childhood and his being referred to Freud for treatment.