Carla Lane, 1928–2016

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Carla Lane, writer and creator of some of Britain’s most successful sitcoms, described herself as “a totally miserable person with a sense of humour”. This downbeat summation reveals the essentially British character of her writing, characterised by ever shorter distances between tragedy and comedy. Born in Liverpool, she immortalised her hometown in two popular BBC series, The Liver Birds (1969-79) and Bread (1986-91). Her focus on friends, families and relationships gave British television memorable female leads whose emotional lives would become more complex over the course of Lane’s writing career.

Though she had written stories, poetry and radio sketches, she only began writing for television in her thirties when, with her friend and writing partner Myra Taylor, she submitted a script for what would become The Liver Birds. The hugely popular series about the lives, loves and mishaps of young women sharing a flat led to Lane and Taylor writing for the Sid James sitcom Bless This House (1971-76). When Taylor left television writing Lane carried on alone, becoming a virtual one-woman industry as she created a further ten series after The Liver Birds.

The Liver Birds writers Myra Taylor (left) and Carla Lane (right) in 1969

Lane (left) and Taylor (right) in 1971

Nerys Hughes and Polly James in The Liver Birds

Moving on from the youthful nonchalance of The Liver Birds, Lane created a number of series around the themes of marriage, infidelity and separation including Solo (1981-82), Leaving (1984-85) and The Last Song (1981-83), among others.

The bittersweet Butterflies (1978-83) is often credited as her finest work. Wendy Craig plays Ria, a disillusioned wife and mother whose life brightens when she meets an attractive stranger. Craig’s perfect performance as the faltering Ria is matched by the scripting, in what Lane called a ‘situation tragedy’. Butterflies remains a great series on the common British sitcom themes of everyday desperation and domestic frustration but its focus and handling of the emotional concerns of its female protagonist still mark it out as special.

Butterflies (1978-83)

Lane continued to move into darker territory with comedy drama I Woke Up One Morning (1985-86), which dealt with alcoholism and recovery, but a return to sitcom with another knockabout Liverpool comedy would prove to be a spectacular success. Bread featured the working-class Boswell family getting into scrapes, to the eternal despair of matriarch Nellie (Jean Boht). The series is perhaps best remembered for its insanely catchy theme song but at its height Bread’s use of soap-opera storylines within sitcom trappings pulled in higher audiences than EastEnders.

Lane continued to write for television until the mid-90s and later in life was known for her animal-rights activism, a passion which led her to be one of Chris Morris’s unfortunate victims on Brass Eye. A revival of The Liver Birds in 1996 was a misfire which only served as a reminder of how fresh and fun the original series had been. Like other Lane characters, Beryl and Sandra found themselves disillusioned by what life had promised as they grew older – but still willing to laugh about it.

See also BFI Screenonline’s entry on Carla Lane.