Simon Carlyle: 'This loss is almost unimaginable'

Carlyle, with writing partner Gregor Sharp, managed to achieve the Holy Grail of sitcom writing, their comedy of manners series running to an incredible seventh season, and managing to land on the hallowed ground that is BBC 1 prime time.

The success was incredibly justified. Very little ever happened in the suburban Latimer Street, but in a way everything did. Relationships were tested, egos flattened and secret sexual peccadillos more than hinted at.

Much of this personal investigation into the nature of friendships, its concepts of loyalty – and how we are all capable of taking advantage of each other – crept from the imagination of Simon Carlyle. Carlyle, it seems, was a man who grew up studying the human condition as if his life depended upon it - because in many ways it did.

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Growing up in Ayr, he once revealed, was ‘hell’. “Ayr was just an awful place to be gay. In the circles I was in I’m not sure if I’d have been beaten up, but I certainly wasn’t for coming out. I had to have fake girlfriends, and it was bloody awful.”

Was he ever an Elton in that he became engaged? “I was never that desperate.”

Did he break girls’ hearts? “No.” He added, grinning; “Look, I would boil the kettle for girls, but I’d never make the tea. What helped me was knowing a couple of gay guys from figure skating. I learned enough to know I should never take a wife and join a golf club.”

Simon Carlyle’s sexuality formed a character who grew up an outsider; a perfect position for looking in on the world and forming a unique overview. But with this place on the periphery came angst. “At the age of 12 I wanted to be in London doing drag cabaret,” he once said with a straight face. “But you can't really say that when you're standing in Ayr High Street wearing a Lyle & Scott jumper, waiting for your mum to come out of the butchers.”

Carlyle couldn’t not be funny, even when recalling monumental despair. He was eighteen when he came out to his parents, who were understanding but the teenager couldn’t develop relationships. “There was also the emergence of AIDS. Not only did I panic about telling people I was a poof, but I also reckoned I was going to die because of my sexual preference. I felt trapped. Dark.”

Simon Carlyle (Image: free)

Simon Carlyle developed neuroses. His head was indeed a very scary place. He sought professional help. He imagined himself fleeing the Scottish coast to become a professional ice skater.

His parents’ meantime pushed him to study at university. (French). Carlyle however took flight, to work at Butlins where a camp relationship with Gary from Sunbeds allowed him free tokens, but little in the way of direction in life.

Confused and conflicted, the very bright Carlyle worked as a model for teen magazines such as Jackie. He was an extra on Taggart playing a teen rent boy. And in 1995, when watching a recording of the BBC’s Pulp Video, Carlyle knew he wanted to work on television.

But as what? He took a media job and landed work at STV on Wheel of Fortune “modelling dishwashers.” Carlyle moved to the BBC to as a researcher and children’s presenter, but he was “awful.”

However, one day when working on Fully Booked with Gail Porter a sketch demanded someone play a cleaner. Carlyle volunteered, (The chance to drag up at last?) and he began to write monologues for his character, who was loosely based on Dorothy Paul’s comedy creation.

The result was a new BBC3 series; Terri McIntyre: Classy Bitch, which he wrote with a young man he’d first met at STV, Gregor Sharp. “Gregor taught me writing structure. And I taught him all the filthy jokes I’d learned in the gay bars of Glasgow.”

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The 2001 series became a cult hit and Carlyle took off to London, yet it’s fair to say a powerful work ethic was yet to evolve. His early Twenties saw the young writer follow in the footsteps of writers such as Hemingway and Capote but only in his ability to pour as much alcohol down his neck as his wallet, if not his liver, could afford.

Before long Carlyle was bankrupt, working in bars to pay the rent, struggling to get out of bed, never mind write. What was he escaping from? Life? Success? The pressure to live a successful life?

Thanks to friends, Carlyle pulled himself together and wrote the 2006 BBC comedy series, Thin Ice. It didn’t hold up for a second run, but it instilled enough in the Carlyle/Sharp team, who came up with No Holds Bard, set in the world of a Burns recital competition. The success saw the pair move onto BBC caravan park sitcom, Happy Hollidays, (which proved too expensive to run.)

But Simon Carlyle hadn’t banished the doubting thoughts that banged episodically on the inside of his head. He said he was considering taking an airport job as a greeter before Two Doors Down became a success. And that series didn’t arrive without turmoil and disappointment. The original 2013 pilot was critically acclaimed but lay dormant for three long draining years before a series was commissioned.

Yet, it proved to be perfect for the talents of Carlyle; he was able to home in on the minutiae of people’s lives. He was able to use the voice of the likes of Doon Mackichan or Elaine C. Smith to relay put downs sharper than tacks - or insults that could make entire locker rooms blush. He looked hard at ‘ordinary’ life and came up with the ridiculousness. His anxious, deliberating, examining style was perfect allowed him access to characters who were universal. Fragile. Bitchy. Selfish. Outrageously forthright. And loving.

Meantime, Simon Carlyle proved he could write on his own. He worked as a script editor on Benidorm on Jack Whitehall’s Bad Education, and he developed transgender comedy Boy Meets Girl, for which he won a Stonewall Award. Carlyle’s career trajectory looked to be continuing, as co-writer with Alan Carr on the comedian’s 1980s series Changing Ends.

But now Simon Carlyle’s final episode has been aired, far too long before it should have. Would he have been happier had he landed (less demanding) work as a drag queen in Soho? It’s hard to say. What is true however is that the loss of Simon Carlyle to the television community is almost unimaginable.