Maurice Gran, the comedy writer behind Goodnight Sweetheart, on Dreamboats and Petticoats

And that’s exactly what you’d hope for from one of Britain’s best-known comedy writers. Since the early Eighties, Maurice Bernard Gran has had enough TV comedy success and fame to merit burial amongst the luminaries laid down in Highgate Cemetery, near his old school, such as Karl Marx and George Michael.

Over four decades, Gran and his writing partner Laurence Marks, have fleshed out, debated, argued over and finally agreed on the characters, plot lines and dialogue that emerged as Birds of a Feather, Goodnight Sweetheart, The New Statesman and Shine On Harvey Moon.

There’s little doubt the work rates explain part of their success. (The main reason for their incredible longevity in the business arrives later.) Today, Maurice Gran is talking about the pair’s move to theatre writing, a switch which has proved immensely successful. Their biggest earner is comedy musical Dreamboats and Petticoats, a tale of youth club love and pop star fantasy, which is playing in Glasgow next week.

Gran says the Dreamboats concept came along at the right time. “When we started writing the show in 08/09 we were conscious of the world going wrong. People were anxious and feeling the pinch and wondering if the world as we knew it was coming to an end. So we knew we wanted to write something escapist, and we remembered that during the Depression people wanted to watch Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1933.”

Dreamboats features the music of the early 1960s, featuring songs by the likes of Eddie Cochran and Billy Fury, which Gran says are timeless. “Young kids love it when they hear it for the first time,” he says. “It’s like the music in Grease.”

But why leave TV? Was their typing hand forced Stage Left by young television execs looking to hire even younger writers? (Birds of A Feather, for example, was dropped by the BBC after nine years, only to fly freely again when ITV picked it up.)

“In the Eighties and Nineties we had our television production company, Alomo,” Gran reflects. “Then in the early part of the millennium we were taken over by Pearson, and they were very generous, but it became really boring. We stopped striving, because we weren’t doing our own thing.

“Before you know it, your contacts move on and unless you go and cultivate a load of ex-punks you don’t get the TV commissions. But then theatre came along when Laurence bumped into Alan Ayckbourn who said ‘Why haven’t your written for the stage?’.”

The pair, both born in the late 1940s, took the playwright up on his offer. “We wrote a play for him, which took us two years and made tuppence. But that didn’t matter because writing for theatre is a labour of love. And we loved the experience.”

He smiles and adds: “I love the line that someone came up with: ‘You can’t make a living in the theatre – but you can make a killing.’”

Marks and Gran had no idea they would go on to make a killing in theatre or television when they met as 10-year-old boys in the Jewish Lads Brigade in north London. As teenagers in 1974 they decided to join a writing school to pass the time and a wise teacher suggested they write together.

After leaving university, Gran worked for the Department of Social Security while Marks became a journalist. In their spare time, they wrote TV sketches. A chance meeting on a train between Marks and the writer, presenter and comedian Barry Took led to them to writing for the hilarious but uncompromising Frankie Howerd. Gran admits to suffering a ulcer at the stress of it all, but the determined duo persisted and in 1980 their first sitcom baby Holding the Fort, starring Peter Davison and Patricia Hodge, arrived. It was only a minor success but allowed the writers to give up their day jobs.

In 1982, however, success shone into their writing room with ITV comedy-drama Shine on Harvey Moon. The pair were truly up and running and in 1985, Gran and chum upped and ran to Hollywood to join the ABC writing team on sitcom Mr Sunshine.

But the pair didn’t take to Tinseltown – and vice versa. “In England, we had worked on shows in which we kept our own hours and suddenly we were thrown into a Henry Ford situation.”

The boys didn’t like the writing factory. “We didn’t find it conducive,” says Gran. “We’d write in the morning and then say we were going out but we didn’t realise we were supposed to go to lunch with the producer.”

One of the producers happened to be Henry Winkler, aka The Fonz, who was not singing the Happy Days theme tune when he met up with Marks and Gran.

“We were once invited to Henry’s party and we couldn’t go because we’d gone back to England. Laurence had a family crises. We figured we wouldn’t be missed.”

They were.

“There are lots of thin skins out there. Although we weren’t kids, we might as well have been straight out of kindergarten for all we knew. But there was no handbook given to us when we arrived.”

The show was cancelled after just six episodes and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Gran is a fan of BBC 2’s Episodes, about the trials and tribulations of two English writers working on a Hollywood sitcom. “Whatever happens in Episodes, well, it’s much, much worse than that.”

That’s reassuring, I suggest. We viewers hope the Hollywood experience involves pain, if the reward is unalloyed hedonism, fast cars and even faster women.

“Well, you did get all of that because the money the writers were on was ridiculous,” he says. “But most of the writers on the show were in therapy. And if they weren’t on therapy they were on suicide watch.”

He adds, with a wry grin: “Looking back, it [the American adventure[ was great. I came back from the Somme with only one leg missing.”

The stint in the comedy trenches had side benefits. “When we came back we were asked to talk about our experiences at an ITV conference, and that’s where we met Rik Mayall.”

Mayall told the writers: ‘I want to play a character who is just like me; vain, greedy, depraved, obsessed with money, and not afraid to kill.’

And that’s how The New Statesman came about. B’Stard had all the compassion of a starving fox facing an open hen house.

Thankfully, for comedy, I suggest, we’re still facing impending doom. Trump, Brexit, terrorism, politicians speaking in tongues...

“Well, yes, we are,” he says. “That’s why we’re plotting to bring back Alan B’Stard because he is the only person who can make sense of all of this.”

But how can the writing pair (both old-school Lefties) make it work without Mayall – who passed away after a heart attack three years ago – who was so wonderfully convincing as the devil incarnate.

“We’ll have to bring in his previous unknown progeny,” says the writer. Perfect. B’stard has a bastard no one knew about. And, of course, the reprobate was an enthusiastic sperm donor in his time, so the storyline is feasible.

The son, Arron B’Stard, won’t work in Parliament. He’ll be online, spreading fake news and creating mayhem.

There’s little doubt television or perhaps the new platforms such as online streaming services Amazon or Netflix will want The New Statesman, (hopefully having learned from letting Birds of a Feather go).

But if not, M&G will surely take their creation to theatre as they did previously with The New Statesman.

There was another benefit to emerge from the trauma of Hollywood. Gran and Marks learned how to run a show, how to hire writers and in one year they went on to make around 25 episodes of Birds of a Feather, (which ran from 1989).

But what the pair don’t often get the credit for is their non-comedy work, such as 1992’s Love Hurts, a soft, warm drama with Adam Faith.

“Sometimes when we say to producers, ‘We’ve got this drama project’ they say ‘Are you sure?’ To a certain extent these days we feel we have to write the sort of show the producer would write if they could write. We’re very lucky we came up in an era when TV was very much a writer’s medium. There was real freedom. It still is a great medium, but it’s very different.”

He checks himself and adds: “I don’t want to sound like a miserable old bugger.” He laughs, “No, I’m only one of those things. I’m old. That’s it.”

Television has changed. Fewer risks are taken. It craves a young audience. (The Real Marigold Hotel and Boomers, being among the exceptions). Gran argues the renaissance of television has been led by the likes of HBO in America and Netflix. “Their shows are making British TV look very parochial right now and are pulling in a lot of talent. No one wants to be a movie writer any more, they want to be a TV writer. Now, TV producers are looking for actors and writers who are brands.”

He grins and adds: “Laurence and I are a bit of a brand. But I think we’re the Co-op.”

He may poke fun at himself but he won’t walk away from writing. What you learn from talking to Gran is the pair love it too much. Their old sitcom pal the late Alan Simpson, of Galton and Simpson, reckoned he’d had enough after he created Hancock and Steptoe. In later years Simpson said whenever he had the urge to write he would jump in his Rolls-Royce and drive around the south of France ‘till the need subsided.’

Does this ever apply to M&G? “Not yet,” says the father of two. “We still enjoy working together. I don’t think we’ve ever really disagreed more than a dozen times in all the years we’ve been doing this.”

He grins and adds: “We fight it out and I like to think I usually win. Whoever is at the keyboard possibly has that little bit extra power, but if Laurence is at the keyboard and then goes to the toilet I’ll change it back again.”

That’s very fair and grown up, I suggest. “Yes,” he says, laughing. “But I have to say when you’re writing something like Birds of a Feather you’re more or less channelling the characters. They sort of tell you what to write.”

Marks and Gran are still developing television formats. “You have ideas and you want to sell those ideas. And because we’re stupid we’ve started another production company and we’re working with young writers.”

But their big love affair now is with the theatre. “We’ve had TV audiences of 17m but I can honestly say that seeing theatre audiences watch our shows knocks spots of this. Watching our shows at home is nothing like the experience of theatre, which is unique. Here’s why; if you watch a movie such as Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible you know that Tom Cruise won’t die in the making of that movie. It’s history. But theatre is always in the moment.”

The added delight of musicals is the chance to wallow in the tunes. “We’re children of the Sixties, very much in the right time for the Beatles, which is a blessing, and I feel for anyone who wasn’t,” Gran deadpans, before adding, “I’d hate to have been born to coincide with the time when Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep was the best you could hope for.”

C'mon now – their Scottish singer Sally Carr's vocal style was legendary, I suggest.

“Glasgow’s a great place,” Gran continues, grinning, “but nowhere is perfect.”

Writing has provided him with fabulous wealth, and a lovely home in the Cotswolds.

“Well, we eat regularly,” he deadpans.

Face it, Maurice, you have to write. And you would never have lasted as manager of the Job Centre in Tottenham.

“Well, I’d like to think I’d at least have been regional manager by now,” he says. “You know, I always expected to write but I never expected to make a living out of it. I only expected to make enough to get a better holiday or a less rubbish car. And I do have a less rubbish car.”

He adds: “I can’t find a place to park it where the birds won’t crap on it, but the perils of the tree-lined street. . . . that’s another story.”

Dreamboats and Petticoats, King’s Theatre, Glasgow, June 12 – 17.