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Published: 19 January, 2012
by PETER GRUNER

Forty years ago, Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran were kicking a ball about a Finsbury Park council estate, humming the latest hit tune.

Today, their 1960s musical Dreamboats and Petticoats is phenomenally successful, and two new shows are destined for the West End stage later this year following nationwide tours.

The hugely prolific writing duo believe a great deal of their comedy originates from their tough working-class Jewish background, where failure wasn’t an option.

Laurence’s own relatively secure upbringing came to a cruel halt in his early 20s, when his parents died within five years of each other.

Marks and Gran, who met at Blackstock Road Junior School, have already conquered TV comedy with the likes of the BBC’s Birds of a Feather, Goodnight Sweetheart and ITV’s New Statesman.

This month, Save the Last Dance for Me, the sequel to Dreamboats and Petticoats, will open in London.

They have written the script for the show, which features 1960s classics such as Viva Las Vegas, Sweets for My Sweet and Can’t Get Used to Losing You.

It will be followed two months later by the stage version of Birds of a Feather, starring all the original actors including Linda Robson, who is from Islington, Pauline Quirke and Lesley Joseph.

Laurence, 63, wanted to meet me outside his old flats at St John’s Court in Princess Crescent, Finsbury Park, for this interview. Maurice lived just round the corner in Finsbury Park Road.

“It was an isolated but happy childhood,” Laurence said. “My dad was a stocktaker and obsessed with sport. My mother Lily insisted that I read widely and endlessly sit in the library. My teenage years were lonely, or perhaps solitary. My parents were in their 60s when the Swinging Sixties began, and the chasm between their values and mine made living with them almost impossible. Life for me was difficult, angry, and much of my time was spent locked in my bedroom reading and listening to just the kind of music that they loathed – the kind of music to be found in both Dreamboats and Petticoats and Save The Last Dance For Me.”

His parents, who also inspired him to succeed, never lived to see their son’s rise to fame.

Lily was 62 when she died in 1969 of a respiratory illness following a heavy London fog.

Laurence was just 21 and had accompanied his mother to the Royal Northern Hospital in the back of the ambulance.

He later had to break the news of his mother’s death to his father and older brother and sister.  

His father died in the 1975 Moorgate Tube disaster, the story of which he used as the basis of an award-winning Channel 4 documentary – Me, My Dad and Moorgate.

“My mother was buried on January 1, 1970, and this kicked off the most extraordinary decade for me, that ended with me having a television comedy hit, and having written for my father’s comedy hero, Frankie Howerd.”

Today, Marks and Gran have won new audiences writing for the stage.

“I like to listen to the songs of the 50s and 60s and try and remember what I was doing at the particular time I first heard them. People of my generation are haunted by the music from those periods. I remember buying Bobby’s Girl from a little record shop in Blackstock Road and rushing home to play it on my Dansette record player.

“The North London Central Mosque [formerly Finsbury Park Mosque] is located on the spot where the Finsbury Park Empire used to be. I queued around the block with my dad to see Frankie Howerd and Dickie Valentine. Round the corner from that was the Finsbury Park Astoria, where Maurice and I first saw the Beatles.”

• Save the Last Dance for Me is on tour. Details at www.kenwright.com/ index.php?id=928
• Birds of A Feather is currently on tour. Details at www.birdsontour.com
• Dreamboats and Petticoats is at the Playhouse Theatre, booking to November 24, 020 7492 9930; also on a national tour.