Introduction

Jack Rosenthal once claimed that writing ‘starts with the realisation that eccentric means absolutely normal, that comedy comes from pain, and that every day is drama’.¹ His plays were fêted during his lifetime and after his death for their gentle comedy,² and taken to typify the kind of ‘golden age’ social comedy that is no longer in vogue with television networks. Yet, as his own statement suggests, Rosenthal did not shy away from less ‘gentle’ themes, including self-delusion, loneliness, misunderstanding, regret, cruelty and death. His long career as a prizewinning television playwright began with a Coronation Street script, the first of 129, for an episode broadcast in March 1961, and carried on until the early years of the present millennium. Rosenthal’s plays attracted directors such as Alan Parker, Mike Newell, Michael Apted – who was responsible for five plays, not counting several of Rosenthal’s Coronation Street episodes – and Jack Gold. The actors who appeared in his work are a roll-call of fifty years of British talent, ranging from Alec Guinness to Ron Moody, Richard Griffiths to Ben Whishaw, Sheila Hancock to Connie Booth, Yootha Joyce to Amanda Holden. The careers of sitcom stars Paula Wilcox and Richard Beckinsale began in Rosenthal’s The Lovers, while Nigel Hawthorne’s flourished after The Knowledge; and Rosenthal claimed that some of his best work was written expressly for his wife, the actor Maureen Lipman. Rosenthal was not simply the stay-at-home dramatist husband of a well-known thespian wife, as popular mythology often has it, but was notorious for attending the shoots of all his plays to keep a close eye on the transformation of script to scene.³

Rosenthal was delighted to be commissioned in 1961 to write for Coronation Street, a soap opera set in a milieu he knew well: a tightly knit northern working-class community, rife with feuds and neighbourliness in equal measure, whose occupants were never short of pithy put-downs. Almost everything for which Rosenthal’s writing became famous stems from Coronation Street, including his interest in the underprivileged and the underdog and their salty, everyday discourse, and in Englishness – his plays were never a resounding transatlantic success – but also in Jewishness. Coronation Street is not well known for its Jewish characters, but in an episode from 1967 about Elsie Tanner’s wedding Stan Ogden asks the photographer if the photographs come out of his Japanese camera right to left, only to be told, ‘No, pal, those are Jewish cameras.’ Rosenthal was the producer rather than the writer for these episodes, but it seems more than likely that the dialogue here was the result of collaboration between Rosenthal and the writer, his long-standing friend and sometime landlord, Geoffrey Lancashire.⁴

Rosenthal’s career paralleled and was integral to a formative period in the history of British television drama. Rosenthal worked for the independent television company Granada before he became a freelance writer in 1962. This was the year of the Pilkington Committee Report. This Report roundly criticised the overly populist priorities of ITV and paved the way for the 1964 Television Act which awarded the third new channel to the BBC. Yet ITV’s output in the 1960s featured important drama strands, including series such as The Prisoner (1967–68) and The Avengers (1961–69), as well as Coronation Street itself. Rosenthal also wrote for other commercial companies including ABC and LWT, and his later work appeared on Channel Four, which was established in 1982, and a Sky TV channel. Rosenthal’s first full-length BBC script, the Play for Today And for My Next Trick, was broadcast in 1972, and his subsequent writing is characterised by jokes about the rivalry between state and commercial networks. Rosenthal’s work on Coronation Street and his contact with its ensemble of writers established many of the concerns and dramatic habits of his later work. He always expressed a distaste for serial drama,⁵ and this is borne out by the format of his writing for the soap opera. Rosenthal’s episodes are usually self-contained and comic, pointing towards the priorities of his future work in the genres of situation comedy and the single play. In the 1980s, although Rosenthal wrote the pilot, he declined to be involved in what turned out to be the very successful series London’s Burning (ITV 1988–2002). Even the sitcoms that Rosenthal devised, such as The Dustbinmen (1969) and The Lovers (1970) – for which he also acted as producer – were handed over to other writers after their initial series.

Jack Rosenthal was born in 1931 in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, the second son of Sam and Leah (née Miller). His parents were working-class and Jewish, elements of his background which characterised all his work. Like Louis Miller (Ray Mort) in 1975’s The Evacuees and several of the characters in Coronation Street in the 1960s, Rosenthal’s parents worked in the local raincoat factory where Sam was a ‘schmeerer’, responsible for sealing the seams of rubber coats with glue using his fingers,⁶ Leah a machinist. Rosenthal’s play The Evacuees (1975) relates the experience of war-time evacuation undergone by the Rosenthal children, David and Jack. They were placed with a non-Jewish family whose provision of non-kosher food caused the boys consternation, and whose old-fashioned notions of child-rearing prompted Leah Rosenthal to take her offspring straight back to Manchester, despite its status as a target for German bombs. When the boys were evacuated a second time, to Colne in Lancashire, their mother accompanied them.

Rosenthal went to university at Sheffield, where he studied English Language and Literature and met the prototype of a certain kind of female character in his plays, the Catholic Wendy. According to his own accounts and to the dramatised versions – she appears as Phoebe in Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar (1968) and as Penny in Bye, Bye, Baby (1992) – Wendy not only eschewed sexual love on religious grounds, but instilled in her boyfriend a rather un-Jewish guilty conscience on the same topic. Academically, Rosenthal was profoundly influenced at university by his tutors, including the Shakespearean scholars L.C. Knights and John Danby. In Jack the Lad (2004), the biographical television programme broadcast in the BBC’s Timeshift series, Rosenthal describes Danby’s lecture on the fundamental structure of all drama consisting of a ‘protagonist trying to score a goal and an antagonist trying to stop him. That’s drama.’ This structure underlies many of Rosenthal’s later works, but most paradigmatically his 1972 play about an amateur football match, Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. This opens with an almost literal version of Danby’s notion:

MR ARMISTEAD: Good morning. A few pearls of wisdom from one who knows. What we’re now about to witness is called a football match – not the beginning of World War III, not the destruction of the human race – a football match. In it, each of the teams will attempt to score more goals than the other …

ALBION CAPTAIN (glaring at Parker Street captain): What are you looking at?

PARKER STREET CAPTAIN (glaring back): Not much.

However, even Danby’s notion is subject to comic irony as it is the referee who is the protagonist, both team captains his antagonists. At Sheffield, Rosenthal wrote his undergraduate dissertation on James Joyce, demonstrating a telling interest in wordplay and tragi-comic domesticity. Rosenthal also wrote a sports column for the student newspaper, Darts, thereby trying out contrasting literary styles.⁷ One of Rosenthal’s first forays into television writing was an adaptation of Joyce’s play Exiles, which was promptly rejected by the BBC.⁸ On his Department of English Literature record card for 1951–52 his tutor writes, ‘Thorough. Diligent. His manner may improve’, while a second tutor the following year has a prescient observation: ‘His written work has been first class. He goes into subjects deeply but hasn’t so wide a range as some other students at the same stage.’⁹ Rosenthal gained a 2.1 degree in 1953 – his chagrin at narrowly missing a First is presented in fictional form in Bye, Bye, Baby (1992), where it is the protagonist Leo Wiseman’s rival for Penny who has gained what he calls a ‘premier’. Although the only one of his plays to be set partly in Sheffield is Wide-Eyed and Legless (1993), which is based on an anterior source, Rosenthal’s fondness for his alma mater is shown by his choosing Sheffield University Library to be the home for his extensive archive, which was acquired by Special Collections in 2002. Rosenthal gained an honorary degree from the University and, as the Maisie Glass Visiting Professor in Drama in 2001–2, conducted master-classes with students.

After gaining his degree Rosenthal undertook National Service in the Navy as a Russian translator, an experience he fictionalised in Bye, Bye, Baby. On his return to Manchester, Rosenthal was appointed to a job at Granada in 1955 as a graduate trainee – turning down what appeared to be an equally attractive job with a men’s shirt manufacturer – and was invited by Tony Warren to submit a script for the new soap opera Coronation Street. The formative nature of this experience is shown by the fact that even the dialogue quoted above from Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. is a development of an exchange which takes place in Rosenthal’s first-ever episode of Coronation Street, in Snape’s Café between the waitress Doreen Lostock (Angela Crow) and a rowdy teddy-boy:

TEDDY-BOY: What are you starin’ at?

DOREEN: Not much.

The young working woman’s reflex response is elaborated out of its gendered context in Coronation Street to that in Another Sunday and Sweet F.A. where it conveys both Mr Armistead’s (David Swift) lack of authority, despite his hectoring words, and the animosity of a ‘friendly’ match.¹⁰ The exchange appears again in Spend, Spend, Spend, where it is part of Vivian’s (Susan Littler) ploy to gain her future husband Keith’s (John Duttine) attention, its sexual inflection restored. These are the first words exchanged by the couple, in tones of feigned brusqueness:

KEITH: What are you gawping at?

VIVIAN: Not much.

KEITH: Do you want a photograph or summat?

VIVIAN: You’d bust the camera.

While writing as part of the Coronation Street stable of regular writers during the 1960s, Rosenthal also contributed to the satirical BBC series That Was the Week That Was (1962–63)¹¹ and co-wrote with Harry Driver pilot plays for potential BBC sitcoms which were not developed, on such subjects as cleaning-ladies (The Chars, 1963) and a door-to-door salesman (On the Knocker, 1963). Rosenthal moved on at the end of the decade to his first 90-minute play, There’s a Hole in Your Dustbin, Delilah (ITV Playhouse, 1968), the pilot for the hugely popular sitcom The Dustbinmen. There followed what Rosenthal himself referred to as his ‘writing storm’ of the 1970s.¹² This is also the decade in which there is the closest fit between Rosenthal’s dramatic preferences and the priorities of televisual commissioning. As well as continuing to devise sitcoms for ITV, such as The Lovers and its mid-life counterpart, Sadie, It’s Cold Outside (1975), Rosenthal wrote a trio of award-winning Plays for Today for the BBC: The Evacuees (1975), Bar Mitzvah Boy (1976) and Spend, Spend, Spend (1977). Each won a BAFTA. The playwright David Hare has argued that the single television play, showcased in strands like BBC’s The Wednesday Play (1964–70) and Play for Today (1970–84), and ITV’s Armchair Theatre (1956–74), was ‘the most important new indigenous [British] art form of the twentieth century’.¹³ Hare had in mind such figures as Dennis Potter and Alan Bleasdale, who, like Rosenthal, were playwrights known for work almost exclusively in a televisual medium. Spend, Spend, Spend was the first of several plays that Rosenthal adapted from other sources, in this case Vivian Nicholson’s autobiography of the same title, while others include Wide-Eyed and Legless, adapted from Deric Longden’s memoirs; the award-winning feature film The Lucky Star (Max Fischer 1980), set during the Holocaust years; and a new version of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim for ITV (Robin Shepperd 2003). The Evacuees and Bar Mitzvah Boy are, I would argue, central works in the canon of British-Jewish writing. The television critic Mark Lawson wrote of Rosenthal in a posthumous appreciation that Bar Mitzvah Boy ‘is among the few British Jewish comedies to match the work of Woody Allen and Neil Simon’.¹⁴ By this I take him to mean that the humour of Rosenthal’s Jewish plays depends upon a blend of British-Jewishness equivalent to the cultural hybridity of the American writers’ work. In this respect Rosenthal’s Anglo-Jewish plays are unique, and do not share such practices as the efforts at ‘translation’ made, for instance, in the dialogue and notes to the published script of Mike Leigh’s 2005 play about British-Jewish life, Two Thousand Years.¹⁵

In 1973 Rosenthal married Maureen Lipman and their relocation from Manchester to London led to a focus on working life in the capital in The Knowledge (1979) and The Chain (1984), in place of earlier plays’ northern settings such as Colne (Your Name’s Not God, It’s Edgar), Salford (The Dustbinmen) and Altrincham (The Lovers). Many of Rosenthal’s best-known plays appeared in the 1980s, but his work during the decade shows the effects of Thatcherism – Margaret Thatcher was prime minister from 1979 to 1990 and the Conservatives remained in office until 1997. These effects are perceptible in the dialogue and ethos of Rosenthal’s plays of the time, both of which react against the political climate. The Chain is about the social and economic gulf between rich and poor, comically symbolised by the ‘great chain’ of the British class structure, while Bag Lady is a comic fable about a homeless woman whose fruitless quest is to find the prime minister. Although Rosenthal did not write overtly ‘anti-consensual drama’,¹⁶ like Alan Bleasdale’s The Boys from the Blackstuff (BBC2 1982) which was intended to record the specific conditions of recession and unemployment in Liverpool, all his plays make clear their comically sceptical view of contemporary politics. It is no coincidence that the ‘golden age’ of British television drama is often taken to have ended – if ended it has – in 1987, at the height of the Thatcher era.¹⁷ The deregulation and private enterprise espoused by the Conservative government was directed at television in a White Paper of 1988, made clear in its title: ‘Broadcasting in the 1990s: Competition, Choice and Quality’. This was followed by the 1990 Broadcasting Act which prepared for an ‘auction’ of ITV franchises based solely on the size of the companies’ bids.¹⁸ Rosenthal’s second-last play, completed in 2003 and broadcast posthumously in 2005, was an updated version of his 1976 television satire Ready When You Are, Mr McGill. The differences between the two versions embody this legacy of privileging ‘cost-effectiveness and private enterprise over creativity and public service’,¹⁹ consumers and programme controllers over writers and producers.

In the 1990s, Rosenthal’s plays became less reliant on comedy and more conventionally dramatic. Jonathan Bignell writes in relation to the BBC situation comedy The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976–79) of the ‘non-realist tradition of satire and social comedy in British television, which makes use of parody, the grotesque, and the absurd’,²⁰ and which characterised a significant strand of Rosenthal’s work in the 1960s and 1970s. Even in, for instance, Rosenthal’s coming-of-age plays Bar Mitzvah Boy and 1982’s P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang, the dominant mode is comedy. Bye, Bye, Baby, in contrast, is comic only incidentally. The same is true of Rosenthal’s pair of empty-nester plays, Eskimo Day (1996) and Cold Enough for Snow (1997), the composition of which was inspired by the departure of his children Amy and Adam for university. Some critics detected a mawkish note in these two plays. John Preston in the Sunday Telegraph declared of Cold Enough for Snow, ‘Seldom have I seen anything so anodyne’ and lamented the play’s ‘excruciating attempts at soul-searching’.²¹ Although other critics were much more complimentary about the play, it is true that Cold Enough for Snow employs emotional rather than comic exaggeration. The representation of class in Rosenthal’s work changes over time, following shifts in media expectations and, perhaps, his professional success and affluence. By the time of Cold Enough for Snow, we see Hugh Lloyd (Tom Wilkinson) trying to give the cleaner, Carmella, a message for his wife. Dressed for a business trip and clutching a suitcase, Hugh calls out as he comes down the stairs: ‘Maria! Gretta!’, and then as he enters the living-room where Carmella is cleaning: ‘Um … Ursula … Yvonne ….’ In this instance, humour arises from Hugh’s inability, as a wealthy Cheltenham-based professional working in ‘financial services’, to distinguish between the many women of varied nationalities who have cleaned his house. It relies upon the viewer’s knowledge of late-twentieth-century patterns of casual labour, as well as, in dramatic terms, conveying Hugh’s guilty conscience – he is flustered not because he is embarking on an affair, as the audience is briefly led to believe, but because he is going to Amsterdam to check up on his daughter Pippa. A great distance has been travelled between this and one of the episodes of The Dustbinmen in which Heavy Breathing (Trevor Bannister) meets an old school friend, Terry Yoxall (William Maxwell), whose social escalation has been enabled by his success as a salesman of plastic ducks. Yoxall now cocks his little finger when he drinks tea, has suppressed his Lancashire accent, and asks Heavy Breathing if he ‘gets to the Conservative club much’. Class-based humour in Rosenthal’s work is always a matter of small, detailed signifiers – indeed, Chris Dunkley compares Rosenthal’s miniaturist scope to that of Jane Austen’s small piece of ivory²² – and the parodic simplicity of The Dustbinmen has been replaced in Cold Enough for Snow by a middle-class self-consciousness.

Throughout his career, Rosenthal’s writing is characterised by the same kinds of comic verbal trope. This is clear, for example, at the level of stage direction, in both his published and unpublished scripts, in which characters perform their actions with hyperbolic expressiveness. They ‘beam’ in delight or are ‘niggled’ by irritations, ‘peer’ for a better view and ‘boggle’ in surprise, and when someone else speaks they may answer ‘blankly’ or respond despite being ‘not interested’. Dialogue may take place without either party listening to the other, as in the following from the 1976 Ready When You Are, Mr McGill, where the extra Mr McGill tells the milkman he is to star in a television play:

MILKMAN: Has it got a beginning, a middle and an end?

MR MCGILL: I speak in this one.

MILKMAN: Never bloody do have, do they?

The habit of not listening is often expanded into the art of the fully fledged non-sequitur, existing, as in this instance from London’s Burning, to demonstrate a wilfully limited self-concern. As a fire rages, bystanders are only concerned with the fact that they know the person who reported it:

MAN’S WIFE: Gordon’s our Sheila’s eldest. He once went to Toronto, but he couldn’t settle …

MAN: Do we claim a reward or anything for that?

Indeed, there is a deaf wedding-guest in Polly Put the Kettle On (1974) who exists purely as a motivation for surreal non-sequiturs:

POLLY (shouting): Alright, Mrs Edwards?

MRS EDWARDS (shouting): Mick Jagger.

POLLY (shouting): Your hair’s nice.

MRS EDWARDS (shouting): In a bit. They haven’t had the Gay Gordons yet, have they?

Like Ricky Gervais, whose claim to find in self-delusion the essence of comedy will not surprise viewers of The Office (BBC2 2001–3) or Extras (BBC2 2005–6), Rosenthal’s characters give free rein to this trait, as typified by the reply on the part of the elderly Mr McGill (Tom Courtenay) in the 2005 version, to a question about who he played in Shakespeare in Love:

No one, as such. I think they thought I was too young. (beat) You know, reading between the lines.

Rosenthal’s characters are frequently ‘thrown’ or ‘puzzled’ by what they hear; yet they are described as talking ‘reasonably’ when their utterances are patently not so. This is true in the case of Manchester City fan Winston (Jerry Haberfield) in The Dustbinmen hoping that he may meet his hero the Manchester City midfielder Colin Bell, whose aunt’s house is on one of the lads’ dustbin runs:

WINSTON (reasonably): Colin might be going for his tea. There might be potato peelings in that bin that’s come off the spuds that made Colin’s chips.

Rosenthal clearly relished the linguistic playfulness of adolescent boys, and develops distinctive habits of this kind for the boys in The Evacuees, Alan Duckworth in P’tang, Yang, Kipperbang, Eliot Green in Bar Mitzvah Boy and Neil in Eskimo Day. While the workmen listening to Alan talk say they blame ‘Dicky Valentine and Lita Rosa’, in Eskimo Day the culprit identified by Neil’s father is Blackadder (BBC 1 1983–89), as if the influence of popular culture underlies all argots. At the opposite end of the spectrum of such linguistic playfulness is the mileage Rosenthal’s characters extract from the single word ‘Pardon?’, which can convey astonishment, outrage, dissent, or blank incomprehension, while the following exchange from The Chain between a young married couple moving to their first home relies almost entirely upon interrogatives:

CARRIE: We can start a family and that now.

KEITH: What?

CARRIE: What?

KEITH: Can what?

CARRIE: Start a family.

KEITH (Incredulously): Kids??

CARRIE: What? …

KEITH: We’re buying a bloody twenty-nine-and-a-half grand flat!

CARRIE: Yeah, well, that’s why, innit?

KEITH: Why what?

Rosenthal’s characters’ quests for a cup of tea may reach plot-driving proportions (in the case of Bamber in The Chain and Rabbi Sherman in Bar Mitzvah Boy), while certain kinds of food are both historically and socially exact. As class signifiers, the details of food are comic by their very specificity and because they frequently embody a wish for betterment. ‘Boeuf bourguignon’, that aspirational dish of the 1970s, features unexpectedly and is mispronounced in both The Chain and Moving Story (ITV 1994). The mushroom vol-au-vents which delight Rita Green (Maria Charles) in Bar Mitzvah Boy as part of the dinner-dance menu cause a ‘pained’ reaction in Mr Ellis (Ron Moody), in Mr Ellis Versus the People (1974), when he hears they are to be served at the Lord Mayor’s post-election drinks party. Rita’s uncritical lower-middle-class aspiration, against which her son Eliot rebels, contrasts with Mr Ellis’s sardonic disenchantment. Rosenthal’s work is characterised by visual and structural as well as linguistic humour. The beefy milkman in Eskimo Day incongruously wears a football shirt bearing the legend ‘Alan Shearer’, after the svelte England striker; while Beryl in The Lovers claims to be ‘drinking in the glories of the English countryside’ on a train journey when the back-projected view out of the window is one of the chimney-stacks and factories of Lancashire industry. Rosenthal’s published and unpublished scripts give directions for particular kinds of shot construction and editing, including meaningful cuts, juxtapositions and dissolves. For instance, in both versions of Ready When You Are, Mr McGill comedy arises from the visual corroboration of bystanders’ comments about the director of a television film:

SECOND WOMAN: See that half-dead one? He’s in charge.

FIRST WOMAN: Fancies himself, does he?

SECOND WOMAN: Oh, he thinks he’s God.

PHIL (calling to the SPARKS): OK, let there be light! (The SPARKS switch on.)

Despite his many industry awards and nominations, Rosenthal’s archive contains several examples of plays that were never televised or filmed. These are an eclectic group and include The Best, a play about the troubled career of footballer George Best which is structured, like Spend, Spend, Spend, so that past and present are ironically juxtaposed; Maiden, based on the true story of the Whitbread Round the World Race of 1989–90 in which the eponymous yacht was captained by Tracey Edwards with an all-female crew; and Black and White, about the problematic visit to the Soviet Union of American chess grandmaster Sam Hoffman and his Russian wife Ludmilla.²³ Although his work is held in high critical esteem and public affection, and he enjoyed occasional forays into Hollywood – he co-scripted Barbra Streisand’s 1983 film Yentl – Rosenthal has never been as well known as his contemporaries Dennis Potter, Alan Bennett or Alan Bleasdale. Mark Lawson ascribes this to Rosenthal’s professional self-effacement, the fact that he was ‘neither a public controversialist like Dennis Potter nor an actor-writer like Alan Bennett’, and that generically Rosenthal’s plays were not experimental or surreal but ‘realist’.²⁴ While it is true that Rosenthal’s plays have a comic focus on ordinary working life, their tenor is more mixed than this suggests. Much of Rosenthal’s writing can be described as ‘everyday surrealism’, particularly that for such televisual genres as sitcoms where domesticity is rendered at a high pitch of comedy. For instance, in The Chain we hear the following exchange:

BAMBER: Vico. Giambattista Vico.

NICK: Irishman, is he?

In The Knowledge, trainee cabby Gordon laments to examiner Mr Burgess about the toll taken on his personal life: ‘I used to be a smart fella. Birds used to give me the eye in Selfridges’; while in The Lovers Mrs Battersby makes an apparently telling remark, interrupting an argument between courting couple Geoffrey and Beryl, her daughter: ‘I know what you two were doing, and neither of you can win’, only to be followed by, ‘when you play me at Scrabble’. Such ‘everyday surrealism’ takes the form of comically precise detail which undermines, overwhelms, or contradicts the speaker’s utterance and confounds audience expectation.

As I argue in Chapter 1, Rosenthal’s stylistic influences include Tony Warren and other contemporaries, such as Vince Powell, Peter Eckersley and Geoffrey Lancashire, in the Coronation Street writing team of the 1960s.²⁵ Rosenthal’s trademark everyday surrealism emerges partly from this source, but it is also, less predictably, indebted to the Modernist style of Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Some have also detected a Pinteresque interest in Rosenthal’s use of the rhythms and hidden depths of ordinary speech.²⁶ Such influences were always, however, integrated into Rosenthal’s particular brand of comedy in contrast to the experimentalism of writers such as Dennis Potter or David Mercer.²⁷ Other sources are quoted more overtly and knowingly. While Annie Walker (Doris Speed) in Coronation Street and Heavy Breathing in The Dustbinmen cite Keats’ Endymion in rapt tones, Phil (Jack Shepherd) in Ready When You Are, Mr McGill ‘wearily’ quotes Byron’s – and, in A Night at the Opera (Sam Wood 1935), Groucho Marx’s – ‘Let joy be unconfined’