For the next two months, the two young men worked on an idea – involving an old soldier whose pride and joy was the traditional gents’ public lavatory that he ran, but who is now faced with competition from a brand-new modern rival down the road – and, when they felt it had developed satisfactorily, sent off a sample script to the BBC. Three more months passed, while the two young men packed beer crate after beer crate and dreamed of emulating Johnny Speight with his Rolls-Royce, big house in the country, champagne, cigars and glamorous celebrity lifestyle. Then a reply finally arrived: ‘We are not looking for this kind of material.’
The brusque rejection sapped the spirit of Saunders, who decided to dream about doing something else, but Sullivan was undaunted: He had discovered that he enjoyed the process of writing and therefore continued to write and work on scripts: ‘I so enjoyed the process of inventing characters and writing the dialogue that it just became a hobby. It kept me off the streets, and I didn’t spend too much money on beer, because I was just writing every evening. And I suppose the dream was that, yes, I still hoped I could get into this business.’ Drawing from his own experiences, he based his plots and characters on themes and people that he knew and set them in familiar, local locations. One idea revolved around a family called the Leeches, who fiddled to keep feeding off the State; another featured a football team that always failed to find the winning formula. As soon as each sample story was completed, he sent them off to the BBC and waited patiently for a letter of acceptance. When all that he received was a rejection slip, he simply rewrote the script and sent it straight back in. ‘Sometimes I’d change the titles, sometimes I’d even change my own name, to try to fool them’.7 He refused to accept defeat.
Working-class heroes continued to offer him hope as the 1960s edged towards their end. Apart from Johnny Speight, Sullivan could also look at Ray Galton and Alan Simpson – two other hugely gifted writers from very modest London backgrounds who had reached the top of the profession (and whose 1962 pilot episode of their sitcom Steptoe and Son, which had featured bright comedy mixed with raw emotional drama, had dazzled Sullivan when he first watched it) – along with such inspired musicians and lyricists as the Muswell Hill-born Ray Davies of The Kinks and the Chiswick-born Pete Townshend of The Who, and, right at the heart of the decade’s pop culture, Lennon and McCartney of The Beatles were continuing to confound Britain’s old class prejudices. ‘I can remember lying in bed and hearing one of their songs, “From Me To You”, playing down the street,’ Sullivan would recall fondly about the so-called Fab Four. ‘I’d never heard anything like it before, it was such a different sound. I’ll always remember thinking: “Aren’t the Americans clever.” I automatically assumed that any new sound, anything good, originated from the States, so when I found out that they were four working-class boys from a few hundred miles up the road, I was really inspired.’8 It was still possible, Sullivan kept telling himself, in spite of the old social bias; there was still a chance for an ‘ordinary’ young man from Balham to make it big via the uses of literacy.
While the challenge of writing continued to inspire him, however, the dull routine of the day job continued to bore him, so he left Watney’s and, for want of another way to earn a regular wage, went to work with his father as a trainee plumber. It did not take long for him to realise that he had made a great mistake: he had no real interest in plumbing and was consequently careless, causing frequent floods.
Determined to find a way to better himself before it was too late, he resolved to teach himself some of the things that he had allowed to pass him by during his days at school, devouring books on a wide range of subjects and trying his best to broaden his knowledge. He also continued to write in his spare time, still hopeful that, one day, an idea would spark something genuinely special. As what he called a ‘brain exercise’, he would open newspapers on random pages (just like he had heard that John Lennon had done prior to conjuring up such songs as ‘A Day In The Life’) and pick out a story to use as source material for a script. The ambition remained unabated.
He was still labouring as a maintenance plumber while striving to develop as a writer when, in 1972, he met an attractive young secretary called Sharon in the upmarket Chelsea Drugstore pub (mentioned, rather ominously, in the Rolling Stones song ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’) on the King’s Road. They got on well, and started dating, but Sullivan went out with her a few times before daring to mention his dream of exchanging his tool kit for a typewriter. Sharon was earning more than he was at the time, but, in spite of any misgivings she might have felt, she continued seeing him and listening to his writerly ambitions, and, two years later, they married.
Sullivan – now living with Sharon in a two-roomed council flat at Rossiter Road in Balham – kept up his strategy of bombarding the BBC with sample scripts, and refused to be disheartened by any rejection letter that came back: ‘I used to drive past the BBC’s TV Centre in west London and I used to look at it like a castle that I had to somehow or other breach.’9 One day, he came up with an idea for a sitcom that really captured his imagination: an unemployed young man from south London who had convinced himself that he was a dangerous revolutionary and the self-appointed leader of the ‘Tooting Popular Front’.
‘I knew it was my best idea yet,’ said Sullivan, who had known such a character in a local pub (The Nelson Arms) who was always spouting radical political clichés while never seeming to do anything remotely practical. During an era in Britain when there seemed to be a bewildering array of Marxist, Western Marxist, Marxist–Leninist, Trotskyist, anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist, revolutionary socialist and neo-communist splinter groups arguing angrily amongst each other, and it almost seemed de rigueur for students to decorate their walls with blood red Che Guevara posters while parroting some or other type of clumsy political jargon (a fashion mocked with great relish by Private Eye via the umming and erring character of ‘Dave Spart’), the relevance of the comic theme was abundantly clear. Calling his proposed sitcom Citizen Smith, Sullivan worked hard on the sample script – believing that its topical revolutionary theme had real potential – and then pondered the most appropriate strategy for submitting it. Knowing that the script represented his best work yet by far, his greatest fear was rejection, and what he would do if it failed to work out.
Determined not to squander this opportunity, Sullivan considered his options as carefully as possible and concluded that his best chance would be to adopt a Trojan Horse-style strategy: get a very basic job at the BBC, learn from within how the organisation functioned and then seek out a suitable patron. He thus applied to the Corporation, on 19 September 1974, and, much to his surprise, was not only invited for an interview but subsequently (on 18 November) given a position in the props department at Television Centre. Feeling emboldened by his good fortune now that he was finally inside the ‘castle’, he soon engineered a move to scene shifting, which brought him closer to the actual business of filming, and started studying who did what on the set.
One evening, as he went about his usual duties, a colleague pointed out someone – a tall, stick-thin, chain-smoking individual – who was deemed to be very special indeed: Dennis Main Wilson. The name, at least, was well-known to Sullivan, as indeed it was, at the back of their minds, to millions of other comedy fans. Dennis Main Wilson was the name that had been heard, as producer, at the end of countless popular radio shows, including Hancock’s Half-Hour and The Goon Show, and was the name that appeared at the conclusion of some of the BBC’s most admired television sitcoms, including The Rag Trade, Sykes and A . . . and Till Death Us Do Part. He was one of the Corporation’s most experienced, influential, outspoken and independent-minded producer/directors, having worked there since the early 1940s and battled long and hard to keep the meddling ‘management’ a safe distance away from himself and the talent. The running joke among some of his colleagues was that he was rarely to be seen without sporting two pairs of glasses – one on the bridge of his nose and the other pair, one