If you only have a passing acquaintance with British comedy history, you’ll have heard of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson; Frank Muir and Denis Norden; and John Sullivan.
But you may not be familiar with names like . . . Ian Davidson, John Junkin, Dick Vosburgh, Wally Malston, Spike Mullins and Neil Shand – just a few of the productive funny men who, having written acres of material for the TV and radio comedians of previous decades, have all gone to that great ‘Writer’s Room’ in the sky!
It’s unfair their creativity has been overlooked, when you consider their massive output from the 1960s up to the early 2000s, when most comics dispensed with writers and ploughed their own furrows.
Whether that lack of writer/comedian collaboration led to a drop in quality control is not for me to say.
But, during the years that TV entertainment shows devoured material, the writers mentioned above, together with dozens more, ensured comedians had a constant supply of gags and carefully scripted adlibs.
Each writer took a different route to becoming a ‘jokesmith’.
Ian Davidson knew some of the Pythons at university, worked with them for a while, then wrote for Dave Allen and many other comics before becoming a BBC Script Editor.
Wally Malston was a dental technician before writing countless episodes of “3-2-1” and “Winner Takes All!”.
Before entering the comedy world, John Junkin was a teacher.
While working as a labourer, Spike Mullins read a magazine interview with Max Bygraves, in which he said he was looking for gag writers.
Spike sent some sample jokes to Max’s agent and received a letter from the entertainer inviting him to Nottingham, where he was appearing in a summer show.
It wasn’t long before Spike swapped labouring on a building site to labouring over a typewriter as a full-time writer. He went on to create the now classic ‘Ronnie Corbett In The Chair’ monologues for ‘The Two Ronnies’.
Chances are, the funny lines these gents created made you laugh out loud and forget your problems on many occasions.
That’s reason enough for them not to be forgotten . . .