mostly david ephgrave

If you held me at gunpoint and asked what my favourite rhyming Indian restaurant name was, I’d have to say the Gandhi, Sandy.    It’s up against stiff competition, to be fair. The Ravi Shankar, Bognor only misses out through being fictional and a half-rhyme at that. Despite the photograph finish, The Gandhi, Sandy wears the crown; whoever came up with it deserves a mention in the New Year Honours List. I spotted the sign for it eight years ago, whilst posing for photographs to promote Glyn's and my sitcom pilot Chipped, Battered and Burgered. The piece was set in a chip shop in the early 1980s for which we needed a suitably old-fashioned backdrop. Glyn’s dad (who runs the Town Fryer, Hitchin) had just taken on a shop in Sandy that was perfect for the job. It only took half an hour’s snapping and a little subsequent Photoshopping to transform Bedfordshire’s branch of the Town Fryer into the Fiscothèque in our script. There w...

I found this flyer while sorting through my bedroom cupboard. Of all our shows’ taglines, this one had the worst. We must have been possessed by the spirit of ITV. Reading it made me sick in my mouth.  It’s the sort of sentence you’d see in a brochure for a Butlin’s Holiday Camp. Not that I’ve ever looked in one, of course. Not that I’ve ever looked. What were we thinking? ‘Four characters, two situations, one night of comedy’ is less a tagline, more an equation. Perhaps we'd stumbled across the secret formula to funny. It only needs an exclamation mark to seal the deal. Two’s Company wasn’t our finest hour. As shows go, it was a pretty cut-and-shut. We glued together two sitcom pilots with a couple of sketches. One of the sitcoms, 'Chipped, Battered and Burgered', was set in a chip shop in the early 1980s . The plot was basically a reworking of Fawlty Towers’ 'Basil the Rat'. Thank God Cleese and Booth’s lawyers never...