Own hair, own teeth

The 59-year old scriptwriter Carla Lane, who claims that wrestling with recalcitrant goats at her animal sanctuary in Sussex keeps her fit, has written a soliloquy for a Shirley Valentine on the verge of 60 who is trapped in marital domesticity and tempted by another man.

The Land Girls author Angela Huth, who took up tap dancing two years ago at the age of 64, explores a long-married couple’s dread of downsizing to a bungalow from a rickety old house full of memories. The 84-year-old Elizabeth Berridge, a professional writer for 60 years, imagines an oldie production of Romeo and Juliet in which Juliet is a silver surfer text-messaging Romeo from the tomb. And 74-year-old Lynne Reid Banks, who immortalised herself with her first novel The L-Shaped Room, tells the story of a 35-year marriage revisited by the ghost of an affair from the past.

The producer of the series, Emma Harding, is just 28 herself. “I feel quite strongly that older people are given rather limited representation in the media, particularly in drama,” she says.

“Media attitudes towards people over 60 tend to fall into two camps: either extremely patronising towards what they see as doddery old people or worthy charity stuff. I wanted a variety of stories, each of them taking on a different aspect of love. Fiction often overlooks the emotional lives of older people, such as Angela’s story about a decades-old marriage. I picked these particular writers because they would be able to write about that age group with humour and empathy and would respond to the irreverence of the title.”

As a card-carrying Liverpudlian who created a netherworld of Giro scallies in the BBC series Bread, Carla Lane’s middle name is irreverence. “My sons know what I’m like; I’m full of the devil, you wouldn’t believe the age I am,” says Lane.

Yet despite a 30-year track record of achievements that include The Liver Birds, Butterflies and an OBE, she says that television now ignores her. “I have not had a script accepted in four years; and it’s not just me, it’s those of us who in our time kept the BBC afloat.

“I sent the BBC one script about a fortysomething couple who separate and then discover how horrendous the world has become since they were last on the singles market. They wrote back and said, ‘We love your script, it’s funny and charming, but we don’t think these people are of today’. I thought to myself, ‘Of course they’re not, that’s what I’m writing about!’ ” says an exasperated Lane.

She claims that the only ageism she encounters comes from a media which does not acknowledge the reality of changing attitudes towards older people. “I have young staff who are always asking me to go clubbing with them.”

Angela Huth has always loved writing about older people: the heroine of her first novel, Nowhere Girl, published in 1970 when she was 32, was an elderly lady. “I love older people’s language, the fact that they don’t use modern jargon but talk in a mellifluous and rhythmic way,” explains Huth, whose film director father, Harold Huth, was 46 when she was born.

Although she has just embarked on a new novel and her anthology of celebrity eulogies, Well-remembered Friends, will be published by John Murray this October, she says that she does encounter ageism in the book world. “I’ve never been busier in my entire life, but my photograph has been reduced on covers to the size of a postage stamp. People underestimate old people. I’m the oldest in my tap-dancing class, but I don’t feel like the old thing; it’s the highlight of the week, I’m loving it.”

A common thread running through the plays is the condescending attitude of many grown-up children, who start trying to parent their parents and police any signs of inappropriate independence. That tendency to patronise is splendidly sent up in Elizabeth Berridge’s story. Yet the widowed Berridge, whose granddaughter Myfanwy Moore is the Bafta-winning producer of the BBC comedy Little Britain, points out that the generation gap is often bridged by a natural rapport between grandparents and grandchildren.

“You are over a sort of barrier,” she explains. “Your children have known you all your life, but your grandchildren are usually totally uncritical — which is lovely, because so many people are critical of the old. I don’t know why — maybe it’s because they feel threatened by them, or because of an envy of the sort of life you have had and they haven’t.”

Berridge, whose latest collection of short stories is published by Persephone Books this October under the title of Flying Solo, admits that she is fascinated by how people react to women, in particular, getting older. “It’s because my age group are the ones who really got things done, what with the war and everything,” she says. “A lot of us are still in voluntary work, which is a huge help to young mothers today. I feel very strongly that we are people in our own right, that our values are still important even though the country seems to be going through an identity crisis. But the media expects us to be mentally slow, as well as physically, and still doesn’t really acknowledge that we spend money.”

Hers is spent on flights to Verona, Paris and other pleasurable places, often in male company. “I haven’t gone as far as the woman who advertised for sex and then wrote a book about it, but I do go around with several men to the theatre and to exhibitions. Life at my age,” she declares, “can be absolutely lovely.”