The Liver Birds is a British sitcom, set in Liverpool, North West England, which aired on BBC1 from April 1969 to January 1979, and again in 1996. The show was created by Carla Lane and Myra Taylor. The two Liverpudlian housewives had met at a local writers club and decided to pool their talents. Having been invited to London by Michael Mills, the BBC's then Head of Comedy, and asked to write about two women sharing a flat, Mills brought in sitcom expert Sydney Lotterby to work with the writing team.
Lotterby had previously worked with Eric Sykes and Sheila Hancock, and on The Likely Lads. For the Liver Birds, Carla Lane wrote most of the episodes, Taylor co-writing only the first two series. The pilot was shown on 14 April 1969 as an episode of Comedy Playhouse, the BBC's breeding ground for sitcoms at the time.
Outline
The series charted the ups and downs of two "dolly birds" sharing a flat on Liverpool's Huskisson Street, concentrating on the two young single women's dealings with boyfriends, work, parents and each other. Dressed in the best 1970s fashions, they looked for romance in a loose female equivalent of The Likely Lads.
The pilot and Series 1 starred Pauline Collins as Dawn and Polly James as Beryl Hennessey. In Series 2, Nerys Hughes debuted as Sandra Hutchinson, replacing Dawn for the rest of the programme's run. The Beryl-and-Sandra pairing is generally regarded as the programme's best period. Beryl was the more 'common' one, while Sandra was soft-spoken and more refined, due to the influence of her snobbish, overbearing mother (Mollie Sugden).
Carla Lane drew on her own mother for the character – "Mrs Hutchinson, I think she was my mother. I'm sure she was my mother". Beryl's 'common' mother (the Hennesseys live in Bootle, a working class district north of the city) was played by Sheila Fay. Future Emmerdale actor Elizabeth Estensen as Carol Boswell replaced Beryl from Series 5 onwards.
The title comes from the name given to two sculpted birds perched on top of the Royal Liver Building at Pier Head in the city of Liverpool. Michael Mills, who commissioned the series, came up with the title, although it was initially disliked by Carla Lane. The Scaffold – a pop group whose line-up comprisesd John Gorman, later of Tiswas fame, poet Roger McGough, and Mike McCartney – sang the title song.
List of The Liver Birds episodes
Pilot
Series 1 (1969)
Both the pilot and all four episodes from series 1 (originally aired in 1969) are missing, presumed wiped in their entirety, however, the opening titles (including some footage from one of the missing episodes) still exist.
The first series was stopped after four episodes because Polly James' hectic schedule—working every evening on Anne of Green Gables in the West End, then rehearsing all day for the TV show—was proving too much. By the time James was available again, Pauline Collins had moved to LWT's Upstairs, Downstairs. The producer Sydney Lotterby remembered having worked with Nerys Hughes on The Likely Lads and, wrongly believing the Welsh actress was from Liverpool, asked her to read for a part in The Liver Birds. (Neither actress really had a Liverpool accent: James was from Oswaldtwistle, near Blackburn, and Hughes was from Rhyl.) Impressed with Hughes' reading, he offered her the part of Sandra, and the new series, in colour, began. The first episode of the second series aired on 7 January 1971. The actresses got on well together. "The rapport between Polly and myself was fairly instant. It was excellent. It happened in a twinkling really." said Hughes later, and James added, "We just fitted together. We learned our lines sipping Pernod milkshakes." There are two different episode listings for Series 2. Sources that list the series always do so in air date order, though the two contradictory listings are both still used. This alternative listing is as follows:
The Wedding
Look Before You Leap
The Holiday Fund aka Housekeeping
The Proposal aka The Engagement
The Good Samaritans
Three's a Crowd
The New Neighbour aka The Man Downstairs
The New Flat
The Dog
Grandad
Mother's Day
Promotion
Series 2 (1971)
Series 3 (1972) Following the second series, Myra Taylor, who missed her family, stopped writing for the show. With 13 episodes commissioned for the third series, Michael Mills felt that the writing duties would be too much for Lane to handle alone, so he handed six episodes to the writing duo of Jack Seddon and David Pursall. This writing arrangement finished at the end of the third series.