No Bed for Bacon: Or Shakespeare Sows an Oat

"While it is not true to say that the film Shakespeare in Love was the film of No Bed for Bacon , it is also true that if you were to try to film No Bed for Bacon , everybody would say, ‘we’ve seen this before and it was called Shakespeare in Love .’ The plot territory is very similar; the themes are similar. For me, the joy of No Bed for Bacon is seeing this funny Elizabethan world that Carol Brahms and SJ Simon built up around a working writer, a jobbing playwright with the surname Shakespeare. Their first historical book was called Don’t, Mr. Disraeli . Don’t, Mr. Disraeli is a jeu d’esprit that takes place in a very Victorian world. It’s very silly. No Bed for Bacon was the thematic sequel. Instead of doing the Victorian era, they do the Elizabethan era. It’s not silly. It has a lot to say about love. It has a lot to say about art. And most of all, it is talking about something that Brahms and Simon addressed throughout their writing lives, which is the human capacity to believe ourselves important. They have a way of gently, lightly puncturing pomposity. I love collaborating. And when I’m done collaborating, I love being left alone to do something. I can’t enjoy anything I’ve made, but I can absolutely enjoy something that somebody else has made. I couldn’t read a comic script that I wrote with any pleasure, but I can enjoy a comic book based on that script enormously once someone else has drawn it. I give them words on a page and they give me back something amazing. I enjoy reading Good Omens more than reading anything else I’ve done because I laugh at all the bits that Terry Pratchett wrote. I get to appreciate Terry’s genius and the mingling of our efforts into something greater. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There is something profound about a good collaboration. Collaboration comedy, in particular, works well. There are lots of collaborative comedy teams in the UK. You have Frank Muir and Denis Norden, Barry Took and Marty Feldman, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, Graham Chapman and John Cleese. I could go on. It works because one of you can throw out a straight line and then one of you can come up with the punchline. Also, you know immediately if it’s funny. For me, the best thing about collaborating is that writing is a really lonely business, it’s something we do on our own. So it’s fun to collaborate because it forces you to interact with other human beings."