Raymond Allen, who has died aged 82 after suffering from cancer, created the 1970s sitcom Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, which starred Michael Crawford as the accident-prone Frank Spencer and Michele Dotrice as his wife, Betty.
At the age of 31, while working as a cinema cleaner on the Isle of Wight, Allen submitted a single play titled Have a Break, Take a Husband! to the BBC. In his original concept, Frank had not been the main character, but by the time he approached the BBC it had evolved. “The Liver Birds had just started on television,” Allen told me in 1990, “and I remember reading a bit in the paper saying there were few situation comedies written for women, with women in the lead roles. I thought I wanted to write a situation comedy with a woman in the lead. It was Betty Spencer, and Frank was the idiot husband who said very little, just following her around. When I started writing it, I found I had more sympathy with Frank and he started saying more and more, and Betty merged into the background.”
