THERE are tricks in every trade — and writing is no exception. I have tried to master a few, but there is one I have never licked, and that is to write about something I have already written. As I am trying to do now — to write about this series called Our House.

It’s a problem. If I write a modest bit of self-effacement I’m suspect, because so many people know me as an egoist: if I beat the big drum and confidently forecast weekly nationwide enthusiasm from Sunday onwards, I would (quite rightly) meet resistance from viewers.

The only way out is to tell about the show and its characters as straightforwardly as I can.

Our House is a series of comedy (I think!) plays about nine people who only have one thing in common — and yet have to live together under one roof. They meet by chance in that modern dreamland — an estate agent’s office — all looking urgently for somewhere to live. Individually, they pale and tremble at the prices asked: collectively, in a sudden flash of optimism, they realise that together, pooling their resources, they can solve the housing problem — by purchasing one big house between them.

The idea is sound common-sense. But people are people, and when they are ill-assorted people, necessity is the mother of their mortgage. I took it from there, and have some hundreds of pages of script and a dustbinful of dog-ends to prove it.

These are the folk I hope you’ll get to know — and like:

GEORGINA RUDDY (Hattie Jacques): Works in a public library, but hates quiet! Has just got to have a place of her own because, noisy at home, she’s running out of bed sitting-rooms to be slung out of.

SIMON WILLOW (Charles Hawtrey): A pillar of the local council’s rating department. Blithe, friendly, but lonely — another victim of bed-sitter life; and nursing a secret ambition far removed from matters municipal.

DAISY BURKE (Joan Sims): A trial to the labour exchange. Will she never settle in one job for more than a week?

CAPTAIN and MRS ILIFFE (Frank Pettingell and Ina de la Haye): A Yorkshireman, former merchant navy captain, and a retired French violinist; a healthy and explosive marital mixture.

STEPHEN and MARCIA HATTON (Trader Faulkner and Leigh Madison): Newlyweds. He’s a freelance artist, and insists on fighting the world; but she’s always in his corner.

GORDON BRENT (Norman Rossington): A law student who hasn’t yet learned one law of life — that a man should do what he wants to do, not what his father thinks he ought to do. Our House helps him to learn this lesson.

HERBERT KEENE (Frederick Peisley): Bank clerk, bachelor to an extreme, meek, easy meat for landladies, a great organiser.

I can’t explain how the characters suggested themselves, I only know that, once they did, they were real to me

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