Terence Frisby was a playwright, author, actor and producer whose most famous play, There’s a Girl in My Soup, was London’s longest-running comedy (1966-72) and a huge hit wherever it played, running in (among many other places) New York (Broadway), Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Sydney, Rome, Vienna and Prague. It is still performed around the world.
Among his other works:
Theatre
The Subtopians (1964)
The Bandwagon (1969)
It’s All Right If I Do It (1977)
Seaside Postcard (1978)
Rough Justice (1994)
Funny About Love (1999)
As producer, his favourite presentation was the South African multi-award winning Woza Albert, which played in London (1983), and then Broadway and worldwide.
Film
His screenplay for the hugely successful film of There’s A Girl in My Soup, directed by Roy Boulting and starring Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn, won the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for Best British Comedy in 1970.
Television
Lucky Feller (1976), a comedy series starring David Jason
That’s Love (1988-92), comedy series with Jimmy Mulville, Diana Hardcastle and Tony Slattery – won the Gold Award for Comedy at the 1991 Houson International Film Festival
Armchair Theatre: Don’t Forget the Basics (1967)
Adam Adamant Lives!: episode More Deadly than the Sword (1966)
Blackmail: episode Take Care of Madam (1965)
Public Eye: 2 episodes (1965)
First Night: Guilty (1963)
Radio
Just Remember Two Things: It’s Not Fair and Don’t Be Late for BBC Radio 4 won the Giles Cooper Play of the Year Award. It later became a stage play with music and then a full musical, under the title Kisses on a Postcard.
Books
Outrageous Fortune, published in 1998, tells the story of fifteen years as litigant-in-person in the High Court over his turbulent divorce. A tale of acrimony and judicial incompetence, equal parts hilarity and nightmare, it caused shock waves throughout the legal community and contributed to the reform of divorce law.
Kisses on a Postcard (Bloomsbury, 2009) draws on the same inspiration as his radio play and the subsequent musical – a vivid and moving memoir of a child’s evacuation to Cornwall in World War 2.
FRA is placing Terence’s shatteringly topical last novel The Misunderstanding with publishers.