Agree completely. Couldn't stand Bread, sorry.
You have to know how TV networks operate to realise how Carla Lane got the gig.
She co-wrote The Liver Birds, which was a network producer's desperate attempt to ape the success of The Likely Lads, a series created by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais in the mid 60s.
Clement was actually a radio producer who was taking part in a BBC trainee TV director's course and wanted a project to direct. None was forthcoming, so he directed a script he had previously co-written with La Frenais, (a bloke he had met in the pub) for a BBC staff group.
So far in this tale we haven't seen the emergence of a single, far-sighted, talent-spotting producer, and I can assure you we won't. They are as rare as rocking horse poo.
Clement produced the series himself.
The Likely Lads was born out of the kitchen sink drama revolution at the time, the taste for "natural" acting in a gritty northern environment was growing, and the new channel BBC2 was going to run with it.
Some five or six years later a bright spark came up with copying the Likely Lads idea, but instead making a series about two independent young women sharing a flat in Liverpool, and The Liver Birds was underway. Carla Lane also had a co-writer, Myra Taylor, and the script editor was Eric Idle. Later she took on the writing by herself.
Roughly ten years later she did "Butterflies" and roughly ten years later she did "Bread". This is because even for writers who have "names" it can take ten years to get another show up, longer if their previous show was as funny as tuberculosis. Carla by this time had achieved legendary status, especially amongst the Pippas and Camillas of the BBC who were delighted that she was a woman's (i.e. unfunny) comedy writer.
Since then, genuinely funny women have come to the fore (Victoria Wood, French and Saunders, the late Jane Smith and more) and even the BBC have realised they don't have to feed women a diet of trite, twee relationship-centred comedy.
