Provocative Publishing

featuring the work of Carole Hayman

The Ladies of Letters welcome you…

…to the world of Irene Spencer & Vera Small, the redoubtable Ladies of Letters. From the small beginnings of two friends playing a game, the Ladies have grown into books, radio series, and now TV!

Discover more about this world - created by writers Lou Wakefield and Carole Hayman - by clicking on the links to your right, and reading the latest about the Ladies, below.

NOW AVAILABLE ON CD at AMAZON & AUDIOGO
LADIES OF LETTERS GO CRACKERS:
THE  LATEST RADIO 4 SERIES

It's Christmas and the Ladies of Letters are busy stuffing home made turkey sausages, adding hot pepper to their mulled wine and giving each other totally unsuitable Christmas presents.  Vera has just returned from a festive trip to the Holy Land, where she has purchased Mary Mother of Jesus Jam and realised that the only universal religion is shopping.  Once home, she discovers that a ruthless Bank has bought the Bothy for redevelopment. Irene, meanwhile, is inundated with friends and family visiting for the festive season and is decimated by what she uncovers.

The Guardian reviews Ladies of Letters Go Crackers - by Elisabeth Mahoney

(Ladies of Letters Go Crackers) is a bittersweet listen. There’s still the hilarious barbed email banter between Irene (Prunella Scales) and Vera (Anne Reid) – two old friends who barely tolerate one another – and the leitmotifs of disappointing families, drinking too much, and loftily delivered malapropisms.

But there have been darker notes creeping in. Vera is finding it so hard to remember things that her daughter Karen has come up with an acronym: CRAFT (Can’t Remember a Flipping Thing). “She doesn’t say ‘flipping’, but you get the idea,” Vera tells Irene. 

The writing is full of beautifully true details like this, iced with splendid flourishes.

Then Karen discovered a lump in her breast over Christmas, throwing the household into disarray. Karen’s vet husband St John, Vera explains, can’t bear to touch his wife despite being “notorious as an udder man”, but he does at least help Karen sleep with “a dose of horse tranquilliser”. When Karen goes to hospital, we hear, she ends up “tussling with an obese child over a copy of Grazia” in the waiting room. The writing is full of beautifully true details like this, iced with splendid flourishes. I liked Vera’s son, Howie, having a sheep called Lady Baa-Baa, and Vera giving Irene “a week-end for two at Brighton’s gayest spa” for Christmas. For all the bleaker subplots, this remains deliciously funny.

ALSO AVAILABLE ON DVD
LADIES OF LETTERS TV SERIES 1

It's older people who are watching TV. I'm not interested in stories about teenagers' love lives. At last here's something for them! (Maureen Lipman, Irene)

AND…
LADIES OF LETTERS TV SERIES 2

Maureen Lipman and Anne Reid return for a second series of this marvellous TV adaptation of the hit radio comedy. 

Corresponding in their inimitable love-hate fashion, the Ladies reveal their lives to be run ragged by ingrate offspring, their equanimity threatened by said offspring’s lovers, and the compensating pleasure of grandchildren’s company. Irene sinks in wine and swims in poetry, while Vera gets an intriguing insight into the goings on behind closed caravan doors. 

The Radio Times reviews Ladies of Letters Series 2: - "Irresistibly, creatively funny"

Ladies Of Letters is the kind of small-scale treat that is exactly what the multitude of tiny channels should be doing but so rarely do. Essentially it's splendid actors Maureen Lipman and Anne Reid bitching and bickering, then rubbing along, in a series of loosely linked comic monologues. It owes a huge debt of gratitude to Alan Bennett's Talking Heads and there's no higher praise than that.

It's a gentle essay in the nature of loneliness, cloaked in a thorny cardy of spiky insults.

The running joke is that the Ladies in question, Vera and Irene, are friends who like to pretend they are enemies; they can't be doing with each other but they can't do without. It's a gentle essay in the nature of loneliness, cloaked in a thorny cardy of spiky insults. Best joke? Vera's gay farmer son Howard calling his sheep Lady Baa-Baa.

Vera and Irene continue to air their frustrations with their horrifically ungrateful offspring and assorted male inadequates. But their laptop laments reveal that Vera (Anne Reid) is having way more fun than her pen-pal. After she and granddaughter Sabrina befriend an exuberant African neighbour on their council estate, Vera starts to dress like Precious Ramotswe from The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency. But Irene (Maureen Lipman), stranded Down Under, is "back washing towelling nappies after a 30-year gap". Homesick and resorting to poetry, her recital of Oh, To Be in England is simultaneously ridiculous and heartbreaking. It's a touching moment that shows the series' strength in depth. But Vera staves off any sentimentality with an unexpected tribute to tripe.

AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST…
BOOK  ONE - REPUBLISHED

The original book, Ladies of Letters, republished by Carlton Books and updated with new material from the ITV series.