Sex-crazed Dorien from Birds of a Feather strutting around singing Like a Virgin; scheming MP Alan B’Stard kicking a crutch out from under a one-legged man in The New Statesman; and Gary Sparrow dressed as Adolf Hitler bellowing random German expressions at a group of Nazi soldiers in Goodnight Sweetheart.

Comedy writing duo Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran created some of the most memorable and well-loved sitcoms, and characters, of the 1980s and 1990s and now they are bringing their magic touch back to the stage of the Watford Palace Theatre.

Love Me Do is a funny, touching love story about two Americans who are stranded in 1960s London as the Cuban Missile Crisis threatens to trigger the end of the world.

Dorothy is from Kansas, and a long way from home. Shack is a World War Two veteran who thinks he’s seen it all.

Peppered with movie references – from The Wizard of Oz to Casablanca – Love Me Do is a witty and fast-moving play with touches of Hollywood romance, glamour and banter, set against a soundtrack of music from Sinatra, Buddy Holly, Brubeck, Dylan, Handel and Bach.

“It’s about the relationship that’s struck up between them in the countdown to what we all believed at the time would be the end of the world,” explains Laurence, whose play Von Ribbentrop’s Watch was co-produced by and staged at the Palace in 2010.

“Maurice and I had been thinking about the film Brief Encounter and thought if we could create a kind of brief encounter but with a far more dramatic backdrop, in fact the most dramatic backdrop one could ever find in the 20th Century, then that would be the play we wanted to write.”

Maurice adds: “I saw it last week at the physical theatre rehearsal and was thrilled by it. We have a fantastic cast, who have a background in movement and dance as well as theatre, and they’re able to do things which are breath-taking to me.”

Laurence and Maurice’s background in TV comedy, sitcom and series writing – they started out writing for Frankie Howerd and also wrote and produced Shine on Harvey Moon, in the early 1980s, and Love Hurts, with Adam Faith and Zoe Wanamaker, in the early 1990s – has, reckons Maurice, taught them how to put on a very good live show.

“I feel very strongly that when people go to the theatre they want, and more importantly they deserve, something more than just five people sitting in a three-sided room talking.

Because, no matter how good the play is, the audience expects more – they’ve grown up on TV and films and the internet, that’s why it’s much easier to get an audience for a musical than it is for a play, because it’s a theatrical experience.

"And that’s what we wanted to do for this one, although it’s a straight play.

"You’ll come out and know you couldn’t have seen it anywhere else, that it couldn’t have happened anywhere else except in a theatre.”

Laurence and Maurice – who met as ten-year-olds in the Jewish Lads Brigade in Finsbury Park in 1960, again as 15-year-olds at a youth club in the area, and started writing together when they were both 25 and members of a local drama group – turned their hands to the writing of plays after a chance encounter with Alan Ayckbourn at a literary dinner.

“Laurence found himself sitting next to Alan,” remembers Maurice, “and Alan said to him ‘Why haven’t you written for the theatre?’ Laurence said that it wasn’t really our area and Alan said he’d help us with the mechanics of it. But then Alan passed out – they cleared the room and found a doctor and called an ambulance and they revived Alan – who was suffering from low blood pressure or something – and, as he was taken out of the building on a stretcher, he removed the oxygen mask and said to Laurence ‘Don’t forget that play’!”

This led to the pair writing Playing God, which premiered at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, the ‘home’ of Ayckbourn, in 2005, and then to adapting The New Statesman for the stage, writing Dreamboats and Petticoats, the hit West End musical which opened in 2009, and a stage version of Birds of a Feather in 2012.

“Theatre is so much fun, so fulfilling,” Maurice continues. “TV’s great but it’s no substitute for a live audience, real people laughing, or crying, in real time.”