Workaholics anonymous

The sage of middle-class London has now written the blackest of black comedies. But then Nigel Williams has a mid-life crisis every Monday morning. By Adrian Turpin

Shortly before meeting Nigel Williams, I was reading the American novelist William Styron's Darkness Visible. Styron's book is a portrait of his descent into clinical depression, a personal apocalypse that came upon him as inexplicably as it went, a stark warning to all - but especially middle-aged writers - of the funeral pall that depression can cast over even the sunniest of lives. Gloomy stuff. So when Williams's new play, Harry and Me, plopped through the letterbox, it was as a bit of light relief that I jumped on it. How wrong can you be.

It promised light relief because Williams is simply one of the country's funniest novelists, the kind who makes you pick up the phone at midnight to read out whole chunks of his books to friends. His most famous creation is Henry Farr, hero of The Wimbledon Poisoner, a downtrodden fortysomething solicitor, local historian and amateur toxicologist whose obsession with poisoning his wife is topped only by his ineptitude.

Williams's Wimbledon is a sort of comic Barsetshire translated to the suburbs, with Trollope's sturdy burghers replaced by characters like the Nazi Who Escaped Justice at Nuremberg and members of the Spiritualist Church of South Wimbledon. Williams himself, now 48, has been feted as a sage of middle-class London life, a genial buddha of suburbia whose sallies into the macabre can be put down to English eccentricity.

Against such a background, Harry and Me - now previewing at the Royal Court - shines like a beacon of darkness, notwithstanding the fact it's a comedy. Harry is the alcoholic presenter of The Harry Harrod Show, a chat show that's seen better days, whose perfect guest would be John Wayne Bobbitt, and whose ratings slide will only be stopped by a kindly controller with an axe. Tracy, the researcher cum secretary cum dogsbody has recently had a breast removed because of cancer. And at the helm stands Ray Goodenough, the Jewish producer, given to delivering torrents of abuse down the phone, even to people in the same room as him. "You think having your tits sawn off is as important as finding a home number for Mr Dave Hewitt?" he says when Tracy phones her mother about her mastectomy.

Hewitt, a pop star who has never had a hit anywhere in the world ("even Zambia"), never appears, but the play's plot is driven by Ray's increasingly obsessive attempts to get him on the show. Harry and Me seems to offer a desperately depressing vision of television; particularly so when you consider that Williams has - like Ray - spent more than 20 years working in the medium. Like Ray, he spends his day glued to the phone, not booking chat-show guests, but knocking into shape BBC1's arts strand Omnibus, of which he is the editor. If television is half as poisonous as it's portrayed in Harry and Me, then Williams ought to be a man in despair. Does he, perhaps, have more in common with William Styron than meets the eye? Should Wimbledon's Samaritans be put on red alert?

In fact, Williams lives not in Wimbledon but Putney, in a large Victorian house choc-a-block with in-laws and teenage sons, music stands, books and dogs. It has been said (with some justification) that he looks like Dougal from The Magic Roundabout. But when we meet he's come hotfoot from a meeting at the BBC, and is dressed like Doctor Who, with a grey-green greatcoat, long black scarf (he keeps it on while we talk), loafers and an open-necked white shirt: Craig Brown mixed with Tom Baker. He doesn't look like a man facing imminent emotional collapse. Why, then, this leap into the blackest of comedy?

"If you look at most of what I've written, let's be honest, the message is pretty bleak. At the end of The Wimbledon Poisoner there's a ghastly trade-off. That book got very mixed reviews when it came out. People just couldn't deal with it." But the funny thing is that both the books Williams has written directly about his life have been about happiness, in particular the joy he gets from his three sons and Suzan, his wife of more than 20 years. In Wimbledon to Waco, his 1995 account of a family holiday to America, his contentment was so palpable that several critics called (unfairly) for the sick bag to be passed. The drive to write about the intemperate and world-weary - something that screams out from the pages of Harry and Me - seems to run in parallel to this domestic contentment. "I suppose," Williams says, "if you're talking about yourself, there's you as a social being, a husband and a father - which are wonderful things to be - and then there's, well, you. And maybe that's a thing that's harder and more complicated. There is something desperate about the amount of work I do. It's not necessary. You don't have to do all that. I should be... [long pause] I don't know what I should be... [longer pause, lapsing into silence]."

Harry and Me, I suggest, has "mid-life crisis" stamped all over it. "That's me, " Williams replies. "I have one on Monday and then I'm OK on Tuesday. One minute someone's the most wonderful person I've ever known, the next I'm saying: `You bastard, why did you do that to me?' I'm an extremely emotional person. As my old friend Don MacIntyre [the Independent's political editor] said to me the other day: `Nige, self-knowledge, nul points'."

Williams is quite vehement about one thing: he's no real-life Henry Farr. "People think my fiction is autobiographical. They couldn't be more wrong," he says. But the obvious parallels between Ray Goodenough, producer of The Harry Harrod Show, and Nigel Williams, editor of Omnibus, are intriguing.

"People have asked, `Is Ray like your friends in TV?', but I think if he's like anyone he's like me: obsessive, desperate..." And foul to the people he works with? "Ray Goodenough is unpleasant to people who are rude about The Harry Harrod Show. I don't like people being rude to me. But I don't think I'd ever be quite as rude to people as Ray is. I think I'd mouth it to myself late at night. I believe in fighting back, but do it rather in the English, middle-class, `stick the knife in the shoulder blades' mode - which in many ways is worse than what Ray does."

To his creator, Ray is indisputably a hero: more sinned against (by TV executives, devious agents, his own presenter) than sinning, a man whose overwhelming desire to serve the needs of a tatty talk show is rather noble. "I've done quite a lot of chat-showish stuff," Williams says. "Some people can be very ashamed of that, which I certainly am not. I think the line between Oprah and Omnibus is closer than people think. I don't think I'm better than Ray Goodenough just because I talk about Balthus rather than a man who can drink a pint of beer through his nose."

Above all, Harry and Me is, according to Williams, about "the futility and the necessity of work"; and one thing Ray Goodenough and he definitely share is workaholism. Williams is up at 7.45am to fit his writing around Omnibus's 23 to 26 films each year. He's prolific: writing screenplays, novels and - only recently, after a long break - for the stage, the medium in which he originally made a name for himself. His first play, Class Enemy, depicted a comprehensive class whose teacher fails to turn up, and played to acclaim at the Royal Court in 1976. A second play followed, a comedy about police entrapment of gay men in public toilets ("I'd seen an interview in which a policeman said: `You'll notice I'm wearing a white raincoat and winkle-pickers. You would not wear normal-issue police clothing for this kind of work.' Which I thought was hilarious"). It was only after he wrote a play no one would put on, set around PG Wodehouse's time in an internment camp, that he forsook the stage in the Eighties. Indeed, apart from in Japan, where The Wimbledon Poisoner has a bit of a cult following, outside Britain Williams is still best known as a playwright. Class Enemy has not been done in Britain for 20 years, but next week opens in a 400-seat theatre in Buenos Aires. In Germany, it was given a production by Peter Stein.

What tempted Williams to return to the theatre was Faber asking him to adapt Lord of the Flies, performed by the RSC last year after the National Theatre reluctantly dropped it as uncastable. Now that he is back writing for the stage, the man is unstoppable. In addition to Harry, The Last Romantics, Williams's adaptation of his own BBC drama about the Leavises, opens at Greenwich next week, and there's already another play in the wings.

Williams's projects most resemble planes stacking to land at Heathrow. There's the novel he's now writing, which he's keeping mum about except to say its working title is The Book of Dog Food, and a finished new novel, out next year, which isn't a Wimbledon book but a serial-killer thriller "with gags". It will be published by Granta rather than his old publishers, Faber, who rejected it. "They expected another comic novel. Well, for God's sake, no. I'm surprised people have managed to stay awake all these years. You've got to keep doing new things or you die on the vine. Surely?"

n `Harry and Me' is at the Royal Court, London SW1 (0171-730 2554); `The Last Romantics' is at Greenwich Theatre, London SE10 (0181-858 7755) from Thursday