In the 1960s, Carla Lane wrote short stories and radio scripts. Her first successes came in collaboration with Myra Taylor, whom she had met at a writers’ workshop in Liverpool. Lane and Taylor would often meet at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool city centre to write. She said that she used a pseudonym, “Carla Lane”, because of her modesty about revealing that she was a writer. With Taylor, she submitted some comedy sketch scripts to the BBC, where they were seen by the head of comedy Michael Mills. He encouraged them to write a half-hour script, which was broadcast as a pilot episode of The Liver Birds in April 1969. A short first series followed, to little acclaim, but Mills then declined to produce a second series, changing his mind when Lane and Taylor wrote a series of new scripts. The series became one of the most popular of the time, characterised by Lane’s “ability to conjure laughs out of pathos and life’s little tragedies”, and, from 1973, Lane took sole responsibility for writing the scripts. Her successful screenwriting career continued through the 1970s and 1980s, in particular with the TV series Butterflies and Bread. In Butterflies, described as “undoubtedly… her finest work”, she addressed the lead character’s desires for freedom from her “decent but dull” husband. Wendy Craig, who starred in Butterflies, said of Lane: “Her greatest gift was that she understood women and wrote the truth about them….She spoke about what others didn’t. In the case of [Craig’s lead character], it was all about what was going on inside her – and many other women at the time.”

In Bread, which ran for seven series, ” Carla Lane became the first woman to mine television comedy from sexual and personal relationships through a galère of expertly-etched contemporary characters, developed against a backdrop of social issues such as divorce, adultery and.. alcoholism.” In the late 1980s, Bread had the third-highest viewing figures on British television, beaten only by EastEnders and Neighbours. However, Bread was criticised by some in Liverpool for portraying a stereotypical view of people in the city, an opinion that Lane rejected. Lane published her autobiography, Someday I’ll Find Me: Carla Lane’s Autobiography, in 2006. She returned to Liverpool in 2009. Carla Lane died at Stapley Nursing Home in Mossley Hill, in Liverpool, on 31 May 2016.