The Late Great Robin

I don't think any of us were expecting the news about Robin Williams this morning. We knew he had some self-destructive habits, but we wanted to believe that he'd keep it together to do a few more movies, and a few more stand-up sets. And apart from being an astonishing performer - and writer - he seemed like a good person who deserved a happier, longer life.

Most people would settle for a third of his career. A quarter, even. Good Morning, Vietnam; Good Will Hunting; Dead Poets Society; Mrs Doubtfire; The Fisher King; Aladdin; and a load of family comedies like Patch Adams, Hook, Jumanji and the 90 eps of Mork and Mindy that brought a lot of people a lot of joy.  There was probably at least one more Oscar Winning performance in him. If not more.

But for me, he blew my mind when Channel 4 showed his 'Live at the Met' show when I was about 15. I think it's what people mean when they call something a 'Tour De Force'. It's astonishing, fast, funny - and very satirical. Check it below. Hilarious, mainstream, utterly brilliant - but thoughtful and satirical. What a pity we've given up on that in the UK. Thanks for showing us the way, Mr Williams.

A Podcast You Should Know About

Stuart Goldsmith

I've just listened to another brilliant interview by Stuart Goldsmith. This time with comedian, Nick Doody. And it occurred to me that some recent readers of this blog don't know about this podcast. It's called The Comedian's Comedian which you can find on iTunes and various other sites where you get mp3s (I've literally no idea what they sites might be).

I hardly know Stuart Goldsmith and he didn't ask me to put up a blogpost about it! I'm a huge fan of what he's doing. The podcast is exclusively about stand-up comedy rather than sitcom, but it's just fascinating to here people talk at length in detail about comedy in a properly technical way, so it's music to my ears.

There are already 87 episodes to choose from so far, but if you have no idea where to start, you'll probably  want to start with famous people off the telly like Sarah Millican, Alan Davies, Greg Proops, Milton Jones, Jason Manford, Tim Vine, Rhod Gilbert - who all do great interviews. But if you're a geek like me, I'd recommend the podcasts with the real joke technicians: Listen to Ep6 Adam Bloom, Ep26 Stephen Grant and Ep67 Gary Delaney. Then listen to all the rest, and donate some money to the cause.

All is Not Lost

Life is straightforward in TV drama. Writers write. Actors act. Directors direct.

Sitcoms used to be like this. They were written by great writers like Galton and Simpson or Carla Lane – and then performed by the best comic actors of the age like Ronnie Barker or Leonard Rossiter. And there were plenty of sitcoms written by half-decent writers, and performed by pretty good comedy actors. In short, there were lots of sitcoms. But my point is this: There was a division between writers and performers.

This is no longer the case. The rise of the comedian, as opposed to the comedy actor, or comedy writer, has led to a signficant increase in shows by comedians. (See here for the pros and cons) But looks can be deceptive. Many of these shows are co-written with an off-screen writing partner. Pete Sinclair co-wrote Lead Balloon with Jack Dee. Freddy Syborn co-wrote Bad Education with Jack Whitehall. Dan Swimer wrote Grandma’s House with Simon Amstell. I’ve co-written seven series of radio comedy with Milton Jones. And I met my Bluestone 42 writing partner, Richard Hurst, writing on Miranda. 

So what should the writer learn from this? Well, that depends on your half-full-half-empty perspective.

Half Full or Half Empty?
Who cares? It's not even beer.

Half Empty

If you tend towards the half-empty, you could conclude ‘What’s the point? Unless I’m a writer-performer, I’m never going to get a chance.’ This is not true. There are still writer-led sitcoms out there. I write one with Richard Hurst (Bluestone 42), but there's more of a mixed economy now. You'll need to think outside of yourself. Sorry.

Half Full

If you’re more of a half-full type, you could decide to turn yourself into a performer so you are increasing your chances. That could work. It worked for Ben Elton who realised very early that writer-performers like French and Saunders, Fry and Laurie et al were going to get all the work unless he got in there with a sparkly jacket.

Performing on some level is not alien to most comedy writers. Almost every full-time writer I can think of working today has been in a sketch group in their early years or done stand-up. Pete Sinclair, whom I mentioned earlier, went into full-time comedy writing from music into political/punk poetry and then stand-up. (More on that here) And this is not all that unusual.

At the time of writing, The Edinburgh Fringe is on. If you could get hold of the programme from ten, twenty or thirty years back and look at the stand-ups and sketch groups you’ll see plenty of names and faces that you may not recognise – but who are now making a living as a writer, having given up performing.

So what did these people get out of Edinburgh? Certainly not money. They got a number of things, but let's focus on two main ones.

Experience

The Fringe gives you experience of writing for an audience who don’t know you personally, or you work. If you do shows in your home town or your student bar, your mates will probably laugh, because they're supportive and nice (Well, they turned up, didn't they?). In Edinburgh, your audiences are strangers. They have no idea who you are. And you will soon find out if your material is funny.

Comedy Friends

But the main thing these people got out of Edinburgh is comedy friends. Hanging out in the Pleasance Courtyard or pushing through Late and Live is all about making friends with like-minded people, finding allies who like what you like, and forming alliances and partnerships. You are very unlikely to win an award at Edinburgh, or even be critically acclaimed. You might not even get a Radio 4 series. But you may impress someone who’s being fast-tracked onto the TV, who is looking for back-up and people to cling on to. You could be Larry David to their Seinfeld. Or their Stephen Merchant to their Ricky Gervaise. You get the idea. Or you might create an impression on someone who’s Head of Comedy Development at the BBC in four years time, which means you get the benefit of the doubt when your script hits their desk and could go either way.

All is not Lost

If you’re in Edinburgh, and you’ve already realised your show isn’t what you thought it was, or isn’t quite working, and you know who’s show is going to be the talk of the town, don’t worry.  That’s only a small part of why you’re there. You’re on the scene. You’re in the mix. That’s a start.

If you’re not in Edinburgh, I really recommend getting along there and having a look, watching some shows, seeing what’s possible, and what’s passable, and think about what you could do next year. Like it or not, Edinburgh really is The comedy trade fair.

So this is a way of introducing a series of blogposts about writing for other people’s shows – since, if you make it as a professional comedy writer, this could easily take up the bulk of your time and bring in the lion’s share of your income. Stay tuned.

I Love This Idea - But That's Not How It Sounds

We Brits look at the Americans with envy. In the world of TV Comedy, they’ve given us M*A*S*H, Cheers, Seinfeld, Frasier, The American Office and plenty more besides.

Pic by Ricardo Liberato

And some Americans seem look at us Brits with envy even though we only seem to have given them Monty Python, Benny Hill, The Actual Office and some shows that became Sanford and Son and All in the Family.  I’m sure American writers look enviously at the idea of the BBC with its compulsory licence fee, noble aims to inform, educate and entertain and therefore the freedom not to chase TV ratings (don’t tell them).

To British eyes, the American system seems to be very regimented – from the calendar of when shows are pitched, pilots are cast, picked up and shot, to the hierarchy of writer-producers (for more on this, go the brilliant Children of Tendu podcast). On top of all this, The Writers’ Guild seems to have hammered out fairly clear protocol, agreements and levels of payment for all of the above. 

To American eyes, Britain must look like a shambles. Which it is. There is no real system in British comedy, apart from the annual decamp to Edinburgh, which heavily favours the writer-performer. For writers, though, there's nothing set in stone. This is partly because no-one feels there needs to be system, and I applaud that. It seems crazy that the entire US TV industry is trying to make dozens of pilots at exactly the same time.

One way in which this shambles manifests itself is the way in which sitcoms are developed. Again, the differences could not be more stark. In America, a studio decides it likes a writer, who’s probably earned their spurs writing on an established show for a few years. The studio offers them a deal. Money to develop a script. Maybe an office. (Ha! Try even getting a meeting room at the BBC, let alone an office.) You might even get some assistance. In the form of an assistant. And ultimately, you get a deadline.

Notice two things here. Firstly, the deal. And secondly the deadline. Let’s take those in turn.

The Deal

In that studio-deal system, the promise of money come before an idea is even discussed. The studio is buying into the talent of a writer and rather hoping the writer will try and deliver something good. That’s a safe assumption, given the writer wants a good show on the air, for reasons of creative satisfaction, a desire to get rich, to disprove a stupid teacher at school or appear clever to other writers (pretty much the big four reasons, I think. Discuss.)

‘The deal’ almost never happens in Britain. I had something like this with BBC Comedy for a year a while back, which produced a script and a readthrough. It all ultimately died when the exec who had championed it left. And that was that.

The British alternative to a deal is a vague ‘Hey, we’d love to hear some of your ideas’. I’ll bet you would. Nothing like ‘We think you’re a brilliant writer and we want to be in business with you.’ It’s all very low-key and non-committal.

I realise this is part of our British way. We’re suspicious of money, contracts, lawyers, business in general and talking like you’re Alan Sugar. In the main, that’s a healthy scepticism. But it leads to amateurishness, confusion and frustration – of which more in a moment.

The Deadline

Because of the rigid TV calendar in America, there’s a deadline. A line by which a script must be submitted or it is dead. There is no such thing in the UK. New TV series start on all TV channels all year round. And so there’s no hurry. For anything. At all. So everything bimbles along, then drifts…

Until a slot comes up, a new initiative is announced, a pot of money being made available, and then there’s a blind panic to get a script in and you work all hours, unsure if the contracts are going to be signed and you’re going to be paid but you do it anyway and you write and rewrite and scream and rewrite and finished and send.

And then.

The exec who announced that initiative leaves.

The development producer you were working with seems be busy on something else.

Your emails seem to vanish into the ether.

People seem hazy on what was agreed and what wasn’t. 

And it’s hard for people to care because the project is dead.

And you don't get paid properly. If at all.

Why do I mention all this?

Good question. It’s all a preamble to a particular phenomenon which seems to be happening a lot at the moment. And I wanted to get some groundwork done before launching into it, so I don’t seem like a petulant, greedy writer who thinks he’s some kind of writing deity - or at least to disguise this fact.

The phenomenon is this: A producer says ‘We’d love to hear some ideas’. And you go in and mention one or two. They latch on to one and ask to see a treatment – a couple of pages explaining the idea, which may well have been in your brain for months or years. A decent outline or treatment could be weeks of work, reading, research, writing and rewriting.

They want this for free.

*deep breath* Fair enough. You’re wanting them to get behind the idea, commission a script and pester a commissioner or controller to give you a read-through, a pilot or a series. So a treatment is just about okay, given we don’t have a dead/deadline system in place. And we're trying to sell our comedy wordy wares.

If they like the idea, they might ‘option’ it, which is a small amount of money (£500. Told you.) which means you can’t take it to anyone else for a six months or a year or whatever. It’s kind of one-page, memo-type deal. Or at least it should be. This £500 in no way covers the hours, days and weeks you’ve already spent on this idea, but it’s a start.

So. Some has said ‘I like the idea’. So you send them the treatment.

Then they might say ‘I really like the idea’. And then option it. £500 quid. Yours to spend on whatever you like. Like food. Or heating. Or your mortgage. The choice is yours. You’ve got plenty of time to think about it. The money won’t arrive for months.

They have a few thoughts on how the idea could be improved. Some thoughts are good. Others are insane and demonstrate they’ve not really understood the idea or been paying attention. Or they’re trying to turn your idea into something else that they’re more interested in, or watched on TV last night. But they’ve optioned it now. So you decide to tweak the treatment.

You spend another day on the treatment. And send it in.

They say ‘I love the idea.’

But.

Could they have some sample scenes?

FX: KLAXON

This is the bit I’m dwelling on. When I mentioned ‘amateurishness, confusion and frustration’ earlier I was talking about this bit. It’s amateurish because someone’s treating you like an amateur  - ie. not paying you. It’s confusing because no-one quite knows what the protocol should be. And it’s all very frustrating.

Sample Scenes

‘Sample scenes’ don’t just write themselves. They take at least a couple of days. Because it’s new show, and a new idea, and it’ll be ages before I could bare to show those samples scenes to anyone, it’s probably three or four days work, scattered over a couple of weeks. Maybe longer, because you're looking to write scenes that crystal key relationships and are demonstrative of the show as a whole. So, five days. minimum. So, do I want to work for five days for free? Tough one.

“Ah yes,” says the Comedy Exec, “but if a script is commissioned… and then a series… and then repeats… and then…” Stop. True. That all might happen. But the likelihood a script won’t be commissioned. And if it is, the likelihood is that it won’t be commissioned as a series, because most scripts aren’t. It took me twelve years to get a show on TV (Bluestone 42). I fully expect the next one to take at least half that time. If not more. If I’m lucky.

But we all know what’s going on here. Someone’s doing everything they can to get more for less. I understand why people do that. I try to do it at the supermarket. But Tesco is a multi-billion pound retailer. Not a writer. (I might go to Sainsbury’s if I’ve just been paid that £500)

So. A Development Producer or Comedy Executive is well within their basic human rights to ask for yet more work, this time for free. And the lack of system encourages this. But here’s why I don’t recommend it:

It doesn’t sound good. I’ll go further. It sounds bad.

The Joy of Subtext

We writers don’t just deal in text. In fact text isn’t even our main product. That would be subtext. That’s what scripts are: Characters saying one thing and meaning another; and other characters hearing something else entirely.

So, while I completely understand why a Comedy Executive may say, ‘I love this. Can I have same sample scenes please?’, this person needs to know that I’m hearing something else. I may well be wrong about most of it, but don’t forget, I’m the averagely paranoid, freelance writer. And I hear a mixture of about 5 things.

‘I love this. Can I have same sample scenes please?’ really means:

1. 'I don't love this. If I did, I’d commission a script.' 

Speaks for itself really. If you loved it, you’d commit . But you have doubts. Why would you that be? Onto the next thing that I’m hearing.

‘I love this. Can I have same sample scenes please?’ really means:

2. 'I can't really imagine this'.

So I’ve set up the idea, the characters and the setting. I’ve explained how it’s going to be funny – and you seem happy with this. In fact you love it. And the only reason we had the meeting in the first place is because you think I’m a funny, competent writer. So what’s the problem? Your lack of imagination. That’s a shame, given your job in development is to imagine what might be. So, could this be the real problem that:

‘I love this. Can I have same sample scenes please?’ really means:

3. ‘I don't trust your ability to make this idea funny.’

The idea is fine. Funny, in fact. Fresh. Modern. Classic with a twist. But how can I be sure this writer - who’s been nominated for a few awards, is well regarded and whom I invited in to my office - can deliver funny scenes around this idea – that they’ve come up with and nurtured?  Maybe it’s borderline but ultimately: 

‘I love this. Can I have same sample scenes please?’ could mean:

4. ‘I don't think you're worth my budget.’

You have a limited budget that you have to eke out over a year so you’re going to make it stretch as far as possible. So you’re going to save your boss some money and make a writer that you want to be working with write for free for even longer. Thanks.

One more thing. Is it possible that:

‘I love this. Can I have same sample scenes please?’ really means:

5. ‘I don't have the guts to stand by this or turn it down.’

Maybe. As the writer and creator of this idea, I had the guts to spend weeks of my own time on this, committing to it at the exclusion of other things – because time is finite, remember? – and yet you are unwilling to do this. That's what I'm hearing. Because I'm paranoid. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong.

It’s not about the money. Okay, it’s partly about the money. But mostly it’s about honesty and respect. I quite like our non-rigid, slightly shambolic system. But this is the downside.

For more on money, have a look here. 

Top 10 Tips on Dealing with Exposition - Part 2

In the last post, we began to think about the writer's nemesis that he can't live without: Exposition. And I promised 10 tips on how to convey exposition without resorting to dreadful, creaky, crunchy lines where characters just say things that a necessary rather than natural. And actors sometimes spot them and ask, on set, 'I don't understand this. Why is my character saying this? It doesn't feel like something they would say.' If you're answer is 'We need to explain to the viewer x, y and z' then you have failed as a writer on this occasion. Anyway, for the first four tips, go here. Otherwise, read on.

5. Have A Blazing Row
Your character is explaining a plan. The other characters listen. Boring. Annoying. Not funny. Could someone have an alternative plan? And explain their plan, or keep interrupting the original plan – and the two characters have an argument about it. Going back to Blackadder, Baldrick’s cunning plans are always really funny, and gives our hero the chance to explain a decent plan, with jokes. Although sometimes, the plan isn’t even explained. It’s obvious. When Blackadder asks for two pencils and a pair of underpants, we’re intrigued – and then we go straight into seeing them in action (funny), and then the explanation. Which leads to asking:

6. Do you Need to Tell them this?
Backstory and exposition often seems very important when you’re planning a sitcom, or outlining an episode, but when it comes to writing it, you quite often realise you don’t need to explain yourself as much as you might think. This is especially the case with backstory. Newer writers tend to get quite hung up on where the characters have been, and what they did before – but the audience are more interested in where they are going. As I’ve written before on this blog, The Vicar of Dibley just turns up. She just arrives. No back story. No past. She’s the new vicar. (NB. As a church goer, this would never happen without consultation with the church, etc, but that doesn’t really matter. Again, no explanation needed.) If you like, you can reveal backstory and hidden depths later.  In The West Wing, they do at that in Series 2, once we love the characters and want to know a bit more about their past.

7. Is Every Line Pulling Its Weight?
If you’re already got a script and are feeling it’s confusing and needs more exposition, don’t just think about adding lines. Apart from anything else, sitcom is brutal in terms of length. On BBC you’ve 28 minutes. On ITV/SKY, you’re got nearer 23 minutes. In USA, you’ve 21 mins. You don’t have the luzury or more time or more lines. Why are you needing to give the audience signposts? Is every story/routine. Make sure every scene, sequence, line – and every action - is working hard not just comically, but expositionally.

In a sitcom, everything happens for a reason. It’s there because you’ve decided to put it there. So use all these tools to tell your story. Let’s consider the work of some real comedy legends, Esmonde and Larbey and their blissfully odd sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles. (More on the title later)

Every time, Martin Brice walks in and fiddles with the phone in the hallway. He untangles the wire, or turns the phone round. He does this a lot – pretty much every episode. This tells you at least three or four things. He’s essentially obsessively compulsive. His wife, Anne, isn’t, for it is obviously her who puts the phone down the wrong way round. She is clearly happy to do something that she knows her husband will correct. And Martin is prepared to do it week after week and force a smile afterwards.

Anne comments on the phone thing in the first episode – which is well worth looking at. Watch the first bit of the first episode. It’s genius. All you need to know about the show is in the first three minutes. By then, you know all about Martin and Paul, which is ultimately the key relationship in the show. Every line and action builds and builds. He’s shouting cheerfully after the boys who’ve just been thrashed at football. He wipes his feet for ages. He does the phone thing. He talks to Paul in an overly knowledgeable way. He thinks he’s winning at life. There’s an interesting moment at 2.58 when Paul reacts to something Martin says – and looks to Anne who doesn’t see anything unusual in this comment. This is the world we are in. It’s masterful. Please. Take the time. Watch it.


8. Use your Opening Title Sequence
The opening titles of Ever Decreasing Circles (because you watched it, right?) is bold. It’s all metaphor, obviously. You’ve got an opening title sequence. That’s about 20-30 seconds that you can use to explain the premise of your show, conveying a couple of essential pieces of information or highlighting a key relationship. My Name is Earl had a brilliant, lyrical, brief opening about a winning lottery ticket and karma, which includes a car crash. (Have a look here if you like) It doesn’t matter if you don’t catch all of it. What really stand out is the end bit when he says, ‘I’m just trying to be a better person.’ That’s all you need to know. He has some money and he’s trying to be good.

9. Use the Title of your Show

What’s your show called? I’m not referring to the title of the episode, which is largely meaningless. (All the episode title, and one sentence summary, does is tell the audience whether or not they’ve seen the episode before.) I’m talking about the name of the show, as they should do at least some expositional work. If your show title is a reference to an obscure TS Eliot poem that you happen to like, and it doesn't help you, I suggest you change it.

Miranda Hart’s show is called Miranda because it’s telling you the show is about her. She’s in every scene and the show is entirely from her point of view. So the audience subconsciously knows that every character in the show is defined by their relationship to Miranda. Him and Her – is about him and her, and their relationship. Ever Decreasing Circles is telling you this is about a man who’s going round and round and slowly going insane. Your show has a name. It’s another tool in the armoury. Use it.

10. Cheat
If you’ve still got a whole ton of exposition to crunch through, you might just have to cheat. Cheating’s fine. Two of my favourite shows do it. Modern Family and Parks and Rec have a very murky, ill-defined documentary style that is wildly inconsistent with odd looks to camera at very points. Somehow it doesn’t seem to matter. I don’t know why. It just doesn’t. I think they’re able to get away with this because of the language and grammar of television has been heavily influenced by ‘Fly on the wall’ documentaries and reality TV in the last fifteen years, and then The Office.

You can cheat by having a narrator. This is how Arrested Development crunches through an amazing amount of story in such a short time. Ron Howard’s voiceover is never really explained (It is? Does it need to be?) but again, it doesn’t seem to matter. More cunning and less cheaty is the voiceover in Desperate Housewives who is a character speaking from beyond the grave. Nice move.

You can have a character talk directly to camera. Miranda does that, and it’s incredibly useful from a story point of view, as she can relate previous incidents in her life, announce the story of the week and give us a heads-up on foreseeable problems, which will hopefully lead to unforeseen ones. Miranda’s pieces to camera also give her an extremely deep connection with her audience.

Finally, you can cheat in the most brazen way possible by having a character called Basil Exposition. It was only on the third time of what that movie that I got that joke.

So, there are ten tips on dealing with exposition. If you have others, I'd love to hear them.

Top 10 Tips on Dealing with Exposition

I’ve just written a novel. Okay, okay, I’ll stop banging on about it. (Four quid on Kindle etc) But I’d like to write about writing the novel for a moment – because there are two aspects of it which are quite interesting for a sitcom writer.  And it’s more interesting than putting receipts into a spreadsheet which is what I would otherwise be doing.

Size Does Matter

The hardest thing about writing the novel is the length of the thing. 80,000 words is a lot. But for me the problem was not thinking of those words or the story or character or anything. Once I had the idea and the characters and the basic structure, writing prose wasn’t that hard. (You be the judge of whether that prose is any good).

What I wasn’t used to was not being able to remember what I’d written. You need to have what you’ve written in the back of your mind because it informs what you’re going to write. You want to avoid repeating yourself, or assuming you’ve established something earlier on when you haven’t. You have to go back and check previous chapters to make sure you’ve kept the continuity or whatever – and it can take ages to find the chapters, read what you wrote, resist editing it and go back to what you were writing 40,000 words later. This was a new experience for me.

Some Memory Sticks. Clearly.

The problem is you just can’t retain a novel manuscript in the back of your mind, or even the front and the sides, without it dribbling out of your ears and nose. A sitcom script, being about 5-6000 words for 24-28 mins, requires about 100 MB of mental memory. And that’s about the size of my actual memory, or back of my mind, or bit where scripts tend to lurk. So when I’m writing or re-writing and I need to check on a line or a prop, I can usually find it within a few seconds and I’m back writing. But a novel is about 1.5 GB of mental memory – and it’s not super-fast flash drive memory, but old school hard drive-type whirring-moving-parts memory. Finding what you wrote several weeks earlier in a chapter you can’t quite remember was like wading through treacle.

However, there is an upside to writing a novel that makes it waaaay easier than a sitcom script.

Exposition.

Exposition is the screenwriter’s toughest, thorniest, deadliest foe. In a sitcom script, you have scene descriptions and dialogue. That’s it so you have conveying exposition and all relevant information using these tools that doesn’t involve stupid lines like ‘So, tell me again, what are we trying to achieve here?’ or the ultimate: ‘So how long have we been brothers?’ And some people try and fix the latter with a stage direction which is ‘JOHN turns to PETE, his brother.’ Great. You’ve told the cast and crew these two guys are brothers. You haven’t told the audience.

The joy of writing a novel is that you just tell the reader stuff. You don’t even need to be in the first person to justify it. You just describe what happens – as well as the reasons for it happening, what went before, what comes after. Easy. So so easy.

But this is not a novel-writing blog, or even a screenwriting blog. It’s a sitcom-writing blog. And in sitcoms we have to do our exposition much more subtley. So here are 10 tips on doing exposition, at least the first four:

1. Show Not Tell, blah blah blah

You know this, but Show Not Tell is easier said than done, ironically. But it is worth going back over your scrip and checking it over with this in mind. Are characters saying how they feel? Or do we see it? Are they saying they are angry, or are they doing things in anger? Blah blah blah. This is all very well, but how to do we explain plot, highlight quests, specify goals and convey relevant backstory?

2. Write a Joke

It’s a sitcom. A few decent jokes go a long way and cover a multitude of exposition. And there’s no better than Curtis & Elton on this. A certain Blackadder line could read:

George: Are we going to attack the enemy? How exciting!
Blackadder: Yes. And we’ll all die in the process. This war is a completely waste of time.

That’s exposition. And not funny. Here’s the same exposition with jokes:

Lieutenant George: Great Scott sir, you mean, you mean the moment's finally arrived for us to give Harry Hun a darned good British style thrashing, six of the best, trousers down?
Captain Blackadder: If you mean, "Are we all going to get killed?" Yes. Clearly, Field Marshal Haig is about to make yet another gargantuan effort to move his drinks cabinet six inches closer to Berlin.

Not only is the latter version 1000% funnier, it also gives us so much more information about their characters. We’re only four minutes into the series when these lines crop up and these are brand new characters for us, since the previous series was set a hundred years earlier where George was the Prince Regent and Blackadder was the butler. Now Blackadder is a Captain. George is a Lieutenant – and calls him, sir. We also learn in the two lines that George is insanely patriotic and overly optimistic – so probably a bit thick given how previous attacks have gone. We learn that Captain Blackadder is a realist, cynical and unimpressed with the general directing the battles and their futility. This isn’t just exposition.

Clearly, the tone of Blackadder doesn’t suit every show, but a joke can really help. So cover some exposition by writing one. If you don’t want to write jokes, write a drama. But you’ll still have this exposition problem, so read on.

3. The Value of Supreme Idiocy

Blackadder is surrounded by idiots. Baldrick, George, Generals, etc. In series 2 there was Lord Percy, too. Idiots are very useful – partly because they are often joke machines. But another good reason to have an idiot-character in your show is because they can get the wrong of the stick and then the other characters have to explain or clarify what’s going on to them, which will also clarify things nicely for the audience.

I wrote a sitcom set in Bletchley Park during World War 2, called Hut 33. In it, I had a character called 3rd Lieutenant Joshua Fanshawe-Marshall, possibly the stupidest man on earth, brilliant played by Alex MacQueen. I did that because codebreaking and the job they actually did in the huts at Bletchley is really hard to understand. So I needed a military person, not an intelligence person that would need explanations. Joshua is colossally stupid who thinks that German already is a code and the enemy should play fair and speak English. But Joshua also needs to know what’s going on because he’s sort of in charge, being the embarrassingly inept son of gung-ho Patton-like British general. So his idiocy, position and backstory all made him a character who needed stuff spelled out to him. This was very useful for explaining exposition – and generating jokes at the same time.

4. Why You’ve Gotta Love a Man in Uniform

Who is everyone? How do they relate to each other? What they’re wearing can explain an awful without a word of dialogue. One upside of military comedies – at least ones on television – is that they all wear uniforms which indicate rank. And even if we don’t know what rank slide means what, you can tell who’s in charge given who calls who ‘sir’ or, in the case of Bluestone 42, ‘boss’. And who snaps to attention when someone walks in.

Thinking about costume applies to all screenwriting.  What do the characters wear? What does it say about who they are – and how they relate to other characters? Do some people have to wear a uniform and others get to wear 'managament-style' suits? Do someone wear their clothes inside our, or back to front, or refuse to wear the right thing? What they are wearing says a great deal about where they’ve come from and, more importantly, where they’re going – both literally and figuratively.

So that’s four. Six to go. Numbers 5-10 in the next blog post.

In the meantime, buy the novel that's full of exposition. In a good way.

The Endless Wormhole of World War Two

I am an over-educated thirty-something man. There is, therefore, a good chance that I’m obsessed with World War Two. I am. This is partly why I wrote a sitcom set in Bletchley Park, called Hut 33, and more recently written a novel about D-Day, called Crossword Ends In Violence (5).

Where does this obsession comes from? Is it the astonishing amount of war documentaries that fill the schedules on all those cable channels? Are they there to meet the demand, or are they just passable cheap television? After all, there’s plenty of footage of the war available to pad out the show, and plenty of war veterans still alive happy to talk about their experiences. These interviews can be very difficult to focus on as as you spend most of the time trying to work out how old they are before deciding whether or not they look good for their age. Add some reconstructions with non-speaking actors and, hey presto, you’ve got some cheap, interesting-ish telly.

You can make hours of this stuff because, as the name suggests, the War took place all over the world. So you can cover the Western Front, the Eastern Front, The War in the North Africa, the Pacific, the Far East and then there’s Resistance, the spying, the technology and the list goes on. On top of that, every year brings a new anniversary commemorating everything that took place from the invasion of Poland in 1939 until the fall of Berlin in 1945. All of the above produces books, films, computer games, memorabilia, tours and, erm, my novel. Hence this blog.

There’s also the simplicity of the war – at least that’s how it appears at first glance. Allies good. Axis bad. Easy. But the more you read, the more you realise it was a lot more complicated than that. Stalin was our friend, but with friends like that, you don’t really need enemies. Stalin was one of a cast of instantly recognisable leaders that are kind enough to have been really easy characters to understand. They are, what we call in the sitcom world, larger-than-life characters. Characters like Churchill, with his cigar and defiance, Montgomery, with his implausibly large beret and arrogance, and Patton, with his Yosemite Sam spirit, would be criticised as clichés were they to be invented and portrayed on a big screen. The same could be said of Hitler, who has been a reference point of evil for over seventy years. 

There's also something about the 'board game' phenomenon too. Hitler invaded country after country like he was playing Risk. In a similar fashion, Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt decided the fates of entire continents on scraps of paper passed across tables, bargaining with countries like betting chips. You can almost imagine Stalin saying, ‘I see your Moldova and I’ll raise you a Ukraine.’

Maybe the biggest attraction is not just arguing over what would have happened if Hitler had not invaded Russia (Germany would have won the war. No question), or getting excited about experimental aeroplanes introduced in 1945. Al Murray does this brilliantly in Watching War Films With My Dad, which I highly recommend.

Within many of us, I suspect, is the question: ‘What would I have done? How would I have coped? Would I have done my bit?’ It’s a terrifying thought, and in our days of lattes, wifi and therapy, we fear the worst. That generation seem so different from us. So much braver. More stoic. Less prone to assert their rights. More prone to give them up for the Greater Good. Happier to even believe in the Greater Good.

But the war wasn't just full of action men assaulting machine gun nests, or going behind enemy lines. And Crossword Ends in Violence (5) is more about the more bookish types. The indoor-crowd. Crossword setters and code-breakers, both in 1944 and the present day. Sure, there’s the odd Luger and a bit of fighting. Churchill puts in a couple of brief appearances. There’s even a guy trapped in a gulag. But it’s not so much about the heroes who fought D-Day, but those who made it happen, planned it and somehow, miraculously, kept it a secret. People knew how to keep secrets back then. That's another they can do that we can't.

When crucial codewords appeared in the national newspaper’s crossword days before you land a million men in occupied Normandy, you’re going to at least look into. This is an amusing version of that story. At least, I hope it is. You be the judge.

The book launches with the assault on Sword beach – on June 6th. Buy it HERE.