The majority of BBC2’s half hour comedy narratives have been
by writer-performers: The Trip, Inside
Number 9, Count Arthur Strong, House of Fools and The Wrong Mans. Tom
Hollander has more than a hand in writing Rev.
And let’s not forget Simon Amstell’s Grandma’s
House and Sue Perkins’s Heading Out. And
Paul Whitehouse’s Nurse is to come (having
done Bellamy’s People, Help and the
much-forgotten but brilliant Happiness). And going back a little, there’s Jack
Dee’s Lead Balloon, which started on
BBC4, a channel which is also giving us Jessica Hynes’s Up The Women. Episodes, W1A
and Hebburn are writer-led, but they
are the minority on BBC2.
You might expect BBC3 to have gone down this route – having
made it big with Gavin and Stacey and
Little Britain, but they haven’t so
much. Clearly one of the channel’s biggest hits at the moment is Jack Whitehall’s
Bad Education. But the rest of their
sitcoms - Uncle, Cuckoo, Bluestone 42, Pramface
- are writer-led, as was Him and Her.
And Channel 4 currently has Toast of
London, Man Down and Derek in the
writer-performer department.
Now, writers normally have a chip on their shoulder about
writer-performers, as I’ve said here. (In fact writers have a chip on their
shoulder about everyone so don’t take it personally) I think it’s something to do
with not respecting people who seem to want attention. Writers avoid the bright
lights, like the undead and the lycanthropes. (Does that work? I’m not up on my horror, I’m afraid). So my
instinct is to decry this inexorable slide towards to writer-performer-led
shows, but let’s look at the facts.
All of the shows mentioned above are decent shows. They are
not all to my personal taste (NB: Critics, if you don’t like something, it
doesn’t mean it’s bad) but most of these shows found an audience and didn’t
create calls for public hangings, which is increasingly rare for the BBC in
these troubled times.
Dazzled By Stars?
It’s not as if a commissioning executive was all starry-eyed
and let someone famous make show that turned out to be nothing but a horrendous
Battlefield Earth-type vanity
project. All of the above are by experienced comedians with a proven track
record of making audiences laugh time after time for years in a variety of
formats and settings. If Paul Whitehouse, one of the great writer-performers of
our age, wants to do a show on your channel, you’re going to need a good reason
to tell them he can’t. (Although the Paul Whitehouses of this world would
probably argue execs are very creative when it comes to reasons why they
can’t.)
When you think about it, commissioning shows from
writer-performers makes a lot of sense. Writer-performers have lots of
first-hand experience of what works for their persona. I’ve written with
Miranda Hart for television and Milton Jones for radio, and both of them have
an instinctive sense of what will work for their onstage character, and what
won’t. They’re almost always right. And it’s not really a surprise, given this
talent has come through years of playing that kind of character. My job as a
writer is to help them generate new ideas or help them to get their ideas to
work with their persona.
Because the writer-performer has often played this kind of
character, or version of themselves, there’s a consistent comedy voice from Day
1. That’s a big plus. When you’re writing for others it can be tricky. Richard
Hurst and I on Bluestone 42 took a
long time to establish a tone, a house-style and ways of talking. And we had to
shoot 8 episodes not fully confident that we’d got it right or even
consistent. Writer-performers are at advantage here, I think.
Writer-performer-led shows tend to revolve around one big
central character like Basil Fawlty,
David Brent, Edina, Miranda, Mrs Brown. Just reading those character names you
know exactly who they are. You can
picture them and know how they’d react in any given situation. And you probably
understood the characters having watched them for about ninety seconds.
Having a character like this means the audience can relax
because they know what the show is about, who the important person is and where
the jokes are coming from. Putting your audience at ease is critical in comedy,
and a show with a network of characters can be off-putting or feel like
homework. Maybe that’s why the mainstream audience never took Arrested Development.
From a commissioning point of view, the writer-performer
makes sense too. The TV channel forking over the money for the show already
know roughly what they’re getting. They’ve seen this character on stage, or in
a sketch show. They know what the comedy sensibilities are – and how to promote
it.
Plus, there’s sometimes a ready-made fan-base too. Jack
Whitehall can tweet when his sitcom is on BBC3 – and immediately get through to
over 2.3 million fans (the population of Birmingham, Leeds and Glasgow
combined). What channel wouldn’t want a piece of that?
Everybody's Happy
And what writer-performer wouldn’t want a bit of telly? It
means that they can play big arenas on tour, sell out in minutes, add extra
dates, sell books, do adverts and start making some serious money. Everyone’s
happy: The channel; the writer-performer; the writers that help the writer
performer; and the audience – who simply don’t care whether the show is written
by the star or two over-educated misanthropic men in a largely defunct BBC
building (or an expensive new building which doesn’t have enough rooms to work
in.) Why would they care?
So. Long live writer-performer shows, right?
Yeah.
Kind of.
But.
Can we take the long view?
Indulge me?
Thank you.
*coughs*
Read the next post. Here.
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