The Plot See-Saw

Some time ago, I was advised to watch Newsradio. I was keen to do so as it stars Phil Hartman, one of my favourite actors in the world, who is tragically no longer with us. Today, I watched an episode that show on YouTube. I chose this episode because it was the fiftieth - and I figured the show had hit its stride and all the characters were established. (In some ways, it's like taking a sample from the middle of the stream rather than the beginning or end, so there's some science behind my choice.)

This blog post will be best enjoyed if you do actually watch the episode. It'll take you 20 minutes. And it's quite funny. So why not do that? It's here.

*drums fingers for twenty minutes*

I quite enjoyed it. Despite not really knowing any of the characters, there was a story that was easy to follow and it had jokes and a guest starring role for Jon Lovitz. In it, Phil Hartman's character has a run in with a traffic warden and it escalates to the police, resisting arrest and a psychiatric assessment. He fails the assessment. Cut to our hero in a mental institution. He wants to get out, but can't because they think you're crazy no matter what he does. When his colleagues come to get him, though, he's decided to stay. And then realises he's made a mistake.

No Offence, but Why Review a Sitcom Episode that was First Aired Almost Exactly 16 Years Ago?
Fair question. I only mention this show because reminded me of a plot device that it worth knowing when about when it comes to plotting your show - which is something I've been writing about on this blog recently (like here). It's 'what I call' a plot see-saw that can work well as a variation in your show. I'll come onto the specifics in a moment, but what I like about the episode of Newradio is the choice they made.I'd imagine the writers room discussion presented various options for Phil Hartman's quest:

Option 1: Our hero has a run-in with law, resists arrest, and it gets a serious because he has to take a psychiatric test. And he really needs to pass or he'll end up in a mental institution - and there'll be no escape. And so his main quest in the episode would be to avoid being declared insane and return to work.

But wouldn't it be better to see him actually in a mental institution? So:

Option 2: Our hero has a run-in with the law, resists arrest, and takes the psychiatric test - and fails. And ends up in a mental instituion. And now he needs to get out. So his main quest is avoid going into a mental institution. He fails. And now he needs to avoid being stuck in the mental institution forever. Eventually he succeeds.

In the end, they went with the more interesting Option 3 - which is getting to the mental institution quickly - and half way through he achieves his inital quest to get out, but decides against it. He stays of his own free will because he's happy there. My only quibble with the episode is that when he changes his mind and decides to leave at the end, it's too easy for him. He should have to do or say something he doesn't want to do or say in order to prove his own sanity. It felt like a really missed opportunity there.

The See-Saw Quest
So, here's what's interesting. If you're feeling your sitcom plot is a bit boring, accelerate it - and give let the character achieve their quest quickly, and then see how they regret it or wish to undo it. It reminds be of Ep2 Series2 of Miranda entitled Before I Die that I was involved in plotting. Miranda is offended not to be asked to be the godmother to a child of some friends she can't stand. But it's the principle of the thing. So her quest is to be asked to be a godmother, so she arranges to look responsible in front of them. She does such a good job that half way through the episode, she achieves her goal. And then realises she's made an awful mistake and the seesaw tips. She spends the rest of the episode trying to reverse this and look irresponsible in front of these friends, which involves reading Mein Kampf to kids in a library and punching a vicar. Funny. (Well, I think so.)

So this is worth considering if you feel your storyline is running out of steam or becoming pedestrian. Try a seesaw. Give the character success in their quest. And then see what the consequences are. It might be funny.

And before we finish, let's just have one more bit of Phil Hartman from one of my favourite films of all time, So I Married an Axe Murderer:

A Hot Prop of Nuts - Bluestone 42 Episode 3

Episode 3 of Bluestone 42 is, if I do say so myself, a belter. Loads of action going on, but more importantly, lots of quests for the characters and things that they want. If you haven't watched it, you might want to do that before you read the rest of this blog which contains spoilers. Plus these script notes that will be slightly baffling if you haven't seen the show. So, here it is in iPlayer. See you in about 28 minutes.

Okay? Done? Right.

So let's have a think about what's going on in that episode. Nick is desperate to prove to Mary that he's not only interested in one thing. Even though he is only interested in one thing. Millsy is fed up of being pushed around and comes through with the right kit to save Nick's life. Simon's trying to get his book published. Mac and Rocket are bickering over Celtic v Hibs. Bird teaches Millsy some skills on ordering kit and manages to put one over on the padre.

Clear Quests
It's worth spending time on these quests because it took Richard and I ages to calibrate what we call 'the clear ToSS' - or Clear Terms of Success of the characters. Simon's written a memoir. We assume that it's dreadful (and you can read the first page here), but we avoided making too much of that. If you want to know why see, 'Avoid stories that rely on an artistic endeavour' here. What we focus on is Mary giving Simon his quest that means that it doesn't matter what the book is like (and let's face it, hundreds of lousy books get published every year). So Simon needs a 'hook' and a 'look' - i.e. a story about himself to give the publishers an angle, and a compelling picture. If he gets those two things, he's got a book. It's a clear quest and, even better, the three components to it rhyme (Book, Hook, Look). And so he goes about trying to achieve them. And then he says to Bird 'Hook, tick. Look, tick. I am sorted!' And then he has his Hook and Look taken away. And walks off. Watching it at home last night, it almost made me want to hear the sad Charlie Brown walking away music like this. But Simon's tough. He'll bounce back.

Yes. It's her. From Borgen. And she's fab.

The Hot Prop
The other story is Nick's attempts to woo Mary - which involve trying to look like he's deep and meaningful and not just obsessed with sex. This crops up with the revelation about the journo who's obsessed with him. And then Nick tries to convince Mary he's not just after one thing but fails. So we clarify his quest when he talks to Bird. Hence:

Nick: How am I going to prove to Mary that I'm not only interested in one thing?
Bird: Stop trying to have sex with her.
Nick: Yeah, but if I do that, how am I going to get to have sex with her?
Bird: Mm, the eternal conundrum.

We wanted to remind Nick of Mary and this conundrum much later when Astrid is trying to be 'grateful' to Nick in his quarters. A memorable form of words is okay, but a physical, tangible 'hot' prop is better. And so we came up with the tin of cashew nuts. (A tin is funnier than a bag. Not sure why.) Mary has been sent some cashews by her slightly useless dad - and she can't eat them so gives them to Nick. Nick gratefully receives them and says to Mary, 'Every time I put one in my mouth, I shall think of you'. It works as a line at the time, but even better, it comes back to haunt him later and really cramps his style with Astrid. The cashews are there, Astrid wants to know where the nuts are from and Nick talks about the padre and suddenly he realises that he needs to apply the brakes.

Zingers
Episode 2 has loads of retweetable jokes about Booby traps (which must have been tweeted and retweeted hundreds of times) and this being the worst Christmas ever (and it's no even Christmas). Episode 3 doesn't have as many of these quotable lines and I'm not sure why. It might be because of the nature of the stories and everything is related to everything else. So one of my favourite lines is Bird's. She's talking to Mary about Simon when she says "Yeah, it's not like he's gonna want any kind of validation from an authority figure." And then later Millsy shouts at her, Bird says "Shit. I think I've broken Millsy." And then later when Nick shouts to everyone that Millsy is touching his balls. You kind of had to be there. Which, in a sitcom, is the best kind of joke.

Jokes on the Fly
Another favourite is the end of the opening scene when Nick, having complained about the suit being an oven, checks the sweat on his brow and says "My juices are running clear, Millsy. Time to take me out of the oven." Richard, my co-writer, came up with that lovely line on the day of filming. He's funny. Follow him on Twitter here.

Music
The theme tune and score for the show is by the brilliant Vince Pope at Beetroot Music. The theme he's created for Bluestone 42 I would describe as the sound you would get if you held a Mastiff up to your ear. The only music in the entire series, I think, that isn't by him is in Episode 3 and is at the end during the football match. It's Swords of A Thousand Men by Tenpole Tudor. It rocks.

In a Chinook, No-one Can Hear You Scream

I’m not spoiling the first episode of Bluestone 42 when I say that the action starts in a Chinook helicopter (one of those massive ones). I say ‘action’ but the scene is actually just soldiers talking. Or, more accurately, yelling. And in some ways, this scene illustrates all of the joys and nightmares of military research and how it collides and colludes with comedy and drama.

Why are they in a Chinook? Well, it looks great, obviously – especially with the set that Harry Banks’ creative cohorts put together. A Chinook is an exciting place to start a TV comedy. It’s the first scene of the first episode and it screams loud and clear that this is not a show set in a laundrette or a failing video store. We have a bunch of soldiers on their way to a mission.

But that’s not the only reason. Richard and I put them in a Chinook because people we talked to say they used Chinooks in Afghanistan all the time to get around – because the roads are, unsurprisingly, quite dangerous. So for accuracy, we wanted them in a Chinook.

The problem is that this conflicted with a different piece of military advice we had which ran along these line: ‘If you’re doing a TV show about soldiers there’s only one thing that really annoys soldiers (apart from BBC’s attempt to get an actor to wear a beret in a convincing way). The most annoying thing is having people talking to each other in a Chinook. Those things are so loud, you really can’t hear a thing.’ Ah.

And so we began the show already sitting on the horns of a dilemma. We wanted to show Bluestone 42 on their way to an operation but if we did it in the mastiff (the big personnel carrier) we’d be going against one bit of advice that ‘they fly everywhere’. And if we did it in a Chinook, we’d have them talking - when in reality, they don’t even bother trying. Either way, we might look like we hadn’t done our research.

We wrote this scene over two years ago, and occasionally re-set the scene in a Mastiff before putting it back into a Chinook and having them yell at each other. After all, we’re making a comedy for the public – who will believe you can yell at each other in a Chinook, even when you can’t. Once we’d committed to that, we were also told ‘they don’t fly everywhere because they don’t have enough choppers, or it’s just not practical.’ And then when we showed the first episode to an Ammunition Technical Officer, I said “I know that people don’t talk in a Chinook. Sorry about that.” He replied, “I know you can’t really hear, but it never stops me trying.”

Ah well. We tried.

The Origins of Bluestone 42

Plenty of things about Bluestone 42 seem unlikely. The fact it’s a comedy drama exclusively set in an active warzone is one. The fact the writers of this show met whilst writing for Miranda is another. It's all rather incongruous. And yet this is how the show came about.

It might seem that writing a comedy about bomb disposal in Afghanistan was just an attempt to be controversial and generate some press. After all, writers are attracted to extreme situations and troublespots like moths to flames. But this is not how the show came about at all.

Why Write about Soldiers?

My co-writer Richard Hurst and I had been talking about a number ideas for new TV comedies and the starting point for Bluestone 42 was simply soldiers. Between us we knew some people who had served in the military but their experiences and general feeling about fighting on the frontline didn’t fit with how it was being portrayed in the vast majority of media. There had been many fine documentaries and dramas telling stories from Iraq and Afghanistan about the trauma of war, the pointlessness of the conflict, the price paid by families and the treatment of wounded soldiers or widows. This was all understandable. There are lots of stories to be told. But each story gave yet another reason to stay away from a conflict against an invisible but lethal enemy in part of Helmand riddled with IEDs.

And yet soldiers want to go. This was brought home to me when I saw a journalist interview some troops from a regiment that was about to deploy to Afghanistan. The journalist asked them whether they wanted to go, and was almost struck dumb on hearing that they couldn’t wait to get out there. They had trained for this for years, they explained. They wanted to put it their hard-won expertise to good use in a place where it would count. We wanted to write about these people.

After plenty of research and talking to troops some things were clear: British soldiers are indeed remarkable. They get on with the job in hand with whatever resources they’re given, normally with a wry smile and a dry joke. Their training is superb, lengthy and intense. One of their expressions is ‘train hard, fight easy’. We’ve not put this expression in the show since it could easily be misunderstood. Of course combat is not easy for them. But the idea is that if you train as hard as you can, you can deal with most things when the pressure’s on and the bullets are flying.

Why Write about Bomb Disposal?

We also discovered that the teams that go out and defuse IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) might be a good place to focus our attention. Roadside bombs are not generally removed by Engineers, as we first thought – although some Engineers have now been trained to do that job. And it’s engineers who do the mind-meltingly dangerous task of checking for IEDs in the first place with their vallons (those metal detector things). But the guy that does the famous ‘long walk’ is called an Ammunition Technical Officer who is, in fact, part of the Royal Logistics Corps.

The RLC is not a glamorous part of Her Majesty’s Armed Forces. As the name suggests, there’s a lot of fetching and carrying involved. But one of the things they fetch and carry is live ammunition, including ordnance left behind, and possibly booby-trapped. by the enemy. Ammunition Technical Officers got good at dealing with this sort of thing over decades of experience in Northern Ireland, rendering safe all kinds of improvised bombs. Which is why ‘the bomb guy’ is from the Royal Logistics Corps and why 11 EOD, the jewel in RLC’s crown, leads the world in bomb disposal.

Who are Bluestone 42?

Corporal Bird. The Bleep.

In our show, our ATO is the emotionally stunted wise-guy, Captain Nick Medhurst. He leads the counter IED team with the call sign of Bluestone 42. He is aided in his take by his diligent number two, Corporal Mills and his ‘bleep’, Corporal Bird. Her job is to jam the airwaves to stop the IEDs from being set off remotely and ensure there’s a safe cordon around the area. Then there’s the three man military to escort, Privates Mac and Rocket, led by Lance Corporal Simon Lansley.  In reality, that might be a separate unit of four soldiers, or they can be smaller. And they could have had their own driver too.

Is it Accurate? 

We wanted the make up of the team to be as realistic possible, partly out of respect for our soldiers, but also because things stop being funny once they feel phony. Comedy is about truth. But getting the truth about how the army operates is an awful lot harder than it sounds. It’s a baffling and byzantine array of battlegroups, brigades and battalions, even more complex that the BBC management structure. Counter IED teams are even harder to grasp because they’re made up of soldiers form different regiments.

Moreover, read books, speak to soldiers and members of previous counter IED teams and you get different stories. Many swear blind something is always done one way before they either think of an exception, or someone else swears blind the opposite is true. Plus a bomb disposal team in Iraq in 2005 looked different from one in Afghanistan in 2007 which looked different again two years after that.

We also had to balance this with what is achievable in half an hour of screen time and what is comprehensible to an audience who may or may not have seen The Hurt Locker (an exciting but profoundly problematic film).

In the end, the six man team (if we count Corporal Bird as a man, which I’m sure she would like us to do) seemed about right. It is quite hard to introduce that many characters in episodes – alongside a padre, Mary, who is another key character in the series. Plus the enigmatic and slightly insane Lieutenant Colonel, Smith. In episode two we also meet another regular character, their interpreter, the irrepressible Faruq.

Nine regular characters is a lot but focusing on fewer felt unrealistic. Hopefully eight episodes gives us a chance to get to know them, peeling back layers and finding out more about Bluestone 42 as we go. We hope the audience enjoy doing that.

Jealousy and Envy are Two-Sides of the Same Bad Coin

That title makes no sense, but you get the idea. A coincidence happened today that I thought I'd mention. As I was having a brief, unhelpful Twitter exchange with someone who was angry about the supposed Oxbridge mafia, I was listening to another excellent Scriptnotes podcast by John August and Craig Mazin about jealousy. Whether you're an aspiring writer or a successful one, it's easy to be consumed by envy, jealousy and resentment (which are all different but related things). It's even possible to feel good, superior or vindicated while experiencing these emotions. But it gets you nowhere. Nowhere.

The success of others rarely has any bearing on your career. Writing is not a zero-sum game. You have no control over anyone else's career. And you don't have all that much control over your own. What you do control is the scripts you write. You control your characters, yours worlds, your jokes, your stories.  There are no special tools, secret weapons or side-doors to success. It's graft, gathering experience, and getting on with it. Fretting about what everyone else is doing consumes calories and time that are better spent making your own scripts better.

No-one is saying it's easy to avoid being irritated by the success of someone that you personally do not rate, or the frustration that others seem to be enjoying some kind of advantage. Use every moment you can to write, rewrite, edit, listen, replot, replan, rewrite and make your scripts the best they can be.

Storylining & Plotting Part 6 – The Pitfalls of Plotting

So, following on from Part 5, we’re merrily plotting our sitcom episode. We have characters doing things in character that make their own lives more difficult. What are some of the pitfalls of this process?

Impatience: Get used to the idea this process takes time. If you manage to plot your way to a funny scene, that’s great. But just spend another half an hour seeing if that plot can be improved, be more natural, more in character and get you to an even funnier scene. Turn of the internet and do it again.

Lack of Confidence: You might have thought of some key jokes in that funny scene and aren’t all that confident you’ll think of new jokes if you change things too much. Jokes are just jokes. Don’t get trapped with the ‘No Joke Left Behind’ policy. The plot has to be right or the jokes won’t matter. The stories have to be faithful to the characters. Jokes are the icing on the cake. You need lots of brilliant icing. But you need cake. Don’t worry. If you’re characters and plots are firing on all cylinders, the jokes will come – if you take the time to work at them. (Again, you may need to turn off the internet)

Meandering stories: Does your story escalate, or just meander? Your hero has a quest. They try and do it, but they refuse to do one particular thing for some reason something goes wrong. They try to fix it – and don’t just fail. They make it worse. And so to fix it, they have to do that thing they didn’t want to do. Except now it’s too late to do that thing. And doing that thing has just landed them in more trouble. And so on, until your character is completely screwed. How are they going to get out of this? You manage to do so with a lovely twist that, in hindsight, we could have spotted, but didn’t.

Third Act Magic Wands: Your plot solution at the end of the show to your character’s problem should not involve new characters, new themes, new elements, even new object that we haven’t encountered before. The ingredients to your plot resolution should have been there almost all along. Your character needs to climb down, change their mind and/or do that thing they didn’t want to do which, surprise surprise, turns out to be not as bad as they expected. Or worse, but with a positive side-effect, etc.

No Clear Moment of Success/Failure: How does the audience know our character has succeeded or failed? What is the physical manifestation of this? Your character wants something – what is it and how do we know they’ve achieved it. There has to be a critical moment, a swift reveal of something tangible. It could be an object of significance that is handed over, or destroyed. A form of words said to someone. We, the audience, need to know in advance what that is. For some reason, the example that springs to mind of is that Hank Kingsley in The Larry Sanders Show. Hank holding out on his contract (series 1, ep 7) because wants to be taken seriously by the studio – and demands a golf cart to drive him around the set as part of his new deal. ‘I want a golf cart’ is the key. When we see him in one, we know he’s won (except there's a nice twist. He gets the cart, but we discover he's paid for it himself to save face). When you’re plotting the show, ask yourself, what’s your golf cart? And can we all see it at the end please.

Too slow: Comedy is fast. And your plot can be escalating and have a golf cart ready to go, but can you get there faster – and go one better, one bigger after that. When plotting Miranda, we would try and think what the huge set-piece scene for the ending was, and then how to get there half way through the show rather than spin it out to the end. So we deal with the fall-out from that big scene which leads to an even bigger one. Going back to the funeral example, Miranda gives the eulogy for an unknown person and falls into a grave at the end of the first act. The show also has her reading Mein Kampf to children in a public library and ends with her punching the vicar from the funeral in the face. Say what you like about Miranda, and people do, it’s not slow.

So, phew, are we there yet? Any questions about Storylining and Plotting Part 6? Or Parts 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5? You could leave them as comments – or you could come to a workshop with me and the highly experienced and delightful Dave Cohen in London in April/May. Details here.

Storylining & Plotting Part 5 – The Principle of Plotting

One of the things that is often said of sitcoms is that you should ‘chase your character up a tree and throw sticks at them’. It’s good general advice. But I’d argue for a slightly more nuanced version, which I will come to in a moment. If we’re being literal, we could have our character suddenly chased by an angry dog. And now our character is trapped. That’s fine. By where did this dog come from? How did our character enrage the dog? Does he think its a dog and it isn't really? Why is today the worst day to be stuck up a tree? How could our character have avoided this situation? Why did they chose to climb a tree when it’s obviously going to be difficult to get down?

Let’s be less literal for a moment. You, as the author of your show and the Lord of your universe, can send all kinds of calamity on your characters. You can set their house on fire, take away their life savings, kill their pets or humiliate them in anyway you chose. But these stories are not as pleasing as the stories where they set their on house on fire, ruin their own finances and kill their own pets (tip: Don’t kill animals in a sitcom. Viewers hate that. In movies, rules are different).

But you need to give them a reason. Especially when they're doing something really stupid. It’s annoying when you watch a show when characters do things that are obviously convenient for the story rather than truthful and honest. So here’s my version of that general advice. ‘Give your character a really good reason to do something as stupid as climb a tree. And give your other a characters reasons to throw sticks at them.’

It may be your characters are not helping you here. You’ve got a great long list of ideas but your characters feel passive in these stories. They’re giving you nothing. In which case, you might got a duff character and you need to go back to the drawing board. You need to know what they want. And how that differs from what they actually need. All is not lost, but ‘making extreme stuff happen’ is not going to help at this stage.

Small Steps

The trick is to lead your character through a story step by step, stage by stage so that the high point is ridiculous – and yet not one step on that journey has been unbelievable or out of character. The most obvious example I can think of in this is the episode of Miranda in which she ends up having to give a euology at a funeral – and she doesn’t know who’s actually in the coffin, and ends up playing some kind of twenty questions with the congregation.

How did Miranda in this ridiculous situation? A new phone, missing voicemail messages that are discovered late, turning up and being called upon to say a few words – each individual beat is believable, not least because you can’t turn up to a funeral and say ‘Sorry, who are we actually burying today?’ And then falling into an open grave is just a bonus.

And again, this just takes time and graft. It means you plot and plan the story moment by moment, making sure there are no cracks, creases or joins. No comedy equivalents of the daft horror film staple of deciding to stay the night in a house that is obviously haunted, escaping the monster/zombie/ghost, and then going back in to face it.

If you write alone, this is where a producer or script editor can be a big help. They can spot these moments where things are a bit too convenient, or a character doesn’t something that doesn’t add up. Fix these problems in the outline, because they are much harder to unpick when you have a forty page script full of jokes you really don’t want to cut.

That's all for now. There’ll be more specifics hints and tips on the next post.

Getting Your Story Straight

If you'd like me to talk you through all this, why not try my sitcom video course, Writing Your Sitcom? Spec scripts are almost always deficient in the storytelling, and if you can get that right, your script really will stand out from the huge pile of other scripts. Why not find out more about the course here?