Readers’ Qs - When devising a sitcom, do you start with story, characters, or situation?

This question came from @amazingmikeyc
When devising a sitcom, do you start with story, characters, or situation?

I cover this in the first main chapter of my book, Writing That Sitcom, in which I write the following:

One might assume that the trick of thinking of a new sitcom is thinking of a workplace that hasn't been done before. Thinking of an original situation in itself is hard enough to do. Since the 1950s, Britain has produced a myriad of sitcoms, set everywhere imaginable: Funeral parlours (Fun at the Funeral Parlour, Billy Liar and In Loving Memory); spaceships (Red Dwarf and Hyperdrive); vicarages (The Vicar of Dibley, Rev); hospitals (Only When I Laugh, Surgical Spirit, Doctors and Nurses). They've all been done plenty of times. And plenty more times and for longer in America.

A new situation might be appealing or ‘feel funny’, but be careful. A funny situation might sell the show, but people will watch it week after week because of the characters. We're drawn to people and stories, not situations. The best jokes are normally funny because of the character and the story, as well as the situation. Falling over is funny. Sure. But it’s much funnier when the guy falling over is Del Boy, out with Trigger, trying to be a yuppy and impressing girls having said 'nice and cool'.

The characters are the key. If you can, think of characters first. Having said that, the four sitcoms I’ve created or co-created have all started by thinking of the situation first. But each time, the bulk of the development was spent working on the characters. Purely for illustration, let’s look at each of the shows, the first three of which were sitcoms for BBC Radio 4.

Think The Unthinkable

Think the Unthinkable was my first sitcom. The starting point was realising I wanted to write a show about management consultants. In my early twenties, I noticed that people I’d been at university with, people with very little experience of business or life, were telling people three times their age what they were doing wrong. That felt both insane and funny. A fruitful situation for comedy.

The more I thought about the show and developed the idea, the more I realised that it was about change and differing attitudes to it. My original three main characters were all happy about change in their own different ways and they insisted on inflicting this on other people who were more resistant, for a mixture of good and bad reasons.

I worked really hard on getting to know my characters inside out before I worked out the storylines, even though I knew the storylines would probably be funny in their own right.

The Pits

My second Radio 4 sitcom is notable only in that it starred the now very famous John Oliver. The Pits has disappeared into obscurity and I think I know why. It wasn't really about anything. It certainly appeared to be about something. It was about professional musicians who worked for the British Opera Company, a fictionalised version of the Royal Opera House. I researched it a fair bit. There were some decent classical music jokes. Some funny-ish characters doing funny-ish things while saying funny-ish lines. The readthroughs were fairly jolly. The audience who turned up to recordings quite enjoyed it.

But ultimately, The Pits was all about the setting, not the characters. I didn't do it properly because I was over-confident, having done quite well with Think The Unthinkable (which had won Silver at the Sony Radio Awards and was on its fourth series). I knew how to write scenes and jokes and stories, but I hadn't figured out the characters and the central idea behind the show. Naughty.

Hut 33
In Hut 33, I really wanted to write a show about codebreakers in Bletchley Park. The obvious angle didn’t feel like it was going to be all that funny. Hut 33 was full of boffins - and therefore ‘being clever’ was not at all that remarkable. And a show full of super-smart people didn’t seem viable. (This was a few years before Big Bang Theory turned super-smart people into billions of dollars). It felt like the show had to be about something else. But what?

Through talking to my wife, who is much more interested in social history than guns and the bombs (I know. Weird), I learned that World War Two brought together people from very different social classes. Everyone saw how the other half lived. Poverty and privilege living cheek by jowl. It’s why Churchill won the war, but lost the general election that year to Attlee in a landslide. People realised that Britain had to change. Hut 33 became a microcosm of that desire for change. So the show was about class – and a potential upheaval in the class system.

Robert Bathurst played an over-educated Oxford Professor who, like many on the social scene in the 1930s, had been on very friendly terms with the likes of high- ranking Nazis like Von Ribbentrop and Rommel before war broke out. Tom Goodmall-Hill played a working-class Trotskyite from Newcastle. Gordon, played by Fergus Craig, was a 17 year-old naïve genius stuck in the middle, wishing everyone could be friends. They were forced to spend all day every day together in a cold confined space because there was a war on. Bletchley was the backdrop and playground for their stories. If it had been set in a hospital ward, Hut 33 would have been almost identical to Only When I Laugh.

Bluestone 42
Richard Hurst and I met working on Miranda. We had a few ideas for new shows, but wondered if there was anything in a show about soldiers. Nothing new there, given Dad’s Army, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, The Phil Silvers Show (Bilko) or the truly great M*A*S*H. There had been a lot of drama and documentaries about the British Army covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but nothing comic.

Our understanding of British soldiers was that a sense of humour is extremely important, so we were interested in thinking up a show that reflected that.

A section of squaddies would be broadly similar in background and outlook – and all male – so we looked for an army unit that would bring different perspectives, backgrounds, genders and expertise together. We arrived at the idea of a bomb disposal squad because it was an inter-disciplinary unit which performed a function that was very easy to understand and show on the screen. There’s a bomb. Deal with it.

We started with the guy who does the long walk, Captain Nick Medhurst. We imagined him to be a cocksure rogue who did a job that made him irresistible to women (Okay, he’s Sam Malone, from Cheers). And then we thought of a character, Mary, who would try harder than most to resist because she’s a padre. (Okay, she’s Diane, from Cheers) And we built the rest of the team around that scenario. But the show developed from there, as the last three episodes of Series 3 contained neither Nick or Mary – because the show is ultimately about something: why soldiers love being soldiers.

A situation can be a good starting point. It can be the reason your characters are together. It can inform the underlying philosophy or point of the show. But a sitcom is not a comedy about the situation. It’s about the characters.

To read the rest, get the book, Writing That Sitcom, which is available for the Kindle/Kindle App via Amazon.

Readers’ Qs - How do you make sure you don't give all the punchlines to the same character?

@MagsTheObscure asks:
How do you make sure you don't accidentally give all the punchlines to the same character who I will nickname Joe Surrogate?

If this is happening in your script, it's probably not an accident.

Best case scenario: One character having all the jokes is an indication that you don't have a sitcom yet. Just one character.  And that's fine. It's a start, you can build other characters and conflicts around that character.

But it's also asking why your character has all the jokes - and what sort of jokes they are. If they're normally jokes about nothing in particular, rather than character, you've got a bigger problem. In which case, you don't even have a character. You just have someone who pays off jokes.

In Friends, the writers could easily have fallen into this trap with Chandler, because his character's 'thing' initially was 'being funny'. His jokes were the sum total of hours of thought from some of the funniest minds in America. Funny guy. But what the show brought out over time, and what is actually funnier, is that Chandler is coward. Fortunately, they could take their time over this because there were five other brilliant characters who paid off each others' jokes.

Another show that leaps to mind in this case is Shane, a perfectly watchable vehicle for Frank Skinner that didn't do very well when it came out in 2004, despite Frank Skinner being one of the funniest, sharpest guys around. When I saw it, I thinking it was perfectly fine, but also remember feeling that the main character had all the punchlines, and that everyone else's reason for being was purely to lob up set-ups so Frank could smash them. And having just watched a bit on Youtube just now, some characters have some lines that no-one would ever say, but it has to be phrased that way for the joke to work.

It's the exact opposite of what Jerry Seinfeld did in his sitcom vehicle, in which he plays a successful comedian. But he isn't actually the funniest or most interesting character. In fact, he's probably the least funny and interesting - and the worst actor. But we had other characters and conflicts that made the show work.

It may be you have a bunch of characters who aren't quite gelling or fizzing. In which case, there are a couple of things you could do.

Try pushing them to extremes
Let's say one of your characters is a pretty straight and earnest. In which case, make them ludicrously, painfully, infuriatingly straight. And honest. And earnest. And innocent. That will generate jokes for them - and at them.

Try putting your characters on the front foot
So, they become the kind of characters who want everyone to be like them - whatever it is. Let's say another character is fastidious and tidy, and the butt of jokes. Try giving them some attitude and insisting that everyone else be as tidy and uptight as them. That might produce conflict, stories and therefore jokes.

This kind of stuff takes ages, even if you're experienced and doing it full time, so don't get disheartened if it's not happening at the moment. Your sitcom episode is essentially a recipe that can be repeated again and again, producing roughly the same consistent enjoyable result every time. Recipes take a while to perfect, but one you've got them right, they really come into their own.

Hope that helps. Thanks for your question, @MagsTheObscure. Keep 'em coming.

There’s lots of technical writing advice like this in my book, Writing That Sitcom, which is available for the Kindle/Kindle App via Amazon.

Readers’ Qs - When you write the 2nd draft, do you start with a blank screen again?

@AdamWareham asks:
When you start writing your 2nd draft, are you just editing the 1st draft, or do you start with a blank screen again?

Great question. Everyone has their own styles and ways of doing things, so I can only say what’s normal for me. And, it depends on how good the first draft is.

If you’re lucky, you’re getting notes back on draft one that are essentially asking for tweaks and polishes. Normally, the big notes are asking for improved motivations or great clarity for why a character is doing something ludicrous or insane. And this can be sometimes be fixed by opening up your first draft, resaving is a second draft and then tinkering.

I say ‘lucky’ because getting a script right is as much a matter of luck as anything else. You can be very experienced, or have planned your script in minute detail, and in the cold light of day realise

the script isn’t really working. You’re going to need to do more than change the oil and wash the windscreen. This script is going to go up on a jack. You’ll need to get underneath it. In no time, you’ll be taking it apart and it’ll be in bits before you know it.

If so, that’s fine. It’s all part of the process. I’ve got that with a script I’m working on right now. It’s a new sitcom for the radio, and it’s largely untested, and my first draft of episode 2 has some lovely moments and some funny bits. Overall is looking like it’s going to be fine. But the notes highlighted some serious problems that needed thought.

Here’s what I did:

I printed it out, went to Starbucks and left my laptop in the bag. I wrote down – in pen - a summary of the script on a page of A4, running through the main beats, event and moments. I already had the outline I'd written the draft from, but the script had moved on. So I looked at my new outline and had a good old think about it. Then I thought of some new themes and motivations that would mean some set-pieces would stay and others might have to go. Fine. I then wrote up the new and improved A and B stories that looked broadly like the old ones, but with crucial differences. I send that to the producer and talked it through. And we were both happy.

And now I’m on Draft 2.

I opened a blank document, which is my main script, so I’m not tinkering with Draft 1. But I do have that old draft open on my desktop and I’m using chunks at a time, and writing a new script using the best of the old. I’ve done this sort of things many times before, and there’s just no way of knowing in advance whether you’ll be heavily rewriting the script or tinkering with it.

Sometimes Drafts 1, 2 and 3 all seem fine – and then you have a read-through and it all falls apart. But we can talk about that another time. I wrote a bit about that here.

Thanks for your question, @AdamWareham. Keep 'em coming.

There’s lots of technical writing advice like this in my book, Writing That Sitcom, which is available for the Kindle/Kindle App via Amazon.

Readers’ Qs - Do I Need Final Draft?

No.

Probably not.

Maybe eventually?

The question 'Do I Need Final Draft' is from @CraigJBeadle.

If someone who's paying you proper money for a script says you need to buy Final Draft because their whole production system uses it, you should probably buy it. It's really not that expensive in the grand scheme of things and it is one of the tools of the trade. You wouldn't want a plumber turning up to your house with a proper toolkit, would you?

But it's not necessarily an essential tool. I only got it about ten years into my writing career when I was working on Bluestone 42 in South Africa. Our production partners, Out of Africa, used it and to make life easier, it made sense to have the same system as we were making changes on set. But the entire first series of eight episodes had been written in Microsoft Word. As has every single script I've written for radio.

The reason people feel they should buy it is because it will make them feel like a proper writer. And, to be honest, if you need a £150 for a morale boost, then there are worse ways of spending your money. But the programme itself really isn't all that brilliant. It's pretty sparse and not especially intuitive. I don't hate it as much as Craig Maizin does - and you can listen to him talking to the creators/owners of Final Draft on the Scriptnotes podcast here. It's great listening.

I think people tend to focus on script software and the look of their scripts because that's something that's easy to control and measure, as opposed to whether the script is any good. When you're starting out, it's hard to know how you're doing, so you want to at least look the part. I'm not saying that's you, @CraigJBeadle, but it's a factor. Hope that helps.

Readers’ Qs - When you co-write, do you have to split the pay check?

I’ve done quite enough blogging recently about the state of the industry and Sitcom in general, rather than the business of writing sitcoms. So I asked on Twitter if anyone had any questions. And you did. So I’m working my way through those over the next few weeks.

To get us started, let’s begin with a nice quick one from @JoChallacombe

Readers’ Qs - When you co-write, do you have to split the pay check?

Yes. Unless the person you’re writing is your slave, imaginary or a robot.

Writing partnerships would typically split the money fifty/fifty. Long term, that seems the only sensible way to me, to save arguments.

Sometimes I’ve been hired to co-write a script with someone I didn’t know who was either the star of the show or the creator. In that case, it wasn’t a fifty-fifty split, but weighted in the favour of the other, and I was fine with that. That was the deal.

Money is split all because there is a finite amount of it available for a script. This is not affected by the number of people writing it. If it’s just you, you get all of it. If there are two, you halve it. If you’re an infinity number of monkeys, that will make the maths more complicated, so good luck with that.

When I say ‘finite amount’, it’s not a fixed amount, since what you are paid will depend on your level of experience. But the main point is that you don’t get more, or even slightly more, because there are two of you.

The fact this question has a ‘check’ in it rather than a ‘cheque’ would suggest the person asking is American – where the system is different. In TV comedy, writers probably end up getting paid more money as producers – on a weekly basis – rather than as writers. I don’t really understand it, because it hasn’t really come up for me. (The Children of Tendu podcast explains the American TV writing system really well)

One thing I’ve heard about happening in America via the Scriptnotes podcast is a practice called ‘Paper teaming’ where two writers who don’t know each other are put together as a team so the production gets two writers for the price of one. This is clearly unethical.

All of the above throws up the question about whether or not it’s worth being in a partnership given you are essentially taking a 50% pay cut. But looking at it that way tends not to end well. Two writers can have a great combination of talents and get more work, and then high capacity for that work. And for some, they wouldn’t even have become a writer if it hadn’t been for their partner. It's an alliance that is often forged in a playground or at university and can last for decades.

That said, some partnerships dissolved because they do become unburden, or unworkable. And that’s just the way things go.

If you want to hear more about being comedy writing duo, listen to Andy Riley and Kevin Cecil talk on the Sitcom Geeks podcast here.

Thanks for your question. Keep 'em coming.

SUBSEQUENT CORRECTION: I see from her original tweet that Jo had written 'cheque' and that I had made the error in copying across. Apologies. I thought I'd let it stand rather than rewrite the whole blogpost. Sorry.

1985-1999 vs 2000-2015

In recent weeks, I've been blogging about the Radio Times Sitcom of the Century (so far) poll. It's been making wonder what kind of progress we're making as far as the sitcom goes. At first and second glance, one has to admit that the sitcoms that ones in the preceding fifteen years were pretty strong. I listed them here.

What are my top ten of those 1985-99 shows? And how does that list compare to the top ten of the last fifteen years?

That throws up a number of issues, not least the fact that some shows are part of my childhood, and can be associated with nostalgic images of the dairy farm on which I was brought up. But I had my favourites back then and the first thing I'll do is whittle it down to the shows that I watched pretty devotedly, and have thought about a lot since. (I exclude Father Ted because I missed it when it came out didn't catch up with it until years later.) So that gives us:

One Foot in the Grave, Dear John, Men Behaving Badly, Birds of a Feather, Bread, The New Statesman, Waiting For God, Brush Strokes, You Rang M’Lord?, Red Dwarf, Drop the Dead Donkey, I’m Alan Partridge, Bottom, Spaced, Operation Good Guys, How Do You Want Me?, Hippies, Sean’s Show, Mr Don and Mr George or Maid Marian and Her Merry Men.

That gets us down to 20. If had to pick 10 'great' shows from that list, rather than just decent or successful at the time it would have to be:

Mr Don and Mr George. A show of utter joy.

One Foot in the Grave, Bread, Dear John, I’m Alan Partridge, Bottom, Spaced, Birds of a Feather,  The New Statesman, Red Dwarf, Drop the Dead Donkey.

And I'd classify How Do You Want Me? as a comedy drama. Mr Don and Mr George is probably almost a sketch show in tone at least. (Even though I just love it and it isn't a sketch show) And Maid Marian is a kids show.

Now, let's put that list up against my list from 2000-15, and you can draw your own conclusions:

Black Books, The Thick of It, The Office, Phoenix Nights, The IT Crowd, Yonderland, Not Going Out, Outnumbered and Count Arthur Strong
vs
One Foot in the Grave, Bread, Dear John, I’m Alan Partridge, Bottom, Spaced, Birds of a Feather,  The New Statesman, Red Dwarf, Drop the Dead Donkey.

Some big hitters on both lists, but I know who wins on points.

My Favourites From That List

In case you were wondering, and you probably weren't, which sitcom I'd pick for The Radio Times Sitcom Of The Century (so far), I've whittled it down to a top ten.

Just as a reminder here are the forty sitcoms from 2000-2015 (bizarrely omitting My Family, My Hero, Two Pints and Coupling):

Mrs Brown's Boys, Miranda,  Not Going Out, Outnumbered, Peter Kay's Car Share, Citizen Khan, Count Arthur Strong, Benidorm, The Worst Week of My Life, Yonderland, Moone Boy, Bad Education,  Black Books, Catastrophe, Detectorists, Early Doors, Episodes, Extras, Friday Night Dinner, Gavin & Stacey, Getting On, Green Wing, Him & Her, Lead Balloon, Man Down, Nathan Barley, Nighty Night, Peep Show, Peter Kay's Phoenix Nights, Psychoville, Pulling, Raised by Wolves, Rev, The Inbetweeners, The IT Crowd, The Office, The Trip/The Trip to Italy, The Thick of It, Toast of London, Twenty Twelve/W1A

From that list, I've made a top ten. But what order should I arrange them in?

Well, the only guide I can think of is how much they made me laugh, how much I want to see them again and how much I admire them over all. Warning: There plenty of shows that are very good, but for one reason or another, I just never got into them or got round to watching them (eg. The Inbetweeners). All that being the case, my ten in order would be along these lines:

Black Books, The Thick of It, The Office, Phoenix Nights, The IT Crowd, Yonderland, Not Going Out, Outnumbered and Count Arthur Strong.

That's nine. My tenth is Miranda which should be somewhere on the list, but given I was involved in the first two series, I probably couldn't say where it could or should be.

I've extolled the virtues of Black Books in the past, making it my 8th favourite sitcom of all time, so there's no need to dwell on that further here.

Thinking about it, though, I wonder if my number one would be The Thick Of It which is full of jokes, characters, atmosphere and satire. When I was compiling my favourite British sitcoms of all time, I didn't really want the Thick of It on the same list as my all time favourite, Yes Prime Minister. So maybe that's clouded my judgement. Either way, Black Books and The Thick Of It are both very fine shows.

My other observation is that only four of those shows are filmed in front of an audience. I really do think we are collectively losing the art of the studio sitcom.

Competing With The Classics
But here's a new thought based on a comment from David Murphy on the blog posted yesterday. He writes:

You also ask whether fewer mainstream comedies are being made. When I think back to that time I think of getting cable TV for the first time. I think that many people will have had a similar experience. Now that I think about how that changed my habits, I think that it meant that I was more likely to watch comedy I knew and loved on UK Gold rather than put the effort into getting to know a new world with and new characters, and risk not laughing. Rather than taking the time to get to know a new comedy, I'll watch a classic instead. 

It's an excellent point. I've said in the past that critics brutally compare Episode 1 of your new sitcom with Episode 60 of Only Fools and Horses. But it's worth noting that the audience at home do that too. A direct comparison can still be made because all of those old shows are still being shown. All the old classics, and plenty of the modern classics are on all time every week on UK Gold, or Dave or any number of Freeview channels.

And it's not just the cable channels. BBC1 repeated every episode of the Vicar of Dibley at least seven times. BBC2's best performing sitcom for the whole of this year has been Dad's Army. And they're in the process of remaking some of the old classics, just to make it even harder for the new boys. That means your new sitcom hero is still fighting with Mainwairing, Fawlty, Hancock, Arkwright, Brent, Del Boy, Fletcher and Victor Meldrew.

Last night, UK Gold launched The Rebel, based on the Oldie cartoon strip, with Simon Callow (above). I've not seen it yet, but it's being played out before and after episodes of sitcoms that we already know are good and are prepared to watch again. That's tough. But that's the TV landscape we live in.

So let's get use to our brave new/old world with some Thick of It to finish with: