360° Festival 2010, Report 3: BBC Comedy Academy

The day’s first session was with Michael Jacob from the BBC Comedy Academy.

Michael stated off by giving us a bit of his background. He was in a band with Marks and Gran. When they made it big as comedy writers they employed him as a reader in their company. From there he became a Script Editor on their sitcoms Birds of a Feather and then Goodnight, Sweetheart. Since then he has worked on My Family, Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps and Smoking Room. Recently, he has headed up the Comedy Academy. In the current scheme there are two writers from Northern Ireland and he has also run a BBC Northern Ireland radio comedy scheme.

And he had this to say:

Screenwriting Gurus – he doesn’t hold much store to taking a script and de-coding it. That’s only for people who can’t tell stories very well. So there!

You can write a script but directors and producers and casting can completely alter it. Never mind all the commissioners and controllers who put there tuppence worth in and can ruin it completely.

And with that he showed us an episode of Fawlty Towers, "The Kipper and The Corpse", details of which are here. And God, was it funny! Having not seen it in a while, it was interesting to see how well structured, written and performed it was. Every scene counts, every word, every action. And even though it is, at heart, based on farce, EVERYTHING that happens is character-based. When you look at it, there are actually only two or three true “gags” in the episode. Anyone wanting to seriously write sitcom could do worse than go study those episodes. Except, of course, that’s only for people who can’t tell stories very well….

It was also interesting to compare it to the sitcom we’d seen the day before. Humphrey Barclay had played us an episode of Agony (yes, I know, I didn’t mention that in yesterday’s write-up. So, sue me). Anyway, Agony was so much of it’s time – slow and not very believable and quite a “stock” sitcom. Fawlty Towers could still be shown today (in fact, it still is) and be a huge success. In going through the episode, Michael showed us how the first scene expertly sets up the hierarchy of the characters and the main plots, and is funny at the same time. There is also a sequence of 16 continuous scenes in the middle of the episode which creates huge forward energy and a sense of disaster. Michael described it as writing as choreography, and yet it feels and looks very unforced. Agony, by contrast, had lots of time shifts which really slowed it down.

Oh, and apparently it’s a well-known comedy rule that words with a hard “C” or a “K” are inherently funny. So get plenty of those in your scripts!

Michael then moved on to talk about My Family. Reiterating Humphrey Barclay from the day before, he reinforced teh point that you can’t change the characters too much. The audience wants to see the people/characters they know and feel comfortable with. Familiarity is the name of the game.

Unlike most UK sitcoms, My Family is based on the American model, in that it is team written and has a writer’s room. The creator is an American and was brought over to do just that. The writers all sit around in a big room and pitch in ideas and jokes, which doesn’t exactly allow for the writer’s voice, but should mean a higher percentage of jokes and also allows for more episodes, not just relying on the same writer to come up with all the episodes.

Birds of a Feather, in contrast, also had a team, but individual writers wrote specific episodes.

The writers on My Family get a salary and if they are credited with individual episodes (someone has to write the final script) they get a script fee too. However, there are writers in the room who have been there for years and never written an individual script. The show also has standing sets (as opposed to only putting the sets up on recording days) so that the cast rehearse on the sets all week and change things as they go along, with the writers in the “room” on hand to make those changes.

Finally, Micheal gave us the lowdown on the Comedy Academy.

It’s there to find writers and to give them a push.

Each writer has a mentor and they attend talks and take part in a residency week, at the end of which they all have a showcase of their work (15 minute pieces).

There are 6 places.

It's unclear how the academy will work in the future as funding isn’t clear.

An interesting point Michael made is that there are more sitcoms on CBBC than on BBC1 at the moment, so it’s a good thing to keep in mind when coming up with ideas.

Finally, as a word of warning, everyone is much more cautious at the moment because of funding issues. Sitcoms are very expensive to produce and rarely succeed. They are very hard to get right and you can’t second guess what the audience will go for. There are also more and more layers of people who can stop it at any stage of its development, or ruin it.

But hey, that’s not going to stop you, is it?

Back next time with Tim Loane and his excellent TV Drama writing session!

Be there.

Or don’t.

360° Festival 2010, Report 2: Writing Sitcom

After Paul Ashton's great introduction, Humphrey Barclay and Vanessa Haynes were next up with a session on writing sitcom.

Humphrey is a comedy legend who directed The Cambridge Footlights (John Cleese et al) and lots of radio and TV sitcoms, including Doctor in the House, A Fine Romance, Desmond’s, Spaced, etc. He is now, bizzarely, a Chief in Ghana!

Anyhoo, his Q & A was with Vanessa Haynes, who he worked with during the nineties. Vanessa has worked as a script editor on The Bill and now develops comedy and drama for Kudos Generator in the new office they have set up in Belfast, with the hope of finding new writing talent to take to network television and the nation. So, that’s all right then.

So, how did Humphrey start out?

He went to Cambridge, where he joined the drama groups, got lots of comedy parts, and was picked to do The Footlights. It was at about that time that the Monty Python lot came along and they all worked together, with Humphrey taking on the role of director. BBC radio, looking for new comedy talent, turned up and offered them all loads of work. Oh, the good old days! As a result, Humphrey developed and produced a lot of radio comedy. When Rediffusion was setting up (for you youngun’s, Redifussion was one of the original ITV contract holders for London) they offered him a job. Once there, Humphrey helped create shows such as “Do Not Adjust Your Set”. He also got Eric Idle from Monty Python to come up with ideas and people – Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Denise Coffey, David Jason.

Sitcom –there are some great ones and some truly awful ones. What is sitcom? What defines it?

Humphrey came up with a great definition of what makes a sitcom a sitcom. He really nailed it. Except our hero (me) didn’t manage to write it down in time. But it went something like this:

“An open-ended thirty minute TV series of comedy in narrative form, with some characters, in some setting, in some episodes. It’s called comedy because it’s primary intention is to amuse. And situation because it is always held/set in a permanent situation – occupational, familial, etc.”

And there you have it. Now, didn’t you think you knew that already. More to the point, could you write one? There were a few more words of wisdom Humphrey had to impart, which may help you on the way to sitcom heaven.

• The audience has a deep desire for the familiar. Like chess, like Wimbledon. Now, keep with me on this one, cause Humphrey had a good point here. What he meant was that we all know the rules of chess (errr…) and Wimbledon (err…) and, more to the point, we know what to expect from a game. At the same time, each game is different. So, great desire for the familiar, but surprise them.
• It has to be enclosed, so that we don’t waste time with setting and setting up. Compare the amount of sets and settings for something like My Family or Gavin and Stacey and dramas like Spooks.

VARIETIES OF SITCOM

Character based – Fawlty Towers

Relationship – Men Behaving Badly

Team – Doctor in the House

Romantic – Gavin and Stacey

Satire – The Thick Of It

Family – My Family

Occupational – The Vicar of Dibley

Star-based – The Cosby Show

Sci-Fi – Red Dwarf

What do they all have in common? They are all comic stories, featuring funny, original, interesting characters in conflicting relationships, built around a strong central idea that inexhaustibly generates comedy. That’s another sitcom definition in my book!

WHERE DO YOU START?

Humphrey gave the example of Desmonds (have a look at this pronto, young whipper-hipper-snappers). It’s basically a barber-shop comedy, but the barber-shop is West-Indian. It’s a family setup. It’s also a work comedy. And in the tradition of West-Indian barber shops, it’s the local drop-in centre for all and sundry. So far, so great, in terms of having a setting which allows for inexhaustible comedy ideas. A couple of other important points:

• Universal: you could take that show and set it anywhere. It was universal. And that is another important factor that you should have if you want a hit on your hands and lots of money in the bank – your concept has to be universal. However…
• Don’t try to appeal to everyone, or it won’t have a voice.
• Find your producer. They’re all different, and they all like different things. This is a good thing. The producer is out there who is gonna love your idea as much as you do, even when no-one else gets it.

And what makes a bad sitcom?

· Too long.

· Lack of focus.

It really comes down to characters in the end, and the two most important things to realize about character are:

• When they walk on we should know who and what they are.
• You, as a writer, walk all around them, and see all the other sides of them. Yes, you have to write types, but not stereotypes. Archetypes. And if you don’t know the difference between the two, don’t worry, that’s why I’m here. Well, that’s why wikipedia’s here. Have a gander at this.

PITFALLS

15 page introductions to ideas and scripts are NO GOOD and NO USE. It has to be on ONE (count ‘em…) ONE page.

Look at American sitcoms. They don’t have long speeches. Ours do. Which is better?

What makes the sitcom work has to be in Episode One. ie we have to know why we love it in episode one, and also what we are getting, so avoid making episode one all set up and not funny. It has to be the funniest episode. We will get the premise as it goes along, just give us a typically funny episode.

DON’T put things in brackets that the viewer doesn’t know and can’t see (ie character description). However, write things in the order they are seen. Ie. In the order you want the shots to pan out.

MULTI-CAMERA SITCOM

Played like theatre in front of a studio audience, with sets across a stage. There is ONE week of rehearsal and it is played out in real time, like a play, usually with 4 cameras in front of the stage to pick everything up and to move between sets, and then everything is mixed in the control room upstairs. Well, it used to be. Nowadays, it tends to be all recorded at this point and then mixed together later, which allows the director to choose the best shots. There are no LAUGHTER TRACKS, contrary to popular belief. Although, Humphrey did admit that the laughter was sometimes “augmented”.

Studio sitcoms also tend to have more jokes, which you should consider when deciding whether to write multi-camera with an audience or single camera. An audience-based sitcom usually has about 3 jokes to the page – if you have an audience sitting there, you have to keep the laughter coming.

When they were deciding on Spaced they decided NOT to go for a studio audience as the texture of the script was so reverential to film that it had to be cinematic in the way it was shot.

SINGLE CAMERA SITCOM

Shot like drama. Often on location. No audience. Not so many jokes.

Last minute advice from Humphrey?

Make page 1 fly!

Make sure your idea is open-ended, so don’t change or develop the situation too much. Surf your franchise – don’t change it!

The ideal pitch? 1 line, followed by a 3 line, followed by a paragraph.

And that's it! Thanks to Humphrey and Vanessa.