Comedy Writing for TV
The Big Happenings in my life have now abated somewhat, so I will be returning to this blog on a more regular basis. I noticed an interesting development elsewhere while I was meant to be doing something else.
This is the WritersRoom on the BBC website. They've set it up as a kind of resource centre-cum-point of contact for prospective writers. Or prospective writers for the BBC, at any rate.
Anyway, at the moment they have a particular project which I've been reading up on. They've set up a writing team and given them the idea for sitcom, (a bunch of cleaners in an office at night) and then told them to come back in twelve weeks with the script for the first episode.
And through the magic of technology, we can read all their script meetings, because they only meet online.
The Cleaners site also has the comments from their BBC editors, so you can see where they're going wrong from the script editor's point of view along the way.
What strikes me about this is first of all how hard it is for the writers to have to meet in chat rooms only. They all say that it is very frustrating when trying to understand somebody, or to get an idea across not to have all the little clues that looking at somebody face to face provides, or even hearing their voice on the phone.
The second thing is how poor the first draft of the script is. I did something like this in College, with a team of ten writers working on a radio series (we were cancelled, due to self destruction, just before our last episode). But we split into two groups once we had the characters all set, and the general arc of the series mapped out. Each group produced a ten minute script every two weeks. One group got together thrashed the whole thing out around a table, from plot to dialogue, while the other group took the approach the Cleaners people have and worked on the plot together, and then split up the writing duty for the scenes.
I can't say one produced any better quality than the other, but I do know that the group which split up had more personal difficulties than the other one. This was, partly, to do with the fact that people saw scenes as theirs, and were unwilling to alter or cut them for the good of the whole. It was also because one of the participants was a lunatic, but what can you do?
In the first draft of the Cleaners script, I can see where one person's contribution ends and another begins. What I can't see is a strong central story driving it on. The spine seems a bit mushy.
No doubt this will all be fixed in the second draft, but there is another problem, which I don't think will be fixed.
As each person only has a short piece to write, they are struggling to cram gags in, whether they're right for the character or story or not. Most of these are flat anyway, because they're based on the "Cheers" kind of inter-character banter familiar from American sit-com. But that only works if we're (a) familiar with the character, and so know what we're meant to laugh at about them, and also (b) if the pace of the programme is fast enough to let their characters zing at each other.
In Cleaners, they have a basically downbeat scenario. But they've made every character a one-liner machine. It gives me a sense of forboding reading it as we've seen this kind of failed attempt at one line heaven fail miserably on British TV before, a la "Babes in the Wood". It is disturbing that the commissioners still seem to take the view that their writers just aren't funny enough, when I feel that the format doesn't suit the way comedy appears on telly outside the US.
One Foot in the Grave, with its one writer and jet black world view is superior to any number of Friends episodes, exactly because the feelings and people are real, even if the events are bizarre.
Perhaps more on this again.
10:03:56 PM 
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