Episode 106 - Jonathan Coe

Welcome to sitcom gigs. I'm Dave Cohen. And I'm Dan Cairy. And we are at the Jourtle Book Festival, Jourtle Comedy Book Festival at the British Library.

Hey! Nice having a bit of a whoop-whoop for a book festival gig there. So we're very excited because this is, for the first time ever, on sitcom gigs we have a guest who is a novelist, in fact, a great comic novelist of one of the best in the country, Watte Carve up, Rottors Club, the Maxwell Sim, which I've immediately forgotten in the moment at the beginning of the Maxwell Sim title was, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. And most recently, a great new book out now called Middle England.

So please welcome Jonathan Coe. APPLAUSE Jonathan Coe, we'd like to say, obviously, first of all, welcome. Thank you very much for joining us this evening. And we sitcom gigs.

We normally talk about sitcom. So why you might think do we have a novelist with us? Well, if there was a question. Thank you.

Thank you. Good night. So in the sort of the Venn diagram of comedy, I suppose, James and I, we write sitcom and Jonathan writes novels. But in that sort of middle area of the Venn diagram, sitcom, I think, it's fair to say that you, Jonathan, are a bit of a fan of the genre.

Mm-hmm. That's true. Yep, and very much the Golden Era, really, I suppose, is obviously gone. Well, we would consider to be the Golden Era the 1970s.

Yeah, I'm looking at the audience and trying to gauge the average age of the audience members. I better not actually speak my calculations out loud, but it could be that some of the references, some of the very specific 1970s comedy references go over some people's heads. But some, you know, you talk about Golden Age. I think we all look back on whatever we were watching as a teenager, probably as the Golden Age of something or other.

And I don't know whether the 1970s really were the Golden Age of sitcom, but they were the age, it was the decade when I started watching sitcoms. Right. We had pretty rich pickings, I think, during that decade. We're going to talk in some detail, actually, about one of those, specifically.

And that's going to be a bit later. We'll talk about whatever happened to the Likeylads, which was the Likeylads. But that's probably the first time that phrase was used, whatever happened to. And that's become such a sort of, such a cliché now, hasn't it, that everybody didn't realise that's where it originated with Clement and LeFrenno now.

You say that you've loved sitcom, but you've never were actually drawn to writing sitcom, then, yourself. It's not that I've ever drawn to it, but no, I'm kind of very lazy. I wait for people to ask me to do things normally. And nobody has ever asked me to write a sitcom strangely enough.

So, you know, and I don't like, I'm not very good at those kind of commissioning meetings and that sort of thing. And writing pitches and all the sort of stuff that you're supposed to do. You're a writer. No writer is there ever any good in a pitching meeting, I think?

I suppose not, but, you know, the great thing about novels is you can just sit down in your room and get on with writing and you don't need anybody's permission. You don't need financial incentive necessarily. You can just do it. Yes.

And so, you know, in the first novel I sent off to a publisher was in 1976 when I was 15. And, you know, if I'd known anything about how sitcoms were commissioned or something like that, then maybe I would have been sending off sitcom scripts to the BBC, but I didn't. But I just thought, I'd read Pecun and that'll fit my partner's down for my spike, Milligan. And I saw that his publisher was called Michael Joseph.

And the address of the publisher was on the title page of the books, and I thought, well, that's easy. I'll just put this in a novel and send it to them. So it was the simplicity of the process that made me do it that way. And what happened?

You know, they rejected it. Well, yes. But did they do it nicely? Did they reject it nicely?

Yeah. Did they get back to you and what was the process? That first rejection letter ought to be ingrained on my memory. It seemed it.

Yeah. But I can't remember. I don't think there was a rejection letter. I think I was a slip.

I think I got a printed slip saying, sort of thanks, but no thanks. And I came back to that novel, I don't know, five or six years later, and reread it. And it was Saturday afternoon, my father was having a bonfire at the top of the garden, and I took it up, and I tossed it on the bonfire. It's the only thing of mine I've ever destroyed in the way.

Wow. And you're thinking, how much that could have got you on eBay now? No, I was embarrassed by the person that revealed me to have been when I wrote it. That was the problem.

It was just a bad piece of work on so many levels. Was it basically your teenage diary extended? No, it was basically a kind of original pairing rip off, I suppose, but done with none of the warmth and generosity and all of the kind of teenage self-confidence and that kind of thing. I just didn't like it at all.

This was a thing in the 70s as well, wasn't it? I remember watching Reggie Perrin, but also then becoming aware much later that they were novels as well as a sitcom, whereas actually I find out from you that lots of 70s sitcoms were made into novels. They were. I had a little shelf, well, it's the window ceiling in my bedroom actually, which was dedicated to comedy books.

So I had the Monty Python, Pappa Bock, whatever it was called, and the Big Red Book, and the Monty Python, the Holy Grail script, and that kind of stuff. I had a book about a book by Dick Emery, although I don't know if you really wrote it. I had Ronnie Barker's books. Dick Emery before you are awful, I like you.

Amazingly, it wasn't until I was a boy. Perhaps that's why it never flew off the shelves in the way that it might have done. I could imagine the book as a character. I could imagine the publishers maybe thinking, you are awful, can we put you are awful on the title of a book, even though it's the well-known country.

And then yes, there was the novel of whatever happens to like. That's first series. There were two or three porridge novelizations written in the first person as written by Norman Stanley Fletcher. Were these written by Clement Le Frannier or were they?

No, they were. I mean, years later, I wrote a biography of an experimental novelist called B.S. Johnson. And one of the people I interviewed for that was another experimental novelist of the 60s called Paul Ableman.

And when I interviewed him about his friendship with B.S. Johnson, I said in a very apologetic way, I'm afraid I've not read any of your books. And then we got talking about stuff, and he revealed one of the books he'd written was the novelization of the porridge movie. I said, oh, I have read one of your books, actually.

I read that book several times when I was a teenager. He wasn't very, he wasn't particularly pleased that that was the one with his books that I had singled out, but it turned out that I had. There was a good life novel. There was a man about the house novel.

That does surprise me, actually. I mean, I can see how good life, I can imagine, a novelization of something like the good life and porridge. But the man about the house doesn't quite feel it has that sort of the powerful storytelling that one might know. No, you're right.

You are right. But it's a much underrated sitcom I think, Man about the house anyway. But no, the novel is not high, even in the pantheon of sitcom novels, I don't think. Right.

Probably wouldn't make the top 10. So do you think that the fact that you own sitcoms, so your own novels or sitcoms, just sort of made the novel a plausible pathway for your, because even 20 years ago when I was starting out writing, being a script writer for the television was not really a thing. And now everyone wants to do that. And that's partly why this podcast exists.

And that's fine. But back, even in the late 90s, it's like, well, people just didn't know anyone that wrote scripts or anything. But being a novelist was sort of a thing, I guess. Do you think it was much affected by those sort of plausibility structures?

Yeah, definitely. I read articles and profiles of sitcom writers like Galton and Simpson and Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes and things. And it seemed completely other to the life I was living in. I was living in a suburb of Birmingham with my parents.

As I said, I could sit down at a table in my bedroom and write a novel if I wanted to. But it sounded to me as though to write sitcoms you needed an office in West London. You went to BBC, you went to meetings at White City and that kind of thing. And that just seemed so far removed from what I was doing.

I mean, I realized in retrospect that this wasn't the case. In fact, I remember talking to David Knobs. Two years ago, just before he died, about the fact which I hadn't been aware of. But in his very brief tenure as a commissioning editor at the BBC, he'd commissioned, I think he was.

What did he really have? He was. And his discovery. Where is Fortnite?

That was. His discovery was Ray Madallan and some others do have him. He, which he kind of plucked off the slush pile. And I said, who was Ray Madallan?

I never really heard anything else about what he wrote. And he just lived with his mother in the Isle of White. I think he sent these scripts in. I bet it.

So you can. So you can. It could be done that way, it turned out. But I didn't know that at the time.

I mean, it does sound to me, though. So on one hand, you said you were a bit lazy. And that's why you ended up writing novels. But the idea that you wrote a novel aged 15, does this kind of betray a possibly more precocious talent?

Well, yeah, I was kind of precocious in that way, I suppose. But it was the kind of unreachability of the TV comedy world that held me back, I think. Well, it's something very democratic about a novel, isn't it? Because you think, well, I could.

You can sort of, there's not rocket science to go, well, you just need to type about 80,000 words. You've got a novel. Whereas actually, a TV script is like an architect story. It's a blueprint for a TV show.

And so there's an extra layer there, which we might just think, well, I wouldn't know how to do that. Whereas actually, it was interesting reading of just the Rossis Club, which I very much enjoyed. And it did occur to me just quite how sitcomy the dialogue is quite often. It has a real rhythm of comedy.

Absolutely. And actually, you were wasting your life as an office, basically. You could have been a great signal writer. And you could still could be.

Come on, it's not over yet. Well, we said we were going to talk about whatever happened to the Lightlands and Nick Clemton Ian Lefrani later. But just let me tell this story, which is that when they adapted to the Rossis Club for television in 2004, they sent me the scripts. And I was very excited, obviously, to read what my, these great heroes have made in my work.

I was a bit disappointed because I was expecting lots of new Clemton Lefrani touches and lines. And this kind of thing. And we had a meeting about it. And I said, obviously, I love the scripts and how faithful they've been to the novels.

But I was hoping for a little, for a few new jokes and this kind of thing, and for them to rewrite the dialogue, basically. And they said, well, you're giving Clemton a re-write. This is amazing. And then they said, well, normally we do.

When we adapt a novel, we do rewrite the dialogue. But we didn't feel like it in this case, because the dialogue felt very familiar to us. And I said, well, that's because it's all based on your writing. That's right.

And I mean, seriously, the rhythms of that dialogue come straight from porridge and the like-a-lads. And they kind of felt that, I think, and didn't feel any need to do much to it. Wow, that's quite some feedback, isn't it? I mean, that's amazing.

Yeah. And you used to come, somebody's going to interview Clemton Lefrani and said, no, I never watched any of your shows. And then I said, oh, but I did read your adaptation of Jonathan Coase Rossis Club. And they won't be very pleased about it.

But apart from the dialogue as well, I think that I was thinking about, in particular, since I've been reading Middle England but in relation to your other books, there's also that the characters often feel like characters from sitcoms. I mean, Maxwell, Sim is a sort of lovable loser type. Benjamin Trotter is someone who's a few of these characters who are Michael Owen in Mottakaw. They've got this sort of obsessed thing.

They're obsessed with them. They're always trying to get the thing that they're never actually going to be able to get, which is a sort of classic sitcom character. Well, I think that the things you watch and the things you read as a teenager are the things that stamp themselves most strongly and irremoveably on your consciousness. Maybe that's just me, but it's certainly true in my case.

And I just wasn't reading any contemporary fiction or any contemporary novels when I was a teenager. I couldn't have named Kingsley Amos or Iris Murdock or Margaret Dravel or these people who were big in the 70s. I just didn't know who they were, but I did know who Clemton Lefrani and Esmin Alabi and Eric Chackel and David Knobs and all these people. I was watching their shows obsessively.

So it's no wonder really that those kind of characterizations, the kind of rigspies and the original pairings and the George Ropers from Man about the House, people like that are the ones who find their way into my books. Right. You know, subsequently, when Cambridge just, I started reading proper literature. I did a PhD on the 18th century novel.

So all sorts of proper literary influences started coming in, but they were secondary, really, to the sitcom influences. Right, OK. So I share it and all these people who were second to a man about the house. Absolutely.

Yeah. Good. Just to go back to that, then diagram that I mentioned at the start. And this is a name that's already come up a few times.

David Knobs is actually one of the few people I can think of who has had a very successful career as a sitcom writer and a novelist. And I mean, I know he always thought of himself as a novelist first and a sitcom writer second. But a couple of the things that, I mean, he used to say that I thought would work that, and again, I see them in your novels, I think, some extent that he talks about. The attention to detail.

He says that all comedy is attention to detail. And there's a lot of the beautiful moments in there. But also, he talks about the fact that all comedy is cruelty. Do you know what the comedy is?

Comedy is cruelty. And this is certainly a lot of warmth in David's books. But there's a darkness in his books as well. I remember watching original career on television and getting about three episodes in.

And then I went to the W.H. Smith in Bronzgrove, my nearest bookshop. And suddenly there was Leonard Roster on the front of a book. And I realized that this series was a book as well.

So I bought that and kind of started reading it ahead of the TV episodes. So I was kind of ahead in the book of what was being broadcast. And I realized that the book itself was very dark, very melancholy, very surreal in the second half. And that was a kind of revelation to me because I thought that there was funny and there was serious.

And I didn't realize that the two things could go inside. And really, David's novel was the first thing that made me realize that combination was possible. I read it almost at the same time in my life, I think, that I read Catch 22 by Joseph Heller, which also, in a very different way, made me realize the same thing. But that was the point at which I realized that comedy and seriousness could sort of coexist.

Did you read all of Catch 22? Because I read all of it, assuming that everyone reads all of it, and discovered that virtually everyone I know gave up after about two thirds because they got the idea. Everyone read all of it, read to the end? Yeah, I read to the end.

You read to the end. Excellent. Good. But yeah, I keep meeting people and said, yeah, I kind of, yeah, once you read two thirds of it.

But if you were enjoying it, why would you stop reading Catch 22 thirds of it? It's more of the same. It is great. It really feels like more of the same, doesn't it?

But no, I enjoyed it. And one of the few occasions my reading have it's made me feel more like superior to people because I've actually finished that one, which is unusual. The great thing about Joseph Heller, I think, when somebody asked him a journalist asked him, and you must be very tired of journalist asking you stupid questions, is a journalist asked Joseph Heller about how you coping with coming up with a sequel or writing another book that comes up to the quality of Catch 22? I can't remember exactly how the question was phrased.

But the punchline was, eventually, well, who has? Who's written the book that's better than Catch 22? And you just think, oh, bloody imagine sitting under that. But at the same time, acknowledging the fact you've written a really, truly an amazing book.

And I should remember the set up to that punchline much better than I did. But you get the idea with that. But yes, there's a melancholy there, isn't there? And actually, in Reggie Perry, it's interesting how the despair and the comedy are slightly separate.

Because actually, in porridge, I'm thinking of some really long and serious moments where the audience are aching to laugh and they give you a laugh. I'm thinking particularly of when Godba has been told to throw the fight, the boxing one. And he sort of says, and he's saying to Godba, you can't go down, you can't go down in the second. And Godba says, oh, it's all right.

I'm going to go down in the first. And it's that lovely audience. It's like, hooray, it was a joke after all. But with Perry, episodes ending with him just screaming.

Yeah. Anything wrong behind me? This is quite a dark heart, isn't it? Yeah, I think David was always very proud of that side of his work, really.

In the early 90s, when I was reviewing books for the Sunday Times, I normally reviewed whatever they asked me to do. And the choice of books was theirs. But I noticed that David had a book coming out called The Cucumber Man, which I asked if I could review. And the literacy was very, very surprised.

You want to review that? And I said, yes, I do. So I wrote a rave review. And the concluding line of which was that I said that I thought David Knobs was probably our finest post-war comic novelist.

And the guy at the Sunday Times said, you realize that that line is going to be on every David Knobs paper back from now on. And I said, that's fine. That's fine by me. I'll stand by it.

And sure enough, it was on every David Knobs paper back from then on, until towards the end of his life when David asked his publishers to take it off. And he told me this. And I said, why have you done that? And he said, I didn't really like it.

And I said, there was a word in there that I didn't like. And I thought he meant probably. I thought he objected to the word probably in that verdict. But he said, no, it's the word comic.

He felt that being referred to as a comic novelist diminished what it was that he'd done. And I thought that was a very interesting thing for him to feel at that point in his career, really, that he felt it was a millstone around his neck somehow. Yeah. Because he wasn't an arrogant person at all.

No, not at all. You could take that to mean somebody who's just saying, or one of those people who says, oh, comedy's not as important as drama. He certainly wasn't coming at it from that point of view. Do you feel that you've suffered from a bit of that in terms of people just say that your books are sort of funny and therefore they take them less seriously?

I mean, that's the case. Undoubtedly with Hollywood movies, it's that if you've done a comedy, you're not winning an Oscar. I mean, that's just a key. Comedy films do not win Oscars, even though anyone who's works in comedy knows how incredibly difficult is comedy, because it needs to have a drama structure to it and have jokes, which is incredibly difficult.

Do you feel that you might have sort of gone more serious for more acclaim or anything like that? Not really. I don't think so. I mean, it's true that none of my novels have come within sniffing distance of a literary prize for about 20 years.

But I don't think that's because they're sometimes funny. I don't know what it is. I think it's just bad luck or something. But no, I don't get the sense of that's the reason.

When I published a novel called The Rain Before It Falls about 10 years ago, which is so uncomical that it's almost comical, the lack of jokes, the grimness of the storyline, and that kind of thing. I think at that point I did, one of the things going on in the back of my mind at that point was, well, this is an interesting test case. I didn't write it for this reason. But let's see if this gets shortlisted for any prizes.

I didn't. So it's obviously not the humour that's done it. I mean, the British, English, even have a strange ambivalent relationship to this in a way, because I think you're right, there is the same kind of Oscar thing going on in the comic novels with the exception of recently how Jackrubsen's The Finkler Question was, which one the book tend not to be up for the big prizes. And at the same time, we pride ourselves on our Woodhouse and our even war and our David Lodge and this kind of thing, and the so-called great English sense of humour.

But somehow they're not seen to coexist in the same universes. Yeah, I don't know. I find it very strange. We were talking earlier before about how, yeah, either a book is a comedy or it's not.

It can't be one thing and a comedy. So you can be a Terry Pratchett and have a fantasy comedy and that sort of a thing now. But I was telling earlier, my failed novel is called Crosswood and I wrote it and it's basically Robert Harris with jokes. That's not a thing.

And so I'm literally agent, they are probably better for novels than they are for screenwriting. They just couldn't get a publisher to do it. And because it's just like we don't know what to do with this. Just tell people it's Robert Harris with jokes.

It's just like nobody wants that. OK, so 80,000 words, I'm not going to get back still. Harry on. This possibly feels like a good time to bring up Middle England.

Now we try not to talk about Brexit in the Sick Congeeks podcast because that way only leads to despair and anger and everything else. But actually it's kind of hard to not talk about Brexit. I just see a quick show of hands of people who've read Middle England so far. Yes, we have to.

Very good. Well done. Who are reading it at the moment. OK, and then the rest of you, of course, are going to buy it.

That's one. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I'll take 10% of that.

Yes. So I've read it and it certainly is amazing novel. I think it's sort of cover. It's quite epic and it really seeks to kind of get underneath, I think, the whole reasons for Brexit.

So it's not just about the actual vote itself, but it kind of starts fittingly, I think, at that point where Gordon Brown is met by Gillian Duffy, I think, with the starting points. And is she inadvertently caught on my friend calling her a sort of bigoted woman? Yes. Oh, yes.

Someone I read someone said, no, it was actually big-hearted woman. Yeah. I'm not playing for trying. Yeah.

I was somewhat glad it's a step-to, I think. So that's what I said. I said that. Credit people.

But there's just a little bit I thought I'd quite like. Wow, you're going to read from his novel in front of him. Wow. Go on then.

Would you rather than novelist himself? Very bold. I have merely opened the page and said, well, I'm going to read it. Oh, I'm going to read it.

Would you like to read it? We haven't read it with your agents. No, that's true. What do you like?

Well, it's about the basically, I mean, should I fill in the little bit of the story? It's without giving away too much. There are two characters who split up who are in a relationship, who split up because one voted leave and one voted remain. And they go and see a therapist after this to try and kind of work out their feelings.

And that's the kind of point at which so that the top of the page, I don't know. Yep. It's not very funny this bit. I have to warn you, babe.

During their first session a few weeks later, their relationship counselor, Lorna, told them that many of the couples she was seeing at the moment had mentioned Brexit as a key factor in their growing estrangement. I usually start by asking each of you the same question she said, Sophie, why are you so angry that he invoked leave? And Ian, why are you so angry that Sophie voted remain? Sophie had thought a long time before answering.

I suppose she said because it made me think that as a person he's not as open as I thought he was. That his basic model for relationships comes down to antagonism and competition, not cooperation. Lorna had nodded and turned to Ian who had answered. It makes me think that she's very naive, that she lives in a bubble and can't see how other people around her might have a different opinion to hers.

And this gives her a certain attitude, an attitude of moral superiority, to which Lorna had said, what's interesting about both of those answers is that neither of you mentioned politics. As if the referendum wasn't about Europe at all. Maybe something much more fundamental and personal was going on, which is why this might be a difficult problem to resolve. There we go.

Thank you. That is a sitcom weeks first. Yes. Nolvist reading from own novel on sitcom gigs.

But I think the reason that struck a chord with me was that I was thinking I did a speech earlier this year at a comedy festival. We were talking about sitcom and the English character. And the thing that I was thinking about really was how Nigel Farage and I probably don't have anything in common at all. But sit us in a room together watching Dad's Army.

And we would probably both sit there and laugh a lot. And I was just wondering if you thought that maybe comedy maybe is a way through. I mean, you've navigated it. I thought that passage shows how you've navigated in a book in a way that resonates with the people who pro-Arranzi can read and can get stuff from.

Do you think that comedy might be a way? I know. I'm sort of freaked out by this idea of sitting in a room with Nigel Farage watching Dad's Army, actually. I mean, I'm not looking forward to it.

I'm sad, frankly. I love Dad's Army, but I think that might suck all the pleasure out of it for me. It's not a request of Nigel Farage, don't you? And here he is now.

I wonder what the big screen was for? Well, Robert Ape. That doesn't mean I'm watching Dad's Army with Nigel Farage. That sounds like an Alan Partridge picture.

It's a TV show, doesn't it? Anyway, sorry. I've done a few events recently, actually, where people in the audience, we've been talking about Brexit and people in the audience have brought up Dad's Army and brought up the fact that it's the only BBC so comfortably, which has been repeated non-stop for 20 or 30 years on prime time to rest real honest, honest day night, and whether there's something about it which strikes a chord with Brexit or has inspired Brexit or something like this, this image of the plucky Brits standing alone against Europe and being a bit useless and amateur about it, but still there's something in their spirit which pulls them through. I mean, I find it is a very Brexit-y sitcom in some ways.

I think, as James will frequently mention, it's the most popular comedy show on BBC Two, Week in, Week in, Week in, it always wins the ratings, pretty much. I think it sort of appeals to both sides in some ways. I think you can watch it as a remainder and see it as a, yeah, actually, the European Union that was the collective thing that was formed after the fact that to make sure that there wouldn't be a thing like the Germans having the power against. You can have that kind of, again, it's a sort of slightly melancholic thing, isn't it, of the feeling of loss, and then, but similarly, as you say, it's us against the Germans and so it can work both ways.

I mean, there are two kinds of humour in Middle England, I think. There are five chapters which, as you pointed out to me, when we were talking in the Green Room just now, have a kind of slight yes-minister feel to them, and which feature a David Cameron aide, a press spokesman talking to a journalist, and they're five set-piece dialogues, and they're there really to take the reader through the whole absurd process of how the referendum was mismanaged, how its results took everybody in the government by surprise, and this kind of thing. And it's quite kind of full on satirical in that yes-minister way, and then with the other characters, the characters to whom the referendum happens, if you like, the ordinary people of Middle England and London who make up the rest of the constant characters, there is a kind of warmer, gentler comedy just of human interactions such as Benjamin's, the fair that Benjamin finds himself having in his late 50s and the absurd 16 and this kind of thing. And I think, with that second vein of comedy, that sort of gentler, more human comedy, there is maybe a hope in the back of my mind when I was writing that, that one of the ways that we can start lighting each other again as a nation and enjoying each other's companies again as a nation is through humour, and just through that finding of a kind of humour, a common ground.

So I don't push that in the book or anything like that, but I suppose there is a kind of slightly tentative optimistic sense that humour might be something that eventually reconciles to each other again. I think it's an even taller order now than it ever was in the 70s or 80s, because now everyone has their own screen. People don't have to watch things together like they used to. Previously, I can still remember there being only three channels, and you basically watch what you were told.

And so, I mean, there were no water coolers back then, but if there had been, people would have been discussing mostly the same shows of the water cooler at work, because there was a shared experience. But I mean, sitcom is already mainstream, so broad sitcom already is a very, very tall order to get commissioned and to be widely accepted and all that kind of stuff. And to sort of put it under the pressure of, we need one of these to save our country. It's like, oh, wow, let's talk about pressure.

I wonder if this, though, takes us from, they're going from Dad's Army and the book into the likely lands, though, because actually it's interesting hearing, because I've sort of come back to the likely lands, whatever happens to the likely lands, I've watched it on YouTube, and I've watched it about four or five episodes over the last few weeks, and just thought, what an interesting sitcom it is in terms of, it feels like Britain at a bit of a crossroads. And you've got one chap who's moving on and one chap who feels left behind. And it's mostly talking. It's just what happens to like, none the worst for it as well.

So what is it originally then you're watching it, because you were possibly unaware of the importance of the show, I guess, when you were first watching the first one, incredibly precocious teenager. What was it that grabbed you? Just a backtrack for a moment. There is a couple of characters in Middlingland are overtly nostalgic themselves for the 1970s, and in fact, specifically bring up this point, famously the Morgan-wise Christmas show of 1977 was seen by 21 million people and drew the whole nation together.

And then I have a character at the end of the book who is a nation woman in her 20s saying, well, I don't want to go back to 1970s. It sounds like an absolute shit time for somebody like me. And I've had people make this point to me before that this idea that comedy back in the 1970s brought the whole nation together involves a very restrictive sense of what the whole nation was, and that, you know, 76 comments and comments shows were often very uncomfortable viewing for women, for the way they were sexualized for black people, for gay people. These minorities were often just used as figures of fun and figures of really cool.

One of the things I like about whatever happened to the like-lads, and Dick Clemton, Ian Lefranay's writing generally, is that with a couple of lapses, they didn't do this at all, and the shows are very generous towards all the characters, and are often very progressive in their social history, but that wasn't something that struck me when I was watching them at the time. I think what struck me about what ever happened to the like-lads when I first saw it, and I suppose I would have been about 13, was it already, it was a show about nostalgia and about the passing of time, and about friendship and how friendship changes over time. And something about this must have struck a chord with me, and it's been a theme throughout all of my books, all of my books are about how people cope with aging and about how they cope with time passing and how you reconcile it often. And just the theme tune, you know, whatever happened to me, whatever happened to you.

It's the only thing to look forward to is the past. You know, it's quite a serious line for the theme tune of a sitcom, and I found a great depth in the characterizations, and I really liked the way that Thelma, Bob's wife, puts us the kind of sticking point in their friendship without herself ever being made fun of, or without the audience ever being asked to do anything other than sympathize with her, really, because she's kind of the tragic heroine of that sitcom, because she's stuck trying to make a go of her marriage with Bob, and really the real love story in Bob's life is his friendship with Terry. And I found that very poignant and very well-handled by Dick and Ian. No, it is as range as you know, you mentioned that.

And I hadn't really spotted that, that she is never the annoying wife who is demanding or this and that actually, she just has an entirely reasonable request that her husband is not obsessed with his childhood friend, who is actually a bit of a waste of space, and is self-pitying and nostalgic. But again, we understand why he's like that. It feels like he does feel left behind, doesn't he, by how everything is moved on, and these great big housing estates are being built in the middle class are now building a nice home for themselves. And he's thinking, well, what about me?

Yeah, no, it is very powerful in that sense. Yeah, and that's the thing you mentioned there that I hadn't really thought of about that sitcom. What is that sort of brexity sense of the nostalgia of a time that has gone? And that's very much what the, the likely ads that time, you know, we're young, we've got a bit of money, you know, we're out chasing women.

The original black and white success series. Yes, and so there is very much a sense that that time has vanished, but that Terry wants to recreate that time. He wants to go back, I think the sense maybe Terry is a little bit of a Brexit, I suppose. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Bob is a remain, maybe. Oh, definitely, yeah, definitely. Yeah, there's the famous episode where they're trying to avoid hearing the football results. There's a great scene in that, which, as you say, it's just a long dialogue scene of the two talking in the pub.

It has nothing to do with the main trajectory of the episode. Which doesn't actually have one. Yes, get onto that. But yeah, it's just Terry talking about how he dislikes and distrusted every other nation in the world.

And he starts with Asian countries and then moves and goes all the way through Europe, stereotyping every single European country. And finally, he says he doesn't like the Scots, he doesn't like the Welsh, he doesn't like the Irish, he's not that keen on the people he live up his street. And yeah, there's a little doubt about how he would have voted in the referendum, I don't think. Right.

The thing about the episode, I did watch that. And that is the only episode I can never remember watching when I was much, much younger when they must have repeated it in the late 80s or something. Yeah. I remember thinking to myself, oh, it's interesting to watch that because I bet you there's this really interesting subtext of the show's not really about them not trying to find out the football school.

I watched it and it's just about them. Not trying to find out the football school. There isn't a long running B plot, which is actually secretly the AP plot. And I just thought, oh, that's interesting.

But because it's such a not that good an episode. But I did wonder if the thing that I was envious of in a way of watching that is like, but it didn't matter because this was episode one of a sitcom. And the BBC had four sitcoms on that week. And this was just another one of them.

And they just didn't overthink it like that. And now every single episode of every single episode of every single new sitcom is sort of really minutely examined. And it's sort of like the impossible burden now being put on for the benefit of this. And I know how my head in my hands is impossible.

I was actually these guys, which is kind of cranking out episodes because they did because they were writing porridge pretty much at the same time. And you just think, well, I'm not for that for cranking out. That's pretty good, isn't it? But I was quite surprised that the lack of subtext, actually.

But it was just a very watchable episode. It was a very simple premise. And you're right. That's one of the ones from that series that everybody remembers because it was repeated so often.

And the reason it was repeated so often was it was self-contained and didn't have anything to do with the other episodes. Because what people forget about what happens to like is that it was a serial. And as far as I was concerned as well, it was a novel, because I had the novelization of it. And that episode is not in the novelization, because it's not part of the story.

It's not part of the story of Terry coming home and Bob getting married. So I can quote a line from lots of the other episodes. I don't know that episode, particularly because it's not in the novel. That's very interesting.

That's also another change I think that's happened in terms of comedy writing. And that age as well as watching Clement LeFrennay and Gordon Simpson watching those sitcoms. I was also going to see comedy plays by people like Alan Plater and Colin Welland. And these were comedy, these were very funny plays.

And these people were then writing sitcoms. They were writing dramas. And there wasn't the distinction that we have now, where you are very much a sitcom writer. And sitcom episodes were dramas as well.

And there was more room for the drama in the way that we don't have now. And producers had the courage to go four or five minutes without a big laugh from the studio audience. If you look at that episode of Porridge, where it's just Fletcher and God by having a night in the cell by themselves, there's a little laughter on that soundtrack for a long, long time. You're listening to sitcom gigs, a quick reminder that James and I both have books out at the moment.

James's book, The Sacred Art of Joking, published by SPCK Publishers. That's available from lots of good book shops, I understand. And my own book, The Complete Comedy Writer, is available on lots of computers. And also, I'm going to be running some classes end of February, beginning of March, teaching, writing for sitcom and for stand up and also for topical comedy and comedy drama.

All the details for that and how to get my book are on my website from page.devcoin.org.uk. Don't forget to listen to the Paul May Who Archer podcast that we did that went out a couple of weeks ago. It's absolutely packed with information and that recommended by Metro newspaper, No Lesser. So there you go.

And also, we're going to be doing a podcast fairly soon with Pretty Up To Date. Lots of big stories happening in the world of comedy. But if you do have any questions for us, please let us know. And we can get a sitcom gigs at gmail.com or find us on Facebook or come and join us on our Patreon page.

That's a sitcom gigs, Patreon slash sitcom gigs. Hope to see you there, where we are creating a brand new sitcom live as we speak. OK, back to Jonathan. OK.

We should offer some questions to the assembled several. You're probably thinking, why aren't they asking him about X? So we should probably do that. So if you have a question, formulate it, whilst Dave asks one last question.

Do you have any particular last burning questions? I've now taken you by a spy store. Yes. What question should we be asking Jonathan code?

Does anyone have a question for our? There's a stunned silence, everyone smiling at us. Very nicely. Edit out the stunned silence.

We did. We did. And personally, you're not even so relevant. Which kind of comes first of you?

I thought you were trying to melt the politics into the personal life forecast. That's a really interesting question. And I'm amazed that I've never been asked that before. But I don't think I have been.

You've got a better quality question here. Absolutely. Yeah. I think the only answer I can give to that is that my first three novels really had no political content at all, no social content.

They were just personal stories about relationships. And there was something about them that didn't gel and didn't take off. And then I wrote a novel called Watercarve, which specifically, I suppose, I thought to myself that I wanted to write a novel about the effects of Thatcherism. And the idea behind it actually was a kind of fantasy I had of getting someone like, why doesn't someone get someone like Michael Dobbs, who knows who at the time was famous for knowing how the ins and outs of Westminster works and putting that into fiction, to show how policies is made in the Westminster bubble, if you like, and then get someone like Ken Lucha, literally equivalent to see how those policies actually impact on people in real life and just to kind of meld those two approaches to storytelling.

And I thought, well, obviously, I can't make that happen, but I could try to write a book which sort of does that in a way. So I think in the case of Watercarve, and maybe even Midland as well, the idea that came first was OK, Thatcherism or Brexit, and how does that impact? So the political context came first. But I have to depart from that quite quickly and quickly create some believable characters or revisit some believable characters and devise some kind of engaging storylines around them because otherwise the politics is not going to mean anything to the reader.

It's not going to have any kind of emotional impact on them. So I would say probably that the political backdrop comes first, but I quickly leave that behind. That's a similar thing with number 11 as well. Yeah, yes, I suppose so.

The story between the relationship between the two girls who were eight at the beginning and the 20s at the end, that's the kind of key thing that's engaged me in occupying while I was writing the book. But it was important to have the political imprecises as a starting point. And you do have these recurring characters, and I suppose Middle England is whatever happened to the Rotters Club. There's an alternative title for that, I suppose.

But I was thinking that the Wishawall family, who seemed to basically control Britain. And are we going to see more of them? Do you think? I don't know, actually.

I don't know what I'm going to write next to them. I haven't really made that decision. Is that the exciting time for you? Because you don't actually have to do anything yet.

You sort of just get to Doodle and, you know, it's terrifying. It's a bit terrifying. I mean, I'm always edgy when I haven't got a book on the go, and I don't really have a book on the go at the moment. So the sooner I can get back to one, the better.

But talking about the balance between character and politics, I mean, I never talk much about Yes, Minister, even though it's actually one of my favourites at Conton, kind of an obvious one to talk about, because it's so political. But I think it's so politically astute and brilliant. Yes, Minister, people tend to forget just what great characters Kim Hacker and Sahumfri and the Derek Foll's characters and Bernard were. And there's a human interplay between those three, who are so engaging and so beautifully judged.

And I think you kind of forget that what they're actually talking about a lot of the time is Bill's passing through the house for Commons and that kind of thing, because the emotional, really subtext to all of it is so strong as well. And it still works. You can watch it now, and it's still funny. And although I do like what the thick of it did, and I've seen every episode of the thick of it and very much enjoyed it, it's sort of showing a different side of politics.

You can now still go back to Yes, Prime Minister. And when they're talking about educational policy, you go, yeah, exactly the same discussion as being had now. The words are slightly different than names of it. But ultimately, there's something, and there's such a good job at not taking sides.

And it's interesting, because I used to watch it at a university with a friend of mine, and he was always on Hackerside. You know, he was always on Humphreyside, and I was always on Hackerside. And we couldn't understand why the other one would support. I couldn't understand why he was so pro-civil servant, and he couldn't understand why I was so pro- this idiot, Prime Minister.

But I remember watching it when it was first broadcast, just because I loved the warmth of it, and I just wanted to be with those three people in the room for half of that. And then I watched it again when it was rerun ten years ago or something, I thought, god, this is a cynical show. And it really doesn't cut anybody any slack at all, but you kind of barely noticed that at the time. And that's just what he was saying about the minister thing, is that point about comedy, about having those two polarised points of view sitting together in a sitcom, so that people who are completely different ends of the political spectrum can watch a show like Till Death is New Park, and it can be the most popular show.

And everyone can say, oh, I love it, because I just love that alfghana. I love it because I hate that alfghana. Or I love the Tony Booth character. Anybody want to talk about that?

It's a pretty good time for one more question. Anyone's got one? Yes. I was wondering if you think that there's an issue with a lot of people thinking comedies about escapers, and when actually it might be, you know, I certainly think it can be a very powerful way of facing up to book victory and not going.

Yeah, I mean, I'm so much of your point of view in this respect, that I never really think about comedy as escapers, I imagine. But yes, we can escape into laughter. And sometimes I think the story of how we've got ourselves into the mess we're currently in is partly to do with that. And that our political comedy and our satiric tradition is so strong and so good that we've kind of relied too much on it in the last few years.

And I think that we've got to be a part of the political comedy and the way that we've got to be in the last few years. I mean, the example I always give of this really is the rise to fame of Boris Johnson and how have I got used to you kind of facilitated and enabled that. And we got so used to laughing at him and laughing with him actually because he was laughing at himself at the same time. We kind of didn't really notice what an ambitious figure was kind of sneaking up into the center of the political stage.

And... What happened to be in the room with him at the time? Right, which you were. I thought it was in the case.

Maybe if you were closer, closer proximity than you did. Well, there's also the counterpoint to that is how something other day about how interesting it was that William Hage was a bit of a disaster for the Conservative Party and he sort of didn't come across well and all that kind of stuff. And once he basically jacked it all in, he hosted a barreuse for you and actually did it rather well. It turned out quite a good sense of humour.

And so you just think, oh, if you've been like that, I think it might have been, you know, the toys were annihilated. He wasn't going to make any great comeback from blowers in for ten years and that was nailed on. But it's interesting how it was missing, you know, he sort of like Hage withheld that from himself and actually he seems like a man very comfortable in his own skin and those things. And seems like the opposite of an ambitious person as well.

So, Johnson was like, he was like a big name comedian that I think of. And he was just like a monster in the room. But then as soon as the light came on, it was like the charm, you know, then as soon as the camera switched on. That's when the charm comes on and that's the character that everybody sees.

And it is a character very much. I remember there was a very funny sketch. I can't remember who wrote it, but when I was conducting a recording of a training purposes, somebody's writing a sketch which basically just said, it was the announcement that Boris Johnson is a hoax. And they had these sort of two people who created this character and had no idea that it was going to get this far.

You just think that's such a great idea, isn't it? And then sort of how it feels on the day to day. It was like a little moment in outnumbered. So they have a German exchange student who comes to stay with the family.

And he's talking to the family about, he said, I love your British humour. I love your British comedians. Ricky Gervais, he's funny. And the other one as well, the blonde one.

The funny blonde one, it is a news show. Boris Johnson, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, he's coming to me watching him in Germany. He's the funny guy. Oh my goodness.

Yeah, no, yeah, I'm sure. Yes, Europe is doomed, isn't it? Discuss. We should probably wrap our mission.

We don't. Yes, thank you very much. And can we please round the applause for our guest golden coach? Thank you.