Episode 111 - Polishing Your Script

Hello and welcome to sitcom geeks. I'm James Caring. I'm Dave Cohen and you join us on a episode where we'll be thinking ahead about the BBC writers from Window which will be opening and closing or it's currently open and closed. It closes at the end of this month which is April the 29th.

That's right. Monday the 29th of April is when it ends and so that's when it closes so your script will need to be in for then. So we'll talk a little bit about that but before we do that we're going to mention a quick email we've had from Bill Thomas. Is he one of our page on subscribers?

He's not. He could be. He could be one. He could be one.

He said he's enjoying our podcast which he's just come across and listen to the one which we recommend that you listen to. We did last year with Simon Nelson, Amanda Farley, our BBC writers room. We get lots of very helpful specific advice from the people who will be looking at your script. So they are the right people to listen to.

That's episode 73 I think all round about there. Yeah. I've said Congeeks. But Bill says who he's about 30 episodes in now.

He said would you be up for discussing royalties and residuals for sitcoms sometime? Yes, we would. Possibly not this episode because we want to be pretty much up and running with the details for the deadline for the sitcom. But just a very quickly mention that the recent EU directive which quite possibly will still apply whether or not we stay in the EU.

It's one of those things that may continue that keeps some of the copyright. It's a losing battle I think to fight the internet, the giants of the internet, the Amazon's and the apples. So what's the EU directive doing? It's holding on to the royalties that are made from repeats of shows on YouTube that find their way onto the internet from pirating or whatever.

So it's a way that writers and performers who get royalties and these royalties are being eroded, have been eroded for the last 10, 15 years. And people like the writers gilled out our battling to hold on to them. So this EU directive forcing companies to pay writers for the work they've done. Strange, but yes, that's what they're doing.

So if you are against the idea of us being a member of the EU, this is a one I know we get told off by someone for being too political on sitcom weeks, but this is the one occasion I would say actually it is in your interest to be in the EU if you are a comedy writer. Yes, I agree to differ on this. I do differ on this. But to a complete different angle really, I think people tend to assume that maybe you assume you're not, that I've been a professional comedy writer pretty much since the age of about 22 and I'm now about 43.

That I would therefore even know what the difference between residuals and royalties. I don't know the difference. I could probably guess. But all I know is that it's quite a complicated area.

I have an observation. One is that my agent gets money for various things occasionally. And I look at it and wonder where it came from and discover, oh, this must be some episode from my episode of my family that I wrote for Series 5, which happens to star Peter Capaldi. And I've got 40 quid for that because it was on British Airways on one route, not to me.

But I don't even know the details of most of those things. I get money from Miranda because I can't write the first two series and I can't tell whether that's DVD sales or repeats or anything like that. And the impenetrable, one thing I could do is I could insist that all of those accounts are audited so that I'm ensuring that I get paid the right amount of money. But if I discover I have been paid the right amount of money, I then have to pay for the entire audit.

And so overall, residuals and royalties sort of turn up in unreliable chunks, both large and small, mainly small. And so a couple of observations, one is therefore, don't join the EU, but do join the Writers Guild. That would help because we have collective bargaining power. That would be very helpful.

Also, if you're a writer who's had any credits at all, join the ALCS because they magically scrape money out of somewhere. I have no idea where or how. And so you get residuals and royalties or something from bits and pieces. You also get a thing called secondary use.

I don't really want to go into the details of that here, but yes, we should discuss what these different things are and how they are being lost. So join the Writers Guild in order to add your voice to make a louder voice. But the other thing is going back to other episodes where we say make your own stuff. If you publish your own books, you will make six, seven times of the amount you would have done.

And you can be a publisher of your own. So there are some swings around about. I don't know what swings around about this are in this metaphor. But at least it's not all bad.

And you can, in some senses, take control. And if you do get a hit, it is going to make you quite a lot of money at some point. Right because you have to. Don't write for the money because the money is never enough.

And even if you really like money and you make lots of it, it still won't ever be enough. I think it was Carnegie when they asked him how much money do you need? He said just a little bit more. So money is the Bible warns against God and you know, God and the Mammon.

You cannot serve both masters. And I'm aware that many are not interested in serving God and I understand that. But Mammon is a terrible. And people are fooled as well because of the great Dr.

Johnson quotes of the no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. But actually we write all the time for no money. I mean, for instance us creating our sitcom out of nothing. Nobody's commissioned that.

So we're just doing that because we love the idea of it. So if you want us on Patreon, you'll be able to hear our Patreon only series called sitcoms suit to nuts. We have been commissioned by each other. Yes, to create a new sitcom.

And we're partly doing it as an exercise to hear how a sitcom will be created. And we hope to see it from original idea all the way through to a radio script read through in front of an audience and recording and everything. So if you want to listen to that, then join us on Patreon. Go to our Patreon page.

And also if you go to our Patreon page and Dave's website, you will find BBC writers room hot tips for what's probably wrong with your script. So let's talk about that now. Just to make absolutely clear, David and I do not, are not employees of the BBC. We are freelancers who sometimes work for the BBC.

I've recently done a bit of work for the BBC writers room on a freelance basis. But I don't work for them. They are good eggs. And so I just want to make it, you know, this is not, and we're not really telling you anything that you wouldn't find out via other sources.

Or just if you sat and thought about it for a bit. But what we want to give you is given that the deadline is clear. You might have a script that you're almost ready to send. Here are some sort of pre-flight checks that you might want to do before take off.

So I refer back to an article on my blog called Polishing Your Script from a couple of years ago. All of which still applies and I have 10 things that we can work through. And you, Dave, have a list of five things that you wouldn't want to think about. I've also got similar blogs and things, but I've got some updated thoughts about actually entering the competition now in the context of what has happened in the last year.

Let's start with that. It all started last June really at the writers room festival where James was chairing a group of commissioners. And the question of what comedy drama is came up. And in fact I was on a separate panel about comedy drama.

I think we were on I think another panel. Anyway, a lot of talk about comedy. A lot of talk about comedy. And maybe what it was.

Exactly. But if you look at what's coming up now in all the stuff that came out in March and April, lots and lots of comedy has come out. So these people who were talking about it, these commissioners already knew about all the stuff that is coming out now. So that was what was in their head.

This is what we're seeing. And you get the range of shows that have come out in the last three months or so. You get a sense that everybody is looking for things, you know, kind of different types of things. And you can look at shows like the returning shows like Fleabag, Softboard and Patrol, Time Wasters.

These were shows that already had a big impact when they came out first time around. Fleabag very much drama with comedy in it. Softboard and Patrol very much comedy, but kind of develops out of improvisation and a lot of people working up ideas. And we've got a whole episode of SickCon leaks where James talks to the production team of that.

We got a whole sense of the process. That's a very kind of detailed process of how they got to that story, which is actually also very sort of topical. Then you've got Home, the Rufus Jones show, which we talked about in previous episodes. That's got a very strong current story narrative, but it's also a funny sitcom.

And it's about a bunch of characters, couples, characters born together in odd situations. Then you've got the Ricci-Cha-Vase show after Life, which is effectively a three hour show. It's like six half hours that all flow on from each other. And it's very dramatic, I think, but it has a few sort of left out moments in it.

But it's mostly kind of bleak and mostly ricci-cha-vase. Having a midlife crisis or whatever. But again, very much a drama. And then you've got Warren, the Martin Clune, the BBC One, which is going to vary.

It's a sort of standard BBC One sitcom, Fish Out of Water character. So you've got a massive range of things. They're all different elements, different ideas of narratives. Cold feet is, again, it's just basically a bunch of people, the five characters, who live in each other's lives.

But it has drama. It deals with breast cancer and male suicide. So it's kind of dealing with very serious subjects, but you've got your basic five characters. So rather than get too worried about, have I got enough comedy?

Have I got enough drama? Have I got enough drama comedy? You kind of write what you write that you're comfortable with. As long as it's got funny bits in, it's a comedy.

And then how much drama is in there? It's kind of up to you, I think. So I think the take-home from that is that there's a, you know, comedy is a very broad thing now. It doesn't need to resemble an episode of ever-decreaching circles, or last in the Summer Wine.

Or even, you know, stuff from, you know, like Ab Fabol or whatever, or the Vigra Dibley. It can be, there's this huge range of comedy, comedy drama, drama comedy, which you're fine with. I think in a way you sort of need to know what you're going for. So, but equally feel, if you want to write something that's just out and out, really big, really silly, really mainstream, or really goofy, then that's fine too.

And I think the stuff that we will just come onto in a moment, it kind of applies across the board, really. The one thing that hasn't been in all of these shows that have come out in the last two or three months is an audience sitcom. And so, time and again, James and I say, they don't want audience sitcom, what's the point? They keep saying they do, and they're not commissioning anything.

But then you look at the form for the writers' room, and it's got, it says two things we are looking for. One, non-audience, blah, blah, blah, comedy, drama, narrative, blah, blah, two audiences. So, they've got, they are kind of strongly looking for an audience sitcom. The fact that there hasn't been one in the last two years is more, I think, that nobody has yet found whatever it is that's going to be the next audience sitcom.

Or maybe they have and they just haven't intercomed it. However, I still think you should try writing that. I still think you should try writing that, as you said, very silly idea or something. Maybe you write a radio script, they do get made.

Their biggest show is The Big Silly Show called Mrs. Brown's Boyz. There's something in it. The other thing, though, to point out, David's writing, the BBC are looking for that.

The BBC writers' room window, the BBC writers' room are looking for are writers to develop what they're not trying to do is, so don't apply for the writers' room because you want your show to be on TV, although you sort of have to believe that it could be on TV. When you're applying for the writers' room, what you're applying for is essentially a year of a little bit of development from the BBC, a few sessions on this and that, maybe monthly, meeting other writers and just having a bit of opportunity thrown in your direction, a little bit of development, feeling like you're getting somewhere, I don't think any money changes hands. If you're lucky, a show might be emerging where they are looking for more than one writer. You might get to be asked to be on that show or be a part of that show.

It's a mixture of mentoring and opportunity and it's generally a good thing to do and it feels like it's not transformative for everybody's career by any means, but I'm sure everyone who's done it thought it was probably worthwhile. Some probably found it very useful, others found it, maybe less useful as a writer, but more useful in context. We're not about to do a straw poll, everyone has ever done the writers' room. With all that in mind, you've got 30 pages, maybe 40 pages of script, burning a hole in your top drawer or burning a hole in your laptop more likely.

It's also worth saying, go back to that episode of People Simon Nelson, where they are a man de folly and they do warn that you need to be registered with the BBC writers' room in order to submit your script and that that takes slightly longer than you think it's going to do. If you apply cold at the very last minute, then you may have a technical problem, which means that you're not going to get in time. So just do all that first and have a look at it and make sure you're familiar with it so that the planets can align for you to get your script in. You've got five things, five snakes.

Well, I suppose there were five, one of the more ones, I don't second guess the commissioning process. Okay, so we're well on the way, you're a number one, I'm done. Don't second guess, right, what you want, you have to write what you know, but you need to write what you're passionate about. And also write something that you can write well, because again, you're not trying to get a show on TV, you're trying to show what you can do as a writer so that they can say, there's a voice here that I really like and we want to develop it.

I mean, the great thing you can say about the last two or three months or so, there has been an incredible range of different shows across all sorts of genres and real attempts by all the comedy commissions. I don't think we always give them as credit that they do deserve credit. A lot of very original stuff happening inevitably, some shows have been more successful than others, but I think Channel 4 sitcoms and ITV2 shows have been some great stuff there. Well done, commissioners.

You've got faith in comedy. You've addressed Dave, you've done very well. I've not actually seen any of it yet because I'm producing a new play about Thomas Beckett, so I haven't got any time to watch TV. I've seen it all so that you don't have to.

Exactly. Thank you. So that's number one. Don't second guess, commission is right, what you want.

Yeah, so right, what you want, but I'll say against that. Don't forget the basics. That's the mistake. And again, when you're thinking of a new idea, we always, you know, we can always think of shows that broke the mold.

You know, we have a lot of young ones or Hancock or whatever that did something very different. But they are few and far between. So, you know, try and at least have something that is, that has something familiar about it. Something that people, you know, we all want to smash the system and create the thing that everyone says, well, that is the newest thing.

But having been involved in various successful shows over the years, I would say that mostly they are things that were very much like something that was before it. And if I got news for you was basically the news quiz puts on telly. So it was, but the Paul Merton angle, I guess, was what made that show different. I mean, horrible histories comes out of Blackadder and Monty Python.

But it's a show and it's just a show about history and, you know, whatever, all the things aligned to make it work. So, but it comes from, you know, it comes from a long line of things. It didn't just come out of nowhere. So stick to the basics.

You know, you've got a story, you've got a beginning, a middle and end. So, you know, character who goes on a journey but doesn't learn, comes back to make the same mistakes. Yeah. That's my key thing, I think, for more than anything.

Yeah. So break the rules if you want. I mean, do what you like. But if you think, maybe I'll just write a script that's a stream of consciousness of one character.

I mean, sure. But, you know, if Stephen Moffat did it, it would still probably be crap. But the chances of you getting that right seem to be pretty low. But why not?

If that's the thing you really want to do, then do it. But don't sort of have a last minute. Well, maybe I should just do this. And then that's, you know, the window will then close with that and just think, oh, I should have just written that idea that would have been actually broadcastable in some way.

But sometimes that stroke of genius really is what it is. So who knows? So do you have any more? I need to finish your five and then I'll clear up with my ten.

Okay. Well, then, as I say, the basics are the beginning of the middle and end. And don't forget the difference, which I've alluded to there as well, the difference between comedy and drama. So yes, you're trying to put some narrative in there.

But don't forget that your character does not grow. That's kind of the main difference. You can have as a lamnish and weird a story as you like. And I mean, one of the problems that I had with the good place, which I watched a lot of recently, it felt like the story was kind of going all over the place.

And it was. But the thing that kind of kept it as a sitcom was actually for most of it was that the characters never changed. They kept putting different situations. But they were always the same, apart from when one character fell in love and that broke that character as far as I feel.

But I think where it kept as a sitcom was because nobody ever thought they did the same thing, whichever world they were putting. The thing that came across to me recently, because I've read quite a lot of scripts recently for various things, is I do find that an awful lot of shows run out of story. And I'm finding a lot of shows where the first 20 pages, you've got some good interesting characters and a good situation and some good jokes and some good writing. You then realise it's really in search of a plot.

And so actually, you probably need to spend more time on your story. Even though people don't really tune in for the story, the story is the expression of the character. And so I just think really hard about whether this story is actually developing, whether there's a twist, whether the character has to make a really big choice towards the end and why they make that choice. But an awful lot of scripts are read, they just sort of end.

And you go, well, that's not really. And having said that, the writers are quite open about the fact that at the first part, they get so many scripts, they only read the first 10 pages. And then anything that looks like it might be onto something is passed up to the next round and they read the next, then they read 20 pages. And then it gets to a smaller problem and they read all 30 pages.

But in a way, make sure your last 10 pages are good, but you will need to get over that barrier at some point, so you might as well do it now. That does lead to the next question. And this is, we'll talk about it all the time, but it bears repeating. You forget to care about what happens.

There's a quote that I remembered from 30 years ago from Kurt Vonnegut, who was a writer that I admired at the time. And he writes about writing and about writing stories. He says, I don't praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways of keeping readers reading. And one of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars and couldn't get it out all day long.

The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed. Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with the finger. And so that's that, as James says, is the point of the story, it's not, it isn't necessarily the thing, but it's why Dan Brown is the most important thing. Dan Brown is the most successful writer in the world, whatever, we mock and laugh at it, and so he's a terrible writer.

But actually, once you start reading, you want to know what's going to happen and you are turning the pages. And it is not as easy as people think. It's very, very hard. But that's what you have to do.

I would say nine times out of ten, there's not enough story in the scripts rather than too much. Very rare, I think. Maybe it's even less than that, one in twenty, one in thirty, one in thirty, where we just think, blimey, there's enough for three episodes here. I'm getting a lot of scripts now where it's just like, yeah, that's not really enough.

Cool, next one. So that's, well, Commissioner Croesus, we've been that. So my last one is, you don't write enough jokes. And again, this is something we come back to over and over again.

And I say, with regard to the Ricky Gervais show, I will say the words fish fingers, which will mean nothing to James, but if you've watched it, you'll go ha ha, yes, the fish fingers, the very funny scene with the fish fingers. And that's what people remember. They remember the funny moments, oh, Delboy, you know, so these are jokes, these are things that are in the scripts and they're there to make you laugh. Yes, it's a comedy show, even when it's as bleak as after life.

So put the jokes in there, make sure the jokes come out of the characters. And you know, if you want to write comedy, you probably, whatever, you were watching something when you were a kid and you, something made you laugh, and rather than just like 99% of the population, you just said, oh, that's funny. You stopped and said, oh, I wish I could create something like that. That's kind of stuck with you.

So that's what got you in there in the first place. You might get excited by your characters that you're creating and things and run away with them and those ideas and forget. No, actually, it was the jokes. It was the things that made you laugh that got you into this in the first place.

That is also the last one on my list. So we'll go back over my list in a second. But it is well worth thinking with your script, could this script be funnier? And could there be more jokes?

And what I would do is it rule of thumb anyway, if, and this is what I've done with the spec scripts quite often, especially when I know I have to send them in and whatever, is print it out on a printer and get a pen and go to a cafe, go to a room where your computer isn't and read the script again and go through each page, go through each line thinking, could this be funnier? Could this scene be funnier? Could this be one way of making something funnier is to make it shorter? That's something that Mike Shepherd, I remember saying on one of our, was Mike Shepherd, wasn't he?

When you go through anything, you basically always think this could always be shorter. But I would say, as a general rule of thumb, it is a good idea just to print out what you've written because otherwise you sort of end up tinkering. You don't read it properly on the screen. So, I would say actually, if you can, go through your script ten times, maybe with a different colour pen, with a different thing in mind.

And then number ten is, could this be funnier? And here are the other nine, but Dave's about to say something. Well, I was just going to say the answer is always yes to that question. Could it be funnier?

Even if you've got the funniest funny script, and people like Lee Mac recognise that because they write a draft of a script and then he makes it funnier, and then he makes it funnier. And then so three or four drafts into that script, he then sends it off to people whose job is to sit down and actually write jokes. And the script says, this needs a funnier joke here. This joke doesn't quite work.

I want the funnier joke here. So even Lee Mac, probably one of the funniest people in the country, writes a funny script and says it's not funny enough. It needs more funny in there. So don't feel embarrassed if your script isn't funny enough because we all get that.

So go through your scripts with the following things in mind. First one, start your story earlier. Again, almost all the time, we get this on our first 10 pages, which you can now, if you join us on Patreon and you become a particular kind of subscriber, we will read your first 10 pages of your script and do us a podcast about it for Patreon subscribers. But when we do those and we did them in the past on this main podcast is so often the story starts on page nine and basically pages one to eight, mostly people talking and introducing themselves and saying how they feel.

And actually, you can normally start it on page two, if not page one. Good discipline, isn't it? Yeah. So work out.

How can I start my story sooner? Not how can something happen sooner, but how can my main character and my main characters have a quest where they're basically given you need to do this by then or this will happen? That kind of thing. If you do it on page nine or a third of the way through your script, it's too late.

Do it on page two or page three, page four at the latest. But if you're doing double space, I'm half a page. So second thing is therefore you can normally introduce your characters faster. How could you introduce them faster?

So first thing I say a lot, you know, when we first see your character, what are they wearing or what are they carrying or what are they doing? What's their first line? That first impression is really, really important, especially if the reader is only reading the first 10 pages. You don't have time to muck about.

And why would you? It's bad writing. So, you know, what is your character wearing doing? How is their first line quintessentially them?

How is it their whole characteristic in one sentence? How do they react to something or how do they not react to something? So, so again, make those first two, three pages as funny, tight as possible in particular. So, you know, the first 10 pages also and all 30 pages very much.

So having said that, don't introduce all of the characters. This is number three at once. So if you have 10 characters in your show, firstly, I would advise against 10 characters. But if you do have 10 characters, don't have them all in the opening scene, if you can possibly avoid it.

Have a scene with two or three of them, which is the people that show is really about and then have another scene with two or three different characters or one leaves one scene from one and goes and meets other characters or something like that. But don't introduce all of the characters at once. And it may be the first 10 pages. You don't need to introduce four of them.

And that's completely fine. We get a little bit spoiled, don't we? Because it shows like Brooklyn Nine, Nine, a modern family where they have like nine or 10 or 11 million characters and American sitcoms. We only see the really big successful ones, but they can do that because they have big economies of scales and they're making 20, 24 in a row.

They can afford to have nine characters. We rarely have more than four or five characters in a British sitcom because we can't really afford to have more than that. So be aware of that, even though, as we say, you're not, this isn't a pitch for something that you are hoping will be made. Bear that in mind.

Last few, check that each character has a unique voice. What are the speech patterns of the individual character? Not only do they have a name and attitude. They have a way of talking.

So if you can create as much distance between those ways of talking as possible, then that would be good. Number five, look very closely at the first few pages. I've done that. Number six, be brutal about action lines.

So quite often, you have pages of three or four paragraphs of who's doing what and where and when. Bear in mind that people don't like reading action lines. They often skip them. But just be as brutal about them being clear and easy to read as you would be about dialogue.

I think it's easy just to sort of cram stuff into action lines. But you should tighten those up as much, if not more so than dialogue. Yeah. Can I just possibly mention at this point as well that people often forget to do visual gigs.

It's a visual medium. So imagine that tagline is going to be, the more of them that are jokes, the better. But you want people to get the joke. So it has to be that clear.

And lay it out so that it's clear, so that the joke lands. And that's a bit of an art to do that. And then just make sure it's clear as to what's going on. If you've never read this, have you ever read the script before?

Is it clear what's happening? This is where you could give the script to somebody who doesn't work in the industry at all, doesn't know anything, and ask them to read the first three pages and then describe to you what's happening. And if they literally have no idea what's going on, it may be your script is confusing. So do that.

Number eight, tighten it up. Anyway, every line, every bit of dialogue should be a joke, a bit of plot development or character development, ideally two of those three things. And if it isn't any of those things, you should cut it. And almost every scene can be shorter.

It could maybe start later. It could maybe finish sooner. You don't have to have people standing around saying hello to each other and just start the scene. And number nine, check for typos.

And again, this is someone that you could get someone else to proofread it for you. They may not find it funny or understand the jokes or be interested in it, but they can do a spot where you've typed words wrong or it doesn't make sense. Because it is annoying to think, well, this is a really big deal and you've sent me a script and there are errors all over it. And that just shows that you haven't paid attention.

And it just breaks the flow of the reading. So you just want to give yourself the very best chance. Number ten, as I've said it, let's not check for jokes. So it takes time.

I would say print it out, use a pen, and then put the changes in once you've done them with a pen, but that's 43. That probably says what about me, anything else. But actually, I quite often do the script as a PDF on an Apple tablet and use an Apple Pencil. I noticed you've been writing using the equivalent of pen.

This is the second one because I lost the first one. Right, okay. I find pen and paper. I've been using a lot recently.

It's great because when you come to type it up, you're already on to your second draft because you're already refining it. So those are our tips, those are our suggestions and we wish you all the best of luck, but you're competing against each other. So you can't all be lucky. There's probably about 3,000 of you as well.

So it's a great learning experience and good luck with it. Great. Well, thanks very much for listening. I think that's the end of the show.

You can get in contact with us on e-mail us at www.congeeks.com. You can find us on Facebook. Sitcomgeeks, we're on Twitter. Sitcomgeeks.

And Dave's website is DaveCohen.org.uk. And my blog is called www.sickonggeek.blogspot.com. If you want to do, I don't know that time is tight, but if you would like to join on a Patreon site, and you can actually, we will do a critique of your script. We'll try and do one in time if you want to get in touch with us now.

That would be possible. Yeah, be re-get your skates on for that. And also, if you join the loads of other benefits, we have at least 10 hours worth of content, maybe 15 by now, or stuff that we've not put out or advanced interviews and that kind of stuff. We're never going to release.

And our Sitcom series suits you nuts as well, where we're creating a Sitcom for your very ears. Anyway, thanks very much for listening. And we'll speak to you next time. Bye-bye.