Hello and welcome to Sick on Geeks, I'm James Kerry. I'm Dave Cohen. And you join us for a special Answer Your Questions episode where you've been soliciting questions on Facebook and Twitter and so we'll be getting to those and hopefully itching where you are scratching or scratching where you are itching. I never quite know where you are scratching itch or itch or scratch.
I think you are scratching itch. There's lots and lots of questions really interesting. Before we get into them, some pertinent points to bear in mind. We are coming up to the BBC Writers Room Comedy window which means that you can send your scripts in to the BBC.
Hopefully our next episode will be talking to the writers and the amount of time from the writer. We spoke from two years ago, but lots of interesting information. Since then, I think there's been quite a few changes really and the whole comedy drama thing has become much bigger. So we've got lots to talk about so we will be talking to them in two weeks time.
Don't forget as well if you're interested in, if you've got a script that you really want to sort of push a little bit further, I'm doing a one day class Friday the 13th of March. Look on my website, DaveCohen.org.uk to find details of that, how to make your idea that writers room proof so they'll go, oh fantastic. Or whichever competition, there's a lot of competition coming up. The road cliff on as well and sick on mission.
I can't show the road cliff on dates have been given yet, but it's usually around this time here. And the other news is that the end of April, Saturday the 25th of April, I think at London School of Economics, which is a company of the industry to be off, just off Old Witch. In Central London. They are doing the British Comedy Guide, who we did our script competition with, are running a conference, a comedy conference, a comedy writers for that for you, which sounds brilliant.
They've got Sandy Toxwig, we'll be there giving this a opening address and we'll be other big names, a big name that we can't say yet, we can't say it is a big name, not a long name, not a big name. But go to the website and go to the British Comedy Guide website and you will see who that is and how you can get a ticket. And the early bird rate ends on the 29th of February, so you want to get your skates on. Dave and I will be there at that conference.
We'll be talking and podcasting and some sort of meetup will take place hopefully, especially for our Patreon subscribers. So we have sort of people who are actually for the Patreon subscribers who go over to our Patreon site and join and there's a private Facebook group for that and loads of extra audio and early access to interviews we've done. We've done a brilliant interview with Anil Gopdoo and Richard Pinto, which is coming to your ears but you can get ahead by listening to that via Patreon and also an interview with Jono Farrell and Brenda Gilhooley at the Chortle Festival, Burbuk Festival and so that's up there too. Plus loads of other extra audio that is never going to be released and also our sitcom soup to nuts series which we are slowly chugging our way through.
We've had the press hold as we've been wading through lots of these scripts for the competition and actually that's the other thing that you get if you join us on Patreon, you'll get access to all of our episodes where we talk about people's scripts and you can read the script and hear us usually do a 10-15 minute podcast where we pick up on specifics of stuff. There's loads of extra audio hours and hours worth for those with hungry ears to know more about how to write situation comedy and also we have Patreon subscribers who've given us some questions to answer but we're answering everyone's questions this time so Dave where should we start? Well we've got a lot to get through but we'll try as many as possible. I've got three questions together because they follow a similar sort of thing.
First of all we've got from Robert Rivett or Rivett as he says. So Patreon subscribers got it. He is, yes. And he says, when do you know the time to drop an idea and start fresh?
And then there's a question from Paul Skeleton that says, I have a vague idea of something that might make a decent sitcom. What do I do next? And there's a few questions that he mentions there. And then Paul Kerenza, friend of the show.
He must really guess at some point. He has a new interview here. He has a very funny comedian and comedy writer. He says, are there any types of sitcoms that could no longer be made nowadays and then how can we prove them wrong by finding a new spin on it?
E.G. A workplace audience sitcom? Never they cry until. So the reason I put these three together is because the last blog that I wrote, which in fact is a guest blog for the Bang to Rights page, is about...
Oh, you're such a tart, Dave. I have no idea. I'll go to anyone who wants to find out more. Will I forfeit?
Yeah. It is about your ideas and it's about a thing we've talked about quite a lot recently. What is your idea? How well have you tested it?
How far can you take it? Specifically, for instance, there are five things that you can do and going in reverse order, number five is give up. Decide that you've done what you can. I think one of the things that we found with the 60-odd scripts that we read was that it felt like it was a good idea, but it didn't necessarily move things forward from other similar ideas and you really need to push an idea.
So if you are writing a family sitcom, for instance, you really need to have something that moves things on from modern family. Modern family has nailed as much about siblings and husbands and wives and relationships and all kind of manner of family things. You need to have something that can say, we can either say, well, that's different from modern family or that's moved on. That's, I mean, a modern family is what, 12 years old now.
So it's something that's why now in modern family. So that's the kind of, you really do need to work harder to do. And sometimes you'll find you worked hard, you worked for two weeks and you thought a brilliant idea, oh, that was a great idea. And after about two weeks, you sort of think, well, I haven't had a lot of new thoughts about it, but I still think it's a great idea, so I'll write it anyway.
Maybe it's not. Maybe you should just say, okay, that's an idea. That's an idea to drop. By drop, that doesn't mean abandon forever.
There is always a room. So to answer Robert's question, when's the time to drop an idea? Really drop it if you've spent a lot of time thinking about it and you haven't got any further with it. It's not exciting you in the way that it's a good idea.
I do that you've pitched it and have found people not responsive. And maybe that you just go, no, this is it. I can see something that other people haven't, in which case maybe you're not explaining it right. But also I think people may be clinging to ideas for a long time because they actually don't have very many.
You really should be building up a whole bank of ideas. 10, 15, 20 different ideas for different sitcoms, different shows. They don't even have to be sitcoms. It could be a drama.
It could be a movie. In a way, you sort of think of the idea and then think, what is it? Is it a novel? Is it a TV series?
Is it a kids show? And what is a way into that show that I could maybe do now? Could I write some short stories based around it or bring it to life in some way? But I think you just need to see all these ideas as children in your family.
And you don't need to say which is your favourite, even if you do have one, you must never tell anyone or you will scare them forever. But these things have their moment and they have their time and you give them your attention and quite often you pitch three ideas in a meeting. You pitch two properly and then the one, they don't like either of them. You throw in the last one on the way out and they go, oh, that sounds good.
Can I find out more about that? That's quite common. So you do need lots of ideas and they all have their moment really, don't you? So to answer Paul's skeleton's question, I've got a vague idea of something, no shortage of material, what next?
And he says, do you just start writing, sketch out an episode? Well, what I would say is what next is just keep pushing that idea, keep testing it. What's, you know, you've got no shortage of material. Well, work it out.
You might, you know, it doesn't all come out nice and clinically like, oh, that's right. And I will, here's this, here's a character that would work really well for that. And here's, oh, and here's a story that I just read in a newspaper that fits to that. And so you just kind of, it's almost like you, you pile, I mean, I used to have this thing with a shoe box when I'm working on something invariably, I get excited about the next project.
Yeah. I think we all do that. And what I've learned to do is I stick it in the shoe box. So when you finish the thing that you have to finish, you've got this shoe box with 25 things in it of which three or four might work.
And I think the same thing applies as Paul Krenza said, I specifically mentioned in the blog that I wrote was the workplace sitcom, which a producer sent to me when I went to him with what I thought was quite a modern take on a workplace sitcom. He said, you know, the workplace sitcom is dead to which I said, you know, yeah, long live the workplace sitcom. But we couldn't make it work. I mean, I go right, we got a long way with it, but we couldn't make it work.
But I think maybe we should have worked harder on the research beforehand and just thought, well, how do you do a workplace sitcom? We did get a lot of workplace sitcom ideas. We got one where, you know, yeah, we did, yeah, we did, yeah. And we got, that you get, there was one that was, you know, was a perfectly good script, but it had, there was like an office of four or five people all kind of hanging out, not doing much, which 25 years ago, yeah, and also even something like the office was a bit like that.
You kind of can't, it's hard to imagine an office now of four or five people sitting around doing nothing. We just, we sort of know that, you know, that sort of stuff has kind of gone, gone by the way, so I can think. Yeah. And I think, I mean, 30 years ago, there used to be a lot of mainstream sitcoms on and they were very open to where they could be set.
And now it feels like every sitcom needs to fight a little bit harder for a reason to exist. And therefore, you know, and you could say the workplace sitcom is dead, we go, well, okay, Brooklyn Nine-Nine's doing all right. That set in a police station, it's a little bit cartoony police station, it's sort of real, sort of not. And I think all these, all these things, all these rules are rules until they suddenly come across an idea that they like and then they'll break the rule.
Yeah. Which leads nicely to the question from Gugard Nine on Twitter, which is, what's your favourite rule to break? And actually, I wrote that slightly tongue in cheek, the idea that there are no rules, that's my response to that. But actually it is, it is, break the rule of there are no rules by obeying every rule.
Yeah. Okay. That's a bit too much. Yeah.
But as you say, the Brooklyn Nine-Nine is carto, but the thing about Brooklyn Nine-Nine, I think, is why that works is it's got a very 80s feel to it. And it is like a lot of the shows around then, Barney Miller, Hill Street Blues, it's got that feel, so it's got a very familiar anchor, I suppose, but it is modern. And I suppose that's not really so much of a rule-breaking thing. But yeah, you want to find something that's like something that's out there, but you bring a new thing too, as a place.
Yeah, exactly. The other thing I said to Paul Scalter, by the way, I've got an idea, what should I do? I did also suggest, well, slightly cheekily, but partly I wrote a book for exactly to answer that question, which is, you know, so therefore by writing that sitcom, which you can be a little bit more, you can get on Amazon, it's an ebook so you can get it for the Kindle App on Amazon, or if you go to sitcomgeek.com, there's a link to how you can buy it as a PDF. Or you can become a Patreon and listen to you.
Yes, if you want to be on Patreon, then there's an audio version of that, but at least the first two-thirds of it, which you can listen to, and another benefit of joining us on Patreon. Just to quickly answer the rule-breaking, a specific rule that I always like breaking is the so-called rule of three, which is that every joke, or most jokes, they have a list of things, and so you have the first thing, which is the normal thing, the second thing that moves on, and the third, which is the punchline. So I come, I sort of like to do a rule of four, or a rule of two, or something, just to kind of mess up out a bit with the form, and make people, you know, keep people on their toes really, at which point the script we will say, why isn't that, why's that got four things? It's supposed to be three.
So, yes, that's my rule that I break. Fair enough. How about you, what's your rule you most like to break, James? That's a good question.
I normally find I regret breaking rules. The moment I think I know better, I think that I don't need to respect the form, because I know I've written plenty of scripts, and I know what I'm doing, and actually usually I've started to soon, I've started writing it, and I've not actually really tested everything properly, and I grind to a halt. I don't know. I mean, I kind of like the rules, I think the rules just kind of, because in a way, if you want to write anything, then you end up with a script that's probably an incoherent mess, and we've read one or two of those, and they just feel like a missed opportunity, especially if there's a good idea at the central of it, and there usually is.
There's a good enough idea to make people want to write something, and then it just sort of doesn't follow any of the rules, and you just think, well, this is, I can't do anything with it, it's had anywhere to start to advise them. So that's a bit depressing. Anyway, sorry, that got a bit sad quite quickly. I'll try to pitch a question to you.
So, Mason on Twitter asked advice on bringing closure to an episode, and how much resolution is enough, and I wonder if that chimes in with another question about story arcs and that kind of stuff as well, doesn't it? Yes, there is a, and as we mentioned, the start, the comedy versus comedy drama, and Al butter asks, along those lines, is having a series storyline ruining sitcom, usually sitcoms, playsplots are resolved in an episode, but does having a series plot where the story has to never to effect the longevity. Yes. Yes, yes.
I don't know what that's showing. I think people now watch TV in different ways, and therefore I think people are fine with story arcs. I worry that that does make an individual episode slightly unsatisfactory, but these days they're not trying to get you to watch one, they're trying to get you to watch three. The media is the message, is the, is very much the word of the day.
But I think it is annoying when things are not resolved. I think you want to be aware of the check offs gun, if you've got a gun, and nobody finds it, that's going to be annoying. So in a sense, just don't annoy people by not resolving things. And I think you need to kind of really feel, you just want a story to have a beginning and a middle and an end.
And as I've often said on this podcast, a sitcom ending should be both unexpected, but also retrospectively inevitable. And therefore you might need to start at the ending, or you need to just make sure that unless you've got a proper ending for your story, you don't have a story. And it's been very rare, you know, we've recently just read 65 scripts, 68 scripts, how many of them had decent resolutions, single digits? Yeah, I know.
Usually the story takes 10 minutes. The story doesn't start till page 10, and it's run out of steam by page 25. Yeah, I've just finished reading a novel by a very celebrated novelist, a very good novelist, and it's quite modern, and it's quite funny, and it's got some great characters. And the story just doesn't hold together as a story.
It's got some brilliant descriptions in it. And I think this is the thing we've discovered more than any really reading all those scripts, is that even saying to you plotting is really hard and making scripts, the story's worked really hard. It's still, it's incredibly hard. It's so rare that when it does work, it's just we go, oh, that one that works.
Well, here is my controversial theory of the day, which I've just hit upon. Is the who done it, the new sitcom? And the reason I say that in a clip, page two titled, is the fact that I've watched a lot of who done it recently of various genres and types, ranging from Endeavour and the Pale Horse to Father Brown and other stuff like that. And it's interesting how we really, really like murder mysteries, because we want to know who done it, who done it, they done it, how do they do it, they did it that way.
Great, roll the credits. And so there is a satisfactory resolution that I think maybe people aren't getting in sitcoms and potlases, maybe they're not getting them in dramas, because actually there aren't lots of comedy dramas in our series arcs, and you've got to last angle in Halifax. Those sorts of shows tend to be all arc. And actually a murder mystery gives you a beginning and a middle and an end in a satisfactory way.
And I think maybe it was interesting I watched the Pale Horse, which was a two part Agatha Christie adaptation by Sarah Phelps, and I really, really enjoyed it for the first hour and a half. And then as they revealed who done it, I just thought, oh, that's good. And then as he explained how they done it, I thought, oh, hang on, how do they fit into this? And then Rufus Jules' character kind of went back to the flat and then had some sort of dream or nightmare.
Oh, was this whole thing a dream? Or was it... Oh, please don't we? You know what I mean?
And so there was an ambiguity. And I thought, is it just me, Twitter, Twitter, January, just basically said, what just happened? You know, lots of other people, entirely everyone knows what happened. And then I read one or two blogs about it where they just said, yeah, it's entirely clear whether this happened or this happened.
And so I thought that probably was lacking a certain amount of resolution and it made people cross. So things don't have to be terribly neat. I think unexplained threats, I think, are poor. And I think you just need to give your story a lot longer than you think you did.
And you come back to story a lot. I come back to character and I tend to come back to modern family as well because the thing about family is you do make the same mistakes over and over, which is what sitcom is about. You don't learn, you come back next week and make the same mistakes. The only difference is, and this is why it works in sitcoms, is that you can at the end of an episode say, I'm really sorry, that was wrong, that was really bad, I will never do that again.
And next episode you will come back and do exactly that again. And we'll believe it because that's how life works, that's how families are, that's how people are in relationships. I will never be late again, I promise. So that allows you to push your story quite, quite long ways.
So coming back to these questions about bringing closure to an episode, resolution, you can have as much resolution as how big your story is in the first place. Maybe murder is pushing it a bit far, I promise I'm sorry. I'll never murder again. Yeah, that might be, but I'll never be rude to your mother-in-law.
I'll never fall out again. That for me I think is how you resolve that problem of people never learn from their mistakes, but you have to have a sense of the drama, what you have in drama, which is a character has gone on a journey and has learned and has resolved to make mistakes. But we just know it has resolved not to make mistakes, they'll come back and make that mistake. I hope that covers those questions.
This is from I Am A Writer of Twitter, good name. Got two things, the question one, character descriptions in sitcom. The BBC writers' room scripts are inconsistent, it says, some have details, some just agenda and age, some don't have anything. Help!
So we'll deal with that question first. We have talked about this a lot. There's obviously not a right and wrong if BBC writers' room is inconsistent, the chances are there are rules. But I like to see four or five or five or six words, roughly how old the person is, male, female, and then two or three words that tell us about this person.
We've mentioned one of the recent podcasts that goes on blunt but well meaning. That tells you a lot about a character. I would say the brutal answer is why do you need to see that? Should be obvious.
Should be obvious from the character from the first thing they say. What are they doing? When we first see them, what are they wearing? What are they carrying?
How do they walk in? How do they say the first thing they say? What are their speech patterns? Should be obvious.
So I would say if you want to be a totally class actor or writer, then it should be quite clear from page one, the first time you meet your character, oh they're that kind of person, or you establish them as one kind of person and then suddenly they do something when they're going, oh I see, they're not just this but they're also that. So I would say I would try to avoid doing that if it's all possible. Then you can put that on a treatment I guess and that's fine but you don't submit treatments, you submit scripts. So I would say the big grown up thing to do is to not have anything other than a physical description.
And we've noticed in the scripts that we've read for the competition that sometimes people in action lines tell us stuff that we can't see and they tell us what a character has decided in their heads to do and they've given us no physical action to demonstrate that. And you go, eh, cheating. That's not, you know what I mean? So I think you need to show that you know how to write a script and put it all on the page without, is that fair?
Am I being brutal? Yeah, I think so. I mean if you're a big character, the first thing they say is hello or something you know and that can be funny providing you know, I mean if it says character is 16 going on 50, yeah that tells you something about, if you say something, if you say something pretty, something pretty. But their first thing they're going to say, if they're a 16-year-old and they say something very 50 something, then you'll just go, oh okay that's interesting.
So you've surprised the reader. So I think if you do that, I'm going to be brutal here. If you do that you are robbing yourself of the capability of surprising the reader and I think that's what you want to try and do. You want to show talent.
Okay. But I'm aware that that's very much without the stabilizers on. Clearly the way that we're discussing this means that it's a great area. So there isn't a right answer.
But what I don't want to do is give the impression that it's okay beyond the first time your character comes in to give people action lines in a script which can't be seen or heard because that's not okay. I'd certainly say it as well. We do get, you know, so he's 43, he's a graduate of this university and we know that he's had a terrible relationship. Anything more than half a dozen words is too much.
I've got a question here. We can put the answer. I was just going to say because he also had this question about writing slapstick which I don't think we've talked about before. How do you write visual jokes?
Do you try and make it funny to read? For me it is hard to do that on the page but I think as much as possible you want to just make it very, very easy to read and think as carefully about the action lines as you would about dialogue and don't have huge long paragraphs of text. I would just break every action up into sort of simple beats so that you can read it really easily. That's a tall order to do that and a script that has funny lines will always do better initially than the script with funny action either I think.
That shouldn't be the case but give yourself the best chance I would say by just making it as simple to read as possible and inviting to read rather than a dense block text. That would be my thing. I've got a question here on the CICOMDEEX Facebook page. If you're not a member of Patreon we do have a Facebook page that we put things up to sometimes and so we've got some questions on there and from Kazimask's, are cold opens a good idea?
What is a cold open? It's almost like a sketch really isn't it? It's sort of a scene that isn't necessarily linked to the whole story but uses the characters. We used to do them in my family.
We always had a cold open scene. I think Brooklyn Nine-Nine always has it. It's the bits that they couldn't turn into bigger stories I think. That's possibly true and also they're eminently clickable and put on YouTube.
I would say they are a good idea because Brooklyn Nine-Nine do them and they use you very funny. I would say in your pilot script they are not a good idea because in the opening two pages you want to be establishing your characters, who they are, what this show is, what this world is and if you establish a funny sketch about a hat stand or a fire extinguisher, who says looking at a hat stand, fire extinguisher. Then they're not mentioned for the rest of the episode. Then you go, oh right, that was a cold open and the reader has already been taken out of it.
I would say in your initial first pilot script of whatever it is, or your writing sample, you want everything to line up. You want one scene to lead to the next and you want to be crystal clear on that. Cold open is not your friend at that moment. The only exception I would give to that is if you've got a cold open that really shows character and it's unbelievably funny then there's probably something in it and we'll make the reader belly laugh then great.
However, the problem is we all think that what we've written is unbelievably funny and we'll make the belly laugh so you might want to seek advice on that. Is that fair? I think that's fair and to come back to the BBC writers room, they only read the first 10 pages remember, again with. If your first two pages of your first 10 pages are sort of a tangent from the main thing, then that's already 20% of what you're writing and the first thing they've seen is very we've talked like we've just come through a sort of military operation having read 68 scripts.
They've got 3000 scripts and obviously there's more than two of them but they've got people sitting there who turn up at 9 o'clock in the morning to read scripts and go home at 5 o'clock and they will read a lot of 10 pages and so if they get two pages that's about this oh and then the page 3 is, oh hang on, hang on, what kind of that relate? If it's like the 17th script that they've read that day, they might just be not very kindly disposed of it. So it's a high wire act and again I guess it's the difference between having a show that's on TV and a show that's trying to show what you can do, the rules are slightly different. Quick question here, if I made, from Tandy Houghton who says, how do you make something new without watching everything in the world to make sure that someone else hasn't already done something really similar, I would say given that in America alone there are nearly 500 scripted shows and in the UK there are probably another 100 or so, there is almost no chance that what you're doing has never been done before.
The question is answering those three basic questions that we ask all the time now, why this, why now and why you? So you might have a great show set on a submarine, there was a radio for sitcom called Big Trouble that had been Willbond in it and well others and so that means you can't have a sitcom set on a submarine. For TV they don't care what was on the radio 10 years ago and then sometimes there's a show that comes along at one point the BBC had bad education with Jack White, hold on BBC 3 and they had the David Walliam sitcom Big School on one and I think they had another one on BBC 2 that was school related, school is pretty universal, they didn't care, the individual channels didn't care what the other channels were doing, it's an audience. It is near impossible and it does come back to this point again as say, everybody has ideas, everybody has good ideas and as James was saying sometimes you know you kind of hold on to your idea because that's all you've got actually it's a good exercise for you to say oh okay well let me just try think of something completely different now and going back to again I think Paul Skeleton, I've got an idea, what should I do, well just research it, think about your opinions as to what's it really about.
We read several scripts set slightly in the future stroke on a spaceship, we had quite a few of those but the ones that worked worked well and they were like the person who had a point of view and it was that writer's point of view that kind of made it, yes it's a sitcom set in a spaceship but actually it's about relationships between the characters and it was a work, well the winning one was effectively a workplace sitcom, sort of a bit red war for the cabin pressure, and we go Paul Kerenza, there's a workplace at Comfy, yes yes it's right but it's not on TV or radio, yes, and the last thing to say is Tandy, in terms of four British ideas go over to the British Comedy Guide and they list everything that's on now and has been commissioned and was on last year and the year before so at least if you're pitching a comedy to a comedy commissioner you can know everything that's been on BCG, no one has ever accused them of not being thorough, boy they are thorough, I mean we call ourselves sitcom geeks, I mean we are not worthy to untie their sandals so British Comedy Guide comedy.co.uk would be the post-go for that and you can, so in a way there's no excuse to at least not know what British comedies have been on in the last five years, I mean if you've got a student comedy for example I mean they're just gonna say Fresh Meat and that was a big show that ran for quite a long time and I'm afraid you'll need zombies in it or something to get away from it but then again it can be done if you have Fresh Meat with zombies, why not, you know, I should write that down, there's goals which we've given it away here Dave, yeah, the rotting meat you call me, and in fact sort of related to that, Chris Dyson asked do you ever write anything with an international audience in mind, are you steering clear of British colloquialisms? No, just writing what you write really, it's like that thing where when people write characters and they are cockneys and it is all written in cockney in it and it's sort of, you know, you find you just what reads well, you know, and it's like if you put thick cockney accent or Scottish accent, you know, you might change the odd word Disney or whatever but you don't kind of beautifully fanatically write, you read it back and if it reads back readably to you then that's fine. We had a question about money, yes Chris Roach asks how much money could you expect to earn for writing a pilot that gets screened and then writing the rest of the series and they're being televised, it sort of depressed me when I said that question, however much I earned many years ago it's probably now less. In real terms.
Yeah, the BBC, the writer's guild, Great Britain, has, if you go to their website they've got all sorts of rate sheets, what is the minimum, what's the accepted rate, depending on what level of experience you're at for instance of a radio pilot you can expect to get something between about two and a half thousand and six thousand pounds for a half hour radio script. That sounds a lot. Yeah, okay, that sounds as a most, I think four thousand is probably the... Oh no, that's not as much as that, is it really?
For a half hour? I think a level, a higher level. One thing is you start out at the bottom if you've got a track record so you know, you're looking at, and actually if it's a non-broadcast pilot you're probably going to get two thirds of that for the radio so you're going to get a 15 hundred quid but caveat, you don't be a writer for the money, as I said often and I've been out for a while, writers need money in order to keep writing, that should be the end game. If you're writing for the money, actually anything else you will do will probably be more profitable than writing and there are one or two writers who are extremely wealthy as a result of their writing but these are very much the exceptions, the rest of us are just trying to make a living.
You do make about, I think at the minimum rate now is six thousand pounds for a TV, BBC script, I think it's about seven thousand for ITV, but again you know, like you get less if for the script and then if they make a pilot ITV, they don't make pilots anymore, they go straight from script to televised and then you get an extra amount on top when it's broadcast so yeah. So you tend to get the, if it's broadcast, if it's shot in broadcast you'll probably get the fee twice over, the only thing that's debated is what is included in that second fee and it might be a certain number of repeats up front it might be, it might be worldwide territory thrown in, you might get some extra for iPlayer if it's a BBC show, but you know these are percentages off that main script fee and obviously if you end up, you know, if your show gets scripted and if your show gets commissioned and you end up writing a script and you get six grand for your script fee and you write six of them, you're going to get 36 grand to write six and actually you'll get that twice over probably because they're filming and broadcasting it so there we go, five years of earning nothing is going to give you two years worth of the average wage and then if you get to second series you get to do it again and then you need to keep hold of that money because it'll take you another nine years to get shown to be. So in a way I'm just highlighting the fact that it is a little bit freestyle famine so to some people the script fee seemed quite high from the outside, you think oh that's loads and you go that's not loads, that's everything, that's what you're trying to get, that's how you're surviving. But it's also, and this comes to another question from Eleanor Haywood who's one of our Patreon members, but she has asked a question about what's the future of the BBC and she's also asked sort of sub questions about big budget comedy for instance Avenue 5, what does this mean for the comedy landscape and it's a little bit like the housing market in that if you want to, if you've got a million pounds to spend you can buy a two-bedroom flat in Mayfair or you know, or the whole of Shropshire, the amounts of money, the kind of disparity between what you get for what you have and the fact is that writing for the BBC which is where most of us go that's where the least money is really.
To some extent, and I think in a way the big budget is for drama and not comedy, but if you look at somebody like Armando Yannucci who spent the first 10 years of his life working pretty much for the BBC and probably getting BBC style money for it and now he's doing Avenue 5 which I think is HBO, kind of shiny new world of streaming and well HBO is not so much new world but relatively new world like Netflix and some like Jesse Armstrong who started out writing some... Sketch, just a mention on web basically. Yeah and you know one line is on The Big Breakfast and Things is now you know showrunner for succession and I'm sure he's earning more in the kind of half an episode of succession than he would have done the whole series of picture. I remember the pilot for the show was made, an example of as about as low a budget as it's possible to have, absolutely for something so.
But I would say as a writer I just think nothing really good comes of trying to second guess A, the governance of the BBC and their structures and B, how much your idea costs and I think the only time you should think about the budget of a show is if it's a show that you personally are planning to make. So I mean I recently had an idea for a show which I think could actually be filmed, you know we could film a pilot of it for virtually nothing but I came up with the idea first and it's something that I'm very interested in and want to do more in that area but then I've got another idea which would be sort of Game of Thrones kind of budget. Game of Thrones setting over. Yeah but you don't get, when you pitch stuff you don't get any credit for it being cheap to make.
That doesn't get you any traction at all these days, people want ambition but actually more than the others they just want an idea. They just want you as a writer to come to them with an idea that you're passionate about that feels like it's off the moment that you know how to execute and that you have the expertise to do that. So that is ultimately the answer to almost all of these questions isn't it? Yeah.
You know you need to have a bunch of ideas that you can be passionate about, some will feel more of the moment than others and you want a sample script of one of them to demonstrate that you can execute an idea once you've been, once you're about to be paid a few grand and play the long game and you might end up like Jesse Armstrong. Brilliant. Again he's an outlier, you might make a living and survive in the industry for 25 years. That is a very precious thing and I don't know I think my, I don't think like I think my god that I can do that and also make podcasts as well as I really enjoy doing.
So I think it's all about the idea and it's about executing the idea and showing that you are both craftsmen who knows what they're doing and are also not mad and easy to work with and all those sorts of things. Okay I think we've got time maybe just for one more subject. One more creep turn out of the wire. Which is because we've got one very long question and then one shorter one but they're basically about audience sitcom and I think we should quickly talk about audience sitcom.
Well again you know it's like oh audience sitcom is dead, well it depends on the idea. Yeah ITV are bringing out an audience that apparently had recorded the first episode. Okay. Like I'm going to go.
They're donkey. They know a thing or two. Yeah they know what they're doing. But Colin McQuaid he's asking, he says I want further discussion the idea of why now when it comes to ideas for sitcom not every sitcom has obvious reason.
Obviously we wouldn't make a low low now or or red dwarf now. But also the why now might be because this writer is very hot and they want they want to be in business with them and so they'll give them the benefit of the doubt on on that. John, John Rens who's another patreon member he's written he's asked a lot of questions about studio sitcom and he's asked various technical questions but I think just mentioning this because with the BBC writers room window opening and when we spoke to them a couple of years ago and we'll ask them again about this but they did say we don't get enough audience sitcoms and we very you know we'd like to see audience sitcoms so and it's a way of making your scripts done now. So what would you say James?
So maybe say three things sort of technically that you think would make what makes an audience sitcom script maybe that's different? I guess it has to be tied to three or four sets. It has to be it needs to feel sort of play like really doesn't it and therefore you need a really strong central idea and a world and some characters that are that feel like they are sort of trapped and sort of thrown together. So you know I think that that would be you know the main the main thing and then he just needs to laugh out loud funny jokes so the rhythm of the script it's got a particular rhythm to it I think.
Would you say some sitcom scripts are broader than sort of single camera scripts? Slightly. I'd love to live in a world where BBC2 made audience sitcoms and they do then they made upstart Crow but again that was a bit of an outline wasn't it? That comes as a theatrical.
It began as a Shakespeare anniversary and it was written by Ben Elton and it starred David Mitchell so these are not normal circumstances and I would hope that would trigger more studios sitcoms because the last one they did before that I think was probably Miranda. Or it might have been the right way. Not the right way. I was not the other thing that the writer and people say is we're not going to make your script so don't worry so the what so coming back to Colin McQuade's why now question you can actually write something that is now you can send in a script that is about that is almost as topical as the point of the goes in as long as if it's a really strong script they won't mind they won't say oh but we can't make this because in two years time it'll be out of date if they see a talent there then and this was something that we discussed with John O'Farrill I think wasn't about the why now you know where he said when he wrote his first book about labour the things can only get better he said he just he got very lucky with that it came out on the wave of the end of the year.
He was two weeks ahead of a Ben Elton idea. He had exactly the same idea. I think we should knock it on the head there and to say that if you want to listen to that interview which is not available yet you need to join us on patreon so go to the words if you google sitcom geeks patreon you will find it and you can join us and you can hear that whole hour long plus interview with John O'Farrill you're also here to talk to Anal Gupter and Richard Pinto and lots of first-end pages episodes sitcoms soup to nuts me and my audiobook writing that sitcom and lots of other things besides anything else say about that. I think that's it really we've got sorry if we've missed your question we've tried to cover as many as possible there but hopefully we've got a lot of questions on the sick oh sick geeks facebook page or on twitter I mean my answer them then written down or point you to episodes where we talk about them.
Yeah okay thanks very much for listening. Thank you. Speak to you next time. Bye.