Welcome to Sit Compeaks, I'm Dave Cohen. And I'm James Carey. And we are catching up. We're doing a special episode of Catching Up Really on the last few weeks.
We're going to talk about lockdown and what it means for comedy, what it's meant for us, what it'll mean for you as writers starting out in the big bad world of comedy writing. We've got quite a lot to catch up on, haven't we, James? Yes, the world's exploded in various ways several times over since we last did a raw episode like this. It's exploded and nothing has happened in kind of almost equal measure really.
It's a bit of a weirdness really. Yes, everything and nothing. Yes, I know what you mean. So, yeah, I'd say what has been busy.
So Patreon, we've had more and more people join us on Patreon, haven't we? Which is very exciting. We were very, we were not sure at all what was going to happen. We thought maybe people might not with lockdown and everything, but actually coinciding as well, I think with sort of quite two quite big script competitions, the BBC Writers' Room and the Golden Simpson Blurchery that was announced sort of about a week after the Writers' Room closed.
So it's been a kind of nonstop possibilities for writers to write scripts and a lot of people, we've been doing a lot of stuff about that anyway. I could name, I could welcome our new Patreons in fact. Why not? Yes, and this is really the last sort of month or so.
Natalie Elvin, hello, Gareth Edward, Joe Reaney, Tesca others, Shane Salter, Tom Doggett, Ian Murray at Smith, Lucy Ransley, Gavin Samuel, David Elliott and Harry Evans. I feel like an episode of weekending where I've been reading out the names. Read the writers. Yeah, yeah.
Well, to me, I felt like I was saying like a football, you know, and the no-school draws are. Yeah, it felt a bit like that too. That's sort of a BBC scene answer. But there's loads of stuff on Patreon.
If you join us, there's extra content being put up. I've only literally just dropped the episode where we spoke to the wonderful Rufus Jones. So we talk to him about home and that episode is very, very early access. But there's loads of stuff that's only on Patreon, loads of extra content and also membership of a private Facebook group and people are kind of helping each other as well and having offline discussions and generally kind of, because it is lonely out there.
But also, I think now is the time to be thinking about the next thing. I know I would say that, wouldn't I? But we've just had a couple of deadlines with the BBC writers' room. There was the Goulton and Simpson Burcery thing.
And next year, there'll be another BBC writers' room window. They won't want the script that you submitted before. And so now is the time to be thinking. And also maybe to think, maybe I need a new approach.
Maybe I need to start again. I've now written that sitcom that I've always been meaning to write. But what would happen if I started from scratch now? So we've also got a sitcom where it's called Suet to Nuts that is being planned on Patreon as well.
Very slowly and incrementally. But it's showing you the steps in which you need to go through to create a show that actually matters. And funnily enough, things have their moment, don't they? Because what's happened in our sitcom that we've been developing offline, as it were?
Yes, well, there's a plot which, James came up with this idea. We were kind of scrabbling around a bit and then it's very much about local council and opportunities for local businesses. And James had this idea that we should set the episode around a statue of a local businessman. And there's a lot of protests in the local community about this statue, mostly because the guy himself, his family, have subsequently become a bunch of ne'er-do-wells and rubbish business people who ruin the town.
And then also they decided to build a road through the town anyway. So the statue just was going to go. That now, if we were to keep that plot, people would just say, oh God, aren't they just kind of jumping on the bloody statue and wagon? I don't know whether we're going to be able to keep it or not really.
Well, by the time that plot appears anywhere in any actual show, it will feel like it's kind of matured and doesn't feel opportunistic. And in a way, that is an interesting metaphor, isn't it? Because these things do have their time. These things do have a moment.
And sometimes you may come up with an idea that doesn't feel maybe off the moment. And actually, a few months later, it feels like it really is. So that's why, in a way, you want to be working on numerous ideas simultaneously. You want to have two or three.
And then suddenly one of them might feel like it's right for now. Whereas another one, which felt so current, actually now, already feels rather dated. But then it may come back in a different way with using some of the same characters. Also, coincidentally, I have a chunk in my novel, which I finished.
And I'm just kind of going through the final rewrites for. I had a whole chunk that I wrote more than a year ago. It's part of it set in Bristol. And there is this chunk about how Bristol was entirely built on the slave trade.
And really, nobody is going to read that and think anything other than he is just so, he shouldn't be talking about that because it's set in the past. And he's obviously just added that in now. I have to kind of really think about how am I going to get rid of it? What could I do with it?
But yes, it's true. And actually, one of the points to mention about competitions anyway, is that there used to be the BAFTA-Roclev comedy script, which is where the deadline was at the same time as the BBC writers' room. And they've moved it now. So that's actually in September.
So if you do want to write the sitcom, there is a competition in September. I had somebody, a friend actually who's a comedian, wrote to me and she said that she was thinking of entering a script for that, but it's something like £42 to enter. Is it worth it? So I put a little question out on our Twitter site, sitcom geeks, and asked, and the general response that I got back, 100%, was, yes, it's definitely worth entering.
So yes, if you are thinking of doing another sitcom, that's September, that's what, four months away now, five months away. It's time enough if you've got... Oh, for months. Two and a half, three months.
Well, I'm actually doing a thing now. This is partly what I've been doing in the last couple of months. I've kind of gone online with some of my teaching. I've got this thing called Lockdown sitcom, and I set it up in, started a few weeks ago.
It's like writer sitcom in eight weeks. So I've got a bunch of people, I'm doing this on a correspondence course with. I'm doing another one in July. That is full, so I'm afraid if you wanted to do something for a roadlift, that one's full, but I'm doing another one again in October.
So basically, we go from soup to nuts, really. Eight weeks. Can you write a sitcom in eight weeks? And quite a few of the people on it, they're pushing through, they're cracking through, it's quite amazing, really.
When you have this sort of force to deadline, it is amazing what you can come up with. But I've been sort of trying to do myself as well. I've had an idea and I thought, well, this might be a good exercise for me. I got to about week four and I just thought, this isn't happening.
It might still happen, still got two weeks to go, but at the moment, I'm kind of giving up on that one. I've had some very interesting insights, really, I suppose, from doing it. Okay. What are the headlines on that?
The headlines and the parallel with the virus that we're going through is actually very, very interesting, because it struck me that writing a sitcom is a little bit like trying to come out of a pandemic. Because you have absolutely no idea where anything is going, but you kind of hazard a guess. So you three weeks into your pandemic and it's all kind of starting to sort of, that the peak has gone and you're kind of plateauing slightly. Okay, what's the next thing that I can do?
So you do do something, but then you find out that that thing has consequences that you hadn't really thought through. Well, you couldn't think through it because it's all new. And so those consequences make you think, okay, I'm going to have to put that to one side for my moment and look at this and think, well, actually, no, we can't do that just yet. We've got to do this.
And I think that's kind of, I suppose, being open to the possibilities and the way of how wrong things can go, even as you are trying to kind of do something by, you know, kind of, you're trying to be scientific with something that you can't always be scientific about. It's not like you're not building a machine or something. You've built a million times before. You are, you know, you are coming up with it every day.
You have to come up with new stuff for it and you've got no idea where that new stuff is going to take you. So I think that's the main thing that I've taken away. Do you think that's the same? That's a good one.
Yeah, as you were saying that, I think the organic nature of it, I think, always surprises people. And I think maybe people think that those of us who do this for a living and do it a lot, we kind of have a system and a method and we impose our will or our formula onto the genre, as it were. And actually, it feels more like you're planting various seeds and the more seeds you plant, the more plants come up roughly in the shape that you want. So in some ways, it's a bit more like gardening rather than building lego houses.
It's much more organic than that. And sometimes you have an amazing crop and it just comes, it comes good and you get loads of great plants that you can work with or make jam with or make chutney with. And sometimes it's just like, nah, well that didn't work. Okay, maybe I infected the whole batch with something that I'm not entirely sure about.
Okay, well that's okay, I'll try something again. And that's frustrating. So I think in a way we're always trying to give people that fairly grown up approach of just try stuff, just try stuff. And I think our only advantage, and particularly my advantage, I haven't done this for 20 years and written however many scripts and pilot scripts, is one of my advantages is I know how hard it is.
And therefore I expect to find it really hard. And that actually weirdly means that I don't panic half way through when I'm finding it hard. I think when people find it easy, or they panic and they're finding it hard and they think they're doing it wrong. So no, no, you're probably doing it right.
So yes, I give them a weekly feedback. So each one person gets an individual feedback and then I do a sort of a mass email. And from since about week three, I've been saying exactly that kind of thing. Or if you're finding it easy, then something's wrong.
And of course, the longer it's gone on, the more people are gone. Here's my week five stuff for you. I found it really hard and I really struggled with this and I wasn't able to do it. And I say, yeah, that's that's I'm not being a sadist here.
I'm not reveling in your misery, but I am trying to say, you know, it's good that you're finding it hard because that means that you are, you know, you're trying to weave your own stuff. And I have just to go back to what you were saying there, a couple of people, a couple of times people have sort of said, I've said something about, I'm not quite sure if that character works or I'm not quite sure you've got that thing working. And some people will just change it and come up with something different. Some people say, no, I'm sticking with that.
And as the weeks have gone on, the thing I sort of feel slightly vindicated to the way of the thing that's the reason it's not working is the thing that I identified early on as a potential problem has not gone away. And that's kind of interesting. I've just kind of been using the process that we talk about, you know, week in, week out on this podcast, which is, you know, what's it about? What's it really about?
Why me? Why now get all that stuff? You know, really, really get that stuff sorted before you even think about writing the plots and the characters and the dialogue and everything, you know, really think about it. And, you know, it is quite amazing seeing what kind of comes out of that.
So I've really enjoyed it. Cool. So that's all fully booked for July, but I'm sure you'll be doing it again in the future. There's also loads of extra advice on Patreon and your blog, my blog, links in the show notes, all that business.
And also the BCG Pro loads of stuff there as well, if you want to register with that. And also you get a discount. I think if you put in sitcom geeks with the capital S and the capital G when you join, you get a fiber off or something. Yeah, one word.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So we'll be after we've done this podcast, we'll be recording a separate Q&A, which will just be for Patreon. So we're planning to do this as a monthly thing now. So the last Thursday of the month, you heard it here first. We think last Thursday, the month there will be a live Q&A or at least a very recent, you know, up to the minute Q&A.
So so yeah. So those are all the benefits of that stuff and chat about sitcom writing generally. What are you telling us about the lockdown latest? Yes.
Well, this is just to kind of keep you up to date really with the sort of comedy news. It's been we should have some theme to music for this comedy news. It's been, I mean, as for everybody, you know, there've been some pretty awful things that have happened. I mean, not above and beyond all the sort of terrible, you know, kind of situation that has occurred as far as the future for, you know, kind of produced TV comedy is concerned.
You know, there's a lot of issues, a lot of problems before coronavirus and some of them have been exaggerated. I mean, Channel 4 was kind of struggling a little bit before the virus, but now it seems to be struggling a lot more. So I think basically cancelled all of their comedy production as a, you know, they sort of postponed it indefinitely. Nobody's and still nobody really knows what's what's going to happen with Channel 4.
I think, yeah, I think, you know, there's going to start rerunning Sean's show, presumably, and dressing for breakfast. I do. Yes. I really like dressing for breakfast.
I thought that was a great sitcom. Pack it up for him. What was dressing for breakfast? What was that?
Go on. Go back to that. I think the most was Susan Kalman wrote it. No, I'm mixing up my comments.
Yeah, it was a kind of, it was a quite a sort of modern for its time. Young people sitcom had to sort of Trent, trendy mom and these sort of two girls, flatmates who, you know, were struggling with life classic sitcom, but very, very lovely, very well written. I remember. I did.
Yeah. And the other one, there was a sitcom about something, there was a sitcom about battered wives refuge called the refuge, actually, which was not Channel 4's finest moment. It has to be said. But they did start with, they started with the Five Go Mad series, which you know, even within November 82 when Channel 4 started.
And that was kind of groundbreaking kind of comedy show, really. I mean, I've kind of paved the way, but the sort of non-audience shows really, I think. They were more like mini movies. And Peter Rickey.
And the way, yeah, really gave BBC 2 a bit of a run for its money as well, I think, in a good way. Because I feel like I grew up in a bit of a comedy arms race between BBC 2 and Channel 4. And my teenagers particularly were all the better for it. Yeah.
You know, because Channel 4 was giving us Clive Anderson talks back as well and Paul Mert in the series. Yeah. As well as one of my favourites, Mr. Donomist and George, for one series only.
Well, Channel 4, as a spoiler for the week that Channel 4 opened, that was the first week that BBC 2 showed the young ones. So the young ones debuted on the same week as Five Go Mad, which was a real kind of, I mean, if I've got Mad, just got completely lost because the young ones just within two weeks was becoming the thing that everybody was talking about all the time. And it was quite breathtaking, the speed with which the sort of alternative comedy juggernaut kind of rolled into town. And it was about that week when Channel 4 started when it happened.
We'll talk about that actually in a minute. So basically, Channel 4, the good and the bad and the not so good, but some great show, Father Ted, of course, the greatest. Absolutely. So, but, you know, there's going to be a lot of hard talking with Channel 4 over the next few months.
Hopefully, something will come out of that. There's been a lot of great initiatives for Black, Asian and minority ethnic writers in the last few weeks, kind of off the back of the whole sort of Black Lives Matter issue. It's kind of gone beyond just a few people telling us, isn't it terrible? And actually, a lot of people have set up initiatives for Black writers and Asian writers.
If you go to the BCT Pro site, there's a topical comedy course for Black and Ethnic minority Asian writers. Jenna Arris-Smith is running a free sketch course. Andy Riley has for years been mentoring Black writers. In fact, he's been joined by the Dawson brothers.
So, a lot of writers now are putting schemes into place really, and I'm also involved in a project which is not just about getting writers involved, trying to get people across the whole process. So, getting writers, producers, performers, everybody who's involved with comedy, who knows Black writers, performers, whatever to say. Actually, think about in this situation, if you can employ somebody from, or from, you know, white working class background as well, anyone from a background who, you know, is basically all about just trying to make the playing field more level, I would say, really. I think that's a, these are things that it's not about, you know, kind of less talented people getting ahead of more talented people.
It's just about making the opportunities easier to access for everybody really, and not just for people who, you know, who can manage, you know, who can manage without having any money for months at a time or whatever. So, that's the kind of basis of that. So, that's a kind of good thing, I think, that's come out of the last couple of months. Have you got anything that you, or should want to answer that?
No, the only other thing, I guess, is any personal thing in terms of what I've been up to. And hopefully, there's something to learn from this, I don't know. One thing, I started writing a novel, and I still plan to finish the novel, but once I'd written about 12500 words, I stopped. And because I also thought, do you know what, by about the end of September and I finished it, and I say, here's my novel, I'll be told, okay, do place it on the pile over there.
What pile is that? I can't see anything, just a massive pile of, oh I see, that's it. And there's me getting a step ladder to put mine on the top of it. Actually, the person behind it is 6'6 inches tall, and still can't see that tall.
I've actually been very mindful of this as well. I finished the novel, as you might have heard me say, about 25 times on here. But I have what I've done the last month or so, I've kind of sent it out to a few people for just to get notes really on it. And I've had a pretty reasonably positive response from people actually.
And I have been looking into this, I mean I would love to get an agent and a publisher and all that side of things, but I'm coming more and more around to the idea that I will publish it myself. It just seems to be an obvious thing to do really. I know and I know a lot now about self publishing, I've learnt a lot through bringing out my non-fiction books about comedy writing, and I'm learning more now about the world of fiction. I feel that, exactly what you're saying, even if my book is absolutely brilliant and wonderful, I send it out to people now.
As you say, the other person knows you're being held in a queue. The other person knows you are waiting, but they have got another 500 books ahead of yours to read first. The more I think about it, the more I think that's a probable route for me to take. So I think in a way you want to make the most of the time, but also it is just also worth thinking for people listening, what can I do?
You do kind of want to be a bit savvy about going where the opportunities are. In a way if you think you want to write a novel, you should write a novel, you might be the next John Steinbeck or Marilyn Robinson or whatever, in which case, great. But it is worth thinking, what do I do particularly well? So the other thing is the publisher who published the Sacred Art of Joking asked me for another book that could be funny, and actually I'm going to write hopefully another book ahead of the novel, which is taking a book on the other side of the book.
Which is taking a comedy approach to two parts of the Bible, but rather than a point in laugh kind of way, which is a common thing to do with the Bible, and there's a perfectly good tradition of that, which we'll get on to canceling comedy in a minute. But for my point of view, it would be more like a yes and approach to the comedy in the Bible. So that's a really strong niche for me, so I would be a bit mad not to make the most of that niche, especially given that that's book I'd really like to write. And it could open doors for other books and other projects, and if somebody in America wanted to write a movie based on Bible characters that might actually be funny, then I go to the front of the queue for that sort of thing.
Another point to make, I think, as well, is that time you spent planning the novel and writing as much as you did, it's not wasted time. No, that's absolutely something that you've learned a lot from, and it's a piece of work that is there. A point might come six months down the line where you suddenly go, oh yeah, and this and this and this and that's really, it'll make sense and suddenly you'll have a month where you can just say, oh, and I can, maybe if I can lock myself away for a month, I can actually go back to this and finish it. Yeah, exactly, yeah.
So I feel I've left it in a place where I wanted to put it down and get a bit of distance on it anyway and that time of distance has improved, but I like to think that's like a fine wine or a mature cheddar. He says, speaking from Somerset, looking out over the Somerset levels, then I then so much the better. It may go slightly blue unintentionally, but who knows? Well, we don't like blue comedy around these parts.
No, oh, it's blue. It's blue, Alan. It's blue. But speaking of inappropriate comedy, I guess the other...
It's a great segue there, James. Yes. Some comedy has been cancelled since we last spoke, or at least removed, and we'll find it's way back into the mainstream at some point in the next 15 years when everyone's forgotten about it. Or maybe not, maybe I'm wrong there.
But yeah, so why don't you just tell us what the headline is? Yeah, okay. Let's first of all, let's look at this as a topical story that we should look at, which is that a lot of blackface comedy has been cancelled, taken off Netflix or whatever, that we will then look from a writer's point of view. I think we can also look at this and we'll talk in a bit about what's your best approach to writing about race as a comedy writer.
But to go to the first point, there was a lot of sound and fury in the last week or so. It started with a kind of misreporting of the cancellation. The news came out, the BBC had cancelled the Germans episode of 40 Towers, which was basically a total misrepresentation of what had happened. As it happens, the Germans episode of 40 Towers had, within it, an extremely racist exchange as they were every week, most weeks between Basil and the Major.
At least six or seven years ago, I think John Cleese had kind of highlighted this, and there is no room for this, there's no place for this sort of sketch. There was a use of the end one, wasn't there? Yeah, and also it was kind of an understanding that it was something of its time, its understanding of the intent, it was obviously kind of not meant in a derogatory way, it was laughing at the Major and Basil rather than laughing with. That was all said at the time, back in the time when this was a fraud question.
Cleese was quite happy to remove that section from that episode. The famously reason that John Cleese was not prone to public displays of rage or anger. But even he was just like, yeah, fair enough. And that was taken out of every episode that was, you've subsequently accepted, when it was sold to an package to UK TV.
And so UK TV had not yet taken that part out. And so the new story this week was that UK TV had removed that section from the Germans episode. So you'd struggle to know that from the headlines there? No, that was a completely, that was a total non-story, but obviously in the febrile atmosphere of last week, UK TV on top of a snap juice being toppled and people killed and the kind of world protest.
Suddenly, Craven BBC has cancelled the episode about the Germans is a much better story. And it got great traction and it became this whole thing about. And then comes along to Avko in with his context. Oh, Dave.
Oh, no. Yes, it did reignite debate, which again will come to a little bit more, about blackface. And that is the more controversial area. And again, Little Britain, particularly mentioned League of Gentlemen, Little Britain, they had for many years also, they had sort of said, we accepted, we did blacking up, we realised now, it wasn't meant in that way, but we actually looked now at how comedy has changed and things have moved on.
And we would not do that in that way anymore. So, again, it's not, I mean, it then started to be a little bit of a story of, you know, well, Little Britain has always punched down to use the sort of common language and really if you're going to attack people, you need to punch up. And the same old arguments that we've been hearing for 25, 30 years now. And, you know, it does always get this sort of worry when this thing comes up.
And I do feel that comedy is very much used as a kind of weapon by both sides to attack each other. And I find that kind of a little bit of a pain, this whole sort of thing. Especially if you're trying to pay your mortgage with comedy. Yes.
And I do, but I mean, I do not need personal, I suppose part of a group of people, we were in the 1980s when we were performing as a sound-ups. And it was nobody knew anything about, you know, or people weren't kind of having these kind of discussions about sexism and racism. But my generation of comedians who grew up in the 70s seeing sexist TV and racist, sexist, sexist, and sexism and racism on TV and whatever happened to not be comfortable with that. And actually, it just happened that we kind of thought, well, we would like to try a different approach to comedy.
You know, for us, it's about, you know, kind of coming up with our own stereotypes, I suppose, people are more familiar to us. So, you know, the mother-in-law was an outdated concept. You know, we couldn't go on stage in North London in 1980s and tell jokes about mother-in-law or, you know, the Pakistani people or black people. Because it just wouldn't, the audience, it wouldn't register with them.
So, you know, we ended up talking about other areas, you know, and relationships and sexual politics or whatever, you know, kind of, and the sort of left-wing politics inevitably that kind of came out of that period, which was the height of Margaret Thatcher's popularity. So, it wasn't like we were trying to cancel sexist and racist comedy. We were just trying to find something new. But inevitably, as that became popular, then the kind of comedy that was considered to be sexist and racist, like Benny Hill or Jim Davidson, whatever, did start to get canceled.
So, you know, you can see how people look at it and say, oh, you know, this is a sort of political correctness, not mad. But, you know, it works both ways. And, you know, I've often been criticized. I've often had very nasty letters for BBC Radio for, you know, when I wrote the sort of comedy shows and we took the piss out of the UK.
You know, so I've got some really, you know, sort of really hateful letters, like sort of letters that you'd get, you know, for people who are canceling in the other direction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's hard, isn't it, because you're enraging people and comedy is actually very, very sophisticated. And you do have to kind of let the audience make up their own mind.
And if they, if they misunderstand what you say, well, there's not an awful lot you can do about that. And I guess this moves on to, you know, what, as a comedy writer, we can do about it. Or what we should, you know, how do we move on from here, given the world we live in, maybe rather than the world that we would like to live in. We got a question about exactly that from one of our Patreon members, Michael Hall.
And he wrote to us and he said, you know, he'd be interesting to hear podcasts, discussions about how, you know, how do you deal with race issues now? You know, how do you put them into the character types? And he quoted the thing that John Cleese said quite recently about the various issues, this particular issue about whether you have racist characters or not. He says, I hope that someone at the BBC would understand there are two ways of making fun of human behavior.
One is to attack it directly. And the other is to have someone who is patently a figure of fun, speak up on behalf of that behavior. And he used Alfa Garnet as the obvious example of that. So what do you...
But then of course, people then say, yes, but people misunderstood Alfa Garnet and he became a hero to particular viewpoints or attitudes. At which point, you know, and I know that you know, Johnny Spake was very unhappy about that. But equally, there is quite an arrogant as a writer to say, I control exactly how my audience feel about everything. And it may be that you're making things clear in one particular direction.
But if you create characters, again, this goes back to what we're saying at the start about, this whole thing is organic. Not only are you growing these organic characters that have a life of their own and a voice of their own, they have a resonance with an audience that we don't fully understand either before, during or after. So I think sometimes, you know, we like to think as a writer, I have supreme control, not just over my world that I'm creating, but the reactions to that world. And I think you're on...
And it's weird because I thought we'd already discovered... I thought poststructuralism and deconstructivism and Jacques Derrida had already said that the author has died, that there is no authorial intention to it, you know, and you can make whatever text you can. And now suddenly we're trying to suss out motives for writers, for characters, for audience members, and sort of get a whiff of the fact that, oh, we've got a wrong in here. So I think in a way, we want to be a bit more accepting of the fact that these things take on a life of their own, and that's partly why they go well as partly why they go wrong.
Yeah, I mean, I would think, to be fair to Johnny Space, it wasn't just that that show, and I do remember I was very young when it came out, but I do remember it was, you know, that the entire national discourse was about nothing else. It was, you know, there were only two channels or three channels, and everybody talked about Alfgan all the time. And, you know, very quickly, it became, you know, you either love him or you hate him. And I think, you know, I don't think any comedy writer had experienced that kind of level of sort of dissection of those work in real time.
But the question is, do you actually want people to talk about stuff? And if you want to deal with an issue within a sitcom, you're going to have to have somebody with an alternative point of view. So you need to be a little bit grown up about not just straw manning, the arguments you don't like. There's a great expression called steel manning, which is you do the best version you can of an opposing viewpoint.
Yeah. And then have a go at that. And you know, and you want to humanize your enemies. And, you know, and show, and one of the reasons why, and I don't know if it's the case, because I didn't watch a lot of Alfganet.
But one of his primary motivations is fear. You can see he's afraid of having his land taken away from him. Or sometimes you might show that it's ignorance, or you might show that it's this or that. And that actually will humanize them in a way that you might not like, but actually people will find easy to relate to.
And then you can have a discussion. And a discussion involves contrary points of view. So if we don't even want to be in a room where contrary points of view are espoused, then I'm afraid I haven't got anything to say to that. I think what you know, it's a while since I listened to the interview you did with Eric Chappell who read Rising Dampe.
But I do, I'm pretty sure I remember him saying that the very conscious effort to how do you deal with race. I mean, Rising Dampe is a masterclass in that room. You have, you know, the winning character is the black guy, you know, and he is a guy, he is a character who happens to be black. And Leonard Rosta's character, Ricksby of course.
And Dicksby, I had the dog Dicksby in my head for some reason. Ricksby would love to be all the things that Philip is apart from black. But it's what I loved about that show was that there's a sort of tangential way. It was a comedy about status, which is a sort of classic comedy thing, class status.
And, you know, oh, and by the way, there's a sort of racial kind of underside to this. But it's actually, you know, it didn't really, that wasn't the main point. And nobody ever accused Rising Dampe of dealing with stereotypes or nobody said this is demeaning to white people. You know, it just, it was like, I thought, you get two reactions.
You get two or three reactions to Philip played by Don Warrington, where you've got Ricksby, who is, it's a bit partridge actually. He's a little bit, he's fascinated and intrigued by the otherness. And the way Philip talks about, you know, there's this, you know, talks about being a son of a tribal chief or something. And you're pretty sure he's messing with him.
And in the play on which it's based, I believe, that the whole thing is shown to be not true and that the whole thing has been stringing him along, which is not, I don't think, ever resolved in the sitcom in quite that way. And you get Ricksby, who is intrigued, but also repelled. And then you've got Richard Beckinsell's character, who's just like, oh, it's Philip, you know, he's, you know, we're going to go out and it's hands nice. Yeah, yeah.
And then he got Miss Jones, who is, yeah, who is, you know, who is utterly in love with him. And you just think, well, you've got sort of two, two as it were, positive reactions and one negative reaction. Well, for 1970s Britain, that sounds about right, doesn't it? Maybe a little bit generous, in fact.
But it's trying to just shift, it's shifting the over to the window a little bit, isn't it? Well, that comes back to another aspect is, you know, how much, well, you guys are you saying, everyone's saying, how much are you trying to be, how much are you trying to get people to watch what you want to see? But then also, you know, how much are you reflecting what's already out there? And I think there is a lot of that.
And I think, you know, I showed like Love Thy Neighbor, which I know was pretty much universally hated by the kind of black people of my generation. And they talk a lot about getting a lot of stick because of that. You know, you watch Love Thy Neighbor and it's almost painful in its attempts to be, to show actually, well, no, it's not about racism. It's about, you know, it's about men and women really.
The women get on pretty well, but it's the blokes and it's about alpha males, you know. But the fact is that the white alpha male is a racist and the black alpha male gives as good as he gets. And so that kind of, there's even less nuance to that, I think it's always than to have to have gone. And I do think, you know, it's troubling because obviously the writers were not trying to write.
You know, they were trying to kind of say, look, I'm a writer. This is about a person, a comedy character with weaknesses. This is what we're trying to show. But, and I had a similar thing that showed, never mind the quality feel, the width, which was about a Jewish tailor and Irish tailor who worked with him.
And so they were called Manny Cohen and Patty Kelly. And there was an ice lovely family sitcom, but because of the surname being the same as mine, you know, I used to get all sorts of crap for it. And you kind of can't help that. You know, people watch it and go, ah ha, he's called Cohen, he's a tailor.
He's called Manny Cohen. The whole Jews called Cohen must be called Manny. You know, so you kind of can see why people get angry. Yeah, and I'm, you know, I'm not about to play my, you know, I'm not about to play my, I'm not that privileged card.
But, you know, I speak, as we speak now, I am in Yoval, in some sense, I live in the West Country. I'm from the West Country, I'm the son of a farmer. When people have a proper West Country accent, you could be forgiven for thinking they're not very clever. And there's, it's just like, I don't know, it's just good evidence that people have a lower IQ in the Southwest.
But it's like, it's definitely true, James. Well, there you go. So in a way, there's like, you know, everyone has these little stereotypes, and some of them are pernicious and very tiresome, and other than just, you know, here we go again. And I'm aware that if you live with it on a day to day basis, you know, many times a day as it were, it must be wearing infuriating degrading.
So, but it's in a way we are playing with all of these kinds of things. And you are playing some form of seventh dimensional chess. And then suddenly people just go, oh, there's an eighth of the ninth dimension. Let's look back at your seventh dimensional chess game.
Oh, yeah, that doesn't look very good, does it? So it's pretty, it's pretty terrifying, really. And I just think in a way, it just heightens the fact that, as we've been saying throughout this episode, and pretty much every podcast really is, it's really hard. And you have to be intentional about absolutely everything.
So that if you're going to address race in a particular way, know that you're dealing with it, or move it to one side and do something else, or, you know, so although I've said, you know, you can't control how the audience is going to feel about it, do also think, well, what are they supposed to think? So when you're planning your sitcom and writing it, if you've got a central relationship that is racially interesting, and you've set it in a racially interesting area, but you've then just said, oh, no, it's not about that at all, it's about something else. You go, well, okay, you have done an awful lot to make it look like it's about one thing. And it's going to be quite a trick to make it actually about something else.
So it's just a question of stage management of directing the audience's attention and knowing what your key characters are, what their relationships are, and then also, what are the audience likely to make of it. And these things do, as you've said, take on the life of their own, but you've got to start somewhere and you've got to put a few pins in the map and just say, right, okay, this is the show. And then, you know, and then a pandemic comes along, and that's the end of that. Or a pandemic, you know, suddenly makes your top, makes your sitcom feel right, and then halfway through a pandemic, race rights break out and ruin a perfectly decent pandemic.
You know, and so suddenly, so, you know, we are hitting moving targets with rifles that don't have correct sightings on them, and it's a very windy day. And I would just add that I have direct experience of trying to do this, and I've tried over 20 or 30 years or so to write very specific characters in which I've tried to deal with the subject tangentially. And it just, for instance, about 15 years ago, 20 years ago, I suppose roughly, when I had this idea, I was working with Jeannie Yashire on other things, and I had this idea for her as somebody who becomes a Tory politician, and who very quickly becomes the leader of the Tory party through a sort of series of accidents, and the fact that nobody, the Tory party at the time had no, you know, nobody stood any chance against Tony Blair. So they might as well go with this lived engineer who turned up at their offices.
Kind of a Joe the plumber basically. Yeah, yeah, with a sort of sort of libertarian views and things. But it just was, I could never quite get it. As we said, you know, it was hard to kind of create it without creating the opposite peoples to it, and so it was just a little bit too fraught, really, as a kind of subject.
I always felt it was a really strong idea, it was one of the best ideas that I'd had for a long time, and I pushed it for a long time, but it just didn't, I couldn't get away from the feeling of uncomfortable feeling that this could easily become something that would be, you know, just the opposite of absolute say the opposite of what I wanted to say. And as you said, you know, you can't control it, and I felt I couldn't control it. I didn't feel I was the person who could write it, maybe someone else could. I guess my final comment, because we should probably wrap up, is when you do get something over the line, again, you know, speaking of the experience of Bluestone 4.2, a show with a modicum of controversy given it was about improvised explosive devices in an active ongoing war situation.
So, and actual facts, you know, the show wasn't as controversial as people thought it was going to be in the end, even though you watch it, it is quite full on. But in terms of the reaction of it, you just can't tell, because I do know that there were some people, in fact, a neighbor of mine who just says I've worked with one disposal people, and I don't think you want to watch your show, because I think it'll be disrespectful. And I'm like, okay, that's fine. And there are others who've had relatives who have been wounded in Afghanistan or killed, and it would be very painful for them to watch it.
But there are others who are in exactly the same situation who find it cathartic, and are like, oh, thank goodness someone has actually told that story. And they find it kind of cleansing in some way. And you just don't know. You just don't know how people are going to feel about it.
And in a way, we need to give people the grace and the freedom just to react to it as they see fit. And I would say this, but you know, there is stuff about this in the Bible, and Christians are very deemed to be very, very judgmental. But there is actually stuff in the Bible about just saying, look, if you don't have a problem with someone else does, that's okay. They don't need to follow your rules on every single issue, which is sort of the parts of the Bible that people aren't aware exist and are actually quite handy.
There is room for disagreement and grace here. So you can't say to somebody, especially now, you are wrong to feel that way about this. Don't tell people how to feel. But equally, if you feel differently from someone else, that's just how they feel.
And maybe that's fine. So yeah, but I'm really grateful also that you have corrected some of these hyperbolic stories about canceling stuff for which the comedian's responsible have already had second thoughts. And of course, the idea that John Cleese, who was part of a very progressive group of Monty Python who did Life of Brian, and the idea that Matt Lucas and David Williams should in any way be part of the establishment kicking down. He's just saying, oh, come on.
You know what I mean? They may not always express themselves right, or it may not date very well. But the idea that these guys are the bad guys. I'm glad you said that's actually going to as well.
Because that's been my feeling. I just think this is a massive, massive distraction from actually, you know, there is racism that needs to be dealt with. And the right people have been dealing with it the right way as much as they can for many years. And there's still a lot more that needs doing.
And any argument about which comedy show we're allowed to watch, or it's just a total destruction. We're going to discuss one more thing, but I'll just mention it very quickly because just to say that one area that's experiencing the worst problem of the world. And of course, live comedy. And we still don't know what's going to happen.
How on earth are we going to come out of theatre? So, you know, comedy sketch groups or whatever. Maybe a bit of homework. We could actually, for the next time or for the next time we record a live episode, we get a bit of information on that.
Maybe talk to a Goldsmith. We can talk to some of the people who've set up a new group trying to sort of get together like an umbrella group of all the people with interest in this called the Live Comedy Association. I understand there's going to be a kind of online version of the Edinburgh Fringe in August. So, we might want to talk to somebody about that, I think.
So, I think that might be a good future podcast, a very near future. But, yeah, I think we've kind of run out of time to discuss that in detail. But, yeah. Okay.
Okay. There'll be more, if you want us on Patreon, there'll be more of this. So, you can do that. The next two, they've already enjoyed the next two episodes that we'll be putting out for your ears is an interview, a two-part interview with Annal Gupta and Richard Pinto, who write together loads of stuff.
And it was also the exec producer of the office. That's a great story. It's a great story. It's a great story.
He ends the first part by just saying, so the story of the... We spend the first part of the interview talking about all of their failures. And at the very end of that first part, Dave, you just say, so some of our listeners may be more familiar with your name because you're the exec producer of the office. It's like...
Only the most popular... Yeah. Exactly. ...around the revolution.
Yeah. Yeah. But also he just says, well, so this is my version. Other versions are available, which is great.
And then in the second part he tells it. So, those are the next two episodes. And we'll be back after that. At which point we might know a bit more about lockdown and theatres and the live scene and all that stuff, as well as more info on situation comedies and new things coming out.
So that's cool. Thanks very much for listening, everybody. Thank you. And well, thanks for the BCG British Comedy Guide.
If you go to their website, comedy.co.uk. Who hosted our podcast very kindly. Thank you. And we will speak to you next time.
Bye-bye.