Episode 156 - 2021 Vision

I'm Dave Cohen and I am James Carey and today this is episode 156 of the series we're going out for the series like we're gonna have a new series starting soon but this one this will be going out on the 31st of December so it's new year's Eve so you may be listening to this on New Year's Eve in which case Happy New Year when it comes and for many people it is good riddance to 2020 but it's a bit of a mixed bag and we look back at 2020 in our last episode didn't we Dave we did and so let's move forward and that's what this episode is going to be all about really is we are putting 2020 behind us we hope and we hope you are too and we are hoping for I don't know what are we hoping for in 2021 or will be to fail in new ways yes there's no point failing the way you fail before so make make different mistakes yeah yeah wow is that too have I given the game away too much already I mean that's well as you said on frequent occasions you know we've interviewed fantastically successful people on this show and just ended up talking about their flop as much them wanting to do it as us bringing it up yeah so yeah it is the fault position of the comedy writer let's talk about our failures and of course the most famous quote Samuel Beckett the great Samuel Beckett fail better okay well there you go I mean in a way that is a good that is a good starting point for 2021 yeah I've just I've just recorded finished recording the audio version of my book writing that sitcom right and the very final chapter is basically essentially saying failure is certain you know what I mean this is like success is the outlier so you just need to learn how to fail better and to take it better and to move on so I think you know 2020 has been a bit of a not such a baptism of fire but a refining process for many of us and quite painful professionally in many ways but I'd sort of also think about it in terms of what you're saying there I kind of see myself occasionally as a character in my sitcom that is that's been running for 62 years now and you know you bang away and bang away at the things that you love and hope that you know these are the things that you put all your emotional investment in but actually and this and this sounds like you know the bad version of every movie that you've ever seen it's like the thing that you were going for it's not that thing it's the thing that was round the corner that you would never never realized that was the thing you know yeah it was there all along yeah every rom-com you know it's like oh all the time I was looking for this but actually this is the thing that makes me happy and I sort of feel that's kind of how things have sort of panned out for me over the last few years and moving into 2021 for me it's gonna be just pause that we'll talk about 21 in a second I just love the idea I just can't let this one go of you looking back on your life as if it's a sitcom and so a there's that kind of perspective of seeing yourself as a sitcom character which is actually a fundamentally very healthy thing to do but be I'm wondering with your sitcom geek hat on would you give yourself notes on how you could have done it better and the problem is I lied to just so messy and haphazard but when you look back on the James Kerry of 1998 and the James Kerry of 2003 it's like you had no idea did you you had no idea that this was gonna happen or that or that you thought you were this sort of person and actually you're that sort of person and actually that's been one of my lessons of 2020 and I'm embracing looking ahead I'm just gonna drop my mind in here is that I've really gotten into a routine and so in 2020 I spent a lot more time in my office than I used to all of my meetings were cancelled all of so I was just in my office pretty much every day you couldn't go to Starbucks it was shut and I would spend a lot of time in Starbucks and so I sort of found a way of working in my office and also making sure that I spend the mornings writing because I'm a writer and not to agree to Zoom meetings or anything like that generally in the mornings I really protect that morning time to get the writing done and thereafter and just making sure I get up slightly earlier I've had some spiritual disciplines as well that I've been much better at since lockdown and discovered that I actually like routine and I've been laboring under the Miss apprehension for at least 10 years that I don't do routine I'm a writer for goodness sake if I wanted routine I'd be a producer I'd be this or that or the other I'd go and work for you know price water has coopers I'd go and be an accountant but actually I discovered that I like routine and so I built I'm building routine into my life more and more and embracing that in 2021 so that's one of my big headlines looking forward but I'm aware I kind of jumped on that I just wanted to put it in whilst it was relevant because you know relevant should always be be tried yeah but what about you Dave that's no that's a fairly that's a good point I mean I've always been I've always liked routine partly because I've I suppose my sort of comedy writing career has not been quite as sort of involved in big blocks of shows I've had so much kind of lack of routine in my work you know today it's a 300 word song I have to write tomorrow it's a you know an episode to come for someone else and then the next day it's something else and yeah it's a gag pass and then going into breakfast or something and so so I actually I've always quite sort of enjoyed the idea of routine since I gave up being a stand-up so it sort of made me pretend that I was like a real working person but yeah to go back to the sitcom thing a lot of this was a kind of realization that came to me there's a chapter in the book that I've written about trying to write during covid and that book is actually coming out in a couple of days time it's coming out Saturday the 2nd of January and it's actually it's gonna be on Amazon as an ebook it's going to be free for that first week so if you're listening to this in the first week after goes out so from the January 2nd January the 9th it's going to be available so get told it's called if I only had the time how to keep writing when the world stops and it's a very short book but it's a fairly personal book really but it's about how do you how do you keep going you know how do you sort of keep powering through and the thing that I one of the things I did was I was you know I kind of looked at myself looked at various things that I did things I've always done that I always thought I was good at and turns out I actually know you weren't that good at that day yeah and I realized that's when the idea of me as a sitcom character came through I realized there were some things where I will never ever learn from my mistakes I will keep making the same mistakes over and over I won't say what they are you can get the book free in the next week if you want if I only have the time and thereafter people listening about how much is it once it once you have to pay for it you know I'm not quite sure yet but I suspect it won't be a couple of times it'll be you know two ninety nine or something I haven't yet worked out and that's part of the beauty of self-publishing is you get to choose and I may put it on at two ninety nine and find that nobody's buying it at which point I will bring it down to one ninety nine and suddenly lots of people will buy it which I think I've started to notice with my other books I sort of say oh here special offer for a week it's down at this price and then suddenly loads and loads of people buy it so you know right it's that's a buy at full price because they miss the deal well you know it's well it's all on the internet and it's all over a period of two years or something so maybe I'm getting an angry email from someone saying I got that book when it was 699 and now you had it on last week for $4.99 give me two pounds now please yeah but maybe not you can write them a high cue and say here you go here's two pounds worth of poetry that's a good idea yeah that would be how I would smarm my way out of that initiative exercise yeah so this is kind of an I hinted on about this in the last episode about you know what what are you going to do in 2021 but before getting into the actual specifics I mean the most general thing is about having tried to take more control of my own career and be in charge of it that's that's going to be that's going to run through everything that I want to do we'll talk about that in a bit more detail later one the first thing that I should mention specifically with regard to sick kong geeks is that I have read the scenes he said right this is the scene competition yes this is yes this is the 31st of December today of course and yep and we're recording live of course we are and between Christmas and New Year I read all of your scenes and I will be announcing the winner of that we'll be sending the best ones to James to look at but yeah but we'll be announcing the winner for that probably in the next sort of two or three episodes we'll be talking about that how to write a scene so that'll be a quite an interesting little episode for us so that's the first thing of the year for me yeah here's a here's another thing just to mention though is there is a positive radio comedy script competition we should probably mention that's coming up the deadline for that is January the 10th so positive which is a company run by David Tyler and Jeff Posner David Tyler who produces Milton Jen show that I do he did a Mark's Brick stocks Brick Society and Jaws won the whole Jeremy Hardy speaks to the nation 99 p challenge I'm underneath his charm offensive and of course cabin pressure the Rolls Royce of radio sitcoms that people like me wish they'd written and and so they are doing a bit of a you know they're basically opening their door to scripts so they will be well worth sending a radio comedy script to so make sure you make full use of that and I should probably do a video about it shouldn't I about radio comedy in particular so so yeah do make the most of that and make the most of opportunities that are coming up throughout the year we've already mentioned the fact that the BBC writers room aren't doing any more comedy ones and their comedy drama window their drama and comedy drama window closes in in a week's time from the time of this episode dropping and there won't be another one for comedy drama for out comedy I believe there's not gonna be a BAFTA roadcliffe thing this year is that right that's correct yes they are I think they're making that every two years okay but again they are another group who are looking at what they're doing we we still aren't sure at this point of recording what's happening with BBC sit conscripts but there will be competitions for BBC sit conscripts that's the definite yeah how they come about this another matter will certainly be the Felix Dexter award for black and minority writers be the carolina herm bursary for women there's a golden Simpson bursary which seems a more general one but I'm I think they're maybe more than that as well so yeah we'll let you know as soon as we find out what's happening with that yeah so what else is looking looking at you this year Dave well I think this is a thing that you talked about in the last episode you wrote you talked about writing a murder mystery the experience of the way and the fact that you have kind of gone back you were like a person starting out and all the minutes you got were from the equivalent of you saying who does this black thinking is bloody hell doesn't mean I had to write bloody murder mystery drama comedy drama is really what's the answer is that and that's the position I'm in this year the first certainly the first three months of this year I am going to be I finished my first novel I've been through all the various edits of it and fine edits and everything else it's coming out at the end of March I have basically got between now and the end of March to market it and I'll be I'll be kind of I'll probably be I'll certainly be running blogs about that maybe doing some sort of YouTube videos as well I'll be because this is a completely new world to me I am you know it's something new I'm trying to I want to I want to be called what I do because I do want to write more novels and I want to I want to make the mistakes and people see with the mistakes and and you know get help from people as well about how I might you know how I might improve selling it on six out there of course it's out of my hands and people might hate it and say god that was so rubbish Dave I don't ever want to see another novel from you again but tough because I'm actually hoping to spend the next the three months actually writing the second novel which I'm very excited about it's a follow on or is it a completely different thing it's a completely different thing and again this is another thing when people talk about self-publishing the first book is about it's it's called how I invented alternative comedy and other delusions right and it's a semi-autobiographical book about the late 1970s when I was a student and I went to Edinburgh and got to know Rick Mayall quite well at that time so before he was famous so it's a sort of kind of about the beginnings of alternative comedy oh that sounds really juicy that's exciting yeah I mean it's very much from the point of view of a 18 year old Jewish bloke from Leeds who's not very good yet at comedy so it's not actually it's not historical it's not historical yeah but it's but it's informed by the times and I don't think there's actually been that much good writing in that area I don't think there's been that much sort of examination beyond relatively prosaic documentaries about alternative comedy it'll be interesting to have a bit more of a comic exploration of that you know in a crazy I fix and away that sounds great yeah no I'm quite so I'm I'm you know we'll see what happens really but I think people say about self-publishing is you know it's not enough to have written a book you need to have a series a little bit like what you were saying in the last episode you're saying if you want to make stuff on YouTube you have to have 35 videos before YouTube even the algorithms even aware of your existence yeah and it's what people say about self-publishing is that well you don't want to write one book you want to write a you need to write a series and all the time that I was writing it and editing it I was thinking you know this book is from 1976 to 1979 I could very easily write another four or five six books about you know they've helped basically autobiographies in my own career and through the prison of the Edinburgh Fringe and you know that was my thinking right up until about October the last year when I chanced upon some information about you know my own family and things from the 1920s and it just felt like this is a really interesting story I've often known about but it's something that I've never actually explored and it suddenly suddenly everything started to kind of you know sometimes you get an idea and suddenly everything you read is about that idea yeah yeah yeah I'm you know here's his an idea for a book that set in Leeds in the early 1920s and suddenly there are a million things that apply to the idea so I'm still very early stage years I won't say anymore about it but I just thought well I'd rather be doing that than you know writing part two of my alternative comedy story yeah you know 1979 to 1984 well in a way you can see how that goes and then come back to it if people really like it yeah and then you start this other thing and in a way it feels like I mean it's exciting because it feels like the future is to some extent in your hands and I think in a way my kind of hot tip really for 2021 and just planning is to work out what you're good at what do you excited about what do you think you can do I think these we mentioned the last podcast a bit about it's frustrating it's it seems like producing a podcast is incredibly easy which to some extent it is this is 156 it can't be that hard and we've probably recorded more that we've then failed to press record on or something like that so you know if we felt at least 156 plus a load more for patreon but it's you sort of do need to know what everything involves because as I said YouTube is not an easy thing to master and you need to kind of decide to have a campaign to do that or you need to have a campaign to do self-publishing or you need to kind of know how it all fits together you do need a bit of a battle plan you do need to work out what you're excited about and therefore the stuff that you're producing needs to be so personal exciting brilliant fresh and fun for you to write that it's worth putting up with the bits of that process that you won't like so when we spoke to Joanna Penn I think it was a brilliant episode and it was really eye-opening she clearly relishes the business as much as the writing so she clearly loves writing but she clearly loves the game of getting her stuff out there and making money now for other people they're not as excited about one or the other or aspects of one or the other so maybe some people like starting writing but they don't like editing maybe some people like promoting stuff but they don't like all of the form filling and you just think well who likes form filling well actually a lot of people like form filling they love a form they love a list and a checklist to make sure that their work is available in this territory and that territory and they monetize this and they send it to that and some people like that almost more than the writing and maybe over this year therefore it's worth looking out for other people who are doing stuff that you like and maybe you can almost team up and say well this person likes promoting stuff and this person likes writing stuff and you know we should be talking to each other so go on I was just gonna say this is this is leading very nicely into what you're going to be talking about for mostly for what you're doing in the next year but I just want to add a point to that which I took away from the join-up pen I listen to all her podcasts now and that is somebody who always actually shied away from all that stuff the stuff that isn't writing and prided myself on it I am a writer and I leave it all to my agent but then I think about all the kind of time that I was in the dark about stuff and the time that I sat as writers often do you know catastrophizing about oh that they haven't got back to I sent that email they haven't got back to me oh god I'm useless and worthless they hate it you know and or worse I'm a genius and they don't realize yeah and I think about the hours and years of pain that I have put myself through that actually when you're in control of something and you know I've no idea what I'm doing with this I've probably got a better idea than a lot of people but I am I'm it's all my work you know I'm not I you know I'll send it out there and people will either like it or they won't or they won't but actually everything that I'm doing with it I have control over the whole process and that has been you know I've been learning about stuff that was just like might as well have been mandarin to me it was such a brand language and that's you know marketing and I'm just sort of thinking you know oh what a vulgar thing and actually it's just fantastic I feel more empowered as a writer having done that so I would actually say yeah do embrace those things they will help you as a writer so so the things that you've been talking about and that you've been learning about as you said last time on YouTube yeah so tell us a little bit about your plan for this year then so yeah in a way that you so I'm planning to write a couple of books I started a book about a year ago maybe slightly less than a year ago which was a not quite a mystery but it was based on a couple of characters from a play I read called the particle and I thought wouldn't it be fun to have them in like a you know a mystery thriller kind of setting so I started out and then this opportunity came to write for Shakespeare in Hathaway and I thought well I'd be mad not to take that opportunity so I stopped writing the book and thought well actually a bit of distance on the first 12,000 words of this book is probably a good thing so I hit pause on that at the time of recording I have literally not looked at it since then so I'll be really interested to see if the first 12,000 words still works and still kind of makes me want to finish and write another 40,000 words or something I think it probably will and then there's another book I want to write which is essentially Narnia so there's a you know obviously yes there was Narnia but I would like to write a different Narnia so I'm kind of interested in that stuff too but oh he's writing a children's book okay I think it's hopefully gonna be slightly more than that but you know I would say lion the witch the wardrobe the cook the thief the wife and his lover absolutely yes and the bottle washer and the waiter and the porter and the upstairs made wow boy that's a really obscure reference so so I'm keen to do that I'm keen to do stuff at the BBC writers room and you know and hopefully I'll get to write another episode of Shakespeare in Hathaway or something like that and keep going down that road being available to write other situations scripts and also to pitch new stuff and I've got one or two ideas on that but the other thing I've been working on this year and I'm releasing is a full-length video course called writing your sitcom so that the situation room on YouTube on YouTube which I've started is a sort of a prelude to that to push people in the direction of this course and hopefully just deliver value because I actually really enjoy talking about situation comedy as you can probably tell after 156 plus episodes so during lockdown I started filming this thing and I finished it and put it up and Patrons have had a little look at it some of them have been able to have access to it and I'm really pleased with it I'm really excited by it and in a way it's aimed at people who just want to kind of start start from the beginning either for the first time or start from the beginning again so the idea is it's sort of almost like 12 videos steps 12 lessons to going from your basic idea to a finished script that you don't hate I think that's one of the things that through doing this podcast lots of people say it's like well I put a script in for this competition but it wasn't any good anything well why why wasn't it any good why wasn't it as good as you could make it so I think the main thing with this course is trying to help you to write that script to write a sitcom that really only you could write because I think the personal nature of your idea I think isn't more important than ever really so that's kind of a new aspect to it that isn't in my book writing that sitcom and so I've tried to bake that in and refresh everything and the key is especially if you've never done this before I'm telling you everything you need to know to write your script and I'm then not telling you stuff that you don't need to know because there is a huge problem of overwhelm there's actually not that much stuff on YouTube about writing situation comedy if you ask me but there are 156 episodes of this and there are some books and it might be hard to know where to start but in a way hopefully what this video courses doing is just going to clear away everything and just go okay let's let's start from a blank sheet of paper but knowing that we've got ideas and how to fill that blank sheet of paper and ultimately how to fill the 30 blank sheets of paper which will be the script so the situation room is the way kind of into that on YouTube so I click on that and that's where the links will be but it's on Teachable you can probably find it on Teachable which is the platform and I'll put links to that up and the show it's the course itself starts it drops on the 7th of January and at that point you can register do the course in your own time I'd imagine it will take you a couple of months to get through it because although there aren't you know there are there are more than a dozen videos but there's homework to do which is contributing to your script so it's me helping you write the script every step of the way so the idea is that you don't just blitz it and binge watch it you kind of watch it maybe rewatch it do the work do the next one and do it that way so that's for people you've done it before but also people you've been doing this a while but haven't really been getting very far and clearly thinking I must be making some basic mistakes here and probably would benefit from just having us just starting again with maybe a new idea and you know and giving that giving that a fresh a fresh approach so and also now is the time to do it you know January the new year make a start and hopefully although it costs money in the long term it's a probably cheaper than then going off to London to do a course several times over because it's 12 lessons as it were and you couldn't really afford to do 12 lessons you know any other way you couldn't sort of keep getting you know staying in hotels buying tickets and stuff that gets very expensive very quickly so hopefully it's cheaper than that but also you can do it at your own pace you can do it when you're ready and then there'll be an extra kind of monthly zoom chat where if you're doing the course you can just ask me anything as part of that as well and there's also you get my book and you get the audio version of the book as well yeah because one of the one of the interesting things as well about courses like this and I do a sort of slightly similar thing but it's a correspondence course so I'm working with with people but and I guess one of the things you find you know you sort of try and break things down everything is all integrated plots yeah characters jokes whatever but you try and deal with one thing at a time but I mean there's for instance the blog that you wrote about eight years ago I think about how to plot how to come up with plot ideas yeah I send that blog out to students but I find every time that I read it and I read it again you know three months or something I think there's something there's something else in it and that's one of the great things about these teachable courses is you know do it write a sitcom have a break but then do it again you know and you'll find you'll find actually things that you didn't see first time around and you'll get them so yeah because you're worried about one set of things it's like watching a comedy again the first time around especially comedy movie you're slightly worried about the plot and so you don't actually get all the jokes but then when you watch it again and I'm like this is my my movies I used to be is the first time I often didn't like it but then the second time I now know what happens and I'm now seeing the jokes whereas with this it's like you know I'm now getting the headline and the thing that I was worried about and I wanted answers to has now been answered and I'm not worried about them but now I can watch it again or get the teaching again and I'll have ears to hear other things at that point so that's the idea once you bought the course you can obviously watch it as many times as you like over the course of a year or something like that but it's good to kind of set a date for when you will have a script I don't know what the deadlines are gonna be for 2021 in terms of competitions but in a way that kind of doesn't matter I think you kind of need to set your own day and there's a little bit of there are some extra videos as well in terms of how to make the most out of the course and how to actually kind of motivate yourself and put yourself on the hook but anyway I wanted to mention that in this podcast obviously because you know this is something which I really hope people will do loyal listeners to this podcast and disloyal ones frankly can get a 20% discount by using the word sitcom geeks as a special coupon so that would give you 20% off sitcom geeks all one word and you need to use that by the second of February which fun fact is candle mass but so February the second is when that discount expires so sitcom geeks will get you 20% off and if you join us on Patreon you'll get a bigger discount again so you join us on Patreon and you'll find out what the discount is for that but it'll be more than 20% so hopefully that'll be worth your while so so yeah so writing your sitcom is the course there's loads of links to it on my YouTube channel sit the situation but also hopefully there'll be some links in the show notes as well to that and you can get stuck in your own pace but finally write a sitcom script that you don't hate or that you don't think this is the best I can do but I know it's no good well actually you know it could be better and hopefully this course will help you do the best you can do rather than just doing something that's the idea anyway I've sneak preview a couple of them and it's very you know it's good it's a very it's a new way of obviously not totally new as with the best sitcoms are start with something familiar and they move into new areas but it's given what I think is a fresh perspective to something that I've been I've been teaching as well for years and it's gonna be some more ideas so thank you James for that it's a pleasure great well anyone anyone can log in and get a hold of it and there'll be extra YouTube videos and stuff around it as well so look out for that we should look ahead a bit more in terms of putting good habits into place so there are any other kind of other good habits that you're thinking about day for 2021 yeah well that's coming back to this thing about sort of being in control I think I just want to add we talked a bit about people who talk to us on the sitcom Geeks on the Twitter page and the stuff that people we got shy who's saying who's he wrote about he said in 2020 he got a commission that's now stuck in development and he's hoped for 2021 I'd like new commissions and hope the 2021 2021 gets unstuck which you know we've all had similar thing but then he had a reply to that from Nicola Prick and she said she's a little bit of a conversation about you know trying to get your things made and a little bit what we've already talked about how you know the whole that the system is changing now more people doing their own thing and she said instead of trying to write screenplays going to movies TV I think I'll go for pros and books feels more likely you're going to get somewhere with it and I would think about this a lot because I sort of I've been having another discussion with myself a quite deep discussion which is am I now you know I'm 62 have I have I have I actually given up on trying to get a sitcom made ever again my track record is not quite up there with you folks James I mean you've had your own I've had one one series made on on radio for of my own thing and I had loads of pilots I've been writing for higher on loads of sitcoms but getting my own one and I just thought about this and I I just the idea of writing something and sending off to someone I thought you know I don't know I'd say 62 how many years writing have I got left do I want to be writing sick and I thought well yeah I would still love to write another radio sitcom I love I love the form I love radio and actually if I do write something now and it's not necessarily something if I think about the BBC as the B or the Nendor which is always how I thought writing for radio you go to the there are two people who basically decide whether your thing gets made the head of comedy radio comedy and the head of radio for you only two people who get the final say and it's sort of down to them really and I just thought well what about if I come up with something and I really like it and they don't like it but potentially I could make it you know and I'm watching the winner of our our competition from last year P2C Award making his own radio sitcom I'm watching with interest he's someone he's very he's very savvy about marketing and stuff he's very good on crowdfunding I'm gonna see what he does with his sitcom I mean if you can actually get a sitcom mate so I am thinking you know even when I finish the next novel or whenever that is hopefully June or something I'm thinking well I'd really like to write something unusual for audio you know something that's me only and see what happens and if radio for like it great but if they don't I'm not just stuck with a script that's not gonna do anything else yeah yeah I think you need to follow your passions in that as well I think you need to be passionate about the form and about the idea and in a way I've got you know if somebody asked me have you only see come ideas I can say yeah how many do you want I've probably got 30 in terms of active development I don't know how many are in active development but all I do know is if I have a new idea then I have to I now know how much I have to really believe in it because I now know how unbelievably hard it is to get on the TV because the competition is so fierce expensive people are frightened they don't know if they're gonna commission the wrong thing you have to have an unshakable conviction in that central idea and those ideas don't come along very often so again as I said in the last podcast you just want to keep yourself in the game so that the moment you've got something and you just think I'm prepared to beat people's doors down to get this idea on then then you're good to go and then you've still got the contacts whereas if you sort of flounced off and just said right that's it I'm leaving I'm gonna retrain to become a Latin master prep school or something like that or I'm gonna go off and join the Navy I mean in a way you're gonna suddenly start have to have things to write about which be quite interesting you could write your new version of the Navy like but yeah so you don't really want to burn any bridges but at the same time you just want to stay in the game do things that you like doing and so they're open to these ideas when they come along where you do feel or you have an idea you know Richard and I have one or two ideas which felt like they were they just never really got any traction suddenly they feel of the moment and you know we're trying to get those off the ground as well so it's just a question of you know it's all timing basically isn't it it's you've got the idea but is it is it the right idea at the right time and it goes back to why this why now why you why are you writing this script and why should it be on TV now it's really really important to have that here's something and you talking about putting good habits in place and this is something that I've realized over the last year and it's something that I'm going to be sure I do more of and it's this however much time you have spent thinking about your idea really thinking through it's not enough I can't emphasize how much I feel that I've learned this this year this last two or three years so that the more that you can't ever know if anything is gonna be a success or whatever but the more you test something and the more problems you throw at it you you you start to answer more questions if you can answer the questions that you throw how is this gonna be funny then why is that character there what is this for why am I the only person who can write this you're asking these questions over and over again whilst you're coming up with the idea and you know most ideas I think that you have if you tested them and tested them you will come to a point you said no that's not gonna work and even the biggest most successful writers you know you've got stuff out there they they have they've or they have eliminated the other ideas that weren't as good so the most you can do you can't know if something's gonna be a hit but the biggest thing I feel I've learnt this this last year and the thing I want to do more and more is that you can just keep eliminating the things that don't work and you have to keep and it's the same as cutting you know and the same advice that I give to people when it comes to writing a 200 word song it's the same advice I got from a friend who's a novelist who writes 80,000 words and she said cutting you have to keep cutting and I just thought hang on it's a novel it's 80,000 words surely surely you have to keep writing no no you've got to keep cutting so keep eliminating stuff and what you'll end up with is you know stuff that you have already road tested a lot yeah only talking of cutting there's a couple of things one is I'm just put in mind of the Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkins interview about about how many ideas you have to turn over and it was just amazing when they basically said after after outnumbered they were they got the distinct impression that people didn't want to didn't really want to hear an idea from them because they were a bit of a one trick pony and got lucky with those funny kids and you go yes that and drop the dead donkey which was an absolute Rawls Royal Server show that ran for nearly ten years so they're not really one trick pony. I was for hire on things like Life on Mars and Shelley you know to the great yeah yeah the last 30 years but even being even being the meanest possible you could be to them because they're not really one trick pony they're probably a two trick stallion you know excluding you know stuff like bedtime and Trevor's world of sport and just loads of other stuff they've done individually and together so it's like but they know just quite how wasteful the process is and actually these ideas that feel of the moment when they when they're on TV they just feel like they belong they don't feel like why is this why is this on now they just kind of earn their place and you do have to cycle through a lot of ideas rather than just kind of twist your idea into something so you know I think it's just being open to those new ideas and then how many rejected scripts was it again was it's like 30 or something it was ridiculous yeah and the BBC are probably knocking on their door asking for Christmas special for next year I would have thought so but so because they don't really have that many shows that they can do Christmas specials of because they keep not letting them like BBC one show so what do you expect but in terms of editing the other hot tip if you read if you read one thing that's not been written by me or Dave I would suggest you read another good writer he's pretty good he's called George Orwell and read politics and the English language and I thought that was a really good book about writing and especially prose but I think in general his principles of simplicity in writing I think are really really good and he gives really good examples of bad waffly writing and he really in a very cool and Orwellian way rather than Orwellian in the other sense of the word he he does a really good hatchet job on bad writing so it's only about 15 pages you can probably find it for free on the internet somewhere I think 2021 is the year George Orwell's work out of copyright globally but even that is you're gonna have some problems if you start launching your own new version of 1984 you'll probably get a letter of cease and desist from a lawyer somewhere but get hold of politics in English language by George Orwell and I think that's a really nice little bedtime tree you can read it in one sitting yes he may go far that's right yeah I'm just trying to think actually what we're talking is there is something that I've read I'm reading a lot of things at the moment something that I've read that kind of speaks speaks beyond just about writing and I mean Aristotle still for me is the is the king I've been reading a lot of books about writing right in this year but I think nothing's there's still I've still yet to see anything that betters the poetics by Aristotle which is incredibly short book tells you everything you need to know about tragedy comedy the characters journey and I can confirm that is out of copyright and therefore you can get hold of it for free on the internet yeah and so do you know what here's an idea you should do your own version for as a booklet maybe annotated the sitcom version sitcom according to Aristotle how about that yeah well my friend Tim Ferguson who teaches comedy writing he was in a he was a great comedy performer in the 80s who have a band called the Dug Antony All-Stars Australian act and he now teaches comedy writing and he is actually he has been trying to write a book a teacher self about comedy book that's kind of that's I think is a dialogue with Aristotle okay well when you get on the podcast and we'll we'll interview him about it because actually another thing we talked about you know the kind of all the terrible things of the last year but actually you know never crossed my mind you know Tim has MS so he doesn't you know well he was still performing with the answers a couple of years ago but he's not going anywhere you know I just thought well you know that's it that's but actually we could probably we could have Tim on the show he would be absolutely yeah full of great great advice and lots of stories about being in a hugely successful Edinburgh Fringe actor well there we go because we love to hear nothing more than success stories hey we we don't spend a whole interview with Stephen Moffat trying to talk about chalk that's not us that's not this podcast Graham Linahan Paris yes exactly yeah yeah you really do learn more from your mistakes and absolutely and you don't learn it unless you make the mistake yeah yeah that's what I am looking for by the way I'm I have to change my name for my novel writing this is not some kind of artsy-fartsy yeah but it's to do with the algorithms of the internet because Dave Cohen already has books out about how to write comedy yeah and then then as a novelist they've Cohen that you know you start to get old people who people who bought Dave Cohen's book novel also bought how to write comedy well no they just want to read a novel and then you actually okay you actually genuinely piss people off so you can be an in banks and in banks well yes I am going to be David Jay Cohen ah so I did think about coming up with an entirely new name for myself I had a list of about 15 names and I just looked at all the oh god I just not sure that age 62 I'm ready to take on you know another another persona really so yeah so David Jay Cohen is going to be the the my novelist name so that people who buy my book please do won't have bought the other books but then I'm hoping that some of you will actually if you've like absolutely there'll be some cross over but I love the fact that we basically got back to failing and failure with regards to what we're just talking about and that we've now gone full circle 2021 we will make new mistakes but we will hopefully fail better indeed thank you Samuel Beckett for that fantastic quote yeah I bet he was hilarious I bet you imagine the Samuel Beckett sitcom hey well absolutely and in fact I didn't know anything about Samuel Beckett the person who if we're going full circle the person who introduced me to Samuel Beckett was Rick Mail there we go hugely fat and bottom really yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I would love to have seen that actually that would have been good yeah I mean to me too of course nowadays if they'd done it would have been video captured and it would have been broadcast to cinemas but sadly sadly not cool well thanks very much for listening everyone thank you and we will speak to you in 2021 yes thank you ever so much which is not if you're actually listening live by now it probably is we've been we've been rambling on quite a long so long it's the new year we've just missed it it's strike midnight and we all turn back into pumpkins marvellous thank you and all and best of luck to everybody for the next year and speak to you soon a couple of weeks make all your jokes be funny here we go