Hello and welcome to sitcom geeks. I'm James Kerry. And I'm Dave Cohen. He certainly is.
It's a good night from him. Sorry I don't know why I feel like saying that. Here we are again talking about sitcom writing. We're really going to get into the bones of sitcom writing today aren't we Dave.
We've both been up to bits and pieces and reflecting on things and then we're going to talk about a bit about networking as well at the end because there's still a lot of imponderables about the future. But what have you been thinking about writing recently? You've been thinking about big entrances, Dave? Yeah I've been doing a lot of, I've been teaching quite a lot about sort of writing and interestingly not just comedy but drama as well.
I didn't know when I started starting this sort of creative writing teaching course and it's comedy and drama. I thought oh bloody hell I'm going to have to learn a lot about drama. And actually the amount of stuff that's the same for comedy and drama is far more far far more than the differences really. The thing that I've been watching a lot of shows, comedies and dramas and just to sort of get ideas for things.
And one of the things that's really kind of struck me is where you see like a writer has really really thought about the entrance the first time you meet the character. And we have talked about this before but I thought I'd mention it now because Sherlock the Stephen Moffat's Mark Gattis version, the most recent version is back on iPlayer and I really recommend you watch the first 10 minutes of that because it's just an absolute masterclass in how to not only how to introduce characters but how to introduce the first time they meet. And the great thing about Sherlock about Sherlock Holmes starring Benedict Cumberbatch, the biggest name in acting as Sherlock Holmes. Okay wasn't it a time?
Yeah but the opening minute is all about Watson and it's fantastic. It's really it's like he starts with this kind of hazing footage on someone's camera and in a war situation and he hears guns and camera goes all wobbly and you see the next thing you see is he wakes up you know it's a nightmare and obviously he was in Afghanistan or whatever and he's got PTSD of some description and then he sort of wakes up and he looks over and you know no words have been spoken yet and he just looks over and you see this kind of walking stick against the desk and you see him sort of looking resentfully at it and then and then you see him he's he's trying to write a blog about his experiences and opens a computer and it's you know Dr. Watson's blog blank page and you know so that the whole his whole story has been told there without without any words and that actual silence and then you know he talks to a therapist who says you really should do this blog and and he says well I think it's that nothing's ever happened to me. We know it's just either he's lying to himself or he's just totally in denial you know and that's it that's the opening of the show and then and then you have like about five minutes of as with every Sherlock story you know the the the story the detective story and so we don't we're about seven or eight minutes in and we still haven't seen Sherlock yet and there's Watson he's just kind of he's hanging out with a friend and the friend says so he says the friend saying like you need to kind of you need a bit of company you know you're just in your own thoughts too much and and he says you know I can't who can I possibly you know I'm not a very I'm not a very I'm the guy's a get flat with someone or something he says well I'm not a very good person to live with and the guy says oh funny enough you're the second person that said that to me today and he goes oh who was the first person you know keep up and then finally we are introduced to Sherlock and it's just the contrast between the meeting of Watson and the meeting of Sherlock it's just fantastic it's like he's in a mortuary and he's he's really excited you know it's someone's died and he's getting all the lurid descriptions of it and you think about Watson and how he feels about death you know he's traumatized by Sherlock and all excited he gets it right in crop out and he's bashes I need to see the bruising on the bed body you know it's a sort of absolutely ridiculous whole business and it's just complete contrast to Watson and then almost immediately the two of them meet they're sort of brought together and Holmes just knows everything about Watson and it's almost like a parody of oh Sherlock Holmes knows everything about everyone and you know it's just you just think that that is just a perfect perfect introduction to the characters there maybe I'll go back and watch that again I did absolutely love the first few series of that I mean I enjoyed all of them and if folks who are interested in more we have two episodes with Stephen Moffat back in episodes 1991 I think don't worry we talk about eventually we get there in the second of the two episodes because that's what we that's what we wanted to talk about really what about that sitcom that lots of people didn't like you know success is all very well but yeah no and he was very very good humans about it and there's a lovely story about Steve Coogan in there as well and I'm not gonna say any more than that if you've not heard it I really would go back and listen to you really great he's such a great person to have had on the show absolutely yeah he's a sitcom guy how brilliant and how successful he's been and how how genuinely modest he is about his limitations absolutely so start out with press gang and you know that kind of stuff so he he's learnt his craft and it's all systems are firing on full capacity at the beginning of Sherlock he's got an actor who is completely on the rise as a bit of a hero in Benedict Cumberbatch someone who's already fairly established in Martin Freeman for a particular kind of performance as well which he's just he is amazing it's a really hard part but I think you've made the point there really well and I just wanted to sort of spell it out a bit more it's just how important it is to set up your show in those first couple of pages if I mean if you were going for a job interview for your total dream job that would potentially be a five-year job for actually quite a lot of money as well you would think long and hard about the first impression that you make in that interview wouldn't you that is what your sitcom script is it is potentially five years of extremely well-paid work doing your dream job writing more episodes of this show or another show so you really really need to think about the first impression not only that the characters are making but that you are making as a writer but whatever you do just make sure that you're selling the show the characters that you're making use of the blank page to and fill it with a surprise but a surprise for the reader but that is absolutely banging the center of where your characters are so for goodness sake have them do the thing that they're doing that they're meant to be doing so the first time you see Sherlock he's in a mortuary examining a dead body and being brilliant we don't I mean obviously Sherlock Holmes is an odd case because people already know who he is in the set up but everyone's still looking for clues as to what kind of Sherlock Holmes is this going to be is this a Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes or is this you know some complete reinterpretation it's a Steven Moffat show exactly so it's like in a way the rules are just the same you know you're working with different parameters another example of that is just so I mentioned the last book I started watching trying and I'm assuming I'm going to watch the rest of the series and I've watched and it was great but I haven't at the time of the recording what's the first thing they do in trying a young couple they're not that young anymore they immediately say that they were the oldest person at that party they're at the age where their friends have started to have kids what are they doing she realizes she's ovulating she ovulated yesterday they actually have sex on a bus on the top tier of a London bus because they really really really want to have a baby bang that is the show and you know they didn't start it at the party when they were kind of too old and out of their depth or you know that everything had moved on all that kind of stuff they had sex on a bus on a London bus and there was a lady who was conveniently asleep although you know there's a nice little twist there and so you know you really want to start your show with a bit of a bang to show not just a surprising opening but a surprising opening that is it's this because your reader and your viewer are just looking for clues so it's not a murder mystery so I've got a blog post and a youtube video about this on the situation in my youtube channel where people sometimes are used to watching movies or you know or inspect them all or indebber where you see five different snapshots of five different characters doing five different things that don't make any sense and won't make sense for at least an hour don't do that do not do that if you want your script to be funny you're writing a comedy a sitcom not a murder mystery and the rules for murder mysteries are quite different especially if you've gotten already established detective like Inspector Moore sort all whatever you know this is this is the first impression of your show you need to show what the show is and ideally your first scene is that kind of real microcosm it is the acorn from which the mighty oak tree of your sitcom is going to grow how about that Dave that's fantastic and that actually perfectly describes another show that I've been watching with my students which is by our friend Neil Forsyth guilt I don't know if you've seen guilt oh I haven't seen guilt now I'd tell me about it if you do nothing else today watch the first one minute and 50 seconds of it and that's all you need you get so much in that opening and then something happens and that's the thing that the whole thing is about an iplayer sorry it's an iplayer it is on iplayer yes it is great what just what's the overall premise without getting away spoilers just watch it because it's just the thing that happens in the opening a couple of minutes is you know something that's you know the guilt is the title and okay a thing happens and they're in a car that's all I'll tell you this probably gives most of it away oh no no no idea yeah so just the characters that we meet in that minute it's so so perfectly described and they are the characters who drive the whole show and you know this is the inciting incident happens so so quickly and it's just sort of it's another masterclass in what's your show really about and that's a thing that actually and I didn't really see it again till I watched a second time we sure not agree that the idea that you know what's on is traumatized by death and Holmes is excited by it yeah and you know that that is also that's very much a very sort of strong and Holmes is actually trying to help Watson yeah but as it happens he's helping him because he the thing that he loves is the thing that Watson hates yeah yeah I mean that's a really good I mean that what that makes me think of is you know there's always this great debate about pilots and set up episodes and what kind of stuff and I reckon the mood of the moment I would say it all changed in two or three years again I'm sure but and there's lots of stuff about comedy drama and continuing narratives and story arcs and all that kind of stuff in the past you might have a set up episode and the whole episode is set up like it is into the mannequin where Audrey Forbes Hamilton has to move out of the big house and blah blah blah and in those days there were only three channels and everyone watched what the BBC decided they would watch and it happened they'll be keeping it so what the heck's the matter with you of course you're gonna watch it and Peter and Peter bowls it's just like what's not to like so that's all fine there's this other school of thought where you go you just go straight in there's no set up episode and that's fine too one example I've traditionally used is My Name Is Earl which sets up the whole show in about seven minutes and then the remaining 14-15 minutes is sort of a mini episode where he starts to make up for all the bad things he's done on his list because he now believes in karma I think they set it up in the first 30 seconds no not not well no they don't as in he starts this little mini quest in around about minute 70 minute seven because I've timed it and then but what you've set up here and what we're talking about here is there's a case to say what's the set up you got 90 seconds you got a pre-title sequence because he talks about that inciting incident there which is normally movie language really to some extent but what seems if your sitcom has an inciting incident how can you tell it in 90 seconds in two and a half pages tops before the opening titles you know that just gets us off to start with a bang I'm just thinking the other show I watched the first sort of 10 minutes of back to life with Daisy Haggard's character is coming out to prison it would have been really easy to have started the episode inside the prison and been there for a whole episode before she comes out and be introduced to a myriad of characters that we are never going to see again um the show starts she gets out of prison it's a new life and we're thinking there's a bit of mystery to it which is what has she done and then there are some clues quite early on which is oh she's done something really bad she's going back to her room that she last was in as a teenager and now she's in her early 30s so um so yeah well how's that for a thesis Dave?
Well I think that's uh that's a great that actually leads to another point that I've been thinking about with with regards to sitcom which is and it's something that I've been thinking about with my own shows now because I've got an idea for a show and I've sort of got it's like a patchwork of ideas it isn't yet kind of solid but I again watching lots and lots of things I was sort of thinking if you have this sort of big life-changing moment in your opening minute what that allows you to do is you're your sitcom character you know and we always want our sitcom characters to make mistakes because they never learn from their mistakes but actually if you suddenly put them into a kind of completely new situation like out of prison efforts after 20 years for doing god knows what but it's pretty horrible whatever that character does is going to be a mistake you know because they just don't know it's going to be new and for you as a writer that's like that gives you a sort of a starting point where you can actually go you can actually it's like you can sort of mold the character to be as much you want it to be or take it without necessarily having a character like this is a character who's trapped in this world because they have this characteristic that doesn't allow them to develop in a certain way and you know you're kind of you are slightly straight-jacketed by your character but if you if a big thing happens then and now oh my life has changed I'm gonna have to I'm gonna have to be yeah well they're gonna be a fish out of water and therefore they're gonna have to learn how to breathe without water and that's they're never quite gonna get used to that just as you were talking they're just reminded me of if you follow Milton Jones on twitter he's the Milton Jones he tweeted a joke the other day where he just says huh I've just realized what an epiphany is which I thought was great but if your character has an epiphany in the first 90 seconds and certainly nothing's ever gonna be the same again if they come back to their house and they realize that their partner has been this whole time doing X that's an epiphany you know and the new world that they're walking into is now not the world that they that they just walked out of it's different exciting we might be onto something here Dave this is good yeah but it could still be a sitcom because everything that they do is going to be wrong all the time you know but it's still so it's still them not learning every week from mistakes but and this is you know it's sort of also trying to kind of solve the narrative arc versus being stuck in the same situation conundrum that is a problem now that we're being asked to write you know big long stories as well as circular self-contained stories it is a sort of okay well at this this new thing I've I'm still being me trying this and it's not working oh it didn't work but some there's gonna be a new aspect of it but I'm still gonna be doing the same thing I'm still gonna be feel dumphy trying the same thing every week even though I know it didn't work that this week either and I'm sorry and I'll never do that again and then you've forgotten about it yeah so yeah or the next time it's like I know I did that but this time it's different you know in a way isn't it's not just the fact that we the character forgets there is an element of over forgetfulness in sitcoms I think which is a bit of a format but having said that as I've said many times this is true to life people don't change and they do think this time it will be different you know they really don't learn and you know this from your own relationships your own experiences your own relatives you have the same conversations with them again and again and you're like how you know and you discover that your sister or your brother or your cousin is about to do x and you're thinking I have no idea why they're doing that it is so obviously a bad idea and it's so obviously the 15th time they've tried to do x and this is their new way of doing it and this time no no I know but this time I figured it out it's different that's life isn't it yeah yeah almost I won't take the ball away yeah it's exactly yeah this time it's different so yeah I think those I mean how do we get here when back from the beginning of Sherlock it's just setting out your store and you know introducing it's introducing the reader to your world and it's almost introducing a character to their world if that is the kind of show that you're doing and those are the ones that people seem to be liking at the moment like Kimmy Schmidt as someone who's just walked out of a cult and is now you know people seem to like that kind of a show and that might be one way of thinking about it yeah yeah cool so that was kind of those were sort of the things I've just one other thing actually I've been thinking about which is this what what what's keeps you engaged with a story and that's sort of you know what's the question we always ask you know what's what's your show about but what's it really about and I think I'm again one of the things that I find that where I'm watching a show and I'm still interested in a show and I'm invested in the characters it's like the characters doing things and I and that script is kind of saying to you the audience okay what would you do in this situation and it's making you kind of go would I do that and you really you know you just it just brings you in and that's I've been kind of looking for that when I read scripts now I'm looking for a kind of way of like how is this script making me go oh I'm putting myself in their shoes is that something that makes sense yeah yeah no I think it's always trying to see things from you know your character's perspective yeah what would I do in that situation I think it's good because in a way you sort of need a reason for everyone to do anything and occasionally you do get you when you're reading lines you're just thinking no one would do that I don't believe this character would certainly not do that yeah or I'm not really that interested you know yeah okay so you've got to get to this place or something yeah there's occasionally a problem or something yeah occasionally it feels like you know a somebody driving along suddenly takes a left turn because they need to for the plot and the reason for them suddenly taking that turn is not really ever fully explained so yeah you you really do need to give your character a good reason for every single choice and action that they make and I think again again if you're watching an awful lot of a different genre you sometimes forget just the critical nature of your character making choices and I was talking to somebody other day about there's this Netflix show called dark which is a just the least funny show you'll ever see it's a German show about time travel with an element of religion to it as well so it's it's you know it's German Lutheranism with time travel the sitcom sort of but it is really what's the whole first series I found it interesting um the reason I found it frustrating at one cent tonight I only realized subsequently is you spend most of the first series thinking what is happening what is happening how is this okay so there's like a time portal okay so who is that person oh is that person that person in the future who is that and you realize that the whole story you are having information revealed to you but very rarely are you seeing a character actually make a choice and actually go if I go down that time tunnel then nothing's ever going to be the same again but I have to because of X-one's that there's very little of that when it does do that it's it's really good but sometimes it feels like we've got a really hot story in our head and then we've tried to sort of mystify it slightly and then reveal the information to the audience but actually we're just revealing you know that storytelling that's not actually a sitcom and so therefore if we watch an awful lot of that kind of stuff that's sort of mystery being revealed you're not actually having a character make choices and I sort of realize that I'm writing a comedy drama mystery at the moment and although the mystery kind of makes sense and I'll come on to it in a little bit in a moment but I sort of realize I really need a key moment for my main two character detectives to actually have to make a decision for themselves are they going to go down this road and then it gets worse and worse for them until the point where if they don't solve this mystery they are in an absolute world of trouble so the stakes get higher and as their curiosity leads them further the need to solve this becomes all the greater and it's not a murder so whenever you've got a murder we have to find the killer before he kills again yeah all right I mean that that'll do and people buy that in the genre but because my stuff is sort of I wanted to be sort of a more of a comedy drama than a than a mystery who done it right you've got to have your characters making choices so that is really really key and it takes ages to make sure that every single choice throughout the script is motivated that's probably not where we started on that Dave I'm sorry but that's been on my mind no because that's you know it's all down to everything that we talked about it all comes back to character getting those characters right and making those characters uh compelling and believable and it's just what what are the ways that you can do that well you can make sure you give them a really big start that tells everything about them you can you can have a life-changing moment at the start the show that the character is a source of blanks late or you know you can give them really really tough choices that's you know the audience are thinking about it's you know it's the thing we mentioned time and again you know that John Clipper does a faulty bashing the car with the stick you know you've never seen that happen but you know the feeling yeah and it's like it's to get the audience feeling what you're feeling and if you can do it in that way like that you know that clip will be shown I can't remember who says it I could probably look it up but they do say that you know with his writing fiction at least don't tell them it's raining give the give the reader the feeling of being rained upon yeah which I think is is pretty good advice but just before we finish off talking about networking and stuff in a minute but just before we get there the other thing about this thing that I've been writing because I think it's very easy for a mystery to become all about the clues and the mechanics of the mystery itself and the revealing of the information and my experience of writing an episode of Shakespeare and Hathaway which I wrote last year and there's an agarly film this year like my instinct was always plot plot plot plot plot motive motive motive motive motive motive plot plot motive motive motive and actually I was ended up just stripping back so much because you know he's a sort of a comedy drama with two brilliant comedy actors in Mark Benton and Joe Joiner so you know the reason they one of the reasons I got hired was like they're funny you're funny right something funny and I spent my whole time worried that I was gonna make a mess of the murder mystery but when actually you think about you know a lot of murder mysteries especially the ones that are an hour rather than two hours you really can over complicate them but my sort of the thing that I learned this week of doing writing is I sort of had this kind of fairly detailed and I started writing as a novel and realized I'm not such to that at all and we talked about that with Lisa Evans a couple of episodes ago I just thought the whole time I've known what the day new more big reveal is going to be and how it's going to feel so although I've been slightly unsure about how many clues and stuff to put in I've just sort of kept going and got to the end and feel quite good about the fact that the big ta-da moment about I can now reveal what the mystery object is and how it has been hiding in plain sight this whole time and how I'm going to redeem my own career which has been looking pretty bleak in the last 48 minutes of screen time you know all that kind of stuff so I kind of know what I want that moment to do and I've written it and I just think it's I just learned that I should just write that Danoumoule write the big reveal thing what information do I need for that moment to feel really satisfying and now go back and rewrite it with that big moment in mind and if it's not going to be revealed in that moment I probably don't need it so I can get rid of it and there's one or two bits that I haven't put in that I do need to put in so it may be that if your show is heading towards something and you're kind of really worrying about setting it up right you know maybe the advice is to keep going right the big finish and then go back and fix everything else so that it matches I've been talking quite a bit about that as well as to say I've found sometimes with a script that I know what the all is not I'm going to work out what the worst all is lost moment is going to be I really know this is going to be that point and then it's a case of working three quarters of the way backwards the whole of the rest of it and then a quarter of the way to the end to end it so it's kind of you know where do you how do you possibly get to that point and how do you get out of it that's like every what every narrative is really isn't it yeah and it's the one thing that people really struggle with because in plotting terms people tend to get they love the opening or they've got a really funny scene in their head and a scene is a scene it's not a story and actually it's that long dark night of the soul where all is lost that's the hard bit to get to and get out of and if you don't have that I think you don't have a script you don't have a plot so so yeah I think that's that's a good place to get to and make sure that you've addressed in detail before you start writing but even then when you start and I thought I had that sorted sort of keep going hold your nerve get there write your denouement and I just go back and fix it is another way of going you know it's that constant thing of tricking yourself that your plan is absolutely definitive I've outlined it I'm going to write it the moment you start writing it you know no plans survive first contact with the enemy that's one of the rules of yeah it all falls away kind of but keep going and then you know you don't have to show this version to anybody and if you have to sort of tuck it all away and start again well you know that's all part of it but anyway that's that's our script bit of sitcom gigs we should wrap up by talking about networking is that we've got a quick five minutes on that yeah that's because you know obviously the writing is so important but as we always say you know okay so you've got a script great now what you're going to do with it and it's it's about you know and we talked last time we've been talking about sort of you know coming out of covid and how how are we going to come out of it and what's what's you know what what can we do and you know a lot of what we have to do now I think is to kind of be uh sell ourselves and be proactive selling ourselves and I know just the very phrase selling yourself for a writer is a kind of you know yeah that's that's that's what I left the rat race to do because I can't stand that side of things I just want to sit and write in my little little hovel and you know but you do kind of have to get out there and sort of thinking that you know we're not sure what the edamriffring is going to be this year I think it could potentially a really interesting thing because you know I think a lot of the fringe is going to be online I think that's the sense that I'm getting a lot of people can do online shows as part of the fringe so it's going to be sort of almost easier to attend the edamriffringish than it's ever been really I mean there's a sort of interesting thing that's my wife those are sort of clinical psychologists and she's uh they uh there was this three-day conference in los angeles that she was just never going to go to because it was three days and that would have been like a week and thousands of dollars and air flights and all that stuff but covid happened and the conference went ahead online so she basically spent from four pm till midnight for three days just kind of watching being at this conference except she was at home watching it and that's you know and it was an absolutely fantastic conference for her it was just the thing you know the perfect thing for her to sort of be at in inverted conference but I think and you know if you can kind of go to edambra you know what shows what's all sorts of things and just familiarize yourself with what people are doing now and as a writer you know get to know uh get to watch your watch your watch shows that aren't as well written as they are performed you know and uh and that's the sort of you know that's something that I think might be a very interesting thing to be looking out for yeah and actually you know if you are not interested in performing in the slightest and you see something that's really interesting that you think you could help with you can email the person and just say you know I really I really enjoyed the show I wondered if you thought about doing this or that or is their potential for this sort of thing don't say let me critique your show for you free of charge you are so welcome they they might not you know but you can make the approach because it may be they really struggle with the writing and they would really like someone to come alongside them and help them with it and you might if you're enthusiastic about what they're doing or particularly the subject matter if the show is about um oh I don't know the trenches of World War One and it's you know and you're really into that as well and you just go oh did you know that there's a whole thing about this aspect of the war of that and you have a shared interest and you can suddenly work alongside each other and but you won't know that if you don't pitch up to shows and watch them think about them you know hang around afterwards in personal virtually so um just the chance to attend things you wouldn't normally attend like webinars and that kind of thing I ran one a couple of months ago and you know later people showed up and I always say you know I think I might have said at the start of that you can get a hold of it as well if you if you follow if you go to my problem you know switch or something I'll put up a link to it but um I always say if you go to a 90 minute webinar you know you might learn two things in 90 minutes uh two one thing you can do differently and one thing that you never knew about to think about that's a pretty good use in 90 minutes isn't it and it's you know it's probably more beneficial than watching Pointless and Countdown um so you know watch Pointless and Countdown but you don't have watched them every day they won't mind um so just improve your interest skill set you know learn a new skill or be inspired to learn a new skill and then and then go off and do it yeah but the other thing I was just going to say about networking is it sometimes you might think that there's you at home with your script and then there's Netflix in there's sort of perfectly spherical office in the middle of nowhere like something out of the prison or something I don't know I don't know where Netflix is based I'm not even sure it exists if I'm honest um yeah yes how can I how can I get my script onto that channel and actually you're not trying to find a secret tunnel that takes you into there so that you get to the thing you actually have to go along it's like Pilgrim's Progress you actually have to talk to a lot of people along the way who are going to help you on your journey I mean it is a quest um and you need to help on that quest you need pointing in the right direction and some people will come with you you need a producer who is going to fight for your idea and they need to they need to persuade a commissioner or controller who's going to fight for your idea so that the channel actually pay for it and then you need them to get together to make sure that the marketing team actually tell people about it so that people watch it so you get to do it again so you're building you're trying to build a series of alliances as well as improve your skills and learning and that doesn't come naturally to most people especially the sort of people who were who were drawn to writing and not the people who were drawn to networking but I'm sorry you have to get on there yeah I'm just going to leave that point with this just say you know they're off there are five stages in the life of a script so you've written your script it's the first one denial okay but the first development it's the same thing you know people telling you how to change it and you deny that so so development and you've got to work on your script you've got to rework it and rework it and rework it and even then it's not quite ready but if you're lucky someone's going to make it and that's going to take that stage two which is pre-production and at this point lots of people come on board and your your vision is yes thank you we like your vision but you've got a bit of a battle on your hands to keep control of your vision but you know if you're lucky you've got a director and a producer who understand what you're trying to do with your script but you know it's kind of a little bit out of your hands at this point in pre-production and then it's in production if you're lucky you might get to be involved there but you know that's not always a given and then you've got post-production and that's where things can change again to your script has changed a lot anyway it's gone to production and now it's being edited and things like as I mentioned a few weeks ago like a show like Life on Mars which had the sort of massive massive plot plot point taken out in post-production and I think was probably better for it and then you've got the stage five which is the marketing and the distribution and you know you can only have so much influence in the production side and the post-production side so you kind of need to get your head around the other stuff you know get your head around development be there as much as you can for know what's the pre-production process is know what the post-production and marketing processes you know just understand what's happening out there I say this from bitter experience just thinking about you know I could have been so much more proactive there were times in my writing career where I just thought oh okay that's it I've done the script that's that's my job done and I just lost sight of things or I got involved in shows and my own shows I created and I didn't push hard enough for my own ideas I didn't know how to do that I didn't know how to kind of negotiate with producers and things so you just you kind of have to look you can learn that stuff you know you can read about it and you can look at other people's experiences as well yeah so two ways to go really and we should probably finish one is if you you know that that state those five stages they all involve other people apart from the very beginning of the development stage they all involve other people so you're going to have to start working with other people and collaborate with them because a tv sitcoms going to cost a couple of million quid you don't get to spend all that money so get used to it alternatively find two million quid and make your own show or you know produce your own stuff episode 141 with danny stack and tim clake a really brilliant at self-starting and really inspiring to listen to you so go back and listen to episode 141 that we spoke to them it says here 10 months ago but if you can't think about anything worse than that then maybe you should be writing novels you know you'll still have to work with an editor and you probably won't make any money but you don't have to work with anybody else and maybe that's for you or you want to write short stories or you want to write articles or you want to write a blog or you want to make your own youtube stuff that's all fine you want to make your own audio stuff that's all fine but you know you need to know what you're going into so i think you just want to be a bit you know so so networking starts now because if you want to work in tv you are going to be part of a network which will hopefully be on a network so if anyone's actually going to see it but yeah so we should wrap up though Dave any final comment on that no i think that sort of sums it all up really well yeah it is a collaborative a collaborative business and you know you've got to remember that and hopefully you know also consider writing with another person you know jennie and i both do that and we write on our own as well but sometimes it's really good to have another from the start to have another voice there um yeah that kind of sums things up but that's the sort of thing that we are looking at more in kind of in more depth now when we're doing these kind of monthly workshops where we actually do on patreon if you go to our patreon it's a sub-patrion i think is the title um or patreon slash so big so don't know one way one way google both words and you'll find it and so we do this sort of monthly workshops now and they are definitely you know you're kind of getting into depth about you know really kind of developing your beyond just the actual writing although we will be talking about writing as well in there but but you know really really kind of pushing forward with a career as a right and if you want us on patreon as well you you can join our facebook group our secret facebook group for patreon members and Dave and i are on there regularly as well chatting and so you're you're one of a number of people and it's just it feels like it's good to have a bit of a team and people are generally not generally people are always really supportive of each other and also posting links to things that they've seen and new script things and helpful articles and that kind of stuff so it's a really um can do help each other atmosphere there because actually as we said in the last episode people love laughing they love tv there's tons of it being made and so there's pretty much room for all of us it's not quite as dog eat dog as it first appears um so uh that's that's my sunny disposition for now anyway i love you again in a couple of weeks yeah i feel it might not be quite the same yeah yes great well thanks very much Dave um thank you James as well thanks for listening and we'll speak to you thanks also to the bcg guys as well who host this podcast on their service very kindly and promote it and also go and have a look at the bcg pro stuff there there's a loads of stuff to look at and they've got lots of extra bits and pieces as well and more than bits and pieces so nuts and bolts too so go and have a look over there too thanks then speak you next time very much bye bye bye bye bye