Hello and welcome to sitcom geeks. My name is James Kerry. I'm Dave Coe and we are joined by writer author producer novelist all kinds of things Bill there. Hello.
Thanks for coming Bill. Thanks for coming back. We've been sat here in silence for two to four weeks Since you were last year for me to come back. Just waiting for you to come back.
We've moved. It's very small in here but waiting for Bill. That's a show right there and Bill you write all kinds of things and also in the last podcast we talked about how you slightly regretted not sticking it Working sticking it's writing for weekending and you then went off and did a whole lot of other things. Yeah, what were those things?
Basically, you know, I started off with a mistaken idea that I was going to be an actor then I thought no now I should I should really be writing so I attempted to write to the top of the show at the time which was weekending He was writing at the time when he walked into the room. Who was looking at all I think. Yeah, that's the only one I can remember. Well that would have been my own thing.
They might have been better than me. I think it would have been. Graduated. I think it was just sort of leaving and moving on to other things but yeah.
So yeah, so I didn't sort of focus just on writing. I basically produced for radio and TV and written for radio and TV. I've written a couple of plays a couple of novels and yeah I've done a little bit of everything also in every genre. I think I've done sketch shows for radio and TV, panel shows for radio and TV, sitcom for radio and TV, topical shows and non-topic shows, live shows, echom ratios, bit of everything.
Basically, Jackable trades, no one knows what pigeonholed to put me in. You've forgotten also that you were a musician with Bristol Review in 1978. I was a musician as well. Very, very bad one.
I really that I have no regrets about giving that out. I don't know. I don't know. I think what it is because sometimes people ask, you know, why don't you just do the one thing?
It's because for me, comedy always comes first. I'm not interested particularly in television. I've read broadcast maybe four or five times in my life. I couldn't tell you the commissioners, the BBC, who they are, what all the controllers, what their names are.
That's probably just as well because they changed every six to 18 months. That's exactly one of the reasons I don't remember their names or even tried to because it's comedy that I'm interested in. If I've got an idea that I think would make a good play, then I've written the play. But I am, or if it's a novel, then I've written the novel.
It's not a great way of getting rich, but that's what I've always done. That's interesting because how do you know? I do struggle with that. I have an idea.
Is it a play? Is it a sitcom? I don't know, but it's just what drives you. I mean, with the students often, they'll say, you know, should I do this?
I've got this idea. Should I do it though? Is it a good idea? The one question they tend not to ask themselves is, how do they feel about the idea?
Are they passionate about an idea? Because to me, a good idea is something that you're so passionate about. It drives you to then write a good script. Let's talk a bit more about that.
So Bill, you are involved in the National Film and Television School, the NTS, as is Dave. And I've come in and done bits and pieces as well. You have students who come in for a year? Is that right?
Yeah, we meet on Tuesday evenings for a year, and then they go off and do their graduation project with a mentor from the industry. I believe you've been out. I've been a mentor, yes, and really enjoyed it, actually. And yeah, it's been a very pleasurable experience.
So you've got these students who are saying, I've got this idea. I mean, for me, I'm most interested in situation comedy, especially audience, studio, situation comedy. So I see every idea through a lens of that thinking, here's an idea, could that be a sitcom? Whereas you tend to think more the other way, which is, here's a funny thing.
What is it? Yes, I do. Yeah. And to what extent when you're advising your students, you sort of trying to help them to work out whether they're fans of a format or whether they're fans of an idea or how you go about getting water?
Well, this is, I mean, the course is very much about writing for radio and TV. So yeah, I mean, I would guide them to write for radio TV and sitcom. And this year, I'm really trying to get them to write for audiences because one reason is because we do little tryouts in front of audiences. So it helps if they've written something for an audience.
And also, it seems to me that if you're writing comedy, as sooner or later, you've got to face the audience, you've got to make people laugh. Okay, maybe at some point you want to write a single camera show, something dark, something edgy, fine. But I think you've got to go through that process of proving yourself and making people laugh out loud. Is it because some of them are, it is interesting to me how the main channels keep talking about being desperate for audience sitcom and then broadly not making any making some, but not much.
And yet the live comedy sort of thing has never really been bigger. So, and you now have tons of writer performers who then go off and make an audience show. Well, basically, and you have something making audience show as well. It seems that there's this great big mix of formats and people who want to make comedy, but they don't ever want to be in front of an audience.
They want to make stuff for YouTube. Well, we know some of the reasons. One, if you do an audience show, you're almost certainly going to get terrible reviews. And you can't, you know, I'd like to point out that my non-audience show also got terrible reviews.
But we had two full pages of A.I Gill on the Sunday Times saying that our shows, you know, we just got to let go. But you know, we're bad at these. Take your hand off his windpipe. I can't do that with you.
You have that in common with faulty channels. But yeah, terrible reviews. You do have less controllers of the former. You get maybe two or three chances to do your scene.
And that's it with a single camera. You know, you can redo things many more times. And with a play, I'm currently directing a play at the moment. You can rehearse.
Yes. And I'm really enjoying it. It's a fantastic experience where we're actually doing a scene, rehearsing it more than three times. You know, maybe 50 or 20 times.
We had a little discussion on Facebook a couple of weeks ago about the audience sitcom and why aren't there being audience sitcoms made. It is interesting that you're getting those students to do audience sitcoms. Because a lot of people at BBC, they say, well, the problem is we don't get sense enough audience sitcoms. So that's a good starting point is that more people send scripts.
They are interested because they do definitely want to make them. So it's interesting. I thought some of the colleagues of ours, Danny Robbins, who's a funny comedy writer, he actually joined him in the discussion. He had two audience sitcom pilots who made two years ago.
And they were both neither of them went to series. He did say that he just, you do fine at every level when you're writing an audience sitcom. You just meet hostility. The social media audiences, people on social media generally don't like audience sitcoms.
But not everybody's on social media, of course. Millions of people do watch audience sitcoms. And don't tweet about it. It's kind of seen some house not as clever as it is.
And yeah, I think it's the hardest thing to write. Absolutely. I think it's seen as a little bit old fashioned. You tend to get bigger performances.
It's probably part of the subtle... I'm fine with that. It's overrated. Going back, you were trying as a child to watch the rat trade thing we called it.
Well, the rat trade for nearly all the listeners was a very, very popular show. I think it seems to be, and then he was brought back in the 70s. And when I was a child, well, my dad was the star of it, basically. And in the very early 70s, I used to go and watch it being recorded.
So I suppose there's a kind of, yeah, I suppose I sort of feel a little bit more home in the studio than some people. But I remember, can I tell one of the jokes at the warm up man? Please do. Now, I'm not sure.
Now, you've got to bear in mind, this was 1972. And this warm up man would come on. And he did this every week, same kind of joke. He'd sort of pick a family out in the front row.
And he'd say, oh, we've got a family in the front row. And two lovely daughters, grown up daughters. Oh, aren't they very pretty, aren't they? So I bet you wish you were still barfing them.
And you'd do that every week. You'd do that every week. No one better. No one better.
The audience just laughed, the dad would laugh. The mother would laugh, the daughters would laugh. Everyone just thought that was... If you actually think about that joke for very long...
You don't even need to think about that. It's just extraordinary, isn't it? Very different times. But also, culturally, they'll see very different times.
But also, your dad being a star with sitcom, that was great. Well, he got a sitcom. Now, when you're thinking about what wouldn't it be great to do an audience sitcom, you're thinking, who could be cast in a... Quite often, I'm thinking, well, I would sound so agree to be an audience sitcom.
What's in it for them? It's very unforgiving. I think David Higg is one of our finest actors. Brilliant actors.
And he was in the not very successful Ben Elton recently. Right, the right name. And I haven't seen him on television since. He probably has been.
But it can really damage a career. Yeah, you think so. You think about that? Yes, I think it can.
If you're in a number of stars, for some reason, you're starring a very high profile sitcom. And it really, really tanks. You can somehow not appear on television for quite long time afterwards. But also, even if you're kind of cool and successful and feeling how big theatres across it as a comedian, you think, well, they wouldn't really want to be in a sitcom that they don't have control over.
And it seems unlikely that they would choose to do it. They want to make it so like catastrophe, which is called on Channel 4. You know, when it wars and that kind of stuff will make the detectorist, which is nuanced and niche. Yeah, but the exception, I suppose, is not going out, which is the pinnacle of course it's written by the star.
Yeah, but the amount of work that Lee puts into not going out, and really a hell of a lot of work. And then there's a time that it takes to do that. If you think that he probably earns as much and probably gets as much profile from spending 12 nights a year doing what I like to you. And then the odd night if I got news for you, he could just spend his whole career doing that.
He doesn't have to do it. It's very much a labour of love. He's really trying to keep the genre alive and the audience to come and move it into the 21st century. I think that's the thing, is that you have to find a way if you are doing sitcom.
But of having a modern post-modern take on Black Mrs. Brown's voice, which is we're not even going to pretend that we're doing it like a story here. And around it was a little bit like that. Yeah, yeah, breaking the fall fall definitely.
I thought you'd need to sort of explain why you're doing this. Which again feels a bit of a shame to me because we don't. When we watch The Old Show's again, and I never tire of tweeting that the most successful sitcom on BBC 2 and Channel 4 every week is Dad's Army. It gets too many viewers.
Some of them make a film about that. Yeah, it's got real potential. But the audience aren't thinking why are they doing this? No.
And that same audience of watching 14 episodes of Friends a week on Comedy Central and watching Big Bang Theory. So it seems to be very odd that we have to explain a way, apologise for, work out some way of sort of acknowledging the elephant in the room, which is this is all being recorded in front of an audience. So it's a difficult one because it is actually people, I think, only notice the university club has canned laughter, which of course isn't canned laughter. It's a genuine audience laughing.
People notice it when they're not enjoying a show. I think the vast majority of people don't think, oh, Friends is an audience sitcom. I like watching Friends. They don't, but maybe just a sitcom.
I don't think of that kind of thing. It's an interesting thing, isn't it? I was thinking of the day. Why, I think he's all tweeted during a panel game.
What's all this canned laughter? And much prefer this show if it didn't have a laugh track on it. Imagine watching, you know, in certain name here, I got an answer for you in silence. It's not funny enough.
What is the show Victor Ricorran? It's not a cottage, it's not a cottage. It's only connected to that. There was one after that, I think.
Maybe it was only a few recordings of panel shows. There's actually been any laugh. Those are shows that didn't go out. It's a bit odd for not having an audience.
It's quite funny. It's sort of odd, sort of silence. It was interesting that nobody has subsequent me before or since used the Kenny Everett form of Stupid Audience, which is The Crew. No audience, but The Crew.
They were called The Crew's laugh. I didn't know that before his divisure. I think it's actually a show. They had no audience.
It's a very common thing in the 90s, Channel 4, late night shows. You get the crew laughter going on. It's a very breakfasty. To some extent.
Kenny Everett is doing it. It's very interesting. You mentioned Ben Elton. Of course, you were there.
You were there at the start of the whole time. I was at the start of the whole time. I was at the start of the whole time. I was at the start of the whole time.
I was at Manchester University. Obviously, I'm much younger than Ben Elton. He was in the year of art. Two years of art.
Okay. This was just, as opposed to the time when alternative comedy was just starting. I think, and I don't know how widely this is known, but I think a lot of it comes down to a play written by Trevor Griffiths. For example, do you know the play?
No. It's called the Comedians. It was about some comedians who were being coached in an institute. The coach talked about sexism and racism in comedy.
The whole play was really about that. One of the famous little quotes was, you know, that's a joke that hates women. No one had heard that terminology before about 1981 when this play came out. I was in a production of it at Manchester University.
I'm pretty sure that that influenced the whole generation of comedians like him. If you want to doubt it, he would have seen it. Has that played on much, such a great league? Is it regularly?
It is fairly regularly. I think it was Jimmy Jewell. It does come around again. It kind of comes around again.
It's sort of almost instantly dated. It was so much off the bat. Within a few years it fell off the fashion. I'm just interested that your background, very much your dad, the traditional background, and then suddenly you're exposed to all this kind of new stuff.
Well, then the Comedy Store started, very soon after that. Ben Elton was one of the original performers. It was my dad who took me. He took me.
I remember being really, really excited about it. I thought this was amazing because it was Rick Mail, Aida and Nigel Planer and Alexi Sale. I was really gutted to find it because it meant I couldn't go every week. It was a lot of money.
I thought, that's just so much. I would have gone every week if I could have done it. I don't know. You did a double act with Simon Bligh.
I started playing in the second generation. I was going very briefly. In fact, it wasn't so much a double act. It took it in turns to do a bit.
We did do a little double act together. It was called Teddy and Idi. You consider yourself foregoes as a writer, but you've had a lot of producers. Yeah, well, I can't write a producer.
Sometimes I've been lucky enough to write and produce my own material, which not many people get the chance to do, which is another reason why I've done a lot of radio because television doesn't really welcome the writer producer. I'm not doing it, you're an H.E.A. or Graham. Don't ever quote those people as to say, oh, but surely we could do it like I'm under an H.E.
That's not a compelling argument. Those guys get to do it. You don't. In one sense, I think I'm grateful for a producer quite often because they save you from yourself at times.
Do you not feel that extra layer of, are you sure about this? Is that actually helpful? Have you said I've done a lot of writing and producing. The only thing I really wrote and produced a lot of was a show called The Secret World.
I wrote about a third of it, but I worked very closely with two other writers, two of them, two of them, several other writers. So we all looked at each other's work. I don't think it's quite right. Plus you had the cast who were quite vocal about what they liked and didn't like.
Plus I always over recorded a lot. Plus I'm always a writer with self-doubt. I'm always telling myself something's bad. You're wearing pretty decent.
You are a writer then. You are a writer then. You are a writer then. So those are the things that protected me.
No, it's not a good skill for a producer, is it really? I think you've got to be the person who says that it's not quite good enough. Perhaps it's not self-doubt, but it's, you've got to be the one who calls it sometimes. Be a bunch of students as we sort of try to begin to wrap this thing up.
They arrive full of hope and expectation. And I destroyed that. Many of them have already had some experience in Australia because it's not quite hard to get onto this course. You have to apply and you can just turn up and pay it.
You do write some material, they send it off and all that. And so what are, I mean, we talked to you about this, Dave, you had some thoughts on it as well. What sort of things do they tend to think at the start of this journey and what kind of things do they think at the end of it? Well, I think they probably start by thinking that they're funnier than they are and that it's going to be fairly easy.
And I think a few of them have a sort of rude awakening when we read their sketches in class and it's not really last. And I think they probably realise that it's a lot harder work than they think. And they did get better. I've just read the sitcom script that last year's intake of Britain.
And I was really quite actually quite shocked by how good a lot of them were. I hope you burn them. Well, I think I might be starting some of them. These people must be stopped.
Yeah, they might be stopped. Stop them. But yeah, I did feel a little bit. I thought a lot of it was kind of funny that I could write.
That doesn't mean that I'm the kind of standard. But if you read a lot of material that's funnier than you could do, you do feel slightly... Oh, you know. Because that's self-doubt to get.
Yes, it's the self-doubt fixing. But no, there was some really, really good stuff. Yeah. I think that going back to what we were saying before about the importance of having your stuff perform live, I think is really, is really important.
And that's why for me in previous episodes we talked about, should I do my YouTube video? And my advice is generally... No. No, my advice is due.
Right. Definitely. Yeah. I mean, YouTube is a way of getting your work out there.
But I think what I'm particularly fighting against is here is a sitcom that no one will want to do. I'm now going to start to make it for YouTube to show everyone what a great idea it is. And in the end it often turns out to be either not very funny, badly produced. But it's a 30 person job, 40 person job to get something looking good.
And on YouTube they also have YouTube, your competing with iPlayer, the audience who are watching it. They don't care that you don't have the money. They don't care. So my main worry is people spending months and thousands of pounds trying to get their idea on television.
And YouTube is the way of doing that. And I think I really need to do a sit-com. But a sketch or two. Yeah.
So I think you can do a funny sketch on YouTube and get a bit of a following that way. And just sort of short and... Yeah. Something very short.
I want to talk to you a little bit about some of the things you've done. Also, coming back to what we're saying about, you know, whether is this a sitcom or is it a book or whatever? I know that the show you did, Brian, your other's travels which I've heard on the radio. And then you wrote as a novel.
And then I'll have a few... It's moving on the... It's been option by an American producer. Which means it will definitely be on television.
Absolutely. Without doubt. As a TV show. It's been a bit of everything.
It's been a bit of everything. It's been a bit of everything. You see I want you to do what the seconds did. You know, start on the radio, then movie TV and then film and then books.
And you know, it hasn't quite gone back in that sort of wiggle. Well, when the idea came, what made you first think this is obviously a radio show? Well, partly because it's about something that visits different worlds. It's called Brian, Gun of the Travels.
And it's a sort of... it's not really an update. It's just my idea. I just stole the other sort of idea about someone who goes to different continents and meets with people.
It would have been very, very expensive to do on TV. That's in St. Jan. It was...
I mean, it's quite satirical. It's not what the awful phrase people keep using now in television, balls out funny. Right. It's a bit of a supple satan.
I'm surprised that people... because so much TV isn't balls out funny. It's all very nuanced and quiet and gentle. And actually this whole balls out funny thing.
I'm fine with balls out funny. I'm afraid I've never heard that phrase. Thank you. I've heard it three times.
Three times too many. Sorry about that. Laugh out loud. Just having regularly seen Malcolm Hardy produce his balls.
The memory of that is what makes it happen really. For the benefit of this though, Dave is now rocking backwards and forwards. It's something to get him a bag to blow into. So I mean, what...
just as we sort of... I mean, what advice... what's the fourth? What's the fourth?
What's the fourth? What's the fourth? What's the fourth? What's the fourth?
What's the fourth? What's the fourth? What's the fourth? What's the fourth?
What's the fourth? What's the fourth? advice people now because obviously there's two very different... lassical things are different to me now of when I start that.
Only 15 and 20 years ago. One piece of advice I think, that if you want to be a writer, writers write, So don't wait for an opportunity, or something to happen. Right? Right now?
There's nothing to stop anyone writing a sitcom. All you need is really a penplate and paper. So type it up before you send it to anyone. Even then.
And don't use green ink. But... I mean, if that's it? What are your problems about?
Because as I said I think I may have said a good idea, that you feel passionate about, passionate enough about to actually finish. Not only finished but to find out about, so it feels like you've got a freshness to it, isn't it? Because we have a thing about the idea of what you know is sort of, I wouldn't do that, right? What excites you?
Right, right excites you, which is often what you know. That's the starting point, yeah. And then it's right, what you don't know. And then, I think two of the important things that a writer needs is feedback and a deadline.
And if you haven't got that, because you have a producer, then try and get a group of people, or a friend or someone who you can give your work to, whose opinion is really useful. And try and give yourself a deadline, because without them, most people, including me, don't really write. There's always something else to do, isn't there? Yeah.
Brilliant. Very good advice. Thank you, Bill. Thank you very much for coming in.
It's a pleasure. Thank you. And we, that's it. We're done.
Yes. So do, look on our Facebook page, send us your first 10 pages of sitcoms, and we'll do some bumper episodes where we go through a whole load of those. SitcomGeeks.com. SitcomGeeks.com.
Bill, you want Twitter? I am. What do you want Twitter? Bill, underscore dare, I think.
I'm going to go to a very good book. Brian Delvers Travels is a novel. It's very funny. I enjoyed it.
I've not read it. I know it. On that book, I saw it. In this, mate.
He did not put that there earlier. As far as I'm aware. James has also written a book called Writing That Sitcom. It's very funny.
Which you can get. It's very funny. It's very funny. It's partly, thank you.
I see it. I advertise it. It's part how to and part intervention. I spent at least the first few pages trying to talk you out to try and try to sit on.
I'm increasingly a review that wanted to write a sitcom with mental illness. Dave has also written an excellent book called How to Be Average Successful at Comedy. I recommend getting that and you're working on another one. Yes.
As I say, it's called Write What You Don't Know. Excellent. Find us on Facebook, find us on iTunes and leave a nice review. That would be a good way of showing the support because we're not asking for your money yet.
Thank you very much to Katie. I'll produce a fake Katie. Thank you. We will speak to you next time.
Bye bye.