Episode 181 - Any Questions?

Welcome to sitcom geeks. I'm Dave Cohen. And I'm James Kerry. And this is episode number 181 of sitcom geeks.

We're sort of deep into the Patrick sitcom script writing competition. And we thought we'd like to clarify a few of the issues. We've had a few questions and we've got a few things that we want to talk about as well. So should we dive straight in, James?

Let us dive straight in and let's just be clear about what we want and what we don't want. There is also running the BBC writers' room competition. And this is jolly helpful for us because they are looking for dramas and comedy dramas. And we are looking for situation comedies, which are particularly suitable to be watched, you know, multi-generational with a family.

So that is, so if your script is suitable for us, it's probably not suitable for them. And if your script is suitable for them, it's probably not suitable for us. Yeah, and we should explain. I was actually just thinking about this today because this is a subject that we have talked about a lot on this podcast.

But it isn't really something that's out there. We know that for the last sort of four or five years, TV commissioners have been saying, we want more comedy drama, we want more narrative. And then, and then this, what do you mean by that? And their answer is invariably, we're not sure, really.

I mean, if you... Or whatever you wanted to mean, well, you're the writer, it's up to you. Thanks. When we see it, we'll know it.

And so, James, you and I, we've tried to kind of navigate, of course, through this. But we haven't really had a lot of help from commissioners or other people. So it feels like this is a kind of almost new development. But when we went to Hatrick, they said, oh, we don't want narrative.

And I thought, oh, that's nice, that's a nice change. And now I went to this meeting with the commissioners a few weeks ago, channel four, UK, TV and Sky. And they all said, we want standalone sitcom. So I thought, oh, great, well, that's what we want on this.

So very, very simply, what this means is a standalone sitcom means that you can watch an episode at any point from any series and get within the first minute or so who the characters are, what the world is, what the whole thing's about, whereas a comedy drama drama. That's army, faulty towers. Yeah. I don't know what series one and what series two are faulty towers.

And I don't know what episode of Are You Being Served is what? Occasionally there's a cast member change and so you can tell from that. But again, the first six series of friends, apart from the haircuts, they're pretty interchangeable. And there are some, oh, we're Ross and Rachel together in this series.

But overall, it's just shuffle the order. Each episode has a beginning and a middle and an end, and they pretty much end up pretty much where they started. That is the situation comedy formula. And that is what we in this competition are after.

Is that right, Dave? That's right. There are, even within that, people are asking questions and saying, well, what do you mean that absolutely nothing can change from the start of episode one to the end of episode six? And inevitably, if we look at a series of six episodes as a year in real time, which generally, if you've got a successful sitcom up and running, it will come back once a year.

Then you can say, well, over a year, I guess, we're slightly different people at the end of the year to what we were at the start. And also, this is comedy, and it's a little bit exaggerated. So we can be slightly more, a little bit slightly more than that. I mean, you mentioned Dad's army there, and actually, you know, 1945, was a very different place to 1939.

So you could sort of get a sense where are we in terms of the war? But then you kind of don't really get a sense, I suppose, either of that. So it's just not as important as the characters stay the same. They don't learn from their mistakes, whatever else is going on around them.

It is all about the characters. And when people talk about story arcs and they get very itchy, and they've got this big, long story planned, that's great. That's not a sitcom. I'm now prepared to say that that's not a sitcom.

Because when the writer in question talks about it, you can tell that they're kind of more interested in the story than the characters. And that's fine. That's great. Good storytelling has a strong story.

But it feels like that should either be a novel, it should be a movie, it should be a comedy drama, a box set. It should be, you know, there's a whole load of different things it should be. But a situation comedy is about the characters. And every episode to some extent is a different expression of the same idea at the heart of the episode.

And in some episodes, it's really, in some circumstances, it's really clear, like the Goldbergs, you know, it's all about the smothering love of a Jewish mother, Beverly Goldberg and her kids. And, you know, in another episode, it's a little bit more sort of well disguised. And there's a greater variety between the episodes. But they're all kind of, you know, modern family or whatever.

But they're all kind of the same. And that's a good thing. People like that. So I think occasionally writers lose their nerve and assume they've got to inject this story to keep things interesting.

And actually, we're more interested in the characters in the story. And the story is what is needed for the characters to be interesting and funny. And I think that's also part of where the confusion comes is that I see this quite a lot with neuro writers. And actually, something that I do myself sometimes, if I'm not careful, which is that you think, oh, if I put this little funny little plot twist in here, that's really going to complicate things.

And it does. But then it sort of complicates other things more. And you start to go from thinking, what will the character do to get out of this to thinking, now this little weird plot twist is going to give me another little weird plot twist. This is going to take me further down this funny plot twist rabbit hole, which is kind of also a way of saying, I'm not sure enough about what my character is.

My character isn't yet strongly enough comedic to kind of respond to that story. And again, this comes back to the thing that, remember John Voorhouse was talking about, he said, for him, he's a sort of extreme version of this. He creates character by literally sticking them in the situation and saying, right, my character will do this because this is the character that I'm trying to create. I mean, that for me is almost too extreme.

But you really need to know how your character is going to respond to the situation. And it's them making the plot more complicated, not you, the writer twisting the plot because you're getting further away from the essence of the thing that makes your character funny. Yeah. And those plots often end up being the and then and then and then plots.

And when we did a workshop on this a while ago and we got people to pitch their plots, they kept on saying stuff that was happening rather than a series of events that the characters were doing, a series of actions this and therefore this and so they have to do this. And therefore she now has to do this. And actually stuck with this and to get out of that she now has to do this, as opposed to, oh, and then so and so turns up and says this and does that. And then somebody else comes along and then that's the day that the fire service attesting their alarms.

And so this and so your character is now just reacting to story rather than being the story. So we want situation comedies. That's what we in that hat trick want. So please send us those.

And if if there's lots of stuff in the episode in the episode you're sending us, which is like, oh, that's all going to be resolved in episode two, then we don't want that. He says abruptly. No, sorry. Too abrupt, Dave.

Well, that's OK. No, not at all because actually that kind of leads us a little bit into our first set of first tronship questions. I would say in fact, I was thinking at one stage when we were asking for questions, we we we got a few questions from one person on Facebook, Andy Wilcox. I was I was thinking of calling this the Andy Wilcox show because he's asked us so many questions, which is great.

We love questions. You know, don't be afraid to ask questions. We do too late for this episode, of course, but you know, that's some if you don't ask, you don't know. So there's a lot of you can email us questions anytime.

Sitcomgeeks at gmail.com. We also are on Facebook and we're on Twitter. So you can send us a question and we might do an episode on it. So you can ask us a question anytime you like and we're always, you know, this is episode 181.

So we were always looking around for things we've not talked about before or things that none of feel different from when we talked about them two years ago. So do send us your questions by email, Facebook or Twitter. But Dave, kick us off. OK, well, rattle through these because there's quite a few here.

So very interesting ones. The first one says, should we attach anything to give a bio on the characters, any other information? James, what would you say about that? We also had that on Twitter as well from my sitcom life.

So how much info to include on the title page. I'm in general, I would say none other than, you know, the basic details, the name of the script. And there are some stipulations about what to put on the front for this particular competition because we're trying to read the scripts blind, obviously. So we don't know who's written what.

But in terms of character bio's and that kind of stuff, it really should be in the script. You shouldn't be telling us ahead of time who the characters are because that's the job of a pilot script is to introduce us to the characters. In the actual script itself, the first time we meet the character, you could put in brackets a couple of adjectives about them or something. But again, it really should be obvious from what they're saying, doing, wearing, carrying, what is their first line, all of those things who this person is.

So I think it does really help them if you say, you know, kind of Brian Brackett's 40s slovenly sarcastic. That's three words of your 5,000 or however many words you have. That's OK. That's plenty.

We get everything from that. Yeah, I mean, I talk about a lot. Phil Dunphy, how would you describe Phil Dunphy? 40s, all American dad.

Does it for me? Doesn't it? I think something like that. Yeah.

So that's how you get your character information through to us. And as James then says, well, the line's then, if you've got 40s slovenly sarcastic and he's not sarcastic for the first place, they're a bit confused. But we just see a line and he says, oh, that's a nice dress you're wearing there, Sharon. We already know he's sarcastic.

So we sense that he doesn't think her dress is very nice. So it's not that difficult, really. Yeah. So you really shouldn't be attaching an extra information to the title page because it should be obvious from the script.

But yeah, if you want to do that, that's fine. And then he's saying he's just double checking. We don't put our name or contact details on the script. It seems scary to do this.

And we'll come on to maybe why in a minute, but do you want to just clarify what that is Dave? Well, it does seem scary. It does sound scary, but this is the British comedy guide and they are, you know, they've been doing this a long time now and you know, they've been running a lot of fun. And this is how they do things and we kind of trust them, but they sort of know what they're doing with it.

It definitely, I mean, it certainly helps us to not know who they come from or where they come from. But I think, you know, the way that when we've been talking to British comedy guys about how to set it up, they've kind of made it very clear that, you know, it's partly issues of sort of GDPR and you know, kind of having private information held in one place. And that's the sort of good aspect of it is that that information is just held in one single place. And so it works from that point of view as well.

So that's and we've done a couple of competitions with them before with scripts coming through. And it's not been any there's not been any issue. So they log it. I'm just trying to find where exactly the competition details are.

But if you just go to comedy.co.uk and have a click around there. Look at the show notes. I'll be in the show notes to the terms and conditions and all that kind of stuff and what to do. Yeah.

And to go with the next question from Andy, which ties into the first one really about some extra information. Should we attach an outline of future episodes to show it's not a one off? So part A should be attached an outline of future episodes. No part B to show it's not a one off.

The answers that should be in the script. It should be a standalone script. We should be able to tell that it's not a one off. If it's a one off, the characters will grow and learn three quarters of the way through and everyone will live happily ever after.

And David Brent in the final episode, the Christmas episode, and the office will suddenly realize that everybody's laughing at him. At which point he ceases to exist as a sitcom character. Two minutes later, the office finishes forever, at least until the ten years later when they need to do a kind of ten years on episode. Yeah.

So if you go to comedy.co.uk, forward slash pro, forward slash opportunities, forward slash hat trick. Or if you just frankly Google sitcom geeks hat trick competition, then it'll come out top. And all you need to do is free to enter. But you do need to register with the website.

And then that way they've got your email address. You registered it. They know how to handle stuff. So yeah.

So, and again, going back to what you were saying now, Dave, just to prove that there are future episodes. What your episode should be doing is giving us a sense of what future episodes will be like. So in a way, your episode is in itself a demonstration of these other kinds of things that will happen. And so therefore, if you have a mid-life crisis episode where somebody's working in a bank and then on page 27, they quit and decide to go and buy a boat and sail around the world.

Episode two is the beginning of their journey around the world. It's like, okay, you should probably start with them buying the boat and learning how to sail because every episode is them trying to sail a boat. So we've got a whole load of characters in the situation in a bank that we're never going to see again. So again, in a sitcom, your episodes are kind of the same.

So you want to show that. You need to have done the work, as it were, to know that you've got six, 10, 15, 30 episode ideas. And yeah, so that, but there's a sense in which you do, sometimes you read a script and you go, you've kind of told a story here. And I don't really get any sense of what future episodes will be like.

So that's something to bear in mind. It's probably too late to do anything about it, but I merely mention that. I think one of the other reasons, Dave, on another question about, I don't like not putting my name and address on the script is Andy says, sorry to ask too such fine-upsstanding jokes. I think a lot of new writers will be thinking this, what's to stop a judge reading a script, rejecting it and then pitching that idea as their own a few months later, or nicking some jags.

Sorry to ask this, but I'm sure a lot of us are rather cynical. What do you say to that, Dave? Are you going to steal people's ideas? Oh, that's a great idea.

I haven't thought of that. I'm going to write that sitcom. It doesn't happen. It does happen that lots of people get the same idea at the same time.

We've already mentioned the office. The next show that Ricky Gervais did was extras. And that came after, Omidya Nili had been spending the previous three years putting together an idea and a script and a pilot. And he was all set to go about, he had this whole great comedy idea about extras.

This is Omidya Nili, around whatever it was, 2006, 2007. We're not talking about up and coming. He's going on the village of having his own BBC series. And all that years of work that he put into that, Ricky Gervais, the office, huge hit, what you're going to do next, the show about extras.

Okay, commissioned. So that kind of thing, that's a not uncommon story. Yeah. There are thousands of scripts around.

So in a way, if your idea shows up somewhere, then it's just, and frankly, even if it is stolen, which it won't be, but even if it is, then you can do about it. So don't not send it because of this very, very small chance of something happening that you can't do anything about. But there's a reason why this is not something to worry about. And that's because what are they actually looking for?

They're not looking for that one magic idea that no one's done before. It's not a secret formula. It's not a vaccination that you've spent two billion pounds worth of research and development like a pharmaceutical company on this magic formula. It's you that they're looking for.

It's the writer that they're looking for. They're looking for a writer, an attitude, an idea, a voice, an expression of all of those things and the prospect of six, 12, 15, 30 more of these episodes. So just literally taking this idea off someone and giving it to someone else. You've already cut it off at the knees because the script needs to be integral to you and who you are and what you're bringing to this.

And that also therefore makes the point of the scripts that we're looking for that I think are being looked for now and will be looked for in 2022, 23, 24. Are those authored interesting perspectives whereby it's obvious that the person that's writing it is really passionate about it and taking it off them and giving it to somebody else is nuts. It doesn't make any sense. I think that's probably fair, isn't it, Dave?

Yeah, and I think in fact, Hatrick emphasizes, you know, we've had a lot of back-and-forth emails with the script development team at Hatrick, who are pretty sharp bunch actually. They've been really helpful and we've been putting out a few blogs and things. And they've come back to us and in fact, one particular point they picked up on where we were talking about, we said something in a blog about, you know, maybe think about casting, you know, that might help you when you're writing to have a person in mind. And we've got a thing back saying, by the way, don't worry about casting.

Don't worry about how brilliantly, you know, we're not so much even looking for the perfect script as we're looking for the writer, we're looking for the voice. Don't worry if they're not experienced. You know, we're here. We know we can do all that stuff, casting, helping with rewriting, et cetera, et cetera.

You know, that's our job. That's the Hatrick job. And, you know, you just worry about writing your best script possible. As James says, it does happen.

And, you know, I spent many years working on behalf of the Writers Guild voluntarily and often people came to me and said, I've had this idea and it's been next. Will you go and when you do something about it? And the first four or five times when I was young and not even didn't know enough, I would go and I would try and do something about it. And each time I would find out that actually, well, it turns out this other idea had been in development years before or something else or, you know, the person had been working with another writer and developed it.

So, you know, it's just, it's the same as, how do I copyright my ideas, which is another question that I used to get asked a lot. Well, you know, it is very hard to copyright your own. You can post yourself a script or something, but actually, you know, the ideas are not the problem. It's the execution.

It's all in the execution in the words of Kalt I. So, yeah, so hopefully that's a lay to people, but also makes the point that the writer and the script should be integral to each other rather than just a, I've cracked the magic formula. Oh, I don't want to tell you the idea because then you might steal it. It's like, that's not really it.

I've written the funniest joke ever in the history of joke writing. We all think that quite frequently. Yeah, okay. So, shall we finish?

And this final question then, which I think is quite an interesting one. And it's about should we write COVID into the script? I don't mean as a storyline. Should it crop up people wearing masks every day less that it seems to be?

Or does the sitcom world prefer it not to exist as the rest of us do? James, what would you say? I would say that entirely depends on you, your idea and the characters and the world that you're creating. So, I wouldn't avoid it like the plague, but I wouldn't say no, no one wants to hear about that.

But if you've got a character who is sort of really risk averse and wears three masks permanently, then that's telling us something about them and that's quite helpful. He says, talking about the plague suddenly, I'm sneezing, the ha, drops down dead slum. Right on cue, there, James. Right on cue.

So, I think it's, if you want it to exist in your world then great. If you don't, then don't. But I wouldn't say that it's definitely yes or it's definitely no. I would say it depends on you, your characters and what you want to write.

I think if it's pretending that things are now as they were a year and a half ago and they obviously weren't, that's fine. It could be set at that exact moment of lockdown, I suppose. There could be references to it in terms of like, you know, someone to say, you know, there could be a joke about, oh, let me, you know, well, you're the kind of person who did x in lockdown or, you know, this is the person who during the whole of lockdown did the following funny thing that demonstrates character and is also a joke. I think those sort of references are probably fine.

But if you don't want to do them, then don't do them. I did just from my own experience last year. Well, I said last year, I wrote a sitcom, I came up with a new idea and it hadn't crossed my mind at the start of it that I would mention COVID. But part of the idea was involved a character, obviously at the start of a new life and as it came to me developing it and the writing of the script, that felt like a few phrases that I could put in there that resonated.

Well, you know, this is the moment, you know, like everyone, this moment was a moment for me to go, oh, right, okay, I'm going to make, you know, my life has suddenly changed, you know, all our lives suddenly changed. We all, you know, the world stopped and lots of people thought, okay, this is my moment to do x or y. And I didn't, I didn't make COVID the be all and end all, but I acknowledged that it was out there and it kind of gave, it felt for me that it gave the scripts, it brought it a little bit more into the presence without kind of, you know, I can't use another testing analogy here, so I'm sort of ramming it down your throat. I hate that bit with the test.

So yeah, don't force it, don't force it in there. But think about how it has affected us, you know, in the last two years or whatever. Yeah, next question I got on Twitter. I'm on twitter, sitcom geek, at sitcom geek, on Twitter, if you want to follow me there, and I said I'm doing the podcast at four o'clock, got any questions.

This one came in, someone saying how important is fade in, fade out, cut to and all those little things. Again, I would say that partly depends on you, but just keep it super simple. it's super simple. I kind of always try to advise people against trying to direct everything on the page, fade in slowly, pan across this and that.

We're listening to this track of music and then this happens and we see this and from this point of view we see this and then we go and nobody's said or done anything yet. And so it's like, oh okay a cinematographer has written a script or someone's written a script not realizing that they're not a writer but a cinematographer. So a script is a document of a movie of a sitcom to get the thing written and it's a blueprint. So don't get carried away.

So if you want it to fade then fade. If you want it to cut abruptly to something then cut. If the scene just ends and the next scene starts it's kind of fine. Again, it's not going to make the difference on whether the idea or the script is good or not that it says fade out rather than cut to or doesn't say either.

But equally I just want to warn against being overly fussy about all of what we're seeing from what angle and how fast we're panning and the exact track and mix and arrangement that we're listening to. So just focus on economically telling us the story and be sparing about the action lines and what we're told as you are about the dialogue. So it's as important. People really don't like reading action lines.

There's something about it which is the moment it's not someone talking. The lines are harder to read so be as efficient as possible on that. But do make sure that every scene starts with interior, living room, day or time of day or how exactly it's set it up. And I do say interior living room day or whatever because we don't want radio scripts much as I love radio.

We are after TV scripts. So if you've got a radio script don't send it as a radio script turn into a TV script please and make it more visual. But that's what I would say to that. I might miss telling you that.

I think that's right. I think be aware. Just think about this script being read by someone who isn't necessarily, I mean we're reading the scripts but if you want someone to read it you want as much as possible for them to kind of understand what's happening. I mean when I see the phrase cut to in comedy terms I'm always thinking of the phrases but we've talked about it's the bicycle cut.

The bicycle cut. That's right. You'll never find me end of the scene it says you'll never find me going on one of those bicycles cut to land on bicycle. Never going to your sister-in-laws for Christmas cut to interior.

Having Christmas everyone. So you kind of... Because that's how people talk isn't it? So that's probably the only reason that you'd want to use cut to anyway in a comedy script and by which point you would not use it because we've already got cut to in our head and we also...

It's a legitimate thing people do it in scripts but it doesn't need to cut to and you know fade in fade out they are their cinematic instructions rather than... Generally cinematic instructions don't matter they say it matters more they probably matter more if you're writing that comedy drama that you're not writing for us but you're writing for BBC writers. They might matter but not for us. So we've got some more a few more Twitter questions and we've got from Moses and Poser, Sevan Dikei.

Sevan Dikei is he asks... I wasn't... I was slightly not sure what this question meant. He said any advice writing one around a 9 to 5?

And I wasn't sure if he meant an obvious sitcom or he mean when you've got a 9 to 5 job. We can answer both those questions. And in fact Anne-Marie Eels who went for the second one. She actually responded with some quite good suggestions.

How do you write a sitcom when you're doing a job day job? She suggests get up early, spend an hour writing before the day starts. Your mind's likely to be clearer after sleeping and you'll talk yourself out of writing after work when you're tired and brain melting from stress. Remove any ritual or routine you have around writing.

Keep it simple. Very nice. Very good advice. Anything to add to that, James?

Yes. On Twitter, Moses actually liked that advice and gave it a touch. I think that's what he meant. I think that's good advice.

If you're trying to hit the deadline for this, I was going to say an hour writing before the day starts, an hour is a long time. But actually it may be that you do need to spend an hour doing it if you're going to hit the deadline. The window is already open and it will close in early January. So you do want to forget as much time as you can.

But I think first thing in the morning is good. If you know you can work in your lunch out, then maybe your lunch out is the time to do it. Or if you can work at night, I used to be able to work late into the night. I can't anymore because I'm 46.

I can't even stay up and watching cricket for the ashes. So what hope is there? But I can get up early. So I think whatever works for you, do it.

But then just go, it's for a limited season. I'm going to do it 12 days in a row and I'm going to take a day off on the seventh day, on the seventh day, shall you rest. But I'm just going to give a good go. Because this is a good opportunity.

We don't know what competitions are going to be on next year. So make the most of it. But doing something regular, I may be to say, I'm going to spend one day of the weekend. I'm going to spend the whole of Saturday on this too.

And it may mean saying to someone, I can't do that thing, which we normally do on that day. And this is the reason that it really matters to me. And they'll be fine with it. So you'll probably have to stop doing something else for a season for a short period of time in order to do it.

But I'm aware that it is a huge brain melt. On that, if you want to, if you want a bit of help in how to get it all in the right order, I've done a thing called supercharge your sitcom. If you go to my blog, sitcomgeek.blogspot.com, then on the first post you'll see there, there's a thing that says sitcom supercharged, which also comes with this five videos, fairly punchy, me talking you through a whole load of stuff that you sort of probably half know already. But there's like a checklist of stuff to do in the right order and how long these things actually take.

So that might be useful. So do go and have a look at that if you think that might be helpful. Okay. And then to quickly mention about the idea of doing an office sitcom, which, okay, most of this didn't mean that.

But again, this comes back to, it's worth emphasizing because this is what Patrick said, and it does distinguish our competition from the BBC writers in competition. I suppose in some ways offices are a thing of the past, but a workplace sitcom is exactly the sort of thing that would have been made. And there are new workplaces, there are new ways that people are working in workplaces. So it's sort of the kind of thing we are looking for.

We're looking for a bunch of people who are stuck together in the same place, and they're going to come back week in, week out, day in, day out and be the same people and their characters are going to rub together and create great quality. You know, they did the latest, the office calling sandwich, that's another one, not mentioned, but I love that one. And sandwich, the Mel Smith sitcom. But also what you can do is go and listen to episode 178 called Where in the World is My Sitcom.

And we spend a whole episode talking about the pros and cons of setting your sitcom at work, home and outer space, all the land of the fairies. So go and have a listen to that for a more fulsome answer. We talk about the workplace towards the end of that episode. I think we sort of do history and fantasy worlds and sci-fi at the start and then do sort of families and workplaces.

Another question here is how many characters can realistically be set up in a pilot? And this person says that they've got a couple of leads and a supporting gang. I think that's fine. I think what you need to establish is just who is the sitcom about?

And we need to get a sense of the overall balance of this sitcom. So if there are two lead characters, if it's about a brother and a sister, they will need to dominate the main story. And the other characters will need to come into that story. So there could easily be brother, sister and a third person involved in that main story.

And then there could be a plot involving two or three other characters, for a B plot and a little running joke with maybe another or two other characters as well. So you could probably have seven, eight, nine characters if you wanted. It's a bit of a large amount of juggle. But you have to be super efficient setting them up and you have to have actually nothing extraneous.

But what the upside of that is it means that you then don't have room for characters we're never going to see again. So just make sure that everyone in your pilot script is significant. And if they're not significant, it should be really obvious that they are just literally a customer in the shop we're never going to see again. A bystander in the street who's going to point at something and not really do much else or say much else.

So I just think you need to own every single line of dialogue on your sitcom and make sure it's working for one of your characters. And if you do that, you can probably set up more characters than you think you can. But just make it super clear who this script is about, who this sitcom is about. Make sure they are front and center.

And if there are some peripheral characters and you don't need them in the first episode, then maybe you don't need them at all. Yeah. And bear in mind as well, we will read the whole script when we like it. But we are mostly, we're reading the first 10 pages and nothing makes our life harder than having six, seven, eight people in the first four or five pages.

And it is hard. Yeah. It's in that first scene when suddenly you've got Mildred, Mike and Marvin all having a conversation. And Martin.

And Martin, and he was like, okay, who are all these people? And people keep coming and going. And the first scene often ends up being seven or eight pages. And at the end of it, you're really none the wiser.

So it is brutal. You're trying to spin nine plates immediately and simultaneously. But bear in mind that no one asked you to do this. This is on you.

You want to do it. And so therefore we're just telling you what you need to do. Yeah. So I would say if you do have a few characters, then, you know, unless there's absolutely no way round at all of having them all in that opening scene, at least try and have like a scene at the beginning where you've got your minimum two or maybe three characters.

And you know very clearly who they are. And then when the next scene comes and there's some more characters, okay, all right, these are more characters. But I'm not having to refer back and go, Oh, was that person in page there? So just be aware of us.

Yeah. And what we're going through with that. So let's see, we just got to actually go back because there's a question we had from Dan Swearich of this parish in fact, Dan has asked a question, which is what percentage of your time should be spent writing your scripts and what percentage rewriting? Oh, that's a good question.

What do you think Dave? I was thinking in terms of what the hat trick gang had said about, you know, don't worry too much about the absolute intricacies of the script. You know, it's the voice we're looking for. And it is, you know, if you're kind of reaching a point, if you're rewriting, what I would say is, I just happened to have been running a rewriting course for the last few weeks.

And it's not, it's a very difficult thing to do because every script is different. But what I suggest you do is if you could possibly leave yourself a week, getting closer to the deadline, but certainly give yourself an amount of time that you can step aside from the script for a day or so and come back to it and read it very quickly after you've written the first draft, then go back to it and give yourself, really, very quickly, and then give yourself straightaway, give yourself marks out of 10, how good are the jokes, how good are the characters, how good's the plot, how good's the world. That's just kind of do that almost without thinking. And then have a look at it and actually, you know, hopefully that kind of not engaging your brain will override the path of you that goes, oh, that's all right, that's okay.

You may find, you know, there's some very bad problems with the script and that might be really frustrating and annoying. But hey, you know, as James says, you decided to try and do it and it might, you might find the whole thing unravels, which is a very unhappy thing to happen. Or you might just think this isn't, it's not as good or you know, the rewrite has made it worse or whatever. So it's kind of almost impossible question to answer.

But I would say leave a space, come back to it really, very quickly, and then come back and read it slowly through. And see, actually, this is too much plot here. Actually, this character wouldn't do that. Actually, I'm not sure that the tension is mounting enough in this section.

And you know, just just try and kind of work those things through. But before you get to that stage, make sure you've got a strong, your voice is strong in kind of coming through that, which again, that's like a whole, we could have a whole episode talk about what is your voice and we have done whole episodes of that. Yeah, yeah, again, I've covered that in the supercharge sitcom. There's a whole session called your voice.

I would add to that that I think that cooling off period is important. It's worth trying to get a draft written so that you can spend as many days as you can without it, letting it stick in an approving rule. Then you take it out and you, I would suggest that you literally physically print it out or put it on as a PDF on a tablet and you read it in a way that you can't tinker with it at that moment. Just read it through in 45 minutes, half an hour, an hour, maybe mark up, this doesn't work.

Just literally just put squiggles in the margin. Oh, I hate that line. Oh, you know, fix that. You know, wow, this scene won't end.

You know, just sort of mark those. And then just work out what, how could it be better? And if it's really veered off course, you're not happy with it. You might want to just sort of write a new outline of it and just go, I had an outline of the script I was trying to write.

What have I written? This doesn't quite bear in relation. Can I spot where the problems are? It is hard to fix your script yourself because in a way you don't get any distance on it.

It's like proofreading your own stuff. Some people are really good at it. Most people are not very good at it. So it may be that you could give the scripts to someone else to read, not for their notes because they probably don't know how to give you notes.

And I'll either say, it's brilliant when it's not. Or they'll say, oh, I didn't like the so-and-so bit. But you can at least ask them, is it clear what's going on? You could ask them questions of clarification.

Can you tell what the show is about from what I've written? Because that voice, that show you're setting up is actually as important, especially in the case of this competition, as it is for the technical writing ability about whether you're still has a beginning and middle and end. So there are loads of things. I'm actually working on a document which won't be ready in time for this call.

14 common problems with scripts or 14 problems with your script. And there are ways of making it better. But actually, fundamentally, it's you've still got time to really work on the basic idea and make sure that it's a decent script in your voice. And if it's not technically it's really excuses, it could be.

Well, that's a shame. But just make sure your voice is in it. I think is really, really crucial. Because we're looking for writers as much as scripts, if that makes sense.

Anything I missed there, Dave? I agree with all of that. I think one thing you can do, which is a slight cheat. And I don't even know why I'm telling you this because I'm going to be the one who's reading it.

If nothing else, go back to those first 10 pages and make them just as good as they can possibly be. Because if we really like that first 10 pages, we're going to read the rest of the script. And if the rest of the script, the extent to which the rest of the script does not live up to the first 10 pages, maybe, maybe, maybe forgiven on the basis of, well, I like that first 10 pages so much. I like that character so much at the beginning there that I'm prepared to kind of consider putting this in the long list pile up this stage.

Because we probably won't, there's going to be a lot of scripts. We probably won't read every single script. But there'll be quite a lot of scripts, I think, where we'll go, that's a good 10 pages there. I want games to read that as well.

So the first 10 pages are important. And this is an industry wide thing. This isn't just us being arbitrary because people do make up their minds. And then I would say, really work on these first 10 pages and then work again, even harder on the first three pages.

Because you are making up your mind very, very quickly. And that's just human nature. It's very hard to keep an open mind when if your first three pages have got typing errors, the character who was called Stephanie is now called Stefan. Or there is a Stephanie and a Stefan.

There are serious layout problems. It looks like this writer hasn't really paid attention to this. And there are some pretty basic things, errors, that you can leave in your first three pages, which really don't make your script look good. So I would say, focus on, once you've done the whole script, go back to the first 10 pages and then give the first three pages yet another going over.

Because that first impression really is important. There wasn't something else that was going to say, well, which will come to me in a moment. I was going to say, I think it's hard to do more than three drafts on your own. So I would say, if you write the first draft, that might take you say five days if you're doing, you know, a few hours a day, if you've got a really strong outline that you're happy with, that the next draft, you can probably do in probably two or three days, because you have done an awful lot of heavy lifting.

And then you want to check it again and maybe spend another day on it, or another few sessions on it, depending on how many sessions you can spend in a day. You know, if you're working nine to five, then it may be you've got one session first thing in the morning. But I think that comes a point where you probably can't see what the problems are and you do need to send it off. But you can do an awful lot with it before you send it off.

Giving it to a friend to proofread it would also be a good idea. So you're not asking for notes from that friend, but you are asking them to hoink out the typos and the sort of the errors that would be well worth doing too. Is that all the questions, Dave? It is.

Well, actually, there's just one last question, but it's sort of been covered, Major Tom Com from Twitter. He says, because I've already written a one page of thing about the show. Currently my script has very little in the way of character description. Well, as we say, we've said how to get the character description in there, but we're not really wanting to see a one page of pitch thing about a show.

We don't want any one page pictures. We want it all in there, all in the script. So hopefully, I think that's everything now. Hopefully we've covered as much as we can.

And so thank you for those of you who've already sent your scripts. And we're really looking forward to seeing what we sense is going to be a lot. But I'm very excited about this. And thank you for doing all the work.

And good luck. We've got a couple of weeks left after this one. This episode first goes out two to three weeks, I think. So that is still a good amount of time, providing you've got time and energy and you're heading in the right direction with your script.

So thank you to all of you for joining us in doing this. Great. I'm really looking forward to meeting them as well. I just want to see what people are actually writing.

So make us laugh. Thank you very much, everybody. All the best. Cheerio then.