Hello and welcome to Ccomgeeks, just the one geek this week, it's me James Carey and in this episode I'm going to play with him to be, I recorded with Mark Ebenz, writer and comedy actor. He wrote Fortnestard in that mentioned web look, he also co-wrote two episodes of Bluestone 42, Series 3, in which he also played the Pardre for a couple of episodes. And I was keen for him to be writing on Bluestone 42 because I've always loved his radio sitcom called Bleak Expectations, that you can regularly hear being repeated on Radio 4 Extra and it then became Bleakol's Shoppest Stuff on the television and like many of the Ken's in Hero was cut off in its prime, so we'll be hearing more about that in the course of the interview. We recorded this interview before we knew that the BBC wanted to show the Ken's in existence, so that's why we don't refer to it and we'll begin the interview as Mark and I have begun many of our conversations by talking about cricket, but don't worry, we get to the comedy.
Yeah, I'm going to go through some of my goals when I switch on, I thought I just wonder if you can do that, you know, that's the half-centre. What do we can go from here and then what do you do? Yeah, I'm going back to our other love of comedy. You obviously found out with cricket in early age.
What age did you realise that comedy was your thing? I think it was sort of beyond how other people consumed comedy. I think when England picked Bill Attlee for the 19th time, that's a very cricket and nerdy joke, isn't it? In the next lecture, he was an ex-likant about some of you trying that in the West Indies quickly, sorry, it's a comedy fucker.
I've catted the team against Bill Attlee when he was qualifying for the MCC and he's called 128 against a bunch of school boys, which I was one. Was he a nice man? Not with a bat in hand. Correct, but at what point did you realise that you enjoyed comedy more than your peers?
I don't know, that's really interesting, because there's always a sort of, there's usually a slightly nerdy group of boys, and usually, I hope it's not any more just boys, but it used to be just boys. Probably because my schools were slightly more boys than girl heavy. Nerds who'd be into comedy slightly. I went on as it was more, I think probably, relatively early, I think I realised I really wanted to do comedy.
And it was, I'm actually going to tie this to cricket now. We used to go on a sort of cricket festival from my school when I was 12 or 13, and one year, one of the four could be schools. So we used to do an evening of fine entertainment sketches, and every school had to come up with a sketch. And we did a sketch that our young critic coach had written about.
Australian standing in the slips for both of them, and it was all, you know, pommy mocking and then he both smacked him away from the place. It wasn't very funny, but one of the jokes in it was they decided that everyone should be sitting from cans of lager in the slips, because they were Australians, and it was about 1981, where you're allowed to be that stereotypically awful. And my father heard about this, and he bought me at the time he could buy Foster's Lager in a tremendously large two-litre can. So he got one of those, emptied it and goes, and he went, I think this might get a bigger laugh.
He's absolutely spot on, and somehow and instinctively to hide it until everyone else's cans have been seen. I think it was that the only point to go, do you know what I think? I'm getting the bigger laugh than everyone else. And thinking it through, the rest of my friends were all critic mad, but I was anyone who was comedy mad and thinking, how do I time this?
How do I do that? Rather than merely reciting something you've heard, or you get that thing where you realise that they're saying the lines are on, or that they're sort of, it's not right, you haven't remembered it. Because also in those days, because we're both roughly the same age, where our comedy, our love of comedy is slightly predated to the video recorder. And so you saw it once on TV last night, and you don't get to see it again, and you sort of pride yourself that you can kind of remember it, and remember exactly what the joke was, rather than roughly what the joke was.
Yes, you have to do that, and you do it with everything. I remember even with Baron Knight's sometimes about eight or nine, which is quite odd, and I still maintain some of them, but quite funny. So I remember, I just think there was a number of times, I couldn't remember it. I couldn't remember it, I couldn't remember it, I couldn't remember it.
I remember making it up my own place, and with hindsight, you go, I think you want us to be a comedy writer on quite a young age. And the first sketch I wrote and did myself, which when I was 13, when I went to bigger school, and we did an end of the term thing at Christmas, a house review, that gives away my boarding school education there, that house. I used the word house. And I mean, you can see all the fact that I was in the house, the boarding school, and I can edit this podcast, do you remove my references?
I mean, a lot of people when they say, well, you know, we did a house review of them, maybe their brother and sister, and their parents, but I didn't see them for most of my childhood. And I didn't even have a sister. I'm pretty sure I don't know, I don't know. I may have one, she may be serious, I'm being in touch for 30 years.
I don't know. I do, I remember that they did this end of, it's my first term, I was in my first term, I wasn't having a very nice time, my first term, I didn't enjoy it, I was a bit bullied as being a... a scholarship boy with a big forehead, you know, a forehead that had metaphorically written in the online target. And yet somehow I really wanted to do a sketch at the end of this term, it was a domain that the other kids, the older kids, and I wrote and performed a sketch like a Jollner friend is doing it with me, which was sort of a parody of a talk, a teacher done about something, and I did that, and I looked back and I think, why?
Why was I putting myself out there when I was already slightly out there? And already slightly being picked on, why would I do that? I've had double on quits, double down on this unpopularity. It's the last night of term, and the worst thing that can happen is one ghastly beating the last 12 hours before your parents come get you.
But it seems to go quite well, but I don't know what possessed me to think I could possibly do that, and to just go away and sit in a small, tiny room and scratch out on a bit of A4 with a pen, because that's how it happened back then, the time horizon, being invented to live in laptop, a sketch, and so I think that again is one of them actually go, oh, I see high enough here, despite all the other sort of career options that were sort of part of the forefront of my mind growing up. And that's interesting though, that you decided to go away and write something, because a lot of, I mean, because you are a writer and a performer, and one would possibly say a writer performer, and yet it seems that you see the two things as slightly more distinct, whereas there are some people who might have risen up through and they would look for something that they could use in order to perform it, so that they could be a performer, whereas it seems that you thought, oh, I could parody that and write it, you sort of saw the two disciplines as separate, and therefore even now, do you sort of see yourself as a writer performer, a performer who can write or a writer who also performs? Is that a cricket around the question? Is he a batsman or a bolls, or is he a genuine rounder like Ian Botham?
Well, I put myself, I'd like to think of myself as Segar Fields and Talking Sobers, Gary Sobers, but I'm worried I'm Craig White, Phil the Fraser, or even David Capel to list three nerdy cricket all rounders who are hailed for new Botham, and he's a really well-ins North America, so it's Canada perhaps, we might be all right. Let me put that in baseball terms, Cal Ripkin Jr, the Boltzmann Orioles, the longest stretch of games without taking a break for injury in the history of the Major League Baseball, I believe. Wow, I can't compete with that. No, I see myself very much as him or Derek Jeter maybe.
Okay, I think it's the right time to the action for the writer. Yeah, the right performing is an interesting question, isn't it? Because it's as I've got older, the writer, can I do more way more writing than performing now? I'm actually not performing, my writer brain takes over quite a lot, and I remember the first time I did on stage after probably about four years, where I'd just been writing, and doing very occasional sketch show, and I also gave with people, it was a tryout for an Edinburgh show, I've been very early tryout, we started in March, just a flink stuff at the wall, and I remember sort of my brain drifting off into a reverie, as I looked at my eyes, I didn't really work, isn't it?
I wonder if we could do it this way, and I was sort of in an out-of-body experience looking down at myself, mouthing these words, and I need to cut this bit coming up to the cheese, we should have thought of that beforehand, shouldn't we? And the writer brain taking over is quite an interesting thing when it before me, and the same happened, well, there's a shake or blue stain for it, I don't know if you know it. And playing the poncho in that race, I remember doing a tape and just thinking, ah, I don't know, I'm following these last two months, I'm not going to knit this in the end, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll say it anyway, and you start thinking that way as a, you know, the writer brain takes over, so I say my writer brain is predominant, but I really love performing, and at the time they were symbiotic within me, and then gradually the writer brain is taking over, because that's what I ended up being paid to do more of more quickly, and if people started paying me to act more of them, maybe I'd write less, I don't know, I know lots of people who wrote and performed their own stuff, loads of them are just actors, or don't write, or you know, write very little, and most people I know who started as writer performers and ended up writing, performing a lot less, it just seems to be the way it goes.
The person you wrote that pantomime with, was that James Bachman? No, it wasn't. Okay, so who was it with, and how'd you end up writing with James Bachman? I never managed to write it together, not with him in the room, no, sorry James, sorry, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm not afraid of him, he's in one of those transformers, isn't he?
Yeah, he's in LA now, where he's, you know, he's in Transliques and Transformers at her, he's a Extinctionally, most recent one, and he listens to the trailer online, he's the first voice you can hear, this could change the laws of physics, we know him, I think, at the line, he plays standard shoots, he's nerdy, lab-coated British assistant. Awesome. Yeah. So how'd you end up writing, how'd you end up falling into that writing partnership, the writing, performing partnership as well, but you did write, you were a writing partnership, not just a writing, former partnership?
Yeah, I've written, with lots of different people, these are different sorts of ways, and I think the main reason certainly to start off with was pejorative way of putting it is cowardice, too scared to do it by yourself, better way to put it, or you haven't got self-flagellations to say sensible way to do it, because you're starting off in a weird industry that's not known for the milford human kindness, it's a relatively harsh industry to work in. Yeah, doors tend not to fling open unexpectedly and you'd be ushered in to both significance and money. So I think given that it's a scary old world, and I think unless you're sociopathically egomaniac or self-confident lunatic, that would be me. Well, yeah, I mean, God on your side, I don't know James, you're the one who brought this up.
I think unless you have a sort of sublime sense of self-confident, some people do have that and I really envy them. It's much easier to write with someone, because then at least one other person in the world thinks it's funny, and it can be when you're starting off, you're not very experienced at things, you make your mistakes together and it's always good to have a script editor with you by your side that is as invested as you are, and that can lead to horrible arguments and foreings out with people, but if you find the right writing partner, that's a great thing. We need to just talk about bleak old shop stuff, but before that, obviously, the majestic bleak expectations. How did that sort of come into being?
And what I'm interested in also is how you created that show, and with that in mind, because you're creating new shows at the moment, which at one point may not come in reality as mine, how you approach that differently. So it's worth thinking, so how did you come up with bleak expectations and what was the process there, and then after that, think about how you would do it now? Well, I woke up with the idea and felt fairly inspired, and I sort of raised it over a day in a heart. No, I wish I was.
I was first writing back 2005, the very first draft of the What became a Radio Show. And... We were invited to do this with you. Not at complete spec script.
And I'm not a great one for writing treatments and going through that process of doing the same thing. Here's my idea. What do you think? Okay, I'll do it like that.
I'm very bad at that, because I think I'm very good at telling people what ideas are until I've written them down, because I don't really know quite often. And no matter how much I think about it, there's some of the magic of putting things on the page. It's quite weird that way. But I saw they were doing Bleak House on TV, which was about 10 years ago, and I...
So they're stickings for a while, but they've done a lot of costume drama. I'm thinking, go, would it be a show like that, but funny? Long, lovely, tracking shots through Old London Town, who was discussing things with serious, important, enormous hats and mutton shots, whiskers, what they're talking about is ridiculous. I thought, come on, that's crying out to be done.
That sounds really fun. And I thought, I think I'm going to stick in this parody. It sounds like you had that feeling where you discovered... You've felt like you discovered a show rather than thought of it.
It's like a low-hanging fruit, I guess. You're looking by his thinking, does no one else know? Oh, can I? Oh, right.
Very occasionally you do have an idea and you just think, I can't believe that no one else has done this. They're going to be sometimes even discovered that they have done it. But fortunately, it was an ITV sitcom in the 70s and all the tapes have been white. So you're fine.
Yeah, it seemed like such a low-hanging fruit. I'll do it. Dickens, apparently for one to bet about it. That's not quite what I was thinking.
I was thinking more 19th century. But the reason I was because I've been in the trenches of light entertainment and not proper comedy in a way, not that I'm just missing life. I don't know. It's a great experience to do by a time without an end to think about things like that.
But I've seen it as for a long time, my CV didn't contain any actual pure comedy. And I hadn't written a sitcom script for several years, so I went on my own. I was going to write a couple of the higher-room things. And so I sat down, I wrote a quite insane, kind of one-hour-long script for TV, originally.
And it ended in a sort of weird cliff-angry way. And the stage script's got more and more self-referential, such as, I think you've probably realized my idea right now, but bear with me. Okay, that's something that happens like this. I mean, that's bad dialogue, but it was a bit like that in the last few pages, which meant that I only sent it to three or four producers, or my agent to three or four producers that I know well enough to get to meet with that.
And also on the basis that if someone didn't like that, where it was on page 57 of this man 62 page script, and if they got that far, I was probably in the green anyway. It's fine. In the green, that's not the right. I had a green light.
No, no, no, no, no, that's the other way. In the black house. It's not even in the black house, it's not in the black house, it's in the black house, you're in profit, where's that sheet? That imply that you're in debt.
How long did it take to write? And how much did you plan first? Because you were a lot of characters and a lot of people come back. Did many of those come out fully formed?
Or was there a bit of planning? Or did you basically just start writing and see what happened? Well, I think it's one of those rare lucky things that it sort of came out. I did plan.
I did think about it. For how long? This is the African-American, nearly definitely go. But what I remember is thinking, it just needs to be a happy family ruined.
They've got to be really rich. There's lovely lifestyle compared to the rest of Britain at the time, and it's got to be ruined by someone evil. And there's probably got to be some law involved, and they've got to end up in a horrible school. Because I didn't know much Dickens, and that sort of sucked up to me what it should be.
And quite right, you can't even attack that nice little thing, but you don't know too much otherwise you write nerdy jokes that some people don't know. That is brilliant. And everyone goes to it. That's why I'm delivering the ignorance of God's dick.
And I just sort of, I rate it in quite a splurgy way, and it was quite a lucky format to sort of hit upon. Almost all of that first episode could be exposition in a way. So things have been driven along by saying, here's what our childhood was like. I know the 12 funniest visual jokes I think are in the TV script at the time.
And somehow you go over 15 pages of Man jokes, what their life is like. And oh, well, there's the characters. And for example, I don't think the main character didn't have two cities at one to start with, but when writing it, it was funny to have a second sister because I wrote a whole thing about their names all being alike. And as a scene was did making into the radio series about the Darguing Hall present, you know, the Peter Piper, Poppy and Pippa.
It was an anvila anyway. Creating characters for the sake of one, Jack is perfectly acceptable. Yeah, and that's why I have to kill her off of it. But I killed her off in a way that was not in this sort of, it sort of fell organically into place in a way.
And the character, well, that seems good. That seems okay. Let's see what people think. So I probably did plan, but I knew roughly what's going to be.
And because it's a sort of parodic thing, that makes it much easier. The shape is out there in the world of bad things happen to unlucky people. There's a story for an episode. You don't have to think too much about it.
Whereas other things you think much harder. So I was quite lucky that way. And then I had to start thinking more seriously about it. I got commissioned for a series on radio having, yeah, I said, what's the Marvel's character?
I said, what's the reason I think you've written the radio show here by mistake. It's full of words. You know, these words would take agency and tell us really more. You know what you're doing.
I don't know. And so I re-wrote the radio. And I think the second episode was between harder because I had to sort of written an expository first episode. And that's why I had to really put the notice of Reisen and work out what it was.
And actually I think the series changes quite a bit in the first series. And then between that and the second, I think the second, third, fourth and fifth are a bit more like a sitcom. There much more here's a story that we usually missed a bit of them trying to take over the world and then fortunately. And that's a really good way to make it easy to write plots for yourself.
Think of a ridiculous plan. Think of ridiculous ways of oil plan. At the end he runs off going, ah, ah, you're foiled. You're foiled, mate.
That's actually quite an easy way to sit comp plot. You have to work quite hard to find the mechanics within that. And the variations in there. Yeah.
But it is, it's easier than Reisen, what I call the proper sitcom. I think in a way, the bleaching places proper sitcom though, I think it possibly is. I'm not sure. It's slightly heightened plot wise.
Well, there's a sense in which, um, the, you said something earlier, which suddenly clanged a alarm bell in my head, which worries me, which is you said, these sitcom, these characters are extremely unlucky and they don't really deserve what happens to them. And in one sense, one of the rules of sitcom is the author, you know, the protagonist is the author of his, or her own downfall. And so there's a sense in which, um, perhaps you do break that rule, but there's another sense in which because it's slightly prodigal, it sort of doesn't matter. There's a sense in which I'm afraid your show doesn't work.
After five series, you have finally declared a play. Yeah, it's probably true. Probably not. I'm not sure.
But there are things like, you know, the main character, you know, the main character is the, uh, Azer's own downfall. So the number of times he's come across Mr. Lemon, you know, disguised as a cowboy or as a woman and just gone, well, that's fine. I'll take them at face value where they're obviously not.
Well, in that case, I think you've probably hit upon the solution because he does take things at face value because he is incredibly noble and brave. He assumes the world around him is equally noble and brave and it isn't. Yes. So in one sense, it's a slight fish out of water, innocent to broad share, isn't it?
Where he is sort of constantly surprised and confounded by quite how dastardly everyone around him is and how cruel life is. Yeah, slightly and also, he's not actually that. No, the character of him was the, how he came out was imagining Roger Reese on the poster of Nicholas Knickle in the 80s, which is him standing in the sort of wedge of the rest of the cast behind him. He's got his hands down by his sides and he's looking noble.
Oh, so noble is Roger Reese's knickle. Well, he looks at me and I ask, let's take that. Let's do someone like that. Let's take him down.
Slightly. And perfectly, there's no way there is noble as he imagined himself to be. He's actually a time-sensitive bastard to his long-suffering wife to, you know, to his best friend. He's a bit of an arse, but there's something great about, I think, about, you know, I think I stumbled on to it, that archetype, but the arse doesn't really, the idiot doesn't realise he's an idiot and a sidekick who isn't an idiot.
And that's, what's the second one there, isn't it? That's fine. I mean, Harry Biscuit came out and thought, oh, what's the funny name? I thought, Harry Biscuit, that's a funny name.
And then I thought, well, why is he called Harry Biscuit? I always put his parents down to the biscuit. That seems the right joke there. And he just goes, I think, it seems to be enough for the state of character, he's an idiot.
That's fine. And then, oh, look, I've written something very useful to go from interrupting any expository or double-scene over the next five series by just saying something at tonight. Brilliant. Or with some ridiculous invention, you know, yes.
The inventions are, yeah, just checking one of those, it makes things much easier. Anyway, the show is, if you want to delight on it, it's all even. However, it's, you thought about it as a TV show, you did radio and then it transversed television, which was overall, I would imagine, an unsatisfactory experience because I saw you at various points during its development and commissioning, decommissioning, recommissioning. And what do you, what do you take from that experience?
And then firstly, you know, what do you please with? What kind of, what did you enjoy about the experience, apart from being paid properly? Oh, that was nice. That was very nice.
What I take from experience, that it was an interesting way. It was a hard sell all along. We tried to get the radio shell to TV as it was basically, and I wrote two scripts, the BBC like that, which proved that it can be done as not just a radio show, one of the nicest comments I got with someone saying, if I hadn't known this was a radio show beforehand, I would never have guessed it, it's such a purely visual script. And, you know, so I, I, I, I, acted in the race completely, which meant I got rid of lots of jokes that way and, and, read it, it, not almost completely, but the story is the same, but I basically did reimagine it completely so that I didn't even be able to tell.
And then a lot of people who liked it, but they would have to make a pilot, they'd have the money to make an expensive pilot, was always that crime, if you want the new black hat, it's a bit too much like black hatter, and so on and so forth. And, and you understand it might be more expensive to make than most, it's, it's not an easily sellable thing. So, yes, why is that? Well, I don't understand this.
I, I mean, I'm going to sort of now a bit about it in a way that I probably promised myself, I wouldn't, but I find it very hard to understand that people would say it's not very accessible if it's a comedy about period costumes, about costume dramas. And to say, you do know that BBC one is actually covering costume dramas, and the biggest show at the moment is down to now be. So to say that there is no appetite for this kind of thing. I think, yeah, I find odd.
I think, I think most people at the top of the challenge, because there are so many things, I've loved that. The instant reaction is how can I say no to this? And I don't mean that in any bad way. I imagine I'd be exactly the same, you know.
I imagine it's a bit like being James Dyson, a venture of the, you know, amazing bag of people. I imagine he gets thousands and thousands of letters from people with suggestions for inventions that he could do next every day, and a lot of them would be rubbish and something excellent, but you just can't wait through that sort of thing. I don't know why I picked James Dyson really though. It's like, it's like he's on runs a TV channel, having a lot of that would be a much better analogy because that wouldn't be an analogy, it would be how it is.
That's the way it works. So there are so many different things, I think you're interesting things to go, no. And your instinct is to play safe because, I think I'm not going to go back to engineering analogy, you know, change inside things like rarely happens in leaps is incremental. And if you're playing that sort of thing to television, they don't want something that's exactly different to what's been on already within the genre.
They want something that's a bit like but different, a bit like but different. And so I can understand the desire for incremental change to it's safer and a sort of costume drama, apparently. Well, it's seen obviously in the comedy world, I think, was that obvious? And again, I think it comes down to that, it was a lot of costume drama, but then that's their premium product.
And to do something that undercuts that is bad. And as analogy, I would acknowledge this, that this is the project I did that the most fun days were done for No Money in My Life, which was Henry Naylor, who's a fantastic man of comedy, and Grant Mangott together a bunch of people. And we did alternative red button commentary for critic test matches, pitch to Skye, beyond the red button, and we would be there. And we all, a bunch of us took on different characters, critic style characters.
Dave Lamb was playing an Australian, who was a shame-worn type figure, Henry Naylor was a gruff, retired Northern Unfire, I seem to remember. And Lawrence Howard did a very incredibly good Mark Nicholas style character, which I wouldn't know how to apparently Mark Nicholas, and he nailed him perfectly. It was brilliant. I did a South African, ex-special forces veteran, and all rounder called Keep the Vancouver, who has killed a man in, what's the most famous?
I have killed a man in Cold Blood. No, I have not killed a man in Cold Blood. I mean, let's call it the new cool. I could have stopped myself.
He also happens to be an ex-cricator and critic coach. So I did that. And we did that. And we did that as a whole days commentary on the test match, we went and did it.
And it wasn't broadcast, they recorded it. And it went up the chain. And it was great. Really funny.
Crickets are premium brown. We don't want to be seen to undercutting it. I don't think, you know, sponsors wouldn't like it. I'm really sorry about that.
And I think that's probably the same with costume veron at the BBC. You don't want something that is going, it's silly. It's silly. You see that thing there?
It's a bit silly. And I can understand that thinking. I really can understand that thinking. Because sometimes we look at the small bit, it's there.
It's apparently what people would love that. They might. But I can understand who might think. But what we did then was- So these were all reasons why I shouldn't be commissioned.
And yet it was. And it was. Well, we did a, we was talking about trying to do a sort of fact or pilot, he's that great American phrase, of doing a one off Christmas special. And you could, more or less, it's one off Christmas special.
And if people like that, they will do a series. And so we saw it shouldn't be one off Christmas special with big expectations because that would be strange to them doing a series off the back of it because he'd have to set the characters, when he set the characters up, it would be a bit odd to be decided to pitch something in the same world, but with different characters. No, I want to see you've already written that script for the whole set up. Yeah.
But it needs to be, it also needs to be a Christmas special type thing. And I think we'll be hard doing that with the characters from the radius already established. And we decided to go for a one off separate thing. And they liked it, we could say, now we'll make the series of big expectations.
And at some point that became, we liked the pilot script enough that if you did make a series, could it be of this? But we got the same thing that everyone likes. And who knows how these things happen? And so the hoops that were jumped through.
And the hoops always seem to be slightly, I think, from no one's ill at all. Just each one a tiny bit away. And that sort of multiplication of small errors into a big error. Not I'm saying it was an error, but it became less on target than...
There were different expectations at every turn from different people for different parts of the project. Yeah. And so therefore, once you'd made then three new episodes, people had different criteria for judging against all that kind of stuff. Yeah.
And I think also there's the thing of trying to invent a whole new show setting the same world. So it's going to be sort of the same but different. And I don't think I was. I was with my own mind producing the original, actually.
And I think, one of the things I look back on, where was my idiot? Where was my sidekick idiot? I didn't have that. I took one of the things that I love best about the show.
I know people like the best, which is Harry Viscuit, you know, idiot character with silly name. And names so silly that even when my, you know, my daughter was very young. So what you do, Daddy, someone who tells stories, gets a lot of what's the first one. One's about this guy called Pip Bin, his best friend called Harry Viscuit.
Big laugh. And she was throwing it well. That's just a funny name. It's a clear, funny name.
Well done. Well done, everyone. Well done. Well done.
Well done. Well done. So I'm conscious. And you're trying to recapture that in a different way.
And I think it was that, no one, you can't recapture that. I don't necessarily like it in the bottle, but it does feel a bit like I lucked into writing something, you know, really good just by chance. Because there is no chance of everything you write that you think. I do.
And I was very fortunate similarly that the first sitcom really that I pitched struck a chord thinking unthinkable on radio for. And we got to say any more for the first episode. And I just thought, oh, this is easy. Things down.
Retire. I won't give you the time. It's really, really not easy at all. And so, you know, the next thing I wrote to him to come off that was, didn't you ever want at all.
But yeah, no, you do sometimes realise, respectively, that you were very lucky with an idea which was the right idea, with the right people at the right time. And then so with all that in mind, if you do a new show, if you were starting a chicken idea now, which is where you are, how would you go about it? Oh, there'll be a lot of cake, coffee, long walks, tears rage in somewhere. And that would come up useful for perfect comic-churn.
Or more likely, 73 pages of terrible crap or I wait for it to go, sort of just show it in here somewhere. So you're a writer who finds the show by writing more than by planning? Yes. So I'm much more of a planner.
I kind of think of the idea, who are the characters? Think of the characters for a long time? Think of storylines, plot storylines, pop, pop, pop, pop, plot. And sometimes bits of dialogue come along the way or a scene will pop up and I'll write it.
But in general, by the time I'm actually sitting down for half an hour, I pretty much know exactly what's going to happen. Whereas you discover more by writing. Yes, I wish it wasn't so. And I don't plan it to be that way.
If I'm sitting down right there, I sit in the thing for quite a long time. But interestingly, you say snippets of dialogue don't leap in mind. They sort of have flash photographs of elements of the show. That's it.
I've got it. Oh, and I'll sort of literally hold in my head as much as I can, in case it tips out my ear. I will get my way to a notebook and write down that thing. And go, oh, is that what I saw in my ear?
I don't know. And no matter how much I try and plan, I really do write outlines and try and do it really in my eye. Great. It goes mad.
It goes mad. In fact, my outlines are mad. I've seen on Twitter a few times that John Finnewall, who's excellent at his coming press, was brilliant as a show. I've seen one of his outlines.
He's put up and it's lovely. It's like a flow diagram done by the best management consultant ever. But funny. And it's people.
It's all plot loops and little arrows around doing this. And then my friend Robert Thurgis, the show death in Paradise, I've seen him do the same on Facebook or something. He's put one of his outlines up. And obviously it's very elaborate.
The mystery's got high things and some of that beautifully neat and perfect again. Like, more like a diagram from chemistry or something. It's like a spider drank ink and then exploded on page. It's just mad.
It's full of, oh, and I just can't think clearly. Someone who's been locked up for a long time. A little bit. It's like a man who's gone mad with cake.
Mark Evans and I could have talked for hours. And in fact, we did. So hopefully we'll bring you more of that interview and have another occasion. Thanks very much to Mark Evans for being our guest on SitConkeeps podcast.
If you're getting Dave Comer's draw symptoms, then good news. You can spend two days with Dave Comer. Not just one day but two. He's doing some of his writing courses on the 21st of April and the 22nd of April.
The 22nd is about SitConwriting. But go to his website, Dave Comer.org.uk and find out details about hanging out with Dave and learning how to write comedy, how to make a living from comedy. And that's Dave's guy who knows because he has made a living from comedy for many, many years. So do have a look at that and Dave Comer.org.uk.
If you can't wait that long and you want to hang out with both of us, we're going to be at the craft of comedy writing conference on the 8th and 9th of April in London. Which I'm really looking forward to. Loads and loads of brilliant people going to be there. Including who we got on the list.
Well we've got Sean of William, he's the commission of the committee and the previous commission of the entire time. Jason Hays and Joe Morris will be there. It'll be lovely in Martin from the Think of It and Beat. There's going to be there.
And loads of people do have a look at that on the website, Crafts of Comedy Writing conference. If you just google that, I'm sure you'll find it. It's in London, no in North Wales. So that's going to be great.
I think we're done. If you want to support the podcast by our books, look our blogs, join our Facebook group and leave us a review on iTunes. Thanks very much for listening and speak to you next time.