Hello, welcome to Sitcom Geeks, this is another in our special from the Craft of Comedy conference in Clandidno. I think we should get our guest, I'm James Carey, hello, we should get our guest to say Clandidno properly because she's a good last speaker. It's Clandidno. Clandidno.
You put the tongue on the top of your mouth and blow. She's a bit like a Casablanca quote. So who is our mysterious voice there? Well this is, joining us today as well as our producer Katie is Sean Edd William.
Hello. Sean Edd is the comedy commissioner, probably who commissions more comedy than any other comedy commissioner in the world I would think. So everybody keeps telling me is. And that is the comedy commissioner for Radio 4.
So delighted to have you here with us, Sean. Now you've been just about for a year or so now? That's right, yeah. I started last March, March 15.
Right, okay. And of course Caroline Raphael had been in charge for what, many years? That's right, yeah. 15 years or so.
So she established the president and she got the various slots in place as well. That's right. So it's a fairly smooth changeover, wasn't it? Yes, yes.
So what did you think when you came in? Is it like kind of hands off or are there things that you thought you really wanted to bring in? Well it's a gradual process because Caroline had commissioned possibly about a year in advance so I've had a bit of time to really look at the slate as it were and work out what I like and what the audience like and what perhaps I think I don't like. So there are a few programmes that I've got rid of that, you know, subjectively I didn't like or didn't feel had their place.
I have to say Caroline set the bar unbelievably high. She was a brilliant commissioner and she brought a range of voices and stories to Radio 4 that is extraordinary. So it's like also being allowed to, you know the verse, I can't even say the name of the suite now, you know that ridiculous sweet shop, Caramel Sweet Shop that exists only in commercials? It's the radio equivalent of that.
It's full of just the most fantastic performers, writers, producers, people who love comedy and it's in its purest form what is not to love. Absolutely. Can I ask a question on that? Is there stuff that you don't like?
Do you need to like everything? I don't think you do need to like everything. There's definitely stuff on Radio 4 that doesn't make me laugh but it makes a large and appreciative audience laugh. I think as a professional you should be analytical about comedy.
You should laugh at things wholeheartedly and with joy but you don't laugh at everything and I think that's actually what grown-ups do. They're able to analyse comedy material like the Americans can do brilliantly and say this is the best of its kind. It may not make me laugh personally but it's got a very loyal audience and it's performing the best it can be performing at the moment. I think that's very important.
Because your background is very much in producing comedy and you've produced big mainstream shows. Yes, I mean obviously a show like Big Train is a... Big Train. Big Train.
So it's not like you've just kind of walked in off the street. Well there was a bit of that going on. Or of course I had a BBC photocopy and you moved sideways into Radio 4. Well I tried for that game.
It's pretty slow and I... Do you still find that you're applying the criteria that you were using? Well I think yes to a certain extent because when you produce situation comedies which I've made an awful lot of actually I was thinking listening to the session we've just been to that I've actually made lots of sitcoms, mainstream shows and I love the process. It's incredibly gratifying.
But it's the same thing that you look for. Is the writing tightly, is it as tightly wrought as it could be? Are the performances as true as they can be? Does this somehow, do we connect with this?
Does it resonate as much as it could? These are the questions you ask of comedy. Because in the end you wanted to shine a light on the human condition. Whether it's about people who are greedy, people who are stupid, people who think one thing about themselves and the reality is the opposite.
These are the kind of tropes to use the word I loathe. Nevertheless it's quite useful in this context. It's a polite version of the word cliché. Yes.
It's like saying disingenuous is a polite word for life. It's so true. But these are the things that you try and look out for and make those connections. Of course clichés are the great comedies are clichés.
The clichés with death. Indeed. We read some scripts for this podcast. We read the first ten pages.
We have a thing called the Ten Page Challenge. And so you must read a lot of scripts as well, which are presumably produced at a relatively high level than the stuff that we did. In this job, yes. But even then, what are you finding that, what mistakes are you thinking people are making?
Are there any general rules of thumb or is that, oh, another, our big thing is, after ten pages nothing's actually happened. Well, that doesn't always matter, of course. You know, Seinfeld was a comedy about nothing, wasn't it? Don't worry about everything.
But you don't always have to have massive plots. It can be a profoundly entertaining conversation about something. But I suppose something has to change, I think. Whether somebody becomes more powerful in that conversation, for example, or whether something that is set up at the beginning of the conversation is beautifully unravelled by the end of it, it doesn't actually have to be plot, but there does have to be some sort of change of tone or character or realisation.
And I think that's the thing. It's about being entertained. It's about engaging completely. You don't have to like the characters, but you do have to care what happens next to them.
I mean, you know, Chekhov was possibly the first great sitcom writer. Nothing much happened in his shows. People were always saying they were going to go to Moscow, but they never did. Actually, what they did was they sat around arguing about love and dreaming of doing something but never quite managing it.
And you could argue Beckett uses the same kind of mechanism. Yeah, great. And what happens in between the words, the subtext, is a very important thing in sitcom. Especially on radio.
Especially on radio, yeah. The sound is everything, of course. The other thing about radio, though, is the thing I love about it is that you can do things that you just couldn't do on TV. I was saying to somebody in one of the breaks earlier how Old Harry's Game is a fantastic sitcom.
And you just know that if you did it on TV, it would either look awful or it would look so good that it would cease to be fine. You know what I mean? I think there's an even more fundamental thing, which is something like Claire and the Community, which I made a pilot for, for TV, in fact. And it was interesting.
It began to bother you that they were social workers and that they were rather inept. And similarly, I think if you had made cabin pressure for telly, which is one of the great, great radio issues, would it have begun to bother you that these idiots were flying planes? I think probably it might have done. Sometimes when you imagine it, and also radio sitcom can be highly literate, densely written, sometimes you have to unpack that a bit for television.
So it's a very different genre, I think, and makes different demands on the realism of the piece. Having said all that, though, one of the joys of radio is if you want to set something on a spaceship, you can. Do you know that people do make enough use of that as they could do? Because with radio, you really can't go anywhere and do anything.
Or do you think, actually, if anything, people tend to rely on that too heavily? There's not enough of a human story there. I don't think it's a virtue in itself. I don't really care.
I think, in the end, is it a funny idea about characters that I engage with? That's my bottom line. I don't really care where it's set. I don't really have rules, per se, because I think whenever you have a rule about comedy, somebody breaks it brilliantly, with great imagination and originality.
But I think what I always look for is some sort of engagement with character. I think, if you can also have, like the Americans do so brilliantly, characters who speak in epigrammatic one-liners, in pithy, beautifully wrought lines that actually make you laugh because they're constructed to do so, they're called jokes, don't you? I don't have no idea what you're talking about. Jokes are phenomenally important, I think.
Pithy, epigrammatic phrases. They are. And they relate to character. They're not transferable a lot of the time, although sometimes they can be, but they emanate from character and attitude.
I used to do what I used to think of a long, long time ago. There was one secret occasion where I just thought, oh, I'll tell you what would be really funny if somebody said this. Oh, the only person who would say that is Owen. He's not in this scene.
Right, I'm going to get him into this scene so that he can do it again, because no one of the others could do it. That's the mark of good writing. I heard a minute of you that you did on feedback on Radio 4, you mentioned that you're kind of not afraid to have kind of quite, not difficult, but challenging, more challenging narratives in the 6.30 slot. Yes, yes.
Yes, I mean, I think it's our flagship slot. Anecdotally, it's the one everybody hears, so I think we should have the best and funniest shows in that slot. I don't think it's one of the funniest shows we've got, again, brilliantly written, hits its targets so surely every time. Very funny characters, a wonderful central character, but that doesn't have an audience, but that plays basically at top of six.
There was a policy that at 6.30 you're not going to sit down. I'm not sure, actually. You have to ask Caroline about that. I've got a feeling that she had a stronger view than I did about an audience.
The thesis, not an unreasonable one, that at 6.30 people are driving, cooking dinner, that you need a bit of noise to grab their attention, but I feel that when you're in the car, and I've got this fantasy which I said on feedback actually, which is that, like I've done in the past, you don't want to get out of the car, you've been doing it at 7 o'clock, but you're just going to wait until the end of it. Weirdly, I was actually driving when I was listening to this interview on paper, and I did actually have to say, I knew I was going to be talking to you here anyway, but I did actually have to say in the car, listening until your interview finished, and that is one of the great joys of radio. The other thing, just the last thing about the downside is when you hear, as a writer, someone say, oh, at 6.30, you need to bear in mind that people are watching Apple, cooking dinner or something. Oh, right, so you want me to make a radio show for people who aren't actually listening?
I agree with that. I agree with that. That's the paranoid vice for me, the most negative version of any possible three. That's a really good point.
I don't think it should be wallpaper in the back that you drift in and out of, and I think the best comedies do far more than that. Well, I think you're right that the 6.30 is primetime Radio 4, and let's be honest about this, 6.30 Radio 4, that is getting three, four million people? Well, on Fridays, you can get over two. Across the week, there's about five or six listening to it.
Yeah, two million. So that's why you're outperforming most TV shows. Yeah, I mean, I did a show for Sky, which I don't think it got anywhere near that, and it was a big show, Yonderland, which I was very proud of, but it didn't get huge ratings, because it's on a limited platform, whereas Radio 4 is accessible to everyone, and we do have a huge and loyal audience. Even at 11 o'clock at night, you can have a million people listening, and it is far more than an awful lot of comedy shows on telly.
What's interesting is that having now come back to radio after a long, long time in television, A, the utter joy of the simplicity of the process. I don't have literally 10 sets of notes on each cut that I have on certain shows I've done, so it's a very simple process, which is very joyful when you've been subjected to the other. But also, I think there's a different listening habit amongst young people who like to curate radio, so they're much more used now to listening to podcasts, selecting material that really makes them laugh, and we are very much part of that revolution on Radio 4. The Radio 4 Friday evening comedy podcast is one of the most popular in Britain, and I'm delighted about that, because it means we've got a new generation of people coming.
You can try things out, we're going to experiment with digital, and I think we're somehow back at the cutting edge, in a way that we haven't been in quite a long time. And the Comedy of the Week as well, isn't it? Yeah, and it's wonderful, because you communicate with a huge audience. Absolutely.
You're working with a range of people from the biggest names in comedy, and then all the way down to people who are starting out, the News Jack and Show What You Wrote People. Beyond those two shows, how do you feel you're bringing new talent along? Yeah, those are the two shows that are doing at the moment. I think that's something that we need to look at again, actually.
One of the in-house comedy departments, which is run by Julia McKenzie, which is a fantastic department, they're always scouting for new talent, so that's one way that new work comes in. And I think the indies now more and more are doing it, because I think they can see the value of getting someone at the beginning of their careers and really nurturing them and growing that talent. And yeah, I think there are more open access ideas that we could look at. I mean, I haven't been offered any lately, because we do have the two stalwarts, one a topical show and one a sketch show, but it's not something I'm opposed to at all, because I think it's the lifeblood of the channel, new writing.
And all the writers started that way, so I think it's really important. The big question, that's one of the big things that Bexis, James and I, is the developments over recent years where there were writers and there were performers, and now there are writer-performers, and not so many writers. Well, I'm married to a writer who is not a performer, and my father was a writer, so I understand this all too well, believe me. Our bank balance relies on this distinction.
Well, I think it's a really difficult one, and I think it's partly back to this lack of respect, in a sense, for the art of writing mainstream comedy that we were talking about in the session just before this podcast. In America, you can make a living as a writer. On other people's shows, I think Joel or Jason brought this up, there's an infrastructure. We used to have it in this country, you wrote sketches, Marshall and Renwick, for example, wrote The Two Ronnies.
You started maybe writing sketches on radio, then you went to television. You learnt narrative skills, you wrote episodes of other sitcoms, Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton, wrote Shelly, for example, The Pythons, wrote on The Doctor shows. There was an infrastructure. You could make a living.
You then become a lot more professional, to be honest with you, about your work, because frankly, you're getting paid for it. So if somebody tells you to put a joke in the joke bank, you're happy to do it, because you'll know. You'll probably get to use it another time. The problem, I think, and it's something that we and Rachel have to try and look at and really try and encourage is, yes, writers are the lifeblood, and they need to have that infrastructure.
It's something I'm talking to my colleagues and tell you about. I haven't got to know them particularly well yet, because it's still quite early days, but Shane and I talked about this, and the value of investing in writers is, I think, does return money millionfold to the channel, because a hit sitcom is worth as much as any hit drama or any other genre, and in fact, will repay you a million times because you can repeat it and repeat it, because familiarity is a friend of comedy. So I don't need to be converted, but what I think we need is money and investment and a sense of an infrastructure, which is a professional attitude to writing. There's one other point I want to make, which is that mainstream comedy is really hard, and there's a slight sense, sometimes amongst writers, that writing mainstream is something second-rate to want to do.
That's, I think, really misconceived. To write Brooklyn Nine-Nine, or The Big Bang Theory, and I'm going to America because actually that's where the mainstream shows up, or The Middle, which is a brilliant family sitcom, hugely satirical. And The Goldbergs around myself. The Goldbergs is another, I've just discovered The Goldbergs through my son this very weekend, recovering from seasickness in the city hours on Saturday hours noon.
I watched four episodes of The Goldbergs, and it's absolutely brilliant. But what you have there are teams of writers who aren't sort of looking down on the idea of mainstream comedy. They want to be there. They want to write the funniest line for that character.
They want to create the richest world for those people. And this is difficult. This is not the easy stuff. Frankly, anybody can do a show that a few hundred thousand people watch that is seemingly realistic, naturalistic, however you want to define it, with a camera, the mock documentary.
That's not difficult to do. The comedy of cringing, of one-note embarrassment, there's a million of them around. They're the easy ones to make. The difficult ones are where you have to create a gallery of characters, give them all the distinctive attitudes, and create stories that allow you then to generate those, do you remember those jokes we talked about earlier?
Yes, that's right. Yeah, those jokes, yes. I've read that down. But I think we should aspire to doing this.
We should look down on it. We should want to do it. We should want to write the next Frasier. What joy?
Again, my son introduced me to Frasier again. He's only 13. He's now watching all these shows for the first time. He said, what a great show.
These wonderful characters. There's 170 of them. Yeah, but that's to do with professional writers being given a living wage to work on it. And it's really hard at the moment, because nobody has the resources to do that.
Well, except you say that, but radio is the one that does. Because the only reason I got it to be, I've written, written or co-written, about 110 and a half hours. And some of those are TV, but actually about 60, 70 of those are radio episodes of either my own sitcom or 40-year-old episodes. And you can make a living too.
You can make a living, let's not say how good it is. But it does mean that when you do end up being commissioned for a mainstream show, you're part of it, you've actually got the skills, you've got stuff to fall back on as well, and you've got the emotional stuff in place as well. Actually, quite early on, I did a sitcom called Thinkable, and we tried to get it onto TV, and it didn't go. And I was obviously disappointed.
at the time. Looking back, I can see I wasn't ready for that, because I didn't have enough comedy under my belt in terms of half-hour comedy. So I think you're right, I think just getting experience is really important. And radio is part of the solution.
Totally. And it is what I think, you know, why we have writers who come back to us. They go to television, but they do keep doing their radio series, because it's immensely fulfilling. As I said earlier, it's the purest form.
And you don't, you know, nobody interferes with you, in that sense. But also, I think, if you do enough of it, you can make a living. Yes, exactly. That's true.
But to come back to the point you were saying about needing money, unfortunately, the BBC is, I mean, they are having to take huge, I mean, they've been getting cut back for the last 10 years. You know, everybody's struggling to make the best, still make the best shows. You know, that's the priority, to get the best possible shows on the telly and not undone radio. Is that all, well, I've noticed there is more now, isn't there, where TV and radio have kind of barely spoken for years, and they're in some different parts of London, now they happen to be in the same building.
But there was things like Little Britain, but it was gracious to me, kind of transferred almost by accident from radio to TV. But there's now much more. Yeah, much closer. And Shane is going to fund some pilots, for me, that may go to telly, but certainly, they've got to work as great radio first.
No, again, it's fairly early days, because we're just beginning to find ways of working together. But the signs are really promising, that there's a real appetite to work together. And I think that can only be a good thing. Absolutely.
There's more money to start with. It's bringing a bit of telly money into radio. But it has to work as a radio show in its own right size. It's got to.
It can't be a soundtrack to a telly show. Yeah. But unfortunately, sometimes if you do something that's very radio, then there's that immediate, well, I don't really see how this is going to be telly. So you go, no, that's because I spent a long time trying to make this a radio show.
But again, it's about being analytical, isn't it? It's saying, OK, it's one thing on stage, for example, we have a lot of shows that come to us from Edinburgh, but you don't sort of think, you don't think that it's going to stay in the same form as it was on stage. So you adapt it for radio, OK? And the same transition needs to go when you're looking at a television adaptation.
You actually look at the essence of the comic idea, and it usually does come back to character and comic idea. And then you say, well, what new dimensions can you add to it in television? You're not, at the back of your mind, you're not sort of looking at a sitcom idea and thinking, this is radio with the potential to go to telly. And your job, your approach.
No, I'm looking for great radio. I'm looking for great radio. But I think Shane, obviously, must look and think, well, these actors are really attracted to me, and this writer is someone I'd love to see developed. And so I think there's a range of, you know, we're both doing our jobs, if you like, and might be so.
You mentioned about the independent, the more independent shows. And it sort of seems to be, is it specifically, what sort of 20% has to be outside? Yeah, at the moment there's a quota, and there's 10% of indie business, and then 10%, which is called the window of creative competition, or the WOC. And that can go to either in-house or indies.
Window of creative titles. Yes, that's right. That is W1A straight out of that. Just by the head of better, obviously.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. So what, we should probably wrap this up, but people listening to the show, lots of people who want to write sitcoms, what should they be doing? What steps are there? Because obviously they're going to send them to you, because you get stuff sent to you by producers.
Listen to a show. If you like it, write to the producer, because you'll share a comic sensibility. It doesn't matter whether they're in-house in Julia McKenzie's department, or whether they're one of the many wonderful indies who make shows for us. Listen to them, really analyse what it is you like about them, and get in touch with the producer.
See if there are any ideas that you have. It shouldn't be the same idea, it shouldn't mirror what you've just heard. They might have a similar tone or a similar feel. And touch to that producer.
The producers are there to enable the comedy. That's what I was always taught by the late great Jeffrey Perkins. The producer is there to enable the comedy. And the best producers will understand, will look at writing talent, and say, this person, I get them, they get me.
What can we cook up? And that's the best way into radio. And also, there are these open access programmes, which are very helpful. But if you're working at a slightly different level to that, then find the producer that really, really gets you.
That's the best thing you can do. Great. Well, I think that's really kind of you. Thank you for spending this time with us.
Thank you for letting me rant. No, no, this is very helpful. Thanks very much to you, Sean. Thank you, Dave.
Thank you to our producer, Katie. And we'll speak to you next time. Bye-bye.