Hello and welcome to Sitcon Geeks, I'm James Caring. I'm Dave Cohen and on today's podcast we'll be looking at the first 10 pages, we'll be recommending some books to read and we'll be thinking about sketches. So that's on the order of the day. Why don't we start by talking about books based on an email we had sent?
We got an email from Jerry Plassen, and November 2016, so quite recently I asked others. Is that what it's about? It's the 13th 2016, the mere four months. So it's about a book which I had seen years ago.
Now that's funny. I've not seen it in this country. I'm ever seen it in New York. It's out of print I think.
Yeah and it has interviewed some of the biggest names in British Sitcon. I mean there's a massive massive list. Dennis Nordenspag, Milligan, Johnny Speicke, Colton Simpson, Keith Wartow, Spary Cry, etc. Up to Graham Linhannath and Matthew Drichakertis, Arabana Weir, Caroline Ahern.
And it's out of print as James says, and it is a great book. And if you can find it, it's called Now That's Funny, Writers on Writing Comedy by David Brabry and Joan McGrath, it was published by Matthew in 1998. So Jerry has written also, he's asking for other just thoughts. Actually he isn't asking us, but I thought we should mention anyway, other books that we would recommend that you read about comedy, comedy writing.
James, do you want to kick off with one or two? There were some books I found very helpful that I read early on. One was Conversations with my Agent by Rob Long, and he then wrote a follow up to that called Set Up Joke, Set Up Joke. So Rob Long was his first job was a staff writer on Cheers, and by the end he'd worked his way up to being the showrunner half Cheers.
So he knows a thing or two about sitcoms, and he's done lots of other shows since. And so what's good about his books is it makes you feel like you're a writer, he's letting you in on his world. And so when I was starting out and sort of wasn't a writer, I began to feel like one through reading his stuff. Which I had that feeling as well many years ago when I was thinking about being a writer, and there weren't really that many books, but the one book that everybody knew was by William Goldman that's called Adventures in the Screen Trade.
And I reckon that still holds up as a good starting point to read, what it's like to be a writer. Yeah, and also how a writer interacts with producers and actors, and the fact that, you know, actors want to be producers, writers want to be directors and directors want to be gold or something. So, but that's very much within movies, but it is a really helpful book. And he also wrote a follow-up to that, and I've forgotten the name of the name of the book, which lie to the screen trade, which lie to the tell.
I think was the follow-up, which is excellent. So those are kind of good industry overviews. Obviously they're American, but that makes you, that just gives you a clue as to what the political factors within writing a show. Rob Long incidentally also does a podcast called Martini Shot on KCRW, and you can get hold of that via iTunes, and it's four minutes long, and it's every week, and it's just him in Hollywood, he's a writer, and he's just sort of giving you one thought on one thing.
It's a very easy and very pleasant listen, so I recommend that. Yeah, actually the American writer Jane Espenson, there's an occasional blog she used to do, a very regular blog about five, ten years ago, and it's still all up on the internet, if you put her name in, it's very good writer Buffy, the brand-class, about the star Galactica, and she's written lots of other things, that was her in her, in her pomp five, ten years ago, brilliant comedy writer, lots of great insight. Going slightly left field, I would recommend everybody really, I recommend should read, 12th Night by William Shakespeare, from coming comedy writer, who I'm sure we'll be hearing more of in the years to come. You don't want to show set on islands, or that's the 10th, isn't it?
12th Night is set in... Well there is an island. The title's very confusing with 12th Night, is this the 11th other night, I don't think that's going to work. No, it's like the 12th in the series.
That's right, yeah, the first one was called Night, yes, the second one was the second one. Yeah, the third one. But it's a great play because it's great, there are several great characters in 12th Night, and sort of comedy types that you just keep seeing in comedy shows, and there is the comedy monster, Malvodio, interestingly being played by Tans and Greg in the West End, which is a show I would really like to see, and there's normally play by a man, so that'd be interesting to see what she does with that. There's a double act, the ones fat and ones thin, so Toby Belch and Andrew A.
Gucci, and you can tell by the names I guess, which is which, which is Laurel, which is Hardy, and so that's a very interesting couple. And there's Festa, who is the jester, and is probably one of the least funny characters in it, but he's kind of, he's a bit smart, he's a bit of a smartass really, he kind of knows what's going on, he's also a little bit marvin the paranoid android I'd say really, his knowledge makes him a bit sad. So great, great comedy characters, and great to remember that everything that we write, we think we're being incredibly original, but usually Shakespeare got there first. Well, and actually your other advice of books to read is often poetic, by Erisa, so you can do a lot worse, it's free, which is many aspiring writers' favourite price points, it's on the internet, and it's only about 80 pages long.
In fact, you don't even need to read the whole eight pages, because part one is comedy and part two is tragedy, you don't even need to read the tragedy a bit, so it's less than 40 pages. It's basically the book that tells us for the first time that every story has a beginning, a middle and an end, but it says that in an interesting way and it tells us how characters develop and grow. And it tells you that for a lot cheaper than Robert McKee will do, in his astonishingly expensive paperback. And in a lot less time as well.
I have read Robert McKee's story and it's very useful, so that's worth it. Although the paperback is that 15 quid or something? Well, it's probably about 15 pounds in cost and weights, I would say as well. But you can go to his seminars and it's 500 quid, so the book's pretty cheap when it comes down to it.
So there are lots of other books, I mean, there is also, obviously, the books that we mention a lot, which are our own books, Dave's How to Be Averagely Successful in Comedy and My Book Called Writing That's It Com. So there are books around, there are some probably more American books and British books. But I'll send them to you more, sorry, I'll just quickly mention by the Logan Laurie's book about how to become a stand-up, he's a very good teacher of stand-up. And that's a useful book, whether or not you want to be stand-up, it's a good book for learning how to get your jokes out there.
And Sally Holoway's Serious Guide to Joke Rising, which is actually a book specifically about writing jokes, it's got some very good tips in that too. Yeah. I think going back to comedians, again, I get most of my stuff now through podcasts, actually, and Stuart Goldsmith's Comedians' Mediums' Medium is brilliant. And that gives you a real insight into not just stage performance, but where comedy comes from and how people make comedy work for them and their persona.
So there's that, and then also there's obviously Script Notes, which is a, with John August and Craig Mays, and if you don't listen to that already, then you want to get hold of that and listen to all 200 and says we have a little bit of that at the moment. Which brings us all neatly too. They have a free page challenge, which is their way of getting people to send in scripts and they talk about them. But we have knicks and that and called it the first 10 pages.
We paid homage to it. We paid homage to it to a format that is impossible to own and ask people to send in the distant past our scripts. So it scripts for us to read for the first 10 pages, which is usually the critical bit of any new sitcom scripts. And we've got one of those to talk about.
No, we'll go straight onto that. It's called 10 Pink. It's by Stephen Quick. Yes, I can tell you what to do.
Yes, I can tell you what it is. If you want to find it, it is up on, if you go to the Facebook page, look for the Facebook, Facebook, there'll be a link to take you to a page where all of the scripts that we talk about are put up. So, something is about a guy called Josh who wants to be a sports journalist, but his life is not turning out that way. He's clearly trained for this job but can't get a job.
The first thing he does is meet a girl who he obviously likes very much called Laura, who was with a man who was obviously someone who he doesn't like and thinks isn't good enough for this lovely Laura. And they talk for a few pages and they're off to court for some reason because Ollie has clearly done something that's not terribly well explained, but maybe we're not meant to know. I think she's an ex-girlfriend and she's with this. Yes, and then, scene two, he goes to the job centre.
So, he gives you a question that he's writing for the Guardian but it's not, it's the Warrington Guardian and actually he's not even writing for the Warrington Guardian because he's going into the going into the job centre and here there is a long scene with Julie who was in the job centre who is clearly not really ideally suited to work in the job centre because she offers him, you know, offers him false hope on a variety of things and getting into full stuff in them. So, those are the two scenes at the start of this first ten pages. Yes, and it's, I enjoyed it, it is a bit slow paced and my main note for this show is it needs a rocket up its backside I think, just to, it needs needs to be bigger and bolder I think and that way it'll become a lot funnier, I mean it is funny, it's gentle and funny. It's good about it in that sense, it's clear what the show is.
So, I intentioned, I did not read the synopsis on the first page before I read the script and it was clear from the script who the show is about and what they're trying to do and it was very comprehensible and readable and easy to understand. So, that's a plus but sometimes but you can normally do that a lot faster than you think you can hence I agree with the rocket to note. Yeah and in this, I've been seeing, as James mentioned, he's about to go into the job centre and the successful ex-girlfriend walks by, seeing very much reminded me of scenes in the early episodes of Peep Show when Jeff and the Arsenal Jeff character who seems to get on very well with the character that Mark is after, is in the Olivia Colman Sophie, Sophie, Sophie, that's right, I just try to remember her name and she usually ends up with Jeff but obviously has a soft spot for Mark, Jeff is unpleasant and seems to win a lot. So, it felt a little bit too familiar to me to that, I needed something a little bit more than that and what I felt was though, and he goes into the job centre and there hasn't really been a sort of plot yet or a plot twist and I'm feeling about Josh, the main character, he's just a little bit too reactive, he's not proactive enough or he needs to be the least proactive person in the world, that's what I mean about sticking a rocket up it, just take your character and invariably when we're starting out we're writing characters and we've been told to write what we know, we write about ourselves, not that I know that Stephen Quicke is a 27 person who wants to be a journalist but I certainly, when I was a journalist before I did comedy I was writing sitcoms about somebody who's a journalist who wants to be a writer, so I think there is, when you are doing something, remember it doesn't have to be true, it just has to be have the sort of believability about it, I thought that's what I liked with the character of the woman in the job centre, she was a little bit quirky, quite unusual but she was believable, she was like someone who obviously is not, you know, is bored in the job that she's doing and would rather be doing something else, and she does, her speeches are very long though, they are very long, this should be, this could all be fitted into like four or five pages I think, rather than the ten years.
But also in that scene Josh is reactive, because he's saying I worked at all for three years and then you know they're trying to fill in this form which doesn't really seem to have that many consequences at the moment then, so so yeah so that, what I like about the show is that it does identify a very common thing now is that people have been given graduate training to do stuff for which there are not enough jobs and therefore I think Josh needs to be either angrier about that and more proactive or more bitter about it or, I wonder also if you were able to cut these ten pages down to five which I think you could do fairly easily, it would be nice to see him do the thing that he wants to do, he feels like he should be on the touchline of a Ryman's League football match and treating it like it's a premiership match and trying to really investigate the characters and tell the story or something, he should be, I think even he would know that if you want this sort of job that sports journalist you sort of have to go out and do it and make it happen or he should be in a pub and others are like just the darts match is going on by him and he turns it into something more than just two blokes in the lunch hour playing darts badly. So at the moment he feels like a bit of a drifter as in someone who's been slightly shortchanged by life, he has the thing he wants to do but he can't see a way of actually doing it, so maybe it says more about me than anyone else that I find this character slightly frustrating but my main reason is there frustrating to me as a sitcom reader because he's not proactive enough, he needs to do something even if that something is obviously the wrong thing, it certainly should be the wrong thing, he should try and flag his way into the local premiership press place and we want to see that, we want to see rather than it just being a show, because at the moment it kind of feels like peep show or phone shop or something and if he's got that thing that he wants to do we should sort of maybe get more retested that, that's a personal opinion about that, I mean that's a very valid point. Okay, well thanks very much for that Stephen. Thank you Stephen, I do think it's worth pursuing but I think you just need to stick a rocket in it and I think you make it bigger.
Which takes us on to our other main eyes with businesses looking at sketches and this is something that Dave has been thinking about recently, he's got a couple of sketches in particular mind, I think about, well firstly why is it worth thinking about sketches given that this is about sitcoms, this is a podcast about sitcoms. Well we've talked before about how a sketch is often like a two-minute scene from a sitcom and what you want to happen in your scene in your sitcom is kind of the same pretty similar to what you want to happen in the sketch, you want to, you're obviously, you've got a narrative running through so your scene starts bearing in mind all the narrative that's already happened but your scene has to start in a kind of normal place in your act one as the co-etics would say and then something big has to happen, a big, your big sort of what-if moment that switches the action and then the consequence of that action is then what happens in the scene, that sort of drives the characters are driving the narrative of that scene. So to use the example of our background noise for example which is a very windy day here in Dave's office and the wind is outside and not inside I'm pleased to say but for example your character on a sitcom has decided that they have to go and hang out the washing, the complication is, okay, what goes wrong, what's the twist, it's now suddenly a very windy day and it's going to be very difficult to hang it on the line and then what happens, it goes into next door's garden and they have to go and get it back, what is it and then the next scene is what's the next, why is the being, breaking an entry on the line? Why does the name not want to give that stuff back today?
What is it, you know, whatever. So, but each of these little scenes are sketches that where someone's trying to leave something or there's an idea and it's been 40 didn't it, we see it play out. Yeah and that's one of the reasons why but also I did think and I, something that I've sort of been scared of doing until recently which is to actually sort of analyze specific scenes or specific jokes because I'd always believed the joke that analyzing comedies like dissecting a frog, nobody laughs and the frog dies which was a famous quotation and that actually I started to think that someone else mentioned this on Twitter as well that actually if something is a really strong idea and it works really well, it's worth analyzing, it's worth seeing, why is this so strong, what is it about this thing that has made it work so well and what can we take from that? So I just basically fairly randomly picked out a couple of ideas of things that I knew that I liked sketches and just thought that I'd like to just look at them in a bit of an detail.
So you can say it might be worth finding them on YouTube and watching them if you've not seen them beforehand, which one do you want to start with? Well I'll start with a sketch which actually put Mitchell and Webb Vectron, a sketch will come up which you may or may not know, it's a great sketch for quite a long sketch actually, four minutes long which is which, well in two rows of days that would be like half a sketch, the four candles sketch is about seven minutes long, but nowadays you know most sketches are kind of two minutes, two to three minutes, a maximum, but this is four minutes long, it's like a big sort of sci-fi show but it's not these various characters who it sets up a world, so it's okay that it's a bit long this one because it sets up a whole world, this is kind of intergalactic thing, we're either on a spaceship or we're on a weird planet and a little bit of Star Trek in there as well and these characters and Mitchell and Webb are very much the sort of the Vectron leader and the various characters come in and say what news of our galactic endeavor are our endeavor proceeds as if Vectron himself were helping, all plays Vectron and they all play Vectron, they all punch themselves on the chest and raise Vectron and then in the name of Vectron I ask for further mandates of pursue whatever they yes in Vectron's name you go ahead you go away, not to the east of the town Vectron, yeah for Vectron for Vectron and they all let's say you know Punt each other and then all smile and then meanwhile the character of Robert Webb is playing he's slightly uneasy and then we get them kind of about 50 seconds into the sketch, 53 seconds in and there's just Mitchell and Webb left then and Robert Webb says so who is Vectron which is a great, I'm nervous like I'm not aware of this, I was ill, I was off work the other day and I came back, I was off on Thursday, I came back on Friday and suddenly everybody's talking about Vectron about three weeks ago, and they've reached out, Vectron, Vectron has always been there, he's a turtle, he's everything he's been with us always forever and gradually those sort of doubt comes in, there's a sort of extra little throwaway thing here, these sort of galactic characters, they're all called things like Pete and Steve and Steve, who came up with Vectron, I'm not sure, Jeff, I think there was some scrolls yes, I might have said plectrum or something, and they all kind of think actually yeah we must say yeah I don't know how it came about okay well let's stop, we think plectrum sounds like the most reasonable and therefore that's a total, so we'll stop talking about Vectron then, so we're in this the consequence of the Robert McKee would call the inciting incident which was who is Vectron, suddenly all confidence in where this came from is shaken and so the next minute and a half or so lots of very funny jokes have actually nobody knows where Vectron came from, it's not a real thing actually at all and they all stop saying Vectron and there's this silence of about 15, 20 seconds which is incredibly bold for a comedy show to have that amount of silence, they're all standing there nobody's saying anything and eventually David Mitchell, who says well life seems a bit empty now yeah it's a great idea, even the character who was responsible for there being no Vectron starts to feel a bit guilty about it, I miss Vectron actually, yeah actually let's try and get Vectron back into our lives a little bit, yeah for Vectron, yeah and they gradually gee each other all back into it so this is the point at which the twist to the sketches are actually having realised who doesn't exist, they now feel they have to create him and I don't know we can say this would be a very deep analysis and we could say this is actually how, you know some people might say well this is how religions start or how some political movement start, it's like so you need to believe in something, we need to believe in something that we know doesn't necessarily exist and so hey yes they went well for Vectron, the Vectron and the order is restored and we're back at the beginning and that's a nice little twist and we get out there, there's a great little punch line at the end there that's um they need, we need this thing, whether or not we think we need it, so I like that, I think it's a kind of, in terms of how to write a sketch, it's kind of almost as like a perfect of the form it's a really good one, I think the reason it's surprising how it's a very simple observation and yet the sketch lasts four minutes and it's funny the whole time and the part of that is as you said it's at 50 seconds to set the sketch up, except the setup also feels funny, because they're not trying to complicate it, all they're trying to do is establish that first 50 seconds is, they're all saying Vectron a lot and it's not entirely clear, is Vectron a god or how is this god embodied or, but they're sort of sort of overdoing it in a really nicely judged way, you wouldn't know when you're first watching it that that's necessarily going to be the who is Vectron, it feels familiar, it feels like this is a world that we sort of know but it's a little bit over the top and then about sort of 45 seconds in, there's a kind of, we notice that Rob Webb's character hasn't really said and so there's a moment where he just sort of and then he doesn't quite join in with the chest and then you almost know what he's about to say before he said it because he's sort of basically questioned that and then the whole thing starts to unravel from there but also what's brilliant is he's not just saying I think Vectron's on the rubbish, I think we're overdoing it, that very specific I was away because I was ill and before that no one mentioned Mr. Meeting and now you're and it's like oh right and they've been going about it so much that they don't really remember the time and it wasn't but it just really unravels at perfect pace so it's just it's just it's a there are so many other jokes they probably could do but don't do they just stick with that one simple idea that's the thing that we always, I was hammered with sketchy to each one idea expressed simply and although it then develops that they know they sort of realise that this Vectron character is slightly built on sand and so they abandon it but then they feel sad that they've abandoned it and then they sort of decide to go on kidding themselves so actually it kind of there are more ideas there developing that you would necessarily need in one sketch. That's a great thing, although it's four minutes long as soon as you get to the point where they get Vectron back again they are really few seconds and they're out of the sketch so great.
It's a lovely sketch. Do you want to quickly look at one other sketch? Yeah we're looking at the sketch, the other sketch that I wanted to look at was the very first and only game the village sketch from Little Britain which has actually has a sort of pre-sketch as a lot of them often do the Tombaker voiceover. It's this quicky opening and a very silly knob gag, never underestimate the power of a silly knob gag.
I think they're very useful and that's a great big laugh sets up the sketch and the sketch opens and they're in a pub and Daffy'd as I found out, Daffy Thomas is his name, in fact it turns out it's Mac Lucas sitting out in the pub in the over the top ridiculous gay looking shirt, big laugh, nice big visual laugh and we haven't even started the sketch yet. Golly's just saying oh I feel really upset and the bar mate says oh why you're upset? Well I'm upset because I'm the only gay in the village and no laugh at this point by the way because it's not a thing yet, this is the first version of it. That's the thing that you never know what's going to become a catchphrase, what's going to take off and obviously they use the phrase a few times in the sketch but the way that became such a massive catchphrase is not necessarily obvious at this point.
So the bar mate says oh there's good news actually, we've got someone taking the logic from Cardiff and he's gay and this is the first point, this is possibly the first sort of inciting incident moment, it's like you'd think that you expect him to be really pleased, oh there's another gay and you suddenly see him kind of bristle on the idea that there's another gay person. Yeah so there's our first twist. And yeah that moment of oh this is not the sort of character I thought it was. Yeah exactly, exactly, so that's immediately that takes it to another place and so he's thinking oh actually we get at this point pretty much he wants to be the only gay in the village, he doesn't want anyone else to be like, to be individual like he thinks he is.
And so pretty quickly after that this character who's just moved into the village comes into the pub and it's as you know expect David Williams in full David Williams mincing the mode you know as he does. In a slightly questionable Welsh accent? Yes yes, that doesn't matter. No we kind of accept that.
And so he comes sort of mincing to the bar in his version of comedy gay man and immediately that food is takes dislike to him says you're not really gay and I bet you don't know who the lead who plays Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz and everyone knows he's a dude he garland you know who's a gay person you know are you being so so it's like when we're getting a sense that even though he's saying he's gay he's actually seems to be less gay than anyone else really and so he really annoys David Williams character and David Williams leaves and the Baum and Baum and Lady berate him for not taking up this chance of you could have had a bit of cock there. She says again very big laugh at this blunt line. So the twist and I don't think it's quite a sort of perfect sketch in the way that the ending is quite a little bit of a it's um I think that often happens I said before with people when they're writing sketches that the twist at the end of Act II often tends to be the funniest the funniest joke of Act II rather than something that really does actually take the sketch to another place and he sort of he gets angry with her being crossed with him and says oh you're just being homophobic which is a sort of twist it's a little weak it'll do and he's such a brilliant performer him storming out it's all fine but it's tiny shorts yes it's a great so but it's a great sketch because it's what I really like about the sketch is it's very character driven and they're great all the characters there's a lot of thought has gone to the characters the Baum aid is well thought through character and the David Williams character is he's not there for very long but he's there long enough to to establish the kind of person that he is and the character that Matt Lucas is playing this sort of and again it's not about the fact that he's gay it's about something else isn't it it's about attention seeking yeah yes he's what and you know be careful what you wish for I suppose as well is another because it's not actually the sketch is not a new idea in the sense that there was the corky and the juice mix on and the only gay esk and my traffic but actually cosmetically the sketch looks the same but as the sketch on rabbles you discover that he's appropriated this so that he can get pity for being the only gay in the village and when somebody who has genuinely accepted that lifestyle shows interest he sort of you know it's so is it and all and that my point is that all happens in about two and a half minutes and that is to go from literally nothing to through those things and then at the end shows you what is possible in two and a half minutes so when we're having a go at our first ten pages saying not very much happens here could it be more could it happen faster you look at a sketch and see how fast that moves and how fast is possible with real character it's not just cartoony ones that you can actually establish a lot move a long way and do jokes all along the way sketch writing is a brilliant discipline to do in it and you can really tell people who started that because their sitcoms just move so much faster yeah no that's a good point and those sketches are probably about three or four pages long and so we're asking for when we ask for ten pages we're asking for a vector on and only gay in the village and it's two pages to spare so yeah absolutely we're just asking for the moon honestly well if you want to write sitcoms that's what you have to do yeah and because you're competing with matt lukeus and david waleums and david mitchell and logweb and all of a day and yeah absolutely and andy riley and kevin sessle and everybody so having thoroughly depressed you well there it is a reality that is the reality we don't offer people a sort of roast interview of what the industry is like when it is but if you get it right it is just it is divine it's one of the outlets surpasses absolutely everything yeah great well we're gonna wrap this up thanks very much for listening if you have a question for david i do get in touch by email sitcomgeeksatgmail.com or on twitter at coindave or at ciconguik and like us on facebook and leave a comment also you could maybe leave us a review on itunes and that would be a nice thing for you to do especially if it's a very nice review it's a nice view to pour review then leave it somewhere where no one's going to find it maybe why don't you suggest to a friend that they listen to this podcast or you maybe send a link to someone to say hey i thought you might enjoy this that's our best attempt at trying to expand the list in the face of the show we really haven't thought that through but anyway thanks for listening and speak to you next time goodbye goodbye