Episode 49 - Tom Edge

Oh, welcome to episode 49 of Sick Combe Geeks. I'm Dave Cohen. And I'm James Carey. And we are here today.

Very pleased to say we are sitting in the front room of a comedy writer. We've got a big fan off who's written a brilliant Sick Combe series, which went on Channel 4 and then to Netflix. And was initially called Scrocal Recall and then became Lovesick. And it's great Joe.

And Series 3 is being written not as we speak because he's with us here now. He's stopped. Well, they're hoping that we're going to leave. Unless he's got some lackeys or what sort of writing it's there for him.

But here is Tom Edge. Hello. That is the in my own home. Yes, that's right.

It's the best of all worlds. Yes. Thank you very much for letting us intrude on your life, in your life. So yes, if you would like to just maybe start with, let's talk about Lovesick and about Scrocal Recall, as it was called originally.

And tell us what it's about first. Okay. Well, the idea came up in a slightly unusual fashion. I was doing a genetics project for Channel 4.

And I was sent off to do a week's residency at the Sanger Center, which is just outside Cambridge funded by the Wellcome Trust. Where they decoded a third of the human genome. So I was sent with my kind of tatative science GCSE in my back pocket to try and upscale somewhat. A lot of listening and nodding and writing.

A lot of that. It's a great place where the world has been changed by this place and you were there thinking, how can I get a sitcom out of it? Quite. I was meeting one of their researchers and his hobby was tracing human migration across hundreds of thousands of years by looking at small mutations in DNA.

It would be able to say that a tribe of Native Americans living in Colorado had their ancestral roots in modern-day Pakistan. Yeah. That's become quite a thing now, hasn't it? I've read a bit about that subsequently.

Yeah, I think it's fairly challenging when you tell a tribe whose birth myth is that they were born from the Grand Canyon, but actually they're from India and you can prove it. It's not going to play well. No, it's not what everyone needs to hear on it, it's not going to be afternoon. Yeah.

But in any case, I want pictures. Or it's not free. Yeah. But yes, I thought that was a really fascinating idea.

And then I thought what is the kind of microcosm version of that? Of sort of tracing a life or history through the spread of a disease or something like that, and committee immediately appeals. It's the funniest of the SDIs. I think it's probably.

Yeah. But that's just out of my back pocket for a while because, well, it seemed like a... You were just carrying committee with that? Yeah.

Just a carrier. Yeah. Which is what I would tell everyone, surely, as soon as I met them. At that point, it didn't feel too much more than a device or a...

So it kind of sat as one of, like, hundreds of little fragments on the hard drive. And then a few years later, I was talking to the guys at Park Hall Films, who made sort of misfits and not-safe-for-work and various other shows that I've really enjoyed. And we were talking about how a lot of the romantic comedies that we really liked were less about. A couple of finds love and they're happily ever after.

Then there's kind of a rueful look back. Things like high fidelity. Annie Hall, which begins with Annie and I broke up. And around that time, there was some more playful, structurally playful things like 500 Days of Summer.

Again, someone trying to analyze from this kind of pattern of failure, what they might learn. And I think that really appealed to all of us. We're all big fans of stuff like Rehein and Sally and the Golden Age of romantic comedy as well. And those two pieces felt like they could really fit nicely together, that if causally he was prompted, have to look back and have to list his past lovers.

And this would then give us a prism through which we could view seven or eight years of his life. And so that organically felt like that fit together quite nicely. And to catch him at a moment of real crisis when he's trying to think, well, my best friend who I now realize I'm in love with is getting married to someone else. How did it come to this?

And the show then uses that as a kind of framing device. And that's a great device. It's a great device. Because a lot of the device heavy shows can wear out quite quickly, but it seems to keep on giving, doesn't it?

Yeah, I think when the show was first announced, a lot of people drew immediate comparisons to things like My Name as well. Which is that kind of... In reverse almost. Yeah, and it's that big sort of kind of heavy thing.

But I think the key difference for us was that was two things. One of the... Whereas My Name as well, you kind of knew that the car format you were going to be given each week, it was generated out of the list. Yeah.

Exactly. I think what we felt this show would allow us to do is to tell a single story in a non-linear fashion. And so you could arrive at events that you've seen before and see them in a new light, which felt creatively very satisfying. And it also felt like we could track the emotional development of this cast of characters and unpack that over time.

In a way that might have been harder to do if we were just saying, we begin today and we march off in the future. We really wanted to be able to look at those kind of bigger ideas of memory and loss. And I think it's a really common experience to be flawed by rejection or the end of a relationship. But if you felt the way you feel the morning after every day for the next 10 years, life would be unbearable.

And memory does this kind of very kind, humanitarian thing of gradually kind of taking the edges of those memories until seven years later, the mention of this ex-girlfriend who was had to you in tears on the floor is genuinely greeted with a kind of a shrug or a kind of slight puzzlement. And he wanted to be able to toggle between a guy who has all of those questions and is looking back and is no longer emotionally tethered necessarily to the people there, but then navigate to those moments and kind of understand what he's made of through both sharing them. And we are making sure all the shows are always going forward rather than continually looking back. Yeah, and that was why we always have that kind of present day frame that kind of frames the flashback.

Because if there was nothing but flashback, then all you're navigating is kind of layered in context, which I think I've got so far. Whereas if you have a present day story surrounding that, you can be shedding light on the present, but there is forward movement at the same time. And you do still have a course of those kind of classical dramatic questions of what happens next. It's hard that the pushing it forward thing is quite because occasionally when I talk to Richard, who's my writing partner, we occasionally have an idea of Frank Cofton, I have an idea and then Richard says, well it won't work, which is great.

It saves an awful lot of time. But quite often I have an idea and he just says that whole idea is looking backwards, there's no forward momentum to that. And you've got to have both, haven't you? You sort of want something to analyze in the past, but you also want something to send you into the future.

It's just my own experience of coming to the show. When it first came out, I saw sort of three or four of the episodes. I didn't see the whole series, but I liked what I saw. And at that point, I wasn't as kind of caught up in the flashback aspects of it.

It just felt like a perfectly self-contained episode of a sitcom. And I watched it again and there was another episode. And then when the second series came out on Netflix, and so I started watching, well let's start again now. I knew I'd seen some of it.

And it was just like watching a completely different sitcom to me because the back story side of it, the flashbacks were quite complex really. And actually, I mean, James and I often talk about with sitcom, no back story. So it's I'm still kind of trying to work out how to do it. How do you make something that is on the one hand feels like a nicely self-contained episode of a sitcom that anyone can come into that episode and say it, whilst at the same time, have this sort of ongoing sort of, I suppose probably the setting in the present helps with that.

What sort of logistical problems have you put together? Yeah, I think that stuff can be tricky. And we are really careful to try and do exactly as you described to make sure that you can come to an episode without having a cheat sheet next to you, to orient you in time as much as anything else. And we hope that the enjoyment of the show isn't contingent on readily being able to say, oh yeah, five years ago, that was before this and after that, which will be a very big ask.

But I think for those, especially those being on Netflix where, you know, experienced people are often blitzing through the full season in one or two evenings, then I think people are better able to kind of put those puzzle pieces together. And certainly when we moved from Channel 4 to Netflix, whereas Channel 4 had a little kind of previously on recap, which we felt was necessary to locate people. And to quietly say these are the pieces of the story that you need to be thinking about in order to... Particularly not only that, we're watching elementary where they sort of have a previously interesting, wow, previously that didn't say, oh, that's going to be all right.

Exactly. What is Netflix said actually can you lock those off? Because they're kind of redundant because people are watching this in the evening and don't require that kind of... That thing that took you in the year, they will knock off in one evening, and then watch these night and go to bed.

So yeah, so we're always very mindful about making sure that to every episode it stands alone in its core and that the story there has a sense of completion, but that it fits the wider narrative. And one of the challenges of the show in getting there is that we are, we're not a show like Friends, which says, you know, here are a bunch of people who you like, let's go skiing with them or maybe one of them gets a job. What we have always been quite careful to do is remain very faithful to the show's core themes and core occupations of love, friendship, relationships and kind of navigating, navigating all that stuff. So as we approach our 22nd episode, which will be the finale of season three, then it feels like that kind of appearance is, it becomes quite challenging because there are only so many permutations on those kind of stories before you risk kind of repeating yourself.

Right. Okay. Is that true? You think this is the final two reasons?

I don't think necessarily that it is, but I think after this season we will be through necessity looking to kind of refresh how we make the show. Because I mean, I think there's a kind of promise to the audience that we're saying that there's roughly a kind of seven-year frame. And what we don't want to do is have kind of characters becoming having an easy act and kind of learning one thing about themselves and the way they conduct relationships on me to shed it to the next and have to relearn. I think you can do that.

I think that's when people ask us a lot about story arcs and whether we're a fan of them or not. And I think in general I'm not because you want them to be self-contained but the same token, every series of friends, which is admittedly 22 rather than six, but that has sort of a gentle arc. But equally over the course of the whole run, Chandler in Series 8 is not Chandler from Series 1. That is not the same person.

It can't be. And I think sometimes if you're trying to be too much of a purest about sitcom, you just think, no it has to be, they never learn, they never learn, they never learn. Why do they kind of do that? And they kind of grow up and we see them grow up.

We see them get older. And so we don't want to see people in their late 30s acting like people in their mid-20s. It's pathetic. At the same time, sorry to interrupt.

I mean, Luke, who for me is the most interesting character in the show, who is, when you're first watching it, who's basically this sort of comedy lad basically. And he's always the one who's getting off with the women. He's always the one who's saying the inappropriate comment. He's the out there funny person.

And then with the situation that happened to the results, I think it's the last episode of Series 1, where a relationship that didn't happen, the one relationship that didn't happen, that should have done that's in deeply. And then in Series 2, he's sort of in, he's a therapist and can't quite let go of the lad. But he's become self aware. But it's nice because we have the flashback.

So we still get free hits of him. Yes. Exactly. Were you aware of that kind of thing?

Yeah, very, very aware. And it's, you know, again, it's a difficult balance because we want the show whose characters are a vault over time, not feel like we're regressing them. But at the same time, it is fun to go back to kind of pre-lapse area and so on. But I mean, we're also conscious that hopefully if people enjoyed the show, they could go back to the show and that as those characters are reframed by what you uncover about them, then subsequent re-watching the effect of that stuff.

So hopefully when you go back to say our pilot episode, where Luke is absolutely as you describe the guy who's basic advices, you know, don't feel anything, lock your feelings away, get back on the horse, enjoy the wedding. That's once you understand the context of that and where he's being historically and where he's headed, you kind of revise your view of him. You see that as kind of a set of armour, worn and the get kind of slightly thread-bear points. So yeah, we certainly had a kind of a vision from the off about where these characters start and where they finish.

And you know, the real challenge I think is for our actors and thankfully they're incredible. And we cast for dramatic abilities, as much as anything knowing, that we require a lot of them really, none of them were ever going to be playing one or two defining character tropes. We wanted them to have real flexibility. But yeah, we now put together essentially a timeline for them so that they can orient themselves within scenes that, okay, we're playing here in the context of this thing and that hasn't yet happened.

And I think without that they would find it difficult to come. Yes, and I think that's interesting about something that if you come up writing comedy through sketch comedy, where it's pretty much all about the joke in the room, you are slightly unprepared, as I, to some extent, was on Bluestone for two, where you're working with actors who've done a lot of stuff and they've done drama as well as comedy. They need to know in any particular scene what their character knows. And where they are on this sort of story, especially performing out of sequence, which I'm sure you do as well.

We shot eight. We started filming episode one, scene four, then episode five, scene six, and that's the first day and they kind of need to know and therefore you need to know. It's quite an... The thing I was going to ask was because clearly you have more than tickle on your CV.

I wonder why you wanted to tell this story as sitcom because it sounds like you've really embraced what sitcoms do rather than because this could easily be a drama, could be an hour long thing or it could have been a movie or something, it could have been a number of things. What is it about sitcom that made you want to write sitcoms because it's a task that's a rutal. It's brutal. But also why this story is a sick guy.

I don't know. Is this part of something growing up? You've loved certain sitcoms and thought I want to do that or? I think you're right about sitcom as well.

I've written more drama than half hours in the last few years. I've just finished adapting to J.K. Rowling's sort of corner and strike books and that's very much kind of bodies and mysteries and then moving on to do a kind of Caravaggio miniseries. So I don't think anyone said the word Caravaggio on this podcast.

Yeah, it's exactly. I mean, my idea is that the kind of comedies that I really enjoy have to do everything that good dramas do but they have to be funny as well and it's kind of like that ginger-orged quite dancing the photos there to do everything he does but backwards and high heels. I think that's very true of really great comedy. I think, I mean, certainly for this show, it felt like because we wanted the ability to kind of range back and forth in time.

It felt like it suited that kind of half-hour structure that we were after building seasons that would work as an emotional whole and a full hour would have felt, I think, quite difficult to sustain. The sheer length of the flashback sort of bookended in the middle, I think it would have been hard to kind of check the line of diving past enough to watch that moment of epiphany and to enjoy a singular scene before you jump back out. But actually, all of our episodes are often on a single day or in a single place and that kind of works well. I think it would be challenging to extend that to an hour.

I think that's something about the single day, the single place because for me, sitcom has its roots in theatre more than anything else and therefore if something all happens in one day or happens continuously or it happens in one location or something, it feels like a play which is great and that kind of pushes towards sitcom. I think some of it's something I wonder if lots of people try to drive sitcoms now, trying to write a movie or an hour-long drama but trying to tell the story in 28 minutes or 24 minutes, I think that's much harder because the idea itself needs to lend itself to that simplicity. I think so and you know we tried several different forms for the show as well and we tried versions, this was kind of before we finally delivered the kind of pilot script to Channel 4. We tried versions that were that jumped around in time and place that used voice over or that revisited the present more frequently during the run of it and in the end I think we probably do the same conclusions that you're doing now which is that a certain kind of simplicity of form in a show that is already quite complicated to piece together because you're essentially drawing a single emotional map but in fragments and requiring the viewer to do some work that are kind of a simple kind of top and tail that moves the present forward in small increments while telling a complete story in the past that you know that is in conversation with the present just kind of finding that kind of ruleset for the show was necessary.

There's a lot of questions to me but it's interesting that you're writing to the murder mystery as well as this and because comedy is very much people won't laugh or get the joke unless they're clear about what the rules are and what's actually happening so mystery is not really your friend or there you are revealing certain things you want to give the audience the impression that they know exactly what's going on and then you can pull the robe on them but with writing mysteries you're sort of happy with the idea that the audience don't actually know what's going on so you must have a fairly serious sort of gear shift to go from drop or are you finding there's much more overlap than you thought it's interesting to me that David Renwick was able to write one foot in the grave and Jonathan Creek which on one's think you think well of course it's all stage management but at the same time we think it's completely different yeah all Stephen Moffat as well you know he's going from those kind of intricate doctor who episodes but having you know come out of coupling which was you know which was often very clever and very funny and so yeah I mean I think they probably are you know they do require sort of gear shifts but I enjoy that I find that really rejuvenating I think if I worked in the in the same forms knowing the way I work I just get kind of lazy so I quite like the challenge of having to kind of adapt but I think also maybe the other influential thing is that really the the first things I did were film scripts and you know film is actually you know madingly difficult to get off the ground but like the first time that a company bought work of mine was big talk buying a sort of comedy spec that I write and I then developed them that with them for quite a while I think it's a little bit of a problem because it's a bit of a problem that drops me an email and tells me about seven years later on the latest one but I think the really useful thing there was that in film they are incredibly focused on a character's sort of transformation and unlike sort of sitcom and how to arguably you you know you run your sitcom into the ground if you have everyone radically and permanently changed by an hour and 30 in but in film they kind of really like to turn track the emotional journeys of characters and make sure that each thing everyone understands was emotionally at stake and even if you're writing quite kind of funny highly pitched set piece then it's still sort of always you know grounded in what what does it mean to this character and how do we feel about where they're at and I think the experience of developing that first screenplay really kind of grounded me into into kind of tracking characters emotionally and making sure that I just kept my eye on those dramatic fundamentals the same ones that you know everyone from the Greeks to mouth and talking constantly kind of clap on about and for you know for a reason those fundamentals of goal, stakes, urgency, why does someone want something? What does it mean to them and coming back to that in every scene in every moment and I think that is contiguous across sort of comedy and drama because you know even if the dialogue is kind of crackling and the jokes are great I think you know a scene begins to drag in a comedy if you don't really believe that a character has a set of intentions in the scene and all the motivation that it's supposedly governs it is as plenty as anything you can get away with it in certain kinds of show that has a beautiful disregard for those things. They frequently often feel like less than the sum total of the parts when they don't have that element that you're talking about where everybody knows what's at stake in every scene although when the good show is doing well like Father Ted that in one sense looks like a bunch of set pieces and a bunch of jokes but actually you fully go with Father Ted's desire to get off the island you know every scene really is about that and it's very easy to overlook even though it's often realized in a ludicrous way. I mean I'm quite interested in already sort of learnt about how you generally you write drama more than comedy and you come from you know that's a different discipline and also the idea of having mystery and back story which as we say we generally don't have another thing we often say is don't have a bunch of 20 something people sitting in a pep talking the whole time and there is you know quite a lot of that in your show we don't know what they do much about their work or anything they're mainly they're mainly meeting and so you're kind of breaking all those rules if they are rules are such and I'm just interested to know how how you sold that idea initially to Jannell for what what what yeah how did you get it to them.

Well I mean I think the kind of the hook that we have talked about the kind of navigating your your past and flashback generator by a sort of a need to try and your former lovers is helpful there and I actually you know when I think about that puts me in mind it shows like Happy Endings where again you know that show seems to offer a very kind of high high-pitched premise a group of friends you know and the marriage collapses on day one when the bride runs out how can they stay friends together so it had the feel of a kind of higher concept at least there's this kind of big heavy premise for the pilot but actually very quickly that showed revealed that what I really wanted to do was be a kind of goofy single camera kind of friends and tell a kind of variety of character stories and I think you know I was fine by that but with that and I really liked that show a lot as well but I wondered partly whether the the kind of high concept premise was designed so that you know everyone could justify putting another show on there there was a lot of kind of stuff I think I think ultimately yes our characters do sit around and talk but I think they sort of talk with urgency and they talk with urgency about the the things in their life pertaining to the shows big things that feel the other things that are keeping them up at night and so you know I no one ever said is this are you smuggling in a kind of flat share kind of the under the radar but you know because that's what we all want to do isn't it we all want to do the flat share as they come and just the flat share is inordinately popular it's just I mean I do well I keep shareism isn't it you know you could just say oh two blokes and sharing a flat thing no longer got anything in common absolutely so I think oh you know not that again but then you watch it and it's yeah it's just totally original I mean yeah I mean there's a lot of dramatic irony isn't there really you have a lot of you know it's a minding comparing you to Shakespeare isn't it? I think given the Shakespeare's initial working title for Roman yeah it was the boner in Verona from the writer of Spokely cool they're essentially where where was he? He marks him out as the wisdom to rethink his working title but that's all that there is between us actually I must ask you you know I watched a couple of episodes even though I was thinking well I'm not going to watch this because it's called Scrotal Rinkle it's on 10 o'clock on channel 4 it's just going to be something that I know that I will hate and I watched it oh I like this I've just watched Scrotal Rinkle I'm not going to watch that Scrotal Rinkle that's obviously channel 4 Frank Fest or some new description and then you know so I guess you know what possessed you day right yeah well there's the challenges of a working title that I think initially you know not this obviously but then you go from the back it's like the errant child who's been here was long enough and no longer trying to have him sent to Ballstor so that by the time yeah by the time we were you know finally on air I think we had perhaps lost sight of the fact of quite how kind of sweatily inappropriate of the show cycle is actually a brilliant title but for a slightly different show I'm not saying it's a brilliant title well I mean Netflix to that credit would have let us sail on under the Spokely banner had we asked but we actually said to them look you know I think that if there's an opportunity to change the title I think it would be you know we we had a feeling and a feedback from a lot of people that there was there were people who would like the show who were being you know profoundly put off by this kind of frontage you know not similar to your experience they and we asked and Netflix said okay look why don't we ask some questions because they're a day to driven company so they asked about 5,000 viewers all of whom heard you know rated the show highly and you know watched it all and a number of questions I think they found that fully 60% of people who'd given it 5 out of 5 instead of they loved it wouldn't mention it to friends because it would involve using the word squabble out loud and arguably this is something of a word of mouth problem if you're having if you can't quite bear to mention to anyone so you know it seemed it seemed like the kind of practical thing to do and I'm glad we did even though I think you know 5% of our audience you know it will always be so squabble for them yeah that's okay what some I mean I'm interested also as well today then the journey that took you from channel 4 to Netflix yeah I mean it's probably some aspects of that journey are still shrouded in darkness and that as a kind of writer on the sidelines you're kind of watching three binoculars going is that a ship does that bring news I mean it was complicated we we felt very well supported by Phil Clark and Narrows and Fiona and Channel 4 they're you know really talented commissioners with you know great taste and they made a lot of really great work in these years they were very supportive of the show and of it having a second season but I think our ratings were unspectacular they weren't terrible but they weren't they weren't high enough to make it you know a no brain for anyone and I think we you know just sat on that bubble of well we can't recommission everything and in the end you know the decision from on high so you know beyond the comedy department was that we wouldn't go go forward which was very difficult but I mean Netflix by then had bought season 1 for North America and a few other places and they had done well for them and they really liked it and they'd already come back while trying for making up their minds and said that they wanted to invest in the show and you know the budgets and so on and when Channel 4 eventually said that they weren't going to take it forward Netflix we're Netflix and and we'll take it on our own which has been great and they are yeah sincerely great to work with I think they're as a as an entity they're a really interesting point in their existence because they're doing really well so they don't have you know it's not like say for instance NBC who are you know struggling as a network and people asking searching questions of them and that's always going to create a more anxious environment to make decisions especially kind of old ones but Netflix is very much kind of on the up there they are building a really great reputation for empowering show creators they want strongly authored stuff and they have the wherewithal to make those decisions on their own so it's been a really happy home I was going to say our next question was how do you what's their involvement in the show? Well they I mean they are these sort of soul financiers and and we go out simultaneously I think in 133 territories I think we we dub for France and everyone else is subtitled we have a quite kind of complicated name in some territories like we're sort of a I think a word that I still can't you can pronounce or remember that has to do with the vestiges of disease in South Korea right so and in terms of you know creative input they they have executives who sit on the show and who came to our read and give us notes but they are very supportive and I think because we moved to Netflix in our second season and the second season of the show that they really liked they perhaps haven't come face it with the anxiety of making a big financial bet on the completely new and untested show when there are many more questions circulating about what is this and is this the right shape and fundamentally they say like well we like the show and we'd like you to make more and we're very happy to do that all right that's really good cool well we are time is nearly up and so maybe I've got to have one more question Dave yes I'm just finding just looking through my say to those yes is there anything quality is called Michael Parkinson's little a can you are you able to reveal to us at this stage is there anything that you can any exclusives that you can tell us about series three what can we what can we look forward to that you without giving away too much that's tricky well it's it'll be eight episodes and probably out in November where shooting at the moment actually the the cast up in Glasgow and everyone has come back and of course there's a next lecture that's cool that's that's all good for some reason I play a BBC online only that's not cool but Netflix is it doesn't make any sense of it so I think what I can say about the third season is that we we really do push their stories onward for all of the characters so so you know none of them is left in and space are sort of spinning the wheels by the time these eight episodes are up without giving anything away do we lose anyone at the end so yes there are no gun fights no ambulance islands okay but I said I'm not having IEDs which I had in my show obviously you can just blow people up it's great yes exactly yes you're done the earth and special effects have been pre-proper and you made some you didn't like the jokes they were blaring you up yeah sorry that's probably rather cryptic but um or simply evasive but um but it's not long to wait otherwise okay well we shall look forward to it thank you very much Tom it's been a pleasure and Tom is going to come back mysteriously on the future podcast maybe in two weeks or four weeks we might just sit here for weeks and talk about a few other bits on the future podcast but until then what's people need to do they need to look on our Facebook page oh yes yes yes and get involved in the dialogue there we sort of try to make it a bit more interactive now because basically if we don't Facebook call effectively shove it all the way down the algorithm so it won't exist yes exactly yes yes and we certainly must not appear to be fake news um to do that follow us on Twitter oh Tom you want to know not well congratulations thank you and so yes and people can email us at sitcomgeatsatgmail.com so do that to get in touch and we will be back so bye brilliant thank you