Episode 97 - The Complete Comedy Writer

Hi welcome to sitcom geeks I'm Dave Cohen and I'm James Kerry. It's episode 97 isn't it? It is 97. That's right recorded only a day before we actually put it out.

So we quickly mentioned episode 100 while here at the top of the show I think we should do which is being recorded next week Wednesday the 5th of December at the Museum of Comedy I think there's still a few tickets left. We are recording episode 100 there. Yes. There's an audience.

They'd be going whoo now Yeah, absolutely and possibly episode 101 depending on how long we record for but we may make that only available to patreon subscribers So we can't say but it would be great if you would come along and join us and Marcus Brickstock and Sarah Morgan Absolutely. So Marcus and I go back a long way. He was in my first sitcom on on Radio 4 in Think the Unthinkable and actually I got to know Marcus when he was doing the Edinburgh Fringe and I was in the Edinburgh Fringe back in about 1996 or 7 Right. And yeah when they were giving out flyers for their show which was the Bristol University Review known as the Club Seals with Danny Robinson Dantetsall among others and and yes so I know Marcus and I was brilliant he said we're going to drop by and Sarah Morgan that he's teamed up with to write The Wilson Save the World Who is?

Which is a very funny sitcom. Yes indeed yes indeed yes and I had an episode not that long ago and I very much enjoyed it. So do come and join us because also there's not just a show that we're going to do and just being there will be great it's just we'll be hanging around in the bar afterwards and you will be with many other like-minded people and there'll be prizes as well prizes I think so yes we just have some prizes we're hoping well we are having the Aaron and Mark from British Comedy Guide will be there as well Excellent they must have tons of DVDs they do they're knee-deep in DVDs and a series two of Aloello Yes I don't think Aaron will give them away. No you'll get those out of his cold dead hand So that's on the 5th of December which one of people when it is is on the 5th of December at the Museum of Comedy in London I know it's in London.

I'm sorry. I don't live in London either. It's two and a half hours away from my house So we should also tell you that it's at 6 p.m. Yes, so we get hoofed out of the actual theatre before the evening show but we'll be able to be in the bar until until later so please do come join us.

Tickets are available after you go to the Museum of Comedy website you'll find that so that's how you get hold of the tickets. Brilliant great well we will hopefully see you there now the other big news apart from episode 100 coming is Dave's book. Oh the front page? It's about to drop a while ago it was called Funny Up which is actually a good title but maybe didn't describe what you were doing in the book.

What is actually called and what is it? It is now called the Complete Comedy Writer. Sounds like a euphemism doesn't it? Oh that guy he's a complete comedy writer.

Yeah yes it does but it also it also kind of explains a little better what it is than Funny Up which is sort of interesting but doesn't quite tell you exactly what it does and also it's sort of got in the way of the subtitle which is make your stand up sketches it comes screenplays and stories 62% Funny Up. You could have put in brackets in real terms. There was a phase when politicians kept on saying it'll go up in real terms. I should put I should also have a little disclaimer as comedy percentages may go up and go down as well.

Your home is at risk if you do not keep writing. So that's yes and so. So what's the thing behind this book? You've already written one book called How to be Averagely Successful at Comedy which was kind of all the everything lots of anecdotal stories from Edinburgh and my stand up days that I tried to kind of put together in just in one kind of memory book for and that was about five years ago since then and really I suppose partly through doing this show and also just writing blogs it felt like there seemed to be there isn't a book there are books like you're excellent writing that's it comes in the book.

There's books about how to come up with jokes and Sally Holloway's good book. Lots and lots of books about how to be a stand up. But nothing actually that covers about being a comedy writer and I suppose the reason for the word complete in is that whatever you're writing I mean that's kind of the main point of this is whether you want to write gags or sitcom or screenplays or whatever. There are a few kind of basics for that apply across the board really and so I've tried to kind of look at as many areas as possible.

And also it's also called a complete writer presumably because we're now aware that you don't get necessarily to choose what kind of writing you do because although we sort of say you know people say things like your style chooses you or something like that. In actual fact I'm going to use the word writer Prenir again but if you're going to have a sustained career as a writer or even as a part-time writer you kind of have to say yes to as much as you can and have a go and just to say oh no no I'm just a sitcom writer I don't write anything else or no I'm just a sketch writer. It's like no you don't that's not going to work. So you do have to.

And it's not just now I mean obviously there are changes now which we can talk about in a bit and we've talked about already on the sitcom geeks but over the years and one of the points that I make about if you want to write screenplays for instance and most of the people that I know who've written screenplays and this is over like 30 years they all started out writing topical online jokes on Radio 4 and there's no escaping the fact that if whatever you want to write you really and if you want to be making a living so that you can be in a position to say oh right well I'm getting paid two days a week for this. That allows me to spend one day developing my screenplay as opposed to I've still got my job and I'm going to spend my weekends writing the screenplay and avoiding my family and all those kind of things. You kind of if you can learn those skills and there are one of the biggest areas of the amount now through the Internet of course is jokes people want jokes. They're not paying huge amounts of money for them but then again he doesn't take as long to write a joke as it does to write a sitcom.

So you can start to see you can start to learn a bit of money and learn how to write jokes in the process and get to know other people get to know producers and get your way into the industry that way. But as far as the pernurbit goes as you say it's kind of not enough just to be a writer you have to be out there you have to be a little bit of a sales person for yourself which of course being a writer is the thing that fills you with more horror than anything else. I mean I often joke that I will do anything to avoid having to phone someone because I want to spend all my time on the phone I'd be a producer. You know producers just pick up the phone to solve problems whereas I will carefully craft an email so that this person might bother me again.

You know what I mean? My instinct is to not, even though I'm not particularly introverted as a person I hate the telephone I hate using it. You have to get over all these things and sometimes you're going to have to phone someone, have to go to meetings, have to work out how to present your ideas and all that kind of stuff because although in a way there's never been a better time to be a writer in terms of the amount of script or comedy that's out there and the amount of comedy that's insatiable demand for it. There's never been more competition for those writing jobs and for that work as well so in a way it feels like it is the best of times and the worst of times isn't it?

Yeah and there are although there seems to be a lot of script or comedy out there I mean that the slots are being decreased as we speak even on radio for instance. I think they're not going to have the 11 in the morning or 11.30 in the morning slots. They're losing that. That's the main sitcom slot.

It's a big big slot that they're losing and so I think whether they're losing two days a week of it or something but they're certainly and that's that these are issues that more and more you either have to say okay well that's it I'm not going to do it or okay I'm going to have to look somewhere else and I'm going to have to be proactive which is another word that features a lot in the book. And there you go you've decided to go write a book you've actually proactively done it before we started talking when we were recording you were saying those little extra things that you've had to get done in order to get the book up onto Amazon in the right format and all that kind of stuff. Is you need to know people who can maybe do stuff that you can't do but also you need to do as much as possible yourself and also in doing that you learn I mean I've been producing theatre shows now and tours and that kind of stuff and you sort of have to have to realize oh I need to think about this or that or I've met these people and that's been interesting and I enjoy that part of the job much more than I thought I did. And I don't enjoy the other part that I assumed I would really like.

It's a little bit reminded me of the days back in the 1980s when I used to take my Bond shows to Edinburgh you are kind of in control of it yourself and I mean there's a lot of things moving really fast in self publishing so you know every day on the internet someone's written a new article which is like a new way of looking at how to write books you know the publishing of books is changing completely in the same way that the making of TV is changing you know the internet is really just kind of tearing up all the old models but the old models are still there. Just about just about people still like buying books and yeah in a way I wonder how many books a bought by people who just love having books and the number of books that brought for people as presents you wouldn't buy somebody an e-book is a present would you but once they get over that once we get over that I think what is done isn't it. Possibly I think well that's interesting with the books isn't so much that I think people still like to hold a book in their hands. And that's kind of kept the book world alive but it's just the kind of explosion of titles that are available and if you read about getting your book published say from like five years ago and it's all about well you need to get a literary agent and you need to do this.

And you need to get that and then even if you've got all that then you're talking about months and weeks. Yeah I mean I wrote a novel that they couldn't get published. I wrote a novel that was a bit of a follow on from Hert 33 in the sense of it was about Bletchley Park in World War II and D-Day and Code Word and stuff. The crossword.

Yes that's why crosswords ends the crossword ends the violence and yeah they couldn't get it published and I had a sitcom on radio on this exact subject and a literary agent who were probably as good if not better for books than they are for screen writing and so they couldn't get it published and I was like oh okay that's 80,000 words. I'm not going to get back. Yeah but you published it. Yeah you could probably publish it now.

You could probably I'm going to now be as well as being a writer, a writer, a writer, a writer, a life coach. Yes. James you have James Carey which is you a unique person. Scott is unique person.

I really say that. No you are. You are USP. One of your many things is you wrote the sitcom about code breaking and at any time one of these movies about Enigma comes and it's always like oh yeah James is a hut 33.

So you've got the sitcom you've probably got copies of those series. You've got the book and actually now I could say you could repackage that. You could get Marcus or someone to read the book for Audible because it's become a very big thing now. I think you could turn your little industry of 33 and you could sort of turn that into your thing because that's the other thing about publishing is you know when even if your book is being published.

And in fact James has got a book coming out next year with SBCK. Right. It's about jokes and religion. SBCK are religious publishers.

Right. It's about jokes and religion. But you know without disrespecting your book I'm sure they will publicize it. They're probably going to be bringing out two or three books at the same time.

Oh yeah. And January is a hopeless time to bring out a book. But it's coming out on Black Monday. Or Blue Monday.

It's coming out on Blue Monday. Blue Monday which is the most depressing day of the year. Right. So I'll call my book which is in one sense about jokes but in another sense is about how making the wrong joke at the wrong time could basically get you killed.

Anyway. You're really selling this well. Exactly. Yes.

But the point with my book is that I can publicize it and I said I was sure that I was going to have it out in the middle of November which didn't happen. And then it was definitely coming out today which is the 28th November. That's now it's going to be Friday. But it kind of doesn't matter because I hadn't had to, you know, there aren't people waiting and hanging on it having to be at that time.

And also, you know, I had a discussion on Twitter with a couple of people about the good place and which is a sitcom that I enjoy a lot. And I suddenly realized that I'd written something about it in my book that actually I disagree with. And so I was able to change it two days ago. Whereas your book...

I'm committed now. Yeah. I got the latest proof. So yeah, I read it and yeah, sort of, last year ago.

But yeah, when I got the final proofs recently it was just like you only get to change stuff. It's factually incorrect. Or that is typed that incorrectly. But now it's sort of, you know, the wheels are in motion.

And the relevance of this, I mean, I'm going on more about the procedure of self-commissioning rather than so much talk about the book. But actually a lot of what the book is about is about you being in control of the production process. And so yes, it is harder. Yes, it's not.

You can't get your sitcoms away as easily. Not that it was ever easy. No. But you know, there are less slots and things.

But at the same time, the fact that you can be in control of your own destiny is becoming more empowering. Yeah. Yeah. Even than it was, say, like a year ago when you and I first talked about doing a YouTube video and we both sort of said, well, probably not worth it.

Whereas now I think we both changed our minds. Yeah, absolutely. And so it is definitely worth doing. And actually, probably this video itself will end up on YouTube at some point.

Hello. If you're watching us on YouTube. 8 million followers. At some point watching us in 2026.

I think we have to use some keywords though apparently to get YouTube to sell it. So we need to say Justin Bieber? No. We have to say that.

It gets me really angry when I find out that I can't publish my book straight away. And I feel emotionally scarred by the experience. I'll just mention Jordan Peterson and that will also be fine. So people are listening to the podcast.

We're recording this one on my iPad. We're just going to see how it looks. You'll probably be able to find it on Facebook as well. So if you want to find out more about Dave's book, which will make you a complete comedy writer, not a euphemism, then you need to go to Dave's website, which is DaveCohen.org.

Dot UK. Dot UK. DaveCohen.org.org, but also follow us. Follow us at Congeeks on Facebook and you'll find links there.

Follow us on Twitter, at Congeeks and you'll find links there from Friday the 30th November. From Friday the 30th November. Available on all good computers. Yes indeed.

So it's an e-book. It's not a physical book. It will be a physical book. So next week I'm going to have to, this is what's going to happen on Friday, so I'm going to get them to print the copy and send it to me.

So I'll look at it over the weekend and if it's fine then it's ready to go. Right, and that also would make, I was saying that would also make a very good present. It would, wouldn't it? So I like reading e-books.

I'm fine with reading books on Kindle on my iPad, but yeah, I wouldn't buy someone one. So if you know someone who might benefit from that, then you could possibly hold off, wait for the physical one and buy that. In a few days time. In a few days time.

So the complete comedy writer by DaveCohen.org.uk go and find that. We have got a few other things to talk about. Somebody a while ago asked us about world building and I can't remember who it was and we probably should talk about it for longer than we're going to talk about it now. But what do people mean when they talk about world building?

The reason that in a sitcom terms people talk about world building, the thing that starts to worry me is world building feels like backstory to me. And that's, I think people, I think we can, there's a lovely way of sort of drawing maps and it feels like you're creating a fantasy world like this world or Tolkien or something like that. And it feels like you're building a world that you can then eventually tell a story in but it feels like a bit of a way possibly of delaying actually writing anything that anyone's ever going to actually read or commission. Yeah, I mean if it's a kind of, if you're stuck and you're sort of kickstarting things, you're kind of staring into space, then it's possibly like a good exercise to kickstart you writing out.

It's set here in Lava Vah. I suppose for me world building is something that evolves when you're coming up with the story and the characters. What it means is it's a place, it's a place you want the audience to come to. And it's, you know, if you think about any piece of art that, you know, you go and look at a painting or you go to the movies, you're just, you're leaving your world for whatever time, the few seconds it is to look at all the 90 minutes and the cinema, all the time.

You're kind of putting everything else to one side and you're coming into this world. And so that's, if things happen in that world that sort of go against it, then you notice it, it's kind of a slightly weird feeling. And it's something that is very, very familiar, but also adds a new thing, which again is something that I talk about a lot in the book, is, you know, we're always looking to create the next new thing. But it's always good to have something a bit familiar.

I'm thinking about a show like Seinfeld, which looks like an American, all American sitcom. And it is a sort of a family sitcom. And if you think about Jerry as the American sitcom dad who brings food to the table and he's always sort of... He's a stable one in the middle.

And he's basically, he's introducing people into his living room, which is his little comedy stage. And he's welcome. Crayman comes in with the funny thing through the door. I'm paraphrasing because that's what happens is that the first ten minutes when they gradually dropped his stand up, it became a...

It's like, okay, here's what's happening. Here are my three friends. And they each come and they each bring their little bit of comedy. But it's Jerry's domain, isn't it, into his world.

And then the stories are acted out off the basis of that world. And they'd still go all over the place. But we know when we're coming back to watch Seinfeld, or we're going back to Friends, or central Perc or something. So it can be a place, because it's kind of the place and the people in it.

And how we're kind of welcomed into it. Yeah, that's a very good way. So I think about a term for when you're writing a sitcom is giving something a sense of place, and also working out what the rules of that place are. Worldbuilding makes me think of Philip Pullman, his dark materials, where he's built an alternative version of Oxford, and a parallel version of religion, based on his own massive anti-religious prejudices.

But it's very good. The first book's very good. I've not read the other two. But in a way, it feels like that's kind of the approach to writing a novel where it feels like you are being fully immersed in a world where you've got more time to show people around and have lots and lots of ideas.

My worry with fetishizing worldbuilding in a sitcom situation is you're going to spend an awful lot of time thinking about the sets and the backstories. And actually what you need to do is work out who my characters and where are they going. So that would be my caveat to that. I like your sort of just going towards the Seinfeld route or the Friends route or just, you know, or rest of development.

It's got its very own particular rules of its world or your porridge or whatever it is. Well, actually Frazier is a great example because Frazier painstakingly builds the world of Frazier in the opening seven minutes from the sitcom. We are introduced to him. He's a talk show host.

He's got his life. He's got his brother. And he's got this amazing flat with all this kind of incredible furniture in it. It's eclectic.

He says, oh, I'm fine. And then we meet his dad and they obviously don't get on. But anyway, this is the world that's been created and Frazier is wonderful flat. And then within about five or seven minutes, that is going to move in.

And in comes the chair. And the chair is, okay, here's this lovely world that has been absolutely almost by numbers. Here's Frazier. Here's his job.

Here's his flat. Here's his perfect world. Plunk. Here comes that chair.

And that chair stays there right until the very last episode. And someone pointed out, I think, that it's actually the same actor, I think, who brought it in in episode one. The same actor is then used to take it out in the last episode. Oh, that's lovely.

So that's a nice little touch. I'm not sure. Did I see the last episode of Frazier? Probably went on a couple of years.

Probably went on a couple of years too long. But having said that, it was still brilliant. I wish I could write a sitcom that went on for a bit too long. Yes, exactly.

That's a nice problem to have. Cool. Well, that's some thoughts on world building that are hopefully useful to whoever it was who asked us about. Talking about on Twitter, I just sort of said that we were doing a recording episode today.

And I don't want to have any questions just that we can get to at the end. And of course, from a facetious one from Christian Kool-E, he was a Patreon member who asked us where his car keys. And then followed up by saying that he found him in his wife's handbag. So thank you.

Solved. Solved from Solved. You are welcome. The fellow called Moses asked us what the ideal...

I think he's a very open touch before. Yes. Thank you for getting in touch. What is an ideal length for a web series?

Is it six by ten minute episodes? That's a good question. And the answer is we are finding out all the time. It's impossible to say.

It's worth pointing out, I think, although it's gone for the next year. But the Writers Guild now has an award for Best Online Comedy. And usually that will be a sketch, but it could be an episode of Sickov. But the maximum, the cutoff point is ten minutes.

So anything that's more than ten minutes will automatically not qualify for one of the few awards that are available for online comedy. And even that length might change. Because in a way, ten minutes has completely pulled out of thin air. Because also there's been a big change in YouTube in the last month, not month, year to two years.

Previously it was thought, if it's on YouTube, it has to be 90 seconds, two minutes tops. And that is completely changing now. And their algorithms are also pushing you towards much longer content. I watch YouTube like television now via my iPad.

There are some podcasts that are also done like a TV show, like this one, hello, this particular one off. And sometimes I'll watch them when I'm eating my, you know, in front of them or something. If my kids are gone to bed and my wife's doing something else. So people can't have the family together, family meal.

Fair enough. Yeah. But if I have noticed that some people have been writing YouTube and are recommending you longer and longer videos. And of course I'm going to mention Jordan Peterson again.

So he does lectures, sometimes about the Bible, despite not being a Christian believer himself. They're an hour and a half long and they're getting millions of views. Now people can talk about all right conspiracies or whatever if they like, which is not particularly helpful. But the idea is, if you think that an idea can be 45 minutes and that you can do it at the right quality at 45 minutes, then you can do 45 minutes.

That's fine. If however the idea feels like it should be four minutes or three minutes or six minutes, then I would be led more by the idea because I just think all bets are off now. That is another thing. And again, coming back to the book thing and in the parallels with TV, there is one article about book publishing, which has become my sort of Bible really.

And it's one of these 24 things that have changed in publishing. And this guy says, you can publish a book, you can publish your book on E.E. on Kindle today and you can withdraw it tomorrow. Nothing has changed, but you'll learn about the process of publishing.

And he says, everyone says a novel is 80,000 words, whatever. You can write a book that's 10,000 words and only charge 99 people or whatever. So you can do whatever you want. And actually, yeah, 10 minutes, six by 10 minutes.

If you've got six great ideas with your characters and they work and one of them takes eight minutes and the other one takes 11 minutes, then you know, who cares? You're not bound by TV rules. You don't have to be finished by the 10 o'clock news or anything. And also, you can put up two versions.

And here's the depressing thing. You might have an episode that you think this can only be nine minutes long. It has to be nine minutes. You can't cut anything.

Make a four minute version. Just decide to make it four minutes and put that up as well and see what gets more views. And I'll bet you the formula one does better. And that's because I think let's go back to the episode we did with Mike Shepherd when we were talking about newsjack.

His observation generally was virtually any sketch could be shorter. There really is very little that could be Python. We're pretty good at getting it down. Pretty much the perfect sketch for me is the hagging sketch.

And even that you could possibly lose the last 20 seconds off when they start arguing about the gourd. But how much it was free. I want to pay for it. Well, it's really, I mean, actually it functions like a nice punchline.

But you could probably shave another 10 seconds off that sketch if you really wanted to. So almost everything could be shorter. So what you want to make sure is that you're putting out something. If you wanted to be weapons grade funny and make you look good.

Shorter is probably your friend. Get to the point of someone always used to say to me in my stand-up days. I can mention this in the book. Two conversations coincidentally on the same day with at the time that they were judging the short, the bicycle short award.

And the winner was like 90 seconds long. I think I went with this year. It was 9 seconds long as well. And I asked the judge on the second group.

I said, what's your recommendation? He said exactly that cuts. Always keep cutting, keep cutting, keep cutting. Coincidentally that night I bumped into a friend who's now a very successful novelist.

I'm thinking of writing a lot. Didn't know what such a thing. Oh, no. She's writing a lot.

This will happen. Of course. My wife reads a book. Yes.

Comedy director. I got news for you on the shows. I was asking her for some tips about novel writing. And she said cut, cut, cut.

Always cut. I thought, oh, that's one and a half minutes. I can see it. Like 80,000 words.

Are you cutting all the time? Yeah, you are. It's true. I think that's a...

And also, I mean, to get to the point, I've been doing a series of blog posts. I've sort of tried to get back into blogging again. And I've been talking about five mistakes that you make in the start of your script. And the first one is basically, you've made the mistake of writing a feature.

And you think that you've got 10 minutes just to set the scene. And you don't. Get on with it. You don't have 90 minutes.

If you're writing a movie, you're assuming that people have paid 8 quid to watch your movie. No one's walking out after 8 minutes because it's boring. There's a grammar to movies. And you establish normality before your hero has their inciting incident.

It goes off on the quest or whatever. In a sitcom, you've only got 30 pages. You've got 28 minutes, 26 minutes, 21 minutes in case of modern family. Get on with it.

So it can always be shorter. And, you know, story is character. But anyway, go and look on. Next question.

Yes, that's right. If you'll always be shorter. Alex Smith has got any touch. Thank you, Alex.

And said, how to go about writing a studio sitcom having only written a single can previously. As a difference in premise, making the most of it within the statistical constraints, common pitfalls, possibly not what you meant by quick question. Well, that's probably true. We've done several episodes about this.

But I suppose very quick points that I would say is your audience is a com you are writing as much for the people in the room watching the show as you are for people at home. Yeah. So you've got to get those big laughs. So you need big jokes.

Yeah, you really do need to be honest with yourself and go, are we going to get three out loud laughs per page? Smiles, we can't hear. So that really does mean that you might push your character slightly broader. It does mean that you might just, yeah, just a bit of slapstick, a bit of slapstick, more physicality.

And also, there are jokes that you just can't do. You can't do jump cuts so well. You can't do pull back and reveal jokes as well. I mean, you can, but you would have to do them at scene changes and the audience are probably not going to laugh at them.

So you just need to be aware that you are entertaining 200 people, 300 people in a room like it's a theatre. And then hope to hell that people at home find it funny. We've talked to a number of people in recent episodes about how it just didn't work. And actually the magic of the room.

Yeah, the magic of the time is late on TV. And we've spoken to Paul Maichu Archil, we'll be putting that interview up probably in the new year at some point. If you subscribe on Patreon, you'll be able to listen to it very soon, where he talks about shows that didn't work in the room and got home and watched it on their own TV and we've spoken to Pete Sinclair about that as well. He wrote Mr.

Charity. Yes, Stephen Moffat, of course, the great chalk, which was the funniest live. I think the sitcom everybody who saw it said that that's just the funniest thing ever. So those are so pickfuls.

Don't make it too funny. It would be nice for them to have, wouldn't it? So there are lots of, so in a way you just want to get into your head. How are you going to feel as the actors are doing this?

And can you honestly say the audience is going to laugh enough for it not to be weird? I think one other thing that I would say these days now, which I think now if you are thinking of doing an audience sitcom, it is hard to, audiences are just not as used to the idea. TV, home audiences are just not as used to the idea. And I think you have to kind of almost imagine that performance is a part, is almost like an element of it.

So if you look at the successful sitcoms, or the new sitcoms, the new audience sitcom is upstart Crow, which is basically you're watching a play about Shakespeare, you're kind of watching a mini Shakespearean play. So you're not watching a family at home on this city. And that kind of audience sitcom now I think, I'm not sure if you'll ever come back at the moment. I think the last three sitcoms I can think of, Mrs Brown's board, Miranda and Upstart Crow.

They are all very much sort of theatricality to them. And this is Brown's board. They both talk to the camera. And also not going out has a live quality to it that Lee Mack brings that you can really imagine anyone else doing that.

In fact, I think that Chris Bussop is only going to be alive. Right, yes. Paul Grenza tweeted the other day or something. He works on the show as well.

He just said it is one of the funniest things he's ever read. He just made him laugh out loud. We say, Griseled Hack, Paul and me and you, I'm sure. Sorry, Paul, let me just call you out as a Griseled Hack.

I think you'll know that that's what I meant. Last question is about, from Derry Manz, is from the, about the illustrious Ronnie Hazelhurst who created memorable tunes like, Last of the Summer Wine, that's a particular favourite. Well, Max Harris's Jaunty End-The-Pourage always seemed out of place. I'm not sure what it did.

I hadn't thought about that, sorry, obviously didn't affect on me. Friends and Cheers got into the pop charts such as their popularity, and obviously that was the theme tune of Mash. Again, we talked to Paul May, who asked her about that, I think he mentions Mash, is that right? Somebody, we talked to him, just mentioned what a incredible, maybe it's a guy I said, was another interview also on Patreon, which won't be out till next year, I don't think.

I mean, sitcom theme tune can make a huge difference. In a way, that's a very long way down the line problem. Well, actually, again, having the most famous one, I think, would be Dad's Army, which everybody thought was an old song, but it was actually written to be, especially like that. And I think, I remember seeing the first ever episode, watching it going out, watching the credits, and the audience seeing those credits the first time, and the raw when those arrows, the British arrows going forward, and then they get back.

And that, the roar of laughter on that, is just like, oh my God. And so, I mean, if you're lucky enough to come up with something that perfectly, when coming back to talk about the world again, that's the world that they brought back for the people who, a lot of people, remembered that more than that. Let's go back to, so I've been involved in a few theme tunes for my own shows, one of which, so you sort of have an idea in your head. I think the unthinkable, when I first hit com, had a theme tune which was meant to sound uber-modern and pretentious, and in the end we took the lyrics off it.

I think we had lyrics in the first thing, where we had to Catherine Shepard saying ridiculous things. But it felt about right. Hutt 33, set in World War II, felt a bit too military for me. It felt a bit too marching bandage, and actually it should have been a bit more geeky and sound more like sonar or radar or something like that.

And then with the sketch, a concrete cow. And for some reason, both me and the producer Adam Bromley, we wanted, for some reason, to have a theme tune which made it sound like an imperial battle cruiser that's passing overhead, which meant that with the final movement of Shostakovich's fifth symphony. And then Bluestone 4 too, we sort of had three or four fairly grungy tunes that we liked the sound of, and I think they were given to compose and did a fantastic job of just producing something that we really, really liked. So it does create a tone.

And it is your friend. So you can use it, and it can help you, and if you don't use it, it can hinder you. Yeah. A similar thing, I mean my thought, because I write a lot of songs, I used to do my own songs and stand up.

So it was always my exciting wish to not only recall my own song, which is great, because of that, but you also, you keep the royalties as well, which if you have a long-running show, if you imagine the people who wrote the Friends theme, I've probably lived off that. The remnants of the show. The Beatles have probably killed their career in another way, but it makes them all, you know, it's probably a price worth paying on. But then, for instance, the show that I did travels with my anti-Semitism, it was that there's type of Jewish music, klezma music, which is very much from the sort of, this sort of precursor of jazz.

And there are a couple of bands around now, and there's a particular band who just did a really sort of heavy rock on a version that just felt like that tells the story. This is like the old meets the new. And so, yeah, you're kind of those are the kind of things you're thinking about. Actually, I didn't like I was a theme tune when I first heard it.

I was a comic geek fan, but I love it now. I think it's brilliant. I think in future I'll always ask James for his opinions. I'll get James to do my own theme tune.

There you go. So I think we're done here, aren't we? We should probably wrap this up. Let's remind people that your book called The Complete Comedy Writer is at DaveCarmen.org.uk.

And also, our 100th episode of Being Recorded at the Museum of Comedy on the 5th of December, 6 o'clock with Marcus Bricksstock and Sarah Morgan and me and you. And hopefully you listeners do come down to the Museum of Comedy. So are we done? Yes, we are.

Thank you very much. Bye.