ANOTHER FAILED SITCOM

So many sitcoms on TV seem to a lot of viewers to appear to be pretty poor these days, although I’m pretty sure that, just as with feature films, nobody actually sets out to make a bad one. This is why I was very interested to hear about the “BBC Writers’ Room” having a competition for new studio sitcoms, and why I thought that I might have a bash.

As ever, the difficulty is always in thinking up the “sit” part, followed swiftly, of course by the intensely difficult “com” part. Over the years with my quietly unsuccessful efforts at writing plays I’ve quite often sat myself down and tried to write comedy only for it to turn out more like a tragedy when I’ve finished it. Sometimes I’m convinced that the only thing I achieve any measure of success with is my unsuccessfulness. Hmm... Maybe there’s a sitcom in that...? 

Anyway, I tuned up my writing muscles and ventured towards the keyboard and decided to have a go and managed to come up with that elusive “something” which did, at least give me a subject to fill that gaping thirty page void up with, so, from that point of view, I suppose, it was some kind of achievement.

As to whether it was any good, of course, is anyone’s guess (although if you guessed “probably not” you are probably amongst the closest). I mean, after all, I wrote the thing so I must have thought it was okay, but it’s not really for me to say, but I quite liked the thing (in a spectacularly underachieving kind of a way), which means that it was, at the very least, worth doing.

I am reminded of an old episode of “One Foot in the Grave” when Victor Meldrew sets out on a very similar mission and decides to write a sitcom which he thinks is hysterical, but which nobody else finds remotely funny when he is finally persuaded to show it to them.

This, I suspect, is likely to be my own experience, but I persevered nevertheless.

The last time I tried to write a situation comedy was for a competition nearly fifteen years ago and it was a bit of a disaster, if truth be told. I can’t remember much about it now, although I suspect that it sits in a faded envelope somewhere in the big box of old and forgotten writing projects. I seem to remember that I only found out about it about a week before the closing date and set myself the task of writing the entire thing over the course of one long-lost bank holiday weekend shortly after I acquired my first ever iMac. This was the iMac that blew up and lost me so many of my contact addresses and emails in the days before they had simple enough ways to run backups. Well, that’s my excuse, anyway. If you ever found that you hadn’t heard from me for a couple of years back in the late nineties, that’s most probably the reason, and it might also explain why there isn’t a copy of that script in that big old box when it turns out that I can’t find it.

I kind of recall that it was set in an art shop and that the three main characters had names taken from the street names of the area I grew up in, because one of the things I have always struggled with is naming characters in my scripts. Without a name, somehow “Character One” doesn’t ever seem to come alive on the page for me, and in comedy especially, it seems that it is the names that somehow go a long way towards creating the character. Would Albert Steptoe be quite such a comic grotesque if his name was Brian Greene? Would Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock have seemed quite so pompous as plain old Tony? Would Lady Audrey fforbes-hamilton have had that crisp cutting manner as a plain old Jane? Would Jim Hacker have seemed quite such a hack if he’d been a simple Mr Smith? Would Norman Stanley Fletcher... Ah, you get the point I’m making by now, I’m sure.

Anyway, when it came to “Art for Art’s Sake” or whatever it was I called it, I think I made just about every mistake that a sitcom writer could possibly make. It was understructured, it wasn’t all that funny, the characters weren’t all that likeable and the relationships weren’t well enough defined. Rather surprisingly, because after all it was me writing it, the darkness wasn’t there, and without the darkness, there is not enough contrast to let the comedy shine. It really is not for nothing that most of the most successful comedies are based around the idea of someone being trapped in some way or another, by family (like the Steptoes and the Trotters) or by circumstance (like in “Porridge”). Also, I believe that, because I was far younger then and not as unskilled in the ways of the world as I have since become, I wasn’t writing people or situations that any of the viewing public might have recognised as relating to them and their own lives, and that is truly a fatal flaw when it comes to the sitcom. If the “sit” is not familiar enough, if the viewers really don’t get a sense of “Been there, done that” (or, at least that someone they know has), then they will never connect to the comedy no matter how funny it may be.

A hotel in Torquay is funny because everyone has stayed somewhere that failed to live up to expectations, or where someone has been downright rude. George Mainwaring is funny because we’ve all come face-to-face with a petty minded bureaucrat with an air of pompous self-importance. But interestingly, both Captain Mainwaring and Basil Fawlty also manage to gain our sympathy despite their many faults. Mainwaring especially, and the rest of his “Fighting Tigers” are made of sterner stuff and amongst the bravest comic characters ever to grace the nation’s hearts, and that is why we have come to love their antics again and again over the years.

Meanwhile, “Art for Art’s Sake” was probably doomed before it even reached the page. I can hardly remember a thing about it now, other than the setting and that I seem to remember that I struggled to come up with a storyline once I’d decided on that setting. So, to be fair, it was probably also going to struggle to have any “legs” if I couldn’t even stretch it out to one half hour. Mind you, I suspect that that’s true of most “pilots” and it’s only when some actual genuine actors have come along to flesh out the roles that the characters really start to come to life and inspire the writers to do something more with them. How much of Del Boy came from David Jason, for example? Or how much of Fletch was Ronnie Barker?

Some of the greatest sitcom writers have been genuine masters of the art; Galton and Simpson, Clement and La Frenais, Croft and Lloyd, Esmonde and Larbey, Eric Sykes, John Sullivan, Eric Chappell and Roy Clarke stand like colossi among the greatest exponents of the writers of a comic art form that seems so deceptively simple but which remains one of the toughest forms of entertainment to get right. Just think for a second about how many have gone so horribly wrong over the years and you’ll see what I mean. All those “hilarious new comedies” that have gone on to sink without trace. For every “Only Fools and Horses” there’s a “Royal Bodyguard”; for every “Red Dwarf” there’s a “Come Back, Mrs Noah”; for every “Good Life” there’s a “Hippies” and so on.

ITV sitcoms used to be notoriously average, or crass, or just plain unfunny, and whilst shows like “On the Buses” or “Love Thy Neighbour” were incredibly popular in their day, the preconceived notion of “ITV sitcoms being unfunny” seems to have stuck over the years. After all, “Men Behaving Badly” only seemed to get really funny (and popular) or just plain old “noticed at all” when it switched channels to the BBC. Even one of the greatest television writers who I most admire, Nigel Kneale, struggled with the sitcom form when it came to “Kinvig”, an ITV comedy about UFOs that only managed to stagger through one series back in the early eighties. 

But when a sitcom is got right, they can become the very glue that binds the nation together. Just think about “Blackadder”, “Dad’s Army”, “Fawlty Towers”, “Only Fools and Horses”, “Porridge” or “Father Ted”, and how many of the little phrases and sayings have crept into the joint national subconscious so that we all know what someone means when they say they have a “cunning plan” or  advice someone “Don’t tell him, Pike!” or call someone a “plonker”.

Genuine gold-dust. Lightning caught in a bottle. Genius.

So, what of my latest effort? Well, because of the looming deadline, if I was going to write something, it had to be in a bit of a hurry, and, because it’s the coming up with the “sit” that seems to be the most difficult part, as well as the “com” of course, I just ran with something and decided to see where it took me to - which was probably nowhere - but with that vague sense that it is better to try and fail than to not even try at all, I did indeed write “something” but I don’t really think that it fulfils the criteria, as I’m not really a “Modern Britain” kind of a guy, if you know what I mean...

Writing scripts is just like any other kind of story, only with a lot the descriptive stuff removed and turned into stage directions, and as long as you speak the words out loud and it sounds just like real people talking, you’re usually going in something approaching the right direction, I hope.

Meanwhile, and rather naturally in the great scheme of things, within days of writing my own humble and ultimately doomed effort, I sat down on the sofa and the BBC ran a trailer for some of their edgy new comedy series and that thirty second blast of energy rather blew my own gentler efforts out of the water, so it is with a heavy heart that I packed up my envelope and posted it away to perhaps receive lots of laughter, but probably not in the way I would like.

And so another failed sitcom inevitably joins the pile...