For a blog by a “struggling comedy writer” there's been precious little recently on comedy writing.
I've got a meeting at the BBC later this morning to find out what's happening with a radio project I've been developing with friend and fellow writer Mark, so I thought it might be interesting to describe a bit about the background to that project.
Last year, having lost a producer to maternity leave (how dare she put her own familial aspirations ahead of my writing career!), Mark and I pitched a list of random ideas to a new producer. At the last minute the meeting was moved forward and halved in length and we ended up with about 20 minutes to introduce ourselves and pitch half a dozen back-of-an-envelope ideas.
I won't give you the specific details of the idea in question, in case it actually gets commissioned, but imagine that amongst our ideas is a sitcom about the crew of the world's first mixed sex submarine. It's not about that, but it serves the purpose of an example. Imagine further that this is the idea that stands out to the producer as the one with the most promise. And in one final feat of imagination picture the moment our producer tells us she really, really likes the idea, but could we possibly lose the bit about the submarine?
So in a fit of optimism we rework our idea so it's no longer about men and women working together on a submarine, it's about men and women working together in an office. And against all the odds, we make it work. The characters are interesting, the situations are reasonably original and the jokes are quite funny. So we write a treatment, and work with our producer on a script, and before long it gets in front of BBC's development panel of fairly senior executives who are generally very positive about it and decide, with a couple of minor changes, it should be put forward to one of the main channels. So we write a 200 word synopsis of the idea and it gets submitted into the commissioning round. We don't expect to hear anything for a couple of months, but a few weeks later we're told that the project has stalled at a stage which should have been a formality.
The decision maker at the channel has decided not to read the script because on the basis of the synopsis they are not to going take it forward because they're not really looking for sitcoms in this round after all. But we can resubmit it in the next round when the landscape may have changed.
Our pilot script is 15 minutes long. You could read it on the toilet whilst having a leisurely number two. Very frustrating given that the script took about 100 hours to write and the synopsis less than 100 minutes.
Then Mark and I have a bit of a Jerry Maguire moment and write an email expressing our frustration at a development system which allows a project to get a thumbs-up from various increasingly senior development people and the not even get read by the next person up the chain. And suddenly things go a bit quiet and we figure we may have burned our bridges with our fit of pique.
Anyway, the latest commissioning round is approaching and we're popping back in to Broadcasting House to see whether it has any chance of getting picked up this time round.
I'll let you know how it goes...
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