Someone actually liked something I wrote? On this thread?
F**k.
I need to get myself a drink.
Me sitcom Page 2
Quote: zooo @ January 24 2009, 2:10 PM GMTQuite fancy some crisps now.
Think I'll have dejavu flavour.
To be fair it's not the worst thing I've read on Critique, gotmilk. But your main problems here are the kids don't talk like real kids so we don't believe in them, and more importantly there doesn't appear to be any story going forward.
You have to imagine yourself switching the telly on to watch this new show. What would make you keep watching? What would happen in the first couple of minutes to hook you in and stop you switching channels? Not inane banter, certainly. It's story. If you're serious about creating a workable script, before you even start writing dialogue you need to have an outline of what's going to happen in this episode. So for instance, Phil and Mike are talking in the classroom reading a family newsletter. (Although I still maintain those things don't exist. I've NEVER seen / read one). Anyway, you've kicked off your story with the newsletter, and subconsciously the viewer will now be expecting you to develop that storyline over the course of the episode. If you don't, the viewer will feel unsatisfied. He might not know why he feels unsatisfied, but he will.
Forgive me if you already have a story worked out for your script - I'm just assuming you don't because most people having a bash at writing for the first time just make it up as they go along. And that's fine, actually. It's a good way to practise writing believable dialogue without the constraints of plotting etc. But eventually you must do what we all have to do in the end, and dally with the basic rules of scriptwriting - and rule number one is work out a beginning, a middle and an end before you even put pen to paper.
Hope this helps - it can be very disheartening when you bravely put a piece of work onto a public forum and get a mauling, but keep writing every day, read a book on scriptwriting, watch shitloads of comedy and your stuff will improve.
Very best of luck to you.
I get two family newsletters every year!
They are very funny (unintentionally of course).
God I hope that didn't sound too condescending. If it did, I didn't mean it to.
Well I talk like that, and I feel a bit like a kid right now!
Quote: zooo @ January 24 2009, 2:41 PM GMTI get two family newsletters every year!
Woah!
Oh yeah and this family newsletter is definitely real, almost the exact same wording actually.
Quote: zooo @ January 24 2009, 2:41 PM GMTI get two family newsletters every year!
They are very funny (unintentionally of course).
Really? My God. What do they say in them? Surely they don't tell the truth.
I bet no family newsletter ever said "It's been a funny old year. Danny's been done for burglary again and Uncle Peter finally had the sex change. Joe lost his job and had his house reposessed and Auntie Harriet's womb prolapsed on a bus to Morecambe..."
Quote: Lee Henman @ January 24 2009, 2:45 PM GMTI bet no family newsletter ever said "...and Auntie Harriet's womb prolapsed on a bus to Morecambe..."
Hee. They are hilaaarious. Little Johnny's still single, but that means more time for his, um... darts.
Always putting positive spin on everything. Bless 'em.
Do we get to be in the next one...? 
Oh they're not FROM my family, they're TO my family!
If my mum wrote about me in a family newsletter I would actually have her done in.
(Actually, come to think of it, one of my something-uncles does a newsletter about his side of the family about once a year. And there's always the banter on the inside cover of Christmas cards.)
Quote: zooo @ January 24 2009, 3:10 PM GMTOh they're not FROM my family, they're TO my family!
If my mum wrote about me in a family newsletter I would actually have her done in.
(Phew.)
When I was nine, there was a terrible fire at my aunt's house. I was staying in a sort of granny-flat out the back with my two cousins and the first we knew of the fire was the unexpected orange glow licking the roof of our shared bedroom. The three of us saw this, and excited, we got out of our beds and traced the path of the light to the adjacent house. The location being new to me, I was more excited than my cousins, and they a little older quickly caught on that this was not a spectacle of joy or excitement, but rather a serious situation. The danger that was so apparent to them only struck me as my aunt's flaming body crashed out of the second floor window, and as she writhed in pain on the dewy lawn, limbs flailing at obscene angles, her hair a Medusa's tangle of black and orange, it was then I realised the sheer horror of what I was witnessing. I shall never forget my cousins screams as they tried to put their mother out.
This was considerably funnier than your script.
Thordox speaks.