British Comedy Guide

Length

I'm assuming something like this has been covered somewhere else, but just gonna ask anyway:

I've written the first draft of a sitcom and have done a timed read through and it was approx 19 mins. Now I know a standard sitcom is 30 mins (ish), but the annoying thing is my script is just over 47 pages... Would prospective producers / commissioners immediately discard it as I've heard that they see 1 page as 1 minute? I'll have to add pages to bring the actual time up to 30 minutes, but that could see an increase of say about 10 pages still.

I don't know if anyone understands what I'm blabbing on about, but please shed some light!

Cheers guys

There's a thread (on this very page no less!) that deals with this question. It's for one hour long episodes so you might have to break out the abacus, but all the info you need is there...

https://www.comedy.co.uk/forums/thread/14090

They wouldn't discard it because of page length, alot of that can just be down to what layout you've gone for, etc. They will probably be more concerned with the word count. If it's twenty thousand, they may think you've gone a tad overboard. When I write a half hour sitcom script, they usually end up somewhere around five and a half thousand words, and that's about right.

Cheers, I will have a read.

Abacus? I'm not that technologically advanced yet.

Forza, just a quick skim of the page (as DB points out) would've saved another repetitive thread. Try a search - the menu bar below the logo - and post questions in pre-existing threads, please.

Regards, SlagA

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