Lee Henman
Tuesday 22nd July 2008 2:28pm
5,183 posts
I had no idea Carla Lane was an animal rights activist so the joke would've sailed over my head anyway.
Calvin - your script needs rethinking. It's obvious you can write dialogue, but you haven't quite mastered FUNNY dialogue yet. Try and imagine yourself sitting watching this on telly and ask yourself honestly - would it make you laugh? Would it hold your interest?
In writing tv comedy what you should be trying to achieve is stopping the viewer getting up to make a brew or worse - switch channels. There are several ways you can do this but one of the most important things to do is hook the viewer into the story in the first two or three minutes. So by page three or four of your script the audience needs to know exactly what the episode is about. You have done this to a small extent - as in you've told the viewers that Alex has been promoted and he can now give his lazy mate Spencer a job, but for me you've gone about in a boring, non-eventful way, through lacklustre banter.
Personally I'd have started off by showing what a truly lazy useless bastard Spencer really is. Maybe he was sat on the couch in his pants eating sweets and watching the end of a monster truck show, and something really boring comes on the telly like a Melvyn Bragg special on the history of Rococo art. But the telly remote is an inch further away from Spencer than it's possible to reach without getting up, so he starts throwing sweets at the channel button, just as a smartly-dressed Alex comes in behind him and watches, disgusted at his flatmate's behaviour. Or something like that, you get what I mean. By doing it this way the audience knows immediately what the characters are all about.
What I'm trying to say is you need to set your stall out early, let the audience know exactly what the characters are and that this is gonna be a f**king funny story so they'd better not miss it.
Then remember, jokes jokes jokes. People watch comedy to laugh.
Hope this helps