Introducing The House

Micheál Jacob's long career as an executive producer and script editor encompasses a plethora of television and radio comedies, including Birds Of A Feather, Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps, Goodnight Sweetheart, My Family, Eyes Down, Thieves Like Us, The Smoking Room, Not For Turning and Dead Canny. He is co-creator and producer of The House.

Next year, BCG Pro will be launching a new audio comedy, called The House. The pilot episode script will be posted online, and members will be invited to contribute lines and jokes. After that, the episode will be recorded and posted, and members will be involved with the development and writing of future episodes.

The plan is to create a participative sitcom, guided throughout by Tim Dawson and I, who met recently to begin the process of creation.

Tim's original idea was to call the show The House, and for it to feature three thirty-something housemates as a core cast, with the possibility of guest characters over the series, played we hope by members.

Because specifics are always useful, the house will be located in the Manchester suburb of Levenshulme, an area that is a mixture of wine bars and taxi offices with boarded-up windows. It's socially lively, and an area which fits the characters and the situation of the owner of the house, Lucy.

Recently divorced, she re-mortgaged when her husband moved out, but to make ends meet has to rent out rooms.

Lucy has a job, the others - Billy and Zarah - earn money in various ways, none of them full time. They both enjoy and are victims of the gig economy. It's freedom twinned with economic insecurity.

Lucy's job didn't require much discussion, but how Billy and Zarah spend their time involved considering several options before settling on something definitive.

Having agreed on the setting, the characters and their primary characteristics (organised, dreamy, larger than life), we then explored them all more deeply - what does each of them want, what stops them achieving it, is what they claim to want really what they should have, and where are the sources of comic conflict - not blazing rows but disagreement over things both trivial and important.

At the forefront of the discussion was that comedy is conflict, and that comedy is drama with laughs. Hence how were the characters going to generate stories, what sort of stories might they be, and although each of the three could produce their own sub-plots, where were the overarching episode stories going to come from?

It's important that each of the three is likeable, can be related to, evoke laughter but are also capable of evoking emotion. In other words, they have to be recognisably human rather than vehicles for jokes. The aspiration is that the audience should laugh, and should care.

None of the three is a 'comedy' character, yet each is capable of creating laughter.

And that was the beginning of the process of invention - world, setting, characters, possible stories and story ideas.

The next step will be the creation of a first draft scene breakdown, revising it, and then embarking on a first draft script.

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