Sitcom Mission 2010 Update
Wednesday 28th October 2009
This week we had the latest of our What's Wrong With My Script? Workshops. It was an opportunity for some of those who weren't chosen (I deliberately didn't use 'rejected' there, and will explain why later) for this year's Sitcom Trials tenth anniversary show to have their work read out by professional actors and to receive feedback from ourselves and their peers, and from this year's Sitcom Trials producer, James Parker.
It's also a chance for us to audition actors so that we can help our directors cast the shows in the spring. All the actors on Saturday were excellent and contributed so much to the day.
The day is split into talking about the restrictions and opportunities of performing live sitcom and common problems with scripts and how to overcome them in the morning, with a break for lunch and then work with the actors in the afternoon.
We were blessed this week with ten very interesting and amusing scripts, seven of which had been entered into The Sitcom Trials, but hadn't been picked. Again, I'm not saying they'd been rejected, because, in effect, they hadn't been.
Comedy can be an incredibly subjective entity which, like love, you can't see with your eyes or hold in your hand, as Johnny Cash once sang. How many times have we all watched the first episode of a sitcom or sketch show and thought, 'how on earth did that get commissioned?' Some of the first reviews for Only Fools And Horses weren't good and Men Behaving Badly was cancelled by ITV after the first series. Blackadder, one of the most popular and successful BBC sitcoms of all time, was also threatened with the chop after series one.
Remember that Decca passed on the Beatles, a casting director through Fred Astaire could only dance 'a bit' and Colonel Sanders was turned away over 1000 times before a restaurant took a chance on his herbs and spices.
There have been a number of scripts that The Sitcom Trials are showcasing this season which we at The Sitcom Mission wouldn't have picked and there were some at the workshop on Saturday which had huge potential and we're very much looking forward to seeing them after they've been re-written.
We've previously picked things for our run of The Sitcom Trials which didn't translate to stage for whatever reason, and this is why we'll be workshopping our long list of 32 (maximum) and then choosing what we believe to be the best 16 for the showcase. And by 'the best' I mean the funniest, most interesting and most marketable. And it'll be our personal choice, you may well disagree with it.
The last season of The Sitcom Trials showcased 32 scripts out of 530 received, this season they are showing 20 out of 380. There are only so many slots that can be filled, and when making the choice between 'yes' and 'no', gut feeling and 'because I just like it' come into play rather than anything mathematically quantifiable. Remember Robin Williams drawing a graph to illustrate how to appreciate poetry in Dead Poets Society and then describing the idea as 'excrement'. It's the same with comedy.
As I said earlier, there's only so many slots to fill in broadcasting-land, and, if you've written something and send it to the BBC or C4, they have to decommission a show before they commission yours. So when you're writing your sitcom, think about which medium, channel, day and time you'd like to see it in, and what you'd de-commission to make way for your masterpiece.
And if it doesn't get picked, it's nothing personal.