Sitcom Mission Longlist blog 2018
Tuesday 31st July 2018
Thank you all for your entries this year. We had 150, which was down on previous years, but we put that down to the shift in time scale to April - June. Lots of people see the long winter months as their time to write, and there was the added distraction this year of an England team not thoroughly disgracing themselves at the World Cup.
We're always incredibly grateful to everyone that enters and we look upon every entry as something we can work on and every writer as someone we can potentially collaborate with. Every single Gold and Silver rewrite was a vast improvement on the first draft and we salute the work that all writers put in to hone their craft.
As ever, a quick paragraph on how to improve your chances in future years (and this applies to other scriptwriting competitions too). Please format your scripts to an acceptable industry standard, check out BBC Writersroom for examples. Also, and this is a big gripe, if it's a 15-minute sitcom competition, please don't send in something that's way, way, way over 15 minutes, it's the quickest way to end up in the No pile and you're wasting your own time and money. Just read it out loud and time it. And every year we get what we term 'shitegeist' which is the opposite of zeitgeist, ie writers unknowingly coming up with the same terrible idea. This year, it was characters that had run out of something to say letting out a big fart instead. Maybe it's something to do with a Trump being a comedy icon. Still, however funny it is in real life, it is neither big nor clever in a script.
So, now's the time to lose 142 friends and become best buds with eight others. Step forward and take a bow and prepare for a lot of hard work:
This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things by Cassie Jauffret-Lenzi
Phantasmagoria by Colm Field
Tim 2.0 by Dan Hobson and Jon Bridle
All At Sea by Daniel Page
Bubble Up by Jamie Humphrey
Wait For It by Helen Cattle
Key Suspect by Ian Williams
Woolybacks by Andrew River
Thanks again everyone, it would be super wonderful if we could do this again next year.