Pappy's interview
Badults is the high-energy new studio sitcom from BBC Three in which sketch group Pappy's play fictional versions of themselves. 'Badults' refers to the concept of the trio's characters being 'bad adults' - and across the six episodes of the gag-packed, joyously silly sitcom we certainly see plenty of evidence of that.
The trio - Matthew Crosby (the one with glasses), Tom Parry (the less hairy one), and Ben Clark (the laid-back one) - have been wowing audience for years live, but despite various pilot episodes have yet to find a successful TV vehicle to showcase their natural chemistry. That all looks set to change with Badults, and here's what they had to say on that topic and others when British Comedy Guide met up with them...
Hi guys. There's quite a buzz around the launch of this sitcom. Do you feel you've got a success on your hands?
A success for us would be, when we watch it back, whether we are pleased with it - and, in that way, Badults is a success. As you know, previously we've done things on television, but we've watched them back and gone "it's not quite what we wanted", and that's not a nice feeling. This time around we watch everything back and think "that's exactly what we wanted".
Also, unlike the pilots, this is a six episode series. As we went on we could feel ourselves relaxing and getting better. Also, the thing when you do pilots... you try and cram every idea you've ever had into the one 28 minutes... where as with this we had nearly three hours of screen time to play with stuff.
You're known for being sketch show performers... but this is a sitcom. Who decided it should be sitcom not sketch?
This has had quite a long development. We started working on the script in about 2009, so it's a script we've had for a while.
We did our first TV pilot [Pappy's Fun Club in 2008], which was basically our stage show at that time, and we thought then we ought to write something more designed for telly - it was a very deliberate decision. The next telly project we did was a game show [Mr & Mrs Hotty Hott Hot Show] which acknowledged the audience and was different from our live show, but contained elements of our stage show still. Once we decided to write a sitcom script, we decided to really write a sitcom script.
Writing a sitcom has always been a goal. When we were growing up, sitcoms were what we loved. They were really formative, more so than sketch shows.
So we kind of wrote it separate to what we did live - and then we waited. We got rejected a bunch of times, but kept on persevering and then found the right team to work with [The Comedy Unit].
Increasingly in our live shows we have been playing ourselves on stage, with a story and interplay between us. Plus, we've been doing podcasts like Pappy's Flatshare Slamdown - that is the three of us playing heightened versions of ourselves. So since about 2009 or 2010 we've really been working on our own personas as characters, and hopefully that comes across in the sitcom.
Certainly, when we came to write the sitcom it was very easy to go "well, Matthew will be doing this in this situation", "that's what Tom would say in this situation", and "this is what Ben would be doing"... that made it a fun writing project.
We ought to say, we didn't have a mission statement at the start saying "we want to end up on television" or "we want to do a sketch show" or anything, we were just doing it because we loved it. It's just kind of snowballed along. A lot of people in this industry ask "what is your game plan?"... it's basically: a) to keep making what we love, and b) not to get found out.
So how has the writing process on the sitcom worked?
We kind of developed a system of writing where all three of us would sit down and talk and just bang ideas down. That's how the shape of the episode comes about, and then we do pair work - so everyone pairs up to write...
Er, hang on, there's three of you?
Ah, yeah, everyone gets a day off! We rotate writing in pairs. At the end the three of us then get back together and read back over what has been done. There's a different dynamic reading back over it as a threesome. Then it gets altered again.
The good thing is that we've always got the start, middle and end plotted out from the group stage - so when the pairs start to write, very rarely do we go off on a tangent so the third person then has to go "What have you done? Why is this suddenly off in this weird direction?!?".
It's very hard to have three people sat around a keyboard bashing out scripts. It takes us much longer to do that, so that is the solution - writing in pairs, which still always feels like a collaborative effort.
The first drafts are done like that, but the re-drafts tend to happen as a group. We didn't realise what a massive part of the process re-drafting is. It's a really satisfying bit, it's a bit like a puzzle - You take an element out, which you've got to do because the script is running at 40 minutes, but then it means these other three things now don't make sense, so they've got to be moved around or changed. It's like balancing an equation.
Then you actually start rehearsing and you realise "oh it doesn't work this way, we have to change it again" - and you're re-drafting and re-drafting. We were re-drafting right up until we recorded them!
Sometimes you'd do a take and the take would go ok, and then in the second take you would slightly change things or add a new line or bring back an old line from a previous draft... which keeps it fresh for the audience in the studio but also brings new life to a scene. So things are changing and evolving.
Talking of filming, as we can see in the clip below, it looks like you had a lot of fun in front of the camera. Did you ever try and trip each other up, in terms of making each other laugh?
I don't think we ever try and trip each other up. We will make each other laugh, but it's never to bring the show to a halt. The worst thing that can happen, when you're on stage, is laughing and the audience are just sitting there going "just get on with it".
With live studio sitcom you do have to learn a certain degree of discipline, in that you've got five cameras on you. You've done a camera rehearsal - if you go off script with where you are on the set, they won't pick you up. This took a bit of getting used to. So we could change slightly what we said or the way we look at each other - and we like to think that keeps it lively, fun and real - but you can't just go "I'm going to head off over here," because the note will come down from the director saying "we just didn't see it".
The other new thing you learn that's different from live shows is your timing and your director's timing have to be in sync. Luckily the director we have - Ben Kellett - is excellent. For example, he'd say "unless you give a beat for me to go to Ben and see Ben's reaction to what you said, a laugh won't come".
It was fascinating doing that first recording. You'd say the line and in your head go "this joke is funny" - but there'd be a pause. You realise it was the camera changing angle - and then the laugh would come, and you'd go "phew - they did laugh". There was so much of that. On stage you presume if you're talking, or something big is happening, people will be looking at you... but in telly, where the audience is looking is entirely determined by whichever camera is on at that point.
We're surprised to hear you didn't try to make each other corpse - didn't you have a bet going?
Yeah, in each recording it was £50 to charity for the first person who made a mistake. What we like about that bet is it sounds like we're quite high rollers and we can afford that kind of money, but it's actually loads of money.
We said a fiver each and then, as we were announcing it to the audience at the first show Tom went "A fiver? Fifty more like!" and that got a round of applause!
The audience were really waiting for someone to mess up, and that was quite exciting.
For the record, the end result was £200 for Matthew; £50 for Tom; and £50 for Emer, who plays Rachel in the show... How do you feel about that, Matthew?
It was all fun and games until a week after we came back from Glasgow and I had to give £200 to Comic Relief!
You wear some quite, er, interesting outfits in the show - and wear very little in some scenes! Do you regret writing all that into the scripts now?
Ben: There were a few for me. It was that thing where, for some of it, it wasn't me that wrote it. People have been saying to me "well you wrote it, you could have just not written that"... but if you're in the meeting and the other two are like "that's a really funny idea," even if it's at your expense, it's entirely the wrong energy to go "no, you can't do that because I'll look like an idiot".
Tom: At our live shows I get naked quite a lot, which I don't mind. Me and Matthew knew that Ben would mind, so it was a lot funnier to make Ben do it, as we knew he wouldn't enjoy it.
Matthew: There's an episode where I'm trying to be cool. It wouldn't be so funny for Ben or Tom to be trying, as they don't have that same uptight persona. It goes back to the idea of knowing who our characters are.
Tom - you must be regretting the bit of the script involving that door though?
Yeah. We wrote this thing: Tom picks up Ben and smashes him through a wall. It was my idea, I loved this idea: I'll get to pick up Ben and smash him through a wall!
And then we got to the set design and they were like "you can't just go through one of our walls" - and that's one of the lessons we learnt really quickly about television. In the first script we gave them, this and that exploded, a tree falls over there... and they were like "we're not going to be able to show any of this, we haven't got the budget for it!" We learnt very quickly to write to our restrictions. But one of the things they said was we could smash Ben through a door...
So we got to the week of the rehearsal and the team were going to hire a stunt coordinator and I was like "Oh, come on guys - I don't need a stunt coordinator, I'm only rugby tackling him through a door!". But they had to as it was procedure, so we had this stunt coordinator... and on the final dress rehearsal I picked Ben up, missed the door, and smacked my head on the door frame. I had to pop off in an ambulance to have my head stitched before coming back to do the show.
Matthew, he's playing that down a bit, isn't he...
What was so upsetting about that was they cleared the set, so I had to go up and sit with the girls from the costume department and the cameras were still on, so we could see the set through one fixed camera. Carol - who is so sweet; she's this lovely softly spoken Scottish lady - said "don't worry, everything is going to be fine" and then on the bottom of the screen we could see paramedics coming across and the next shot was Tom going the other way strapped into a wheelchair with blood pouring down his face. So it was a bit nerve wracking. We had to adjust camera angles so we couldn't see the plaster.
They did a good make-up job on that in the end! So does this sitcom mean less live performing for you now? You did call your recent offering 'Last Show Ever'...
Hopefully the opposite is true, in the same way that when Good News took off, it meant that Russell Howard could perform to even more people. If indeed our show does well it will just hopefully mean more people want to come and see us live. Live is so fundamental to what we do, and is so exciting.
Also, if people have seen the sitcom they still won't have seen any of the stuff in Last Show Ever so potentially that show still has a life ahead of it yet. The plan was to write a show about our last show ever, not to actually write our last show over... but equally the phrase 'last show ever' doesn't ever hurt marketing-wise does it? Ha ha.
Ultimately, we want to keep writing new stuff. Everything we do feeds into everything else - for instance, the reason to do podcasts is because they're brilliant fun, but they also introduce us to a new audience. The same with telly, live, radio, touring, and going to Edinburgh - hopefully every year more and more people are seeing us and we're building a bigger fanbase.
We spent three months living in Glasgow making the sitcom, and prior to that we'd been on tour, and straight after - literally just one weekend break between - we launched into a 20 night run at the Soho Theatre. Basically over half a year of very intensive work, but the live shows at the end felt like a little 'treat'. Performing live is something we love doing and we don't want to stop doing.
Badults is on BBC Three on Tuesday nights at 10pm. Explore our guide using the menu on the left to find out more about the show. To learn more about Pappy's live shows visit pappyscomedy.com