About Big Top
Big Top, a BBC One sitcom, showcases the world of the not-so-spectacular Circus Maestro, a grand traditional circus.
For hundreds of years it has travelled around Europe delighting family audiences with its astonishing selection of the world's most death-defying acrobats and most uproarious clowns! At least, that's what the posters say.
In fact, the circus has been running since 1973, touring the same nine sites in the North Staffordshire region. And these aren't the world's greatest circus acts. They're a mixture of fading talents and struggling wannabes, all wishing they were somewhere just a little bit more glamorous and successful.
And although struggling, Circus Maestro is crucially not in the least bit rubbish; it has a hard time drawing in the crowds, but when people do see the show, they are genuinely entertained. The performers, although not the best in the world, are talented... except for the clowns. Despite - or perhaps due to - this, Ring Mistress Lizzie is in a constant struggle to keep the show, and the business, going.
The Writer
Writer Daniel Peak won the 2002 BBC New Talent Sitcom Writer's Award, and has since gone on to write for several sitcoms and children's programmes, most recently No Heroics, The Revenge Files Of Alistair Fury and Not Going Out.
He wrote the BBC Three series I'm With Stupid, starring Ruth Jones and Mark Benton, which won an RTS award and was remade for NBC in America.
Speaking of how he came to write Big Top, Peak said: "A couple of years ago I went to a circus near Macclesfield, the first one I'd been to since I was a kid. The girl running the ticket office was about nine years old, and the man on the hotdog stand was in the ring a few minutes later, juggling deckchairs with his feet. I realised there was a very small team of people doing absolutely everything: performing the show, selling the programmes and afterwards packing up the tent to move to the next site.
"At the same time I was talking to Big Bear Films about sitcom ideas, and we all really wanted to do a big ensemble show. Big Bear's Head of Development, Suzi McIntosh, started talking about her friend Linnet, who is an acrobat. So we thought: let's come up with some circus characters."
Talking about the lack of circus-based shows in the past, he continued: "The fact that the characters live in small, confined caravans seems to make it ideal for a studio audience sitcom. A lot of sitcom ideas are about families, or about workplaces or about people who live together. With a circus you get all three: a group of people who are often related, and who work together and who live in their place of work.
"They all live in tiny caravans, so they can't really escape from each other, and twice a day they have to go into the ring and risk their lives for the entertainment of a few kids. A circus is a self-contained world. I think only about four scenes in the entire series take place outside the field where the Big Top is pitched."
The Characters
Going on to explain his characters, writer Daniel Peak said: "I started off with about 12 characters, wrote lots of story ideas for them all, gradually worked out which characters were the least interesting and killed half of them off.
"So out went the nine-year-old ticket seller, Boyco's Russian wife, Benji the alcoholic knife-thrower and some others. The six that remained felt like the clearest, funniest and best for generating stories.
"I was very keen not to make this a show about a rubbish circus, where the main joke is how rubbish they are. So these characters are all hard-working, dedicated and quite good at what they do (apart from the clowns - they really are rubbish). So, for example, Boyco the acrobat is extremely talented: he just doesn't realise it. The characters are united by their shared desire to put on a great show - and divided by the fact that each performer thinks he or she is the star."