George Jeffrie and Bert Tyler-Moore interview
The writers of Channel 4's Pete Versus Life are George Jeffrie and Bert Tyler-Moore, the co-creators of irreverent award-winning comedy Star Stories. Other notable writing credits for the duo include The Armstrong and Miller Show, That Mitchell and Webb Look, Harry & Paul and My Family. Here, they reveal a little more about the dark arts of writing a seriously funny comedy...
Hi guys. What's the concept of Pete Versus Life?
George: It's basically about a would-be sportswriter who's not really cracked it, and is struggling around on the fringes of it. He's a very socially inept young man who gets into all sorts of scrapes - it's quite farcical - and along the way, you have these commentators, commenting on his rather rubbishy life, as if they're commentating on a football match.
Pete is a bit of a bastard, really, but we end up rooting for him anyway. That's a difficult trick to pull off, I imagine?
Bert: Yes, and I think a lot of the success of that is down to Rafe Spall. As you say, at times Pete's behaviour can be a bit on the shitty side, but Rafe just has a such a charm that he manages to make you end up rooting for him as well. Some of that was intended in the scripts, but I think that charm of his particularly helps.
George: I think also everyone's capable of being a shit, really, so it's quite easy to empathise with him. And at the end of the day he's always going to come out worst - if he was absolutely triumphing and a massive success, it would be really hard to care about him, but because he's a failure, it lets us off the hook a bit.
Bert: Yeah, I think you understand where his shitty behaviour comes from, because it's all things we've felt ourselves.
He gets into some horrendous situations, largely due to his own crass ineptitude. How much of your own experience is in the script?
George: Quite a lot. And quite a lot of it is our friends' experience as well, I'd say. A lot of the stuff has happened to us either directly or indirectly.
Is it fair to say that the commentators play a similar role to the internal voices in Peep Show, in that they give you a different perspective on a situation?
George: That is probably fair enough to say, yeah. It's quite ambiguous what the commentators are, which is deliberate.
Bert: They're sort of characters in themselves, as well, hopefully. So we get comedy from the 'colour' man, Terry McIlroy, sometimes saying the wrong thing, in a way that sports commentators do.
George: They're mainly from Pete's point-of-view, whereas in Peep Show they're completely from Jeremy and Mark's viewpoint. So they can give you information that Pete wouldn't know anything about.
Did you watch a lot of televised sport to get the characteristic language of the commentator accurate?
Bert: George is quite a sports fan.
George: Yeah, I've always watched a lot of sport. It can be very funny - particularly when you get somebody like Ron Atkinson doing it. And Mark Lawrenson I've always found quite funny, and Mick McCarthy at this World Cup as well.
Bert: Is he the Yorkshire guy?
George: Yeah. He's so miserable-sounding. He hasn't got a good word to say about anybody. I like him very much. Terry certainly isn't based on Mick McCarthy, but he is based on some commentators.
Can you explain a bit about what it's like writing as a team. How did you guys find each other?
Bert: Under a blanket in a skip. No, we both used to do stand-up on the comedy circuit. George used to be in an act with another guy, and I used to do stand-up, so we knew each other from that.
George: Yes, you have an awful lot of spare time when you do that. You work for about 15 minutes-a-day, so you tend to have a lot of free time in the afternoons. So we started getting together to write. And it eventually just took over.
Do you miss doing the stand-up?
George: I personally don't miss it at all.
Bert: I don't really miss it. I sometimes miss the camaraderie and the social side of seeing people you like, fellow comedians. But the positive side of not doing it far outweighs that. When we started to write, it almost immediately seemed like a much more successful thing to do.
George: And we get to watch EastEnders now.
Why does writing for a duo work for you guys?
George: Well, personally I find it very hard to get out of bed in the mornings if left to my own devices.
Bert: I think there are many double-act comedy-writing teams. I think comedy needs you to bounce off each other.
George: It is really a very hard thing to do on your own. You've got to challenge the joke, and you've got to hear the laugh. If you think something's funny and your partner doesn't, they're probably right. It probably is a more rigorous process than a lot of drama writing, really.
Bert: In a way you save time, because you're constantly thinking it through together. Some writing duos write separately and then swap drafts, but we do everything together. We sit in the room together, we map out the plots together, we write every line of dialogue together.
And who makes the teas and coffees?
Bert: Generally that's pretty evenly spread. We're never far from the kettle, though.
Do you ever have major creative disagreements?
Bert: Yeah, we have healthy disagreements. It's all part of the process.
George: I recently had to spend six weeks in hospital over a pun that we couldn't agree on. But we have our ding-dongs, but they don't last, they don't linger.
Bert: It's odd, you can get so close to things that you do have a big ding-dong, and then afterwards you'll think "Christ, what was that all about?"
You guys have written for sketch shows and entertainment shows as well as sitcoms. Do you have a preferred genre?
Bert: I think for me it's definitely narrative, so sitcoms. And I think George, you like sketches, don't you? I'll let George answer that, actually.
George: Thanks, I appreciate that. I like a good sitcom, I also do like sketches. But I don't think you can beat a really well put-together sitcom. I'm a massive fan of Seinfeld and Fawlty Towers - I think to put those together was a great skill. That's what I aspire to, but I do still like writing sketches.
Do you guys carry around notebooks and observe people in order to get ideas?
Bert: I do have a notebook, but I'm not like Alan Bennett sitting on the bus writing down what old ladies are saying. It's just that as a writer you generally have that antenna. A lot of it is about noticing your friends and what they do, or what your family do.
George: I don't carry a notebook, but I sometimes wish I did. If a funny situation happens, I try and remember it, and I inevitably forget, but it does tend to re-emerge at the appropriate moment during writing. But I should carry a notebook.
Bert: It's interesting how, when you're writing a scene, those stored little memories do pop up.
Of all of the shows that you've written for, what work are you most proud of?
George: Without wishing to push it, probably this - Pete Versus Life. It's such a complicated sitcom, and we think it's come out funny. We've got high hopes for it. I also liked some of the sketches we did for Armstrong and Miller (pictured, above right), both now and when they were on Channel 4.
Bert: I'd agree. That was sort of our first break, and it was a very exciting time. It was such an unusual show, they were open to anything, so we could do some really imaginative stuff. Likewise, we wrote for the second series of Big Train, which was also full or very creative ideas.