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Home , French and Saunders, Jon Plowman, The Vicar of Dibley

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TIMECODE NAME Dialogue MUSIC 00.00.01 NARRATOR This is the BBC academy podcast, essential listening for the production, journalism and technology broadcast communities. Your guide to everything from craft skills, to taking your next step in the industry. 00.00.13 CHARLES Hello, I’m Charles Miller, this week we’re hearing about the world of television comedy from one of its most successful practitioners, . If you haven’t heard of him don’t worry, he’s a producer not a performer but his work includes plenty of shows you will have heard of. , , , The Office, W1A and there are plenty more. At an event for the Media Society, Jon Plowman was interviewed by journalist Phil Harding, Jon offered his take on scripts, stars and what makes a great sitcom. 00.00.47 CHARLES Phil started by asking about Jon’s comic roots, which were back in school, he was no good at sport but he could make people laugh but he never expected that to turn into a career. 00.00.59 JON I didn’t spend my life thinking I want to make people laugh, if I thought anything, particularly a bit later than school, end of school I thought I want to be a theatre director and I was lucky enough to get a job early on at the Royal Court Theatre, with a wonderful guy called Lindsay Anderson, who made, if you’re old enough, movies like If and Oh Lucky Man and was a very, very good theatre director. 00.01.23 JON And I think the main thing I learnt from him and from working at the Royal Court was the thing which, to a certain extent goes through my career which is respect for writers, that the writer is king, that if people haven’t written something I haven’t got a job to do. You know if I think the Producers job is about anything, I think it’s about making sure that everybody involved in translating the writing to telly feel okay. 00.01.55 PHIL So it starts with the script? 00.01.57 JON It absolutely starts with the script. 00.02.00 CHARLES So how do comedy programmes get made, well they need a Producer to make them happen and the Producers needs a script. Finding a good script is a vital part of the Producers job, Phil Harding wanted to know how that works. 00.02.14 PHIL Have you ever had a script sent to you, as it were, blind, and just thought this is brilliant, this is absolutely, I must make this?

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00.02.24 JON It doesn’t happen quite like that. PHIL Or have you always known the person? 00.02.27 JON Well quite – sometimes, but it doesn’t quite happen like that it usually, I think the thing about comedy is it’s about surprise, you have to, you know if I tell you a joke you already know you might smile cause you’re being nice to me but if I tell you a joke you’ve never heard you might smile, or you laugh because there’s a surprise involved. And so I think reading scripts is partly about thinking what the hell is this about, you know I think if you read a script and you think oh I see its one of those, it feels like a sort of imitation sitcom, then probably it’s not going to go very far. PHIL Does it have to make you laugh? 00.03.14 JON It absolutely has to make you laugh but I think it also has to interest you, by which I don’t mean you know I’m interested in X and Y and therefore it has to be about X and Y, but I mean that you have to read it and think I’ve no idea what this person is on, but (laughing) I wouldn’t mind taking some of it. CHARLES As well as a script a producer needs great performers, in some cases the performers write their own material, French and Saunders did that, often while they were rehearsing, Jon described the process. 00.03.52 JON I remember the first I met them sort of in a producing, writing context was in a small room opposite Hammersmith tube station that they’d hired for the duration and there were two main events in the room, one was post it notes along the wall and the other was magazines. So they had lots of ideas, the way they wrote was that whoever’s idea got a bit of traction between them, so Dawn would say what about and talk and dah, dah, dah, and then she would go home, if they sort of agreed on that and they’d improved the dialogue, she would then go home and write that up and the same for Jennifer except Jennifer was less good at writing it up. 00.04.43 I think it’s fair to say, but they worked by testing their material a lot and I think that’s not a bad way of working out what works and what doesn’t. I don’t mean they tested it by going to comedy clubs and doing it which is one way of testing it, but I mean they tested it sort of on each other, which is one of the great advantages of double acts. CHARLES The result was what Jon praised for being pure silliness. 00.05.11 JON At the time that I was doing this I was also working with and Griff Rhys Jones on their series and the contrast is interesting cause what Dawn and Jennifer do is they’re just silly, and I say just silly although I think it’s one of the most difficult things to be on television and I remember Mel www.bbc.co.uk/academy 2 3

and Griff literally saying but they’re just silly. CHARLES From French and Saunders came another hit series, the inspiration was one particular sketch. 00.05.48 JON We’d done this sketch called Modern Mother and Daughter, which was essentially a sort of South Kensington sketch in which Jennifer played the mother who was downstairs, it was a role reversal thing, she was giving a party and the girl was studious, I don’t think she was called Saffie. PHIL The responsible figure, yeah. 00.06.13 JON She was the responsible figure, she was upstairs doing her homework, mum I’ve got to and there was talk about going to university, where are you going to go to university, Aberdeen. Aber Bloody Deen, I don’t know anybody in Aber Bloody anyway so we’d done the sketch and it was a sketch that Jennifer liked a lot, big part for Jennifer in it. LAUGHING PHIL Ouch. 00.06.38 JON No that’s not fair, and there were a number of sketches which I had sort of privately thought I suppose might make it in the series and this wasn’t one of them. So Jennifer had written this thing quietly, by herself, in pencil in an exercise book, and I’d got warning that I was going to be sent it and I read it and I thought this really isn’t like anything else, I don’t know that I thought this is going to be huge, but I did think this is different. CHARLES Different enough to be produced, Absolutely Fabulous ended up as another hit for Jon Plowman, but it wasn’t all plain sailing, accepted the part of Patsy, she was more used to straight acting at the time, which created some friction in her partnership with . 00.07.33 JON Joanna came in to sort of read with Jen for it and I don’t think it’s any secret to say that Joanna says she then went home, rang her agent and said get me out of this. LAUGHING 00.07.48 JON And I think I know why and I don’t think it was really the part, I think it was Jennifer sort of from time to time, particularly in the early days of rehearsing the show forgot that Joanna wasn’t Dawn. In other words she knew how to work with Dawn, it was a sort of tennis match and you lobbed it back and then somebody lobbed it. Joanna. PHIL Was used to having. 00.08.12 JON Was used to having a script, which had a beginning a middle and an end. And you got a sense of; you got a chance to www.bbc.co.uk/academy 3 4

rehearse your script and so on. Whereas this was a different feeling. PHIL Did she find that very hard? 00.08.26 JON I think she did find it hard and well done her for carrying on, because again, this may be a relatively well known story about the show but Jennifer wasn’t, okay, generosity Jon, what she believed was that if she didn’t write it down, i.e. the script, if she didn’t write the script down it could boil around in her head and get better. CHARLES As the schedule for filming and studio recording approached Jon and the rest of the production team made increasingly desperate efforts to get Jennifer Saunders to send them a script. It was a well practised routine. 00.09.09 JON She knew the order of events, she knew that I would ring up and say when do you think we’ll get a script and she would, I think it’s fair to say, lie, and say oh nearly there you’ll get it by Friday. Oh Friday comes, nothing, yeah I think my computer ate it or the dog ate my fax machine or no but it’ll be with you Monday I promise, honestly its fine. And obviously I knew the game she was playing and she knew the game she was playing, but she also knew the next person who would ring up would be the designer, because he needed to know what to build for that week’s episode. So he would then ring up and say what do we need and she would say, okay, I think we need the kitchen, I think we need the front room, no we don’t need the front room, I think we need the kitchen and we need the hall and then there would be various locations. 00.10.05 I knew we were in for a relatively surreal experience when in the first, so the standard way is you do some filming then you rehearse each episode so you have 6 weeks of studios and we’d done the filming for Series 1 and we’d got to about Episode 3 in terms of rehearsing and recording and Jennifer said could you show me what we’ve filmed for the last episode because I’ve sort of forgotten. And I’ll have to write the episode around what we’ve filmed already. 00.10.48 Now that may sound sensible to some of you, it’s slightly nerve wracking on the producers bowels if nothing else. It’s not necessarily the way you would normally expect to make a TV show. CHARLES Scripting was a very different business on the Vicar of Dibley, starring Jennifer Saunder’s performing partner . Here the script was written in advance by Paul Mayhew Archer and , fresh from his success with Four Weddings and a Funeral. Here’s Jon’s analysis of how the writers structured the first half of the first episode in www.bbc.co.uk/academy 4 5

order to introduce the star of the show. 00.11.33 JON I remember when we were recording the first episode seeing what a very good structuralist as it were that Paul Mayhew Archer and Richard who wrote it together were, and I remember that there was a moment when Dawn’s character arrives and its about 12 minutes in to a 30 minute episode, now that’s quite a long time before meeting your main character, in other words you know to a certain extent people have switched on thinking hooray its Dawn French, or thinking I’ll see what this is, whatever, it’s quite a long time to leave it. 00.12.12 But it’s also an interesting sort of essay in how to write a certain type of sitcom. So starts with the death of the old vicar so first scene, Vicar dies. Second scene Parish Council meeting, you meet the main characters of the show and they go around the table talking about the new vicar or what’s going to happen. So we meet fussy man who takes the minutes, we meet a man who says yes, yes, yes, no. We meet a woman who has bizarre menu ideas, we meet a man who usually just had his hand up a cow and you sort of get a sense, oh okay, alright I’ve met them. 00.13.02 Cut to second scene where we meet the verger, there’s just a small scene between David Houghton and the verger and we meet the verger, hooray, then third scene pre the new vicar arriving we meet all those characters again, so we’ve got a sense, before Dawn arrives that there’s a man who says yes, yes, no, there’s a woman etcetera, etcetera, so he’s sort of established those characters before the leading character arrives. 00.13.37 And obviously it pays dividends because when she then meets them they do all that again and by the end of the episode you absolutely know, in the same way that you do with say Dad’s Army who these characters are. CHARLES Jon praised Richard Curtis’s understanding of what makes a sitcom work. And it isn’t all about the jokes. 00.13.59 JON He knows how you set up a sitcom so that the audience know what’s going on, that may sound stupid but what I mean is you’ve got to know, why do you laugh, you laugh cause you like the characters and because you enjoy what you know about them. So if you think about Dad’s Army, we know what Jon Laurie’s reaction to most situations is going to be, we know what John Le Mesurie’s going to do, we know what Pike is like, you know so we anticipate that we’re going to have a good time when Pike has to do whatever he has, you know. 00.14.40 So we know the characters and the surprise, cause it seems www.bbc.co.uk/academy 5 6

to be comedy is about surprise, comes when they either dont’ do that or when they do it but a bit more or a bit less than we thought they would. PHIL And in that scene, because we’ve had the characters already established. 00.14.57 JON We sort of get a sense of what she’s walking into. PHIL And her reaction to them. JON Yes. PHIL Works. 00.15.04 JON And also the fact that she doesn’t poke fun at them or laugh at them or whatever makes us like her. A lot of scripts particularly you know people who send scripts think that scripts are about jokes, I don’t really think they are, I think they’re about character and I think it’s sometimes about giving the characters some nice jokes but that’s not the main deal, the main deal is we like the characters and we’re going to have a nice time with them. CHARLES Phil Harding asked Jon about one of the differences between British and American comedy. PHIL British writers usually work either as single writes or as pairs, it’s very different to the American system of team writing. 00.15.51 JON Yes. PHIL What’s that all about? 00.15.54 JON The American system is about you’ve got to produce 22 episodes a year if not more, you’ve then got hopefully to get 5 Series because at the end of 5 Series you’ve done a 100 episodes you can sell it in syndication, nobody ever needs to work again. And a very good example of this, taken to an extreme was Charlie Sheen did a show called Anger Management recently, in which they made 45 episodes a year so that after 2 years they’d made enough, normally its 5 years, but after 2 years they’d made enough to have a 100 episodes to sell it in syndication. PHIL Wow. 00.16.40 JON So Charlie never needed to work again. And the way it works is usually one or possibly two people have a story idea for an episode and they take that away, everybody agrees that’s a good story they go away, they write that story up. And then they bring that script to the table with the other let’s say 10 writers there and you put the script on a screen and you go to the first line and the first line is usually because the way American writers tend to write is set up, gag, set up, gag, so first line, anybody got a better second line and you www.bbc.co.uk/academy 6 7

go through the script. 00.17.23 You might say improving it and in lots of cases you are improving it, you’re making it sharper, you’re making it set up gag, set up gag and that’s, I mean it’s a way of writing comedies that the American’s like. And I’m not saying I don’t, I do like it, i think it’s wonderful if it has problems it’s just a rhythm thing I think, it’s that it goes set up, gag, set up, gag, but it doesn’t vary from that, that you’re looking for a laugh at every other line. The American system has lots of advantages, it generates much more stuff and the American system has the money to generate much more stuff and one of the problems with British television is it doesn’t have enough money to make enough good comedy. CHARLES One of Jon’s programmes that started out as very British, but actually made it across to the States successfully was The Office, Jon talked about how he was originally approached by the then unknown Stephen Merchant and . 00.18.33 JON They had another thing you want in comedy, they had such confidence and they had such enthusiasm it was as it were already a big hit in American in their heads, before we made Episode 1. PHIL But in terms of comedy it was quite risky; it was shot like a documentary. JON Yes. PHIL It had none of the usual comedy kicks. JON Gags, yes. PHIL It didn’t have gags; it didn’t have a laughter track. JON No. 00.19.03 PHIL The audience wasn’t being given any cue about when to laugh or? JON No and that’s interesting because it first played out in the summer sort of August, beginning of September, and it didn’t do very well, I seem to remember being told it got the worst AI, which is Appreciation Index thing, audience appreciation index, it got the worst AI of any new series that year on BBC2. And then the controller of BBC 2, Jane Rue noticed something and god bless her for noticing it, she noticed that the last couple of episodes, most comedy’s sorry just to explain. 00.19.46 Most comedy’s get their highest audience for their first episode and then people either forget that they’re liked it or didn’t like it and it goes down and it usually then settles, so it settles with as it were the core audience and Ricky’s show had started there, which wasn’t very high to begin with and www.bbc.co.uk/academy 7 8

then gone down and then the last two episodes had just picked up. And what that sort of points to is either you put it in the wrong place and people had just come off from holiday and they didn’t know it was on, or, more likely word of mouth is good. 00.20.27 So people have found out that this thing is meant to be laughed at, it’s not a documentary which some of them thought it was, it’s a comedy and so she did a thing that BBC 2 doesn’t do very often even to this day, she repeated it a couple of months later, and it doubled its audience, so it’s a good repost to those who say why does the BBC do so many repeats. Well, the answer is cause sometimes you can make a show a hit, it doubled its audience on the repeat. 00.21.01 CHARLES And so the audience slowly learnt that they loved The Office and Ricky and Stephen have never looked back. Well that was Phil Harding talking to BBC comedy producer, Jon Plowman who incidentally got the OBE for services to three years ago. Our thanks to Jon and Phil and to the Media Society for putting on the event. There’s plenty more about comedy on the BBC Academy website, and if you’re interested in writing check out the BBC writer’s room. By the way there’s a transcript of this podcast on our website. Join us again next week for another podcast; I’m Charles Miller, thank you very much for listening. MUSIC 00.21.39 NARRATOR You’ve been listening to the BBC Academy podcast, if you want to find out more about this topic or to hear previous shows search online for the BBC Academy. MUSIC 00.21.54 END OF RECORDING

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