1 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, Jon Plowman. 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. French and Saunders, the Vicar of Dibley, Absolutely Fabulous, 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? www.bbc.co.uk/academy 1 2 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 time 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 Mel Smith 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, Joanna Lumley accepted the part of Patsy, she was more used to straight acting at the time, which created some friction in her partnership with Jennifer Saunders. 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.