My big break on Radio 4 Extra’s Newsjack

 I’m Gabby, and I’m one of this year’s BBC Radio Comedy Contract Writers, which means that for 12 months I’m being paid a wage to come in and write across a range of comedy shows and develop my career as a comedy writer. For those of you thinking that would be the best job in the world – you’re right. It’s amazing.

Three years ago I was a 32-year-old at-home mum and radio comedy enthusiast. I’d grown up on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue and Round the Horne courtesy of my Dad, gone through being a smug teen who’d known about people like Harry Hill and the Goodness Gracious Me team years before my friends because I’d been a fan of their radio shows, and graduated to losing myself in the world of Bleak Expectations or getting far too emotionally invested in what happened in Cabin Pressure while doing the washing up.

,I was an amateur writer, but I had no professional writing credits to my name. Then, in spring 2012 I submitted some sketches and jokes to Newsjack. And got absolutely nothing on. I sulked and complained and forgot about it. Then in autumn 2012 a new series of Newsjack started and I tried again, and started getting sketches through to the final edit. With a fairly good hit rate, the producers invited me in to a writer’s meeting that series. I was able to come up with pitches that they liked and sketches they were happy with, so the next series I received a commission, which is when I believed I could make a career out of comedy writing.

From that first Newsjack contact I started getting bits of freelance comedy writing work, which meant that last spring I had the right amount of broadcast experience to go for the Contract Writer post. What’s great about Newsjack is that it opens up doors for everybody, no matter what your walk of life; if your work is enjoyed then it can be a great first step towards a career in comedy.

Because it’s such a great opportunity, Newsjack does get a lot of submissions – hundreds of sketches and thousands of one-liners every week, and it’s hard to get your material through the many cuts to get to the recording script, let alone the final edit. I’ve had many more sketches rejected than put through, but I find that following this advice does help: 

• Look through the news at the weekend for stories to use, especially on a Sunday night or Monday morning (if you have the time to then). The sketch deadline’s Monday at noon, but the show doesn’t go out till Thursday, so the fresher the story the better. Unless it’s a massive story, if it happened any earlier than Saturday I treat it as old news.
• Don’t just look at the big political stories, lots of people are going to be doing sketches about those and they’re not going to broadcast lots of sketches about the same story. Bear in mind though, if you do write about the big stories, you need to be inventive with your treatment or angle. Don’t write up the first idea that comes into your head – you are best off discarding that and looking for something more original to make yours stand out from the others. I find going through the Science, Environment & Tech sections particularly useful, as well as Arts & Entertainment. Last series we were also noticeably low on Sports sketches, so that’s worth having a crack at, even if you don’t know much about the sport in question, as long as you can find what’s funny about the story. I know very little about horse racing, but one of the Newsjack sketches I’m proudest of is in the form of a horse race commentary (listen in the clip below). 

• Good sketches are joke lead. If it doesn’t have at least one joke per line (or one short line that’s a set-up followed by a punchline) then it’s going to die. Newsjack’s recorded in front of an audience of about 200, your sketch has to have them laughing out loud throughout.
• Be as brief as you can. Make your point in as funny a way as possible, and then get out quickly. I aim for sketches to be under three pages. Chances are, if it makes it through, it’ll be cut to under two pages anyway.
• Write a short introduction for the host. Introduce the story, add a quick joke, set up the sketch and you should be away.
• Remember that there will always be a cast of two women and two men. You’ll be surprised how many sketches we get with fice people in, or three characters that have to be played by men, or sketches where there’s one woman who’s just there to feed lines to the male voices. We’ve got some brilliant female talent on the show, and the producers are going to want material that makes good use of them.
• Know how your sketch is going to end before you start writing it. You need to go out on a strong punchline or funny twist, it helps to have the backbone of the sketch planned out first so you can get the structure right. It’ll save you a lot of staring at a three page sketch wondering how the hell to make it stop. I speak from bitter experience here.

BBC Radio 4 Extra’s Newsjack begins on Thursday 26th February at 10.30pm, and jokes can be submitted here.

Gabby Hutchinson Crouch is a BBC Radio Comedy Writer