So last week the College went to Manchester and had fun, despite the weather living up to the Manchester cliche of dark, cold and drizzly. Further entertainment was provided by a group of WWE wrestlers on tour who were staying in our hotel, and were pursued by some quite alarming fans - overweight, massively pierced, and obsessive. Although the Kevlar vests recommended by Aspie Boy were unnecessary, one day I found a bullet outside the hotel, and the next day I found a discarded black bra with large green spots. Make of that what you will.
We began the week with a visit from Jon Mountague, who established the BBC's Comedy North and is now its executive producer. Jon talked about his past career, which involved working with some, um, large personalities including Alan Davies, Danny Baker, Jo Brand and Dale Winton, before setting up shop in Manchester. The unit has been responsible for I'm with Stupid, The Visit, Massive, Scallywagga, and co-produces Ideal with Baby Cow. A new series of Scallywagga has been commissioned, as well as a series from We are Klang! and a series of Admin, and the unit is working on web content as well as planning for a potential series of low-cost pilots.
We looked at the pilot of Spacehopper, which became Scallywagga the series, and discussed what changes were made and why. As expected, they were a mixture of thoughts from the commissioner and channel, and analysis from the production team,which led to some re-casting, a new stylistic focus, and more young characters at the expense of older ones to fit the brief of BBC3. Further adjustments are expected in the second series, highlighting the fact that television series evolve.
The writers then embarked on their project for the week - re-storylining and re-writing scenes for a problem first draft of an established audience sitcom. At our summer workshop, the writers had asked for this one to have a practical element, so for some of the time they became a team, with me as sort of guide and sort of writers' assistant, trying to avoid giving away the solution that the production found for the episode.
It was an interesting and, as it developed, demanding experience, which if nothing else demonstrated that solving problems with a team is just as hard as solving them by oneself. The solution that the production chose actually hovered in the air before disappearing, but the analysis was good and the rewriting was enjoyable. Watching the finished episode was illuminating, and the consensus - though hardly earth-shattering - was that mainstream sitcom isn't as easy as it looks. Given more time, I think the group would have come up with a valid and entertaining alternative solution.
We had a surgery session, when the writers talked about how their original ideas were coming on and problems they were facing, which resulted in some useful suggestions. One good thing about the college is that it's not competitive, so people are happy to chip in ideas rather than guarding them in case someone else wins.
Then we had a visit from a winner, the Manchester-based writer Danny Peak, who came top in the Sitcom Talent competition of 2002 with his show The Bunk Bed Boys. Having won a competition in 1992, Danny worked on scripts without success until Talent, a remarkable example of keeping faith with your ambitions. Since 2002, he has written episodes of a number of shows, including Two Pints, My Hero and My Parents are Aliens, until being asked to write I'm with Stupid, and then gaining a commission this year for a BBC1 sitcom, Big Top as well as writing on Not Going Out.
Danny is a big P G Wodehouse fan, keeps a shelf of published scripts, and as a book for writers recommends Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott.
Our third visitor was the Brighton-based psychotherapist and writer, Loretta Riordan, who did a fascinating session on the psychology of character, having endured a difficult train journey with many diversions and a coach full of drunken QPR fans on their way to defeat by Manchester United. (Arsenal's young guns triumphed over Wigan that night, though the senior Unreliables failed to follow suit against Aston Villa on Saturday).
Beginning with Freud's analysis of humour and jokes, continuing with Jung's archetypes, moving on to Adler's adoption of humour as a therapeutic tool, and advising avoidance of websites which talk about enneagrams and personality scales, Loretta instead recommended delving into the literature of transactional analysis as a useful tool for writers devising characters (the foriginator of TA, Eric Berne, has an entertaining book called Games People Play), and not least looking into oneself by keeping a journal and doing 'free writing' - essentially thinking of a character or topic and writing for no more than ten minutes without thinking. Then take the most important thought, express it in a sentence, and free write again.
As parting exercises, Loretta invited us to think of the person in our lives to whom we had felt the strongest negative response and to work out why, and to say without reflecting what our favourte fairy stories were (there was one confusion when someone picked Rumplestiltskin when meaning Rapunzel, doubtless Freudian in some sense).
There wasn't time to analyse this in Manchester, but I've been thinking about my choice of Sleeping Beauty. Am I the Prince or Beauty (in the spiritual sense, obviously)? Thinking about that made me think about aspects of myself and before I knew it I had invented two viable characters. So, as I heard no one say in Manchester, think on.
