The Sketch What I Wrote for The Show What You Wrote

Writer Jack Bernhardt shares his example of a comic kitchen sink drama sketch and his top tips for sucessful submissions

Right click on this link and select 'Save Target As' to download Jack's kitchen sink drama script

If you’ve read that sketch what I wrote, you, like hundreds of other people, are now thinking, “Good God, why?” Here I will try to explain why I wrote it, through a series of hilarious bullet points!

The most important thing though is that these bullet points are just things that work for me – they’re definitely not a set of rules that you have to abide by. Most of all, make sure you write stuff that YOU find funny, otherwise you might as well be writing out the phonebook.

• LENGTH: if nothing else, it’s short. Most of the sketches we will use are under three pages. The best sketches are often no more than a page. In a fast-paced show like The Show What You Wrote you want your jokes to be quick and to-the-point as fast as possible.
• TASTE: try to keep it at the same level and tone as other Radio 4 comedy shows. Sketches that have gratuitous swearing or are just plain offensive don’t have much of a hope of getting on the show. The rudest word in this sketch is probably ‘kettle’.
• SETTING: as you’re writing for radio, you can set your sketch wherever you want. Outer space, the rainforest, medieval England… here I’ve chosen the outlandish world of A Kitchen in Lancashire Somewhere.
• FORMAT: each episode will have a number of different types of sketches – whether that’s a parody, a straight scene, or an interview. This sketch is a straight scene mixed with a bit of ‘soap’ parody, but it’s worth thinking about different ways a sketch can work without being just Two People In A Room Talking About Something (like this one).
• PLANNING: I tend to scribble out a couple of notes beforehand so I can work out whether the central conceit of the sketch works, then come up with a couple of jokes that come out of that. Otherwise I can get halfway through a sketch and realise that I don’t know where the next joke is coming from, or what the actual point of the sketch is.
• COMING UP WITH IDEAS: obviously people come up with sketches in different ways, but if I’m stuck for inspiration I like to think of a common trope in a genre or story and take that to its illogical extreme. In this case, it’s the trope of family revelations in a kitchen sink drama.

PS: If you try these things and none of them work for you, feel free to shout angry things at me on Twitter (@jackbern23).