TOUGH CROWD by Graham Linehan

Author:Graham Linehan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-09-15T09:53:18+00:00

14

It All Comes TogetheR. No One Cares

I worked on a show where some of my collaborators on the production were stiff and slow and argumentative, and the scripts always had a tangled mess of dead wood in them, because they refused to do that part of the process that is absolutely vital when you’re rewriting, which is clearing that stuff out; anything that muddies the plot, disrupts its flow or puzzles the audience, you have to get rid of all of it. Twice, I was hired on a sketch show by friends, ostensibly as a script editor, and twice, I was fired when those friends realised they would have to do some work. Punching-up jokes on a flawed premise is like mopping ice off the deck of the Titanic.

For a show to be a living thing – for it to have that special something that holds your attention throughout a lengthy process – you must be open to feedback. Your actors are your first audience. If something is bugging them, listen carefully. Each actor sees the story as a timeline they’re passing through, and if something is obstructing them, it might get in the way of the audience’s engagement too. Just as audiences will ask ‘But why didn’t he…?’ or ‘Why doesn’t he just…?’, actors will raise the same kind of questions. They are your scouts, warning you of treacherous ground ahead.

To extend the metaphor for a moment, the crew are your soldiers. They’re your first audience and, like your eventual audience, they are discerning people who know what they like. You’re surrounded by dozens of people who could give you a single idea that might raise the show from a conventional experience to one that is truly unique. Keep your antennae twitching. A member of the cast or crew might tell a joke that gives you a solution to a problem you didn’t even know you had.

But to allow that process to happen, you have to get out of your own way. ‘Rewriting’ is too prissy a word for the early part of the process. Think of your story as a bonsai tree hidden somewhere in the chaos of an overgrown yard. With the micro-scale of a bonsai tree, the imperfections are clear, and you can set about them with those clippers that make a tidy snip. But those clippers arrive at the end of the process. The tools you need for the overgrown yard are a machete and a skip.

Now don’t get me wrong. It is possible to sort of accidentally write a perfect script. The Father Ted episode ‘Flight Into Terror’, for example, barely changed from its first draft to the last. But for the most part, a first draft will not have: foreshadowing (because you don’t quite know where you’re going); set-ups and payoffs; consistent characters; and a comfortable, confident tone that carries through the whole thing. That’s your target, and ninety-nine percent of the time you’re not going to hit it with your first draft.

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