Channel 4 Workshop for Sitcom Competition Finalists

Meet the writers:  Jenny LeCoat

I was a standup for 11 years; I did other things like feature-writing, acting and presenting. I decided I wanted to write 7 years ago and have been doing it as a full-time professional for 4 or 5 years.

The main thing that I've had on which you may have seen was an ITV sitcom called Sometime Never which took five years to get on screen from the first meeting and lasted 7 weeks and didn't get re-commissioned. I thought what I'd do today is not talk about structure and stuff like that, I thought I'd talk generally about being a writer in the business as this is the kind of stuff... I was told some of this seven years ago, I'm glad I was, some of it I wasn't told and I wish I had been. I'm just trying to pass on what I learnt from that process really. You will meet a lot of people, present company excepted - and I mean that quite honestly - you will meet more wankers in this industry then you've ever met in your life. If someone comes up with very concrete rules and starts saying to you things like "it has to be structured in this way, it has to have a three act structure", make a note of it and then shove it up their arse and set fire to it because there are no rules at all. There are guidelines but the most important thing is to work that stuff out yourself, not listen to people who say "it has to be done this way" and try and fix some kind of blueprint over everything you write because that's not going to be helpful. The main thing to remember about this, someone told me this when I started writing, nobody knows anything. Nobody.

What Paul was saying about people like John Sullivan - absolutely right. People like Marks and Gran, John Sullivan, Clement and La Frenais, all these people we look up to have all had an enormous failure in the last 5 or 6 years. It's not a science, nobody knows the answers. So you'll get a lot of knockbacks but just remember they don't know more than you - but of course that works both ways - everybody knows something and therefore you've got to take that on board. The first point that I really want to make is that you've got to listen to everyone, in terms of opinion, and that doesn't just mean your script editor or your producer and people like that - however irritating they may be to you it doesn't mean they haven't got something useful to say. I always try and show stuff to my Mom now, because my Mom is like that constituency somewhere in the Midlands which always goes the same way as the elections. If my Mom likes a show, it's always a hit, if she doesn't like a show, it's always a flop so I'll always ask her - in terms of new programmes or in terms of scripts I'm working on - "Would you watch this?". If she says "Yes, darling" in that kind of unconvincing, you're my daughter kind of way, I know to throw it straight in the bin. The postman might know as much as your script editor; someone in the pub may not express it in the same way as your script editor but they may have actually come up with the same point. So listen to everybody and take on everyone's opinions and just because they're quite sad or whatever it doesn't mean they're not going to say something useful.

On the same kind of theme, don't get married too much to one idea, possibly your original idea. When I first took the idea of what became Sometime Never to Alomo, it was originally a show about a woman living with an ex-boyfriend and we couldn't really find a reason why she was living with him. But I was determined - "this is the idea I want to write" and I was forcing it all the time and it took me about a year of shoe-horning the situation together all the time... it just wasn't truthful. Try to be flexible about your idea and the one way to do that I think, is to try to work out what it is in that show that interests you. It might just be one particular character, one particular relationship and you might have to set it in a Post Office, maybe the people don't live in the same house. Work out what it is and pare it out - "that's the bit I want to write about, that's the bit I care about". Then you're free to take that into whatever context you think is right because the hardest thing is to get at what you want to write, it normally takes months.

In terms of listening to everyone, you've also got to interpret what they say. If my Mom says "I don't like this bit" what she may mean is that character isn't clearly written or defined enough. You will also have a 19 year old script editor - who's read a book or gone on a course - saying "I feel this section should be more yellow, do you know what I mean". She will be talking out of her arse but there may actually be a genuine point in there so you have to work out what it is and then decide if that's a valid point.

The other side of that same coin which is my second main point is trust your instincts and, no matter who the person is who's giving you notes or advice, if you really feel that that advice is wrong for you or that project, if all your instincts are telling you not to do that then don't do it. As Paul said you've got to write for yourself, you can't write for other people. Take all the advice, process it, consider it carefully but if you really feel it's wrong don't take it. There's a quote in a book about sitcom writing "there's a million ways to succeed in writing comedy but there's only one guaranteed way to fail and that's to write what you think somebody else wants". It's no use second-guessing them, and it probably won't be what they want anyway - and that applies to script-editors, producers and also audiences as well. Those are the two main things.

Paul covered some of this... be clear about your idea - decide what you want to write. The one mistake I made when I wrote Sometime Never, I quite liked the pilot - the pilot's quite good - when I came to write the series - there was a gap between the time they decided they wanted the series and a gap before I actually wrote it - and because it was the girls from the Philadelphia ads there was quite a lot of publicity about it. And they all said "it was a show about two friends" and I started to believe the publicity, actually, and I started to write a show about two friends and I lost the focus. The show was meant to be about one woman, one character with a subsidiary friend who reacted to what was going on her life and I just slightly lost the focus of that because I forgot what the show was about. Decide what the show means in one sentence and write it above your computer or wherever you work, and look at it every day and remind yourself what the show is about. So if you start going off at tangents and you suddenly find yourself writing about something it wasn't originally about - you've lost the plot of the show. A kind of obvious thing to say, that's been said to me many times and is a criticism that's nearly always right is "don't leave it in your head, put it on the page." I know what Paul was saying about "don't put everything down" and that's quite right but it's sometimes easy to have so much in your mind that you haven't actually transferred it to what you've written.

So you've worked out a fantastic character whose prime characteristic is they're very selfish, for example, don't write a script or send it in as a pilot, about the character who goes on holiday with their mates. What's that got to do with them being selfish? And it's no good you saying at that first meeting "ah, but the thing is they're selfish", it's got to be that what's in your head is on the paper and the primary characteristics of that person has got to be clear so if it's necessary make sure it's in there somewhere - at least in the pilot.

The only other thing to say, really, is be prepared for a long haul because, as Paul said, you're going to get constant rejection. I thought getting one series off was going to make it easier to get another series but I did the show now about two years ago. I'm still putting ideas in, they're still coming back.

I have pretty good relationships with people that work in most of the main broadcasting areas.

I get meetings but it doesn't mean they like what I'm selling. And you're constantly going to get rejected - "well, I've actually got something like this already" or "we feel that's been done". There's terrible fashions, in the industry as well, which is nonsense most of the time. I do remember seeing a script editor at an independent company who shall remain nameless who said that "the working class sitcom is dead, what we want now is nice middle class sitcoms with a big kitchen set." I said "what?". And she said "Yes, you look at Absolutely Fabulous, the reason that was such a success was because people look at that kitchen and they want that kitchen. It's an aspirational thing. That's where the future of comedy is going." I think I left the office crying. But you're going to come across that stuff as well. The only thing to do is to keep going, listen to everybody - even if it's a totally radical idea - listen to them and consider it seriously and if you feel it's wrong reject it. And basically just keep banging away as that's the only way you'll get better. If you can read stuff that you wrote a year - 18 months ago and think "that's not very good, I can do better than that now", that means you're getting better now. If you feel that you're improving and learning that's very, very important.

<Five years seems long>

Five years is not all that long. It started with a two page idea. They didn't like it but they saw something in the way I'd written it that made them think I could write. I went to lunch a couple of times; we discussed the central relationship for about six months; they said go away and think about this; I worked on other treatments.

At that stage there was an option taken out which was a few hundred pounds, no money, so I was doing it for love. Eventually they commission a pilot script. That's where you start to get the money. The irony of comedy writing is the money is completely the wrong way round. You do most of the work for nothing or for a few hundred quid working out the characters, the structure, the motor, how it all comes together and when you spend two years working on that, someone commissions a script and you get loads of money to just fill in the dialogue but that's unfortunately how it works. So there were a couple of scripts written. ITV liked the first one, wasn't sure about the second one so that took a few months to write, we're up to 2 years. ITV then spent 18 months talking about casting, we had endless meetings. "What about Cilla Black?" It's the most depressing thing to go through, all they're interested in really is that they've got a contract with a big star they're paying half a million quid a year and they have to find a vehicle for them and they're not interested half the time whether someone is suitable for the rôle. I was able to say no but in the end if you're arguing about something for 18 months it gets to the point where if someone's said they're going to use glove puppets you think: "Yes". You get to the point where you say yes to anything. The person you choose may not be available so you go to the third and fourth and fifth choice. If you're very lucky you may get to cast, you're involved in that process but you won't be the only voice in the process.

You don't have a lot of clout on your first series. I would advise that if you feel very strongly stick to your guns about it otherwise major things will slip by and you realise it's too late to do anything about it.

After the wait for 3 and half years I only had two months to write the show having spent so long talking about nothing. Again, that's the way it works. That's how the five years fill up. The worst thing is you never get a champagne moment - "Yes, now! I'm going on air!" - because it's just a relief after four years. So if you get a chance to celebrate go out and celebrate.

<Scripts or treatment?>

Having done some scripts and had a series on, if I can't sell an idea to someone in treatment there's not much point in writing a script but having said that if you do a treatment they're going to want to see a scene breakdown or an episode one outline so you've done an awful lot of groundwork anyway. If you're starting off you're probably going to need to have a calling card script. There's no hard fast way of doing things. I guess if you've written a script it's because you want to write that as a series but I've also sent sample scripts [to try and get on existing shows]. If I had no idea who this person was, I'd want to see any script just to prove you can put words on a page, just to prove you know how to structure things; it doesn't have to be a perfect finished thing, just something.

<ITV?>

I would avoid ITV for the simple reason, personally, that I don't think they have a real commitment to situation comedy. They are controlled by advertisers, they panic, they want the first series to get 10 million viewers and build to 13, 14 and with all sitcoms that just doesn't happen, it will never happen because sitcom is character based and people have to get to know all the characters. Until they have the commitment to letting shows bed in then they will be not my first choice but we don't have that many outlets in this country. Channel 5 may start making sitcoms but they haven't got the money. You've basically got BBC, ITV and Channel 4 and that's it. So if the BBC and Channel 4 don't want it...oh well. It could change if ITV get one big hit show; they could then have faith in the sitcom format.
 

1: Meet the writers: Paul Mayhew Archer
2: Meet the writers: Jenny Lecoat
3: The Actors Kick Back
4: Working with Comedy Producers
5: Meet the Commissioners