I hadn’t intended to end the year with a Final Flourish and a Big Gesture but the decision to take my teaching and comedy chat off Twitter happened to coincide with a few other plans that mean it makes no sense to stay. I still call it Twitter. This isn’t a passive-aggressive attempt to stick […]
I mentioned earlier this week that some of the top comedy writers began their careers writing one line jokes for BBC Radio. We do still have a BBC Radio Comedy office (now incorporated into BBC Sounds) but there are half as many producers and fewer shows. Decades of cuts, underfunding and bullying have made it
Great news! The British Comedy Guide have announced they’re running another conference, which will take place in the last weekend of September. Meanwhile on the 21 and 22 May you can catch Steve Coogan and Lisa McGee at the BBC Belfast Comedy Festival. https://www.comedy.co.uk/pro/opportunities/318 I always recommend you go if you can, quite simply there is
How We’ve Helped 42 43 Writers To Their First Professional Credit There are many ways to start your career as a comedy writer, and nothing gets you noticed faster than being able to write topical jokes for the radio. Times have changed. The opportunities for a successful topical comedy writer are no longer as bountiful as
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What do the following top writers have in common: Georgia Pritchett (Succession, The Thick Of It), Simon Blackwell (Back, Breeders, Private Life of David Copperfield), Mark Burton (Madagascar, Shaun The Sheep), John O’Farrell (Chicken Run, Mrs Doubtfire The Musical)? The answer is they all achieved their first professional credits writing one-line topical jokes for BBC
Yes. The answer’s yes. Emphatic. You can start earning money today. Thanks to the almost year-round existence of topical comedy, you can listen to the news, come up with a joke about it, send it to a producer and hear it go out on BBC Radio in the next couple of days. As far as
Can You Make A Living Writing Comedy? Yes But… Doors opening… For the first three decades as a comedy writer for TV and radio there was only one piece of advice guaranteed to confer an immediate advantage over your competitors. All you needed was to be a white middle-class man. Lucky me. That’s changed. There’s
In last month’s Q and A sessions I had two extreme versions of the same question. First, how do you deal with an unequivocally negative response to your script from a producer? Second, what the hell are you supposed to do when your script comes back with feedback from five different people and much of
On a day when the news got a whole lot worse I was already reeling from hearing about the death of Bill Dare. I was about to write “radio producer” because that’s the way most people knew him – and indeed, a huge amount of my time spent with him was in the world of
Attention comedy writers – the BBC Comedy Collective Bursary Award is open for submissions. But hurry! The deadline is a week on Friday, 31 January. There aren’t many competitions or schemes I unequivocally recommend comedy writers investigate – two to be precise. This is one of them. This will be the third year the BBC
Sixteen reasons why Horrible Histories was such a hit On Friday 29 November I’m off to BAFTA with a legion of writers, performers, costume designers and history experts to celebrate the Honorary Award for Horrible Histories. I wrote around 100 songs over ten years from 2009 and saw close-up how it evolved from just another
