Andrew Collins - Sitcom Writing Interview

Andrew Collins (photo, left), who co-wrote "Not Going Out" with Lee Mack (photo, right) kindly took some time out from his busy life to talk to us about creating their new BBC1 comedy and provide some insight into what it is like to write a mainstream sitcom.

Andrew Collins has also written the sitcom 'Grass' which was shown on the BBC in 2003. Apart from being a sitcom writer Andrew is also a popular author, award-winning broadcaster (BBC 6 Music: Saturday 4-6pm and Sunday 2-5pm), host of Radio 4's Banter and the Radio Times film critic! He has been the editor of NME and Q Magazine and a scriptwriter for Eastenders amongst other things. Andrew's official website is: www.wherediditallgoright.com

Hi Andrew. Thanks for taking time to talk to us. Perhaps we could start off by asking how you first got involved in comedy writing?

I've always been a heavy consumer of comedy, making tapes of my favourite shows in the early days of video and re-watching them. I suppose, although this was done for pleasure, it meant I developed an analytical eye for what I found funny. After I left college in 1987, I joined a comedy theatre group at St George's Hospital Medical School in Tooting, South London, and we performed a number of self-written comedy plays at the hospital's purpose-built theatre. The group was founded by a mutual friend called Matthew Hall, a trainee doctor. We even took one play to the Edinburgh Fringe, in 1989, which was an experience I'll always look back on fondly. A formative experience in performing and writing comedy. And yes, Matthew Hall did give up medicine and change his name to Harry Hill. That was him! And he hasn't changed a bit since those days. Less hair. More money.

Meeting Stuart Maconie at the NME in 1988 was key. He and I have a very similar sense of humour, and clicked straight away. We wrote humorous items for a now defunct NME section called Thrills, a section Stuart went on to edit. We became something of a team at the NME, and this led to our first experience on the radio, providing satirical items for a show on the old Radio 5 called The Mix (hosted by Richard Coles), then its replacement, Fabulous (hosted by Mark Lamarr, then Johnny Vaughan). We ended up getting a commission to write and star in our own comedy series, Fantastic Voyage, which was a parody of yoof television. This was in 1993. It was a great experience, and it gave us the comedy bug. We always used humour in our subsequent gigs together, the Hit Parade on Radio 1, the Movie Club on ITV. This was my grounding. We wrote the pilot of a sitcom that was never commissioned called Bully For Men (about a men's magazine), and ended up co-writing Clive James' last ITV comedy spectacular, Night Of A Thousand Years for new year's eve 1999. So that's how, really. It's all in my book [That's Me In The Corner, Published May 2007].

You went on to become, amongst other things, a staff writer on EastEnders. Writing comedy must be very different from writing drama like EastEnders?

No. It was my two and a half years' writing for EastEnders that got me Grass. Simon [Day] already had the character, Billy Bleach, and the basic premise, but the draft I saw was just a series of gags with no character development or dramatic structure - the basics of drama writing. So I was brought in to see if I could bring some of that to the table. The first thing I did was interrogate Simon about his characters - has he been married? What are his parents like? How old is he? - and this "dramatic" approach bore fruit. We actually structured Grass like a drama, and the humour came from the dialogue. I could never have done Grass without EastEnders. Soap has been the most important experience of my writing career.

How did you become involved with the writing of "Not Going Out"?

It was a blind date set up by Avalon, the comedy production and management company who had the programme in development with Lee Mack, who's also a client of theirs. Because I'd been drafted in on Grass a previous Avalon-linked project - Simon Day used to be managed by them too - and it had worked out, they obviously thought I could provide a similar co-writing service again. So I had a sense of déjà vu when I first met Lee at Avalon. Although in both cases, there ended up being no real demarcation once we started writing, as Simon and Lee were both as keen to get the story right, and I also ended up doing gags!

Mainstream sitcoms are notoriously difficult to get right... in fact looking back over the last 10 years of BBC1 sitcoms it would appear to be the biggest challenge in the comedy industry! Did this cross your mind before getting involved with the project?

I feel I am more instinctively better at story, structure and character than actual gags and punchlines, although I've written comic stuff for myself on the radio before, and one of my first ever commissions back in 1993 was a six-part radio comedy written with Stuart Maconie called Fantastic Voyage on Radio Five. That said, Lee's vision was for an old-fashioned sitcom, with audience, and punchlines. At that stage, it should be noted, we were developing Not Going Out with a view to it showing on BBC2, not BBC1. So our ideas were a little edgier than something like My Family. I realised that this would be a challenge, and relished working with someone new. You only improve by trying new things with new people, and I liked Lee from day one.

How long did it take you to write the series?

We wrote the pilot script in a month. It came remarkably easily. This earned us a commission from the BBC to shoot it as a non-broadcast pilot. Once this had been made and a six-part series commissioned for BBC1, we were locked in a rented writing office in Central London from the beginning of January 2006 to the middle of June, solid, five days a week. It took that long to write the other five episodes - with some preliminary work before Christmas at my house and Lee's house.

Where did you write the series? Did you always write with Lee or did you spend time working on sections separately?

Six months solid, Monday to Friday, in a soulless rented office in Central London, with Matthew Holness and Richard Ayoade in the office next door writing Man To Man With Dean Learner, another Avalon production. It was like the Brill Building, except for comedy. We would meet at the kitchenette and compare gags. Lee and I worked together the whole time, with occasional days apart writing separately for reasons of sanity. Paul Kerensa came in for the last month or so on a permanent basis to help keep the energy levels up on the last episode we wrote. Paul, Simon Evans and Derren Litten also supplied extra gags after a day's brainstorming in the office. And once the six scripts were finished, and rehearsals started, Lee, Paul and Simon added and changed stuff according to the way the rehearsals were going.

How much time was spent re-writing?

Not a single scene of Not Going Out came out exactly as we wanted first time. Most of the rewriting took place as we went along. We'd finish for the day, come back the next morning and spend the first part of the day rewriting. It was a constant honing process. Lee, in particular, would think about the script overnight and have certain ideas that we'd work in the next day. I was more the kind of writer who switched off when we left the office and didn't switch on again until the next morning. There's no average number of times, as it was ongoing.

What were the main reasons for the re-writes?

The two main reasons for rewriting were: the story would change, or the joke needed improving. We worked hard on plotting before we wrote a word, but inevitably, the subtle nuances of motivation would change as we went along, and these would affect a lot of the dialogue. Jokes? Well, we set ourselves a hard target for jokes, so reading back and finding that, say, Lee had all the best lines, and Kate had no funny lines for three in a row, we'd roll our sleeves up and try and re-dress the balance. We didn't want Kate to be the straight woman.

Talking of jokes, where does you inspiration for jokes come from? There are 100s packed into every episode!

Lee is a gag machine. If you see his stand-up show, there is a high gag rate, albeit not as insanely high as the record-breaking gag-rate in Tim Vine's! We start with a story and spend many days plotting it out in detail. Once the story's watertight, we start writing the dialogue, from whence the jokes arise. So, the inspiration is the situation and the relationship between the characters. Also, as you'd expect, some of the gags have been tried and tested on stage by Lee. We tried not to crowbar these in, but sometimes the opportunity was staring us in the face, so it would have been mad not to.

Did the fact the sitcom was to be broadcast on BBC1 just post-watershed have any impact upon your gags?

What joke you are most proud of having come up with?

It's hard to claim individual ownership of a joke, as they came out of a collaborative process, so all jokes/scenes are "ours", rather than "mine." That said, I was pleased with the line, "It's not like turning on a tap." "Force it." "Alright, it's not like turning on a faucet." Why? Because it's clean, it's related to character (ie. Kate's American, he's English) and it has a nice rhythm.

How did you plan and manage the plot of each episode?

Using a lot of coloured Post-it notes.

Did you set out to write to the strengths of the cast or was the show written then the cast found to match the characters?

Lee was always Lee, obviously. Tim was cast very early on (he was in the pilot in November 2005), we wrote his character with Tim in mind throughout. Megan was cast after we'd written two episodes, so we went back and rewrote her character in those. So on the whole, the three main characters were written with the actors in mind. Julia Morris, who played Ruth in Aussie, was actually the studio warm-up comedian for the pilot, and Lee and I wrote that part with her in mind, though she had to read for it along with other actresses. The other supporting characters were completely written before they were cast, but it's amazing, and gratifying, to see how much a good performer can bring to even a small part, such as Miranda Hart as the acupuncturist in Stress. Fantastic. She doubled the impact of the lines we'd written.

"Not Going Out" has just three main characters and only one, maybe two 'guest' characters in an episode. Not many for a mainstream sitcom. Why did you choose to focus on such a small group?

It's a classic love triangle. Without analysing it too much, it also fits the classic "family" structure of all the best sitcoms, with Tim and Kate as the "parents" and Lee as "the wayward son". Obviously, this is theoretically complicated by Lee and Kate's bubbling-under romance, but try not to think about it too much. I like the simplicity of less characters. Different kettle of fish, but Grass was awash with characters, it was more like a soap, so it was good to do something different. Lee and I promised ourselves we'd do one episode with no other characters, and even toyed with the idea of a siege, where Lee, Tim and Kate are trapped in the flat, but maybe in the second series...

How do you avoid contradictions?

Like Lee in the Aussie episode, if in doubt, keep it vague, vague, vague. We never say how long ago Tim and Kate split up, for instance, nor give any ages. We've never actually said whether they own the flat or rent it. Or what part of London it's in, although it's hinted that it's Docklands by those glamorous inserts!

Did Avalon or the BBC get involved much in the creation process?

It's amazing how little interference we had from the BBC. Avalon had to keep an eye on cost, as they had the purse strings, so certain flights of fancy of ours had to be reined in, but that's just the practicalities of filming a sitcom. The scene where the car crashes in the episode Stress [episode 4] was pared back. I actually prefer the economy of how it turned out: one shot of an upturned car with a line from Tim. Much less messy than the epic scene we originally planned involving dripping petrol and a big explosion!

Our commissioning editor at the BBC, Lucy Lumsden obviously read the scripts as we finished them, and we had regular cast "table reads" with everybody involved present, to see how they read, including the BBC, so we weren't working in a vacuum. One episode which we liked turned out to be overcomplicated and confusing when it was read out, so we went back and did an extra week's work on it, as a result of the table read. So they were useful. That wasn't the BBC or Avalon interfering, simply keeping on top of the programme. And they were right.

When writing who did you mainly have to converse with (other than Lee of course)?

We kept in close contact with the producer Alex. He's the first point of contact. He's getting everything together, overseeing production and casting and all that stuff, while we're in a room, racing to finish in time. As exec producer, Lee was across everything, so it was much harder for him than it was me, as a humble writer - although I was invited to some of the final castings, which was good. I was there when Megan clinched it. On both sitcoms I've written, I've done so with the star of the show. I would imagine writing on your own, or with another writer, would involve a lot more to-ing and fro-ing with the producers etc. but with the star sitting opposite you, the connection to the finished product is more explicit.

Did you try and balance scenes between the main studio sets (the flat & the pub) and the outside locations to fit the budget? Or did you just write and see where your characters end up visiting each week.

We knew that budget would restrict the amount of location filming so we planned accordingly, but we always wanted the flat to be the main set - it was our equivalent of the church hall in Dad's Army or the lobby in Fawlty Towers. We always brought the story back there, and endeavoured to begin and end every episode there, as good sitcom is about equilibrium, the shattering thereof and the redress at the end.

Did you describe the layout of Kate's flat in the script or was this designed by the production team?

I think it was described in the first episode, but not in great detail. The set designer worked from our specifications, and brought his own design ideas and experience to the job. It was a great day when he brought in the little model of the set. Then we knew this was real.

Roughly how many pages did each script come to?

We went for around 7,000 words a script, which, double-spaced, came out at about 50-odd pages. The crucial timing came with the table reads - that's when you find out it's too short or too long.

Typically how many scenes are in each episode? Any views on whether writers should vary scene length e.g. interspersing longer scenes with shorter ones?

We went for an average of between ten and twelve scenes per episode. The opening scenes tended to be overlong, because that's where the story was set up, plus we had to establish the relationship for anyone tuning in for the first time. We didn't plan the lengths of the scenes, we just wrote a detailed scene breakdown listing the important story "beats" that needed to happen in each one. We worked through them and saw how long the scene was. If it was too long, we cut back into it. The creative part is knowing where to come into a scene, and when to get out. With a gag-based comedy you usually end on a good punchline, although occasionally, as with the episode Death [Episode 2], we actually ended on a line about the story ("You just have to pick the right moment..."), that was paid off in the next scene. No rules, as such.

The series was filmed in front of a live audience. Did you have to do anything different in terms of the scripting as a result?

Well, if an audience doesn't laugh at a joke, it may well not be funny, so if you're looking for cuts in the edit, that's a good place to start! I find big studio audiences to be incredibly receptive. They'll laugh at stuff that we didn't intend as a laugh, because they've made the effort to come to Teddington and they're here to laugh. We actually performed each script to a small invited audience at the rehearsal space in Soho to gauge audience reaction very early on, and their laughs and silences were duly noted. Once you get in the studio, hopefully the script is in pretty good shape, but they can always surprise you.

Once the writing was complete did you have much involvement in the project after this?

I had no influence over the direction or the filming. I was the one standing around on the studio floor trying not to get in the way of the cameras, just enjoying the process of seeing it come to life. Lee was exec producer, so he was hands-on.

We love your sitcom and the audience reaction to "Not Going Out" has been in the main very positive (which is fairly amazing for a mainstream sitcom) - were you nervous what the reaction would be or did you know you had a hit on your hands?

We certainly did not know we had a hit on our hands. I'm not sure yet that we do, although the audience figures seem to be holding steady, which is encouraging. We knew that the type of sitcom we were making was deeply unfashionable in a post-Office, post-Nighty Night age, and thus expected it to bypass critics. We convinced ourselves that the fact it was on BBC1 might work in our favour, as nobody expects a BBC1 sitcom to be any good any more. Sad, but true. People look to BBC2 and BBC3 nowadays, which is where Grass was shown. You can get away with less laughs there. But not on BBC1, not in front of a studio audience. Let's hope there's a second series, so the characters can be developed more. Because it's a short-run first series, we treated every episode as if were the pilot, and people were tuning in for the first time. To make it inclusive. In a second series you can assume more of an audience, and break the rules a bit.

We'd love to see second series of Not Going Out... glad to hear you'd be interested in writing some more! When might you get the greenlight?

No go ahead as I write. A decision could be made any time. Lead Balloon has already been recommissioned and that started in the same week as us. I guess it's a bigger commitment on BBC1. We'll see. I don't want to tempt fate talking about a second series. There's certainly a lot you could do with the characters, all the while keeping Lee and Megan on a platonic basis.

One criticism that's been mentioned is the plot is, in places, fairly thin on the ground and therefore some scenes are more of a standup routine than situation orientated. Do you agree? Is this something you'd work on in the next series or are you happy with it the way it is?

Clearly, with Lee and Tim Vine being stand-ups by trade, they enjoy delivering that kind of material, and are very good at it. Megan is an actress, so her delivery might be more "real", but I think Lee and Tim handle the dramatic scenes very well. I suppose we've made a rod for our own back, making it so gag heavy. It was conscious.

Fair point! Do you take a lot of interest in the comments from fans and critics?

I think I am more in tune to internet chatter than Lee, who wisely has better things to do! So, yes, I check the comedy forums. Comedy fans can be an unforgiving bunch, and will write something off pretty sharpish if they don't like it. If anything, reaction has been fairly quiet among the comedy hardcore, although it's slowly building, which is nicer than a big burst of reaction which tails off. This might be one of those shows where people say, yeah, I tuned in for the third episode and kept with it. The audience figures certainly bear that out, rising from 2.8 million in week one to 3.2 in week four, very much against the trend for new programmes. You've done a great job of getting the discussion going on here, and I appreciate it. Apparently, and this is anecdotal, comedians seem to like it.

We loved the warmth of the humour of Grass and were very annoyed that the BBC ditched it after just the one season. How did you feel when you heard Grass wasn't to be re-commissioned?

Pissed off. Simon [Day] and I had loads of ideas for a second series, and we were asked to pitch for it. This we found irksome in itself, as some sitcoms are recommissioned automatically, but we had to pitch for it. Well, we did. We actually wrote two full scripts, one a direct follow-on from the first series, in which Billy wants out of the witness protection scheme before Harry's trial and escapes from Dundee to a small Surrey town where Heartbeat now lives, married. We were excited about this, but it was rejected. So we went away and wrote a completely different script, in which Billy is a drifter, who drifts into a small Surrey town and shacks up with an old school friend. This was not called Grass, it was called, simply, Billy. We were also very fond of this - it felt a bit like Hancock. But this was also rejected. So we gave up.

That plot sounds great! BBC3 are officially stupid!

No, BBC3 are not stupid, as it was BBC2 who turned us down for a second series, twice. Grass was a BBC3/BBC2 joint commission. It wasn't a BBC3 show that was picked up by BBC2 - it was always going to be shown on BBC2. If anything, BBC3 were straighter with us. Stuart Murphy, then controller, didn't want a second series and told us so. So it was all down to BBC2, who had a new controller, Roly Keating. Previous controller Jane Root had commissioned Grass and then gone to America. Which is why it was like starting from scratch. For writers, the biggest curse in entertainment is commissioning editors changing jobs. You lose your champion and you have to start again.

Final question on sitcom writing... in your opinion what's the most important thing to get right when creating a sitcom?

The "sit". Whatever it is - Home Guard platoon, hopeless boss of Slough paper firm, flat-based love triangle - it's got to support the "com". If there's no sit, it's just a load of set-ups and punchlines. Whether we achieved it or not in Not Going Out is up to other people to decide, but the aim was create three believable characters that you'd care about. Yes, Not Going Out is heavily gag-centric, but if you don't want Lee to get together with Kate, the show has failed. At one point during a studio recording, the audience actually did an involuntary "aaahhh" after a poignant Lee-Kate moment. That was the clincher for me. That gave me hope that we might just have pulled it off.

So, what's next for you then Andrew? Well, apart from continuing to host your award-winning BBC 6 Music radio shows, editing the Radio Times film section and everything else you do of course?!?

I am currently racing to finish my next book and I should by rights be doing it now, and not answering these questions! It's the third volume of my memoirs, That's Me In The Corner, published in May 2007, and it picks up where the last one, Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now, left off. It is 1988, I have left college, and I get my first job in the media - design assistant at the NME. It unfolds from there through all my various jobs in the media, ending right now. I'm 41 and I still have no idea what I want to do. Should I concentrate on the scriptwriting? Or the radio? Or try and get back onto TV myself? Or write books? I have no idea. I've never specialised, always kept a hand in with a bit of everything, and this makes me a master of none. It's good fun not knowing what you'll be doing in a year's time.

We better let you get on with that! Thanks very much for taking time to talk to us Andrew. It's much appreciated. I'm sure everyone will agree that this is such a great insight into all the thought, time and effort that goes into writing a major sitcom! Fingers crossed next year will see you writing another series of Not Going Out!