Where are the laughs today?
Creating a TV comedy hit has never been harder, says veteran producer Jon Plowman
Mark Harrison
- Jon Plowman
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Comedy is hard to do. And it’s in trouble. It scares channel controllers because it’s expensive, it’s risky, and there are few slots for new shows. With drama you just have to tell a good story. With comedy you also have to make people laugh.
In my long career producing comedy – from Bottom to The Thick of It, The Office and Absolutely Fabulous – I’ve found that great shows usually start from unpredictable beginnings. Bottom was a stage act; The Thick of It’s trademark look was thanks to Armando Iannucci getting a budget for one episode and stretching it out to pay for three. The Office was Stephen Merchant’s homework – a short film at the end of a BBC trainee directors’ course, for which he hauled in his mate Ricky Gervais. And Ab Fab – which celebrates 32 years with a reunion show on Gold this week – began life as a sketch on French and Saunders.
TV producer Jon Plowman. backgrid.com
For great comedy to develop, you’ve got to trust the talent. That, I’ll admit, isn’t always plain sailing. On Ab Fab, Jennifer Saunders had to wait for the comedy spark from heaven to fall, and sometimes it took a while. Sometimes, before rehearsals began, I’d be begging her at the 11th hour – could you at least tell me which sets we’ll be using?
If you make people laugh, you can say anything you want.
But now, with pressure on budgets making channels more risk averse, it’s harder to nurture those mad ideas. And if you don’t allow people to take risks or make mistakes you get the same old stuff or repeats.
Lots of people say we couldn’t get away with Ab Fab today, with its smoking, drinking, drug taking, jokes about weight issues, alcoholism and knitting-needle abortions. I disagree. There has been a discussion about whether political correctness is killing comedy. That argument is often made by comics who aren’t funny, blaming PC.
Some things are never funny – like punching down. Comedy should always punch up. But otherwise, if you make people laugh, you can say anything you want. That’s as true today as it’s always been. Look at Derry Girls, a filthy and brilliant comedy about Northern Irish girls during the Troubles that was rude about everything. Viewers loved it and everyone was talking about it.
To create buzz today isn’t easy. Comedies work best when you go into work the next day and talk about the show. Then anyone who hasn’t seen it thinks they should. Comedy needs a decent-sized audience to discover it at the same time. That’s difficult in an age of on-demand viewing and with so many broadcasters and streaming services.
David Brent (Ricky Gervais) and Gareth Keenan (MacKenzie Crook) in The Office. BBC
With Absolutely Fabulous, we were lucky – it was extraordinarily successful from the beginning. We were on BBC2, so we had a chance to grow. In an age of public service television in the 90s, there wasn’t the same pressure on budgets.
Comedy is more expensive than the average drama – it needs lots of rehearsal, it costs broadly the same as an hour of drama but it’s usually only half an hour. And so, there’s more risk. Drama gets money from international co-productions – but comedy can be too British to travel. You have to hope the US TV exec gets the joke from reading the script – but Jennifer wrote the Ab Fab pilot in pencil in an exercise book. Would that have sold to Disney?
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Ab Fab was groundbreaking because we could show women behaving badly on their own terms while making any jokes we wanted. Ben Elton saw the pilot and said he’d seen the future. Unless we protect budgets, allow people to experiment and make sure the results get seen, we might never again see a comedy as game-changing as Absolutely Fabulous. Of course, you might not want to…
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Jon Plowman
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