They're Nice And All, But We Don't Care

And so we reach the age old debate about 'likeable'.

I've heard it said (either by Goldman or Long) that networks want a Mickey Mouse. But comedy writers want to write Bugs Bunny. Let's not beat about the bush on this one - Mickey Mouse just isn't as cool, as funny or even as 'likeable' as Bugs Bunny, who torments, frustrates and bullies his assaillants and walks off with lines like 'Ain't I a stinker?'

Bugs is cowardly, brutal and mean. And yet, as a child, every time cartoons came on, I would cheer if it was Bugs Bunny and switch off mild-mannered-middle-of-the-road Mickey Mouse. Unless Donald Duck was around who as, at least, a comically hyper-charged ball of rage that would at least pass the time.

Let's keep going with this. One of the most appealling characters of British TV of the last ten years is Gene Hunt - a sexist, homophobic, xenophobic throwback to the bad old days of dodgy policing. He was literally head and shoulders above all others in that show because his character was larger than life in every way. Five series later, he's bigger than ever.

Previously I've blogged about the wonderful Damned United (here) in which the incorrigible Brian Clough is portrayed, a man who got under your skin and intentionally set out to annoy people - like Gregory House, MD. Or, for that matter, Gordon Ramsay on his TV shows.

And yet, in a way, we care about Bugs Bunny, Hunt, House and Clough - even though they are sadistic monsters. In pure sitcom, we have the likes of Victor Meldrew in One Foot in the Grave. In 30 Rock, we have Jack Donaghy and Tracey Jordan who are both rich and arrogant monsters in their way.

In my own limited experience, we have Penny and Tilly in Miranda who say and do outrageously unlikeable things, but we love them all the same. In writing Hut 33, I created a character called Professor Charles Gardiner, ultra-conservative Oxford don who was on first name terms with Rommel and Von Ribbentrop when war broke out. Played by the delightful Robert Bathurst, he often had the best jokes and zingers, and was a lot of fun to write for. In fact, the most popular character of that show was the Polish psychopath called Minka, voiced by Olivia Colman. She always brought the house down with her tales or threats of sustained and imaginative physical violence.

The common stereotype of the TV Commissioner is that they want someone 'likeable'. Or think other people think they want someone 'likeable'. This is sadly often true. But let's not confuse 'likable' with 'engaging' or 'absorbing' or 'charismatic'. The audience and the commissioner want the same thing - characters they keep coming back to. We need compelling characters, not necessary likeable ones. Miranda is very likeable. So was Del Boy. But Gregory House isn't likeable. He is an utter jerk, and cruel to anyone who shows love or affection for him. And yet, I've seen every single episode up to the middle of Series 6.

Conversely, the problem of Episodes is that we have a perfectly likeable couple at the centre of the show - but we don't really care about them, as I said here. They're nice and all, but we don't care.

Ultimately, we live with a paradox. We are able to love people we dislike. (Think of your own family). The skill, the trick, the art of writing is to make characters compelling, so that we have sympathy for them. It make be that we make them Mr Nice Guy. It may be that we can relate to them. Or it may be that we understand them, see the world through their eyes, but realise we would dislike them if we met them - but we just can't look away. eg. David Brent, Captain Mainwairing, Victor Meldrew, Tony Hancock.

It seems surprising that writers keep being asked for 'likeable', when that is not, ultimately, what the audience, the commissioners or any of us want.

Of course, Mickey Mouse made Disney and lots of other people hundreds of millions, so we can probably ignore all of the above.

But come on, who wants Mickey, Minnie, Donald and Pluto, when you can have Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn and Elmer Fudd?

Understanding Failure in Comedy

Criticising sitcom, as I have remarked in previous posts, is the easiest thing in the world. Like many things that are easy, it can still be entertaining and fun, but it is ultimately destructive and unhelpful, as least for the purposes of this blog and constructive criticism of sitcom in general.

So passionate am I about situation comedy, that I want to defend every sitcom from attacks on all sides, regardless of whether I even like the comedy in question. At least that is what I felt when I read a recent posting on The Quietus - called Emma Johnston On The World's Worst Sitcoms. which can be found here. I don't mean to pick on her - I'm sure she's delightful - or the website for which she writes at all, but the article is a very typical example of pundits talking about sitcom that makes a number of curious points - and contributes to the overall welter of bizarre punditry surrounding a very specific form of commentary.

The trigger for Ms Johnston's article was undoubtedly The Persuasionists, the latest sitcom to emerge from the trenches before being mowed down by gunfire before it had a chance to fight back. I'm not going to defend The Persuasionists per se. A post-mortem is useful though, which I will come to in a moment. But in one sense, the audience have voted with their fingers. Episode 3 was only watched by 330,000 viewers, I believe. I recall a line in Which Lie Did I Tell? by William Goldman, who explains the failure of his turkey movie The Year of the Comet. When the Box Office numbers came in, they simply said something like 'They don't want to watch your movie, Mr Goldman'.

But I'm minded to defend The Persuasionists as a valliant attempt at big silly comedy, simply because sitcoms are routinely given the most violent of kickings whilst they're on air, and then for many years after - regardless of their success, it seems.

For example, Ms Johnston says picks out The Persuasionists' "stilted dialogue, childish, laboured gags and excruciatingly unlikable, stereotypical characters" as if all of those things are intrinsically bad in comedy. Sometimes stitled dialogue is funny (like Moss in IT Crowd). Childish, laboured gags can work very well, as can excruciatingly unlikable (David Brent), stereotypical (Del Boy) characters. But we really have to do better than just point these things out and say "Why couldn't they have done a grown-up, nuanced, unpredictable comedy with Aaron-Sorkin-esque dialogue, since that would obviously work?" For a start Aaron Sorkin himself tried this on a sitcom called Sportsnight. The show was slick, clever and well-produced, but funny? Not so much. And secondly, big silly comedies are very popular and can work well, Black Books, The IT Crowd and Miranda being recent examples.

Merely describing the premise of a show is also not enough. Picking out Heil Honey, I'm Home as a bad idea for a show - whilst acknowledging the Producers pulled off a similar premise seems odd.

Slagging off shows like Two Pints of Lager (which is not a show to my personal taste) or Are you Being Served? seems bizarre to me - the latter show ran for 13 years, spawned numerous catchphrases and is fondly remember by many. To say "Are You Being Served? managed to deliver two jokes, neither of which were funny" is, at best, disingenuous. Ms Johnston has looked back and judged an 1970s/80s show by the standards of 2010 and, unsurprisingly, found it wanting - even though it delivered much joy at the time and even though David Croft was responsible for hundreds of episodes of sitcom that were gladly received by the British public at large (Dad's Army, Allo Allo, You Rang M'Lord etc)>. It is entirely fair to pick out Come Back, Mrs Noah as a notable flop, but why did it flop? That's what I'm interested in finding out.

What is my point? I'd just like to raise the quality of the debate. Why do some shows work and others not work? What is it about comedy - and audience comedy in particular - that sets it apart from normal criticism?

There are two main reasons that come to mind. The first is that comedy is so personal. It's a wonderful thing to laugh, and when you connect with characters, when you identify with themes, situations and ideas, and when the joke arrives perfectly formed, it's funny and joyous. But when it doesn't, it's unfunny and painful. And the sound of laughter - other people getting a joke that you don't get, or dislike - is irritating. It's like they're all in on a joke and you're not. A number of times, I've read critics write that they simply don't understand why the studio audience were laughing. Myths about canned laughter still circulate. It seems that people seem reluctant to acknowledge that we all laugh at slightly different things.

The difference is particularly marked if there is a moral dimension to this. Are You Being Served is of it's time and broad - when attitudes to woman and homosexuals were very different. There's the jokes about Mrs Slocombe's pussy or John Inman are, to many today, distasteful (perhaps because they haven't been told in a sufficiently ironic way to allow us to laugh at them). In the process, comedy that seems unfunny also seems, to the unamused viewer, morally defective - and then the hackles rise and criticism gets more and more vicious.

The second factor is that comedy is designed to illicit laughter. A comedy which fails to amuse has categorically failed - and can therefore be written off. The fact that it has amused others seems to be of little consequence as the knives are sharpened and people trot out the usual comments like 'That's half an hour I'll never get back', 'Worst sitcom since [insert previous failed sitcom]' or 'How does this stuff even get commissioned? Do the BBC actually hate us?' etc...

To analyse a comedy that fails to amuse, then, is difficult work. It requires empathy, imagination and a serious engagement of critical faculties - in a way that isn't terribly amusing. It's probably more akin to investigating and air-crash or a crime-scene. But that is what I'm interested in - partly because I should be, shouldn't I? I'm a sitcom writer? I have been for about ten years. I should be curious. I'm just surprised that lots of other people involved in the industry are not equally curious, and seem to be satisfied with explanations of failure like "Bad script, stereotypical characters and scenarios that just aren't true to life" - when plenty of shows survive with poor scripts, some of which have stereotypical characters and some extraordinary scenarios.

I started out my comedy career writing a sitcom called Think the Unthinkable. Ryan, splendidly played by Marcus Brigstocke, would say that mistakes are opportunities. Annoying, but true. We learn more by failure than success. Which is just as well because I fail far more often than I success - you see? I just did a typo. I really should learn to be more careful. So we need to work out a way of embracing failure, picking through the wreckage, learning and moving on. That's my plan, anyway.

The Persuasionists

Here’s the short version: I rather like it.

Here’s the longer version:

The problem with launching a new sitcom is that most viewers compare your Episode 1 against their favourite episode of their favourite sitcom. We all have our favourites - and we love those characters as if they were members of our own family. Frankly, I would like to hug 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon and tell her everything’s going to be okay. Or we’d like to smack the characters because they’re making the same mistake week after week. Seinfeld said their rules were No Hugging and No Learning - but pretty much every sitcom has that second part. Sitcom characters don’t learn. Mainwaring and Hancock are pompous, always. David Brent thinks he’s funny every week. And so on. And so usually we find ourselves chuckling before they’ve even done the joke. Sitcoms that are up and running have a crucial momentum that keeps us laughing.

And so getting a new sitcom off the ground is like launching a rocket. Once the thing is moving and orbiting the earth, you just need to nudge it the right direction. But getting the darn thing of the ground, that takes a lot of energy.

Why am I saying this? You may well be ahead of me. I’ll fess up and say that I didn’t really like episode 1 of The Persuasionists, and some of this is because of the reasons above. I just didn’t know the characters. There are other reasons, which I’ll mention in a moment. But I did like episode 2. I’ve watched some scenes several times over and laughed a lot. And I’m looking forward to seeing episode 3. Put it this way: I watched Episodes 1 and 2 on iPlayer. But for episode 3, I’ll try and make an appointment to view - or at least tape it on my PVR and watch it within 24 hours (high praise in my house).

Why did I like it? I liked it because it was a big silly sitcom with jokes in it. It sounds rather daft to say that, but I do worry, sometimes, that some people think jokes are beneath them or just too obviou, or that a show is all character and story, and the laughs are simply organic. In one sense, they are. But you need them all the same. It’s another reason why writing sitcoms is so hard. You need to create characters, relationships, a situation, a story that hangs together - and then write about a hundred jokes that make a roomful of 200-300 people laugh out loud. Oh and three million people at home, give or take. That’s why the money is quite good when you get it right.

The Persuasionists is, then, a knock-about comedy set in the world of advertising. Are the characters believable? In a sense, but they’re obviously larger than life. And they’re clearly meant to be that way. And as with most office sitcoms, and audience shows, you tend not to believe that any actual work goes on in the office in question - but nobody minds that. It’s a sitcom. The audience understand that real life isn’t that funny. And that an office of 25 people tends to have more than 5 people who actually talk to each other. Sitcom is a contrived format by its very nature. But it works.

Clearly, the recipe for this particular show didn’t work for some people. The reviews and comments were almost entirely negative. It’s all rather sad. Reviewers, bloggers, and tweeters single out comedy for the vilest of comments. In a way that shows they care about comedy. It also shows that people are prepared to hide behind the internet to say horrible things that they would never say in real life. But the relentless stream of twitters say “Worst show ever” and “I’ll never get that half hour back” is pretty depressing. Apart from anything else, most TV is dreadful. Even successful shows. But we digress from the matter in hand.

Here’s my main worry about the show - the mix of characters. There are five characters, all with fairly strong traits. And since the show is set in the world of advertising, most of the characters are, what tv execs call ‘unsympathetic’. They shout and rant and are generally mean to each other. The exception is the Adam Buxton character - who is the optimist and nice-guy. The other characters are more grotesque, which is fine, but it makes them less believable. And so every single line those characters say has to be really funny. If it isn’t, we’ll stop laughing and think to ourselves “I don’t buy this”. Occasionally, you need a character to say things like “Hey, we have to get this done in time, or else” or “I hope my mum doesn’t die” or something that they have to mean. We all know it’s made up, but if the we don’t even believe that the characters believe in anything, the whole thing falls apart into a deconstructed heap on the floor.

I’ve run into this phenomenon writing Hut 33, which is a sitcom for Radio 4 set in Bletchley Park in World War Two. One character is called Minka, played by Olivia Colman. Minka is a psychopath who believes that violence is the solution to all problems. And she’s very handy and has all manner of weapons secreted about her person. She’s a preposterous character, keeping weapons in places where they couldn’t possibly fit, but it works - as long as she’s not carrying lines of exposition or doing what the other characters do. The problem comes when you have a whole show of those big characters. They have to gag their way in and out of every situation, and if one joke misfires, it can fall apart. If two jokes misfire, it hurts.

In Episode 2 is because the jokes fired. They worked - especially the lunatic stuff Keaton said and did, and the wonderful scene in which the boss explained to the popstar why Australia wasn’t ordinary. It was great, and bits like that really carried the show. There were other lovely moments when the popstar looks at Adam Buxton from afar and he’s sniffing his hands. And then he says how boring he is saying “Even when I hear my own voice, I think ‘O God, not him again’.” Lovely. The question is whether episode 3 can pull off the same trick. I hope so. I do enjoy laughing.