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?

The Pressure of Perfectly Paced Plotting

BBC Radio 7 has been repeating Series 1 of Cabin Pressure - which I completely missed the first time round. I caught one or two episodes of Series 2, and enjoyed it, but am pleased to have heard almost all of the the first series. It's lovely show with an admirably small number of characters, as the title suggests - pressured relationships in one cabin of one aeroplane.

There's just a 1st Officer we know should be the Captain, but is a bit of a rogue; a Captain who's a bit uptight; the owner who's the headmistress kicking her boys into shape; and her son, the air steward who is breathtakingly dim (played by the show's writer, John Finnemore - who's a fine comedy actor as well as a superb writer. Yes another reason to dislike the thoroughly pleasant man.) There are more details about the show here and here.

In some senses, the central relationship, between first officer and captain functions a little like Wilson and Mainwaring in Dad's Army. I don't know if John Finnemore was, or even is, aware of this. Past shows influence all of us. When devising Hut 33, and created Charles and Archie, I realised I'd created a relationship akin to Glover and Figgis in Only When I Laugh. And pretty much every configuration of every relationship can be found in classic novels or Shakespeare. So this is not a criticism at all.

But it takes more than a central relationship for a show to succeed (unfortunately). In my last post, I wrote that it's important to do proper autopsies on sitcoms that die a painful death. Much can be learned. But one can also learn in an altogether more pleasurable - laughing hard at a decent show, and then thinking about it work so well.

I don't propose to list the virtues of the show. "I cannot find a single flaw in it. So top marks" said the Independent on Sunday. Praise indeed and well deserved. I've mentioned the characters. Oh, and there's the jokes. They're good. Properly funny. But the thing I'd like to praise Cabin Pressure for in particular is boringly technical - but this is a boringly technical blog. And frankly, if the boring mechanics don't work, you have a coughing and spluttering sitcom. After all, an Alfa Romeo may be fun now and then, but it's not got the boring mechanics to get you very far. Boring mechanics are only ever notable by their absence.

So here it is: the show is perfectly paced. There is exactly the right amount of story and plot to give the characters room to bounce off each other to maximum comic effect. There's not too much frantic running around at the end, ploddy bits of exposition or a mad dash to tie up loose ends in the last 90 seconds. That's what I find hardest to do in Hut 33 - but perhaps Mr Finnemore is reaping the benefits of having four regular characters (Hut 33 has six characters - and there is a war on). I'd be interested to know how Mr Finnemore does this - whether he spends a lot of time on the storylines so that they fit the show precisely, and unravel at exactly the right pace. This has the added benefit of increasing plausibility, which adds a health dose of 'this could really happen'. Which makes it funnier.

What are the temptations here, then? Why do some sitcoms often cram story in and become too frantic? It may be lack of confidence in the characters. It may be lack of confidence in one's own ability to write enough jokes. Much easier to blow up a car or lose a set of keys in the story to add extra frustation and 'mayhem'. But it may not make the show funnier. It may just make the show noisier. We can, I'm sure, think of examples in which that is the case. There are warning signs: If you find yourself typing the line "Wait a minute, there just one thing I don't understand" or "So the whole thing was covered by the insurance" or some other nebulous or unsatisfactory line. Plot is like marmite - best thinly spread.

But then, we can also watch an episode of Seinfeld and think 'How did they fit all those stories in 22 minutes?'

Sitcom is a dark art, a conjuring trick with no manual that requires hours of practice, the odd prayer - and even then one runs a serious risk of being pelted with fruit. Still, it beats real work. My dad was a farmer. I know what I'd rather be doing for living.

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.