Teevee Addict
Mike Teevee from Charlie and The Chocolate factory is surely one of the most cruelly treated kids in children’s literature. Mike was tortured by snobby little Willy Wonka all because he preferred the telly box over a boring book. Well, I’m sorry we’re not all as highbrow as you William, with your sophisticated love of clunky poetry about how you hope various children will injure themselves. We all think that Willy Wonka, if he was around today, would be a loveable maverick. But his obsession with the 3 Rs and cavalier attitude to kids eating vegetables actually suggests he’d be setting up a Free School somewhere with Michael Gove where all the children have to speak in rhyming couplets.
Thankfully history has proven Mike right. That little boy was ahead of his time. He knew that peak TV was not only on its way up, but about to surpass nerdy novels as the uniting cultural touchstone of our age. His punishment by judgemental Mr. Wonka was to end up stuck inside a real-life TV. Well I too was a child telly addict and I also ended up inside the TV and, jokes on you 70s Gene Wilder, I love it.
Old Bill boring a poor kid about some book he read.
Writing jokes for TV programmes can be divided into three rough parts. Well four really. Mainly you're unemployed. You send vague panicked texts to friends who also write comedy, fishing to see how busy they are. It's like you're all dating the same love rat and you just want to make sure everyone is being treated equally as bad.
Then there’s the writing you do at home. That can feel like dragging furniture around with your teeth. You get occasional flashes of relief when you come up with something you're happy with, send the stuff in and read any reply from the producer, like it’s Egyptian hieroglyphics and contains confirmation you are either a beloved child or an unwanted sack of shit.
The best part of the job is when you get to write with other people. Sitting with your friends, getting a wisp of an idea, concentrating, embroidering it with your thoughts, then it’s an angle, a take, a joke! It's like hearing the whisper of a melody and then someone else starts humming along adding bass, someone comes in on violins and before you know it a joke arrives fully formed, as obvious and as clear as if it was always there. No one owns it because it could only have come into the world with you working together. Once again straw has turned into gold and it is truly magic.
Unless of course, you don’t like one of the people you're working with. Then you spend a lot of the time texting friends things like “is blank blank always such a total witch?” You must be very careful who you text though because comedy networks are more complicated than the shifting alliances of the War of The Roses. Gossip is like a class A drug, to be shared strategically to make people like you better, but it can backfire. I once declared to a room of comedy writers that I heard a certain notorious comedian was writing jokes for an actor who was winning lots of awards that season. Leaning back on my chair, I smirked that I knew it was true because this actors acceptance speeches suddenly had a lot more rape jokes in them. So far, so hilarious, I’m sure you’ll agree. Until the person sitting beside me quietly added, she also heard that story but mainly because her sister was married to the comedian.
The final and sadly smallest part of working in TV is the occasional hyper glamorous moments that suddenly arise. Like the time I had to teach RuPaul how to pronounce Timothee Chalamet. Moments that are so strange that you have to remind yourself that last week, you were so depressed you binge watched an entire Ken Burns documentary series about Ernest Hemingway and yet here you are, bold as brass, asking Rita Ora if she’s happy saying “Hello I’m Rita Ora.”
I’ve written the bits award presenters say when they announce the nominees. The half jokes that no one really remembers unless the person saying them is Chris Rock. You assume that reading a teleprompter on live TV in front of a few thousand people is a regular day at the office for a famous Hollywood star, but they are terrified. These are people trained to perform in the intimacy of a film set, not in front of a big crowd. I once found myself stroking the back of an A-list Hollywood star who was so nervous, we thought they were going to pass out. They then walked out on stage and delivered their introduction with the intensity and fire of a drama school audition speech.
My comedy icon, my formalwear icon.
I’ve also worked on comedy election shows. They are strange affairs because, obviously with something so high profile and with so much air time to fill, producers want to be as prepared as possible beforehand. However the reality is that the minute the exit polls come out, everything you prepped before is completely irrelevant. All the faces of the election, the token target voter, the campaign gaffes, they all feel like decades ago.
In the days beforehand, you end up generating material you know will never be used. I once spent a whole day in a windowless room writing hundreds of jokes about constituency names “Boston and Skegness - Baddies in a Guy Ritchie film?” After a few hours I genuinely started wondering if it wasn’t some sort of prank, or that the whole thing was a plot to get me out of the house so that robbers could use my empty flat to break into a bank’s vault next door.
And election shows are by their nature unpredictable. In 2019, as soon as the exit poll came out, the audience changed from excited and buzzing to more like a grieving family who’d just found out they’d been cut out of a will. When I say they hated every single bit of pre-planned levity after it became obvious Boris Johnson had won a landslide, I mean they reacted to every joke like it was a heckler at a press conference for a lost child. The silence could only be described as aggressive. One by one all the comedy bits of the show were cut, while the live audience started to give up and go home. Political guests didn’t turn up. The incredible warm-up comedian tried to keep the energy up to a studio that now looked like a game of Guess Who that was half over. At 3am Rylan was asking Ed Balls why political parties still existed in front of 20 people who were just waiting for the tube to start.
The swingometer is such a f**king diva.
I absolutely loved Clive James when I was little. I only found out recently that he wrote award winning essays and poetry. He won my heart with “Saturday Night Clive”, every weekend he introduced weird Japanese game shows, American local news and Margarita Pracatan. I couldn’t believe how funny he was, he made nine-year-old me so happy that I would watch him in my pyjamas hugging myself with glee. His sentences were like fireworks, fizzing and exploding into punchlines. His words never went where you expected. I’d try to guess which way they’d zig and zag but I could never predict where they’d land. It didn’t need to be as brilliant as it was but it was and I noticed.
The late-night shows, the award ceremonies, the election nights are the comedy equivalent of writing a joke on condensation, or in the soot of a dirty car, or pissing a message in snow. It's not literature, it doesn’t last, it doesn’t win awards. Yet those programmes are full of smartest, funniest, hardest working people who want them to be fantastic. Because why not? Why not make it as good as possible? Something that sparkles for a moment and then vanishes into the night sky. Because someone at home is watching it, because they do notice when you make an effort, and shouldn’t they have the absolute best? What’s more life affirming than that?
Oompa loompa…..doopity doo!
Icons only.
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