Sitcom Trials news, judges, tickets, sweary words

Hi Sitcom Trials fans,

A quick note to remind you that the Sitcom Trials begins its run at the Leicester Square Theatre on Monday Oct 19th, with shows every Monday night at 6pm (£5) and 8.30 (£10) leading to the grand final in December.

Judges lined up for the first few shows include I'm Alan Partridge star and comedy writer David Schneider, Red Dwarf star and author Robert Llewellyn, Inbetweeners writer Iain Morris, and Brass Eye & TV Burp writer David Quantick, with more cracking names being lined up as type.

James Parker, the season's producer, will be announcing the line up of sitcoms very shortly. In the meantime tickets are now available online at (that's Ticketweb.co.uk if the link doesn't work directly) and have already started selling nicely.

News and updates will appear here and at sitcomtrials.co.uk, we all look forward to seeing you at the shows. Have fun.

Kev F Sutherland
Executive Producer
The Sitcom Trials
http://sitcomtrials.co.uk

PS: Totally by the by, James has compiled this graph, repesenting the most used swear words in all the 380 script entries in this year's Sitcom Trials. Enjoy:

The Mac and PC thing again

How do you argue with someone who knows and admits they're wrong? Frustrating but brilliant article by Charlie Brooker in today's guardian: http://is.gd/3Kdkw/indeed - wherein he admits he realises PCs are rubbish and Macs work better, but still insists on using a PC through, I think he says, masochism.

The thing is Charlie Brooker is allowed to be contrary and counter-intuitive, it's his stock in trade to say rather extreme things in a highly entertaining way, and frequently he'll say things that he clearly doesn't mean, though in this case he means them even though he knows he's being irrational and nonsensical. The bizarre thing is the millions of other people who do exactly the same thing, without the self-knowing wit and levels of irony. People use PCs and defend PCs and rail against Macs, despite clearly knowing, and having demonstrated to them on a regular basis, that Macs work better.

I've used Macs since I was first given one in 1994, so that's 15 years of looking over PC users shoulders wondering what the hell they were messing around at. Why did anyone get a PC in the first place? The first 'Brooker' I encountered in this regard was my mate Steve (oldest school friend, Steve, we stayed in touch even though he moved hundreds of miles away, then he ended up being my office landlord for a while). Steve was, and I'm sure still is, both an early-adopter and a PC user. (Early adopter? Steve not only got Betamax, he's the person who bought a Phillips V2000 - the precursor of Betamax - and one of those VideoDisc machines, for which he only ever owned one disc, which I doubt he ever watched). And he works in computers, or certainly did from University onwards. By the time he was my landlord he was in advertising. And I had got my first Apple Mac, one of those simple beige boxes with a floppy disc drive and no internet. But it ran Quark Express and Microsoft Word and did it really quickly. And Steve would always be trying to show me things on the PC, and they'd regularly work really slowly and stop, right in the middle of his demonstration of them.

So I got a regular, reliable, drip-fed message that PCs, whenever they were called upon to do something impressive, would be unable to do them. (I know this was a by-product of Steve's over-eagerness to show you something a little prematurely, and that he was pushing the machine's ability, and no doubt he could have pulled the same negative selling trick had he been let loose on my Mac and some new piece of software which he was trying to use without reading the manual, but it had a lasting effect). His advertising company was even full to the brim with Macs. Yes, Steve would say, we have to use those because they work better. But doggedly he, alone in the company, would have a PC on his desk. (Along with that big tower-like box they have beside them. Why do PCs have those? My Macs have been all-in-one nifty unit ever since we got the helmet-shaped iMac and toilet-seat laptop nine years ago. Nine years, isn't that like 90 years in computer time?)

Meanwhile every subsequent Mac I got worked better than the last, looked nicer than the last, and when I compared notes with a PC-using friend, did more things, more easily than they could. Online - first on egroups and messageboards, then on Facebook and now on Twitter - I'd read regular rants from my fellow writers, complaining about work they'd lost through a computer crash, and cursing the names of companies like Tiny and Dell and PC World, and all I could do was try not to let out a reply of "you're not on a Mac then?", which I realise could only be aggravating, but surely not as aggravating as having a computer that stops working when you're trying to do stuff. (And when you turn PCs on, do they still give you some green letters on a black screen, like some arcade game from 1979? Or did I dream that?)

Let's be accurate here, my Macs have crashed in the past. In 1998 I had to take my black Mac Power PC back in once cos it crashed. In 2002 my toilet-seat iBook had to go back in because I'd made it crash editing a film in iMovie. And in 2004 we took the helmet-shaped iMac back in cos it crashed once. The iMac and MacBook we bought in 2005 haven't crashed yet, and I still use the old iBook for stuff. So they crash, on average, once every 3 and a bit years, or used to until 4 years ago. I'm not good with maths (you never had to be with a Mac, maybe that was another of its attractions).

So, Charlie Brooker has characterised me and my fellow Mac advocates as Christian-like evangelists, and what can I say? He has a point. It's the one area in my life where I always end up sounding smug and superior. I may not earn as much money as some people, I may not have the biggest car or the biggest house. But my computer, er, works. Oh great, now I've made even that sound trivial. Sigh.

Films Are Dead Good

New from the Socks, a song called Films Are Dead Good. Well, I say new. This was, in fact, the very first thing I wrote for The SFSPT Goes To Hollywood a year ago, and we recorded a couple of stabs at it, neither of them seemed performable. So, rather than the audience coming in to this track before every show in Edinburgh this August, it's mouldered unlistened and unloved in the iTunes file for nigh on 12 months. Digging it out for the Socks to perform, it doesn't sound that bad. In case you can't follow the words (the song's big problem), they're annotated on the YouTube clip and listed below. Enjoy.



Cecil B B B De Mille and
Laurel Hardy Buster Keaton
Harold Lloyd and Sennet Mack and
Keystone Cops and no-one black

Lillian Gish, Al Jolson’s Mammy
Charlie Chaplin, Goldwyn Sammy
Potempkin and Caligari
Valentino, didn’t marry

Edison, Arbuckle Fatty
Randolph Hearst, granddad of Patty
Napoleon part 1 and part 2
Griffiths Birth and Nosferatu

Douglas Fairbanks, Clara Bow
And Eisentein, Erich von Stro-
Heim, the It Girl Swanson Gloria
Nickelodeon, the Astoria

Lumiere the Melies brothers
MGM and all the others

Films are not round, but somehow you can roll ‘em
Got to go to the pictures, so we can extoll them
Films are dead good and they’re always repeated
Except the ones made on nitrate stock, they’ve disintegrated

Paramount and RKO
Frankenstein Marilyn Monroe
Disney Singing In The Rain
The 7 Dwarves Citizen Kane

Orson Welles & Errol Flynn
Gene Kelly & Gone With The Wind
Spencer Tracy The Jazz Singer
Fred Astaire and Rogers Ginger

King Kong & Count Alucard
Film noir Sunset Boulevard
Jimmy Stewart, he was super
Cary Grant and Gary Cooper

Jimmy Dean and Marlon Brando
Jimmy Cagney Greta Garbo
Ford and Wayne and all the westerns
Hepburn Davis Charlton Heston

Vertigo and North by North West
Psycho Rear Window and the rest

Films are the best, come in iMax and Dolby
Got to turn it up louder, the projectionist told me
Films are fantastic whether black and white or colour
If you burn a small hole in them, then they might get duller

Connery James Bond Carry On
Hammer Horror
Blaxploitation Peeping Tom
The Sound Of Music Krakatoa

Mary Poppins Michael Caine and Dustin Hoffman Francois Truffaut
Lawrence of Arabia The Graduate
& Mr Hulot

Great Escape La Dolce Vi-talian Job
Butch Cassidy
A Hard Days Night and Kurosawa
Jean Luc Godard Flower power

Planet Of Bonnie and Clyde
The Seventh Seal and Samurai
2001 Ray Harryhausen
Adam West & Barbra Streisand

Jules & Jim and Charles and Di
I’m Spartacus and so am I

Films are superb they come in cinerama
They come in 3D and smellovision, and they do not harm ya
Films are the best, although some are quite rubbish
Some are in a foreign language, so they get a bit dubbish

Great unfinished graphic novel?

Most novelists (writers of comics without pictures) start as amateurs, and most first novels (and many subsequent ones) are written on spec, for no money up front, and nurtured over many years. I know half a dozen people with a novel on the go which may never see publication.

Does anyone treat comics that way? That is to say is anyone sitting on a partly-finished masterpiece, which they're honing and refining, adding to and editing, with the feeling that one day it'll get published then the world will realise what they've been missing?

(I have two half finished comics in just that state, only short things, but rattled off when my Beano work dried up and waiting to see print. I keep meaning to do 50 copies at Ka-Blam in time for the next comic show, then always remember too late. I rattled off a 64 page Socks comic cos I knew I could sell out a print run to fans, but working on spec I find hard to do.)

Anyone sitting on the great unfinished graphic novel out there?

Kev F

PS: Here's a fun item, courtesy of James Parker, producer of the new season of The Sitcom Trials. He's taken all the sweary words from all the scripts entered in this year's Trials and expressed them as a graph:

Job satisfaction

I just finished some comic strip pages and experienced a feeling I'd forgotten about, a real tangible sensation of job satisfaction. It's a buzz, a relief, a feeling of accomplishment, that outstrips any other work related feeling I can summon to mind.

I've not been drawing enough comic strip pages, since the Beano started using me less and the comedy took priority in the last year or so, and I'd forgotten how much I've missed it. Today, as the deadline of home-time approached (yes, on days when I'm in the studio rather than out at a school or away at a gig, we keep beautifully regular domestic tea time hours which see me leaving the studio on the dot of 6pm), I had finished and was scanning the last four pages of a privately commissioned comic strip. And as I walked out of the studio with the pages in my laptop ready to email to the client, I felt that uncanny feeling.

Be it endorphines or what (and I would quite like to know the scientific explanation), the feeling of having finished comic strip pages knocks spots off my other work-day climaxes.

Finishing a day of Comic Art Masterclasses comes close, especially when I've raced to produce the copies of the kids comics on the photocopier and I get to hand them the finished item as they leave. Their thanks and obvious pleasure are great. But it's not as good as finishing pages.

Finishing a script probably comes closest, but the edge is taken off that by the knowledge that there's always rewriting to be done, a script rarely being the finished thing, and the fact that I do far too little script writing. Finishing a Socks script rarely gives me that buzz cos I always know I have to get on with the performing of it before I'll know it's right.

The experience that is far and away the most anti-climactic is finishing a solo theatre tour gig. Alan Davies was talking about this very thing on a chat show this week. You do the gig, everyone laughs, then afterwards they all go home and you're left to pack up and clear off. The most depressing can be a really good theatre with great aucoustics. You've never heard anywhere as silent as an empty theatre with good soundproofing, as you're crouched on the empty stage collecting up your props, emerging fifteen minutes later to find the bar has long closed, the punters even longer gone, and you're alone in the middle of a provincial town whose one chip shop just called it a day through lack of interest.

Ironic that the most solitary of my many activities should provide the most satisfying sensation. Perhaps, and this is another top-of-the-head theory, the fact that I'm able to listen to the radio all day contributes to this feeling. When I'm writing I have to work in silence, ditto selling (emailing and phoning to promote my classes and tours), and of course recording. But comic art has, today and yesterday, enabled me to devour hours of radio 4 and iPlayer including 4 whole episodes of Paul McGann's Doctor Who (a couple surprisingly good), Cowards, Miranda Hart, Heresy, a documentary about backing singers, From Our Own Correspondent, Mitchell & Webb, loads of good stuff.

After I've finished this strip, I hope the feeling keeps my momentum going enough to produce a 64 page Socks comic from scratch to publication in time for Christmas. I feel inspired.

Wiltshire Schools Boys Writing Conference

I don't get asked to speak at many conferences, so I was delighted to be asked to talk yesterday at the Wiltshire Schools Boys Writing Conference. 150 teachers from schools in that county were addressing the problem of literacy and boys, why they struggle in comparison to girls and what approaches can be taken to tackle this.

I was very pleased to find a couple of the speakers, one of whom was presenting the results of a government funded survey on the subject, had made very similar observations to my own, but delivered them in far more impressive academic terms than I can. One key point is the visually-oriented learning that a lot of pupils have, and that I had and still have, which means that the marriage of words and pictures presented in the comic strip is a vital and incomparable learning tool. The speech bubble was what led to me having the best reading age of my school year at primary school. Because, from the age of 5 or 6, I was reading Marvel comics, and seeing overlong words emanating directly from the mouths of these colourful characters. So I could read the visuals and, by association, work out the written words.

That, and many other of the things I pointed out in an overview of my Comic Art Masterclass and comics in general, seemed to chime with a lot of the teachers there, and I hope to be working with one or two of them to develop projects in schools to utilise comics in education in a more structured fashion.

I was left with one task I'd set myself, and that is to come up with a recommended list of comics or graphic novels for libraries. What would I suggest schools get in? It's hard. I can think of one or two classics - Persepolis, Maus - and a couple of failsafes - Asterix, Simpsons comics. But is that really enough?

Here is the list of recommended reading I've doodled, as suggestions for what primary and high schools could get in as graphic literature that would interest someone who has either never read a comic before or who needs encouraging into reading. What would you add?

Manga (Naruto? What else?)
Asterix
Fables (but beware language, poss not for primary school)
Watchmen (but is it interesting to non genre fan?)
V For Vendetta
Batman - Killing Joke? Year One? Dark Knight Returns? Arkham Asylum?
Simpsons comics
Spiderman (can't name a book myself?)
Ultimates (genre fans only?)
Preacher (poss not for any school, but would try for high school)
Lucky Luke (vanilla, but safe)
The Spirit (or too archaic?)
Alice In Sunderland (poss too academic for kids?)
When The Wind Blows
Maus
Persepolis
Ghost Town (too boring for kids?)
American Splendor (ditto?)
Tin Tin
Nemi
Dilbert
Doonesbury (though I've never met anyone else who likes it)
Sandman (too dated?)

Surely there must be more out there, that requires no prior knowledge of comics and isn't just about superheroes or other comics. Suggestions please.

Colston Hall gig, a Bristol thing

Last night (Monday) I had the pleasure of appearing (in the guise of the Socks) at a comedy gig, launching the revamped Colston Hall in Bristol, organised by the man who has, for the last half dozen years, been Bristol's comedy curator, Mark Olver.

I have long had a cultural cringe when working with comedians. A feeling that I may not be either as famous or, more importantly, as funny as them. There is a pecking order in comedy, regularly refreshed and competed for, and one I've frequently felt out of place in. Especially in Bristol where, from 1994, I was the compere of the Comedy Box and the man who had the privilege of, firstly, being introduced for the first time by Simon Pegg, then having the pleasure of being the first person to welcome to the stage such would-be luminaries as Marcus Brigstocke, Stephen Merchant and the line-up of tonight's show.

Tonight was to be a celebration of Bristol comedy, and Mark had drawn together the best of the last decade's comics to have sprung from this city. Having felt like the Godfather of many of these artists comedy careers I should feel okay in being there, but I'd be the first to say that, on merit, I as a solo artist wouldn't have deserved a place on the bill. But two things won me a slot. My Michael Jackson routine, which anyone who's seen me solo has seen, and the Scottish Falsetto Socks who have not only eclipsed any of my prior work as a comic, but who have also appropriated the aforementioned MJ routine, so Mark knew he could happily have them on the bill, knowing they brought with them my good comedy guise and my one good banker of a routine. That said, we merited 5 minutes on the bill, a brevity of slot matched only by the headliner. (As David Brent would point out, as we were being paid irrelevant of the length of the slot.. well, you do the maths).

What a bill. First act, after a blinding warm up by Mark, was Russell Howard. No one would dare to deny Russell (of whom I was first to say "ladies and gentlemen" etc) is the most successful of our generation. Okay, Russell and Marcus, but actually two critical years separate them. Marcus won the BBC New Comedian Award in 1996, two years before both Russell and Mark emerged, so he's really Bristol pre-history, along with Pegg, Matt Lucas and David Walliams.

Russell opening a night's stand up is a rare thing and by god a hard act to follow. The Colston Hall is also not the easiest room to play. 2000 punters and an indomitable echo stand in comedy's path, but Russell trumped it and rocked the house valiantly.

And that was the start of the night. And no one but no one let the side down from then on. Tom Craine, Sally Ann Hayward, James Dowdeswell, Wil Hodgson, John Robins, Dan Atkinson, the brilliant band Bucky, Ian Cognito, Jared Hardy (and I'm bound to have forgotten someone totally marvellous, sorry) so many acts so good I forgot they even had a Bristol connection. For me the funniest most laugh out loud act was Richard Herring, who I also had the chance to talk comedy with backstage, which very sadly I counted as a much greater privilege than I'm sure he did.

The Socks got away with their set, introduced via video by Mark Watson (who, I didn't hear, but I'm pretty sure didn't mention that the last time I MC'ed for him in Bristol I introduced as Dave Watson). And there was another video piece by another CPF (close personal friend) Stephen Merchant.

The show was closed by a very special appearance by VIP Justin Lee Collins, who was the first to admit his stand-up was not his best feature. Instead of trying comedy he gave us a brilliant karaoke rendition of It's Not Unusual. So, after 4 hours (and 8 costume changes by Mark Olver) an audience went home very happy.

I came away feeling I, and the Socks, had just about held our own with the big boys. Funny that I should feel so much more famous outside of the town where my comedy first flourished. Bristol has a fantastic comedy heritage, heaven knows what the new wave holds.