Friday 13th saw me in Glasgow for the 2009 Scottish Students on Screen event. Have to be honest and say that the event wasn't really for me in the end and I left very early, however the Graham Linehan masterclass was the real pull and I managed to fight my way in to that.
As you would expect from a writer on shows like Father Ted, the Fast Show, Black Books and the IT Crowd, he was an intelligent and funny speaker and genuinely interesting to listen to. I took a lot of notes which I thought I'd pass on here. I've typed them up in the order I took them so they might not flow brilliantly, but they are as near to his words as I could scribble...
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The character of Ted was created with writing partner
Arthur Mathews in a U2 spoof band. Arthur and Graham got started by sending unsolicited sketches to Smith and Jones. From there they were called in, got an agent and it all steamrollered.
He can't write unless he knows there's an audience, or (he changed his mind) he's being paid for it, as payment adds to the pressure and means you have to do it.
He feels that he developed his writing muscles with Father Ted as he was able to use the wide armoury of jokes he had gathered from his time on Smith and Jones - visual gags, quick jokes, and the talking heads of Dougal and Ted.
Father Ted remains his most rewarding experience as a writer, as he was writing with Arthur and thought Arthur was funnier than he was. He was also a bit scared of him, as Arthur was 10 years older. He felt he had to up his game and make what Arthur had already written even funnier, and make the story better, to prove himself.
He thought Ted was a good character as we already make so many assumptions about priests, so simply by a character wearing the outfit we hit the ground running, and a lot of the character work can be easier done.
For sketches and sitcoms, think of a situation that people think they know about but don't really know about. (He was talking about this mainly in relation to the Fast Show characters
Ted and Ralph.)
A bit of warmth in a comedy is a good thing to have.
Writers can work best with audience restrictions - TV Burp has to appeal to one of the most potentially easily offended audiences on tv and is one of the funniest shows on. He thinks there is too much reliance on swearing and lewd humour in British sitcoms, and that often the sex situations don't seem real enough to happen, therefore aren't funny.
Don't write down to audiences and explain everything, write up - your audience will understand what is going on in time.
When you see something on TV that's really, really good, you should watch it lots and absorb it. He famously did this with Seinfeld when writing Black Books. He thinks the Simpsons is good for this too - one thing he took from the Simpsons was the idea of starting with something shockingly unlike the rest of the episode.
He has a fear of writing negative women in case he does it badly, as he says that 'women are mysteries for men'. He hated the trend a few years back of women characters in sitcoms who just came into a scene and commented on how silly the men were, and never wants to write a character like that. Despite this fear of writing negative women, he admits that Mrs Doyle is the best female character that they (he and Arthur) have written - she's not an ideal of a woman but of how the Catholic Church treated women, and how some women acquiesced with this view and allowed themselves to be negative figures.
There's an idea that if you're not typing, then you're not writing, but that's bull***t. (He swore there, of course, didn't actually say *.) Thinking about what you are going to write and planning it in your head is part of it.
He recommends
StumbleUpon as a good way of finding out more about something you are writing, or getting inspiration. (If you've not used it before, check it out, there's a firefox add on which is great fun). He searches for terms - eg airplane - and sees what amazing web pages are returned.
He scribbles down lines, scenes, prop ideas, characters etc on cue cards as he thinks of something. When he has 100 he likes to lay them all out and find connections for episodes.
He likes to have three big funny moments worked out before he starts to write an episode, as he thinks it gives you the confidence to write the whole thing. If you are writing a scene which is a bit dull, you know you're going to get to the funny bit soon. When rewriting you might find the scenes aren't as funny as you thought, but they propelled you through the first draft so were useful.
You need to know your characters inside out, before you even write anything. He recommended checking out the Indiana Jones character PDF which is going about just now as a great example of a well worked out character. This particular comment was in relation to an audience question - one boy found that he couldn't link the funny bits in his sitcom together. Graham suggested that this was down to not knowing what the characters were going to do or say.
He's not a great fan of treatments, particularly not if you want to send something in for a producer to read. He reckons that if you are at all fired up about the project then you should write the script.
He says not to worry about copyrighting everything as people don't steal ideas. He says that a producer wants to find the right person to work with, not a script to steal.
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Hope that's of interest.
