Sanjeev Kohli: 7 on 7 - 4

What do you think are the fundamental elements of a good sitcom?

Sanjeev: When I think of my favourite sitcoms - probably I'm Alan Partridge, Spaced, Porridge, and Fawlty Towers almost goes without saying - I guess with all the best sitcoms there's an element of being trapped. In Porridge literally you're trapped by Her Majesty. I'm Alan Partridge he's trapped in this awful early morning radio show. He had it once, the TV career. He doesn't have it any more, and he's trying to get back to that. In Spaced they've got the house share.

And it's interesting what Gareth's saying about wanting two different things. I'm very fond of sketches where you think to yourself: that could be a half hour. I wrote a series of sketches about a woman and her driving instructor. And he was obviously very much in love with her and knew everything about her. And her husband clearly didn't care about her. And so he'd do things like get her stuff for her birthday which she wanted and her husband had forgotten. And you find out by the fourth or fifth sketch that she'd passed her test two years ago. And she'd just been going because she obviously fancied him back. And I think it was quite emotional really at the moment where she reveals that.

There was a Comedy Connections that was on a few weeks ago about the Ronnie Corbett sitcom Sorry which I had liked when I was ten years old. I thought why did I like that? And then I watched it.

I liked it cos it was good. It was really, really good. It was Ronnie Corbett, forty-year-old librarian stuck with his mum, trapped in the family home. At one point he nearly makes it out. And I can't remember what she does but his mum does something to absolutely scupper him leaving the house and he returns a broken man to his bedroom. And it's properly emotional you know. I mean it's funny but there's emotion there and you shouldn't be scared of that emotion. So you shouldn't be scared of playing with those emotional beats and dark and light.

Gareth: I think there's room for pathos even in a big old multi camera studio sitcom. I often think about Dad's Army which for all its daftness and jokes about incontinence is about old men expecting to be killed by paratroopers for the sake of their country. And behind all the daftness and silliness, there's a sort of unspoken sadness.

I think my favourite line in all of Fawlty Towers is when Sybil says to Basil "What should we do?" And he says "I don't know. Give it another fifteen years." And that means there's something in their relationship that he cares about and can't escape from or, somehow, the alternative of actually leaving the hotel and leaving his wife is even worse than the appalling hell that he finds himself in on a daily basis. It's very eloquent. It's very moving. And I think comedy is at its best when it can do those things.

I think my favourite comedy film of recent years is Little Miss Sunshine. I don't know if everyone's seen that. I would urge you to go and have a look. It's a sort of a road trip movie. During the course of it a family member dies and a small child is humiliated in front of a room of extremely hostile and frightening people. And it's still uproariously funny because it goes fearlessly into those areas. Quite how we do that in sketches I don't know.

Sanjeev: Ted and Ralph. That's tragic. And actually when Ted and Ralph went to feature length, it just wasn't as good as the sketches somehow. Somehow it was good enough just to see the surface.

Gareth: There is the sketch of Ted and Ralph where Ralph has come to the pub to tell Ted that his wife has died. And he has to do it with the drinking game that they're playing at the moment. And it's heartbreaking but it's also brilliantly funny.

I think to some extent there are two sorts of sketch writing. You can start off with sketches that are character driven like Lou and Andy, or Ted and Ralph. You can also end up with quite high concept sketches that are driven by ideas. And I think for 7 on 7 there's definitely room for both. It's fine to start off with an idea and work backwards rather than starting with two characters you want to see how they behave together.

What's particularly good about writing for radio?

Gareth: One thing that I really like about radio particularly is that control over how the information is released. The moment we're doing a TV sketch you have to give people quite a lot of information at the start. It's much harder to do what I would call a pull back and reveal joke, where you think they're talking about one thing and it turns out they're talking about something else. On TV those invariably look a little bit clunky.

Sanjeev: Radio comedy is such a luxury. You can put your sitcom on the North Pole. You can put it on a submarine. We put ours in a shop, was actually quite short-sighted of us, although it means it could go on the telly. And also you could be a lot more florid with the language as well on radio. You have that luxury as well, purely from a performing point of view. It sounds like a stupid thing to say, but actors don't have to learn lines for radio. You just have less things to worry about when you're writing for radio. You're obviously still obeying all the basic rules of writing, rules of comedy, but you are freed up so much more. It's just a shame it doesn't pay as much as TV. Honestly, if radio paid that amount of money I'd work in radio 52 weeks a year but it just doesn't pay all the bills sadly.

Gareth: One thing that is nice about radio is that you're far more likely to realise your mission without it being compromised. If you're setting out to write for radio as a writer you've really only got to communicate your vision to one person, the producer, who can then disseminate it to the cast. In TV you've got fifty people who are all standing by with their own idea of what it is that you might be trying to do who are ready to go off like a shot in massively the wrong direction at enormous cost. With radio, the immediacy and the speed with which you can turn it around and the hands-on nature of it means that it's always a joy to do.

Sanjeev: It's much harder to make an arse of radio comedy than it is of TV comedy. It's surprising actually that TV comedy isn't worse than it is, in some ways. There's so many variables in a TV sitcom than can and do go wrong. There's too many variables that you have absolutely no control over.
That's another strength of radio. You're right in amongst it and there's a smaller body of people. It's more fun. There are less people to have to please. It's a real joy and you know, I just wish there was more money in it generally cos honestly I can't big it up enough.

Gareth: I wanted to round off with a plea for silliness as well. Having talked a bit about the theory, and what makes a good sketch and so on, probably what really makes for a good sketch is thinking up an idea in the pub with some friends and you all find it funny. You write it down and try and communicate that daftness to other people. I suppose what I'm really saying is that quite often good sketch writing defies all sorts of rules or principles or, or any kind of scientific explanation. Sometimes things are just funny because they're funny.

The Number Sketch, which some of you may know from Mitchell And Webb, started life as a conversation in the pub between two of our regular writers on Mitchell and Webb, James Bachman and Mark Evans, and David Wolstencroft who is the creator of Spooks. And they all started making this game up in their heads. They wrote it down on a piece of paper and handed it in with several other sketches to me when we were doing a radio series and as they handed it in Mark said "I'm sorry about this last one, it's just something that made us laugh in the pub". And because it was a radio series I thought we might as well give it a try. It made me laugh a bit. I thought that's funny, why don't we just do it and see what happens. And you can't say oh that's the tension between the characters or this is high concept, this is low concept. It's just extremely silly. And done with a kind of celebratory joy.

One of the joys was being able to do it on the radio was that it cost about fifty pence in terms of PRS payments for crappy game show music, which is the same music that we stuck with on the TV series. I don't think we ever would have risked it if we'd gone straight to telly, cos to make the TV version costs something like twenty five grand. To do it on radio it's 25p. And to be honest it's just some silliness. I suppose that's just a timely reminder that ultimately it's all just about mucking around.

Sanjeev: Although obviously it wouldn't have worked if it wasn't such an accurate parody. Webb's delivery is exactly like a game show host. If it hadn't have been, the joke wouldn't have worked, as funny as it is. That's the point about parody. And obviously parody's a big part of sketch writing.

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