Sanjeev Kohli: 7 on 7 - 6

Will 7 on 7 have returning characters? And do you envisage it being quite quick fire or not necessarily?

Gareth: There's always going to be room for gags in it. Definitely. The show's evolving at the moment and so we won't be reading through it going "Oh that's very 7 on 7. That isn't." We'll be reading them for the comic sensibility. The next stage of the process will be much more specifically focused in on the particular style of the show, which we have as yet to decide on. And will be partly determined by the kinds of people that we find to write for it.

How important is it to be able to perform?

Gareth: Something I feel quite strongly about is that if you possibly can it's great for you to see how your material is playing to an audience. Now that could mean that you perform it yourself or it could mean that you get some performers to do it in front of a pub theatre. That's the laboratory where you really get to find out what's really funny and what isn't. And we're trying in the Radio Department to build on that culture of trying stuff out. So we have tryouts in pub theatres, try and have readthroughs.

But I think on the simplest level it could be having a writing partner where you read it out, see if you can make your writing partner laugh. Ultimately this stuff is going to be performed if it's going to be successful. So if there is a way that you can experience your words being performed to an audience, even an audience of one, I think that will help.

Sanjeev: I would give the example of Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain. If they walked in here you probably wouldn't know who they were, but they're two of the best and most successful comedy writers on the go at the moment. I don't think they've got any designs on performing. They're purely writers. I don't know if they sit there and think I wish it wasn't Mitchell and Webb doing the lines. I wish it was me. I don't know. But they've never had to perform their stuff. The stuff has always been good enough.

Gareth: What's interesting about Sam and Jesse, who I've worked with on sketch shows before they did Peep Show, is they're very, very interested in the sound of words. And a lot of their early sketches were quite stylised, and less naturalistic than you have in Peep Show. Some of them were funny and some of them were slightly too arcane and it took a while to get yourself into the world of the sketch. And I think it just took them a while to realise that they went very far down that for want of a better word, that "writerly" route in their sketch writing, of putting unusual words together.

By the time they got to Peep Show they were pulling back from that quite a long way. And you still get the enjoyable word play, but I think it took them quite a long time to write for a TV audience. Possibly they would have got there quicker had they been able to get more of their stuff in front of an audience sooner. But clearly they're hugely successful. And maybe the uniqueness of their writing style is a direct result of the fact that it took them that bit longer to get there. I don't know.

What advice would you give to a young writer trying to break into the industry?

Sanjeev: I always come back to sketches. I'll bang on about it till the cows go blue in the face. The best way to get into the industry is like Gareth was saying before: It's about the relationship with the producer. You need to try and get your work on a producer's desk, say this is who I am. This is what I can do. And it might be a two minute sketch but he might say "Oh that's good". And "Who wrote that?" and "Drop me an email".

I've never done stand up. I purely came from a writing point of view and that was how I got into it. I was based in Glasgow. I had presented a radio show, someone had heard it, thought I was funny, asked me to write sketches. I'm suddenly writing sketches. Another producer asks that producer "Who've you got writing sketches?" He suggests me. I send a sketch to a workshop like this. Gareth reads it.

Gareth: That's exactly how it works.

Sanjeev: There's no quicker, more direct way. If you're good you'll get noticed through this work, through this kind of infrastructure.

Gareth: I think the other thing is to write a lot. What Sanjeev said earlier about writing out some of the more derivative material is really important. It'll take you a while to find out what your own voice is and what the funny thing is that you do in your writing that other people don't do. And so don't write one sketch, send that out, wait and see if you've got any response before writing the next thing, just keep writing.

Does every submission that comes to you come through the BBC writersroom?

Gareth: I used to make a point of reading everything I got sent. That's beginning to prove impossible. The writersroom has got a really excellent infrastructure, and so we're now trying to encourage people to approach the writersroom not least because they're in a position to approach producers themselves. So that might be another way of building up relationships with producers that you wouldn't otherwise have found.

One thing I would say though as a writer, if you listen to some shows on the radio - I'm probably going to regret saying this - if you hear a show on the radio that you really, really like then you might as well drop a line to the producer of that show and say "I really loved your show. I'm a writer. Can I send you a sample of my material?" Because you already know the person you're approaching shares a sense of humour with you.

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