Ida and Phil chatted to Alex Hudson from the Death of A Xerox Salesman podcast about our writing process, Bulletproof Jest, manatees and spoons. Lots of spoons. Very small spoons.

Our thanks to Alex for having us along and to Jimmy for putting us together!

Hello TDS enthusiasts,

How are you today? Good? Excellent.

You might be wondering what we’ve been up to since we last updated our blog. Well, we have been on Tour with our show Bulletproof Jest! That’s right, we ventured forth into the unknown – the unknown being a lovely little village called Thorner, just outside Leeds in Yorkshire.

Despite not knowing what to expect, and notwithstanding the fact that Thorner is a little out of the way, the good people of Yorkshire came from as far afield as the neighbouring village, and further, after hearing about the show on BBC Radio Leeds. A right jolly time was had by all in TDS, and our excellent crew. Once again we got some great feedback from the punters, and a lovely lady gave what I think has to be my favourite audience comment ever: “I enjoyed it because it was mad, but in a clever way.” Mad, but clever. We’ll take that: certainly can’t argue with the mad part.

What next for Bulletproof Jest? Well, we’ll be performing an Edinburgh Fringe preview on July 30th at the Miller, London Bridge, in, well, London (see http://www.themiller.co.uk/venuelistings/event/2013/july/30 for more details) and then it’ll be off to Edinburgh for an exciting two weeks of blood, sweat, and (probably) tears.

But wait! That’s not all. In case you missed it, we also managed inbetween shows to put together our first podcast which combines two of Bill’s greatest loves: science and Prog Rock (he may well be on his own there)… but the result can be found on our podcasts page. Happy Listening.

On March 22 and 23 2013 we performed our first live sketch show in Oxford, at the Old Fire Station. Two hours of new material was presented, a mixture of live and filmed sketches, to a sold out house – so thanks to everyone for coming! We hope you enjoyed it!

After months of writing, editing, editing, more editing, choosing what sketches to include, changing our minds, cutting things at the last minute, rehearsing, filming, re-filming, yet more editing, sourcing props and costumes, and locking Will in the editing dungeon  suite, we somehow managed to bring it all together.

We also got some very nice reviews, which you can read here:

http://www.dailyinfo.co.uk/reviews/feature/8199/Bulletproof_Jest

http://www.tvbomb.co.uk/2013/03/bulletproof-jest/)

We had promised an evening of culinary sleuthing (turns out he drowned in his own consommé), emergency vicars (who else do you need at a village cake tasting?), remarkable inventions (oh… Jeremy…), and the greatest threat mankind has ever known (space geese. They’re coming, and they’re not happy). And a bear (who wasn’t available for comment).  And plenty of other sketches besides. This is what they looked like:

If you want to know what else was in the show (because you didn’t get a chance to see it) then you’ll have to come and see it: For information on where we will be performing it, see our Bulletproof Jest page.

Working with us was our great crew. Our stage manager Fiona Sinclair provided much needed control, calm and organisation. Our technical team, Michael Howe and Dominic Hargreaves, had a huge technical input, and dealt amazingly well with guidance from us such as “the lighting in this sketch – can you make it a bit, well,…”womby”?” and “for this sketch, “political”, make of that what you will”. Our front of house team Sinead Matthews and Joseph Kenneway provided order on the night. Nathan Grassi, our occasional guest performer and external director, provided much needed input and whip cracking. Vince Haig designed our amazing poster, which you can see on our homepage.

So what now? Well, we are preparing for our two-week stint in Edinburgh (5-17 August) at the The Spaces, Surgeon’s Hall, 19:15. To get ourselves ready for that we are doing a mini tour, taking a two hour show (our one hour Edinburgh show plus “the best of the rest”) to Thorner, Yorkshire on June 15. We are also doing an Edinburgh preview at the Miller, Balham, London on 30 July.

Exciting times!

[Photos by Vince Haig, Barquing"]

Well it has been an exciting couple of weeks here at TDS HQ, and I know you are all super keen to hear about what we’ve been up to. The first exciting thing was that we entered a comedy video competition. This was our entry:

Well, we all thought, “we probably won’t win anything but maybe one or two new people will see one of our sketches, and that would be rather nice”, and so we were all gobsmacked when The Huffington Post in New York saw our video and not only retweeted it but uploaded it onto their comedy pages! Thank you very much indeed, we thought, as we watched our views jump from 100 to 11,000! What a lovely surprise – so thanks everyone for watching and sharing, and as a thank you gift, here is a pic of us “on location”. It may be a bite sized sketch for you to devour, but it took us over 3 hours of filming, and it was VERY cold. And yes, we did get some rather odd looks from some people.

If you’re interested to know what won the competition, it was this brilliant sketch:

The other exciting thing that is afoot, is that we are well underway with rehearsals for our new sketch show Bulletproof Jest (March 22nd/23rd, OFS Theatre, Oxford). We will be performing some of our new sketches, which we have written especially for you lovely people (so you should come and check them out!)

We have also been working on some filmed bits for the show: here is a picture from the day that Bill tried to freeze us all to death by making us film in the snow. All will be revealed in the show, by which time we all hope to have recovered from the frostbite.

The phrase “comedy is a serious business” is as old as the hills but it’s true, as I have recently re-realised. Again. A good comedy sketch, like anything else of high quality, often appears effortless – this probably means in reality that a huge amount of work has gone into the making of the sketch to create that effect. Which leads me, perhaps a little confusingly, to Twitter.

Andrew Ellard for example, is someone I discovered through following other folk on Twitter connected to comedy. He’s a script editor, whose credits include Miranda, Red Dwarf and The IT Crowd. He also produces (his hashtag) #tweetnotes on various movies and TV programs he has no working connection with, but shares out of a love of giving insights into all aspects of writing and production (if you’d like to follow him on Twitter, look for @ellardent). It’s fascinating to see the thought processes of an industry professional, with such laser-sharp analysis and frankness about TV and movies. I’ve never met him and I am not on commission, honestly, but it’s a pleasure to tuck into his tweets – for example, here’s a series of tweets of his on the subject of naming characters in Storify form: http://storify.com/ellardent/naming-characters

This stuff is gold dust for a writer.

From my years acting in student theatre, in professional theatre, in improvised comedy and amateur dramatics – all vibrant and useful experience that informs what I’m doing now with TDS – I would categorically state that comedy is much harder to make work on stage than drama. Okay, it’s not open-heart surgery; making comedy isn’t seen as anywhere near as valid or noteworthy a profession (though it’s more well-respected than investment banking right now, but then most things are these days), BUT comedy is tough to get right. Ditto for comedy writing – it’s difficult, a constant learning process!

Even more to the point, I think any kind of creative writing is just damned difficult. My wife is an author, with over 20 published books to her name, but it’s not something she simply delivers into a dictation machine as a highly polished end product – she works damned hard, sometimes agonising over sentences, characters or plot points to make everything work in the best, most believable way.

Maybe I should make it very clear at this point that it’s probably just me that finds sketch writing really difficult…! Yes, it’s all about me me me. Well, it is my blog piece this week! In my time I have written many essays, way too many emails, a terrible dissertation or two at university, and tried to make them all as well-written as possible – but writing a comedy sketch is pretty daunting! It’s early days for me, and I hope that with time I will be able to produce more and better sketches, at a faster rate. But right now, it’s a challenge to keep up with my TDS colleagues, whose volume, and quality of output, frankly terrifies me.

How do I write? Well I’ve tried different methods. The method which has proved most successful for me so far is to free-write for 15 minutes. This is effectively a stream of thought-processes put onto the page in my terrible handwriting (I can’t touch-type, alas) with no punctuation; then, after 15 minutes, I go back through what I have written, decipher it (!) and formulate a sketch from those notes. I have to be in the right frame of mind for free-writing to work, and I have to have given some kind of thought to the sketch in advance, but if you were to write continuously for 15 minutes without stopping, you’d discover that you have more time than you might think to gather your thoughts on the page! Without stopping!

Recently I have had a bit more time (thanks, Christmas holidays) to collaborate with some of my TDS chums on writing in a group session. We have always drawn inspiration from our improvisation sessions and shows, riffing ideas off each other, but taking this into a writing sphere has been quite different and really rewarding. The challenge for me is to find the time to be able to do more writing, by myself and in a group, and to stop finding excuses not to write. Needing sleep, for example. Sleep is for wimps! And for people without kids!

Finally, well, almost finally, some thoughts about character. Having a character in mind, partly- or fully-formed, while writing a sketch, is an important part of my approach. I think my sketches are better read aloud than read on the page – there’s an element that isn’t quite there on the pages of my script, and probably should be there, that helps lift the writing – and that’s the character(s).

Some great examples of this, where the characters add another dimension to the (already great) writing – and I am not suggesting that my writing is on a par with the great writers of these sketches – would be the Two Ronnies’ Four Candles sketch (written by Gerald Wiley aka Ronnie Barker), the Victoria Wood sketch Two Soups, and the Monty Python Argument sketch (written by John Cleese and Graham Chapman) – the difference between reading the scripts to yourself (try imagining that you had never seen the sketches before) and then watching them….there’s quite a difference there!

They are all favourites of mine, classic sketches, possibly too well-known now, but they got to be that way for a reason. Because they are that good. It’s a distant target for my own writing, but it’s definitely something to aim for!

In the series, “Contractually Obliged and Delighted”, we go beneath the scenes, behind the magic, and astride the mystery, as the various members of The Dead Secrets share their experiences of the sketch-making process. This week’s post comes from Will Payne, the group’s resident video editing minion.

If you’re reading this, please send help. The meagre diet of leftover scraps (which the other TDS members make me dance for) has enabled me to lose enough weight to slip out of my shackles so that I can send this message whilst they’re out having their champagne breakfast.

I have, for several months now, been imprisoned in the Video Editing Dungeon of TDS HQ. I’m occasionally allowed out, pale and blinking in the harsh daylight, to operate the video camera whilst Ida bellows instructions at me and lashes me with a diamond-encrusted cat o’ nine tails which I was told was bought using my credit card as punishment for having the temerity to ask for a sip of water.

Luckily, Chris often visits me in my dungeon to laugh maniacally at my pleas to see my family or to instruct me to go through a sketch frame-by-frame and make him appear more “ruggedly handsome”. After these visits, I scramble across the floor to clutch at the pile of discarded quadruple-espresso cups and energy-drink cans which he inevitably leaves in his wake. The hydration and caffeine I can eke out of the dregs help keep me alive and provides the energy boost I need to turn out work that Spielberg would be proud of on a woefully underpowered computer.

Oh hell.. they’re back. I need to get back to my dungeon before I’m caught or else my daily mocking will be extra scornful. Send help.

Will

In the series, “Contractually Obliged and Delighted”, we go beneath the scenes, behind the magic, and astride the mystery, as the various members of The Dead Secrets share their experiences of the sketch-making process. This week’s post comes from maestro Bill Moulford, ivory-tickler and occasional scordatura ripieno bel canto.

Hello readers of the intratubes! Bill here, composer in residence at TDS HQ, taking a well-earned break away from a hot keyboard to sit at a slightly warm keyboard. That’s two different types of keyboard, of course, not that I’m trying to write an e-mail on a piano. Ha ha! A little musical joke there, not unlike the works of Harrison Birtwhistle, that fedora-wearing archaeological pirate with a star ship.

As a composer, people often ask me, ‘where do you get your ideas?’, to which I reply, ‘I steal them’. And when they ask me why, I look them in the eye, heave a sigh, and say given that there are only 12 notes in an octave, there can only be 479 million different arrangements, which Mozart pretty much polished off before his twentieth birthday, while James Last did for the remainder. So I took a leaf out of my “mentor’s” book [editorial note – quote marks added by court order], the late, great Andrew Floyd-Rubber, and I borrow vicariously. That is, I dress up as a vicar and half-inch people’s tunes. As the great, late Andrew Ployd-Grubber said to me when I first started out, “What are you doing in my orangery?” From this deft syllogism I learned two things; firstly, that music is its own reward, and thirdly, that if you’re going to go to the expense of putting in an orangery, don’t get those concrete garden gnomes, because they go through double glazing like a female artist through backing dancers. Ha ha! A little musical joke there, not unlike that new Spice Girls musical everyone’s raving about. Well done Julia Saunders, I say.

Anyway, it’s back to the other keyboard now before the others find out I’ve escaped and dock my teacakes. Just because I tried to stab Phil with a fork for taking the last crumpet. But we artists must work under duress, or we get staid and start stealing other people’s tunes, like my latest song: Da-da-da-dum! That Laurens van der Beethoven stole that from me in 1706. Pair of bastards.

Bill

In the series, “Contractually Obliged and Delighted”, we go beneath the scenes, behind the magic, and astride the mystery, as the various members of The Dead Secrets share their experiences of the sketch-making process. This week’s post comes from Chris Sugden, the self-appointed “co-ordinator” of the group’s creative output, and the only member of the group to have been banned from at least one coffee shop in every UK postcode.

Hello readers,

I just want to clear up some of the negative rumours that have been circulating about me during the recent filming sessions. First of all – hang on a second.

No, I didn’t say double espresso, I said two espressos, in the same cup, twice. How is that confusing? And a Red Bull. I’ll be sat over in the corner. Can’t have people sneaking up on me. I don’t care if it is a Costa. You make enemies in this business.

First of all – sketches don’t just APPEAR. They take blood. You write them, you edit them, you storyboard them, you cast them, you direct them, you film them, you edit them. And if they’re not good enough, you delete them, burn the computer they’re on and start again. That’s just the way it is. So I don’t care if Will thinks I owe him a computer. He owes me more competent film production.

Second of all –

Yes? Oh, good. Just put it down there, thanks. And do you have a large empty glass? Thanks.

Second of all – scientists are basically split over whether people even need sleep. I sleep 90 minutes, twice a day. Little writing tip I picked up from Napoleon. It’s amazing what the body can do if you push it. So when the other lot in The Dead Secrets start whining about how tired they are and how they don’t get to spend enough time with their families, and how they’re so tired their brain hurts and their doctors say that if they don’t get more rest then there will be serious health repercussions, well, I don’t buy it. You just need the right toolkit.

Yes? What is it? … No, of course I haven’t made a drink out of espresso and Red Bull. And what if I had? … Well who the hell are you? … Yeah, off you go. Run along now.

Third of all – You don’t get to stop. I mean, my team, these Dead Secrets, they’re only human. They pass out after about 40 hours of filming. And that’s fine. Everybody deserves a rest now and again. But we’ve got sketches coming out on a regular schedule, so those 40 hours count. When we’re filming, they try to make it fun. Will, the poor boy, he was filming a scene and he actually laughed at a line Ida delivered. I mean, I can understand. I spent over 3 hours writing that line. It was literally perfect. But Will doesn’t get to laugh when he’s filming. He knows this, he just needed a little reminder. So now he’s got one. Every time he takes his socks off and counts.

What now? Who are you? … The manager? I don’t care if you’re the manager of the bloody Vatican! … Yes I suppose that would be the Pope. What do you want? … Yes? … Yes I am drinking that. … Yes, it does contain both espresso and Red Bull. … And kerosene, yes. … No, quite a bit actually … FOR WRITING, you imbecile … Well, you do what you must.

Anyway, I just wanted to clear these things up. You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few people’s spirits.

Until next time!

Fine, I’m leaving. But I’m taking these biscotti and all these single portions of sugar. Stay back! I’ll biscotti you, don’t think I won’t!

Chris

In the series, “Contractually Obliged and Delighted”, we go beneath the scenes, behind the magic, and astride the mystery, as the various members of The Dead Secrets share their experiences of the sketch-making process. This week’s post comes from Ida Persson, the group’s most “experienced” member, and the inspiration of countless showbusiness greats over the past [redacted] decades.

Hello,

I know these first blogs are meant to be a sort of introduction to the members of the group – I was told so by the message sent to me by Will via my personal communication device (a lovely young thing called Bertram), which I read as I was having my routine morning caviar and hot stone massage – but I need to take this opportunity to deal with an issue that I just feel it is imperative to raise.

This happened the other weekend when we were filming some serious snippets called “Scientists” (which you will see in our live sketch show in March). I’d been called from my hotel room, interrupting my “Be a Bette” champagne reception with Bette Midler, Bette Davis, and Karl Bette, to do a scene. Fine. With my consummate professionalism, carrying the rest of the cast through, I did the scene. I watched it back standing next to a trembling Will. (He’s just a boy really. After that incident with the mackerel after he made the mistake of walking into my dressing room without an appointment he just seems so nervous all the time. Who’d have thought a mackerel to the face, some apparently “harsh” words, and his fingers getting caught in the door when he was ushered out by my personal bouncer Frederick, would have made such a fuss!)

Anyway, as I watched it I noticed something that I just can’t be doing with. Jen was blocking me in the shot. Now, we all put up with a lot. But, as Frank (Sinatra) said to me once, “Ida, doll, a classy dame like you don’t want no bozos blockin’ your shot. You hear me, doll?” Well, I’ve built my career and reputation on his words.

Naturally the whole shoot had to be rescheduled, the sketch essentially rewritten and Jen is banned from speaking directly to me for the next month. And of course I retired to a spa with my personal emotional healer, Geoffrey. Apparently Chris has some “vision” (he always does) about restoring the proper hierarchy.

Good.

Because, I say again… Jen was blocking me in the shot. I mean, really…

As ever, Ida

In the series, “Contractually Obliged and Delighted”, we go beneath the scenes, behind the magic, and astride the mystery, as the various members of The Dead Secrets share their experiences of the sketch-making process. This week’s post comes from Jen Sugden, who when asked “Heads or Tails?”, always flips a coin to decide.

Hello,

Jen here, writing to you from the Headquarters of The Dead Secrets, the location of which is top secret simply because the torrent of Ida’s fan mail would smother us all.

If you have watched or listened to the sketches we have shared with you so far, then you would be forgiven for thinking that the group has only one female member. You see I do not appear in a single one of these sketches! Why is this? Well therein lies an interesting a story.

I was wandering the streets of London one day when I spotted a VW Combi van with a sign in the window saying Fortunes Read And Told. Now I’ve always tried to live by the motto: “if fate throws you a grape, then open your mouth”. Not wanting to miss out on one my providential five a day, I stepped inside Mystic Pete’s Van. And it’s a good job I did, because it turns out that on account of the position of Saturn, if I had filmed a sketch in October then I could have suffered a fate worse than death! What was this fate? A subject for another reading, Pete explained. So mystical.

Just to be safe, I’ve booked another reading with Mystic Pete, and he was good enough to waive his deposit and for no charge he took away all the cursed money that was somehow lurking in my purse, so that he could get it exorcised at a nearby Natwest which he knew to be built on the site of an ancient Aztec burial ground.

All being well I’ll be in our next sketch, which will be up next Friday!

Cheerio,

Jen x