Our next meeting is Tuesday 16th April
We're back at the Old King's Head near London Bridge at 7pm to read an episode of the sitcom ‘Monroe’ by Ian Cowmeadow, plus sketches. Details on our website.
We are currently booking slots for sitcoms, sketches, monologues, comic plays, webisodes, shorts and comedy dramas. Remember, your space on the list is dependent on you turning up to support other writers.
What’s In a Title?
I watched a film recently entitled ‘How To Blow Up a Pipeline’. It was very good; tense and engaging, thanks for asking, and it also got me thinking about script titles. As you might expect, HTBUAP is about eco-terrorists undertaking an act of anti-fossil fuel sabotage on behalf of the environment, with the central idea coming from a non-fiction book of the same name. You could hardly make things clearer for a potential audience unless the movie was called ‘activists plot to destroy oil infrastructure in last, desperate attempt to save the planet’, which is significantly less snappy, I’m sure you’ll agree.
Varying Conventions
But when it comes to sitcom titles, there seem to be varying conventions, all worth exploring before naming your own. If your comedy revolves around a protagonist who is central to the plotlines, and whose point of view is so integral they’re in almost every scene, you might want to name your pilot after their character, as in ‘Miranda’, ‘Rev’ or ‘Frasier’ (the latter of which had name recognition on its launch thanks to ‘Cheers’). For a workplace sitcom, you can give a taste of both setting and situation in an evocative title like ‘Parks and Recreation’, ‘Stath Lets Flats’ or ‘The Office’.
Puns and Double Meanings
Older sitcoms will often employ a pun which, if you can pull it off, is extremely satisfying (as we recently saw at LCW with Vicky Richards’ ‘Bad Heir Day’). Think ‘Toast of London’ or ‘The Good Life’ here, where the main characters’ goals match their surnames. Slightly different, but just as effective, are those sitcoms that have a double meaning like ‘Fawlty Towers’ (Basil Fawlty owns the hotel, and everything there is faulty), or 70s favourite ‘Porridge’. If you know that “doing porridge’ is slang for spending time in prison, you’ll instantly understand this sitcom from a single word; one that has the bonus of being a silly-sounding breakfast, regularly served up to convicts.
Summing Up the Tone
Trickier are those inexact titles that manage to sum up the tone and atmosphere in a word or three. I’m thinking of ‘Catastrophe’, ‘Outnumbered’, or even ‘Colin From Accounts’, a show that doesn’t feature a person called Colin and never visits an accounting department – yet somehow it works. My most recent experience in naming a script was unusual for me, as the first thing that came to mind was an attention-grabbing title. This was accurately descriptive, but I didn’t think the overall idea had legs. But eventually the possibilities evoked by this title nagged away at me, and I felt compelled to develop the concept further, ending up with a pilot script I’m relatively pleased with.
Finding the Right Name
This is rare though. When first working on a concept, I rarely have a title in mind. Sometimes one will come when I’m in the midst of a first draft, or a name suggests itself while reflecting during rewrites, or even later. My advice is not to get hung up on the perfect title, especially early on. It’s much more important to execute your idea well, and the right name will usually come at some point in the process. So long as you have a title by the time you’re ready to show your script to others, that’s fine. If you’re really stuck, you could use a placeholder then bring your sitcom to LCW to see if anyone in the room has a suggestion you like more - we’ve done that for writers before. Either way, have faith the perfect title for your project is out there somewhere, but don’t let its absence hold you back.
Al
'The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance.'
Robert Bresson
Competitions and opportunities
The Verity Bargate Award, the Soho Theatre’s flagship new writing competition, is now accepting plays of at least one hour running time (10,000 words). The prize is a full London theatrical run for your work, as well as £8,000 for an exclusive option. Deadline: 17th June.
Sapere Books are offering a 5-book publishing contract for a writer who can submit a 2,000 word synopsis and the first 3 chapters of the first (fictional) work in a series out of a choice of six briefs, including Bletchley Park codebreaking and Gothic House mysteries. Find out more. Deadline 31st May.
The annual Shortcom sitcom competition is currently open for scripts of 23 - 30 pages in length (plus a one-page pitch document). The early bird entry fee is £15. Deadline (for the early bird): 22nd April.
Member news
The advantage of writing this newsletter is that I get to push my wares to anyone who makes it this far, like the short story collection ‘Outside The Comfort Zone – Tales From Austerity Britain’. My book is free in the digital format until the end of Tuesday 16th; for e-reader or any device with the free app. The tales therein contain some moments of dark comedy but be warned, it’s not exactly light entertainment.
Long-time friend of LCW Beth Granville, whose co-written pilot ‘Foiled’ we read before it became a hit BBC Radio Wales sitcom, is running a one-day comedy acting workshop with Tom O’Brien on Saturday 27th April, from 10am to 6pm at the London Welsh Centre (King’s Cross/Chancery Lane). The workshop will delve into joke structure, comic timing and rhythm, and give you the tools to create great comedy characters from performance. The cost is £90 but you can get a 10% discount by quoting LCW in your enquiry when you contact Beth via the button on her website.
LCW’s Siobhan Spooner appears in Antigone at the Jack Studio Theatre in Brockley from 30th April to 4th May. More information and tickets here.