Well it has been quite the exhausting couple of days, not too much sleep and stressful days, but duty says I have to comment on our last meeting or this blog is a bit pointless..

Sketchageddon III was yet another mighty success for the London Comedy Writers, at least when I remembered to cast the scripts. Whoops.  Anyway, lets see what we had.

Acceptable Discrimination?, Body Harvest, and Big Issue by Gareth Moore, – The winner of last months blog contest hit the floor running three sketches, general consensus was tighten them at the top… except the last one which at 3 lines was short enough.  Debate rages about whether you can still take the piss out of ginger people.

The Art of Wally by Olly Allsopp, – Equally well received and with one person even commenting that it was one of the finest Wally based sketches he had ever heard.

The Present by Sally Ingrey, – Not so much a sketch, but scene from a film, wonderful dialogue, interesting characters.

Owning a Break-up and Carbs and Bombs by Ahmed III – The first sketch pulled an excellent slight of hand on the audience, while the second one that paired an airhead and a suicide bomber had an interesting mix emotions, but ultimately very funny.

I Was Also Thinking of Writing a Script by Anon II – In response to last week’s anonymous script, another was submitted, a fantastically funny homage to the original.  If only we knew who were writing these… maybe it was the same person….

Absolute Weakest Link by Luke Llyons, Class Conscious by Jeremy Davies and John’s last minute submission were all well received, however all suffered from similar ideas being done before.  This lead to an interesting debate about the originality of characters and ideas, or whether once they are performed, even be it over 20 years ago can  no one else go there? Deliberate or not.

The Lamb and Lion by Douglas Hooker – again this was less a sketch and more a scene from something larger, there were nice moments, but ultimately most felt that this was character exploration for the writer rather than a story.

Cuba Libre by Sally Sheringham – Two men in Cuba, this script had some great moments, although as is quite often the case, was over written at the start and the ending didn’t quite work. Some thought it would be better to explore a longer version, perhaps a feature film.

Middle Earth and Drone Controllers by Joel Soetendorp – Two short nicely written if somewhat surreal pieces, great take on the military and Middle Earth.

Finally Matthew Jessee presented the first of what I hope will be many webisodes from the group.  Sadly by the time we got round to this everyone was tired, while we are normally done by about 9.30, in an effort to get everyone’s sketches in we had over run and it was nearing 10.15.  The energy had left the room and reading came out oddly flat. Comments were fairly positive although the script still held too close to a scene from a sitcom rather than a single self contained story. Since the script Desperate was originally written as sitcom, it now needs a lot of changes to make it work in significantly different medium.  This means cutting down on locations, telling smaller stories and focusing mainly on a single character.

Well that is all for now. At some point when I have processed my thoughts I will comment on my Fourth Plinth disaster, and thank you to all those who offered such kind words of support. Like they say, life goes on and it doesn’t matter how you fall, but how you pick yourself back up.

Tags: feedback, london comedy writers, meeting, Script, sketch, webisode, writing

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