Today I received an e-mail from a newbie at the London Comedy Writers.
“I was very impressed by the high quality of the writing and acting, and extremely depressed when I asked someone, based on the calibre of the readings, how does one make a transition from LCW to BBC to ITV.
The person beside me replied, “Oh, it’s extremely easy. Just go to Oxford or Cambridge, and when one of your friends gets a job at BBC or ITV, call them up!”
I don’t know how true that is. I hope it’s comedic overstatement.”
Here is my reply.
As for making the jump from LCW to the BBC. The person next to you was probably more right than wrong… if you are looking for one easy step.
The chance of you sending a script to the BBC and them making it is tiny if not non-existent. Think about it as if you were an actor, you would do plays, do commercials, do one lines, student films, short films, go to audition after audition, make contacts within the industry and then when you made it everyone would say “you came from nowhere.” No one, not even writers come from nowhere, they will always have a body of produced work behind them.
As writers we need think more like actors, but as is quite often the case, we writers are perhaps not so pushy, we are use to working alone tapping at our keyboard and not selling ourselves and our scripts. We have dreams of crafting a Lord of the Rings epic before ever producing a short film. We also think that writing is easy, and never learn the craft of good story telling that is led by emotion and not events (it doesn’t help that so much out there is dross anyway).
If you want to write, start off small, with sketches that can be filmed or performed by sketch groups (Messers of Comedy and Stephens and Brooks are two groups that will accept scripts). Move up to one act plays, there are many directors and actors out there desperate to perform since they need the experience too. Once you are getting work seen you can get an agent and then you can get your scripts read by people who matter. If a script is submitted to a company by an agent it will be read, if not, it will sit on a pile and may get read. An alternate route is to get into Soap, start off as a runner and work your way up through the ranks – it maybe a more reliable root, but perhaps nowhere near as creatively fulling.
I guess the bottom line is you need to write and get things produced rather than letting sit in a draw. Easy things to get produced are short films and sketches and with modern distribution methods provided by the the net a lot of people get the opportunity to see it.
