The Tricky Fifth Episode

Last night, BBC7 broadcast Episode 5 of Series 2 of Hut 33. It's called Getting Heavy and the official blurb said:
Hut 33's record is the worst in the complex. Charles is mortified with shame, Archie is desperate to prove himself and Gordon wants to impress a girl he has just met. They break into Hut 7b to get extra information on a message they are decoding, which turns out not to be a good idea.

Getting Heavy was easily the mot difficult episode to write of that series. And it happens every series I've ever done. You write episodes 1 and 2 fairly slowly, as you're just character's voices into your head and feeling your way. Then episodes 3 and 4 are written in fairly good time, as the ideas are flowing and the characters are talking. Then comes Episode 5, which is like pulling teeth. It takes lots of drafts and just doesn't want to settle down - leaving you about a week to write Episode 6.

One of the problems for me is that with episode 5, I start writing the script before the story outline is in place. Flush with the 'success' of writing episodes 3 and 4 quickly and con brio, the temptation is to dive in to writing dialogue when the plot doesn't actually work. There's also the desire to save time and cut corners - but this normally backfires and I often end up deleting pages and pages of dialogue.

I'm aware that others write differently from me. One writer I spoke to the other day, who writes a much loved Radio 4 series, starts with a couple of slightly garbled pages of an outline and then writes a very very long script before he starts cutting and redrafting. I tend to start with a fairly long and detailed outline with some key jokes and bits of dialogue in it, so the process of actually starting to write the script isn't too painful. Sometimes, I abandon the ending and come up with a better one en route. But I have to start with something in place.

So Getting Heavy was one of those tricky ones that took six full drafts to crack. It was only in the fifth draft that I deleted a whole plot strand about radioactivity, which is was one of the reasons I wanted to do an episode in the first place. It thought it would be funny if our characters not really understanding Uranium, touching some and then being bundled in a van and taken off to some secret facility where they would be tested, poked and prodded. There was even a part where they thought they might have special super-powers as a result of the exposure to radiation based on Gordon's comic. This sounds rather preposterous but let's not forget that in 1941, not an awful lot was widely known about radiation. The first H-Bomb was still to be invented. In the end, we had a Quarantine episode in a different show, so the idea of being sealed off was covered in the series.

What I was able to retain, however, was the rivalry about sex-lives between Archie and Charles - and then Gordon. Archie is full of bravado, but short on delivery. Charles is aloof and unimpressed by innuendo, but has finally given into Mrs Best's pestering. Then step forward Gordon, who becomes the star of this show. Once he finds his woman, loses his virginity - he thinks - he becomes a man.

Two parallels spring to mind. One is Arnold Rimmer's alter-ego in Red Dwarf who is known as Ace - and says 'Smoke me a kipper. I'll be back for breakfast' played by the splendid Chris Barrie (who, let's not forget was also Brittas in the hugely popular Brittas Empire). The other is Harry Enfield's whining Kevin character, the teenager who hangs around with Kevin and complains about everything. He radically transforms once he's had sex, becoming polite to his parents and very contented.

Then, of course, comes undoing this transformation since one of the rules of sitcom is that they end up back where they started (unlike in movies where characters are changed by their 'journey').

The Views of the Author
I should add that I don't share this view about losing one's virginity. It doesn't 'make you a man' or turn you into a contented polite person. We're back to the theme of myself as the writer having different views from the characters that I write. I hope, if anything, that this episode demonstrates that the hypocrisy and lying that goes on around sex is rather feeble and very pervasive.

And let's be honest about this. There was War on and people weren't sure when their time was up. So there was a lot of it about. In Hut 33, I was hoping, where possible, to painting a picture of Wartime Britain as it was rather than how we would chose to remember it. If there's no truth in a show, it's just jokes and won't last. If there's no jokes, well, that's another story...

The Inspector Episode

For a while, I wrote a blog about my radio sitcom, Hut 33. There is an blog post on there that pertains to this week's episode of Hut 33 that was on BBC7 on Sunday (and on iPlayer here). Here it is (with a few tweaks and changes).

The Royal Visitor - the blurb for Episode 1 of Series 2 of Hut 33 is as follows:
A royal visitor is coming to inspect Bletchley Park, but the top brass are worried that this particular royal is a Nazi sympathiser. Hut 33 has to delay him and make sure he doesn't see any of the code-breaking machines.

Since this blog is about the boring mechanics of situation comedy, allow me to fill you in on how and why this episode came together without, hopefully, deconstructing the whole thing into a joyless series of components - although if I do that, so be it.

The Inspection Episode
The 'inspection' episode is common sit-com device and also a very useful one. Characters are sent rushing around getting things ready. Cleaning, polishing and tidying. In the process, skeletons can be found in cupboards, difficult tasks can be comically compressed and plenty of dirt can be swept under the carpet. See the effect of the Inspector in JB Priestley's An Inspector Calls in which the presence and prospect of an Inspector causes lives to unravel.

Another advantage of the 'Inspector' episode its simplicity. Simplicity is everything in comedy, especially in half-hour sit-com. If the audience is confused, even slightly, they can't laugh. In that sense, sit-com is contrived reality, over-simplified and sign-posted. The audience is normally happy with this because they understand the genre and that real life is more complicated. The trick is, within the contrived situation, to make the plot and events seem as organic and uncontrived as possible. We start with something believable, and through a series of believable steps end up somewhere original and bizarre, so we're left thinking 'How on earth did we get here?'!

Inspections are a reality of life - audits, royal visitors, tax men - so we have a believable, clear goal that we can all understand - everything has to be ready for the inspector or special visitor. It's a variation on 'The Boss Comes to Dinner' episode that's common to many domestic sitcoms.

The Twist
The trick of sitcom, then, is to take a familiar situation and push it further, into unfamiliar areas, involving characters that we are familiar with. As you would expect, World War Two threw up plenty of these. And so when I came to consider the inspection episode, I tried to think of what the twist would be. As the blurb of the show suggests (so I'm not spoiling it) what if the Royal visitor cannot be trusted?

This taps into the very real concerns during the war that some members of the aristocracy could not be trusted and were well-known for Fascist sympathies. It is a running theme of the series - partly embodied in the character of Professor Charles Gardiner. As a well-connected Oxford professor, he moves in elevated circles and was friendly before the war with high-ranking Nazis and sympathised with some of their views. Every episode, Archie normally makes jokes implying that Charles played some kind of sport with a prominent Nazi. And Charles has to concede that he was friendly with the Von Ribbentrops, the Rommels and even Mussolini.

And so as I was thinking about which Royal visitor, real or imagined, could visit Hut 33, I stumbled across Prince George, Duke of Kent. If you read up on the man, you will see that he was a very worrying figure for the British Establishment. Given the extraordinarily secret nature of the work at Bletchley Park, the Prince's visit would have to be frustrated in some way. If news of the breaking of Enigma was leaked back to Germany, it would have proved disastrous for the Allies.

German High Command had no idea that the British were reading their messages so a hint to that effect would have been catastrophic for Bletchley. 1941 was a difficult year for the Allies. Britain stood alone against Germany and was on the verge of starvation. The convoys in the Atlantic bringing food and supplies from America were a lifeline. This, then, gives an intensity to the story that hopefully makes it play and gives good motivations for our regular characters who are instrumental in keeping the prince away from the code-breaking machinery.

Hopefully, this creates a twist on the Inspection episode. Our characters frantically prepare for a Royal visitor, making easy-to-understand displays so that the inspection will explain exactly what they do at Bletchley Park, giving our characters a clear and comprehensible focus for their activities in which the comedy can play out. But when it is discovered which member of the Royal Family is coming, they have to frantic undo everthing and obscure that they are doing at Bletchley.

Guest Star
Fans of Radioactive, KYTV and Trevor's World of Sport will recognise the voice of the Prince. He is wonderfully played by Michael Fenton Stevens (who also played alongside Robert Bathurst (Charles) in My Dad's the Prime Minister).

What the Hell does He know?

Some readers of this blog may be wondering what on earth qualifies me to talk and write about sitcom. For a sample of my work, BBC7 are repeating Series 2 of Think the Unthinkable, a sitcom I wrote a few years ago about management consultants going into companies and wrecking them.

I was sad and a little astonished when BBC Radio 4 decided to cancel the show after four series in late 2005, since Marcus Brigstocke and David Mitchell seemed to be in the ascendancy, had never had a bad review and won a Silver Sony Award. I was very much looking forward to writing a fifth series (and still would like to!). But the writer must accept his lot and be grateful he doesn't have to lift heavy boxes for a living. It was the cancellation of Think the Unthinkable that led to my coming up with Hut 33, which has run for three series so far.

Anyway, do have a listen to Think the Unthinkable here. You buy Series 1 on Amazon too here.