Since the previous posts first appeared in the Radio Magazine, I now spend rather less time in cafes and a lot more researching news stories for topical gags at home on the internet. This more recent piece describes this (often mind-numbing) process...
During my brief spell as a stand up comic there was a fellow comedian at London clubs who would begin his act with ‘Which do I use: HP, Daddy’s, Lee and Perrins? I’m not telling you; a good comedian never reveals his sauces’. Confidently delivered, this Tim Vine-style wordplay got a laugh.
But I thought I would tell you about the endless daily news sources I have to trawl through to come up with the quota of (generally pun-free) show prep that I write for radio presenters.
It’s not so bad when I’m on my way to speaking engagements; I just buy a Sun, Mail (and, if it’s a long journey, a Telegraph as well) at Bournemouth station and hop on the train. I block out the chattering of Brockenhurst College students and announcements from overly descriptive buffet stewards and just concentrate. Ideas seem to form pretty rapidly; gags and observations are noted down and then sent by Blackberry before or after my talk.
But if I’m at home in front of a screen with access to ALL the news sources… You’ve heard of Parkinson’s Law that work expands to fill the time available? Well, so do newspaper websites!
I start with Ananova. Now, I know there are those who say it’s overused by presenters but it is irresistible, especially the Quirkies. The majority of these stories seem to come from either China, where, let’s face it, there are a lot more people available to take part in peculiar activities, or Croatia, a significantly smaller country where they just seem to do weird things anyway.
Then I look at showbiz news on Digital Spy Wire which takes entertainment stories from all the UK and US media. The trouble is, the headlines only include surnames so you have to click on them and investigate the story further. Take today, for example: ‘Lloyd dates businessman in Paris’. Which Lloyd? Emily Lloyd, the award-winning actress? Wendy Lloyd, the DJ-turned-singer songwriter? Surely not a misspelled Loyd Grossman? No, it’s Danielle Lloyd. Not even interesting. But I usually get the odd idea from somewhere on DSW.
The Daily Mirror site has a strange new habit of putting people’s names in headlines there, even if they’re not well-known, so I will read something like ‘Bill Bloggs leaves wife for postmistress’ and wonder whether this Bloggs chap is an important public figure who I’ve somehow missed hearing about rather just some randy vicar.
Where next? Oh yes, the Daily Mail. If only they wouldn’t distract me with their serialised books or the furious readers’ comments under some item about political correctness/petty officialdom.
Next stop: the Sun. Always good for a broad range of stories but I can’t help noticing that by now I’m taking ages longer than when I write on the train using just a couple of hard-copy sources and I’m still nowhere near my daily quota of material!
After this, I’ll look at the Evening Standard which posts new, mostly London-based stories – but I have to wait until around midday for them.
Nearly there. I love the Telegraph’s current (and perhaps, for them, surprising) in-depth reporting of men having sex with inanimate objects: a bicycle, a Henry vacuum cleaner, a lamp-post... (Mind you, one of the dodgiest gags I ever had broadcast by the BBC was about a story I once saw in that paper in 1995 about a man in Ghana caught having sex with a cow because he didn’t want the health risks of having sex with a human. Punchline: he’s now UHT positive…)
The quota has, at last, been reached but I can exceed it if I also read the Times, Guardian, Independent, Sky and BBC News online. Then there’s Reuters, Associated Press, Exchange & Mart...
Perhaps I should just buy a few papers each morning and get on a train – regardless of whether I have a talk to go to or not!
(Reprinted from the Radio Magazine Issue 831, 12 March 2008)
Friday, 30 May 2008
Tuesday, 13 May 2008
Food for thought (or punchlines at mealtimes)
The debt-ridden novelist Honore de Balzac wrote many of his 85 masterpieces in French cafes. An impoverished J K Rowling completed her first ‘Harry Potter’ manuscript in coffee bars, making each beverage last an hour, like the pensioner in Ralph McTell’s ‘Streets of London’. And, somewhat further down the literary food chain (but no less hard-up), the Radio Gagster comes up with many of his topical jokes while sitting in a Subway, a McDonald’s, or, if he’s actually been paid by a presenter, a Starbucks.
What is it about writers and cafes?
Is it that we’re outsiders who like to observe others’ everyday lives and eavesdrop on their conversations for inspiration? Or could it simply be that many of us live in conditions that would make the producers of BBC 1’s ‘Life of Grime’ shudder, so that even the grottiest greasy spoon would seem like the Ritz by comparison?
I first got into the cafe habit at Broadcasting House where many BBC Radio Light Entertainment writers probably started going up to the canteen because it was less stressful than trying to buy anything from the tea bar at 16 Langham Street.
One woman who served in there was absolutely terrifying. From the moment a customer appeared at the door, she would glare at them and bellow ‘WHADDYA WANT?’ As soon as they’d made their hurried selection, she would hold a hand out for payment a millimetre under their nose, stare at the coins suspiciously, deposit them in the till with a grunt, and then move on to her next victim.
The writer would return to the task of fearlessly scripting satirical sketches to bring down the Establishment - while still quaking from their encounter with the BBC tea lady.
The BH canteen was situated on the eighth floor and commanded spectacular views. It was open 24 hours a day and, despite being the butt of so many jokes over the years, served food that was perfectly acceptable, reasonably priced (i.e. subsidised) and very varied. There was one problem, however: you couldn’t always tell what you were getting. Savoury dishes seemed to be cunningly disguised as desserts, and vice versa.
A colleague, Ben Francis, was a vegetarian. One day he dished out runner beans along with what appeared to be a savoury white sauce. This turned out to be custard. It will perhaps give you some idea of the eccentricity of radio comedy writers if I tell you that he actually said to me, in all seriousness, ‘I didn’t half feel ill by the time I’d finished it’.
Things weren’t much better if you knowingly bought the stuff. A BH canteen cashier once accidentally dropped £1 change straight into my custard. Instead of apologising, she simply came out with a perfect, seventies sitcom-style ‘OOH-ER!’ She really should have been performing on radio, not serving its writers.
Nowadays, as I work on my material in a cafe, there is often an ILR station playing in the background and this is useful, not only for breaking news as I approach a deadline but also for keeping me up to date with presenters’ styles.
And if I find a place that’s conducive to coming up with ideas, I’ll go there most days for months, sometimes years on end. Proprietors get used to seeing me with my pile of newspapers, my notebooks and my anxious glances at the clock. They tolerate me, just as I sometimes have to tolerate them…
A café owner who was obsessed with keeping dogs once spent some considerable time explaining to me, in full gory detail, the complete process for castrating a King Charles spaniel. It was difficult trying to write after that with my legs so firmly crossed.
But then that’s a different kind of Ball-sac…
(Republished from the Radio Magazine Issue 734, 10 May 2006)
What is it about writers and cafes?
Is it that we’re outsiders who like to observe others’ everyday lives and eavesdrop on their conversations for inspiration? Or could it simply be that many of us live in conditions that would make the producers of BBC 1’s ‘Life of Grime’ shudder, so that even the grottiest greasy spoon would seem like the Ritz by comparison?
I first got into the cafe habit at Broadcasting House where many BBC Radio Light Entertainment writers probably started going up to the canteen because it was less stressful than trying to buy anything from the tea bar at 16 Langham Street.
One woman who served in there was absolutely terrifying. From the moment a customer appeared at the door, she would glare at them and bellow ‘WHADDYA WANT?’ As soon as they’d made their hurried selection, she would hold a hand out for payment a millimetre under their nose, stare at the coins suspiciously, deposit them in the till with a grunt, and then move on to her next victim.
The writer would return to the task of fearlessly scripting satirical sketches to bring down the Establishment - while still quaking from their encounter with the BBC tea lady.
The BH canteen was situated on the eighth floor and commanded spectacular views. It was open 24 hours a day and, despite being the butt of so many jokes over the years, served food that was perfectly acceptable, reasonably priced (i.e. subsidised) and very varied. There was one problem, however: you couldn’t always tell what you were getting. Savoury dishes seemed to be cunningly disguised as desserts, and vice versa.
A colleague, Ben Francis, was a vegetarian. One day he dished out runner beans along with what appeared to be a savoury white sauce. This turned out to be custard. It will perhaps give you some idea of the eccentricity of radio comedy writers if I tell you that he actually said to me, in all seriousness, ‘I didn’t half feel ill by the time I’d finished it’.
Things weren’t much better if you knowingly bought the stuff. A BH canteen cashier once accidentally dropped £1 change straight into my custard. Instead of apologising, she simply came out with a perfect, seventies sitcom-style ‘OOH-ER!’ She really should have been performing on radio, not serving its writers.
Nowadays, as I work on my material in a cafe, there is often an ILR station playing in the background and this is useful, not only for breaking news as I approach a deadline but also for keeping me up to date with presenters’ styles.
And if I find a place that’s conducive to coming up with ideas, I’ll go there most days for months, sometimes years on end. Proprietors get used to seeing me with my pile of newspapers, my notebooks and my anxious glances at the clock. They tolerate me, just as I sometimes have to tolerate them…
A café owner who was obsessed with keeping dogs once spent some considerable time explaining to me, in full gory detail, the complete process for castrating a King Charles spaniel. It was difficult trying to write after that with my legs so firmly crossed.
But then that’s a different kind of Ball-sac…
(Republished from the Radio Magazine Issue 734, 10 May 2006)
An excellent article about topical monologues
Many comedy fans in the UK will be familiar with the Tonight Show with Jay Leno or Late Night with Letterman but may well have missed this superb article by Sam Anderson in New York magazine about their different approaches to the recent writers' strike in the United States. It includes some acute observations about the daily grind of producing a quota of topical humour.
Sunday, 11 May 2008
Preparation, Preparation, Preparation (Parts 1 & 2)
I think a good way to start this blog will be by posting the first two Radio Gagster columns I had published in the Radio Magazine. These were all about the daily show prep service of topical gags which I have been supplying to commercial radio presenters for fourteen years. The only real change since this two-part article appeared is that the material is now delivered by email from home or Blackberry when I am out at a speaking engagement rather than leaving gags on a presenter's voicemail.
Part 1
Every day, a shortish, balding man goes to a café and sits leafing through a pile of newspapers, occasionally stopping to scribble the odd hurried note. From time to time, over the past twelve years, intrigued fellow diners have asked him ‘What exactly are you doing?’
So I tell them: ‘Writing jokes for independent local radio presenters’.
That was one of the first things I learnt. Commercial radio disc jockeys are presenters. (Unless, of course, a club owner calls and says ‘I need a DJ tonight – it’s good money!’ Then they temporarily become jocks again).
But whatever you call my clients, or my service (Prep? Programme Support? Link-writing?), it’s what I’ve done since August 1 1994.
It wasn’t planned. I’d spent years working on national topical shows like ‘Week Ending’ and ‘News Huddlines’ and I’d seen some of my BBC colleagues get head-hunted to write for Simon Mayo on Radio 1 (very lucrative!) but I hadn’t considered presenters as an additional market for me. Instead, I was advertising in the ‘Stage’ to write speeches for weddings, routines for comics, etc.
Then, one Friday night, I got a call from a presenter on a tiny station I’d never heard of. Between rushing his tea before hurrying off to one of those club gigs (busy lives, presenters, second thing I learnt) he told me that he wanted eight daily topical gags or observations. He was using another writer but I could supply him on alternate days.
I faxed him the first selection the following Monday. A week later, he asked me to write for him every day. He was livid because his other writer’s entire quota had been about mass-murderer Fred West – totally unbroadcastable!
Since then, he’s gone from graveyard to primetime (the presenter, I mean, not Fred West), and from that small station to one of the majors, always using my material as well as his own original ideas. But he needn’t have a seizure reading this because I’m not going to identify him. That’s the important thing about this service: confidentiality. No-one has ever known that he uses my writing, we’ve never even met (in fact, I have never met any presenters I’ve written for).
It’s been pretty cloak and dagger at times. Nowadays, I mostly send material by voice or email but for many years it was a case of waiting for a phone call with the loudly whispered ‘The fax is clear, put it through now!’
And not just from him but from others because the service grew, due in no small part to an ad in the ‘Radio Magazine’. Within eighteen months, I had four clients in different parts of the country, so I was able to syndicate material without any overlap (digital/internet radio makes such total exclusivity impossible nowadays but it’s still assumed that most listeners only tune in to local stations in their own regions). And when additional presenters contacted me in areas where I already had a client using daily topical humour, I was able to provide them with alternatives, such as Birthday and Anniversary or Golden Hour/Hits and Headlines gags.
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve learnt a great deal over these past twelve years; I used to think that ‘reach’ was a toothbrush, ‘demographic’ was a diagram of a protest march and ‘swing presenters’ only played Count Basie tracks (the jokes I write for radio are much better than those, honestly). In the next article I’ll tell you about the highs, lows and funny side of being one of radio’s hidden humorists.
Part 2
Last time, I wrote about how I came to supply comedy for ILR stations. But what sort of life is it?
Precarious, certainly. Presenters who use my service tend to stay with me for years but it’s still possible to lose them, not through a decline in the quality of the material but because shows are never static. The introduction of phone-ins, requests or banter between on-air crews may leave no room for scripted links.
Cash flow is also problematic. As I’ve mentioned, presenters lead hectic lives. Invoices must go out well in advance as cheques may take weeks to arrive. It’s much worse when I’m paid by stations themselves and have to deal with infuriating, centralised accounts departments who say they’ve had nothing from Programming while Programming say it went off weeks ago…paperwork ping-pong. I actually once had some accounting minion making typing noises down the phone as he pretended to send off a furious email to a station.
Some presenters can’t really afford the service. I wrote for years for a lovely chap who had taken a massive pay cut from a top industry job to work in radio. We had payment problems for months before parting company, with me having to write off hundreds. The last I heard, he was a Programme Controller!
I’m not always kept informed. I was dictating daily gags on a presenter’s voicemail before he rather sheepishly called to say he’d actually been on holiday for ten days. He paid up anyway.
Writing for breakfast shows is tricky as we don’t get the papers early enough here in Bournemouth but I have found that items from the previous day’s ‘Evening Standard’ and news programmes become national stories the next morning.
Then there are stations who only want jokes about their own areas. It’s amazing how ingenious I can be at crow-barring in the relevance of a story from the Orkneys to city life hundreds of miles away!
Slow news days are easier now we have many sources in addition to the papers, particularly the web. At one time, if there was no inspiration in the press, it was a case of desperately searching for something from Welsh Headlines on Ceefax! And if the news is full of tragedy (e.g. 9/11), my services are not needed as stations cut back on humour.
What do I write about? It helps to know demographics, but generally, topical gags about current events/personalities, inventions, surveys, trends, pop culture (for a heterosexual man in his forties I have a surprisingly detailed knowledge of boy bands) and timeless, observational humour about everyday life.
Subjects to avoid are politics, the politically incorrect, drugs, anything too risqué (although I wrote for years for one breakfast presenter before finally hearing his remarkably rude show. The material he could have had if I’d known…) and gags about a station’s advertisers.
And what do I get from this, besides payment? Well, since the demise of ‘Week Ending’ and ‘News Huddlines’, it means my material continues on the radio. No audience laughter, no mention in the credits, but still the knowledge that a six-figure audience is hearing my jokes.
It’s become an unbreakable habit. I write on holiday, I even wrote for a show one Christmas Day.
One last thing. Dictating gags in public is hideously embarrassing.
So if you see a shortish, balding man getting odd looks from elderly ladies while bellowing something about ‘Chantelle’ into his mobile in the only part of the street outside the cafe with a signal, well, in the words of that song by Sting and Eric Clapton: ‘It’s Probably Me’.
(Reprinted from the Radio Magazine Issue 728, 29 March 2006 and Issue 730, 12 April 2006)
Over time, I came to discover just how frowned-upon radio show prep services are in some quarters - despite the fact that all I'm really doing is augmenting a programme in an 'additional material by...' capacity, just as I did for BBC shows for twelve years. In the end, I wrote an article in defence of show prep services. You can read it here.
Part 1
Every day, a shortish, balding man goes to a café and sits leafing through a pile of newspapers, occasionally stopping to scribble the odd hurried note. From time to time, over the past twelve years, intrigued fellow diners have asked him ‘What exactly are you doing?’
So I tell them: ‘Writing jokes for independent local radio presenters’.
That was one of the first things I learnt. Commercial radio disc jockeys are presenters. (Unless, of course, a club owner calls and says ‘I need a DJ tonight – it’s good money!’ Then they temporarily become jocks again).
But whatever you call my clients, or my service (Prep? Programme Support? Link-writing?), it’s what I’ve done since August 1 1994.
It wasn’t planned. I’d spent years working on national topical shows like ‘Week Ending’ and ‘News Huddlines’ and I’d seen some of my BBC colleagues get head-hunted to write for Simon Mayo on Radio 1 (very lucrative!) but I hadn’t considered presenters as an additional market for me. Instead, I was advertising in the ‘Stage’ to write speeches for weddings, routines for comics, etc.
Then, one Friday night, I got a call from a presenter on a tiny station I’d never heard of. Between rushing his tea before hurrying off to one of those club gigs (busy lives, presenters, second thing I learnt) he told me that he wanted eight daily topical gags or observations. He was using another writer but I could supply him on alternate days.
I faxed him the first selection the following Monday. A week later, he asked me to write for him every day. He was livid because his other writer’s entire quota had been about mass-murderer Fred West – totally unbroadcastable!
Since then, he’s gone from graveyard to primetime (the presenter, I mean, not Fred West), and from that small station to one of the majors, always using my material as well as his own original ideas. But he needn’t have a seizure reading this because I’m not going to identify him. That’s the important thing about this service: confidentiality. No-one has ever known that he uses my writing, we’ve never even met (in fact, I have never met any presenters I’ve written for).
It’s been pretty cloak and dagger at times. Nowadays, I mostly send material by voice or email but for many years it was a case of waiting for a phone call with the loudly whispered ‘The fax is clear, put it through now!’
And not just from him but from others because the service grew, due in no small part to an ad in the ‘Radio Magazine’. Within eighteen months, I had four clients in different parts of the country, so I was able to syndicate material without any overlap (digital/internet radio makes such total exclusivity impossible nowadays but it’s still assumed that most listeners only tune in to local stations in their own regions). And when additional presenters contacted me in areas where I already had a client using daily topical humour, I was able to provide them with alternatives, such as Birthday and Anniversary or Golden Hour/Hits and Headlines gags.
As I’ve mentioned, I’ve learnt a great deal over these past twelve years; I used to think that ‘reach’ was a toothbrush, ‘demographic’ was a diagram of a protest march and ‘swing presenters’ only played Count Basie tracks (the jokes I write for radio are much better than those, honestly). In the next article I’ll tell you about the highs, lows and funny side of being one of radio’s hidden humorists.
Part 2
Last time, I wrote about how I came to supply comedy for ILR stations. But what sort of life is it?
Precarious, certainly. Presenters who use my service tend to stay with me for years but it’s still possible to lose them, not through a decline in the quality of the material but because shows are never static. The introduction of phone-ins, requests or banter between on-air crews may leave no room for scripted links.
Cash flow is also problematic. As I’ve mentioned, presenters lead hectic lives. Invoices must go out well in advance as cheques may take weeks to arrive. It’s much worse when I’m paid by stations themselves and have to deal with infuriating, centralised accounts departments who say they’ve had nothing from Programming while Programming say it went off weeks ago…paperwork ping-pong. I actually once had some accounting minion making typing noises down the phone as he pretended to send off a furious email to a station.
Some presenters can’t really afford the service. I wrote for years for a lovely chap who had taken a massive pay cut from a top industry job to work in radio. We had payment problems for months before parting company, with me having to write off hundreds. The last I heard, he was a Programme Controller!
I’m not always kept informed. I was dictating daily gags on a presenter’s voicemail before he rather sheepishly called to say he’d actually been on holiday for ten days. He paid up anyway.
Writing for breakfast shows is tricky as we don’t get the papers early enough here in Bournemouth but I have found that items from the previous day’s ‘Evening Standard’ and news programmes become national stories the next morning.
Then there are stations who only want jokes about their own areas. It’s amazing how ingenious I can be at crow-barring in the relevance of a story from the Orkneys to city life hundreds of miles away!
Slow news days are easier now we have many sources in addition to the papers, particularly the web. At one time, if there was no inspiration in the press, it was a case of desperately searching for something from Welsh Headlines on Ceefax! And if the news is full of tragedy (e.g. 9/11), my services are not needed as stations cut back on humour.
What do I write about? It helps to know demographics, but generally, topical gags about current events/personalities, inventions, surveys, trends, pop culture (for a heterosexual man in his forties I have a surprisingly detailed knowledge of boy bands) and timeless, observational humour about everyday life.
Subjects to avoid are politics, the politically incorrect, drugs, anything too risqué (although I wrote for years for one breakfast presenter before finally hearing his remarkably rude show. The material he could have had if I’d known…) and gags about a station’s advertisers.
And what do I get from this, besides payment? Well, since the demise of ‘Week Ending’ and ‘News Huddlines’, it means my material continues on the radio. No audience laughter, no mention in the credits, but still the knowledge that a six-figure audience is hearing my jokes.
It’s become an unbreakable habit. I write on holiday, I even wrote for a show one Christmas Day.
One last thing. Dictating gags in public is hideously embarrassing.
So if you see a shortish, balding man getting odd looks from elderly ladies while bellowing something about ‘Chantelle’ into his mobile in the only part of the street outside the cafe with a signal, well, in the words of that song by Sting and Eric Clapton: ‘It’s Probably Me’.
(Reprinted from the Radio Magazine Issue 728, 29 March 2006 and Issue 730, 12 April 2006)
Over time, I came to discover just how frowned-upon radio show prep services are in some quarters - despite the fact that all I'm really doing is augmenting a programme in an 'additional material by...' capacity, just as I did for BBC shows for twelve years. In the end, I wrote an article in defence of show prep services. You can read it here.
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