Tape 166: Trust

What Do Stath And Colin Have In Common?

We’re wrapped! Last week we finished off shooting my comedy pilot and, as I said last week, I’m so enormously grateful to all of you who generously donated and enabled us to make it. I’m so proud of all the hard work from so many incredibly talented people, and I can’t wait to see what we’ve made.

My creative energy really is in its death throes for 2024. It lies twitching on the pavement, burnt out, spent, occasionally burping out half-arsed suggestions like “Michael Spinach Buying An Organic Mirror” or “Chain of Fools but it’s about cheese, so it goes “Cheese cheese cheese, cheese of fools,”” but it must be nearly time for me to accept that I’ve had all my good ideas for one year. So I think this will be my last newsletter until the highly-anticipated return of “Word Of The Year” after Christmas, but while this big, overwhelming, exhausting project is fresh in my mind, I just thought I’d write a quick companion piece to last week’s Tape. Last week I was writing about letting other people be funny, and how nice it felt to be at the centre of a project where I’d tried to make a concerted effort to ensure that I wasn’t really at the centre of it. This week, following on from that, some thoughts on trusting people to know what they’re doing.

While we were in pre-production for The Happiness Chain, Ben Kent and I had a lot of chats about our comedy tastes in order to sound out what we both liked and what sort of space we imagined this show sitting in. The ones we both kept coming back to as things we both loved in recent years were Jamie Demetriou’s Stath Lets Flats and Harriet Dyer and Patrick Brammall’s Colin From Accounts. They are, in my opinion, two of the best new sitcoms of the last ten years (along with Mum, they make up my top three). The more we discussed this, though, the more I started to wonder what this said about my taste. After all, on paper, those two shows are incredibly different.

Stath is over-the-top and ridiculous and goofy, and Colin is heart-warming and grounded and human. That’s not to say that Stath never tugs at the heart-strings - it sneaks in some surprisingly affecting moments - or that Colin From Accounts isn’t ridiculous - it has some hugely over-the-top and daft setpieces. But their basic energies are almost opposites, and I started to wonder what I meant when I said things like “I guess we’re looking for something that sits in between those two energies.” What did that even mean? Wouldn’t those energies just cancel each other out? Was I pushing for us to make something that was the comedic equivalent of a blank, ambient space? A bowl of room-temperature water? I sure hoped not.

So I tried to work out what those two shows do have in common to work out what was actually drawing me back to both of them as useful points of comparison, and I eventually realised that it was trust. Both are the result of decisions where a group of creative people have been entirely trusted to do the thing they believe in, because they knew how to be funny together. There’s nothing remotely compromised or corporate in the way they’ve been designed or delivered, and their creators have been trusted implicitly.

I heard stories about commissioners struggling to understand how Stath was going to work because on the page it just looked mad. The scripts mostly consisted of lines that sounded a lot like gibberish, or stage directions like “He bangs his head.” Apparently there were a lot of conversations where someone had to go “You don’t understand, when Tash Demetriou delivers that line of gibberish it WILL be funny. And when Al Roberts bangs his head, it WILL BE FUNNY.” And at some point, somebody went “OK, we trust you,” and the results speak for themselves. It was the funniest thing on telly in years.

Similarly, the thing that shines out from Colin From Accounts is the incredible chemistry between Dyer and Brammall - they’re funny together because they’re a real couple. Their scenes together aren’t necessarily packed with signposted gags in the way that you often feel pressured to do as a writer turning in scripts, but they’re still incredibly engaging and funny because both actors know exactly how to give each other the space to be the funniest version of themselves.

So I’ve realised this is the key ingredient in the comedy I like - whether I’m watching something goofy and stupid or something grounded and human, I like to watch things where people have been trusted to make something in the ways that they know will make it funny. I like it when decisions haven’t been made by external committee to appeal to the broadest possible audience. Because when too many people have said “By the way, we need it to be like this,” that becomes a tangible feeling that you can’t shake off when watching the end product. And when people have gone “We want to support you to make the best version of the thing you’re good at, because we trust you,” that’s also a thing you can physically feel when you watch (and re-watch) the things you love.

And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that solo creators should be empowered to just do whatever they want. That’s a slippery slope to the kind of limited, self-absorbed comedy writing I was talking about last week that’s very easy to slip into when you’re working alone. Along the way on this pilot project, certain preconceptions of mine about the script and characters were questioned and challenged and then tweaked and enhanced by other collaborators, and that was a really exciting thing. I’ve no intention to ever shake off the idea of collaboration, and the best producers and commissioners understand that dynamic of support and challenge.

But I do think we need to place more trust in the idea that writers, comedians, filmmakers and creatives do actually know what they’re doing, just as producers and commissioners do. We need more of those relationships to be built on mutual respect and mutual risk. I attended another comedy industry event this week which was good fun but once again featured plenty of jokes and anxious, hand-wringing comments about how bad things are in comedy commissioning right now, and how important it is that we discover the next big hit. I also heard more stories about creative projects friends were working on which were hitting stumbling blocks over basic disagreements over what the project was even meant to be. I wish more people understood that the big hits they’re all so anxiously craving can’t be engineered or designed, they have to be risked. Trust has to be placed in the hands of the people who make stuff, and trust has to be placed in the ability of an audience to discover and enjoy great work.

I’d love there to be more shows like Stath or Colin From Accounts or Mum. Some great stuff is being made at the moment, of course, but I feel like the atmosphere around the making of TV comedy is still very tense and watchful and nervous. I completely understand why - it’s scary times! But nothing good ever game out of tense, watchful creative environments. My resolution for 2025 is to loosen up and trust more in the simple power of making good stuff.

A Cool New Thing In Comedy - Edy Hurst’s Wonderfull Discoverie Of Witches In The Countie Of Himself, the delightful comedy-theatre show about witch trials and Vengaboys that I directed and which launched at the Lowry last month, opens at Camden People’s Theatre tonight and runs until tomorrow! Come along if you’re free!

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most - There’s a big squishy green fish with a big nose in Moana 2 and it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

Book Of The Week - I’m still on Philip Teir’s The Winter War, which I’m enjoying, although it drifts perhaps a little more than I’d love. I’m enjoying its various strands, but I’m sort of yearning for them to gather into something that feels more clear and urgent. Maybe they do in the final act.

Album Of The Week - Jazz From Hell by Frank Zappa. This is rubbish. I like Zappa an awful lot, but I have definitely now listened to all I need to. This is just a guy messing around with the presets on a Synclavier synth for 34 minutes. Mind-numbingly dull.

Film Of The Week - Conclave. This is my dream film. It’s got elections and ballots and counting and finding out who won, and it’s also about power vacuums and the dastardly machinations of people trying to fill them, and it’s also kind of a thriller/whodunnit, and it’s also about the powers and dangers of faith and spirituality, and it’s also very funny, and I found Ralph Fiennes’ performance incredibly moving. I cannot think of a single thing I would like to see in a film that this didn’t have. Loved it.

That’s all for this week! As ever, let me know what you thought, and if you enjoy the newsletter enough to send it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe, that would be hugely appreciated! Take care of yourselves until next time,

Joz xx

PS Cheeky lil wrap photo. Sorry I look so tired and haggard in it. I blame the light.