A Sitcom What I Once Wrote

Danny King

The Pub

Why aren’t there any good British sitcoms on the telly anymore? Back in the day there were no end of classics: Porridge, Steptoe and Son, Dad’s Army, Rising Damp, Fawlty Towers, Yes Minister, The Likely Lads, early Only Fools and Horses to name but a few. Even the shows that weren’t widely regarded as classics I still remember laughing at: Are You Being Served, It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, On the Buses, Only When I Laugh. These might not have been shows I would’ve rushed into a burning building to save but at least they had a few jokes in them.

This is a conversation me and the lads have in the pub on a Friday night with tedious frequency. You’ve probably had it yourself. If not then you’re probably not old enough to remember the golden age of British sitcoms or you work for the BBC comedy department. Either way, it’s a conversation most boozers know only too well.

I spent years having this self-same conversation before finally deciding to do something about it and wrote my own sitcom.

Now, I know what you’re thinking; “Bet that was funny!” which is exactly what I would’ve said had I heard one of my mates had written a sitcom. But you know what, it weren’t bad. Naturally, what I know about writing sitcoms you can scribble on the back of a beer mat (which is basically what I did) but I do know what makes me laugh so I was surprisingly chuffed with my final output. It weren’t a classic by any stretch of the imagination, but it was definitely funny. And that was surely the most important thing. Wasn’t it?

I got some of the lads at work to read it and by and large most of them liked it. I even overheard a couple of them quoting bits from it while I was skiving off in the bog one morning circling my day’s horses, which warmed my cockles all the way down to the pan, so I knew I’d hit upon something.

A bit about myself: I was, and in fact still am, a postman. I work out of a sorting office in Frimley, Surrey – you know, where they hold the darts championships every year. Anyway, I’d been doing this for about twelve years and the actual work aside didn’t mind it too much. It could be quite a good crack, most of the lads liked a beer and we all covered each other’s arses when the Royal Mail Investigation boys came sniffing around. I liked it. Naturally I had a hundred-and-one stories from my time here, stories that had most people in stitches, so I put this bounty to good use and wrote about what I knew. Therefore, my sitcom was set in a sorting office somewhere in a small town (where they hold the darts championships every year) and it was basically about a load of skiving, dishonest postmen who were constantly lining their pockets opening kiddies’ birthday cards or sloping off down the pub.

Now, I wasn’t naïve enough to assume what made me laugh at work or in the boozer was automatically going to make for great telly – though I did like my mate Big Kev’s idea of calling the show Well I Guess You Had To Be There, but I honestly thought it had some good funnies in it. Some were true, some were embellished and some were better than others, but it had a decent strike-rate nevertheless. And there hadn’t much on the telly that could claim that for a good few years. Ask anyone down the pub.

So I posted it off to the BBC.

I didn’t hear back from them for about four months but when I did, when I saw that BBC logo on the envelope, my heart skipped a beat.

It needn’t have.

Dear Mr Bailey,

Many thanks for sending us your script which we’ve now had a chance to consider. We’re afraid we do not feel suitably confident in the strength of the material to explore it further so we are returning the script to you and wish you every success placing it elsewhere.

Yours sincerely

W

I spent several minutes wondering who W was and just what the fuck he knew about anything anyway before chucking the whole lot into the bottom of my wardrobe and out of sight next to my Argos dumbbells and unopened Spanish for Beginners tapes.

I came across my script a couple of years later and frowned at the sight of it, like seeing a dead goldfish who refused to go with that first flush, but I had a flick through all the same and you know what, it still weren’t bad. Some of it really made me laugh in fact, though this all stopped when I re-read W’s accompanying letter.

“We’re afraid we do not feel suitably confident in the strength of the material to explore it further...” it had said, so I scratched my brains and tried to recall all the storming sitcoms that had been on the box in the intervening years, but you know what, I couldn’t think of any. Sure there’d been no shortage of new shows and I’d given each a fair crack only to be disappointed every time, which was how I imagined my lonely old Nan must’ve felt whenever Anglian Window got her sprinting for the phone.

My confidence renewed I dusted off the script again, tightened up some of the gags and fired it back off to the BBC in the hope that W might’ve retired or been honourable enough to chuck himself in front of a train following the French & Saunders Christmas Special.

The BBC turned it down once again (cunts!), so I tried half a dozen different independent production companies and got the following reply two weeks later from one of my front-runners.

Dear Mr Bailey,

Many thanks for your sitcom script which we read with great interest. When would be a convenient time for you to come to in and talk with us regarding this project? Yours sincerely,

Simon Naismith-Jones,

Commissioning Editor, Mirthling Productions.

Well, as the expression goes, fuck a duck!