Washed up at 28

We recently pitched some sketch ideas for a new sketch show for BBC radio. The brief was very wide, anything would be considered it said, and since there wasn't much time till the deadline, we dusted down a load of old sketches from various other shows we've written for, which they hadn't used but which still made us chuckle, and we sent them in. That's what writers do, you see. Recycle, recycle, recycle. Our carbon footprints are tiny. Our thinking was if the producer liked our stuff, we could fire off some new material more tailored to fit the brief. Or something.

Well, apparently the producer has been inundated with sketches. About a thousand. So that wasn't practical. You see in the old days, most BBC radio sketch shows had an open door policy so you could send in stuff at any time. Then they closed the doors. Except they now open them occasionally on specific shows in an effort to still appear like they give a toss, get absolutely swamped by people who are now desperate to be seen, think it's not worth the effort and close the doors again. Yeah, that's smart.

But that ain't the problem here. The problem is we were told our stuff was funny, but we're writing for 'too old' a crowd. Because you see the cast are aged between 18 and 22. Oh, are they indeed? Are they now? Because, I can't get my head around that. Now, regardless of how radical you want your shiny new sketch show to be, it's got to link to aspects of real life or things that people can relate to. It can distort or exaggerate them for comic effect, but it's gotta consist of dynamics that people can understand. Man and woman, boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife, children and parents, old and young, gay and straight. If there's only a four year gap between your cast, and some are still in their flippin' teens, you ain't half limiting yourself with what you can achieve. Now, I don't know who the cast are, some of them might turn out to be great comic performers, but to have such a wide open brief, and then cast actors that young seems to be an incredible contradiction. It makes you feel washed up at 28.

And who is going to listen to a sketch show with a cast that young? On a channel that feeds people a near constant diet of Goon Show and Round the Horne repeats. Does not compute. But that's the BBC mentality at the moment. It drones on about how great 'Doctor Who' is because it appeals to a family audience, then proceeds to make sketch shows that seem to have an age discrimination policy not seen since 'Logan's Run'. If there's a sketch with anyone over 30 in it, it gets zapped. But it's not just here. We've recently worked on sketch shows about gay people, sketch shows about 'northern' people. Why not just do a show about people, all people, whoever they are? The whole point of a sketch show is it should be about anything you like. Anything. But that notion seems to have been lost somewhere.

It makes you think that the BBC should spend less time having internal enquiries about whether or not a researcher pretended to be a contestant on a phone-in quiz, and more time having internal enquiries about just how insular their creative output seems to be.