Comedy Writes - QI Part 1
I've been listening to the always excellent
Rule of Three
podcast the last few weeks and loving every minute. Hosted by Jason Hazeley and Joel Morris - the chaps who gave you Philomena Cunk and those spoof Ladybird books, among many other good things - the show is all about writing comedy. Every episode they invite a guest - a comedy writer or writer/performer - to come in to talk about the craft and, in particular, something they hold up as an excellent example. They then deconstruct it in an engaging and fascinating way. So far we've had people waxing lyrical on things like Bottom, Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album, Time Bandits and the wonderful cartoonist Leo Baxendale.
I've met Joel and Jason before and they are wonderfully funny and intelligent guys. And, listening to the shows, it's made me think a lot about how I go about writing funny stuff. So I thought I'd plonk some thoughts down on my blog. I'll start by talking about my association with the BBC TV series QI .
I was involved with the show (and its sister show on BBC R4, The Museum of Curiosity) for 11 years, starting off with some illustration contributions to the QI annuals back in 2006. My break into writing for the show came in 2010 with the 'H' Series annual. A fellow 'elf' - the historian Justin Pollard, had come up with the idea of a double page spread with the instructions for building Stonehenge as if it was an IKEA product. Now, this wasn't a new idea; there had been IKEA spoofs before. In fact, just a year before, in 2009, a good friend of mine - an advertiser called Huw Williams - was given the job of designing a paper-based promo for the British gangster thriller 44 Inch Chest. What he came up with was an A5-sized leaflet that opened up just like a sheet of instructions that gave the reader a giggle and an insight into the plot of the film. The spoof Swedish product name was, of course, inspired by the film's colourful dialogue. I've also seen the same format used for everything from lightsabres to the Large Hadron Collider. The idea was tried, trusted and funny. If done right.
So, I began drawing up the Stonehenge pages. But it soon became clear to me that it was a bit of a one trick pony. Once you got past the 'Oh I see, it's Stonehenge but as an IKEA product' gag, it was all over. I was sure we could make more of it. I wanted to stuff it with gags. Justin agreed but he was extraordinarily busy at the time, not only as a QI scriptwriter (I hadn't reached those heady heights yet) but also as an The first thing that I noticed from Justin's original sketches was a doodled wizard/shaman character. I also noted that his builders seemed too tall, so it wasn't a big jump to construct a narrative involving a wizard summoning up a brace of giants to build Stonehenge for him (and, being a Cornishman and having grown up with tales of giants building big stuff, it was kind-of in my blood). So I drew the whole thing out and it looked okay. But it was still lacking something. And then it hit me; we could turn an IKEA-style set of instructions into a comic strip, using the numbering sequence of the assembly as panels.
So, one evening, I drove over to John Lloyd's house to talk it through. John is the big boss of QI. He's also something of a comedy genius, having created and produced such shows as The News Quiz, Spitting Image, Not The Nine O Clock News, Blackadder and many more. John knows good comedy. And he lives about half an hour away from me in Oxfordshire. So, we sat around his kitchen table - the same table, incidentally, where he and Rowan Atkinson discussed the creation of Mr Bean, and we bounced ideas around.
The 'story' as I saw it needed to play on people's experience of buying flat-packed furniture. John suggested that maybe we could have the giants having trouble with the instructions. Flat pack angst is something that many can identify with. I also wondered if we could add a cowboy builders element to cover the fact that Stonehenge, as we know it today, looks only partially built. As the tea flowed and the evening wore on, we toyed with ideas like mislaid allen keys and missing components. I then suggested that we have our 'customer' employ a wizard to build him a henge. The wizard then sub-contracts two giants to do the work. But the giants (who, as myth would have us believe, weren't the smartest of races) can't figure out the instructions and get increasingly more frustrated in each panel. Eventually they start drinking and swearing and getting angry. Finally, they give up, kick half of the henge down in frustration and go off down the pub (we've all been there), leaving Stonehenge looking like it does today. I sketched the idea and John loved it, so I drew it up the next day. And here it is:
There are some lovely little touches in there that I'm very proud of. Like the image of a handful of workers and the figure 'x 10,000'. And the guy who's been crushed as he's tried to lift a giant stone on his own. But my favourite thing is the two little figures at the very end of the story and the safety disclaimer blurb which reads:
Small parts are not included. I was so pleased with that line.
I will say that the finished piece didn't meet with the approval of everyone initially and I totally understand why. QI prides itself on its accuracy; it's very rare that the show gets something wrong. And the QI annuals reflected that ethos; they were jam-packed with funny stuff but the funnies were always built upon facts. For example, in the same annual, Justin and I had created a two page history of the world using mocked-up Health and Safety signage. The facts were there under the silly images:
But, in the end, John decided to run with HENJ on the grounds that QI is a comedy show as well as a font of knowledge and it was okay for us to let our hair down now and again. And I'm glad that he did. HENJ was a big hit and is easily the most copied and circulated thing that QI has ever published. Just do a Google image search and see how many websites it's been featured on.
It's nice to see that we are credited on a lot of pages now.
HENJ was a turning point for me. Not long afterwards, I was taken on as a researcher/writer for the TV and radio shows and I eventually became one of the main scriptwriters.
But that's an entirely different writing story.
And one for another blog post.
I've met Joel and Jason before and they are wonderfully funny and intelligent guys. And, listening to the shows, it's made me think a lot about how I go about writing funny stuff. So I thought I'd plonk some thoughts down on my blog. I'll start by talking about my association with the BBC TV series QI .
I was involved with the show (and its sister show on BBC R4, The Museum of Curiosity) for 11 years, starting off with some illustration contributions to the QI annuals back in 2006. My break into writing for the show came in 2010 with the 'H' Series annual. A fellow 'elf' - the historian Justin Pollard, had come up with the idea of a double page spread with the instructions for building Stonehenge as if it was an IKEA product. Now, this wasn't a new idea; there had been IKEA spoofs before. In fact, just a year before, in 2009, a good friend of mine - an advertiser called Huw Williams - was given the job of designing a paper-based promo for the British gangster thriller 44 Inch Chest. What he came up with was an A5-sized leaflet that opened up just like a sheet of instructions that gave the reader a giggle and an insight into the plot of the film. The spoof Swedish product name was, of course, inspired by the film's colourful dialogue. I've also seen the same format used for everything from lightsabres to the Large Hadron Collider. The idea was tried, trusted and funny. If done right.
So, I began drawing up the Stonehenge pages. But it soon became clear to me that it was a bit of a one trick pony. Once you got past the 'Oh I see, it's Stonehenge but as an IKEA product' gag, it was all over. I was sure we could make more of it. I wanted to stuff it with gags. Justin agreed but he was extraordinarily busy at the time, not only as a QI scriptwriter (I hadn't reached those heady heights yet) but also as an The first thing that I noticed from Justin's original sketches was a doodled wizard/shaman character. I also noted that his builders seemed too tall, so it wasn't a big jump to construct a narrative involving a wizard summoning up a brace of giants to build Stonehenge for him (and, being a Cornishman and having grown up with tales of giants building big stuff, it was kind-of in my blood). So I drew the whole thing out and it looked okay. But it was still lacking something. And then it hit me; we could turn an IKEA-style set of instructions into a comic strip, using the numbering sequence of the assembly as panels.
So, one evening, I drove over to John Lloyd's house to talk it through. John is the big boss of QI. He's also something of a comedy genius, having created and produced such shows as The News Quiz, Spitting Image, Not The Nine O Clock News, Blackadder and many more. John knows good comedy. And he lives about half an hour away from me in Oxfordshire. So, we sat around his kitchen table - the same table, incidentally, where he and Rowan Atkinson discussed the creation of Mr Bean, and we bounced ideas around.
The 'story' as I saw it needed to play on people's experience of buying flat-packed furniture. John suggested that maybe we could have the giants having trouble with the instructions. Flat pack angst is something that many can identify with. I also wondered if we could add a cowboy builders element to cover the fact that Stonehenge, as we know it today, looks only partially built. As the tea flowed and the evening wore on, we toyed with ideas like mislaid allen keys and missing components. I then suggested that we have our 'customer' employ a wizard to build him a henge. The wizard then sub-contracts two giants to do the work. But the giants (who, as myth would have us believe, weren't the smartest of races) can't figure out the instructions and get increasingly more frustrated in each panel. Eventually they start drinking and swearing and getting angry. Finally, they give up, kick half of the henge down in frustration and go off down the pub (we've all been there), leaving Stonehenge looking like it does today. I sketched the idea and John loved it, so I drew it up the next day. And here it is:
There are some lovely little touches in there that I'm very proud of. Like the image of a handful of workers and the figure 'x 10,000'. And the guy who's been crushed as he's tried to lift a giant stone on his own. But my favourite thing is the two little figures at the very end of the story and the safety disclaimer blurb which reads:
Small parts are not included. I was so pleased with that line.
I will say that the finished piece didn't meet with the approval of everyone initially and I totally understand why. QI prides itself on its accuracy; it's very rare that the show gets something wrong. And the QI annuals reflected that ethos; they were jam-packed with funny stuff but the funnies were always built upon facts. For example, in the same annual, Justin and I had created a two page history of the world using mocked-up Health and Safety signage. The facts were there under the silly images:
But, in the end, John decided to run with HENJ on the grounds that QI is a comedy show as well as a font of knowledge and it was okay for us to let our hair down now and again. And I'm glad that he did. HENJ was a big hit and is easily the most copied and circulated thing that QI has ever published. Just do a Google image search and see how many websites it's been featured on.
It's nice to see that we are credited on a lot of pages now.
HENJ was a turning point for me. Not long afterwards, I was taken on as a researcher/writer for the TV and radio shows and I eventually became one of the main scriptwriters.
But that's an entirely different writing story.
And one for another blog post.
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