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Welcome to the Gangbusters page, a compendium of comedy stimuli from Giles Brody.
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Thursday, August 23, 2012

Sitcom Pilot

Hello there. "Student Teacher" got through to the finals of the RTE Storyland competition and finished in a very respectable second place. Congrats to the Begrudgers, Philip and crew on their success, and to all the other shows. Thank you to everyone who voted.
I've spent a lot of the summer writing sitcom pilots and specs for folks. I wrote my first sitcom pilot when I was seventeen. It was a comedy set in an Irish language summer camp. The next one was about detectives in a college. The one after that was about a lurker in a hospital. By the time I graduated from college I had written seventeen odd sitcom pilots, all seventeen uncommissionable. Even a commissioning editor somewhere hell bent on being fired would think, "No, that'd just be taking the piss." These were mostly first drafts because why mess with perfection.
I think about those scripts sometimes - badly formatted, characters names changing on a whim, the same five jokes in each one - and try to will myself to burst into flames out of shame. I gave these to PEOPLE to READ. People I knew and people I didn't. Luckily, I often didn't have the courage to submit these scripts and spared some poor reader somewhere the indignity of reading about the world through the perspective of some young lad with, being alive aside, next to no life experience. The simple act of writing some many pages of bad stuff is that it helps you get all the gunk out of your system.
Since then I've written a few scripts, hopefully with less gunk, some of which I'm very fond of but will more than likely never get made, the simple fact is that television takes an age to make and costs a lot of money. I thought it'd be fun to do it in the style of a radio play with performers reading the scripts accompanied by music and sound effects.
Rob Kearns, who runs 10 Days In Dublin and produces the monthly Death Of Comedy gave us the go ahead to stage a reading of "The Greatest Actor In The World". It's about a Daniel Day-Lewis type uber thespian called Daniel Clayton who, despite being enormously successful, has fallen on hard times financially. He mentors a doofus teen sensation Sparky in beginners thespaining and has a hate-hate relationship with the never seen Sean Penn. Unfortunately for me, (but good for everyone else because they're great) Arthur Mathews and Matt Berry also have a sitcom about a brash actor so TGAITW's prospects of getting made are currently estimated at minus zilch. Fortunately though we have a venue and a terrific cast led by the hilarious Shane Langhan (Diet of Worms) supported by the super funny Jim Elliot, Colin Chadwick and Petra Sheehan.
The plot revolves around trying to rescue a cat from a tree using only acting. Myself and the cast took the first draft and did a lot of gag adding (or "gagding") that improved things immeasurably. If you have a script that needs more jokes and you can convince hilarious people to help you make it better I can't recommend this way of working enough. It's (the show) is going to go down in The Workman's, Wellington Quay, Dublin on Tuesday the 4th of September, kicking off at 8PM. Funny people including MC Conor O'Toole, Tony Law and Tom Walsh will also be playing. It's going to be a lot of fun.