Lee-Ann's Spare Fridays skipped an episode
What the blazes happened to March?
Episode 10, or Series 2 episode 4, of my audio sitcom Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays was due out in the middle of March, but here we are at the end of the month and it hasn’t happened. I could have kept quiet and hope nobody noticed a longer than usual gap before a new episode (hopefully) appears in April, but I thought some of you might find my failure interesting or instructional.
The script I was trying to finish for March was originally intended for February, but you may remember me saying that I happened to have got further with another script by the end of January so I made that one into episode 9 for February, and postponed the other one.
While I was waiting for my freshly-microwaved porridge to reach a temperature marginally below volcanic, I flicked through my notes and wondered if this Bishop Blaise festival had been a barmy idea from the start.
Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays series 2, the episode that wasn’t to be
I was obviously already struggling. The failed script was about the Bishop Blaize festival Lee-Ann suggests in episode 6 when she’s acting as historical consultant for the village fete. Parish council bigwig Anthea Harding suggests it would be more fitting to hold that in February, as the Saint’s day for Yorkshire’s favourite martyred Armenian bishop is Feb 3rd. Cue the hilarity of permanently-disorganised Lee-Ann trying to organise a parade in a small village where few other people are interested, and she’s a stickler for historical accuracy.
Bishop Blaise (or Blase or Blaize or Blaze, depending where you look) seems to be the least forgotten ‘forgotten’ patron saint you ever heard of. While the 1825 procession through the streets of Bradford appears to have been the pinnacle of celebration, he was toasted and commemorated in Bradford (and elsewhere) at various points throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, and each time the local paper called it a revival and harked back to 1825.
As far as I can ascertain the Bishop Blaise festival was mentioned in Bradford newspapers at least until the 1950s, usually with an article around the 3rd of February explaining that while nobody has even thought about the ancient bishop since 1825 and no reader will have heard of him, it used to be the custom to hold a procession, etc etc. A similar state of affairs to if the Daily Express ran weekly articles on how it’s a crying shame nobody ever talks about Diana, Princess of Wales these days.
It took a while for me to find a way in to the story at all. I can have an outline and know what the situation is and what events take place on the day, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I know exactly how Lee-Ann sees it and where we ought to come in.
You might say I ought to know my characters well enough to know how they’d react in any given situation, but I honestly can’t say I know exactly how I’d react in some unprecedented situation. At best I can relate it to something I’ve experienced before and remember how I reacted then. If I’d had less sleep or more breakfast or hadn’t just had an unfortunate misunderstanding with a bus driver then it could have gone in a completely different direction.
And then the writing itself seemed slower than usual. Long periods of searching for the right word, or typing a word, staring at it, deleting it, typing another word, deleting the whole sentence and starting again. Paragraphs that seemed to be the wrong way round and inside out, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to rearrange them to make proper sense. I kept referring back to things I’d forgotten to mention in the first place, and having to go back and insert a line in an earlier scene.
Maybe those terrifying lists of perimenopause symptoms in the Guardian include ‘loss of ability to write comedy’, but the memory loss they usually mention has already kicked in and I’ve forgotten. Or maybe the fact that it was feeling so difficult should have alerted me much earlier to a problem with the plot, and I should have ditched the script in January instead of stubbornly trying to make it work.
I lose confidence very easily. I’m usually pretty quick to identify something (cooking attempt, half-written short story, craft project) as a disaster and give up on it, even if it turns out to have been not that hard to fix. Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays is one of those rare things I’m confident about and proud of, and possibly this was my downfall in this instance. It stopped me from realising that this script wasn’t salvageable; it wasn’t that I needed to put more effort in, it was a badly chosen plot and it would never be wholly satisfying.
Gina said it was purely my fecklessness that was causing the problem, and if I wasn't so workshy and quick to throw the towel in, I would have had everything sorted before Christmas
Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays series 2, the episode that wasn’t to be
I wrote five and a half thousand words, a complete script, (just) in time to record and edit it for release on Good Friday. I read it to my other half and he laughed maybe three times. In twenty-odd minutes. He said lots of sitcoms have a ropey episode and maybe if I tweaked this bit and that bit…But he also identified a couple of places I’d bent reality (the already unreal sitcommy reality of Upper Wheatley) to fit the plot, and would Gina have really done that?
I had wanted to write a disastrous Bishop Blaise festival episode right from the start, though the disaster was supposed to be on Lee-Ann’s end, not mine. It was tempting to sink more time into it and ‘get it right’ (it still wouldn’t have been right). For five minutes I toyed with the idea of changing the quest slightly, taking Douglas out of the way in scene 3 (he would have known how to fix the situation Lee-Ann presented him with — that was another bit of bent reality, having him suggest something that didn’t work) and shoe-horning more jokes in. Another few days’ work might do it.
I binned it.
Coincidentally the latest post on James Cary’s comedy-writing Substack is about plotting in sitcom, and he’s running a pay-what-you-like webinar on the subject on April 24th. Don’t let my uselessness put you off — he taught me all this stuff well, I just wandered away from it with this script which should stand as a lesson to us all.