What if you could spend two whole days in a real writers’ room? Sitting around generating ideas, pitching stories, breaking them into plots and shaping a pilot from the ground up?
Sounds like a dream? It could be a reality.
Join me and a small group of fellow writers in North London on 11th-12th September for From Premise to Pilot: an intensive, practical two-day workshop designed to get you thinking, pitching and writing like a proper TV comedy writers’ room.
Places are limited, so book now to secure yours:
Int. Office. Home. Thursday 5th March 2026. 10.35am
This time yesterday, I was getting on the London Underground to go to a meeting. I used to live in London, moving there soon after leaving university in 1998. It was the only place for me to live as someone who wanted to be a comedy writer. That’s where all the comedy was. The whole comedy industry then decamped to Edinburgh in August for the Festival Fringe, where comedians showed their hilarious wares. (Been there. Done that. One for another time.)
You had to put on an Edinburgh Fringe show because you really couldn’t make your own stuff. Cameras were expensive. Even cheap cameras were expensive. And even if you had access to professional cameras and editing equipment, you couldn’t post anything online because there was no online. Not really. No broadband internet. Video was something you watched in your living room on a broadcast TV, video or a DVD player. Tablets only existed in the world of Star Trek.
The most advanced piece of tech back when I left university was the Blackberry. Remember those? The very first one came out in 1999. That was the Blackberry 850. (Why not just The Blackberry? Or The Blackberry 1? Tech companies are terrible at naming products.) By 2010, the Blackberry controlled 50% of that market. The luxury iPhone, released in 2007, was declared dead on arrival because it didn’t come with a physical keyboard, unlike the Blackberry. And the rest is history.
Side note: Blackberries were also known as Crackberries, since they were highly addictive. The warning signs about smartphones were all there…
You also couldn’t attend meetings via Zoom. Frankly, that only became a thing in 2020 for obvious reasons. Video calls have rapidly become the norm, but not in the late 1990s. So you had to live in London. I did. That’s where I met my wife, got married and in 2012 we moved back to the West Country.
By that time, I had become a moderately successful sitcom writer, having been involved in the first two series of Miranda. In 2012 found myself writing a show for BBC3 called Bluestone 42 which ran for three series. I was making decent money. I didn’t mind going in and out of London for meetings. My writing partner and I figured out a productive way of working together and apart. Everything was fine.
Until it wasn’t fine. Broadband. Fibre. Phones. Streaming. Money. We’ll get into that another time.
Once you’ve left London, you are rarely inclined to move back, especially if you’re not from London. I was born in Frome in Somerset. My parents still live here as do most of my extended family. I want my own kids to have roots. Plus, Somerset is at the heart of Wessex – home of Alfred the Great, Glastonbury Abbey – which, and I don’t think I’m overstating this, is the cradle of Western Civilisation.
Could my meeting in London yesterday have been done on Zoom? Not really. It would have been much less effective. It was one of those blue-sky-so-what-are-we-actually-doing meetings which are 400% more productive when you are sitting around with people in person. We spent three hours on big ideas, and expressions of those ideas. We laughed a lot. No surprises there. Milton Jones was at the meeting. One of the reasons I like working with Milton on his radio shows – along with David Tyler and Dan Evans – is that it’s just so much fun. The shows that are broadcast are funny. But there are so many other jokes cracked along the way.
As I left the meeting, I realised that it didn’t much matter whether the show I was watching that evening at the theatre was funny. It could hardly be funnier than the three hours I’d just spent in a fully immersive, joke-filled experience. Fortunately, the play was funny. I thought it would be. I told the writer as much afterwards.
Funnily enough, the play was a one-man show in a Fringe theatre in North London. There’s no substitute for just writing something and putting it on. No cameras. No smart phones. No sound editing, dubbing or mixing. Just do the show right there. That’s what people are actually prepared to pay for: live experiences.
Musicians don’t make money through writing and recording songs. That was smashed to pieces by streaming over a decade ago. It used to be the case that bands toured in order to sell copies of their album. Now the album is essentially free on Apple Music or Spotify, earning the artists fractions of pennies. Putting your music online is an attempt to find a fanbase that will pay good money to see you perform live. Is that an improvement on the previous system? Maybe. It’s hard to say. But comedy works the same way.
After I talked to the writer and director (who had both written situation comedy for TV) for a little while, I got onto the Northern Line back to my car. I had driven to London because, as I said before, I like driving. I was able to think, ponder and listen on the way. But the sad fact is that I had no choice. Even though the play lasted an hour and finished at around 8.35pm, getting back to the West Country by train would have been impossible. So I spent an hour on the tube getting to my car, thinking to myself what I knew I would be thinking which is, “I really should write a play.” I always react that way after watching a play.
I got back to my car and drove home listening to a podcast about conspiracy theories. By the time you are reading this, that conspiracy theory from that particular episode will probably be revealed to be factually true and correct. However, we are so desensitised by social media, war, streaming TV and economic uncertainty that no-one will care.
Postman is right: Huxley was on the money. We are amusing ourselves to death. But my day had been very amusing. So that was nice.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get to work on my pilot episode of The Lab.
You can only learn so much from YouTube. All of the above underlines the point that if you want to get better at writing sitcoms, show up in person and get in the room. That’s how you will hone your skills. And if you’ve read to the end of this article, you’ll LOVE it! You can do that for TWO WHOLE DAYS in September with me! More info here:
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