Giving new BBC Three comedy the green light: Q&A with a commissioner
Gregor Sharp
BBC Comedy commissioning editor (London and Scotland)
Julia Deakin, Will Merrick and Vincent Franklin star in new Comedy Feeds pilot Fail
As the BBC celebrates 60years of the sitcom, all six pilots in the latest run of BBC Three’s Comedy Feeds strand are in that narrative format. But that’s where the similarity ends, says Gregor Sharp. In this short Q&A, he gives an insight into the inexact science of commissioning new comedy for a young adult audience:
How do you know when you've found what you're looking for to fit this specific slot?
The Comedy Feeds strand was designed as a showcase for new talent, both behind and in front of camera - a series of pilots where writers, performers and directors can try out new characters, formats and scripts.
Not every project is immediately ready for the challenges of a six-episode run, which tends to be the norm for comedy series. So Comedy Feeds is designed to be part playground and part lab, where things are tried out, refined and hopefully discover their optimum voice and shape.
With all that in mind we have no fixed set of criteria for commissioning against. We simply go for the most exciting ideas and strongest scripts that demand a chance to be made into TV programmes aimed at the BBC Three audience.
Obviously we look for range across the strand - we would never want six flatshare sitcoms, for example, or six stand-up vehicles. So we're looking for a mix of shows that offer a variety of comedy approaches and reflect different people and places across the UK.
How risky and/or rewarding can it be to work with brand new talent?
There's always an element of both risk and reward. We've commissioned everything from puppet shows to comedy thrillers in this strand in the past and you never quite know what will have the alchemy to make a show that should clearly go on to become a series.
Comedy is quite a divisive thing, people tend to have very strong feelings about what they do and don't like so it's a risk putting relatively untried ideas and talent under the microscope.
And we've certainly had some shows that just haven't quite come together or connected with the audience, for whatever reason. But against that it's been amazingly rewarding to see shows like People Just Do Nothing, Josh and Fleabag come through. They might well have found their way to screen via other routes as they're all quality pieces of work, but hopefully Comedy Feeds hastened that journey.
Limbo, from Hat Trick Productions, stars Al Roberts, Bekka Bowling and Ellie White
How much work has gone into bringing these latest BBC Three pilots to air?
There's no set development process for every project, they're all unique and evolve in their own ways. In this round of Comedy Feeds something like Fail came to us as a script that was very confident and pretty much fully formed. Writer Tom Melia had already made a series of much admired online shorts and so a longer form narrative piece was a natural next step. So most of the work we did with Gavin Smith, who produced the show for The Comedy Unit, was in refining the script to the limitations of budget and in discussing key decisions in the casting (which they made a great job of, incidentally).
The same was true of Limbo, written by Lucien Young and Joe Parham for Hat Trick Productions. Some of the other shows started from a less developed starting point but with compelling talents at their core. The process there was about shaping the material and finding the best form for the original idea.
Other pilots in this run are A Brief History of Tim by Tim Renkow, Man Like Mobeen (Guz Khan and Andy Milligan), Pumped (Stewart Thomson) and The JPD Show (Joivan Wade, Percelle Ascott and Dee Kartier). Comedy Feeds are available on BBC Three on iPlayer.
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