This isn't to say Miles isn't funny. He is - very funny indeed. He's the lynchpin in the Newsjack (Heath Robinson) machine. Part of what makes him so suited to the role of Newsjack anchor is how he knows his way around a joke. Never be afraid to give Miles a joke. I've been asked by a few writers whether they should include stuff for Miles at the top of their sketches and my answer is always the same - absolutely. I tend to write the opening monologue but everything else comes from the writer of the sketch. If your sketch needs and intro and there isn't one, I just have to write it so all you're doing is adding to my workload and cutting down on your minutes. Honestly, a nicely written Miles intro is a joy and a relief to read.

However, and I mean this as a compliment, what makes Miles almost unique is his skilful way with a feed line, a set-up, with the unglamorous spadework of the straight man. A bit like Kenneth Horne (who I always have in my head when working on Newsjack), Miles is a man who it's a pleasure simply to spend airtime with. Very few people can deadpan through a 'crazy spokesperson' sketch as well as Miles.

And it's not fair, goddammit!

The good straight man is the un-squeaky wheel that never gets the comedy grease; the clumsy metaphor that never gets rewritten. Sometimes I suddenly spot Miles hasn't had any jokes for four pages. He's been good, and amusing, but Dr Funnyname, has all the laughs.

So what this is, I suppose, is just a request. Think about the spread of your jokes. The straight man / funny man paradigm is as old as sketch comedy itself. The cashier, the customer, the Journalist 2, the Woman - these are the characters we've all written who's only job is to say "How can I help?", "I'm sorry?", "You want to do what?" and other thankless feeds lines. Sometimes their sacrifice is necessary - they die so that others might laugh - but often it's just a matter of having another look and seeing if there's a more interesting way of doing things. Why not have sketches where everyone's funny?

There's a brusque bit of TV sitcom writing advice that's applicable here: protect your star. The name on the marquee should get the best lines. Miles (or anyone in his position) with no jokes works OK, the show still rolls along but it's a waste. I've no idea if Miles reads these blogs so I'll spare his blushes and move this from the specific to the general. A sketch needs to be as funny as possible in as short a time as possible - if half of your lines are just feeds, is that the best use of your printer ink?

While I'm talking about spreading the love - women. Remember the show's cast is two men and two women. Sketches where three men talk and then are joined by a fourth man (and we get a lot of those) are not much use to us. Miles, of course, is one of those men so even sketches where Miles speaks, then hands over to two men talking, who then hand straight back to Miles can be logistical nightmares. Write more sketches with good parts for women. It seems crazy in 2010, but if you looked at the submissions we get, you'd assume that a lot of people don't know women can be doctors, police officers, MPs, scientists.

This isn't a PC call for balance, this is a practical, artistic call - use all the talent available to you.
As always, not rules, just thoughts.

I'm going to the TV Writers' Festival this week, so the script editing duties on Newsjack Show 3 will be in the capable hands of Gareth Gwynn. If the drama people don't spot me for a comedy interloper and beat me to death with their copies of Robert McKee, I look forward to reading your stuff for Show 4.

Dan

How's everyone been?

Just a quick heads up that Newsjack (Radio 7's open door topical sketch show) is returning for a third series, starting in June.

A refreshed Writers' Brief should be up any day now but essentially the idea's the same - a deadline for sketches of midday on the Monday before transmission (and a slightly later deadline for one liners).

This series is being produced by Sam Michell and Simon Mayhew Archer - making me officially the oldest, shortest and least boybandy of the editorial team. In the spirit of the new regime, some of the sections and returning items in the show will be getting a shake up. Some will be shaken all the way out of the door. I'll also be sharing the script editing duties this series, so at some point I'll be handing over the secret BBC blog password. Oh, go on then, I can trust you - it's K1LL6Mu$ic.

The first show goes out on Thursday 17th June, which makes the first sketch deadline 12pm Monday 14th. Keep an eye on the show's page for more specific details in the next few days.

Those of you new to the show might like to have a look at some of my previous blogs, particularly my partisan ravings about sketch formatting. If you're unfamiliar with the show, have a listen to the first one of the new series to get a flavour and, as always, if you're able, I think coming along to a recording is both fun and informative. Like an episode of Zingzillas. Except fun and informative.

Bam! Yeah! Take that, Cbeebies.

If you can top that sort of blistering satire, then maybe Newsjack is the show for you.

Dan

Say you're listening to Coltrane play 'My Favourite Things'. He'll start out with the basic tune, and then he'll take it and muck about. He'll take that tune all over the shop, he'll noodle, he'll swoop, he'll throw it over to the piano, maybe the drums will get a solo. For most of the track, he'll do all the things that jazz lovers love and jazz haters hate. Then he'll bring it back. The basic tune reasserts itself and... finish.

A sketch is like that.

I've said elsewhere that a sketch is one idea. It can have as many twists and turns, as many opposing viewpoints and (must have) as many jokes as you like, but at heart it is one single idea. The opening of a sketch sells that idea, gets a laugh, sets the tune. From there on you can take it anywhere as long as, like Coltrane's rhythm section, you have the basic idea backing you up. A sketch can, and should, be as surprising as you can make it but every twist is just a variation on the central theme, an improvisation around your tune. Look at how Fry & Laurie play around with the information desk idea here.

The punchline, then, is the tune reasserting itself. It's the payoff - the ideal finish that the start promised. Everything in the sketch is pointed towards this moment. That's why a satisfying punchline gets such a big laugh - it's a Freudian release moment, with everyone getting there effortlessly at the same time.

Of course, you might not like punchlines. A lot of people think they're old fashioned. These are people who have to put stings between their sketches to cover the lack of laughs. A punchline doesn't have to be a badum-tish gag, it shouldn't inspire a wah-wah-wah from the trombonist. It does have to tie up the sketch. A sketch always has to have a last line, obviously, so why not make it funny? Otherwise you might just find your producer cutting out on the last big laugh.

So there you go: Thesis, Antithesis, Conclusion. Oh, wait, no. That's why sketch writing is like A Level History essays. I think my basic point is this: I like jazz.

Well, its just a bit-of-fun theory, thought up over an idle hour on the tube reading Newsjack submissions - and anyway I'm more Ornette Coleman than Wynton Marsalis, so feel free to go your own way, play whatever tune you like.

Which sounds like as good an excuse as any to listen to this.

Dan

This one, though, I'm going to turn over to wiser heads. When I started this blog I asked a few writers I knew who'd been through the topical sketch mill for any advice they'd give if they were in my position. Well now, through the magic of cut-and-paste and formatting they are.

We start with Laurence Howarth. One half of Radio 4's Laurence & Gus (but I'm not saying which half), Laurence has written for, among others, Armstrong & Miller, Dead Ringers, Omid Djalili, Mitchell & Webb, Look Away Now as well as his own sitcoms Rigor Mortis and Safety Catch and the granddaddy of all topical radio shows Weekending.

Be careful of writing in the subjunctive. Not in the sense of using the subjunctive (it's a perfectly good mood) but in the sense of writing something that might work, that could be funny, that may fly if it gets a good rewrite or is really well performed etc. If you're struggling to think of a really good idea, it's tempting to alight on a mediocre one and work on that in the hope that it may eventually, somehow turn into something really good. Such ideas rarely do. Better to wait for the really good idea and then write in the indicative, i.e. a sketch that does work, is funny and will fly. Easier said than done, mind.

If this was an Alan Yentob documentary I'd fly to New York for the next interview. As it is, I just sent a friend an email. Danny Robins, as well as being a comedian, presenter and art panel pundit, is my long term comedy partner. We've done loads. You can trust him.

Beginnings and ends are the hardest. Go for unpredictability if you can and have a killer punchline - don't let it fizzle out, even if the beginning and middle are good, sketches with bad ends always get cut.

Keep it lean and mean. Look at every line and see if it justifies it's place in there comedically. A short and very funny sketch is better than a longer quite funny sketch.

Arial 12 point. It's the professional sketch-writer's font of choice. Times New Roman is for people who don't know how to work their computer properly and Comic San Serif is for the dangerously mad.

See, Arial 12pt. I said you could trust him. Since I asked Simon Blackwell (The Thick of It, The Old Guys, Peep Show) his opinion, he's been nominated for an Oscar, so hark unto this:

Always rewrite when you're asked to, and, unless you have a huge objection, in the way you're asked to. Most of what's in your first draft won't get broadcast, and that's a good thing.

Finally, Gareth Gwynn is one of the Radio Entertainment department's staff writers and has helped read / rewrite for every episode of Newsjack - as well as working on The News Quiz, The Now Show and I Guess That's Why They Call It The News. He's chosen to express the Newsjack submissions he read in the form of a graph.

Yeah, graphs in a blog. I'm like Ben Goldacre.

Next time: Why Sketch Writing Is Like Jazz. No, come back, where are you going? It is. It is like jazz.

So, the sketch deadline for Newsjack show 3 has passed. Did you send anything in? Slow news week, isn't it? And where it's not slow, it's grim.

The first radio job I had was writing on The Way It Is - like Newsjack, a topical open-door sketch show. The phrase 'explosion in a clown factory' became a writers' meeting joke for when we'd discussed all the headlines and we'd moved on to the AOB news stories; a code for the ideal subject for a topical sketch show. Anything other than write another sketch about London Fashion Week. It always seemed to be London Fashion Week back then - it was snow of the late 90s.

Newsjack has brought those days flooding back. Of course, then a non-comm could actually come in and wave their script under nose of the producer and find a corner of the canteen to do rewrites. This was before the whole Jill Dando thing made the BBC much pickier about their door policy. Added to that, most of the open door submissions were coming in by post or fax so the competition from slush pile was only a few inches rather than a couple of feet. Email has oddly made submitting both easier and harder.

These days I use 'explosion in a clown factory' slightly differently. For me it's a news story that at first sight looks like it'll result in comedy gold but actually has little to offer the sketch writer because it's already funny, a joke on a joke.

Last year, Swindon twinned with Disney World. Brilliant! Yet, I think it's a prime example of a light industrial Pierrot tragedy. The problem for a comedy writer is that all the jokes are already in the story. There's no sideways angle, there's nothing other than a funny news story. The jokes are already there for everyone to see - no matter how much you extrapolate, there's very little you can do that is funnier than the fact that Swindon and Disney World have twinned.

Beware the 'And finally...' news stories. Beware anything in a tabloid that's less than two inches in length - and beware anything that sounds like a set-up to a penis joke. Beware the Most Emailed on the BBC website, where comedy news never dies - that goat was still getting married last year. It might sound pretentious, but a sketch has to have tension and drama like any other script, just in miniature. OK, it did sound pretentious, but it's still true. Often that tension and drama turns on the juxtaposition of the story and your treatment of it. So if the source material is already a joke, where do you have left to go? Obviously, we're not asking for page upon page of Haiti jokes, but if there's nothing real under discussion what's the point of the sketch? That's not to say that 'just being funny' can't be the point - I certainly don't want a drily po-faced satirical show where the cast solemnly hold their fists in the air after every sketch - but it's better to be funny about something with a bit of balls than a nothing story that happens to include a dead parrot.

There's also a sub-set of the EiaCF (as all the cool kids are calling it) and it's this: the bleeding obvious take. Last week we had a lot of stuff about Iris Robinson and I'd say 90% were some form of The Graduate parody. That's not to say some weren't good, but they were all parodies of The Graduate - with a story about an older woman called Robinson seducing a younger man that's route one; the bleeding, dare I say it, obvious. That might sound harsher than I mean it to be. All I'm asking of you is this: when you're thinking of a funny angle on a story, be better than a Sun sub-editor. Could anyone have written that sketch or only you?

Now, by way of variety and to give some respite from my endless stream of opinionated rule-making, I've asked some writers that I respect and, more importantly, have the email addresses for, to write down the one bit of advice they'd give to someone starting out writing for a show like Newsjack. First up is Tony Roche, writer of The Thick of It, In The Loop, The Comic Side of 7 Days , World Of Pub and many more. Tony...

Always re-read what you've written before you send it.

Don't take other people's advice as gospel.

Thanks, Tony. Considering the nature of these blogs, that last one's quite interesting and I'll be discussing it in my next dictatorial rant: Script Editors - Where Do They Get Off?

Dan

The first sketch I ever sold was to a short-lived and now forgotten Channel 4 show called Barking. My writing partners (Danny Robins and Marcus Brigstocke) and I had spent long hours laboriously single-finger tapping it out, letter by letter, on Marcus' word processor with the screen about the size of cigarette carton. We then printed it out on his dot matrix printer (that dates me) and posted it off (that dates me even more) to the producer. Who said, "Do us a favour - make the next one readable". We'd just written it out like we did for our stage scripts, trying to fit as much on one page as possible without any thought to font, layout or formatting. Thinking back it must have looked like a black page with a light dusting of white.

Reading as many sketches as I do for Newsjack, I can understand where that producer was coming from. If a sketch is hard to read, it can be hard to laugh at. Obviously, the most important part isn't the way the writing's laid out, but the writing itself. It's only the film industry, I think, who live by arcane rules of formatting - and isn't adorable how they use Courier so they can pretend it was written on an old typewriter? As long as what's on the page is clear, good writing will out.

However, I think taking the time to get your formatting right for radio will actually help the writing shine all the brighter. In radio the physical script, the pieces of paper with your words on them, is central to the whole production. In TV and film the actors learn their lines, in radio they don't. The sound engineers, the producer, everyone works from the same script the actors do. In radio, it all springs from the script. That's why it's such a writer-friendly medium - that and there isn't enough money to attract the massive, greedy idiots that can make film and television such a chore. So your radio script has to be clear and understandable, everything you want to say has to be right there in black and white - and the standard radio template we use in comedy is there for a reason. It's simply the clearest for everyone to read.

There's another, more selfish, reason why I'm urging you to take the time to lay out your sketches properly: IT MAKES MY LIFE EASIER. When I go in to tweak a line here or cut and paste a section there, it's seconds of my life wasted changing Times New Roman or Tahoma or Wingdings Italics or whatever into normal, sensible, clearly-the-best Arial 12pt. Those seconds add up. Do you really want me to lose precious moments with my young daughter over a serif font? This is no time to assert your independence from the hivemind. Arial. Arial. Arial.

I apologise if this is teaching anyone to suck eggs, but here's how you layout your basic vanilla radio script for Newsjack (and pretty much any other radio show):

DO NOT USE SCRIPT SMART. Controversial, I know, here in the heartland of Script Smart usage but, frankly, it's a nightmare. I'm sure it can be useful for longer scripts (though I just use Word without any macros) but for a three page sketch I don't see the point of using it. Plus, we can't edit it - and everything gets edited. When I see that 'Enable Macros?' box come up, my heart sinks, and you don't want my heart sinking just before I read your sketch.

FONT. Use Arial 12pt. It's the best - certainly the clearest for sight reading. It's what we'll change it to anyway, so be a mensch and use Arial.

THE TOOLBAR IS YOUR FRIEND.
Start by clicking on Format.
Then click on Paragraph.
See 'Indentation Special'? Set that to 'Hanging' and '4cm'.
Change 'Line Spacing' to 1.5 Lines.
Now after writing your CHARACTER NAME or FX (sound effects) or GRAMS (music) cues on the left, one tab will take you to the start of the cue - no need for multiple tabs or pressing the space bar. You can also set the hanging indent by moving the bottom margin arrow to 4cm. At the end of each cue, Return twice and start the next.

CHARACTER NAMES in capitals, FX and GRAMS in capitals, bold and underline.

FORMAT WHILE YOU PROOF READ. It's become second nature to me now, so I do it as I go along, but if you just want to get the words down without worrying about margins etc, just combine it with your final proof read.

DON'T FORGET THE BASICS - Name, email address in the Header, page numbers in the Footer. Everything that's in the writers' brief, basically.

If you're confused by any of that or unsure in any way, have a look at some of the radio comedy scripts on the Writersroom site - like this one by a couple of thrusting young Turks. As long as it looks like that, you'll be fine.

So, that's the easy way to format a radio sketch - and, like everything in this blog, it's only my opinion. Based on years of experience. Smiley face emoticon.

To sum up: it's the writing that counts, but making it look right can't hurt.

That Barking sketch turned out pretty weak in the end, but it did get sampled on DJ Dee Kline's Don't Smoke (Da Reefa), so take heart - maybe your next sketch will end up as a 1990s novelty drum n bass No. 11 chart 'hit'.

Next time on the Newsjack blog: Explosion In A Clown Factory - why a funny news story doesn't always equal a funny sketch.

For fear of sounding like an anonymous alcoholic, I'm Dan Tetsell and I am the Newsjack script editor. Though I can't give you the secret code to the door marked 'success' - only Jonathan Ross knew it and he's dead to us now - I will try and tell you as much as I can about the process behind the final broadcast show and what we're looking for from our non-commissioned submissions.

For now, let's run through the Newsjack schedule.

As you'll know if you've read our writers' brief (and if you want to send stuff in, you really should) the deadline for sketch submissions is midday on Mondays. We get around 300-400 emails a week and sometimes more, so that's a big pile to get through but, and I can't stress this enough, everything gets read. If you send it, we will read. Newsjack wouldn't exist without its open-door submissions, so it's in our interest to make sure that nothing get missed. As I may have mentioned - everything gets read. Everything. Gets. Read. Oh, would you look at that, I can stress it enough.

What we're left with by around 5pm on the Monday are 80 or so of the best sketches. This is the selection that gets passed on to me and which I then do another pass on - putting them into 'Yes', 'No' and 'Hmmm?' piles - so that by the 10am Tuesday morning meeting we have a pretty strong idea about which news stories we've got covered and which ones we haven't. The Tuesday meeting for commissioned writers is essentially to plug the gaps left by the submissions. Maybe a story has broken that morning or maybe nothing we've had in has really cracked the best comic angle.

Tuesday is taken up with getting as many sketches as possible into as good a shape as possible. Pretty much everything gets rewritten - some sketches more than others. With a show with so many different writers (we got over 70 new writers on air during the first series) my main job is to find, and fit things to, the Newsjack tone. Also, some things could just be funnier. Though I do the bulk of any rewriting that needs doing, sometimes I get the writer of the sketch to do it themselves (particularly if they've had something on before or I feel we're tonally simpatico) or I hand it over to Gareth Gwynn and John Luke Roberts, the Radio Entertainment department's staff writers.

While for most of Tuesday it feels like we've got no show, at about 4pm it all suddenly starts coming together and what looks almost like a show looms up at us out of the fog. The job on Wednesday morning is to finalise that shape. The idea is to go into a rehearsal with the cast at around 1.30pm with about 50 minutes worth of material. This does mean that some sketches that we've done several passes on can fall at this hurdle. Again we may write some last minute sketches to address something that's happened overnight or that morning (though Hoon and Hewitt helpfully decided to shoot themselves in the foot just ten minutes after we'd printed the scripts) or decide that a sketch could be held over for another week - particularly if it's about a news story that's going to bubble away for a while or if it's less urgently topical in it's subject matter.

The producers, our invaluable production co-ordinator, the cast and myself meet in the bowels of Broadcasting House and read the script through once. As I said, at this point the script can be around the 50 minute mark. The aim is to record about 40 minutes, so after the rehearsal there is a quick script meeting between myself and the producers about what needs trimming, punching up or cutting entirely. This can be the most brutal part of the rewriting process. It's only when you hear it read that you can really spot a script's weaknesses. That sketch? Needs to be half as long. That joke? Doesn't work. Replace it or cut it. Any line changes or cuts the actors amend on their scripts by hand, anything more complicated or radical I type up and reissue the pages.

There's then just enough time to rehearse on mic with the sound effects and music, make some final script tweaks, have a small sandwich (maybe they'll get bigger now Ross has gone) and a pre-show wee before the audience come in and it's time to see if any of our calls pay off. Ideally next week the media won't have spent all day warning everyone not to leave their homes and we'll get more than 50 people.

The show is edited on the Thursday morning using scissors and chewing gum before being fed into the giant robot who lives in the Radio 7 basement. To be honest, I have nothing to do with the show once the recording's over so I may have some of those final details wrong.

OK, right, that's how the show works from our end. I aim to look in more detail at each part of the process - and your part in the process - in later blogs but for now I'll give you the most basic of basic advice for getting on Newsjack.

1. Keep it short. A sketch doesn't want to be more than three pages in radio layout (of which more in the next blog).
2. Keep it simple. At heart, a sketch is a single idea. You can, and must, fit as many jokes into it as you can but the central premise has to be strong and clear.
3. Listen to the show. You really can tell who's heard the show and who hasn't. Go on get that podcast
4. Come and see the show. We record every Wednesday at Broadcasting House in London. Tickets are free and here. Not only is it more fun than sitting at home on your own, you'll also get an idea of what works in front of a live audience and get a feel for our cast.
5. Keep the faith. If you don't get something on, it's not a personal judgement on you. There are other shows and other chances. "No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better".

That's right, always leave 'em with a maudlin Beckett quote - it's the third rule of comedy. The first two being a Fight Club joke. Alright Newsjackers and potential Newsjackers, see me back here for our next sermon: Formatting. Ooooh.

Dan