AliceFraser

Mock The Week: Behind The Scenes

Added 2019-06-20 12:34:06 +0000 UTC

On Tuesday, I came in to the BBC studios in White City to hang out with Tiff Stevenson and Larry Dean before their episode of Mock the Week this week, because I’d helped with some joke writing and figured I’d like to see the process. Also of course so that when they ask me on (heavy irony), I will know what to do.

It is a much fancier studio than the ones I’ve been in in Australia; for The Project, Tonightly and Whovians. The ceiling is massively high and the raked audience seating is much more expansive. I’m always reminded when I’m in London how much bigger it is as a country. There are just *more people*, than there are in Australia, and of course the BBC is funded directly by the television license, rather than the government’s discretion which makes it so much more stable and possible to do things at scale.

The filming was a lot of fun to watch, and it was a fascinating exercise to see which jokes got responses in the room - writing jokes is always a gamble; you can’t tell if something will work until it’s in a room, and when you’re writing for other people’s voices you have to have a sense of what will work for *them*.

If you’ve ever tried to relate someone else’s piece of material to someone who hasn’t seen them deliver it, you’ll know how hard it is to communicate what it is about the material that is funny. It’s so much about the delivery and the chemistry of how those words combine with the delivery in the energy of the room.

It was a lovely show, and watching my friends do well on television is a joyous thing. One of the qualities that’s sometimes hard to cultivate in this industry is sympathetic joy - being properly happy for other people. It can sometimes feel like a zero sum game, where someone else’s success feels like success that you don’t get to have. But particularly in a bigger room, it becomes easy to see how much room there is for all of us.