01 May 2005
Don't Give Up the Day Job
“BBC Last Laugh competition”
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Well, after a couple of weeks of writing, scrunching up, rewriting, revising, scrunching up, rewriting, un-rewriting, un-scrunching, editing, rewriting and going back to what was originally there in the first friggin' place, I finally decided to stop tweaking and uploaded my entry for the BBC’s Last Laugh competition. I did an ending to "The old Guys"]. Now, I’ve just got to sit back for a couple o months and wait for fame and fortune to come a-knocking at the door and then I’ll never again have to waste precious minutes composing this tedious drivel [that no fucker ever reads anyway!].

My mate O——, up in Kendal, was also giving the competition a whirl, although he chose a different story to complete: "Last Quango in Harris" so we’re not bitter direct rivals [Yet!]. In fact, we’ve had quite an intensive email correspondence over the past two weeks with the hopes and fears of all the years flying back and forth between us, through the ether:

  • "I’ve just realised my lead female is 150…​!"
  • "I’ve got one of my characters stuck up a tree and can’t get him down…​!"
  • "My scene lasts three hours when I read it out…​.!"
  • "I’ve severed my typing finger…​!"

etc etc. All in all it was quite an enjoyable experience. I don’t think I’ll come anywhere near winning, as my entry has a couple of holes in it the size of extremely large barn doors, but I’m quite pleased with how it turned out, considering I’ve never actually tried to put any of my feeble attempts at rib-tickling down on paper in such a structured fashion as a timed and formatted comedy script before.

I’ve read on the Intarwebs somewhere that Channel 4 are running a comedy scriptwriting competition as well, soon. This time to write a series of five minute sketches, so I think I might have to give that a whirl as well. Maybe if I throw enough shit at the wall, some of it will eventually stick [to a Commissioning Editor!]

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TAGS: comedycompetitionbbclast laughscriptwriting

ORIGINAL PUBLICATION DATE: 01 May 2005

AUTHOR: stíobhart matulevicz

LAST MODIFIED: 25 Apr 2020  — REASON: "extract asciidoc preamble into separate file and include it"

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