Well the words are pouring out at the moment with two new website proposals written, my grandson’s dailyblog diary, my work website needing to be updated and this blog of course. I’ve put the ’embarrassing moments’ e-book on hold for a while because an old friend (who’s a lovely writer with a nicely observed dry wit) and I are doing some outline scripts for a tv or radio-based sitcom. We might well be using some of the red-faced scenarios within the plot lines so I need to keep them fresh and under wraps for the moment. Wouldn’t it be fun to see the most amusing days of your life played out on the silver screen? Anyway a long way to go before that happens.
I’ve been doing some background thinking and observing. A typical US sitcom which airs over 30 mins only has 22 mins of programme with 8 mins of advertising breaks. UK sitcoms maybe last 24 minutes. A typical script would be 6500 words and run to around 35 pages depending on the amount of dialogue – some like Yes Minister are dialogue-heavy whilst the Royle Family relies on a lot of visual content. I watched an episode of Frasier closely yesterday morning and counted around 70 moments (be it a telling phrase, pay-off line, funny look, visual humour etc) that resulted in a laugh reaction from the audience. That’s a lot of humour packed into 22 minutes and it’s all beautifully-crafted around a single or sometimes two storylines. Such great writing. And that’s all my mate and I have to deliver. Yikes, better get back to the laptop if we’re going to create characters as memorable as these two…that’s me on the right by the way.
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Pasta Paulie 
Many thanks for the ‘likes’ guys
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