KNIFE & WIFE: THE TELLY-GANZA
Part Three
Get a load of
this, you silly fresh boys and girls: Channel 4’s
Knife & Wife animated Comedy Lab is complete, and
provisionally scheduled for broadcast on
Thursday December 6th. Frankly, welsh
animation studio
Siriol has performed a startlingly brilliant
job given the intense budgetary and time
limitations. It’s safe to say they’ve done us
proud in bringing Popular Culture’s #1 Chicken
Character to the small screen.
But hey – that’s for the future. For now, we
concern ourselves with the past. To wit: how we
got to this stage. Crivvens – it’s Part Three of
our Knife & Wife Telly-Ganza feature series thing!
FOUL-MOUTHED FUN
FOR ALL THE FAMILY
So, it was
decided, that in spite of being scheduled in a
late night slot, Knife & Wife should be made for a
broader audience. This was good for two reasons:
1) It forced me to be a bit cleverer in the
writing, and not resort to needless sweary-dos
when I ran out of jokes, and 2) You can be so much
more subversive when you’re pandering to a wider
audience.
After the disastrous, directionless, and mostly
very unpleasant first draft, it was fairly clear
that the script needed a focus. I tinkered with
the possibility of Knife worrying that he was
getting too old, but threw that out – I didn’t
want one of the main protagonists spending the
episode wracked with angst, like some big ponce.
And then I hit upon Knife realising he has no
friends, and attempting to prove otherwise to
Janine, his wife. After a couple of mini drafts,
both myself and Channel 4 commissioning editor
Robert Popper (confusingly, keep your eyes open
for Look Around You, his excellent BBC2 comedy
series, sometime next year) felt that the story
was still all messed-up.
JEFFREY THE
LEFTY-BOY
The character of
Jeffrey – Knife and Janine’s son – was another
sticking point. Of all the characters, it was
Jeffrey who became the hardest to nail down. He
started as a sort of proto-Leftie, and then an
effeminate softie, before he became a deliberately
cipher-like teenager, worn down by years of
emotional abuse by his talking chicken father.
It
was draft number five when it all started coming
together (I should explain how I write… Unlike
most other writers, who’ll rewrite and rewrite and
rewrite, and sit back and re-read, and rewrite,
and reread, and then show scripts to their friends
and family to get an opinion, and officially only
have done two and a half drafts by the time
whatever it is that they’re writing gets
broadcast, I prefer to keep an ongoing open
dialogue with Mr Telly, bombarding him with
relentless drafts. It can be fairly unyielding for
poor Mr Telly – in this instance Robert Popper –
but it helps me to shape the story in my head and
on PC-paper… mmm?).
By mini-draft number five, I’d pretty much
stripped the story back to basics; there would be
no deep inner analysis of the characters, or any
major events, just a basic day-in-their-life sort
of thing, where Janine wanted a loft conversion,
and Knife didn’t. And that was that. That’s all it
took. The basic structure, scenes, characters
(Jeffrey excepted) and broad strokes were in place
– ready to be trimmed, and extended, and
re-written and revamped over the subsequent dozen
or so drafts. Except… it didn’t quite work like
that.
UNLUCKY FOR SOME
(IE: ME)
Sometime around
draft number 13, I lost the plot quite
dramatically. Suddenly wracked with terror that
everything written thus far was utterly appalling,
I began cutting out vast sections of the script,
and delivered a draft which wasn’t so much two
steps forward, as a million leaps backwards. So
devoid of funnies was this script, that it would
become to be known to Robert Popper and myself as
“The Forgotten Draft”.
But that was OK. I got over the crisis of
confidence, and the remaining drafts dribbled out
surprisingly smoothly – in spite of deliberations
over a line about Buzz Aldrin doing “the first poo
on the moon”.
Mr R. Popper suggested the line be removed, on
account of it being juvenile. I, however, felt
very strongly that it was a funny line, and fought
my corner to keep it in. Then, when it came to
deliver the final draft, I decided the line wasn’t
funny after all, and took it out myself. Hey-ho.
Such is the fickle nature of we “creatives”.
THE TIME HAD
COME
As
the writing juddered to its conclusion, the time
had come to consider the other issues required
when making things for television. You know: stuff
like who’s going to
make it, and who’s going to be
in it, and that. The list for possible cast
members was long, and featured pretty much every
up and coming comic talent in the country.
However, it was an associate of Robert’s who
suggested getting an older, more established actor
– someone like The Goodies’ Graeme Garden, or the
late Terry Scott – to voice Knife. And then Robert
suggested Monty Python’s Terry Jones, and after
that we couldn’t bring ourselves consider anyone
else ever doing the voice. Which was pretty
stupid, because – we figured – the chances of
Terry Jones doing it was about as likely as Jesus
agreeing to host a week-long thrash metal
festival. Yet word did come back: “Tell them I’d
love to play the chicken”. And that was that.
Over the following weeks, we met with several
animation companies, and elected to go with the
20-odd years experience offered by Superted
producers Siriol – under the production aegis of
veteran animation gurus Robin Lyons and Les Orton
– rather than a newer, hipper company. Nicely,
unlike some of the others, Siriol was more than
happy to keep my designs of the characters intact
– and for that I shall always love them.
SPEAK TO ME
The Knife & Wife
recording session was undoubtedly the most surreal
day ever.
It was mad enough that here was a
cartoon being made of the stupid, poxy little
comic strips I used to draw for friends at school,
but having a comedic icon – not to mention stars
of Big Train, Spaced and bloody George out of
George And Mildred – bringing those characters to
life, and telling me they thought the script was
funny, blew the top of my head off. Literally. It
made an awful, awful mess.
Highlights included Terry making a number of
inspired directional suggestions, and reprising
his Python “pepperpot” voice, Paul Putner’s
Charlton, with accompanying distressing vomiting
actions, Jessica Stevenson’s authentic “old woman”
stance, Kevin Eldon’s Dad’s Army impressions, and…
Brian Murphy being himself.
And heck, Terry was kind enough not to point out
all the Python references in the script.
THE END
And so, with
that, it was up to Siriol to knuckle down and “do”
the animation. Three months later, and the
24-and-a-bit-minutes Knife & Wife is finished.
Fully scored courtesy of the excellent
Brollyman,
and looking as great as it sounds, it feels a bit
funny that it’s all over. ‘Course, if enough
people contact Channel 4 after December 6th to
tell them how much they enjoyed it, who knows what
could happen… Do you see?
Hey now – click
this link here for an exclusive extract from
an early draft of Knife & Wife. You won’t be
seeing this ever. Why? Because it’s eerily
reminiscent of a scene from South Park, you big
cheesy puff, that’s why.
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