timewasters
A jazz comedy with an unusual time signature
THE ORIgINal tItlE WaS going to be Black To The Future,” says Daniel lawrence taylor, writer and star of new ItV2 comedy Timewasters, which gives you a good idea of what to expect from it. It’s about a jazz band from present-day South london – Nick (played by taylor), Jason, lauren and Horace – who are catapulted back in time, with no way home.
taylor says Timewasters wasn’t originally going to be Sf, but it drifted that way. “the original idea was I just wanted to write about a group of mates, and then wouldn’t it be funny if they were a jazz band, and then wouldn’t it be funny if it was set in the 1920s... and then out of nowhere, I just thought, ‘What if they time-travelled?’ and that kind of slotted everything into place. It was that perfect fish-out-of-water story.”
Being back in time means the group must contend with the prejudices of an earlier age – but they also bring with them a vast catalogue of songs nobody has ever heard and are soon claiming Outkast’s “Hey Ya” as their own original material, in the grand tradition of time-travellers as varied as Dr Evil, gary Sparrow – and marty mcfly, of course.
“there’s so many elements that you could go, ‘Oh, that’s quite Back To The Future-ish’,” taylor admits. “I avoided watching it while I was developing it [but] it was almost inevitable, and I realised how influenced I was by that film. But we were just reinventing it and made it our own.”