Just what are the golden rules for an Ab Fab comedy?
How To Produce Comedy B ronze Jon Plowman €23.99 ★★★★★
The path to the comedy perfection of Absolutely Fabulous was a rocky one for legendary TV producer Jon Plowman. First, the role of Patsy was offered to a household-name actress, who sat on it for weeks before declining because she thought the louche, Bolly-swigging, beehive’d fashion director was a role she’d played before. (It wasn’t.)
Joanna Lumley was second choice for the role. She signed up within hours of seeing the script only to try to quit during rehearsals because she thought Jennifer Saunders hated her. Lumley’s agent persuaded her to stick it out because Saunders was in fact just a bit shy. But the actress would never become accustomed to Saunders’s habit, perfected on her long-term comedy sketch partner Dawn French, of improvising a funny line in the hope of a witty reply.
The show could easily have died like a bad joke. On the afternoon of the pilot recording, Plowman was in the gallery of the studio when he was approached by the then BBC head of comedy Robin Nash. ‘I’ve never found women being drunk very funny,’ said Nash. ‘Ah,’ the producer replied, ‘there goes the show…’
Plowman’s blood pressure was also at the mercy of skeletal scripts. He has a treasured example that reads: ‘Series 3, Episode 1, Door Handle by Jennifer Saunders’, then in smaller type: ‘1st Draft – no jokes at all yet.’
As well as Ab Fab, Plowman produced The Office, The Vicar Of Dibley, Dead Ringers and The Thick Of It, the double acts of French and Saunders, Alas Smith And Jones, A Bit Of Fry And Laurie and also the more niche The League Of Gentlemen and Little Britain. He even lampooned his own employer in the BBC satire W1A.
Plowman’s hilarious memoir charts his early career producing for Russell Harty and Terry Wogan through to his 1994 appointment as the BBC’s Head of Comedy Entertainment. By the time he quit his desk job to return full time to the floor in 2007, he was the corporation’s head of comedy. John Cleese’s three rules of comedy are, famously, no puns, no puns and no puns. Plowman’s are truth, character and surprise, people doing something you didn’t see coming. A funny show, he believes, cannot be just a series of gags, no matter how clever and well stitched together, it has to have a serious intent.
The Vicar Of Dibley, for example, explored the impact of a female vicar in a conservative parish.
Not all of his shows have been runaway hits. One series called Way To Go featured three friends who launched a business helping people kill themselves using a euthanasia machine called the McFlurry Of Death. He loved it, as did critics, but audiences didn’t and it was axed after six episodes.
He claims to have made serious executive decisions in the name of funny. There was, for example, the day, he persuaded Sylvester Stallone and the crew of Judge Dredd to keep the sound down at Shepperton studios because The Vicar Of Dibley was shooting next door.
It was a Sunday – he reckoned God had priority.