Crossword Ends in Violence (5)

If you enjoy Hut 33, and/or crosswords, you may enjoy a novel I've just written called Crossword Ends in Violence (5). It's a quintessentially British thriller about a professional crossword setter who discovers that his grandfather was accused of passing secrets to the Nazis just before D-Day. It's a comic spy novel - with a gulag and some chess grandmasters thrown in. It's like Robert Harris with jokes.

You can read long extracts of it here. And you can buy it here.

Milton Jones & Miranda Hart

As well as writing Hut 33, I get to co-write Another Case of Milton Jones, with the thoroughly delightful and eponymous Milton Jones. The show is produced by equally splendid, but less eponymous, David Tyler. You can listen to it, via the BBC iPlayer, here. And buy the previous series on CD here.

I've also been helping Miranda Hart write her Joke Shop for BBC Radio 2. It aired over the summer and is now available on CD, just in time for the Credit Crunch. Ah yes, comedy is all about timing. It's here.

Enigma News

In case you haven't seen already, it has been revealed that Franco used the Enigma Machine in the Spanish Civil War.

But it may be worth pausing to consider for a moment our country's fascination with the Enigma machine. Why is it such a popular icon - and any stories about Enigma machines are immediately snapped up by the Enigma machine. Why? Here are a few reasons:

1. The Enigma machine represents a tangible, enduring, inoffensive of war memorabila. It is an easily identifiable object that stands for one aspect of World War 2 - and of course, as a nation we are still obsessed with World War 2.

2. The Enigma machine is simple and is in itself a thing of beauty. And yet it represents bamboozling perplexity. Such a small, easily contained item - not much bigger than a typewriter, in a pleasing wooden case. And yet it has serious scrambling power.

3. The British encryption machine, TypeX, was actually more effective and powerful. It was based on the Enigma-rotor system, and was not broken by the Germans. They did not however, have a code-breaking initiative on the scale of Bletchley Park. But it is not such a beautiful design and it doesn't come with the same stories that the Enigma brings. It's altogether less exciting to the man in the street.

4. The cracking of the Enigma machine represents a popular, memorable, British success in World War Two. It's something to be proud of as a nation. I say 'popular' because it is popularly believed that the British cracked the Enigma when it was the Poles who got there first, invented the Bombe and handed their research to the British - saving them months of headscratching work. The Poles were, in my opinion, rather shamefully sidenlined thereafter, but there's not doubt that Turing, Newman et al built on the work and did amazing things with numbers and letters. One unequivocally British success of cracking the Lorenz cipher, Hitler's own personal code that was far more heavily encrypted than anything else previously encountered. And this led to the building of Colussus, which, despite the name, isn't as strong a 'brand' as the German Enigma machine.

Anyway, those are some brief thoughts on the matter. Read about the Spanish Civil War story here.

Some Useful Links

Here are one or two links if you are interested in the business of writing, or thinking about sit-com.

Ken Levine, writer of many American sitcom hits, has a blog here.

I also recommend Rob Long's weekly podcast called Martini Shot, broadcast by KCRW. It's only 4-5 minutes long, but is an interesting window into the comedy writing world. You can find that here. He is also the author of this wonderful semi-autobiographical book published a few years ago called Conversations with My Agent. He has followed it up more recently with Set Up Joke, Set up Joke.

Rob Long writes very well about the Biz, as it were. And there are literally dozens of TV shows about sitcoms from the past. But there isn't much out there on the technical subject of comedy writing itself. One book I read when I was starting out was Writing Comedy by Ronald Wolfe, writer of the now unwatchable On the Buses. But the structural stuff and the way in which comedy works is all useful, even if you end up writing jokes that don't revolve around 'crumpet'.

If I stumble across other resources, I'll put them up here. In case you're interested. You may not be. You may just like Hut 33. In which case, let me reassure you that I'm doing my best to write Series 3 at the moment - and it should be out in the second half of 2009.

Don't Bet on it

Last week's episode (in this current run of Series 1 repeats) was probably my favourite episode of either series. And not just because of the sultry, sizzling tones of Miranda Raison - although that had something to do with it. It's because the character that Miranda played sent the characters spinning off in all kinds of directions - and ultimately back into each other. Once the idea was in place, the episode came together very quickly.

This was not the case with this week's episode - Don't Bet on It, which was the eternally tricky fifth episode. See below for details on why Episode 5 is always the hardest to write. (We circumvented this issue in the latest series of Another Case of Milton Jones by only making four episodes). I was keen that Charles establish some kind of betting syndicate. My original idea was to have them bet on results that Charles could rig - and then eventually bet on baseball in America which he could not rig. Then a crucial game would be cancelled by the intervention of Pearl Harbour.

I did use Pearl Harbour as a plot intervention - in series 2. I also used the German invasion of Russia as a plot intervention in Series 1, which got all the characters off the hook for some Marxist-based misdemeanour. Both, if we're being honest, are cheats. The technical term for them is Deus Ex Machina. They are an event from the outside over which the characters have no control. (I believe Shakespeare uses it occasionally. There's some bit in Measure for Measure when a Duke returns 'fortuitously' and it's all a bit contrived.)

A Deus ex Machina is, to some extent, an admission of defeat. In sitcom, the characters problems are caused by themselves. No matter how tenuous. Ideally it isn't tenuous - and involves the resolution of colliding plots. Because if someone is vindicated - or destroyed - by a Deus Ex Machina, they don't deserve it. Sitcoms are, to some extent, morality tales. When a character is exhonerated unjustly, or maimed without good reason, it seems unfair. (This is one reason why I stopped reading Evelyn Waugh. As an author, he is horrid to his characters who just don't deserve to have life go so badly for them when they've done nothing to deserve it).

I suppose this tells us about our innate sense of justice, right and wrong. We don't want to read, hear or watch stories where people are not treated as they deserve. But here we get far more profound than a preposterous wartime sitcom like Hut 33 merits. So we'll stop there. Suffice to say that Charles, in this episode, gets his just deserts.

Pressing 'pause'

In case you were wondering, the repeat of Series 1 of Hut 33 is taking a short break for the Edinburgh Festival. Episodes 3-6 will be broadcast in September. Fret not.

In the meantime, you may be interested to know that the complete first series of Concrete Cow - a sketch show wot a wrote from a few years ago - is now available on CD. It stars the Olivia Colman (Hut 33's Minka), Rob Webb (of Mitchell and Webb) and the now ludicrously famous Sally Hawkins (Happy Go Lucky, Fingersmith etc). Sally also wrote some of the sketches with Catherine Shepherd, so they're clearly annoyingly talented. The show also starred Chris Pavlo and Steven Kynman. It also contained sketches written by Jon Holmes (The Now Show) and Robin Ince (whom I saw on Richard and Judy the other day). The show even got some good reviews.

Anyway, it's available from places like this.

History Repeating

It seems odd that Episode 2 of Hut 33 should be about one of the characters potentially leaving, but it proved to spark a good spat between Archie and Charles.

A foreign posting in Iraq becomes available and naturally it is assumed that Charles will be the one to be sent - he is the linguist after all and knows the area. But Archie won't stand for it. Why should Charles get the foreign posting? He's only just arrived for a start. A game of cat and mouse ensues and the foreign posting is not quite what it appears. Eventually, they have to join forces to wriggle out of their commitments. They are only saved by exterior events and a Fascist coup in Baghdad which was temporarily taken over by the Germans.

And so begins the theme of "being sent abroad" in Hut 33. It's been a common threat in Hut 33 (as it was in Allo Allo; the German soldiers were all worried about being to sent to the Russian Front, which meant certain death, or worse.) In Series 2 of Hut 33, the big threat was being sent to Burma, a land of poisonous snakes and terrifying diseases. Who knows what threats Series 3 will hold?

In any given sitcom, there needs to be jeopardy. One needs to ask 'What's at stake?' If there are no consequences to failure the audience will rapidly lose interest because they don't care about the characters. In reality, the consequences of failure at Bletchley were often too awful to think about, but since our regular characters are not really at the coalface of code-breaking, there is less at stake. So failure, for them, needs to be punished in other ways. Being sent abroad was one of them.

Of course, the greatest thing to be avoided is 'losing face' or being seen to be wrong. Pride is one of the great sitcom motivators - and in that it really does resemble real life.