Today, Glyn's and my sketch show 'Doggett & Ephgrave's Comedy Shorts' became available to watch online in its entirety for the first time since we shot it, back in 2011; after all, what's nine years between friends?
While the film's by no means perfect, it documents one of our most productive periods, in which we wrote, shot and edited the 25-minute short in three weeks, in time to be shown as part of The Comedy Project's 2011 season at the Soho Theatre in London that April. The filming itself took about a fortnight with nearly every second of each day accounted for, and the editing took us right through to the early hours of the morning of the day we premiered it. We originally intended to host that night's show too, but we bowed out so we could keep a low profile in the lighting box because we were frankly exhausted (though I was still riding the audio levels throughout, so no punchlines were missed).
The sketch show was a massive exercise in pulling favours, with us managing to not only steal the actors' and crew's time for no money but to also blag everything from the use of a police car to a cinema to an undertakers' (when we had a coffin rather bleakly made up to match the actor who was supposed to be inside its' specifications). It was one of those few occasions where everyone we asked about anything said yes.
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| Doggett & Ephgrave, filming 'By Extension' (20.03.11) (Photo by Gemma Poole) |
Watching it last night for the first time in years, I was pleased to see how well it still holds together, particularly when you consider how quickly we had to work. There was little time for retakes, and we seldom watched anything back on set, just having to trust that we'd captured what we needed. Some of our delivery's inevitably rushed (most frustratingly, the second half of the Bop-It sketch that opens the show, though we hid this pretty well in the edit), but all-in-all, I'm still happy with it. And the process was hugely satisfying; in fact, it's probably the most I've enjoyed anything I've worked on.
It came across really well on the night and got a great reaction from an audience, which was a relief as we weren't sure how it would read in a live setting. Among the crowd that night was our sometime supporter Michael Barrymore, who gave us some lovely feedback and enjoyed it enough to appear in a reading of a sitcom pilot we wrote the following year, which was one of the most surreal nights of my life. So he must have liked it.