mostly david ephgrave

I found this flyer while sorting through my bedroom cupboard. Of all our shows’ taglines, this one had the worst. We must have been possessed by the spirit of ITV. Reading it made me sick in my mouth.  It’s the sort of sentence you’d see in a brochure for a Butlin’s Holiday Camp. Not that I’ve ever looked in one, of course. Not that I’ve ever looked. What were we thinking? ‘Four characters, two situations, one night of comedy’ is less a tagline, more an equation. Perhaps we'd stumbled across the secret formula to funny. It only needs an exclamation mark to seal the deal. Two’s Company wasn’t our finest hour. As shows go, it was a pretty cut-and-shut. We glued together two sitcom pilots with a couple of sketches. One of the sitcoms, 'Chipped, Battered and Burgered', was set in a chip shop in the early 1980s . The plot was basically a reworking of Fawlty Towers’ 'Basil the Rat'. Thank God Cleese and Booth’s lawyers never...

Today, I’m finding it hard to get into a creative flow. I’ve spent the past hour working up a blog on the subject of a noticeboard I spotted at my dad’s doctors’ surgery. The topic is more interesting that it sounds. Despite knowing what I want to get across, I can’t seem to get past the first paragraph. That's the way it goes some days. It’s very irritating. I become obsessed with the structure of every sentence, constantly adding and subtracting words here and there, until I eventually lose track of the point I was trying to make in the first place. (I even did it with that one. Fuck off, David. FUCK OFF!) This happens when you focus too much on the mechanics. Most ideas are at their freshest and most coherent at the moment of inspiration. If you don’t get it down quickly, when you’re still enthusiastic about the subject, it ends up sounding forced. I remember this happening when Glyn and I wrote some material about a Dutch Phrasebook I’d bought whilst tour...