McPhail, Gadsby and Grant prepare for new series

Press, 26 April 1983, Page 13

McPhail, Gadsby and Grant prepare for new series

Several hours each week, for the last few weeks, David McPhail, Jon Gadsby, and Alan Grant have been meeting at Gadsby’s flat in St Albans to write sketches for the next series of the “McPhail and Gadsby Show.” The show — which has been running to good ratings since it developed out of “A Week of It” in 1980 — will begin a new series of seven episodes on May 23. McPhail, Gadsby, and Grant write most of the show at Gadsby’s flat out of habit. Like old dogs, each has his regular place. Gadsby crouches over the typewriter at one end of a table, McPhail sits at the other end, while Grant usually lounges sybaritically on a sofa.

“We have always done it that way and if we tried to do it here (his office in the Manchester Unity building) I don’t think it would work,” says McPhail. One can see his point: if they all met there they would be sitting in each other’s laps. There must be as many ways of writing comedy as there are comic writers. McPhail says that their

technique is to rough out their sketches to the punchline and then go back and flesh them out.

They have found that if they do not do that they can waste time roaring away with ingenuity and wit on a sketch only to have it all dribble into the sand when they cannot develop it.

Marty Feldman, who worked as a writer on shows like “Around the Horne” and “The Frost Report,” once wrote that contrary to the popular image of comedy writers as grim, dour 'men, he and his colleagues used to laugh like drains at their jokes. Is it like that for the McPhail and Gadsby crew? “Sometimes,” says McPhail. “Sometimes we laugh like mad. Sometimes it can be very tense.” The main sketches, songs, and some other set pieces are written up to four months before the show is broadcast. The more topical sketches are written up to the day before the last ones are taped, which is on Friday for broadcast on Monday.

The show is cast mainly

from about eight regular performers. Stewart Devenie will appear again this year, and David Telford who, according to McPhail, bears an uncanny resemblance to David Lange. Lyn Waldegrave will continue to try to outdo the sartorial horrors of Karen Hay. Although he once performed in university revues and for the Merely Players on stage, Alan Grant does not take speaking roles in the show, although his Pooh Bear-like figure can occasionally be glimpsed swelling a scene in things like the pub sketch. When the show is running it gets about 10 to 15 letters a week, mostly from people with ideas for jokes. “Sometimes they are quite good, but a bit out of our range. They will end up with something like, ‘And then the car crashes over the cliff,’ which may be quite funny but is a bit beyond our means.” McPhail and Gadsby met in Dunedin. McPhail had just become a producer after working for “The Press” and later TV news as a journalist. Gadsby was writing scripts for Radio Otago. “We were introduced at a party. I had been told I had to meet this marvellously funny chap and he had been told the same. So for the first hour we glared at one another thinking, ‘Come on you bastard, try to make

me laugh.’ ” Despite this sticky beginning it was to Gadsby that McPhail turned when TV executives in Christchurch accepted his idea for “A Week of It.” “McPhail and Gadsby” developed out of that. Critics with a taste for satirical gore have sometimes deplored the McPhail and Gadsby show’s occasionally velvet-gloved ribbing of politicians. McPhail is effectively the final arbiter of what goes in and is acknowledges that he does not want to be “overly offensive or gratuitous in any way.” Now and then they hear remarks passed on from their victims that indicate that a characterisation or joke has its mark. Karen Hay, for instance, was once reported to be slightly miffed at Lyn Waldegrave’s portrayal of her. And Tom Scott gratifyingly reported in the “Listener” last week that Aussie Malcolm admits that Gadsby’s portrayal of him as a bumbling sycophant of the Prime Minister had probably permanently damaged his image. According to Scott, that portrait developed , after Mr Malcolm went backstage at a McPhail and Gadsby stage show with the Prime Minister and fell about laughing at everything the P.M. said, including gems as, “Good evening.”