Giving notes

Receiving notes is an inevitable part of a writer's life. Anybody who is serious about becoming a comedy writer needs to be prepared for it. All successful comedy writers have received tens of thousands of words of notes over the course of their careers.

The life of a British writer is rather different to writers in Hollywood. As the sitcom Episodes highlighted, the television industry here can be quite different to across the Atlantic. There, the process is much more formalised; here, we retain an ad-hoc quality to our activity.

The result of this is that you might find yourself,...