The Sitcom Mission 2013
Friday 25th January 2013
Here We Go Again...
So, how have you been? Hopefully, you've been soaking up a fantastic year of sport and have all written Olympic-based sitcoms which are now out of date and are wondering if you can change the setting from Newham to Rio and get away with it.
We got this message from last year's winner, Snez Naik: "Finally [when people ask] I have something interesting to say about myself. I talk about how helpful the production company have been and how they've taught me new writing skills to help me move forward. I enjoy bragging about how much they liked the pilot episode I wrote for them. I tell anyone who listens about how great The Sitcom Mission is and I continue to recommend Simon and Declan's brilliant workshops, they provide hope for the hopeless and clues for the clueless. Most of all I tell people not to give up, if you know you can do it, you will. Snez 'Interesting' Naik."
We're really proud and pleased for Snez and we know he's determined to succeed.
We've had a few things to think about ourselves and took a good, hard look at how we've been doing things over the past few years. When we set up The Sitcom Mission, we wanted to produce a live show that the audience loved and we could be proud of. Whatever format this took and however much effort some brilliant people put in, we were never happy with the live show element of The Sitcom Mission. It's an awful lot of work putting on 16 sitcoms when only four of them are going to be showcased and we need to streamline what we do in order to be successful and sustainable. And after all, it's a writing competition - the finger has been pointed that a sitcom could win or lose based on casting and direction. So, a big decision but we've removed the live element of the competition and we'll be sticking with a rehearsed reading industry showcase which means that we'll be able to attract quality actors for a shorter period of time.
After two years of sponsorship, Hat Trick have now decided to put their money into a competition on their Bad Teeth website. We thank them for their support in the past and wish them well. They're a great bunch of guys with a very promising future ahead of them.
So where do we go from here?
We decided to play to our strengths and stick at what we're good at - script development. We're very proud that the last two winners of The Sitcom Mission took our writing workshops and we believe we can add value to the scripts we shortlist through feedback and development. We're now teaching sitcom writing at London's City Academy and, with the success of our ebook, Your Sitcom Mission... Should You Choose To Accept It, this is definitely the way forward. More than anything, we love doing it, and we're sticking with our passion.
We're putting together a 'money can't buy' package for four winners. We'll be long listing down to eight and then, after feedback and rewrites, we'll be choosing four winners that we'll develop the work with. We've got the support of development officers and producers from indies such as Bwark, Avalon, Left Bank, Little Comet and So TV, with more coming on board all the time. The four winners will have meetings with them and get feedback on their scripts in order to prepare them for the industry showcase later in the year. And we're talking autumn for the showcase - we don't want to rush things and we'll serve both writers and the industry best if we spend some quality time working together with our four finalists to make everything as sparkly as possible. To misquote Isaac Asimov, the three laws of Sitcom Mission are:
1) Serve the writers
2) Serve the industry
3) Serve the drinks
We vow every time to make The Sitcom Mission the best one ever. We're as optimistic as we've ever been, probably more so because of the changes we've made. We've always lived by the ethos that you have to love the process as much as the end result - the process of writing is its own reward and the same goes for running a writing competition. We're really looking forward to reading those scripts and getting our teeth into them with a fantastic bunch of winners who we know are out there.
Are you going to be one of them?
Declan & Simon