Writer Training

The café downstairs has flooded and RUBEN's laptop is in it — with the only copy of eleven months of work, which he has explained is not the same as a backup for reasons that took four minutes. The landlord is away. The stopcock is behind a panel none of them can open. NADIA has a plan involving towels and a rota. FELIX has made three jokes. OZ, who has been told to stand somewhere else twice already, worked in a theatre for two years and has opened this exact kind of panel roughly four hundred times.

The world

Multi-camera, played warm and fast to a room. Two flats across one landing, and the café underneath that has given up asking them to order more. Six friends in their late twenties and thirties, out of the phase of life where friends are assigned to you and into the one where they are chosen, and quietly aware that this arrangement has an expiry date nobody wants to name. The group is the unit: nothing happens to one of them, it happens to all six within four minutes. Never mean, never smug, and the feeling always wins in the last beat.

The group is the unit. A secret survives about ninety seconds, and the fun is the ninety seconds.
Nobody is the loser of the week. Whoever is wrong is wrong for a reason the audience recognises in themselves.
The landing is neutral ground and both doors are always unlocked. Anyone can walk in, and someone always does.
Play the feeling, undercut it, then let the feeling win. In that order, every time.
Affection underneath, always. They are each other's people; that is why they can be this rude.
The third line is the funny one. Let the first two be true.

Comic engines

A small kindness told as an untruth, then maintained by the whole group, each of whom improves it.
The one thing that must not be said in front of the person who has just walked in. Someone always walks in.
Someone must choose between a good thing for themselves and a small ordinary thing for the group, and the group finds out.
The one who is always the punchline turns out to be the only one who knows how to do the thing.

Cast

NADIA COSTA Chef; hosts everything, 31

Wants: To be the one everyone relies on, and to be told so out loud.

Flaw: Cannot let anyone else do anything, and then resents having done it all herself.

Talks like: Fast and competitive. Turns a favour into a contest and a contest into a rota. Says 'I'm fine with it' while rearranging your work in front of you.

Choose your comic engine

Required before grading

Put the beats in order

inciting-mess
complication
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