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Grubby banter, sexless flirting and the smell of pizza and ambition ... writer Sarah Morgan reveals the funny business that goes on behind the scenes of your favourite shows
In the recent movie Late Night, Mindy Kaling plays a naive young comedy writer joining the writing team on a late-night US chat show. The staff are exclusively white, male, expensively educated and surly – a running gag is that every one uses the women’s restroom to defecate because no women work in the office. Kaling, as a perky “diversity hire”, shakes up the show and drags it into the 21st century. It’s a wish fulfilment comedy: what would actually happen, with just one woman or person of colour in the room, is that the lads would carry on being sexist and racist but would then swivel their heads at her like ventriloquist dummies to check that she was “cool” with it.
US writers’ rooms have a feral romance to them, as seen in shows such as 30 Rock, which was inspired by Tina Fey’s real time as head writer on Saturday Night Live, when her male peers would pee into jars on their office window sill and call it “sun tea”. In the UK, we’re a little more embarrassed at the idea that comedy is “written”, and feel it should be hidden away, shamefully and quietly. (When a writing partner and I asked for an office at the BBC in which to write our radio series, we were grudgingly offered “The Jill Dando room”, an 8ft sq office in TV Centre featuring a King-Kong-at-the-window-scale mural of the tragically murdered TV personality. We laughed. Writers are horrible.) Continue reading...