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Wednesday 11th September 2019

6115/19044

Time Gentlemen Please was (apparently) first broadcast on this date in the year 2000. I think we were still in the thick of making it at that point - that series had 22 episodes, though was initially commissioned for 13, so we had to put together another 9 very quickly (as I am sure I have discussed before). It was commissioned almost exactly a year earlier off the back of Al’s Perrier win, so it was 20 years ago that I began work on it. It sort of feels that long ago. Strange to think that Warming Up began after it was over though. I am pretty sure that I wouldn’t have had time to document the daily goings on when I was writing an episode a week (and what would I have written about anyway? All I was doing was writing). And most of the stuff that was happening with that brilliant cast was too crazy to document at the time. We were certainly fairly committed to method acting (and writing) as there were a lot of boozy nights (I missed many of them as I was at home writing) where cast members argued, occasionally fought and occasionally got run over by a black cab, but refused to go to hospital.
They were hard core.
It was a hectic time, much of which is hazy now, where I, not quite but almost single-handedly managed to create an American style season of 22 episodes of a sitcom more or less on my own. The second series of 15 with a bit more time and a bit more help was a breeze comparatively, but I was in two turbulent and dramatic relationships (one for each series). It was a whirlwind.
There was a bit of Twitter chatter about the show and it’s nice to see that it’s remembered fondly by the few people who discovered it and I ended up clicking on a link to watch a random show. It was the one set entirely in a hospital and I remember very little about it, which is weird because I am actually in this one. I know this would have been written in days and was ready to spot the rough edges, but it actually holds up pretty well, with some subplots and running jokes and lots of recurring characters from other episodes. There’s a joke about someone being run over by a black cab and I suspect we came up with the idea of this outside episode to allow the actor who was actually run over by a black cab to recuperate. So remarkably, it wasn’t Phil Daniels.
It also, spoiler alert, seeds in the storyline of Ms Jackson’s pregnancy, (though in this episode it looks like perhaps she is about to die) something we decided to put in as Rebecca Front was pregnant and we realised that by the time we finished the extended filming session that much would be apparent. The good thing about writing stuff on the week you did it was that you would work round injuries and pregnancies and make them a feature. That was probably the only good thing about it. Well actually it was good that my episode fee became my weekly wage. For the first time in my life I had some spare money.
The unseen little baby growing inside Ms Jackson is now an adult. Gosh.
Anyway, it’s an OK episode, my favourite part of which is the fairly impenetrable parody of Charlie from Casualty’s habit of looking over the shoulder of anyone he is talking to (I think maybe if we’d shot it different it might have worked better- we clearly also ran out of time when attempting to film the slapstick shot of the crash at the end of the episode which is also a bit confusing and poorly covered). It holds up pretty well too. We made a conscious decision to do nothing topical or even UK specific in the hope that we could be repeated forever and sold to other countries (I think Freddie Mercury and Princess Diana might be the only celebrities that get mentioned). 
It didn’t get repeated forever, but it did get repeated quite a bit. Thank God. The repeat fees in the mid-noughties probably saved me. I have to thank the young idiot for me for working so hard. He felt at the time that he was providing some kind of security for his as yet unborn children (and probably unmet partner) and he was right about that. Though you have to balance that out with how burned out I was by the end of the second series.
Fun to watch and critique a script I’d written but mostly forgotten.And now I know this is the anniversary. It's good to have something to remember on the 11th of September.


A great RHLSTP up today - it followed another one that we haven’t put out due to er technical difficulties, but you might be able to piece some of that together from our comments. This one has Mark Charnock and Dominic Brunt from off of Emmerdale Farm. And still listen/watch if you don’t watch Emmerdale. They are spectacularly nice and funny men.

Come and see me on tour in case there are more er technical difficulties and we can’t put the podcast out 


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