From Sharon Horgan to Jo Brand: women take the comedy throne at C4

Game of Thrones’ Sean Bean plays it for laughs in Wasted as broadcaster unveils new season

The road between Westeros and Channel 4’s Horseferry Road headquarters is a well-travelled one. Sean Bean will play a thinly-veiled version of his Game of Thrones role, Ned Stark, in E4’s bong shop comedy, Wasted, while Kevin Eldon, who played a comedy Ned in the HBO series’ play within a TV show, will co-star in Jo Brand’s Channel 4 social worker sitcom, Damned. Coming soon: Jaime and Cersei Lannister on the Gogglebox sofa.

For Bean it is a rare venture into a comic role. For Channel 4, says its head of comedy Phil Clarke, it is quite a coup. “Sean Bean, in his Ned Stark, Game of Thrones persona, is the spirit guide to one of the characters and appears whenever he passes out,” says Clarke. “Sean was brilliant by all accounts, they couldn’t believe this big star would come and play a bit part in a small E4 comedy.”

Eldon, star of countless TV comedy shows, is adjusting to the higher profile the fantasy drama brings with it. “I saw him the other day, he said you can’t believe the attention you suddenly get even from doing a relatively small role in Game of Thrones. It’s massive.”

Game of Thrones aside, it is the women who catch the eye in C4’s forthcoming comedy line-up. At a time when the number of women in TV comedy is still a live debate – Tina Fey recently said they had a “terrible time” compared with men – it appears not to be an issue at C4. New shows include Julia Davis’ breakfast TV sitcom Morning Has Broken, co-starring David Schwimmer, and dinner party comedy The Circuit reuniting Sharon Horgan with her Pulling co-writer Dennis Kelly, plus Bafta-winning Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum and Roisin Conaty’s Gameface, both self-penned and both on E4. Jo Brand is writing Damned with Morwenna Banks while the award-winning Catastrophe – Horgan again, this time with Rob Delaney – will also be back for a third run.

“I am really pleased and proud that a lot of our stuff is made by women but it hasn’t been a strategy per se to promote women over men,” says Clarke, who heads a department including three female colleagues. “When I first started out in comedy 3,000 years ago it was a male preserve, there’s no doubt about it, it was blokes do jokes. There was Jo Brand and Victoria Wood but they were exceptions, I remember the heckles Jo Brand used to get, they weren’t allowed to be funny.”

Now, says Clarke, “society has changed and women have found their voice, their comic voice, which has always been there but it’s a confidence thing as well. They are writing and performing brilliant stuff. We don’t have quotas or anything, we take what suits us”.

It is just over two years since the BBC’s then director of television, Danny Cohen, declared an end to all-male panel shows. Most agreed it was a good policy, but accusations of “tokenism” might have been avoided had it not been made public. “It was a strange thing to have said,” says Clarke.

Fans of another female-penned C4 sitcom, Raised by Wolves, face an anxious wait, however. The jury’s out on a third run of the series written by Caitlin Moran and her sister Caz – and being adapted for US TV by Juno’s Oscar-winning Diablo Cody. Also undecided is whether there’ll be a fourth series of Matt Berry and Arthur Mathews’s Toast of London, another Bafta winner.

It is a sign of the times in TV comedy, not just at C4, that a consolidated audience of close to 2 million viewers is now regarded as a hit. One such is The Windsors, the Friday night royal satire that will return for a second run, averaging a consolidated audience of 1.8 million.

Toast had rather fewer viewers but was loved by those who watched it and did another important job for C4, says Clarke. “It was very popular in the industry as well and that was brilliant for us. It was saying, it’s OK, it’s safe to come here and offer us your stuff. If we can do Toast, we can do anything. It was a brilliant calling card for us.” Clarke, head of comedy at Channel 4 since the end of 2012, ditched sketch shows to focus on narrative comedy with a “whiff of drama” about it, citing Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls as inspiration. He wanted to shock less with f-words – including F for a former C4 face, Frankie Boyle – and more with “shocking plot twists. Audiences have grown up and the taboo bashing that used to be a Channel 4 thing is pretty old hat. What’s shocking to me is a brutal plot twist, like the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones”.

C4 has looked to co-fund comedies with US partners where it can – with Sony on Morning has Broken, and NBC Universal on the Olivia Colman comedy Flowers – echoing the transatlantic tie-ups in TV drama. A typical half-hour sitcom is around £300,000, compared with high end TV drama which is £1.5m and up. “Compared to the US, the UK is a cottage industry,” says Clarke, visibly balking at the idea of “filling a room with writers and paying them by the week. It’s just the money”.

Coming to C4 on Wednesday is Power Monkeys, a sequel to last year’s topical election comedy Ballot Monkeys, from Outnumbered and Drop the Dead Donkey’s Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin. If it works, it might come back on a more regular basis.

Clarke, a former stand-up comic who worked as a producer and later executive producer on shows such as Peep Show, Bo Selecta and Chris Morris’s notorious Brass Eye Special, also has the rare distinction of being banned by Radio 4 for blasphemy. The comedy, about Jesus’s older brother Eamon and his struggles to live in his sibling’s shadow, debuted on Radio 1 (those were the days) but hopes of a hit on Radio 4 were squashed by its then controller James Boyle.

“My argument was I didn’t think there had been a recent case of blasphemy and I thought we had stopped burning people,” remembers Clarke. “But he dragged me into his office and said he had taken legal advice and it wasn’t going out.”

Industry rumours suggest Clarke might be on his way back to the indie sector. His response is not exactly unequivocal. “My plan was to be here for three years but it’s already three and a half, so what the hell? People talk about what you might do next but I’m still here. It’s exciting.”

Contributor

John Plunkett

The GuardianTramp

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