Lee Mack wrote an episode of Not Going Out based around the funeral of Bobby Ball’s character – but scrapped it because it was too sad.
Ball played Mack’s dad in the long-running sitcom until his death from Covid in October 2020, aged 76.
Speaking at the BBC Comedy Festival in Liverpool, Mack revealed that he had got as far as writing the dialogue for the funeral episode when he dropped it, even though ‘once you start getting to the point where you write the dialogue, it’s [usually] far too late to stop, because you’ve already spent two or three weeks getting it to that point.
‘But this one was when Bobby Ball passed away. We did an episode of his funeral, and we just didn’t know how to pitch it, we were trying to get it right. It wasn’t that long after he died, and it just felt so sad and upsetting. It was hard to do it, and we said, "just forget it".
‘We wrote a whole different episode about him having an oil painting done… and basically made the timescale like it’s now a year later, rather than he’d just died.’
Mack also recalled filming an episode in a lap-dancing club with Ball, which had to be re-edited at the last minute.
He said: ‘We did topless [scenes] around time that the Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand ringing up Andrew Sachs story was all over the papers. And for reasons I’ve never still quite understood, the BBC suddenly decided they’ve got to be very careful now and said, "You’ve got to get rid of all the nipples."
‘Because, as we know, if you ring up Andrew Sachs, the one thing that’s going to stop that one again, is to get rid of the nipples. So we suddenly had to re edit the whole thing.’
The comic also explained that the show had changed over its 20 years on air, especially with regards to bad language. ‘There is stuff [in] the early episodes that now I probably wouldn’t do,’ he said.
He said he used to have no truck with people not wanting to hear swearing on TV for the sake of their children, but added: ‘But when I had kids, it would annoy me if we were all loving the show [and the f-bomb was dropped] and I’d think: Well, that’s not necessary, is it… Greg Davies on Taskmaster?
‘So I just thought, for the sake of one or two words why don’t we just not swear? Now there isn’t a lot of swearing, it’s all bleeped, and we use it strategically.’
The comic also reiterated his complaints about a ‘snobby attitude’ towards studio sitcoms.
‘I think one of the things that defines class is your appreciation of the arts,’ he said. ‘So if you appreciate an artform. It has to be an artform that not many people watch, because then you define yourself as being different to the rest.
‘So I think the fact that ballet and opera are more of a minority thing in terms of how many people go and see them, makes it easier for people who want to aspire to be the high-class… you don’t like the idea of watching stuff that everybody likes.
‘Sitcom is like the soaps. Soaps are full of brilliant actors, brilliantly written, but the snobs and the industry aren’t watching it.’
However, the fact the genre isn’t popular has also worked in his favour because no one else is pitching them to broadcasters, even though ‘the BBC would love more studio sitcoms, because there’s something special about them’, he said.
‘There’s been less and less people making them. Nowadays, if you’re a 25-year-old comic, you didn’t grow up on studio sitcom, it’s a genre that’s dying out, which both annoys me and is massively good for getting recommissioned.’
But Mack acknowledged creating the show was hard work, explaining: ‘You can’t get away with not writing a joke in sitcom, in the same way as in stand-up, you can’t spend 10 minutes just creating an awful tension.’
‘When I started out I was told you had to have a joke a page,’ he said. ‘But that really is not enough’.
He said he studied American sitcoms intensely when he was creating Not Going Out, as US sitcoms were being lauded whereas in Britain it was believed to be a dying genre.
Mack estimated that American writers were aiming for a joke every five seconds. ‘I wanted as many jokes as possible,’ he said. ‘At the expense of character? Damn right! I’ve been doing the show for 20 years and [my character] Lee still hasn’t got a surname – and I’m very proud of that.’
He said what made a sitcom a hit remained a mystery, saying that while Not Going Out is about to celebrate its 20th anniversary ‘I did another sitcom and it lasted one series. I don’t think that one’s terrible and one’s brilliant. It’s just the way it works.’
Mack explained that shifting Not Going Out from a flatshare sitcom to a family one came after he and Catherine Tate made an unaired pilot for a British version of Everybody Loves Raymond in 2013.
But realising he couldn’t do both that and his own show, he thought ‘why don’t we just turn Not Going Out into a family sitcom? So that’s what we did. We got married and we jumped forward seven years. We got kids in…’
Mack added he’d like to make a sitcom that went out live every week, following the success of the nerve-jangling one-off he made in 2018.
‘You need that edge in television,’ he said, ‘because it has become a little bit sanitised.’ He praised Saturday Night Live on that front, saying it was an advantage that viewers could see the mechanics of filming, such as the performers reading the autocue, saying: ‘It feels dangerous in that – it can go wrong, and we all want to see it going wrong.’
He also revealed that he and co-writer Daniel Peak had discussed making a stage version of Not Going Out, as its fixed sets already feel theatrical.
‘We could just pick four episodes and not require any effort,’ he said – the same model Fawlty Towers used – but added he’d prefer to write a ‘proper stage play’.
‘I would like to do it. It’s just [finding] the time. It takes so long to write the TV show that there isn’t time to get that together.’
That was the same reason, he said, that he was not planning a return to stand-up, as the sitcom took him nine months of the year to write and make.
‘To be honest with you, I like writing jokes more than performing, and so because [Not Going Out] is so gag-heavy, I don’t feel the need to do stand-up.’
Lee was being interviewed by former BBC comedy chief Shane Allen, who had commissioned several series of Not Going Out. Allen, who now runs Boffola Pictures, joked that the show ‘pre-dates diversity’, adding: ‘When Reform get in this is the show that is going to save the BBC’.
