The BBC struggled to market Here We Go when it first hit screens, one of its executives has admitted.
Comedy commissioning editor Gregor Sharp said that the broadcaster found Tom Basden’s family sitcom a difficult idea to sell to audiences, saying: ‘I don’t think it cut through in that first series’.
Issues include the fact that it was an ensemble with no clear lead comedy character, and that it had no fixed location.
‘It's really funny, and all the cast are incredible, but it’s quite difficult to get all that over for a new show,’ he said. ‘How do you communicate all that in one shot and make people understand it?’
Basden agreed, saying: ‘What's so great [with the family format] is that they can do anything each week, but it does mean communicating to an audience is hard.’
Series one started with 3.4million viewers, falling to 1.7million by the third episode. But last year’s third series constantly achieved more than 2million, and a fourth is coming later this year.
The team behind the comedy were speaking at a panel at the Edinburgh TV festival that described their show as a ‘modern sitcom classic’, which prompted Sharp to speak about the decline in the traditional studio sitcom.
He said: ‘I think, ultimately, the studio sitcom comes across as phoney. You can tell it's not the real house; you can tell it's a studio.
The way the shows go over that hurdle is they acknowledge that it's phoney, like Miranda or Mrs Brown’s Boys.
‘The production of comedies has ended up much more like filmmaking than it has entertainment. Creative choices in the studio are much more limited. The cameras have to be over there and for writing and performance you have to make the audience laugh… you've got to have gags all the time.
‘Plus there's a limited setting: you only have two or three sets so that limits the type of stories that you tell. You can do all that and some of those shows are still very successful but [the format can’t cope with]… complex characters with loads of psychological depth doing all sorts of things.
‘It's often seen as, "Oh, commissioners or TV channels just moved away from it." We didn't decide, "Well that's over." It's just that viewing tastes evolve and we follow what creators want to do.’
Basden also spoke about his writing process, saying: ‘The scenes can be very long. They could be 10 pages. We tend to have a big scene in the house early on, which is where I'm establishing everything that's going to happen this week. Obviously I'll try and do it in a way that doesn't feel like it's, but the scenes can run very, very long. I usually try and include pretty much everyone in those scenes.
‘For me it's all come out of sketch writing, which I started doing with friends in a four-person sketch show [Cowards, alongside Tim Key and others]. You're writing scenes where everyone needs to have a position and perspective in the scene. You can't have any dead weight… every character has got a reason to be saying stuff.
‘I think sketch writing, particularly for three-plus characters, is the best possible training for that because then you begin to hear the rhythm of it. Different characters can either be antagonists, or they can work together. Generally what I found with sketch writing is that if you've got a group of people who all want to do something, it's incredibly intoxicating and it can be really funny.
‘A lot of comedy comes out of a group of people who all want to achieve the same thing but they will have different ways of going about it.
‘It can't descend into little elliptical non-sequiturs – the way people talk to their own family. It can't just be unmoored dialogue. It's got to have a very clear purpose; otherwise it's very hard to manage.’
Asked whether he would rejig dialogue on set, especially as an actor in the show, he said: ‘I don't ever use filming to solve problems I didn't manage to solve in the writing.
‘Generally we want to shoot exactly what's on the page first and get it and then we can start unpicking it a bit, adding stuff, and trying to take it away, whatever we need.’
Basden also said that the character often ended up sounding like members of his own family, even if that was not his original intent, but added: ‘My brother’s never realised that Robin [the character he plays] is based on him.’
