Name: Matt Lucas of Little Britain on the development of characters - presented at #EffWeek 2018
Uploaded: 2020-03-13T06:20:54.000Z
Duration: 24 min 9 s
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Past simple

And thank you, by the way, for keeping the applause until I got to the stage.

Because there's nothing worse than it's stopping halfway.

So we got what brought you here to talk about creativity?

And I assume David Williams was unavailable.

So actually, I don't believe that is the case.

Maybe you've been listening in and listening to some of the issues that have been raised when it comes to creativity matching that creativity up to deliver delivering results.

So, uh, you know, I I like the adverts I always have done when I was a kid.

My, you know, before I learned pop songs.

So I feel that there's a relationship that you have with adverts that starts a very young age, Which is why you have to be responsible with them.

But, um uh, my favorite commercials from growing up with the ones with characters, you know, in many way, they many ways they influenced me and David.

I mean, one of my earliest memories is watching the football with my brother and father on being so bored by the football and just waiting for the adverts.

And you are You could be described as a master of carrots.

Well, it's, um I used to really like when we did Lou and Andy because it felt like something very idiosyncratic with me and David.

You know that only the two of us could do together.

And I rather liked playing Marjorie because she just said things that I wouldn't dare say.

It felt fresh to us in that we'd had you'd seen characters like Mister Humphries on.

But it felt like the first character that actually said he was gay, so that felt that felt like a new thing.

And then, interestingly, you've got you've got the ladies up there that you that you wouldn't do today.

I think because we look a TTE transgender people in a different way, we have more knowledge of them on dhe.

We don't think of transgender people now, as a man trying to convince you there a woman, we look att, somebody who's transitioned as a woman.

If they were a man of the transition to a woman there, a woman who are least I do anyway, So we would do that very differently.

So interestingly, that in some way that's a social document of its time.

It really is interesting as well, knowing how do you know when you've got it right?

Because we're seeing some new, more characters in advertising and marketing that how do you know when you got the tone just right and it's going to appeal you know, I was think of comedy is a dialogue between you and your audience, and it's the same with your commercials.

You know, ultimately you get a sense from market research groups, but ultimately on also, I guess what the client says.

But ultimately it's to do with sales, isn't it?

I mean, if you're if you're selling a product and you sell more of them than you got it right, you have to get it right before you.

Even before it goes on telly, You pitch it.

So what we would do what we would do when we were doing little Britain, for instance, is we'd have about once a month.

We'd have ah, session without script editor whoever that waas.

Mark Gate is from the League of Gentlemen did the first series.

Richard Herring did the third Siri's and these were people with great comic voices who we admired a lot and we'd sit with them.

I'm with our producer, Jeff Posner, who is a sort of godfather of comedy, and we would just sit in a room and just read all the sketches and actually, as much as anything, it was just a time effective because I think when David and I started out, we might write six sketches of a character and then get into that room on.

Actually, no one's laughing at the first sketch.

We're embarrassed by the second sketch, and then we don't even read the 3rd 4th 5th and six sketches.

So actually, we learned that it was good to hear other people's voices quite early on in the process.

You can go to the other extreme I was writing.

I was one of three writers on a big American animation feature, one of the big studios on Dhe.

They would cause us the producers would call us during the meeting.

What you got and that was that was too much.

Well, I don't even know what is called yet, but so that was putting the cart before the horse.

I found that too much, but I think it's really useful to find really intelligent people who have done it before.

People with experience and listen to them.

You know, Andi, uh, that that was a cz much a part of little Britain, as anything else is.

Anything we wrote was listening to other people When we when we very first read Lewin, Andy Top far right top to our producer, my family more.

And to Mark Gate is from the league of Gentlemen, actually, and he couldn't walk And he really genuine iwas in the wheelchair on dhe.

There was concerns like Is there a risk that you're depicting disabled people in a certain way?

And we went and thought about it and actually realised we could have We could expand the idea if we did the whole pantomime thing of He's behind you, you know he can walk, but who doesn't know?

So sometimes these when you have a meeting like that in the second draft.

Actually, the bigger idea comes, I suppose, in the tech world, they call it a pivot.

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Matt Lucas of Little Britain on the development of characters - presented at #EffWeek 2018

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