'The Ginge, The Geordie & The Geek'
Paul Charlton will soon be known simply as 'The Geordie' in households all over the country as BBC 2's new comedy sketch show 'The Ginge, The Geordie & The Geek' comes to BBC 2 this Sunday, September 29.
Joining him are Graeme Rooney as 'The Ginge' and Kevin O’Loughlin as 'the Geek', and we were happy to get the opportunity to speak to Paul about the show.
"How did the idea for your new show come about?"
It started a long time ago. Me and the boys went to drama school together (Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama). Me and 'The Ginge' lived together since the second year of drama school really, and 'The Geek' was always staying in our house - in our flat.
We all moved to London after we graduated and me and 'The Ginge' lived together again. 'The Geek' would just kind of turn up there two or three nights a week - he was always just sort of around!
We did our separate acts and stuff and then we just decided we wanted more control of our careers - so we thought "right let's do a sketch show."
When we at drama school we did a play called 'Bouncers'. It was a module that was gonna be self-directed so you could do what you want with it, so even though that was a set play we put sketches into it and added bits to it and that was the first time we as a group did something like that.
It went down really well, so we thought "Oh, we can probably do that on a bigger scale." so fast forward a few more years, we'd done some acting jobs and then we decided to get together in 2008 and make a sketch show.
Me and Graham were always calling ourselves 'The Geordie' and 'The Ginge' and Kev - he's not a traditional geek he's kind of a quirky character so we thought, "this makes sense" and that's why we called ourselves 'The Ginge, The Geordie and The Geek'.
What we've made though is a show full of sketches it's not just those characters, it's a lot of sketches that are feel-good. Not cynical sketches - we wanted to make some uplifting comedy effectively and as we went through.
We did our first show in 2008 - a bit of blind faith - booked a theatre and invited our friends, family and industry people to come and see a show.
We had no idea whether it was gonna be funny or not and luckily it was!
With all sketches it's gonna be hit and miss when you first starting there's always gonna be some missing things and you've got to learn from your mistakes quite quickly and change it.
We took the show to Edinburgh, all moved out of our places in London, living on a credit card and just hoped for the best - which is ludicrous really when you think "we've put so much money on a credit card just to go to Edinburgh and then just see what happens", and somehow we managed to sell 3,000 tickets in our first year, which we were gobsmacked about.
From there we went back every year; in the first year we got an agent, in the second we got a production company (Yalli Productions), in the third year we got a pilot and then we got a series after that.
As we were moving through from 2008 to 2009 onwards we found our voice a bit more as well - we didn't want it to be cynical comedy as we found we had quite a cross-section of society coming to see us - a really broad demographic - so we thought "let's just go with this and keep making it broader".
At the very beginning we had a slight difference in tone of sketches and had some darker ones, but actually what we found were that the most successful ones were when we made it more inclusive for everybody, so we took any element of dark stuff out, made it really family friendly, which is a weird word. It gets banded about for us 'this show's family friendly', which it is - our youngest audience member this year was two and the oldest person I know that came was in their eighties, so there's a big difference. People can enjoy it at any age because it's got no swearing and stuff in it.
With 'family friendly' people think it's gonna be a bit rubbish because it's 'family friendly' but that's bollocks. It's all about characters and it's all about the worlds. We've got surreal characters in a real world.
So, we've got a scarecrow who's in love with a crow - he's doing his job then the farmer comes and sacks him.
It's all about the characters and what happens to their lives and that crosses between kids, adults, teenagers, older people - it crosses all those bands.
That's what we're trying to do while keeping it uplifting.
We want the whole of Britain to be able to sit down and watch an episode together with your family - and no-one's cringing because grandad's in the room "Oh I don't know about that joke!" or "the children shouldn't hear that joke!"
We want people to identify with the different characters and that's the idea of the show basically.
We've got an amazing director so it looks great as well. Filming was done 65% in the studio and 35% was done on location in Glasgow, Scotland. So we've got some really beautifully shot sketches on location and then we've got our studio stuff as well.
There's a couple of things online already about the trailer, about "why have they put canned laughter on" - it's not. Every sketch was seen by a live audience. We did our location sketches first, we did rough edits of those sketches so when we came to do the live studio weeks, in between setups for our live sketch, they played the sketches that were roughly edited from the location sketches, so every sketch has got real laughter on it, and that's what we're using, so it's funny when you look on Twitter asking why we've used canned laughter - it's not canned, it's real!
"Would you say the TV experience is different to that of something like your time on-stage at Edinburgh?"
Yeah definitely. If you make a mistake you can do it again! You've gotta change your performances as well, which we worked a lot with, with the director Mandy. She's an industry legend - she's an expert in going "that worked really well on stage, now do exactly the same thing, keep the essence of it but pull it down and change your performance slightly", so we worked on that. Then also there were certain jokes that worked on stage purely because there was a live buzz, but then they might work in the studio filming but not work when you watch it on the camera, so there were things we really had to adapt in the script as well, so there was a big process of writing for the TV show that involved changing scripts as we did stood up and did them and went "right, what works about that and what doesn't work for the TV angle of that?", so it was quite an intense three or four months of working together on rehearsing something up then rewriting something, then rehearsing something up, then then rewriting again after you've rehearsed it to see what works and what doesn't, then do some live recordings, then start again next week and do it all over again.
What I think the BBC were eager to capture is, because we sell so well in the live world - I think it's about 28,000 tickets we've sold over 5 years - so it's a hell of a lot of people that are coming to see it and there's a buzz when we come out with a lot of music, some musical sketches, dance routine type numbers so there's some similarities in bringing that to the live studio feel, but then obviously it's a slightly different performance because you've gotta be aware you're doing it for the camera as well. It was a bit of a learning curve for us but it was an amazing experience to change that and adapt it, and when you've got some brilliant directors and producers around it that just know their stuff it just makes it easier. It was really good.
"Do you have any stories from your time at the Royal Scottish Academy?"
I could tell you some stories but they're too rude! I can't think of a single story now!
"Who are you inspired by when it comes to the world of comedy?"
For sketches we draw a lot from 'The Two Ronnies', and from 'Morecambe and Wise' really - that's a big thing and then more modern stuff, it's 'Big Train' - that'd be our inspiration - looking at some big characters put in a real world. They've got a fantastic sketch where a group of friends go out to a pub. One friend is dressed as a cat, then someone else comes as a mouse, then they end up fighting but they play it for real. We learned a lot about playing big comedy for real rather than playing it just laughs, you play the truth of it.
"Can you tell us a bit more about some of the characters in the series?"
Well you've got the scarecrow, a ventriloquist and his dummy that are following through the series.
In the first sketch they've just done a gig and the dummy dumps the ventriloquist because he's found someone else, so that story goes through, rather that it being a load of catchphrasey repeat sketches that you'd see over and over again, we wanted something that was a few little repeats like that, then other things that actually have a journey and carry on and move. There's basically a whole journey you'll see throughout the first few episodes, about the dummy who dumps the ventriloquist, then they get back together and go on holiday to try and find their relationship again, then the ventriloquist meets another dummy and he brings that dummy back, so there's a big kind of love triangle relationship between them, and that's a whole story rather than it being a repeat sketch.
Then we have certain sketches that tie-up as well - that meet-up - we've got seagulls that BBC have put online - really chavvy seagulls - that get into lots of different troubles in different places.
We've got a tooth fairy who's a very aggressive man who scares people and Santa Clause owes him a tenner, so they've got something going on there. Office guys as well that are kinda feckless office guys that take their jobs really seriously and everything they do is really serious but actually they never do anything during the day.
There are loads of big finishes - what I can tell you is that we do a variation on River Dance - every episode has a big musical finish, there are lots of big numbers in there as well.
"How would you describe the whole experience?"
Amazing. It's a career highlight. We've all done lots of telly jobs and theatre jobs and that sort of thing but it's hard to describe unless you've been there - it's a rollercoaster, it's not easy. Making comedy, making any kind of art - it's so hard - it's been all-consuming for the past two years, well really for the last five years since we've been putting it together from a live show, but especially that last 18 to two years of putting the pilot together, then seeing if we're getting the series, then getting the series, and then putting the series together.
We didn't want any of the writers to work on this, we were really proud that it was just the four of us John is a co-writer with us and directs the live shows and between the four of us we really wanted to write that show ourselves, but there's a hell of a lot of sketches in the show - about 25 in every episode so there's about 150 in and maybe a few that didn't work so obviously you're writing a lot of sketches where even to get to that stage of filming those sketches, we probably wrote about another 50 sketches that didn't get included or filmed at all that you write. You're constantly having to think of new ideas and then there's adapting it and working together as a group, then there was a massive rehearsal process before we actually did any filming - it was a massive workshop stage where we did five weeks of workshop stuff on the material. Then we did the location filming, then we went back into the rehearsal room before we did any live stuff. Then you've got the editing process which is another six week process so by the time you've finished with it all you're exhausted. It's amazing and when you see the finished episodes, once it's created and they've put the different colours on and the sound-mixes and everything it becomes real as a TV programme because you see it and it's rough to start with, then from there you see it from different levels, when they put the light on it, then the sound on it it becomes so real and amazing. You go "wow, we've made this show that we're massively proud of", and we think it's a really strong show and because we want everyone to watch it - anyone to watch it - we're really proud we've made the show - there'll always be a sketch or two that someone doesn't like, but that's just a particular taste, we think we've made something that appeals to a wide range of people and a lot of people that we're really proud to have done.
Sometimes there's a lot of comedy nowadays quite specific for the 'comedy people' and people that think they know what comedy is and that's an opinion and that's totally fine and there are shows for that, then there are shows for people like 'Mrs Brown's Boys' - I personally like it and I know a lot of people don't like it - but there's a massive amount of people that love it. It's the first show in a long time that my mam, my dad as well, my uncle in his 50s that doesn't really like anything like that all loved it and it's the first thing that they've lit up about the comedy world for a long time. That's what we want to do as well, we've very different to 'Mrs Brown's Boys' - it's not all about innuendo and that type of thing - it's very different but in the same way that got a lot of people that think "comedy these days is not very good", we've got something that brings them in and also people who want something a little bit new as well, hitting the whole cross-section was the idea.
"Do you have any ideas for future projects now that you've wrapped up the series?"
Yeah, we all continue to write sketches because you never know if we're gonna get a second series or another sketch show. I've got another sketch show in the pipeline that I want to write which I don't want to say too much about, but I've been doing some plotting for that. We've all been writing sitcoms lately as well, so we've all got different sitcoms in various stages of where they are in terms of writing, and we sometimes write in twos or threes, or sometimes as a four, and sometimes individually as well so we've all got different stuff. We're all doing different bits of telly projects as well, different TV bits and bobs, and stage stuff. I'm about to go and do a Christmas show in Northern Stage, Newcastle, then the boys are gonna come down and we're gonna do a couple nights live performances as well because while I'm in Northern Stagewe thought we could do a couple nights there because it's a lovely big theatre, and Newcastle's always been a really good place when we've done live stuff there - it's been fantastic - so we thought we'd do a couple of nights at Northern Stage.
We haven't got a plan for a tour at the minute because it's quite time-consuming so rather than doing a tour we thought we'll just do a couple of nights in Newcastle and leave it like that for now and just see what happens maybe in a year or two when we might do a tour or something, but at the moment we're all busy with different things. The boys have just been filming some different things, the Ginge did - it was just on - 'Bad Education', and the Geek's just done something for Sky Living at the minute.
Catch 'The Ginge, The Geordie & The Geek' each Sunday at 7.30pm on BBC2.