Father Ted creator Graham Linehan on the process behind writing sitcoms

It’s so refreshing and something of a relief when someone as well-respected in their craft as Graham Linehan seems as bemused and befuddled about the creative process as the rest of us. “I find it easier talking about the creative process than doing it – the first stages feel very unlike doing it,” the Father Ted and IT Crowd screenwriter told Rob Alderson at last week’s Here London, the It’s Nice That-curated creative conference. “There’s an early stage where you gather materials, things like stories I find on the internet – like that taxi driver who went on BBC news and got mistaken for an executive for Apple. I could watch that over and over.”

So what for some is procrastination, for many of us (thank God) is creative fodder, working through the soupy sludge of Twitter feeds and rolling news and video clips and storing them up as fuel for ideas. As we haphazardly scroll through the Daily Otter feed again though, it’s obvious that some hours whiled away online are more useful than others. “It’s a very fine line between finding funny things and wasting time,” said Graham. “You know the difference between researching and disappearing down a hole. You realise it’s 5pm and you’ve only done four things all day.”

One way Graham turns off the distractions is using a programme that turns off the internet or simply moving himself to a place where he can’t get a connection. “It’s good to be bored,” he said. “Your brain revolts and then just says ‘fuck you, if you’re not going to do anything I’m going to think of something for you to do.’”

For all his modest chatter of days lost in the internet and boredom as a catalyst, Graham’s writing is a carefully honed craft, one loved by millions but that comes from a very unique, and perhaps rather strange mind. He talks of advice he was given about writing from “the South Park guys.” A story, they told him, shouldn’t be connected by “and,” instead “but” and “therefore” should connect parts of a narrative. That’s what makes it a story, rather than a series of events.

Graham’s process is an interesting one, very much in line with the “get it writ, then get it right” school of thought. “I do shitty first drafts just to get to the end, and to have something I can change,” Graham said. “Then I do the tricks like putting in the buts and therefores. There’s a crafty element, but also room for explosions. They say that exposition should be as hidden as possible, but in Father Ted we used to make fun of how bad we were at hiding the exposition.”

While Graham’s talk focussed on his very personal creative process, the endeavour of writing a sitcom is, of course, inherently collaborative. Father Ted was co-written with Arthur Mathews (whom Graham mentions a lot at Here) and of course the series is put together with numerous others – inducing a casting team, whose choices ultimately shape the end result. Talking about one of his less successful ventures, Paris (“Alexei Sayle as a French Impressionist painter,” which sounds rather good to us), Graham said: “You can’t just let actors act. We were writing things that were quite unreal and heightened…unless you’re working with someone like Edgar Wright, you can’t always trust people, and you have to be involved right down the line from casting to editing.”

He added: “I’d like to be better at collaboration. I need to learn to let go, and let talented people do the right thing and step back a bit. I find it very hard to watch my own work as every time something’s wrong I think it’s my fault and that’s very embarrassing. That’s something it’s taken me a long time to learn to do, to relax a bit.”

One system to help Graham “relax a bit” and to eschew the “all nighters” his writing has forced in the past is a simple one. “I have a system where I have a whiteboard where I write down all the problems [with the script],” he revealed. “By day five it could be just one line of dialogue that’s not right. I’m starting to trust the process and the people a bit more, which makes for an easier life. It makes for a longer life, too.”

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