Scrotal Recall: an infectious and very clever concept
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Version 0 of 1. While plot and dialogue are crucial to the success of a drama or comedy, much of the discussion during writing and editing involves structure: how can it be made to be seem logical and even inevitable that this scene follows that one and that the story begins and ends where it does? And a multipart drama or comedy raises the extra question of which material appears in which episode. In sitcoms, where the characters and basic scenario are often more or less identical at the start of each part, it is not uncommon for the order of the episodes to be shuffled just before transmission because of judgments over “entry points” or “impact”. One way of negating such debates is a concept or novelty structure. The 12th part of a series of 24 can’t suddenly go out fourth, because it would result in lunchtime coming before dawn, while the fourth part of that great comedy The Worst Week of My Life (BBC1, 2004-06) could never be swapped with the fifth without Friday suddenly preceding Thursday. And, in Scrotal Recall (10pm, Thursdays, Channel 4), the written and recorded opening episode (Abigail) always had to come before the second (Anna) because it would otherwise ruin the conceit of the series, in which a young man called Dylan Witter (Johnny Flynn) is diagnosed with chlamydia and, ordered to inform all previous sexual contacts, decides to visit or ring them in alphabetical order. All sitcoms are repetitive, designed to return each week to the basic situation that gives the genre the first half of its name, and if the situation is a good one, the second as well. But this element of repetition usually involves a weekly return to the home or hotel in which the series is set, whereas the form of Scrotal Recall has an unchanging frame that flexibly permits huge variations of location, time-scale and occasion. The opening episode is set at a disastrous middle-class wedding, inevitably invoking thoughts of Four Weddings and a Funeral, and appropriately so because that film was a classic example of a structural concept comedy – the title gives the audience a check-list of events that will occur – and also because the general tone of Scrotal Recall is a sort of dirty Richard Curtis. One of the most enjoyable aspects, though, is that, having set up expectations about the shape of the action, writer Tom Edge’s scripts then enjoyably confound them. The initial tension involves the identity of each week’s collector or possibly bestower of Dylan’s viral souvenir, with some careful withholding of names from early dialogue leaving open the question of with whom Dylan will end up in bed. In the opening episode, for instance, we at first assume that the future recipient of the letter from the STD clinic (“a bad Valentine’s card”, as someone calls it) will be the girlfriend Dylan takes to the wedding, and then shift our suspicion to a tantalisingly unlikely female guest before the potential victim or villain is revealed. But the shape is also unexpected in another way. Knowing the scenario, I had assumed that each programme would neatly divide between a flashback to the shag and then the bad-news-breaking encounter in the present day. That approach, however, risks the episodes becoming identical and Edge is much cleverer, with the story of the first contact (Abigail) stretching into the third week, and overlapping inbetween with the second contact (Anna) through varying which women are told in person and which by phone. The advantage of such over-arching notions for a writer is that they immediately take care of so many of the questions about the architecture of a piece that can often consume so much time. For example, the form of The Worst Week of My Life, created by Mark Bussell and Justin Sbresni, dictated the number of episodes (seven, taking place on consecutive days) and also echoed a stand-out sitcom of the past, David Nobbs’ The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (BBC1, 1976-79), in which each episode began on a new day, with Leonard Rossiter’s central character burned-out businessman character commuting to work. And Robert Popper, writer of Channel 4’s Friday Night Dinner, never has to waste time worrying out about when the episode is taking place. The peril of many such concept structures is that they can literally be limiting, potentially restricting the number of times that the series can return. Because 24 could theoretically go on as long as time, that show was fine, although it perhaps began to seem implausible that Jack Bauer had quite so many bad days at the office. The Worst Week of My Life ran to a second set of seven weekdays and a three-part seasonal special The Worst Christmas of My Life, set on the 23, 24 and 25 December although, owing to the vicious competitiveness of the BBC1 Christmas schedule, slots could not be found for the obvious thematic gag of transmission matching the calendar of the narrative. A similar misfortune happened to the final series of another concept comedy, Bedtime (BBC1, 2001-3), written by Andy Hamilton. In that case, the pattern was chronological, with each storyline taking place in a different bedroom at around 10.35pm, the time when the programmes were transmitted. A scene in which a couple were watching TV in bed must statistically have led to a situation in which viewers with televisions in their bedroom were watching people watching television in bed. However, the final episodes set, as with the finale of TWWOML, on Christmas night and the bedtimes either side, went out at the right time but the wrong days because of a yuletide pile-up of programming. In the opening episode of Scrotal Recall, Dylan is shown holding a list of former lovers and one-night stands that suggests enough material for around three series and a Christmas special. Ratings will decide how many contacts Dylan is allowed to trace, but Scrotal Recall is an infectious concept that ingeniously allows a wide range of embarrassing social situations to be examined. |