How we made Smack the Pony
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Version 0 of 1. Sally Phillips It was the late 1990s. The Spice Girls had happened and Caroline Leddy – then the comedy commissioner at Channel 4 – felt that a sketch show by a trio of girls could finally work. There’d been a few around before, but people hadn’t been that interested. Caroline commissioned writer Victoria Pile to investigate and they held workshops with several performers: me, Julia Davis, Fiona Allen, Amanda Holden. Eventually we got a pilot together, and that became a series. At first, I thought it was going to be a disaster. There were some popular female comics around – French and Saunders and Victoria Wood – but I just didn’t know whether anyone would watch a sketch show like this. But I was 26 years old and 40 million times more confident than I am now, so I worked like mad. For a year, I just shut myself away and wrote. Before we made the pilot, I was convinced it was going to be so awful no woman would ever be allowed on telly ever again. I bumped into Doon Mackichan on the stairs at the production company Talkback one day and said: “I’m putting together this girls’ sketch show, I really need you.” Then I got a cold and went to bed for three days; when I got back up, Doon was in the show. She was a fantastic performer – if she was a man, she’d already have had her own show – and she brought energy and loads of material. Within 24 hours of Channel 4 watching the pilot, we had a series. We developed rules: no celebrity references, no recurring characters, no catchphrases. We didn’t want to be like The Fast Show. It meant a lot more work, but it does mean that the show hasn’t dated too much. We were definitely coming from a feminist perspective: our characters were the women who would normally be stuck on the sidelines. In a boys’ sketch show, you might have guys doing a bank robbery. We were interested in the women in the car park round the back, unaware that the robbery was happening. We’d take each script and improvise. That’s how I came up with the toilet Duck sketch, which is still one of my favourites – a supermarket worker ends up accidentally stacking a whole shop with Duck toilet cleaner. I also have a happy memory of Doon playing a Spanish woman who’d had tons of plastic surgery. The character had a dog called Elton John. “Elton John,” Doon kept saying, “don’t lick my face.” I still get people writing to me saying, “Love Smack the Pony can I have a picture?” But I hadn’t watched it in years until they held a retrospective at the BFI in 2012: pretty much all the sketches they chose of mine were filthy. I was like: “I don’t remember being Dirty Spice.” Doon Mackichan Smack the Pony was different to anything I’d seen before. We didn’t do anything about diets or sexual politics. “Let’s just let women be clowns,” we said. I’d been doing standup for ages, and had become thoroughly disheartened by the fact that other female comics all tended to tackle the same subjects. People would say, “Do you do any period jokes?” and I’d go, “Well, no, I don’t.” It was refreshing to have women in the lead. We’d all done years of “feeding” for various sketch shows – playing the foil to set up the joke, so that the male comic could take the laugh. My first sketch show was called Five Alive, with Brian Conley and Peter Piper; from the beginning, we women were told in no uncertain terms that the show was to launch the men’s careers. For Smack the Pony, we’d get sent stacks of sketches from writers who had often been turned down by male comics, such as Mel and Griff, and rework them, turning the straight female characters into the funny ones. The first ever sketch we shot was me limbering up by a swimming pool and then doing a belly-flop. We were shooting in front of an all-male crew and none of them laughed. I thought: “This is absolutely dreadful.” But gradually, as we went on, the atmosphere on set changed. I remember doing one of the dating agency videos, and seeing the crews’ shoulders shaking with laughter. I thought: “We’ve cracked it!” Despite winning awards in the US, it didn’t get much recognition in the UK. But I still get younger women saying they started out in comedy because of Smack the Pony. What’s depressing is that it didn’t produce a raft of other shows. What else have we got apart from Miranda? Women are out there, writing, but they’re not getting commissioned, or seeing their shows dropped after one series. It’s still a battle. |