Put a load of profwriters in a room, tell them to write a radio show ready for broadcast four days later and see what happens.......this!

It’s Friday afternoon. The setting is a lecture room at University College Falmouth, Cornwall. The main characters are fifteen students of various ages and backgrounds – all of whom were strangers until five days earlier. Their reason for being there is to listen to a radio comedy being broadcast on The Source 96.1 FM, directed and produced by the BBC’s Paul Dodgson. And together with my new friends in this room I helped write it. What an incredible way to start the first week of our MA in Professional Writing. We had four days to make this happen. Could we do it?

Our first task was to agree on a setting for the show. Paul gave us the choice of a supermarket or a railway station. A quick show of hands and the supermarket was the winner. Next on the agenda was a title – the most important part of any writing. We threw out ideas as Paul wrote them down on the whiteboard. Someone in the room told us to BOGOF! We were a little insulted. Then we learned that BOGOF! means Buy One, Get One Free. We liked it. We had our title.

We brainstormed ideas for sketches that could happen in a supermarket. Once we had a good idea of the kinds of thing we wanted to include we started the hard part. The writing. We began by each of us writing a sketch. Time was tight; we only had 30 minutes to do this. We then read our piece to the group. This was a scary prospect. We were new writers who didn’t know each other and now we had to read aloud a piece of writing that we’d had only a few minutes to create. Plus there was a guy from the BBC directing our work so it had to be good.

Once the first couple of writers shared their scenes it quickly got easier. There were laughs from the group at the jokes that we’d written. We were funny. As our writing deadline approached we had to be tough. Some sketches were cut and others were rewritten and polished. By the end of the second day there were more gags on the writing room floor than in the script. On Wednesday we began the final editing. Scenes and sketches were chosen. The show needed to be fast-paced so we interspersed longer scenes with snappy one-liners. The format was coming together.

On Thursday we moved to the recording studio where we met the four actors who would perform our script. As professional scriptwriters we would not normally be involved in this stage of production but we were given the opportunity to experience the full process. The actors read through the script and they laughed. We laughed. A collective sigh of relief ran through the studio. The recording started and there was a final twist in store. We were going to perform in the final scene. We were not only writers but actors too.

Friday morning. The final day of production arrived and Amy Sampson, our production engineer edited the recorded pieces and added the sound effects and music. It was beginning to sound like a professional radio show. With literally one hour to go, the show was finished, and Paul ran to the radio studio to deliver our work.

So here we are on Friday afternoon. Fifteen students in a lecture room waiting for our radio show to be aired. The moment of truth has arrived – our work is on air. We like it. It works. It’s funny and we’re proud of our collective achievement. Four days ago we were students in a room presented with the challenge of writing a radio comedy. Today we are writers.

What have I learned from this? Writing can be a lonely business. Most of us write alone and we usually only share our work when we are certain it is ready for an audience. Collaborative writing is fun, challenging and emboldening. There’s no time to tweak something that you have written, you have to throw it out to the others and hope it has merit. You learn how far you can push your own writing limits and you try to pull the best writing from others. In the final edit a writers’ words may not make it onto the script but their participation in the overall process is hugely important. Everyone has something of value to share, everyone’s voice counts. Our radio comedy would not have happened without the contribution of everyone in our class.

One of the hardest things that I found about writing comedy is that when you write a scene or a line and read it to yourself it sounds funny. You then read it to the group and they laugh too. But after two days of re-reading the same scenes over and over you stop thinking of them as funny. Doubts creep in and you wonder how this radio play will ever work. If you’re not laughing anymore how will the audience react to it? But a transformation occurs. The actors arrive and do a read-through of the script and amazingly they laugh. They perform the scenes and you find yourself laughing again at your own jokes. The production engineer pulls each sketch together with skill and speed and the Producer orchestrates the piece adding a sound effect here and a snippet of theme tune there. It works.

A writer's work is their baby. They nurture and feed it and care about it but eventually they must let it go. It must be given to others to direct and mould. A director can lift it with effects. An actor can enhance it with their delivery. But as a writer you have to hope that the listener or reader will love it just as much as you do.

Sarah Farley

Our class are terribly proud of ourselves and would like to show off our work, so click on the link below to listen to 15 minutes of fun set inside a supermarket. And if you don’t like it then you can BOGOF!

If you would like to join the MA in Professional Writing here in Falmouth, our next cohort begin in January on the two-year, part-time course. There are still a few places left...

Bogof show