At the time of writing it’s the end of my first week of quarantine in Romania. It’s been a busy week and not quite the relaxing writer’s retreat I’d envisaged. However, I have started to catch up my student work. I’ve written my premise. Tick. I’ve written about what story telling means to me. Tick. I’ve left constructive feedback. Tick. Week 1 complete (albeit 2 weeks late) and it feels good to be doing the work and making some progress.

However, reading my earlier blog posts, and re-reading the briefs, I need to treat this blog more as medium for academic reflection and not a personal journal. However, I’m really gonna struggle to separate the two. I’m a working filmmaker of sorts (“no daddy you make TV commercials!” – it still stings…) and so my work and my study are intertwined. What I do at work is inevitably going to feed into my course work and vice versa. For example, I’m currently working on a Wild West themed TV commercial so the short film script I plan to develop is a western. So there’s gonna be crossover. Anyway, time to reflect…

Question 1: What kind of story telling do I use and why?

This is one of the main reasons I’ve signed up to do an MA. I don’t know yet. The types of stories I’ve always been drawn to are comedy and character studies. If I read back through my early attempts at writing, it’s all comedic or absurdist. The scripts I wrote on my film making BA, were black comedies. These days I make a living out of directing comedic TV adverts. Yet ask my family or friends and they’ll say I’m quite serious and not particularly funny. Don’t worry, I’ve made my peace with that.

But why comedy? Robert McKee calls comedy the ‘angry art’ and I guess on some level – as a mixed race, child of hippy parents, growing up in an all white, rural part of the UK, where I received some half-hearted racial abuse and made to feel like an outsider – that yeah life isn’t fair. Whilst my childhood was largely very happy and secure (thanks mum! thanks dad!) I have always felt like an underdog and I had something to prove. And I guess I had something I needed to say. But why comedy? If I was feeling injustice why was I not drawn to documentary, journalism or drama?

If you put a gun to my head now, I would probably start babbling incoherently about how comedy is as powerful a tool as any in shining a light on the darker or ridiculous aspects of humanity, just take Borat, The Coen Brothers or Judd Apatow. I would probably try to argue (whilst soiling myself uncontrollably) that comedy can make challenging issues more accessible to jaded audiences who just want some joy after a hard week at work. And that (whilst sobbing pathetically) entertainment is, if done well, as important as any other storytelling medium, because life isn’t just about correcting wrongs and empathising with other people’s suffering. It’s also about laughter, togetherness and gratitude (again, thanks mum! thanks dad!).

But that’s all just post rationalisation. I didn’t think about any of this as a child. I just wrote what was inside. So, I don’t know why I’m drawn to humorous storytelling in particular. But it feels like a worthwhile activity trying to find out.