7. Make a sketch comedy series.
For as long as I have known my nest friend Scott (26 years), we have always had similar tastes in comedy. We would watch the Goodies and Comedy Company, listen to Monty Python and the Goons, and we would say to our selves "we have to do our own sketch comedy show one day."
Back in 2002, I was talking to a different friend (James) and he convinced me to do a comedy TV show with him. It was going to be called CrassTV and we started working on ideas. Then he got a job teaching English in Japan and CrassTV was shelved.
Then I got together with some different friends (Jess, Neville and Brooke) and we decided to make a sketch comedy series to be called Mostly Filler. We had a team of writers writing scripts, we held casting over a couple of days (and saw hundreds of people), we cast a core team and started rehearsals. For reasons that I can't quite recall, we had a difference of opinions on which way the show should go, and sadly Mostly Filler was shelved.
With the bitter taste of failure in my mouth, I decided that sketch comedy was something that just wasn't going to happen. There was instead a Red Dwarf fan film competition I was going to enter. I wrote a B grade comedy horror short film called The Killer Bikini Vampire Girls. It had every cheesy cliche you could think of... it was so popular and so much fun that we did a sequel. And then another. And then another. We had a series of several more that we were looking at making, including a musical. Then one day, I was being interviewed for a job in production at a TV station and the station manager looked at me weird when he saw all the Killer Bikini Vampire girls films on my resume. I got the job but I felt I was known for the KBVG films only. For better or worse I decided that it was time to distance myself from the KBVG films. I moved on and did several dramatic films, all in the hope to show that I could do other things.
Then my friend Scott said "we really need to do that sketch comedy idea" and the ball was rolling. We threw around ideas, wrote sketches and then secured cast and crew. Although slightly behind my original schedule, we have filmed the majority of the sketches! There are a couple we have dropped because they have been done before, or they just weren't as funny as we originally thought, but we are looking good. Here is the first sketch that I have edited together:
From here we need to film one or two pickups and cutaways, then edit it together. We will then pitch it to several TV networks and hopefully, we will be picked up. We will also cut together a web series so I am well on track to fulfilling this goal :)
