I’m not on actual telly very much these days – which is partly my own doing: I have turned down a number of opportunities to be on various news couches of late, and I’ve been hard at it behind a laptop for much of the last year, concentrating on what, I hope, I do best – so I cannot resist making a fuss of this. As the Sky subscribers among you may know, as it was heavily trailed, one of the ten ten-minute films packaged up under the umbrella Common Ground, was written by me and Simon Day, its star. Based on a character we originally wrote for a feature-length comedy for C4 called Personal Training, the name of our episode was Colin – also the name of the personal trainer around whom it revolves – and it aired on Monday night on Sky Atlantic. (I am inordinately excited about having had my name flash up onscreen on the same channel that shows Girls and Boardwalk Empire.)
It is the result of two mad days’ filming in and around Clapham Common in early October last year, as blessed production company Baby Cow completed all ten films in 20 consecutive working days, with producer Ali McPhail and director Dave Lambert at the helm, and a redoubtable crew doing all the heavy lifting and keeping a cavalcade of comedians and actors supplied with coffee on parky days. That the results are already on telly is testament to the insane energy of the project, and of Sky’s commissioning process. By definition, it is a curate’s egg, as each ten-minute character piece is written by different writers, and they vary in tone and intent. I like to think of the format as “speed-piloting”. (We all want a longer commission; one or more may get lucky!)
Anyway, we must blame Dave Lambert for insisting that I do a “writer’s cameo” in Colin, which I did. For the benefit of Sky refuseniks, Virgin customers and Sky subscribers who might have been paying attention to the dialogue taking place in the foreground, on the bench, between Simon and young actor Harry Foster (as Colin’s sole, 12-year-old client), this is it. Hey, I co-wrote that dialogue, so I’d rather you were listening to it than watching a man in an all-weather Blue Harbour coat tramp past, right to left, but I was that man. It was me all along! And I think you’ll agree I walked pretty bloody convincingly. Other, trained actors were impressed.
For the record, my favourite of all the Common Ground mini-adventures so far (and there are two to go – 9pm, Sky Atlantic, Monday), has been Sunshine Simon, starring and written by Tom Davis and Eleanor Lawrence. (There’s a free clip here.) I hope that one gets a series.
And ours.
Never Knowingly Underwhelmed 
Worthy of Hitchcock đŸ™‚
This is a tiny, minuscule gripe, but you have previously used the term Sky refuseniks. Maybe it’s just my inference, but this seems to suggest that those of us without Sky are ideological dinosaurs who deny ourselves out of a misguided sense of anti-Murdoch righteousness. I suspect that I would feel incredibly ambivalent about having Sky (like all right-thinking people I loathe Murdoch and his demonic empire, but imagine being able to watch The Ashes!), but happily it’s not a dilemma with which my conscience has to wrestle since I simply can’t afford it. For some of us it’s less about the ethics, more about the bottom line.
A good point, which I take onboard. (As a TV critic, and someone who works in TV, I feel I have no choice but to have multi-channel.) I use the term “Sky refuseniks” as that’s the response I usually hear, in the Guardian comments and on here, so I generalise based upon experience.