Wildseed Studios

Harry Deansway is the creator behind our new series “Shambles” based around an actual live comedy night Harry hosts at the Aces and Eights bar in Tufnell Park.

Watch the trailer here

Where did you get the inspiration for it?

As a very lazy man with little imagination when Wildseed approached me to make something  I thought what do I know? How to run a comedy night badly. In twelve years of promoting comedy I’ve learned nothing and always make the same mistakes. Things always go wrong and I am completely broke. Could we just film that I said? One year later here we are.

What’s the series about?

Throughout history there have been great works of art – book’s, films, paintings which are supposedly about something but when you look deeper into them they are actually about a whole lot more, life, love, the human condition. This series might be that, if not it’s about the comedy night I run in Aces And Eights called Shambles.

What made you want to make it? (both series 1 and 2)

The pursuit of fame and fortune and a misguided desire to live on through my art long after I die.

What’s your history in comedy?

As the Summer approaches and we at Wildseed watch everyone else go on holiday while we continue to slave away (not really!) I thought it might be a good time to review why we do what we do at Wildseed – restate the mission if you like – so here goes…

In TV, as we know, there is a commissioning culture where commissioners, conservative and fearful often, seek to develop and develop to guarantee as close to perfection as they can before they commit.  They work with expensive talent, and make expensive products, and accept a devt ratio that sees a lot of wastage. I was in that world, commissioned lots of work, honed it, spent money on it, endless drafts, endless notes, endless conversations with teams of devt people about the material… This is the world of six months work in pursuit of 5% better – we’ve all been there I know.

We started Wildseed in the belief that this approach was a large part of the problem – IE the same talent working for a group of nervous and essentially conservative commissioners with similar tastes and cultural backgrounds giving lots of compulsory notes in fear of getting fired for saying yes to the wrong thing.

Instead we set out to make a really diverse range of intentionally scrappy pilots. We seek to avoid the expense, time, fear, wastage and most importantly homogeneity that the TV process creates. We do not seek to work with tried and tested talent and then give them compulsory notes – we seek to enable an often very inexperienced group of creators to make  the best version of the first iteration of their vision, and then step back and  watch the audience reaction. When I was in theatre we used previews to re-write plays – and so it is with the £10k first pilots.

This means resisting the deeply ingrained urge to make it “better”  ad nauseam – yes we have some basic needs – we need well told stories, we need characters that are original funny, compelling, and we need to avoid cliche and lazy answers  but beyond that we need to connect with and enable what the creator wants to do in as an unfiltered way as possible – because only then will we get the fresh surprising creative outputs that could just be the new South Park or anything else that no one has ever seen before, didn’t know the audience was ready for, and then scrabbles to copy.

We put these out, imperfect, and rough and ready as they often are, often already with our own opinions about how they could be better, and wait for the audience to tell us what is working by their reaction. Once we understand that we decide whether to make more and if we do make more – how to begin to fine tune the creative products we publish in light of that feedback/engagement. This part of the process – IE the £25 investments we have sitting behind the pilots –  is more about polish – but guided  by the intended end users responses.

I am sure to a passing grandee of TV, the results look just as undeserving of their attention as the Sex Pistols did to whichever corpulent old hipppy was producing Genesis double concept albums in 1976 – and I understand why someone would look at the channel and feel like it was “unprofessional” when viewed from that lofty elevation – but my honest take is that these people’s opinions are ushering broadcast TV to its grave…

When we committed fully to creating our own distribution brand and launched the channel a really interesting thing happened – and that was the idea of the channel brand began to play its part, as did the responsibility for marketing to an audience.

That was in fact hugely focussing – and it led us to focus much more specifically on audiences below 25, and to really engage with the new Social Talent Star System in terms of their power to drive mass engagement.

Like our strategy – we want that brand to stand for creative courage, energy, fearlessness, variety, surprise, and yes – the right to fail. The feedback we get is that this audience are very positive about this brand identity – in some ways more positive than we were expecting – but then this is the audience that made long form factual the hottest ticket in the form of Vice – so they aren’t the ADHD suffering fools the Daily Mail would have us believe…

That said, running a channel does entail catching the fear virus – because suddenly all those old voices which say “this has to work” and looking for that sure fire hit start to bite again – and you start to book ideas for reasons other than your experience tells you this is a talent with a great idea/something fresh to offer and the ability and drive to deliver it. Obviously it’s balance – we need to book people and ideas we think have the potential – but we have to resist the need to hedge our bets – that’s what 50 x £10k is for – as opposed to 1x  £500k.

But it is a real head trick to pull off – and one we need to keep working at.

I feel more confident about what we are doing than ever – I feel like we have learnt so much about the need for a younger Editorial PoV in what we pick up, about the audience and their tastes, about the talent ecosystem, about grass roots marketing and how to build our audience fan by fan and so on – and are now in a position to apply all this more consistently.

It is true we are only one hit away from relevance – but I know we will have to work three years to be an overnight success – but luckily – as the ubiquitous “Chinese proverb” says – ‘do what you love and you will never do a day’s work in your life’.

At Wildseed, we believe that there are literally hundreds it not thousands of great UK generated stories waiting to be told. However there are only a few movies that are deemed to be “Box Office”, most of which, surprise surprise, go some way to affirming America’s idea of what the UK is.

That is why we have launched our punky “microbuster” strategy – which we believe is the best (and possibly only) way of proving that there are great stories to be told, and the audience there to justify it. However, in that we can probably only make two or three of these movies a year – here are some of the British Film you can no doubt look forward to in the 12 months ahead while you are waiting for our next one!

Film One – “It’s tough to be posh”

A film involving repressed aristocracy struggling between duty and desire – the subtext being “it isn’t as easy being posh as you would think”.

EG The Kings Speech.

Film Two: “There’s strike and I’m coming out”

A Film involving, for some reason, striking miners, and liberation through the adoptions of non conventional male sexuality.

EG The Full Monty, Billy Elliot, Pride, Brassed Off.

Film Three: “Cockney’s on Coke”

Films involving Cockneys and cocaine where some sort of likely lad gets in too deep with psychopaths the film maker can’t quite help get the horn for.

EG Lock Stock, Layer Cake, Dirty Beast.

Film Four: “Being working class has damned me”

A film involing the unending misery of being working class and living on an estate, usually made by middle class film maker, giving the whole thing a slightly unpleasant sense of being a pornographic zoo of misery.

EG Breaking the Waves.

Film Five: “Oh Mr Darcy”

A “Bonnetathon” adapted from one of our literary greats involving various shades “Colin Firth coming out of the Lake”.

EG Pride and Prejudice

Film Six: “Gosh aren’t we all sillies”.

A film involving the endearing dithering of a group of middle class friends who went to university together, but are finding the choices of adult life and love a just little bit confusing.

EG Notting Hill

Film Seven: “Old people fall in love too”

A film involving old people finding love in European Mini Break hotspots, resulting in them feeling able to dance in public”

EG To Paris with Love, Mamma Mia etc.

Film Eight: “Cold witty spies are good at killing”.

Can be serious, or can be a comedy – but the premise is the same, spies or other security operatives with trouble expressing themselves emotionally due to training and/or being posh, are nonetheless able to remain witty while killing people.

EG James Bond, Kingsmen.

Film Nine: “Well it did Jolly Well in the West End”

The film adaptation of play that the producer saw with their partner in the West End in press night and “just had to have”. Usually directed by the original stage director as their way into the movies – with rather beige results.

EG: Posh.

Film Ten – “Silly talking Animals amuse middle class children/childlike adults”

A film, often adapted from a book, in which middle class children, often suffering from emotionally distant father, encounter a talking animal (real of fantastical), and, after increasingly dangerous japes, find the courage to confront emotional issues and heal entire family as a result.

EG Paddington.

Content London has grown quickly to be one of the most interesting and therefore important gatherings of producers and platforms of the year. While most of the event consists of panels discussing trends and working practices etc, there is also a professional training element, the Showrunners Masterclass, which I will be curating today with US Showrunning Brit Simon Mirren (Criminal Minds, Spooks and now the magnificent Versailles on Canal+).

Here's why Content London decided that this should be their focus:

As even the briefest survey of Amazon, Netflix or Sky Atlantic will tell you - big budget drama is booming as platforms vie to cement their position in the content ecosphere with their very own Mad Men or Homeland. Drama may cost money - but any platform is only one hit away from relevance - and when drama hits it can transform the status of the platform that spawned it - so while the costs may be high - the potential rewards are even stratospheric. 

Alongside this, the traditional US networks and cable market is under considerable domestic pressure from falling advertising revenue/cable subscription - and these previously insular US media corps are looking outside their own boundaries for additional sources of financing. While it was once the case that a drama could at best generate $500k per episode in international sales - now the number can be as high as $2million. Taken together - this has created a boom (and some would say bubble) in high end drama production.

Then comes the question of who will make all this material? 

With so many partners involved, the market requires showrunners who can act as the anchor of the production. The term Showrunner is a loose term - but for the purposes of this post let's call them writers who also produce.

Showrunners emerged in the US in response to the impossibly fast turnaround in US TV from order to broadcast - quite simply one person had to have a great deal of power for the job to be possible in the time. As a bi-product of this necessity, America found that, at its best, working in this way also produced the most authored shows. From the Sopranos to Homeland, that singular vision of the writer who also then oversees all aspects of production resulted in shows with a real sense of authorship that audiences love - and what audiences love, advertisers and subscription mangers love - and so Showrunners, it seems, are here to stay - and justly so.

The issue in Europe is that traditionally the producer and the writer have been separate roles. I won’t go into all the theories as to why this is - but a fundamentally literary tradition of The Author is definitely in the mix of reasons. However, it means that outside America, there is a dearth of showrunners - which means that many European shows have an American at the helm. While this is not in itself a problem, networks and distributors are keen to grow domestic talent who are possibly more attuned to the cultures the shows describe, or the industry production custom and practice...

And so - back to the subject of this post - the need for more writers who can produce and producers who can write. Simon and I met on a showrunners course run by MediaXhange in Berlin for European producers. Over the course of four days we worked with a group of producers simulating a US style writers room. We loved the experience - and so did the participants - especially the ones who sold shows off the back of what they learned!

When Simon asked me if I would be interested in joining him for this course - I said yes immediately, not least because he is so energising and inspiring to be with.

In some ways it seems a million miles from the punky piloting we do at Wildseed - but the truth is that at the heart of what we do is a desire to mentor creators towards achieving excellence, and whether you are working on a £10k pilot or a $100million drama, the rules of story are the same - find a character who fascinated you at a turning point/crisis in their lives - and "write the truth or let heaven fall" (as Robert McKee would say). We love creators at Wildseed - and it is a total privilege to have been asked to be part of this event.

I am expecting to learn just as much as any writer there today - and this is the key lesson of the writers room - brilliant ideas can come from anywhere, and smart people use every great idea they can in the common pursuit of something extraordinary.

Goodbye lonely garrett - hello writers room. What a joy.

Wolf Jenkins Ep3 - Animal Fiddler is now LIVE on YouTube.com/wildseedcomedy

Michelle Gomez being 100% serious and professional on the set of Heather’s American Medicine