Rob Gilroy: New Friends

"This seemed like another column whereby I brown nose a famous TV programme, but actually, I’ve hidden a very good writing tip in there too."

Recently, my long-suffering, yet free-to-leave-whenever-she-likes girlfriend and I, have been re-watching Friends. The sitcom, not the people we hold dearest.

Living, as we do, with no direct connection to Comedy Central and bemoaning the loss of E4’s relentless repeats, we had no option but to stump up the cash for the complete 10-season box set. It was either that or heat the house for another month.

Friends isn’t one of those shows you think of when you mention box set binges – it’s hardly in the same breath as Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad or Tweenerific: The Very Messy Best of The Tweenies.

Nevertheless, we devour each season as though it were the complete works of Jake, Milo, Fizz, the dog, and the other one.

Friends is one of those sitcoms that, in this post-Office age – by which I mean, the time since The Office first broadcast, as opposed to a time of increased first class delivery – is now seen as slightly uncool.

The endless showings on TV have meant that people think of Friends as ‘easy watching’ or use it purely as background noise. However, when you sit and watch it, you realise just how sharp the scripts are.

What’s incredible about watching the show from start to finish, as opposed to as part of Ross’ Top 10 T-Shirt Episodes or Phoebe’s Ultimate Uterus Shows, is how strongly developed the characters are from the start.

While it’s an understandable must for any show to be a success, Friends manages to make you feel like you know everything about these characters from the get-go.

If this were speed dating; they’d all get a big tick from me. Or a honk of my horn. Or a waggle of my glow stick – it really depends which night you attend.

The real surprise though, is that this box set has a staggering number of deleted and additional scenes.

Now, that’s nothing special on a DVD release – in fact; it’s the most underwhelming DVD extra on offer, except for an ‘Interactive Menu’. Yet the curious thing about these deleted scenes is – they’ve been put back into the original episodes.

Obviously, I wouldn’t recommend this on every DVD – I can’t help but think it would give an uneasy tone to My Left Foot.

But with a show like Friends, which most people know so well they can mouth along to it like a particularly exposition-heavy version of karaoke, it’s interesting to see where additional jokes and asides have been cut.

While this may all sound geeky and somewhat irrelevant – almost as if I’m trying to pad out my column – these additional scenes have taught me a lot about writing and editing.

I’m currently working on a couple of scripts and let me tell you – it’s hard. You’re constantly second-guessing yourself on every single line.

I wouldn’t normally describe myself as a commitment-phobe but I’ll be damned if I can write a joke and stick to it.

When I’m writing, I have a feel of how things should play out in a scene – I’m not always sure what jokes are going to be there – but I certainly have an idea of the type of joke needed to fill a gap – working out the right one is like completing the jigsaw.

I try pepper up a script by putting jokes wherever I can, just to make sure the gag rate is high. That in itself, is no bad thing, but Friends has been a good guide to helping me work out which bits are actually needed.

In most cases the additional bits in the Friends episodes are extra jokes or tangents tagged on to the end of a scene – and watching them now, knowing the rest of the episode so well, it’s easy to see why they were taken out. They’re just not funny.

You can see what the writer was trying to do, and you can see why they may think it’s needed but ultimately; it isn’t. It’s filler.

I’ve tried to apply this to my writing. Once a script is finished – I go back over it and take out every additional joke or idea that doesn’t add anything to the scene. If it’s not relevant, it’s not in.

While I’m still, no doubt, just polishing a turd, at least I’m picking out the unnecessary chunks first.

If you’re writing a script – I urge you to check out the Friends DVDs, or any of your favourite sitcoms and look at the deleted scenes – try work out why they got cut. Then make sure they don’t appear in your script either.

So there. This seemed like another column whereby I brown nose a famous TV programme, but actually, I’ve hidden a very good writing tip in there too.

Could you be any more impressed?