All the dramas I admire most - 'Six Feet Under,' 'The Sopranos' - even when the scenes aren't laugh-out-loud funny, per se, there's a comic twist that gives the stories an energy.Collection: Funny
In 2005, the Iraq war was entering its third year and no one believed that we were going to find WMDs any more. The prewar claims of their certain existence were becoming an embarrassing joke, a big present we'd been offered that was getting ever later in showing up.
There are lots of great characters in fiction who viewers and readers have engaged with that behave badly. Great characters can be unfaithful. They can lie and cheat.
There's loads of succession stories to draw on.
Under a government committed to cutting public services to the bone, the police are often left to clean up all sorts of untidy situations that are really social work or housing, mental and physical health issues.
Comedy is not good for anything, really. Apart from being one of the only things that makes life worth living.
Hit shows are very difficult to achieve. You need to have everything just right - that's what's so terrifying.
When you're a nerd, you know there's a million types of neurotic self-loathing.
My daughter, who says 'Horrible Histories' is her favourite programme, gets that the tone is sophisticated and that it takes children seriously. It doesn't talk down to them.
Standups always like the room cold, and if you're shooting a sitcom live you want it a little bit chilly for the audience. I don't know why - you'd have to ask a combination of an evolutionary psychologist and a building-maintenance man.
One of the things that strikes me when I've read about these families - whether it be the Maxwells or the Redstones or the Julio-Claudians - is that, when you get that combination of money, power, and family relations, things get so complicated that you can justify actions to yourself that are pretty unhealthy to your well-being as a human being.
For people who come from powerful families, there is nothing in life quite as interesting as being at court.
Oswestry's a bit in the middle of nowhere - quite tough, and quite English, in the way border towns are.
I started reading about media moguls in general, and Sumner Redstone and Rupert Murdoch both made the same joke: they both were asked, 'What will happen when you die?' and they both said they didn't plan to die. It just struck me: what's going on with these men in their 80s and 90s who are still packing their diaries every day?
You have to be careful. You have to be able to stand behind what you write and believe in it.
You've got to trust the audience, and hopefully if you do interesting work you'll get an audience that are interested and engaged. But if they go out thinking, 'Ra-ra-ra, I wanna be like Malcolm Tucker,' then at a certain point you can't take responsibility for that person. That person's just a moron.
Kids are as discerning as adults, if anything they are quicker and clearer in knowing what they like.
Everyone has tacit levels of trust, don't we? In every interaction that takes place in our professional and personal lives we have boundaries that we sort of trust the other person not to breach.
A lot of research went into 'Succession.' I wrote the pilot solo, so there was a good deal of my own research and life experience in there.
There's an underlying sense that your family should accord you a greater level of safety in your interactions with them. When that's violated, it's particularly brutalizing.
We always knew that we could write what it's like to be men together, bickering, but also having this fondness.
Writing a sitcom compared with writing a novel is a bit like the difference between going on a big, noisy group holiday compared with a solitary march to the South Pole.
The truth is that when writing a TV show or a film you are a part of a team. And though you might be the architect who makes the initial drawings, somewhere along the line it all has to be given up, handed over. To the costume department and the actors, the art department, the director and the producers.
Getting under the surface of real-life humans' poker faces humans is hard in a sitcom, even a drama.
Sitcom characters, my writing partner Sam Bain and I sometimes tell each other, are not normally self-conscious. Or not quite. The best sitcom characters are probably just a little self-conscious. Deep enough to feel pain and humiliation, but shallow enough that there are no hidden depths.
It's a good tip for writers, that - write with an actor in mind. Even if you have no hope of getting John Cleese, it's much better to write it with him in mind because you might find someone else to do that stuff; it really helps.
Character is key. Once you've got that voice going, everything else can follow. If you've also got the right tone, you're in the right area - an inconsistent tone can screw up a project.
The best bit about having a collaborator is plot. Plot is quite hard to get right. It is a testing intellectual exercise that feels quite different to being in the flow of voice or characterisation. I like having someone to construct a plot with.
From working on heavily researched films such as 'Four Lions' and 'In the Loop,' I knew that research in itself is nothing and it's everything.
When you talk to police communications staff and think about their job from an insider's point of view, you can see they have to inch out along a razor's edge every day. They have a duty to be honest. But there's also a responsibility not to inflame.
The Day Today' was at least as interested in satirising form as content.
Talking about satire feels like death.
Who has not stared at the blank page and not been able to think of anything to write for what at least felt like six months? Getting started is the hardest bit, obviously.
Far too interesting are times when you wake up to find that the tube line you take to work has been blown up and people you know might be dead. Not interesting enough are times when too much stuff about county cricket makes it on to the news pages.
Some of the material in 'Peep Show' I wouldn't sit down and watch with even my parents, who are not easily offended.
What you don't think when you sit down to write a show is, 'How can I be shocking?' That question isn't interesting, it's all about, 'Is this funny, does it work?'
I wouldn't defend comedy that I find offensive, but there is a lot of comedy that some people find offensive which I would defend. You can't talk usefully in generalisations.
Roy Chubby Brown's offensive material is disgusting to me, an offensive beating-down of people who have already been beaten down plenty, culturally and historically.
I do think it's really tough being super-rich, really hard-working and wanting to get some sort of immortality by passing on the organisation to your kids. But then looking at your kids and thinking, 'Oh, they're just these privileged people who haven't had to struggle. Am I really going to just give it all to them?'
I read about lots of media moguls: Sumner Redstone, Conrad Black, Robert Maxwell.
With an unscripted take, you let the thing live and bring an extra level of life to the performance. Sometimes you get extra jokes because the actors are super smart and see a funnier or more true way to go with the scene.
We read the financial papers and there's a ton of tech and media mergers and acquisitions we're likely to take inspiration from.
All powerful people make foolish decisions and end up in humiliating and embarrassing situations, as well as wielding their power.
If you're writing a show about modern media moguls, Rupert Murdoch and his family are an incredibly important model and some of their disputes and the dynamics have been very vivid.
Unlike many hour-long scripted American dramas, 'Succession' has very few standing sets.
If you have seven homes, every room is not a beautifully curated expression of your personality.
I'm uncomfortable with the word satire. In the U.K., there's quite a bit of sledgehammer weight to that word, which is the antithesis of the subtle approach I strive for.
Succession moments are always dangerous for democracies.
You can't control how things that you're involved with are received. But 'The Thick of It' wasn't intended as an instruction manual. Writers like hearing how bits of this stuff have got out into the world - but it was not meant to be a joyful celebration of the way these people behave.
Trump is just extraordinarily unusual.