Tilt is a new topical comedy programme fom BBC Radio 7, and one of its first episodes deals with the question: Why does the government need to issue ID cards when we have Facebook?
This short sketch is called “StateBook”.
[display_podcast]
Read more about the tem >>
Tilt is BBC7’s first topical comedy sketch show, starring Simon Brodkin, Margaret Cabourn-Smith, Olly Maltman, Nick Mohammed, Isy Suttie and Katy Wix. The producer is Victoria Lloyd.
If you are a budding comedy writer, find out how to contribute to the series at the Writers Room Tilt page.
Thursdays at 11.30pm and 4.30am
Episode 1 - 27th March 2008
Episode 2 - 3rd April 2008
Episode 3 - 10th April 2008
Episode 4 - 17th April 2008
Episode 5 - 24th April 2008
Episode 6 - 1st May 2008
Comedy writer and producer Gareth Gwynn shares his thoughts on writing for Tilt:
There’s something very 21st Century about my involvement with Tilt. I’d always imagined that topical comedy shows generally involved a group of people crammed in a room, eating biscuits, drinking coffee, frantically distilling the week’s newspapers into setups and punchlines, whilst bouncing ideas across the office and ploughing through draft after draft of a script that is constantly updated with every Radio 4 news bulletin that spills from the longwave radio in the corner of the room.
I’m sure that still goes on of course, but I’m not a part of it. I live and work about 200 miles from the epicentre of all things Tilt, so my contributions are destined to be solely via email. I’ve only made it to one meeting - right at the start, when the idea for Tilt was first being mooted, and we were working out exactly what it would become (and, possibly more interestingly, what we didn’t want it to become). I headed down to London on a train that was so severely delayed I was offered free food and drink by staff. In all my years of delayed train travel, I’d never experienced this sort of compensation, so presumed I would be spending the night on the train and so stocked up accordingly. In the end, I turned up a mere hour late, with far more ideas than I would have otherwise had thanks to an extended stop in Swindon and a healthy amount of complimentary Diet Coke.
Fortunately, I don’t have to endure this on a weekly basis now that the series has started. I presume that in the days of Weekending, long-distance contributions were still encouraged, but you can only be so topical, when you’re relying on the Royal Mail. Thanks to the internet, I can submit sketches and cut-ups for consideration, right up to the last minute – provided my housemate hasn’t broken the router. So even now, as I write this, bedridden with flu with only a few hours to go to the recording, if I came up with a suitable one-liner and fired it off in time, it might make it onto the show. Not that that would happen. I’m up to my eyeballs in Beechams and unable to do anything suitably constructive - but like time-travel or a conclusive solution to the Riemann Hypothesis in pure mathematics, in theory, it’s possible.
Plus by operating at a distance, I get to keep my romanticised image of witty Oxbridge graduates honing one-liners and drinking BBC coffee in tact, no matter how incorrect it is almost certain to be.
