Thomas Phipps & Peter Bowden

24 August 11

What first inspired you to write your script?

Mostly, a combination of creative boredom and the swiftly dawning realisation that we were unqualified and totally uninterested in doing anything other than writing stuff. Once we sat down and decided to write something, the central ideas came together fairly quickly. Once the central ideas came together, we spent eleven months arguing about them.

Which professional screenwriter do you most admire?

There are dozens. But after a brief argument, Pete and I narrowed it down to five: Armando Iannucci (The Thick Of It, satire, many other things), George Meyer (The Simpsons), Greg Daniels (Parks & Recreation, The Office, The Simpsons), Mitch Hurwitz (Arrested Development) and Vince Gilligan (head writer and showrunner on Breaking Bad)

Is there a screenplay you have found to be most impactful on your style?

Pretty much any episode of Arrested Development is a masterclass in the construction of callbacks, call forwards, wordplay, self-reference, balancing the demands of featuring eight different plots in twenty one minutes, and a heap of other comedy tricks. I could name any, but I'll go with Season 1's 'Pier Pressure' - just because after reading it, I felt slightly dizzy and had to go lie down.

What’s your worst habit for procrastinating when you’re supposed to be writing?

Literally anything. I'm the most easily distracted person ever. I'm like a dog - a strangely coloured leaf could flutter by and that's me sidetracked for five minutes. It's taken me half an hour just to answer this one question.

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