Unproduced Scripts - Absolutely Scrabulous

2008

Here’s the latest of my sitcom scripts that never made it air. This one from around 2008 about a bar where people play Scrabble, based on Goblins in Balham and my own experience of taking part in a few Scrabble tournaments. We got as far as doing a table read with this one in front of execs, which I don’t remember much about. I wrote this blog about it at the time and it’s a very impressive cast list of actors. But it didn’t make it beyond this point sadly.

I think it’s a pretty good conceit and the characters are good and there’s a fair amount of drama in this episode for a piece set around one bar (and some Scrabble boards), but there you go. I obviously think pretty much all the scripts are good and should be made. It’s very sad when you put in all the work for it all to come to nothing. But that sadness usually comes at some point in the process, even if you’re cancelled after eight successful series.

Trigger warning for you sensitive 2024 residents, there’s a couple of disablist terms in here, though they are used in character and context, but I would write those differently now. A few years later I would get into a bit of a spat with Ricky Gervais fans for criticising his casual use of disablist language. It was quite a trying time as this and maybe subsequent blogs attest. I was really just asking people to be more thoughtful about the issue and was never saying that any word must never be uttered, but it took me a bit of a while to understand this issue properly and I merrily did Joey Deacon jokes back in the 90s (about how the Blue Peter efforts to educate backfired, rather than directed at Joey himself… usually at least. We’ve all been on an journey with this one).

I did want to use this series to discuss offensive words though, as anything is allowed in Scrabble and words are shorn of their meaning. Before Tim Minchin did his ginger song I had come up with the idea of a character getting the letters NGERIGS and fretting about playing the word he had come up with (especially as he was playing a 10 year old black child), but the other players live in a world where a word is just a word. And in any case, you could just play Gingers. Which would be offensive to a different demograophic,

When I played Scrabble myself I ended up playing against a group of very rich middle-aged ladies who’d had some work done and one of whom was married to someone who owned a football club. I liked the fact that this game could bring together people from such different backgrounds. That’s what I thought might make the sitcom a good one. Plus you’d get to know the characters outside of the Scrabble world too. But there we go. Another one bites the dust…

Paid subscribers can read the script below. Why not become a paid subscriber for this and other extras!? Oh and hopefully I’ve accidentally managed to make it more readable this month by somehow copying the pdf across page by page. Apologies if it doesn’t work