Writing Wooden Overcoats

I wrote an early version of this article for How To Make Waves, a new online resource for audio drama creatives, supported by Arts Council England. I was asked to reflect on the challenges of creating and writing four seasons of Wooden Overcoats: leading a writer’s room, developing characters, using the audio medium, and finishing a story eight years in the making.

2015 - We just finished recording Season One - John Wakefield (producer), Ciara Baxendale (Georgie), Tom Crowley (Eric), me (head writer), Felix Trench (Rudyard), Beth Eyre (Antigone), Andy Goddard (producer)

BEFORE WOODEN OVERCOATS (2014)

I only had one experience of writing for the audio medium before Wooden Overcoats: a 6-part detective comedy serial with a cast of seven called Drayton Trench: Great Caesar’s Ghost in 2012.

When writing that, I drew upon radio comedies I enjoyed for the style of jokes you could do on audio, while I also knew from listening to Big Finish Productions (years before I wrote for them!) that you could do action scenes and spectacle without visuals. So I just went straight at it, with no idea I was writing anything ambitious. That’s what led to me writing a sequence where a helicopter smashed through a glass ceiling and an assassin slid down a rope to steal a priceless artefact, just as our hero rode a horse through a crowd of onlookers (and the Mona Lisa). A few minutes later, they did battle on the top of the Eiffel Tower.

I edited the first production of it myself in 2012 and it was a nightmare. I knew if I ever attempted anything like this again, I’d need sound designers who were much more talented than me!  

Drayton Trench received three separate productions over the years; the second one - which you can find here - was recorded in 2014, and featured Felix Trench, Beth Eyre, and Tom Crowley. That experience led directly to Wooden Overcoats.

Our ambition was 'simply' to make a sitcom that would compare to BBC Radio 4's output. No major action scenes, just characters and dialogue. But then we decided to have an expanded cast of characters, each with their own voice actor, and it wasn't long before we had angry mobs rampaging through every episode, and all kinds of bizarre action. It was audio, we could do what we wanted, and luckily we had two producers in Andy Goddard and John Wakefield who were totally up for the challenge.

SEASON ONE (2015)

The story and tone came about from discussions with Felix and Tom, who'd approached me to write this show after recording Drayton. We wanted a situation-of-the-week series, so that every episode could be distinct, but we also wanted a 'Netflix drama' model where characters grew and their arcs could be carefully plotted. We recruited a stable of additional writers to create less work for me, though in the end I became almost as involved in every other episode as my own!

It was my first time being a 'head writer.’ My inspiration was Russell T. Davies's The Writer's Tale, a book going into detail on the day-to-day decisions on writing and making Doctor Who. If it hadn't been for that book, I'd definitely have been less confident about trying to establish a consistent tone across eight episodes when I was only writing four of them myself. 

The major benefit of having more writers, of course, is having more ideas and perspectives. I owe a lot to Tom Crowley, Christopher Hogg, Cordelia Lynn, and Tiffany Woodsmith on figuring out that first season. I’d allow any new characters and situations that 'felt right', which is how we ended up with an island that was meant to be very small but had an impossible number of things on it.

Some early ideas were never used. Antigone talking to the spirits of her dead parents was mooted in one discussion as a recurring gag, and Eric originally had a secretary called Joy Leyland - but then we decided it was funnier (and more exasperating for Rudyard) if Eric was able to handle everything by himself.

After script reads of Season 1. We haven’t done any recording yet.

Standing: Me (head writer), Felix Trench (Rudyard) Sitting: John Wakefield (producer), Tom Crowley (Eric), Andy Goddard (producer)

One funny thing was that everybody wanted to write 'the Antigone episode.' They'd latched onto this quirky supporting character from the pilot, and they all pitched ideas for her instead of Rudyard. I was happy with that; it was far better to let my writers follow their own passions and interests, and so they all wrote the episodes focussing on Antigone while I did the ones focussed on Rudyard! This created a new tension between those two characters - battling for supremacy of the series - and it became a literal part of the text when Antigone wrested partial control of the funeral home away from Rudyard for Season Two. 

That subtextual battle between the Funns was a more satisfying story thread than the background plot-arc about a serial killer at work on Piffling. I thought we needed an explanation as why so many people were dying in what was supposedly a small village community, and so we made it the focus of the last episode - but it became pretty clear once the series was out that the listeners were happy to accept anything so long as it was entertaining and consistent with the vibe of the show.

That's a tip I learnt on that first season: if you want your audience to cross the room and enjoy the buffet, don't put furniture in their way. Just let them get to the buffet. 

Every episode needed Rudyard and/or Antigone to have a goal which motivated them to take action, and that would involve the rivalry with Eric Chapman. Scenes were led by dialogue, but I wanted a pace and rhythm that kept the stories moving. We played with gags that would only work on audio, like Rudyard's best friend being a mouse (who turns out to be the narrator). 

The stories had to be funny but the characters had to take them seriously (no ironic detachment). No swearing, to keep it light. Piffling was a playground. Serious things could happen there, and hearts could be broken, but it had to feel welcoming. 

SEASON TWO (2016)

There’s a part of me that still thinks of this as my favourite season. We were all buzzing, confident, excited to see what more we could do with these characters. Rudyard and Antigone were now learning how to work as equals, which gave a spine to the new season. We knew that the tone and style worked, so we stretched it even further with some of our most ambitious (and visual) ideas. The finale There Ought to be Clowns is still definitely my favourite episode of the entire series.

This was the first season we made knowing we had an audience of listeners who liked what we were doing. That was magical. We read every review and every comment. People were drawing pictures and even writing fan fiction! (We rarely if ever read it, as we didn't want to accidentally pick up anybody else’s ideas; so any similarities between our plots and those written by fans are purely coincidental!) We fundraised to make this season, establishing a model we followed until the end of the show.

My approach to shaping this second season was much the same as that for the first, with some subtle changes. There'd been a few comments that Rudyard was too abrasive. But I felt strongly that Rudyard needed to be a difficult man for the stories to work. The solution wasn't to change Rudyard, but instead to create more opportunities for him to be vulnerable and sympathetic - like when he struggles to cope after Georgie quits the business, or when Antigone is stuck down a mineshaft.

Georgie became an increasingly important character too. She’s a kind of moral barometer; if she wasn't upset by what the Funn's were doing then the audience wouldn't be either. The few times Georgie loses her cool, it's for a good reason.

SEASON THREE (2018)

Season Three was a much more difficult proposition than Season Two. That's partly because I'd just left my day job to concentrate on writing full time, which placed an enormous professional pressure on what was previously a fun vocation. I’d also not teased a story arc for this season at the end of the last one, unlike “Antigone is taking over” at the end of Season One.

Most importantly of all, my grandmother had died. I was trying to come to terms with a real loss, while still providing entertaining stories based around funerals. I felt strongly that we needed to keep raising the bar... but I didn't really know how.

I decided to develop the supporting characters, to increase the longevity of the series by opening up the stories we could tell; we called it ‘doing a Simpsons’. Most episodes of Season 3 revolved around a key character introduced in the first two seasons. For instance, we had Rudyard solving a mystery with Agatha Doyle, Antigone writing erotic fiction with the Reverend, Eric helping out Dr Edgware, and Georgie running a campaign for the Mayor. 

The strength of podcasts is our personal connection to the voices we hear. People subscribe to podcasts to 'hang out' with their favourite voices on a regular basis. Sitcoms have a similar audience attachment. So a podcast sitcom is really ALL ABOUT fostering relationships with a core cast of characters that you really care about - even more so than a TV or radio sitcom, because as a podcast you're actively carrying these characters around with you. As the creator, you pivot away from this at your own peril. 

With Season Three, widening the focus of the series reduced the opportunities for our core cast - Rudyard, Antigone, Eric and Georgie - to interact with each other. While I think each episode is an absolute winner taken individually, in retrospect we'd have benefited from a few more stories focussing on that core cast to make the season a more satisfying whole.

However, I may be alone in this opinion! I’m glad to say our listeners still very much enjoyed the episodes, and some of them like Altar Ego and Rudyard Takes a Hike are regularly cited as amongst our best. Whilst I at times lacked confidence in my own creative decisions, the performances and production remained stellar. The finale Putting the Funn in Funerals is a very emotional episode, inspired by my grandmother’s passing. I've received more messages about that episode than any other.

So even though I felt personally that I’d split the core cast apart too often, this season probably did the most to cement those characters as a family.

SEASON FOUR (2022)

The decision to end the series wasn’t an easy one. There was a strong temptation to let it run and run, but as individuals we were getting increasingly busy with other work and projects. Listeners would ask frequently whether there would be another season. Eventually, in 2019, we announced at a live event that we would be making our fourth and final season. In 2020.

Thanks to the pandemic, things took a little longer than we’d anticipated! Wooden Overcoats was always recorded in studio with a full cast, so that we could benefit from the immediacy of the performances, their energy and rhythm. We made one short episode in lockdown, recorded remotely, but otherwise we bided our time until we could get back into studio together.

We wanted to tell the best stories we possibly could for our last season, and I believe we made our most confident run of episodes and our best season overall. To improve the variety of stories, we had ten episodes instead of eight, which also gave us the room for these characters to become who they needed to be so that saying goodbye wouldn’t feel so distressing.

I deliberately brought the focus back down to examining the dynamics of the core cast, asking our terrific team of writers to pitch ideas that revolved around at least two of the four (like Rudyard and Antigone at school) or preferably the whole group (like Funn Funerals doing a pirate parade, where Eric saves the day). We even had a Madeleine episode at long last, focussed on her dynamic with Rudyard. And of course we finally examined the mysterious backstory of Eric Chapman in a way that hopefully made sense, while subverting expectations in a satisfying way.

The final episode is a 90-minute spectacular I wrote, A Funn Farewell, which I think we earned. It's the sort of undisciplined writerly gambit that you can get away with in podcasts (even if it drove my producers up the wall).

The final scene of recorded was the final scene of that episode. Wooden Overcoats was done. We all cried. Even though we knew we'd all see and work with each other again, the characters felt so real to us that saying goodbye was incredibly sad.

Then we went pulled ourselves together as best we could, went outside, and took this photo:

2021 - We just finished recording Season Four - Felix Trench (Rudyard), Beth Eyre (Antigone), me (head writer), Andy Goddard (producer), John Wakefield (producer), Ciara Baxendale (Georgie), Tom Crowley (Eric), Elizabeth Campbell (production manager)

How to Make Waves is a resource for creatives interested in making audio fiction, drawn from the experiences of those who do it already. You can discover the stories of how podcasts were made, or search for more specific advice on topics ranging from writing to recording to sound design to accessibility.

You can even find another lengthy interview about Wooden Overcoats, if you want to know how our producers made it!