Still no luck in securing an agent for my book. Every now and again I get another rejection and the day is temporarily ruined. But then this:
I’m afraid I thought this one as dire as its title:
“In May of 1974, after reading through a pilot script written by John Cleese and his then-wife, Connie Booth, a clearly unimpressed ‘comedy script editor’ by the name of Ian Main sent the following memo to BBC Television‘s Head of Comedy and Light Entertainment. Luckily for the general population, and thanks in no small part to the persistence of Cleese and Booth, Main’s opinion was ultimately ignored by his superiors and a year later the script had evolved into a programme which to this day is considered one of the funniest ever to grace our screens. The show was Fawlty Towers.
Speaking in 2009, John Cleese said of this very memo, ‘It just shows you people have no idea what they are doing.’
(Via Letters of Note.)
From what I’ve heard of BBC script editors, this doesn’t surprise me.
