Greasy Food with Gonce (2014)
As I approached the end of production on the second season of The Murkum Show, I started thinking it was a pity Gonce and his kitchen hadn't got a bit more of an airing (appearing in just 1 episode in the parent show) - so I decided that before I demolished the set, I'd give Gonce a spin-off, and Greasy Food with Gonce was born.
It took a few weeks to figure out the format of the show and to get the first few scripts written, and I invited my long-time collaborator Tim on board very early in the process; we ended up with a near-perfect 50:50 split of the writing credits between the two of us. Once we'd nailed down the basic shape we wanted, the next stage of the process was somewhat mathematical: we made a list of the dishes Gonce should attempt, and a list of the Gammas who would make the funniest 'Special Kitchen Helpers', and then tried to figure out which helper should be paired with which dish and what order they should appear in. It soon became apparent that the spin-off's episodes were going to be significantly longer than those of its parent show - in fact, longer than those of any other episodic project I've worked on.
In the end, the first 3 instalments of the 6-part series came out of my own ideas (although Tim helped work out the details of Episode 1), following a loose structure of main course, pudding and drink, as Gonce points out in the preamble to Episode 3. Episode 4 Chilli Beef was actually the first script finished (or at least one of the first two), but we knew it would have to air in the second half of the series in order for Eggs' remarks about the failings of past 'Special Kitchen Helpers' to make any sense. It was my idea to do an episode about vegetarianism, but Tim came up with the notion of turning it into a public-service warning video and putting Hansox in it, and he wrote the script with very little further input from me. Finally, the Banquet episode (which began life in Tim's head) was always intended to be the closing part of the series, and ended up being the last script completed, with the final draft only getting nailed down after I'd finished post-production on Episodes 1 to 3.
Greasy Food with Gonce will probably never return, as it was always intended to be a limited-time deal, but it was followed by another Murkum Show spin-off, The Lower Ranks, in autumn 2016.
© Matthew G. H. Colclough 1988-2024 - all rights reserved