Why Smoking worked wonders for writer Brian Dooley

What he didn't know as he was ‘going slowly mad’ flogging spruces was that the powers that be at the BBC loved his last set of scripts. Only they'd lost them.

Thankfully, a courtesy email to the corporation's head of comedy Sophie Clarke-Jervoise, got things moving again, and now his sitcom The Smoking Room, is about to hit BBC3 screens.

Today Brian admits he had nearly hit rock bottom before The Smoking Room was commissioned.“Writing work had totally dried up," he says. "I hadn’t had a proper job for about six months, which is why I had to go and work in a shop.

"I had really got to the point where I thought, 'It’s not going to happen, I’m just completely deluding myself’.”

But perseverance paid off. Six months after sending his scripts for a series of ten-minute sketches set in a smoking room to Sophie Clarke-Jervoise, he emailed her to ask if she’d seen them. It was then, to his surprise, that she revealed she liked them – but couldn’t remember what she’d done with them.

A few weeks - and a second set of scripts - later Brian was having meetings with producers at the BBC. As a former script reader, Brian knows how lucky he was that his dreams didn’t turn into ashes.

The next problem was to convert the ten-minute sketches into a full-blown sitcom. And, with a suitable touch of irony, the pressure drove him back to cigarettesf.

“When we had the read-through of the pilots, I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll just have the one’. And in the space of about two weeks, I was back on them full time. I kept thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to give up’, but it didn’t happen.”

It was his earlier experiences as a smoker that inspired the sitcom, based on the “passing human traffic” that drifts in and out of the average office smoking room. Among those in Brian's sitcom are Barry, who likes hiding behind his incomplete crosswords; Robin, a bored trivia fanatic with a secret; Sharon, the insufferable boss who always has an ulterior motive for visiting the smoking room; and fiftysomething Lillian, who is waiting for some sort of silver-haired Prince Charming to sweep her off her feet following a divorce.

Were his characters based on his former colleagues? “I didn’t think they were, but when I saw a bit recorded I started to realise how much they were based on people I knew. I just kind of invented them but they’re all a hybrid of different people; bits of me, I suppose, are in all of them.

"It’s done in quite a modern way, in that we don’t pull any punches in terms of the language that’s used. I hope that doesn’t deter people and that older audiences will warm to the characters and accept all their foibles. I hope it doesn’t get bracketed as a young, anarchic show. Really, it’s just meant to be a human thing, something people can relate to.”

Born in Crosby, Liverpool, Brian read English at Cambridge, though he only admits this with acute embarrassment because, he says: “People always assume that, one, you’re really posh, two, you’re really well off and, three, that you’ve had life really, really easy

Now 33, he's spent the last 12 years in London going from one job to another, most notably as a sketch writer and a script editor for various TV shows. He also wrote two plays for Radio 4 in his early twenties. He never wanted to do anything else.

Inspired by comic icons including Woody Allen, Peter Cook ,the two Ronnies and, even thee Carry On films, he says: "I just thought to myself, ‘I’d love to be able to make people think about me the way I thought about them. It would just be so good to make people happy.That sounds really trite. It just seemed a worthwhile thing to do in your life.”

The Smoking Room is his career breakthrough. A lot of young writers would love to know his secret but it turns out to be something as ordinary as walking.

“I could never spend more than half an hour at a desk because I get very claustrophobic, so I used to walk to Chelsea and back, or walk the length of Clapham Common and back and just think about it," he says.

Describing his writing method as “shambolic”, he adds: “Sometimes I was writing till 2am and other times I’d be done and dusted by lunchtime."

Now all he has to do is wait for the reaction to his work. And he admits that he's terrified of what the critics might say. Even savage reviews for another sitcom, Eyes Down, kept him from writing another word for two weeks.

But he is also philosophical about the show’s fate.“At the end of the day, if everybody rips it to shreds, it’s still the show I wanted it to be. I’m really chuffed with it. Obviously, I want people to like it, I want it to do well, but I’ll have these episodes sitting on my shelf and I’m really pleased with them and I’m really pleased with all the effort that went into them and it was a great time.

“But it would be nice if people liked it.”

First published:June 13, 2004

Published: 22 Mar 2009