Live! Girls! Present Dogtown
Background
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Live! Girls! Present Dogtown hails from the live sketch show, Live! Girls!, created by twins Beth and Emma Kilcoyne and Sam Battersea.
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Emma, Sam and Beth have been honing their unique brand of character comedy on the Edinburgh Fringe and live comedy circuit since 2000, and Dogtown brings together the best of those characters – plus a few new ones besides - and unites them in a fictional coastal town.
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Writer and performer Emma Kilcoyne explains: "Dogtown came about after Vanessa Haynes and Humphrey Barclay from Celador saw our Edinburgh show in 2003, Live! Girls!, and asked us to provide a treatment as to how the show could work on television.
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"We selected several characters - Bill and Sheila, Carol and Denise, and Eenie Thompson, and created a world that they could all feasibly inhabit. This became Dogtown."
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The storyline in the library and the characters of Geoff and Sue were specially created for the series.
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Producer Vanessa Haynes explains:
"The library storyline was created over the development period. The girls wanted to do something film noir–ish, and decided that if it was going to be film noir, we needed a crime story to complete it.
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"It seemed suitably ridiculous to make the setting a library and the crime that romantic fiction was being systematically defaced."
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Beth and Emma grew up in the Northeast. They met Sam when all three were at the National Youth Theatre, a hotbed of creative talent where many of comedy's best-known names started out, including Matt Lucas, David Walliams and Catherine Tate.
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During this time Beth Kilcoyne also attended Cambridge University and wrote and performed in Footlights.
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Sam Battersea remembers:
"Emma and I met at the National Youth Theatre in 1993. Emma and Beth had been there for a couple of years and I was the new girl. We found ourselves quite similar in the way we worked and the things we found funny."
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Emma and Beth began writing material for Sam and Emma to perform and their first collaboration, The Ghost Of Auntie Pat, played at the Pleasance in Edinburgh in 2000.
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Live! Girls! followed to great acclaim and the occasional celebrity endorsement - Paul McCartney saw the show in London, and wrote an impromptu review on one of their posters: "Go and see these girls – they're dead funny."
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Although the world of Dogtown and its characters are wholly fictional, they draw on reality to create a world that writer Beth Kilcoyne describes as "just the other side of normal".
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She says:
"You take strands from people that you know and recognise funny characteristics from, but the characters become their own people.
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"Carole and Denise, for example, came about because when the Olympics are on I always pretend to be a gymnast, in my own head. And I thought, 'Wouldn't it be awful if I were caught?' and then, 'Actually, what's wrong with pretending to be things in your own sitting room?'"
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Sam Battersea adds:
"It's a recognisable place and setting with recognisable characters but it's slightly heightened for comedy purposes, but not grotesquely.
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"Ultimately, people can be very strange, and real life can be fantastical and can be magical, and that's what's enjoyable and very funny."
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Of Eenie Thompson, the dwarf psychic, Emma Kilcoyne says:
"I made up Eenie Thompson when I was 14 in a Physics class because I was bored. She used to live in a dustbin and eat cats, so I've toned her down a bit since then."
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As twins, Emma and Beth have a unique collaboration, and they have been writing together since they were teenagers.
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Emma says:
"We enjoy writing together because we find the same things funny. Needless to say, we also know each other inside out, which helps as well.
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"Our first joint venture as comedy writers was a satirical pantomime when we were in Sixth Form at school. It was in rhyming couplets and Beth reeled it off in about an hour, lying on her bed, while I hastily wrote it down sitting on the floor."
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Nowadays, Beth writes most of the characters of Geoff and Sue and Carole and Denise, whilst Emma writes Eenie, and most of Bill and Sheila, but they collaborate throughout.
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Beth explains:
"One of us will be at the computer, with the other perched on the edge of the very uncomfortable spare room bed.
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"We sit in the spare room at home and we stay there all day and possibly much of the night, writing. We speak it aloud and usually there are big rows with one of us storming out saying 'You don't think my line's funny,' but then it all kind of comes round again.
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"It's quite intense but that's okay because we're twins, and if you're a twin you feel very free. If you're writing comedy, you've got to be able to say something that's absolutely appalling and not funny, and not have the other person lose faith in you."
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Having known Emma and Beth for so long, Sam segues into this creative partnership easily.
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She says:
"It's a joy. We've been working together for eight years, and now we've got to this stage, we've become very tight creatively. We've known each other too long now to even be able to work it out.
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"Three is not often a good number but because they are sisters, I'm quite often the big sister. It's a nice diffusion. They're my ideal comedy partners because they just make me laugh so much."
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On the creative relationship between the three girls, Vanessa Haynes comments:
"It is rare to meet writers/performers who are as disciplined on script as they are in their performance: Dogtown is the work of both extraordinarily good writers and performers."
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Emma and Beth's newest creation, written specially for Dogtown, is the film noir-ish world of Horton-le-Hole library and the characters of Geoff and Sue, played by James Gaddas and Geraldine McNulty.
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Beth says:
"Writing Geoff and Sue, and watching James and Geraldine play them, has been fantastic. It's the only time in the show when two new actors are doing something together, as opposed to Emma and Sam.
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"Geraldine and James are both brilliant comedians and actors, and they have an extraordinary chemistry on screen. It would have been easy to ruin with vanity, because there are some quite seductive lines in there, and if you went just for the seduction then it wouldn't be as funny.
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"But what Geraldine does brilliantly is she never tries to be sexy when funny will do."
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On what she hopes viewers will find unique and enjoyable about Dogtown, producer Vanessa Haynes says:
"One of the underlining themes of the show is aspiration, and the striking chasm between our secret aspirations and the mundanity of the reality that we're actually living.
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"You never need to explain why these two women are pretending to be Prince Philip and the Queen; you just kind of understand it.
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"The same with the library: Geoff and Sue love all the drama, and I hope that's what we've captured that in Dogtown – the suspicion that we all exist perhaps a shade brighter in our own heads."
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