Before the broadcast of Antiquity, John-Luke Roberts and I wrote the following piece for the BBC Comedy Blog. Unfortunately, it never made it online (Presumably because, when we sent it, every person involved with the BBC Comedy website, or indeed BBC Comedy in general, was at the Edinburgh Festival, so it just sat in someone's inbox until it was far too late to do anything about it).
Anyway, I thought it made sense to pop it up here so it wasn't lost forever. Not that anyone would miss it if it was. It was meant to be accompanied by 2 minutes from the show itself - which I presume would do more to convince people to listen than anything we could say in 300 words.
How we came up with the title "Antiquity"
(By Gareth Gwynn and John-Luke Roberts)
We spent almost as long coming up with the title to this show as we did writing it. And the sitcom took a perfectly respectable length of time to write.
"Antiquity" was the name of the word file Gareth saved it as when he first sent it to the show’s producer, Victoria Lloyd and, months later, that ended up the name of the show. Knowing the Welsh people’s famous unpredictabily, it could just have just easily been called "Mr. Potty Goes To The Shops".
We decided something we thought of that quickly couldn’t possibly be right and set about coming up with a better title for a sitcom set in an antique shop. Personal favourites are "Queen Anne And The Chippendales" (vetoed on the grounds that "it sounds like a different show") and "
The BBC Ticket Unit issued tickets for something called "Cavendish’s Curiosities" and we suspect our cast including Tim McInnerny, Andrew Sachs, Nadia Kamil and Will Andrews all turned up to appear in differently named shows.
We were convinced we'd think of something better right up until there were 350 people in the BBC Radio Theatre staring at our cast and David Reed, our announcer, needed to say something at the start of the show to let people know it had started. And with the same quick thinking with which we named the word document, we once again opted for "Antiquity".
(We’ve since been told the best way to find the show on the iPlayer will be to search for "Happy Tuesdays", the strand our pilot appears in. So maybe thinking of a name didn’t matter so much after all).
