Picture from Spin

Situation comedy has only a handful of stock story-lines that get re-used every few years, especially the traditional family shows. The 1990s sitcom 2.4 Children once had a story involving winning the Lottery (the National Lottery provided a lot of writers with material when it first happened) but they had lost/thrown away the ticket, rewind back to the 1970s and this scenario could have been Sid Abbott winning the Pools and Jean Abbott having forgotten to post the coupon. This is the basis that enabled me to have a quick blast out on Twitter after reading an interview with Jake Bugg in this week's NME. 

(I started collecting the NME again when it became a free paper, there is very little to read within its pages that wouldn't make Steve Wells turn in his grave but my reason for collecting them is a morbid curiosity with the fact that this once important music weekly has been reduced to the sub-Heat rag that it is now. I'm treating the pile of magazines in my office as a countdown to the final days of NME until the day that everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY goes on Twitter and Facebook to say something relating to NME standing for 'No More Editions').

It is known that I am not a fan of the music of Jake Bugg and have criticised him on several occasions for a variety of reasons; the fact that his songs all sound like other songs, his affected swagger and general twattiness. However I realise now that I have got it all wrong about not liking Jake Bugg as a singer and the reason I am wrong is because I was coming from it at the wrong angle. As a music lover I was supposed to dislike Bugg, but as a lover of comedy I now love the guy. Yes, I am now a fan of Jake Bugg.

To be honest I feel a bit of a fool for not 'getting' it straight away, such is the genius of the actor/comedian who created the character. Just as people think that Keith Lemon is a real person (even weirder are the people who find him funny but that's another issue altogether), or didn't realise that the people playing themselves on Extras were actually playing a twisted version of themselves (Keith Chegwin said in an interview that the people who bought that he was really a racist homophobic probably also think Johnny Depp actually is a pirate). I once called out fans of The Darkness for not realising that they were a spoof along the lines of Bad News and Spinal Tap and I thought that the cartoon punk character Donny Tourette was brilliant in the comedy series (and spin off band) Towers of London, especially as he appeared in character on Never Mind The Buzzcocks and Celebrity Big Brother. This makes it especially silly of me to have not realised that Jake Bugg was not real. 

With my new found realisation I re-read the interview in NME (No More Editions more like, just getting in early) and laughed at the comedy of it. Here was a guy who created a wannabe Oasis type who had minimal talent and said amusingly arrogant things in interviews. It all makes sense now, pretending not to know who legendary producer Rick Rubin was, saying that he told a group of seasoned session musicians in Memphis that they were doing it wrong, and pretending not to be bothered about winning a Brit Award. The creation of Jake Bugg is a work of genius, and I spent an evening this week thinking up a sitcom called It's A Bugg's Life about the everyday life of a singer who accidentally gets a record deal. Not only did I come up with the title but I managed to cast several key Nottingham actors too, none of them responded on Twitter but I'm sure that's just because they were busy and once I send them a script they'll be up for it. 

With Vicky McClure as the wife, Su Pollard as the mother-in-law (a big part of the traditional domestic sitcom), and Samantha Morton as the sexy neighbour, I have a small ensemble cast in place. I threw out some 'sits' including Jake having to hide a song-writing team because Paul Weller is coming to dinner (the boss is coming to dinner was an inexplicable plot in a lot of 1970s domestic sitcoms), arriving at a hotel in Spain for a gig and the hotel not being finished (another popular story although usually used in either the movie spin-off or the Christmas special), and an amusing misunderstanding with the sexy neighbour. All of these stories are of course plagiarised from the past, but instead of admitting to theft I will just cite them as influences, just like Jake Bugg does when writing songs.

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