FROM THE ARCHIVES: Dylan Morgan (13/1/09)

Welcome once again to From The Archives, the section of the blog in which I showcase some of my student work (that's a lot of alliteration). This week we're entering the second series of The Yesterday Show, having got the Christmas celebrations out of the way.

The major change with the second series was that almost everything was scripted rather than improvised. This was done mainly to ease Tom's workload: not only did he have to edit the show every week, but he had to trawl through all the stuff we had improvised to find the good bits first. The extra time it took to work out every line was balanced out by the time we saved on editing, meaning that we could both find that little bit of extra space to do our degrees (yes, we did work in the midst of all this - the two are not mutually exclusive).

It made sense to start the new series was a recap of the last year, allowing us to poke fun at a lot of different shows or films without having to go into too much detail. Dylan Morgan, as the name suggests, owed a certain amount to the Irish comedian Dylan Moran, of whom I was (and remain) a casual fan. While he is something of a one-joke character, I think he has more to him than, for instance, Hank Timbuck II; he plays on a popular stereotype (critics who want everything to be dark) but also goes beyond it to almost absurd degrees.

The voice was based on James Porter, a softly-spoken and highly intelligent PhD student with whom I had many stimulating discussions about theology. I knew James from Christian Focus at Warwick, and during a trip to the Scottish island of Iona we collaborated together on a short film called Opus Pani, which parodied The Da Vinci Code in a film noir style. I should stress that he is nothing like the character he inspired - though I can't speak for his opinions on Doctor Who, or lack thereof.

The other point of interest with this episode is the character of Barry. Tom and I always wanted to bring Alex back, but having written him out of Series 1 as we did, we felt that bringing him back straight away wouldn't feel right. Instead we came up with the idea of Thomas hiring a replacement who is so terribly boring that he begins to miss Alex. I'll come back to how this changed their relationship in later episodes, but for now all I will say is that the character does his job very effectively. Barry was played by Bhavik Dhokia, Alex and Tom's housemate, and he did a really good job.

So without any further ago, let's embark on Series 2 of The Yesterday Show. Let Dylan Morgan offer you his thoughts on The Dark Knight, Doctor Who and Russell Brand. Oh, and evil - lots and lots of evil:

Daniel