S7-EP2: In the Room Where It Happened: Richard Sparks on Writing for Rowan Atkinson, Robin Williams, and the Golden Age of British Comedy

He was in the pub with Rowan Atkinson when John Cleese called. He watched Rick Mayal and Adrian Edmondson do their very first television appearance. He stood at the back of an empty auditorium the night Stefan Grappelli made a seasoned guitarist stop mid-conversation just to watch. He was there for so much of it — the golden age of British comedy, the writers' rooms, the charity stages, the moments that became television history.

And then, decades later, he sat down alone one night to play a role-playing game with twenty-four strangers across the world. And thought: what would it really be like to actually be this guy?

That question became a novel. Then a series. Then four books.

Richard Sparks has had two full creative lives, and he is not finished with either of them. In this conversation, he talks about what it meant to write for some of the most iconic voices in British comedy, what the room was really like when Rowan Atkinson switched on, the night he watched Robin Williams hold thirty people in physical pain from laughing, and why the most important thing he ever did for his career was quit the safe job he hated two weeks after signing on for another year.

He also reads live from his New Rock series — a chapter so quietly constructed that it gives you the answer to everything in chapter nine, and you don't realize what you've been handed until much later.

His advice to every young writer listening: learn the melody before you give anyone the riff. And never try to write like somebody else. It took him decades to prove that with his own work. He's still proving it.

Find Richard at richardsparks.com and the New Rock series wherever books are sold.

Spirit Talk Show – Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups
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