by Hannah Brackenbury
I never really watched that much TV before lockdown. I never understood people who would recommend box sets or brag about completing all 186 episodes of the latest sexy fantasy dragon drama. The thought of sitting on my bum and staring at a rectangle for that length of time just felt plain wrong, a waste of time, and the best I could manage was the odd half an hour of Eastenders a few times a week.
But then along came a global pandemic and a national lockdown which changed everything. Suddenly there wasn’t much else to do except sit on my bum and watch TV, and with endless hours to kill I dutifully succumbed to the obligatory Netflix subscription. My partner and I (who had only moved in together a few months before) quickly made our way through some excellent US comedies at an impressive rate – four or five episodes per night of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place, Parks & Recreation – and I instantly fell in love with these hilarious characters and their heart-warming storylines.
It seemed as though feel-good TV was just what I needed to get through the most depressing time of my life. Just as the pandemic reached our shores, I was about to set off on my first big UK tour as a musical comedian. I was finally going to make a living from the thing I’d spent years chipping away at. I could finally give up the day job. I’d dedicated those last few months to tour admin – booking venues, arranging accommodation, printing posters, setting up social media ads, monitoring ticket sales – only for it all to be swept away in a matter of days as the world went into forced hibernation with no end in sight. My plans for the year were gone, and TV quickly became my comfort blanket.
After sobbing our hearts out to the final episode of Schitt’s Creek (the image of Moira Rose in her celebrant’s outfit will remain with me forever), my partner suggested we try a show called Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. She had watched the first couple of seasons before we met but never got round to finishing it. “It’s got funny songs in it,” she said. “I think you’ll really love it,” she said. I agreed to give it a go, and smirked my way through the first couple of episodes while she roared with laughter. It was ok, but it hadn’t grabbed me… yet. It wasn’t until episode 3 when Donna Lynne Champlin’s character Paula sang Face Your Fears – a ridiculously brilliant song featuring dubious advice on finding strength and courage – that I began to understand what I was watching, and to appreciate the genius of the song-writing team. I was hooked, and night after night we quickly ploughed through episode after episode (there are 62 in total).
The show features over 150 comedy songs in a huge variety of different styles and genres. Everything from punk-pop to Irish drinking songs, from a Billy Joel-style piano ballad to a Les Mis parody… it was a relentless barrage of perfectly crafted musical comedy from the show’s star and co-creator Rachel Bloom and her song-writing team, Adam Schlesinger and Jack Dolgen. The soundtrack albums were all we would listen to on Spotify, and after a couple of months we knew most of the songs word for word. From the show’s title I’d assumed it would be a fluffy rom-com about a love-sick woman who wouldn’t take no for an answer, and yes, it starts out that way, but believe me it quickly becomes SO much more. The story digs deep into mental health issues and the songs tackle some difficult subjects with style, care, and above all, pitch-perfect humour.
I’d been writing comedy songs for years but only ever in two formats – original songs and lyrics of my own, or parodies of existing songs (using an original artist’s music but changing the words). But what the CXG team were doing was completely new to me. Their songs were somewhere in the middle, parodies but not straight copies of songs. They were writing original songs that sounded a lot like an existing song – not enough to be served with a copyright claim, but enough for the listener to know exactly which track, artist or genre they were referencing. It was next-level genius, and I loved analysing each track and breaking down the song structures and instrumentation to figure out just how the hell they were doing it.
The credits rolled on the final episode and we sobbed our hearts out once more to the most perfect ending which made me believe, just for a second, that this show might have actually been written just for me. I was left feeling empty that it was over, but so full of ideas. I was satisfied that it had ended so perfectly, but aware that it had given me a hunger for more. I’d been making my own music videos for years and knew my way around video editing software pretty well, so the spark of an idea struck me that maybe I could have a go at something like this myself. I wouldn’t be performing live again for a while, so why not create some new content at home? Why not write my own musical sitcom? I’d never written a script before, but I’d been immersed in brilliant TV shows for months and felt as though I knew what worked and what didn’t. I sat with the idea for a few days and then talked it through with my partner, who thankfully has always been fully supportive of my comedy nonsense. She spurred me on and I started jotting down some thoughts.
The idea for the storyline came naturally. It had to be set at home because the outside world was still off-limits, and as everyone was now working from home this seemed like the obvious idea for a homemade TV show. I didn’t want to tie the show to the pandemic though, as it would become outdated and irrelevant pretty quickly, so I scrapped the original ‘Working from Home’ title and went for a more generic scenario, and something I had experience of – setting up as a freelancer and trying get through life as an awkward human being. As a huge fan of the late, great Victoria Wood, I’ve always thought that relatability is the key to comedy. She was the master of real-life comedy writing, and I learned from her that the more personal you can make your material the more audiences will warm to it.
I want to stress at this point that I am NOT an actor, and I’ve never had any desire to be one. I’m a musician and a comedy performer, and although I do slip into a slightly different character when I’m on stage, my acting skills wouldn’t pass a mock GCSE Drama exam. Not even close. But I figured that the more I based the character on the real me, the more I could get away with being awkward and clunky, because it would be even more true to life. So the main character was called ‘Hannah’ and the show became ‘Everything’s Fine’.
I chipped away over a period of a few weeks and came up with an 8-episode script which told a very simple story with a gentle love theme running through it. I wasn’t confident enough as a writer to touch on any of the sorts of subjects tackled in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, instead keeping it all reasonably light while basing a bit of it on real-life experiences and a lot of it on my real-life awkwardness, especially around the subject of dating. I gave each episode a theme and began to write two songs per episode which would fit those themes and help carry the storyline along. I tried to work in this new CXG method by writing songs ‘in the style’ of other songs with varying degrees of success. I wrote in genres I had never written before, basing tracks on hits by Avicii, The Streets, Michael Bublé, ‘Defying Gravity’ from the musical Wicked, and more. But by far my best effort was the noisy neighbour song Bangin’ On The Wall, written in tribute to my teenage heroes, Oasis. I totally nailed that Noel Gallagher guitar solo and channelled my very best ‘lager lout Liam’ in the music video.
As the world eventually started to open up I realised the enormity of the project I had taken on. To make just one music video was a big undertaking, but I had just committed to 16 of them, along with all the actual sitcom scenes in between, not to mention writing and recording the songs and all the editing work that would follow. The story featured a few other characters, one of whom I could film via Zoom, but the others would need to come to my home to record their parts. My partner agreed to play one of the roles, but I still needed help with filming, and a decent video camera with a green screen to bring my silly ideas to life. I’d written a real-life cat into the story for god’s sake! How I thought I was going to pull that off I had no idea!
I put together a Crowdfunder on social media with the aim of raising £800 to cover some of the costs. People were unbelievably generous and I ended up with twice that target plus a little more on top. This allowed me to upgrade my video editing software, invest in a better camera, pay the actors, and buy some silly props and other bits and pieces to help bring the thing to life.
A few months on and we were now out of lockdown. Life was getting back to semi-normality and we had decided to move to a new flat, so now the race was on to get as many scenes recorded in the old building as possible, leaving the green screen scenes and a few outdoor shots until after we’d moved. This was incredibly stressful, and the project was now beginning to consume my life, even though I had other things I needed to focus on. I started gigging again, and from then on I found myself chipping away in the evenings and at weekends, trying to find pockets of time whenever I could to get this project finished.
Just over eighteen months after the initial idea was formed, I completed the last of the editing and launched Everything’s Fine on YouTube on 1st January 2023. It wasn’t perfect, it was very DIY and my acting was as wobbly as I’d expected it to be, but there was a lot to be proud of. I see it as the ultimate showcase of my talents as a writer, songwriter, performer, music producer, videographer, editor, graphic designer and TV theme tune writer (it’s catchy as hell, I’m told).
The pandemic brought a lot of sadness and misery to the world, but I’ve always been someone who looks for the light in darker times. This project would never have existed had it not been for Covid and the accompanying lockdown which kept me away from the stage. It forced me to find a new creative outlet and pushed me way out of my comfort zone, helping me to develop a whole bunch of new skills along the way. And I’m 100% certain it would not have existed without Rachel Bloom and a genius musical TV show that’s about so much more than just someone’s crazy ex-girlfriend.
All four seasons of CXG are now available to watch on ITVX here in the UK. And when you’ve finished watching them all, give my little lockdown project a try! If you love great musical comedy, I hope you’ll love them both as much as I do.
HANNAH BRACKENBURY
HANNAH BRACKENBURY 