There is one thing that fascinates me about improv and that is how it is portrayed in Television and Film. This is becoming more and more apparent in recent years because the comedy art form is sort of in fashion. There are some interesting topics that we can gain from these ways they are displayed so every so often we are going to look at different scenes from different shows and films.

I was listening to Off Menu the other day on the commute to work – if you have not listened to this podcast yet, i can only recommend it as it is a very good food and comedy podcast. I like to go back to episodes that I have not seen before and decided to listen to Rob Brydon’s one.

In between the food conversation, there was a really interesting talk about the show The Trip that he dos with Steve Coogan and I wanted to highlight it as it is a really good point about improv. Rob Brydon discusses that it is really hard work to constantly look for conflict in a scene. He discusses that when you do a scene when the the characters disagree on something it ends up being a scene where you end up constantly fighting, this can lead to it being really difficult.

It can be really hard on a show like The Trip to get the balance right between conflict and friendship. I felt this was a really important point to talk about in improv because conflict is something that you can fall into in a scene really easily, especially when you are starting out very early on.

When I was part of Punderstandably we had training with Suki Webster who told us very early on that we fell in to conflict in scenes when we didn’t know where to go with the scenes. Suki told us something that stuck with me after that – Love Each other. When you set up a scene, you shouldn’t go looking for conflict or even start with a conflict because it is very hard to turn the scene around to be a scene where you agree and like each other. Try and start a scene that develops without creating a conflict and it will naturally develop into something magical.