DMs Are Open

Another week where I attempted to get 2 sketches, 2 one-liners and 1 voice note into the show.

3 weeks in now so I can do some further analysis of DMs Are Open.

DMs Are Open is a weekly topical comedy show which accepts user submissions for oneliner jokes and sketches. The BBC do pay for all broadcast user submissions.

You may have seen my analysis of NewsJack episodes so I’ve tried to keep to broadly that structure. Things are a little different as DMs Are Open isn’t a ‘Topical News Satire’ show, but is a topical news show. Its also ‘new’ so I think the producers are also looking to find their own way on how this goes forward.

I’ve listened to the broadcast and I’ve tried to analysis what content makes the show.

First of all, I do not include the opening dialogue in the stats as this isn’t something that members of the public can submit to.

Secondly, there is no released details on who has written what, but occasionally they do tweet out who wrote what. Anyone who wants to can submit 3 sketches, 2 one-liners and a Voice Note

Thirdly, this is my analysis. The assumptions I make are mine, as are the conclusions I come to.

This week we saw this breakdown

More one-liners again. We also had 12 seperate sketches but like episode 1, 3 of them were the same thing (Tiktok Finfluencer this time)

The structure of the show was 6 sketches, then all 12 One-liners, then another 6 sketches, then we had the 5 Voice Notes.

Over-all the sketch time is down (by about 30 seconds), the one-liners remain consistent at 2.25 and voice notes are up by about 10 seconds.

This has a much wider net of subject covered. Good to see less politics (well not for me, I’m a politics submitter!) as this matches what people were told in the webinar. The Tik-tok sketches (3 or 1) also leaned more towards it being about ‘the socials’ rather than ‘breaking news’.

An interesting thing is that if you consider the TikTok sketches as 1, then the 80’s reboots was the shortest sketch by a long shot. At 35 seconds long it is a good 25 seconds shorter than any other sketch broadcast (in any of the previous episodes) so if they think it is funny, they will include it even if it isn’t pages long.

We also had the joint longest sketch this week at 2 minutes 30 seconds. This shares the honour with the Wagatha Christie sketch from episode one.

One extra one-liner this week compared to last week.

The topics of the one-liners were as follows;-

Got to love that the Prince Andrew related jokes are making their way regularly into DMs Are Open. It was great that there was an extra one-liner broadcast this week. The reason for this is ONE OF MINE WAS BROADCAST!

Mine was the Google joke. It felt like a NewsJack/DMS are Open joke and I’m glad it hit the mark. I would have thought they’d go for the other one, as it was sillier, but I’m glad they broadcast one at least!

Another 5 voice notes ends the show this week – no final sketch.

Another impression! And another Scottish reference. I guess the people writing for Breaking The News are looking for other outlets of their jokes!

Strange to reference the Bot from last week. Because there was the Dyson robot sketch this week I thought they meant that, but they didn’t – the last VN from the week before was a bot. So are re-occuring characters now going to feature – its always possible!

I think some of the voice notes are tipping over the 20 second mark…not by much, but if they are putting 5 of them in a space of 104 seconds (1m44), then they are all getting just over 20 seconds each…use the time if you think you’ll need it!

There were 19 writers credited this week and 5 Voice Actors. In total 24 separate people were credited but some people might have more than 1 credit and others might be part of a writing partnership. This week the DMs Are Open team did shout-outs on Twitter to all the credited writers. This is a great thing to do – they just need to start adding them to the episode page on the actual BBC website.

It seems obvious, but listening to DMs Are Open will help you understand what the producers are looking for.

I still think that they could lose 1 sketch and include another load of one-liners. Hopefully this balance will improve through the series. I’m also not sure how many Voice Notes they get so it might improve your chances of getting stuff broadcast if you do a Voice Note as you’ll have less competition. Its important you focus on the Golden Rule (Write Funny) and then worry about other things.

Also, it really helps if your name is Alex….an Alex has been credited 6 times over 3 episodes.

The government are looking to axe Radio4extra and someone has set up a petition against it – check it out here – https://actionstorm.org/petitions/save-bbc-radio-4-extra-628fabbe41f11?ref=433347

Hopefully the team over at DMs Are Open will share some stats on submissions. Another thing I noticed is that the Voice Note contributors get a separate acknowledgement (I’m guessing as ‘Voice Actors’) so we know who wrote the sketches/one-liners, even if we don’t know who wrote which individual ones.

What are your thoughts on the third episode of DMs Are Open? Let me know in the comments? Did you write some of the jokes? I’d be interested to know which ones 🙂