Way back in 2003 I wrote The Taste Of Quatro, one of my first TV comedy scripts. It was intended as a kind of sketch show, but using the format of nostalgia shows like I Heart The 80's which were much more prevalent back then; the sort of shows made up of narration, archive clips, interview nuggets and pundit commentary. When they'd first started, they'd been well-made and well-researched, but by 2003 they had pretty much become a very cheap way of filling television, with the same old commentators being trotted out to wax nostalgic about things they were too young to remember and the same old comedy faces being trotted out to make snide, obvious observations. It had almost got to the point where it seemed some pundits would be willing to pretend to remember things that hadn't actually happened....
So I had this idea of doing a comedy version, where it would be all about stuff which might have happened in the 1980's but didn't. I still think it was a very good idea. This script, whilst containing much that is far from brilliant, and which was clearly written whilst heavily under the influence of Chris Morris, The Day Today and The Rutles, showed sufficient potential to secure me my first agent.
It was then sent around various TV companies. As I recall, they all responded that whilst they liked it, they already had something similar in development; which wasn't surprising because it was rather an obvious idea. It is also kind of a law with these things that when a script is rejected because there's already something similar in development, that other show will never see the light of day either. I suppose Armando Iannucci's Time Trumpet used the same format; but it was doing a quite different thing in having the future reminisce about now, rather than people now reminiscing about a past that never was.
Anyway, it's now nearly 10 years out of date, the format it is spoofing is pretty much a thing of the past, so I think it's safe to say it will never get made... so why not read the script here.
Link to download PDF