Victoria Pile builds comedies out of sketches and then finds them an institution to live in: a hospital, a university, a police academy. Green Wing is the one that came off, rudeness and all, and it is still the reason to know her name.
Fi1m perspective
In Green Wing (2004) the picture will suddenly speed up. Two doctors bickering down a corridor turn into a blur, the picture slows again, and there they are at the far end, still bickering, having lost none of the argument and most of their dignity. It is a sketch-show trick used to move a sitcom along, and it tells you what Victoria Pile is: a sketch writer who wanted her sketches to add up to something.
She began writing them as a student at the University of Sussex, for Not the Nine O'Clock News, and went on to Spitting Image before devising Smack the Pony (1999–2003), the all-female sketch show she wrote, produced and directed. After three and a half series of that she wanted, in her own words, 'a different beast, one with the freedom of a sketch show but with a proper structure'. Green Wing (2004–2007) was the beast. Since then she has taken the same method to a university in Campus (2011), on to The Delivery Man (2015), and to a police academy in Piglets (2024), written with her long-time collaborator Robert Harley.
What she does well is people. Her casts are large and every face in them is worth a second look; the shows are built so that a performer with one odd habit can be handed a scene and trusted to make the habit alarming. We laughed a great deal at Green Wing, mostly at behaviour we would have reported to a manager had it happened at our own place of work, and the reason it lands is that Pile, with co-writers Robert Harley and Gary Howe, keeps the first small irritation recognisable before the response goes mad. As a director, alongside Tristram Shapeero and Dominic Brigstocke, she is patient with a physical gag: we see the foolish act, and then we are given time to watch the fool try to recover.
The patience is also the weakness. At 60 minutes an episode of Green Wing can spend far longer on a modest joke than the joke can bear, and by the fourth sped-up corridor of the hour it starts to look like a way of getting through it. Her tone divides people; a viewer who wants a plot to hold on to will find the plots here are mostly an excuse. We have not reviewed Campus or Piglets, so we will say only that a university and a police academy are exactly the sort of places she likes: full of rules, full of people who ignore them, and, presumably, full of corridors.
Biography
Victoria Pile is a British comedy writer, director and producer. She began her career writing for Not the Nine O'Clock News while a student at the University of Sussex and went on to contribute to Spitting Image and CBBC programmes.
Pile created, wrote, produced and directed episodes of the sketch show Smack the Pony (1999–2003) and the sitcom Green Wing (2004–2006). She later created Campus (2011) and The Delivery Man (2015), and wrote and produced Piglets (2024). She has received BAFTA nominations and International Emmy awards for her work.
