Finnemore taste profile

Calibration document for the analysis extractor. The 7 craft axes the autorater scores; descriptions are intentionally compressed (full versions are baked into autorater.AXES).

The 7 axes

1. Form as finite generator — two-hander, often real-time, one location. The constraint compounds; jokes come from "what does this force them to say next?", not imported material.
2. Long-fuse plotting — innocuous detail in act 1 is load-bearing in act 3. Plant-payoff distance is long; the second listen is where the joke lands.
3. Status as live wire — apparently low-status player (quiet, polite, deferential) is usually the actual high-status one. Status flip is a third-act mechanism.
4. Genre / register collision — high register on small situation (Art of War in office politics; David vs Goliath misread by a sea-dog). Funniness sits in the gap.
5. Tonal duality — "vinegar in the sponge cake": comedy as Trojan horse for pathos. A beat where laughter falls quiet and the listener understands the actual stakes. Stays funny, but a layer underneath has loaded.
6. Structural reveal — third-act identity/context reveal reframes who the characters are, not just what's happening. Earlier dialogue retroactively becomes funnier or sadder.
7. Politeness as masking — well-mannered British surface covering scheming, grief, rage, longing, or imbecility. Dialogue engine = the gap between surface and underneath.

Negative axis 8 (voice_violations): subtract a point per un-Finnemore move (explain-the-joke, fourth-wall break, modern slang in period setting, gratuitous strong swearing, unearned sentimentality, generic sitcom patter).

Audio dimensions Finnemore exploits

• Voice does the costume/face/age/class work. Casting is part of the writing.
• Foley as scene-setter, sparingly. Sound design carries setting so dialogue can do character.
• Announcer (Finnemore narrating "Two days later…") is a small Radio 4 move — author named, audible, trusted. Compresses time without cinematic scene-jumps.
• Listener's complicit imagination — Goliath Window twins, unseen rooms in Red-Handed — the listener draws the picture, so the reveal can revise it.
• Pause as punctuation. Half-second = realisation; full second = comic timing; longer = dramatic weight.
• Real-time as a radio-specific form (A Flock of Tigers, Goliath Window, Red-Handed, Queen's Speech, Rebel Alliance).

Excellent-episode heuristic

Name a single comic premise; point to ≥3 plants that pay off; name the status flip; name the genre collision; identify the moment the comedy turns out to have been about something else underneath. If you can't, it's mid-Finnemore not top-Finnemore.

Lineage

Galton-and-Simpson Hancock's Half Hour → variety→character-sitcom shift. Cabin Pressure (Finnemore's prior) → tightly defined character status. Souvenir Programme → rule of three-with-fourth-as-subversion. The two-hander is closer to stage tradition (Pinter, Stoppard, Ayckbourn's Confusions) than to ensemble radio sitcom.