A friend of my housemate's mum wrote the Spitting Image Maggie Thatcher/cabinet/vegetables gag and gets a small cheque every time it's repeated in a clip show.

Hi. It's Joel what done that Rules for the Word.

The comedy writer's payment system is changing all the time.

The usual method is to be commissioned for a certain amount of broadcast minutes. You pitch ideas to the production team. Depending on how much stuff they like, they commission you to write, say, ten minutes of material for the series. You write it up. That doesn't mean it'll be broadcast, but they expect to use about that much of your stuff in the rough assembly of the script (before editing). You will doubtless write more than that - especially if you write a runner (series of repeating sketches) they decide not to use - and your ideas pitch will have included way more than ten minutes of ideas, obviously. There's a lot of wastage, but your bottom drawer fills with ideas that didn't get used, and that bedrock of unbought ideas can usually be employed in the next pitch meeting for another show if the tone's broad enough. Plenty of good ideas go from show to show looking for a home for years, before finding a sympathetic ear and getting bought and doing perfectly well. Rejection means it's not right for that show, not that the sketch can't be looked at again, rewritten, and find a new lease of life.

For narrative shows, that's easier - you write a half hour show, they pay you for 30mins of script (or 24mins on commercial telly) at your usual per minute rate. You're paid for commission, delivery, and acceptance by the channel, in three chunks. You can sometimes get paid for plotting and outlines separately too - occasionally another writer will be brought in to write up the script for a storyline you've devised.

On minute rate, you traditionally got paid when it gets broadcast, and you get repeat fees - the writer's pension. Back in the day, you'd get paid again when something was shown again. This is less common these days. A lot of shows employ you on a buyout basis, so the production company or channel own the stuff in toto. You get paid once.

Kids' telly very much operates like this. You may be surprised to learn that cartoons, stop frame animation and so on, that get repeated to death and sold on DVD don't pay the writers a penny in repeat royalties. It's a practical but slightly eggy habit the industry's got into. You can write an episode of some massive hit character branded thing, and it can be repeated dozens of times a day all over the world and you get a single flat fee on commission that never reflects its success. The writers' strike in the US was sparked by this sort of thing - DVD sales and repeats on branded franchises that didn't net the writers a penny - but we're better behaved over here and take it on the chin and moan on the Word message board.

The BBC, for its part, has a Public Service Fee (a slightly-too-small one-off sweetener you get paid on delivery) that covers usage on the internet, clips shows, digital channels (a meaningless term these days without an analogue signal by April 2012, but hey). That usually has repeats folded into it. Another change that means you don't get paid for reusage (though the wild proliferation of digital repeat channels - Radio4Extra, Dave etc - would be unaffordable without this understanding.)

Digital channels can be naughty too. In the olden days, if you wrote something for BBC2 and it got repeated, it'd be on BBC1 or BBC2, and you'd get paid again. Now, those repeats tend to be on 'digital channels' like Dave, who pay a fraction of the money and have to be hounded down mercilessly like animals and bolt gunned in the face to make them pay up. Again, what used to be the writer's pension is increasingly whittled away by the fragmented market and digital distribution. Moany moany. Still, it's better than picking through the dog bins for change.

The other way to be paid is on a day rate - you're in a room coming up with ideas with the meter running. That's how panel shows and topical progs tend to be done. You do a couple of days throwing ideas around for 8 Out of 10 Cats or Alan Carr's chat show. You don't get any ownership or repeat fees, but you get a guaranteed pay packet, and it's well remunerated. You're part of the production team, as it were, and that's nice telly money with no fuss.

Occasionally this day-rate bodies-in-the-room model means you get credited not as a writer, but as a 'programme associate', which reflects that 'production help' rather than 'writing' method of payment.

The US model, by the way, as far as I understand it, is to pay writers a salary - that big room of smelly people you sometimes see working on 30 Rock - where claims of ownership and repeats are moot, because you're being well paid to be in the room. That model hasn't taken off over here - because of our tradition of paying by the minute, meaning people hoard their ideas (every thought is worth hard cash) - and that's why talk of writers' room sitcoms being launched over here never come to anything. The channels just don't have the money to pay a room full of salaried writers to share their thoughts amongst the class. And we end up with 6 episode runs created by a single mind, or a small group of individuals working on a episode each, on a laptop, in a cafe. Which is where Jason and I are at the moment. Time for a sandwich, I think.