The Surreal Vortex of Sevenoaks

One of my favourite films is After Hours – not just because it’s one of the best things that director Martin Scorsese has ever done, but because I have the smallest of sneaking suspicions that most people’s lives are but a hair’s breadth away from the uncomfortable, nightmarish ‘comedy’ world that the (generally unsympathetic) Paul Hackett spends the vast majority of the movie attempting to escape from.

Oh. OK. Just mine then.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a series of meetings in London. Of course, the first step is to get there. When it comes to travel, I’m pretty well organised – I always allow myself far more time than I actually need, especially if the place I’m going to is unfamiliar. I take everything I think I might want: notebook, pen, wallet, phone, iPod, book, novelty Bender statuette. Lastly I make sure that my shoes are on the right feet and that I haven’t put my jacket on back to front. Right. Off we go.

That’s when everything starts going a bit After Hours.

Take Brighton station: to park in the car park there, you don’t need coins. You simply pick your ticket up at the automatic barrier and pay by credit card in a handy machine when you arrive back some hours later. Nothing could be easier. So, having to catch a train from somewhere other than Brighton, I automatically assume that all station car parks are like this. They’re not. Sevenoaks station is a case in point: pay and display? Jesus: I thought we were living in the twenty first century. OK, no problem, just whip out the old credit card and... Oh. The machine is cash only. Cash? Uh, OK, how much? £4.90? I haven’t got £4.90. Bugger.

Right: find a cashpoint. There’s a petrol station, they’re bound to have one, right? Wrong. "Nearest cashpoint is at the station, mate." Aware that I have about ten minutes before the Charing Cross train arrives, I traipse to the station (quite a trek as it turns out), find a cashpoint and take out a tenner. Back to the car park. Try to find somewhere in the devil’s parking machine to slot a ten pound note, only to discover that it doesn’t take notes: coins only. Bugger - again. Train leaving in five minutes. Hang on – the machine does take credit cards after all, but only for a weekly ticket, which is £23! Arse.

By now, I am out of time, so don’t have any option but to pay for a weekly ticket and leg it to the station – I make the train with about thirty seconds to spare (on the train someone tries to sell me pre-packed meat out of a Tesco carrier bag: “You want any meat, mate?” “Uh, no thanks: I’m good.”)

I wouldn’t mind so much if an event like this was a one-off. Problem is, it isn’t.

Next time round, I stock up on coins. Pull into Sevenoaks station right in front of a parking machine. Get out, pump £4.90 in change into the machine. Nothing happens. The instructions on the machine appear to be some sort of entry test for The Krypton Factor. After nearly ten minutes of pointlessly re-feeding coins into the parking machine, I decide that it’s broken. Off to find another machine: this one works. Hoopla! I make the train with thirty seconds to spare (on the train I sit opposite a twelve year old Downs Syndrome kid who is with her carer. “Hello”, she says. “Hello”, I say back. “What’s your name?” she asks. Before I have a chance to answer, she says, “Is it Elizabeth?”)

Next time round, I’m fully expecting to be hunted down by a baying posse of crazies in an ice-cream van. I’ll let you know how I get on.

Julian Fellowes at Lighthouse

I remember Lighthouse back in the days when they were located at Middle Street in Brighton - rather sensibly, they have now relocated to a set of super-swanky offices in Kensington Street. Thanks to a tip off from Danny Stack, the beautiful and talented Michelle Lipton (in comparison to myself: slightly stooped and illiterate) and I were present last night to hear Julian Fellowes give a whistle stop tour of his career to date.

Judging from the amount of notes Michelle took, I suspect she will be providing chapter and verse on the event at some point. That said, the only notes I took were: “Michael Winner is a key figure in all our lives” (chortle), and a bit about some of the decisions made regarding the period that Gosford Park was set in. Robert Altman didn’t want Christmas as a backdrop as he found it ‘too sentimental’; also, the general consensus was that there shouldn’t be any mention of Nazis. Hold on a minute: Christmas, with the Nazi Party? There’s a high stepping, vaudeville number if ever I heard one.

Suffice to say, the evening was brilliantly entertaining, but not massively oversubscribed – there were perhaps 25 people in the audience, which I found surprising. Either everyone in Brighton has heard Mr Fellowes speak before (doubtful), or the evening was just not well publicised enough. In any case, if you ever get the chance to hear him speak, take it: he’s fab.

Writersoom in Brighton

Thursday evening at the Sallis Benney theatre saw Paul Ashton from the BBC Writersroom essentially presenting all ten of these – Paul is a brilliantly engaging speaker, and the love for what he does was more than obvious to everyone present. Lots of frantic notes were scribbled, and someone in front of me even videoed the whole thing. There wasn’t a huge amount of time left at the end for an extensive Q&A, and part of this was taken up by two questions on copyright (sheesh!). Suffice to say, the BBC will assume all copyright in your work once your script has been sent into Writersroom.*

Afterwards I went here with the beautiful and talented Michelle Lipton, the insanely personable Sheiky, and the always entertaining Mister G, who regaled us with tales of writing for The Bill and getting a sitcom commission. Yowsa! At this point you may well ask what I’m doing hanging around with such talented people when all I have to offer is a Uwe Boll story. Well, ask away; I haven’t a clue either. All I know is that the likes of Ms Lipton cannot escape, as she now owes me cake. Quite a lot of it, in fact. So there.
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* This is a lie, for which I apologise. I am a bad person.

Writersroom in Brighton

Many thanks to John Soanes for informing me about this – the last time I was in the Sallis Benney theatre, Steven Berkoff was getting all unnecessary about skinheads (which he used to do with frightening regularity). So, see you down the front for a spot of heckling (joke).

That said, these events usually attract the odd crackpot or two, so hopefully the entertainment value will be quite high!

Off on a Tangent, Part 13 - Vast Swathes of Generalisation

Apropos of absolutely nothing at all, here’s Alexis Petridis in a recent Guardian article talking about a Feist gig:

The audience was heavy on hipsters, presumably lured by Feist's long-standing associations with a succession of achingly trendy cult artists... There was an almost tangible air of come-on-impress-us about the audience, their cynicism perhaps compounded by the ads.

Er, are you quite sure about that, Alexis? I was at the very same gig and, whilst it’s nice to be described as a ‘hipster’ (I think), the audience was the usual Brighton melting pot mix of indie kids, scruffy students, people with silly haircuts/stupid hats and old geezers who had dragged their bored looking other halves along. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that the average audience age that night was well over 30.

At that point, The Reminder had not been released in the UK, so presumably everyone present had no doubt been drawn by the previous album Let It Die and Feist’s powerhouse performances with Broken Social Scene. The gig was also completely sold out. That curious breed ‘the hipster’ (how do you spot a hipster anyway? Do they stand under spotlights dressed in polonecks wearing berets?) was noticeable by its absence.

All of which says to me: if you can’t think of what to write, either a) make it up, or b) blandly generalise.

That said, if you want experience vast open plains of generalisation, pick up Made in Brighton, a series of essays on modern Brighton by Julie Burchill and Daniel Raven (who Julie just happens to be married to). Polemicists seem to thrive on generalisations, as the reality of any situation is just too knotty and complex to really get your knickers in a twist over I reckon.

London to Brighton – The Ubiquity of Ideas

Warning! This post contains spoilers for London to Brighton.

First off, let me say that I have absolutely nothing against London to Brighton – all round, it’s a pretty decent film (with one major lapse of narrative logic, but you can’t have everything).

The thing that really intrigued me however, was the ending – despicable gangster Stuart Allen drives tart with a heart Kelly and her ward Joanne deep into the Sussex countryside with the express intention of having them killed by his gormless foot soldiers – Derek and Chum. Whilst Derek and Chum get busy digging a shallow grave, Kelly and Joanne plead for their lives, convinced that they are going to be killed. However, when the moment of truth arrives, Stuart’s cronies’ guns are aimed at Derek and Chum, and Kelly and Joanne are freed. It’s a great scene, full of menace, and the switch is cleverly played out.

There was just one problem for me – it all seemed a little familiar. The reason?

A few years back, I wrote an almost identical scene.

My script was set in south London circa 1974 and focussed on a timid accountant who gets drawn into a violent criminal underworld. The scene I wrote featured the accountant digging what is supposedly his own grave, only for it to become the final resting place for the big bad gangster’s psychotic rival. Without labouring the point too much, the scene in London to Brighton is almost identical.

And what’s more, that’s cool.

I am not for one moment suggesting that plagiarism of any sort has occurred here (my script did the rounds just as the British gangster movie was about to explode messily all over the place, so it got lost in the noise I guess). I think what this episode shows is that some ideas are simply ubiquitous – they possess a weird form of common currency. The fact that I wrote an identical scene a few years back means nothing. And besides, there are so many damn scripts out there all jockeying for attention, at least of few of them are going to share a lot of unintentional similarities.

On the other hand, a friend of mine got understandably upset a little while back when a British feature came out that seemed to borrow entirely from one of his own scripts. To add insult to injury, my friend had actually sent the script to the lead actor’s agent a few years before, only to see the idea apparently recycled wholesale into a starring vehicle. I think he consulted an entertainment lawyer but from then on the trail went cold (the film bombed big time anyway, so a law suit is pretty pointless when no-one has any money available to compensate).

Whether or not this was a similar situation was difficult to tell. There was a certain ubiquity in the idea, and, as we all know, you can’t copyright an idea (believe me, I deal with this sort of crap every day). You could launch an action based on a like-for-like comparison of the two scripts side by side, but if that test fails, you’re screwed. It’s all in the specifics – the idea/concept is obviously important, but what counts in an instance like this is the execution (there are other issues to consider here of course: unless you have a compelling case, try finding a media lawyer who would take this sort of thing on for free, not to mention the damage it would do to any career if litigation was a first port of call).

Anyone can have an idea for a screenplay – it’s not difficult. The difficulty comes when you have to actually write the damn thing. How many times have you seen someone on Shooting People announce that they have a drop dead brilliant idea for a script, but what they really need is for someone to write the thing for (or ‘with’) them? In the next breath they start talking about confidentiality agreements just in case you think their diamond studded, gold plated idea is worth stealing. Pah. It’s the execution that matters.

My solution to this? Be original. What I took from London to Brighton is that I’m not being original enough (must try harder). If nothing else, being original gets you remembered.

And that lapse of narrative logic in London to Brighton? When Derek and Chum happen across Kelly in her friend’s house in Brighton, they order everyone (a bunch of dozy dope smoking slackers) out of the house at gunpoint – the slackers then promptly disappear! Hang on a minute – crazy pimp with a shotgun holding two women hostage? Quick! Call the cops! On second thoughts, don’t bother. We’re all pretty laid back here in sunny Brighton, so when crazy pimps start waving shotguns around, we all go, ‘Meh – been there, done that.’ Besides, I think I’m getting a bit autistic about narrative logic (which in the case of London to Brighton seems to be directly related to how much money was left in the budget). I need to relax a bit, I think.

Off on a Tangent (Part 4 of many)

Battles at the Concorde 2, Brighton, 21st August

Battles made the Concorde sweat right through its scruffy, seen-better-days Shellac t-shirt – this, in a venue whose idea of air conditioning is to keep the back door open. I’m certain that most bands that play the Concorde haven’t got the first idea what they’re letting themselves in for. The Concorde – Brighton’s Premier Music Venue proclaim the banners – the reality is a little different. When bands such as Battles or Wire play here, I always think – why the hell aren’t you guys playing up the road at the Dome? Much more civilised. The Concorde is so grimy and indie (for that read credible) it positively smarts. And don’t get me started on the sound. The way in which the venue is constructed means that the acoustics are totally shagged – that is, when the whole PA doesn’t pack up like it did when Wire played there last. Battles set up their own equipment, and I don’t blame them – I’m not so sure anyone on the Concorde crew is qualified to touch it, let alone try to get a decent sound out of it.

Quite how Battles do what they do is quite beyond me – no-one in this band actually seems to play anything (with the exception of John Stanier). Ian Williams fingers a few frets and jabs on a keyboard. David Konopka doesn’t really play what you and I would understand to be a bass line – half the time, the bass is there for low end texture, rumbling away like a tube train in some unseen tunnel beneath your feet. And Tyondai Braxton’s vocals (when they aren’t buried in the bloody atrocious mix) aren’t ‘vocals’ at all – they’re high pitched, highly treated wails, pushed through about a hundred different effects pedals.

And John Stanier? Good god, the man’s a demented power tool. How he keeps the barrage up for nearly ninety minutes is completely beyond me (if you want to know why the Helmet reformation didn’t work, look no further – trying to do it without John Stanier is unthinkable).

Apart from the crapped out sound, the only other major problem with this gig was the fact that I was standing behind a man wearing a trilby. Note to all future gig goers: if you stand six feet two in your socks, do not wear a fucking trilby and stand in front of me. Forty minutes in, I took drastic action and ended up stamping on some poor girl’s foot (and judging from the footwear of the average Brighton gig goer, I bet it hurt as well – sorry!).

Oh, by the way, Battles rocked. But you don’t need me to tell you that.