A to B (And All the Way Back Again)

Once upon a time, I wrote a script. In chronological order, this is what happened to it:

1) To start with, read about Terry Illot and the Hammer Films episode here.

2) After that, Marchmont Films got their grubby little hands on it – you can read the full sorry lowdown here.

3) More or less at the same time, this happened (hello Yellow UK!) (I never got those script reports done, incidentally).

4) November 2007, and the script is selected by METLAB for development and eventual pitching to a cabal of investors. After a meeting in January 2008, I launched upon a month’s worth of rewrite and whizzed the new draft over to the truly gorgeous Lucy Vee for comment (Lucy is/was METLAB’s script editor of choice). Notes came back: super! At this stage, I was hoping to get another meeting with both Lucy and John Sweeney (METLAB head cheese) as per the original ‘calling notice’ to discuss potential ways forward. For whatever reason, the meeting never materialised. Wary of putting a lot of work in for no discernible gain, I turned my attention elsewhere (I was mid-way through a tricksy collaboration/treatment; stay tuned for more fun and games on that one at some point). Over the next few months, I waited for a meeting and a plan of action from John Sweeney, but nothing turned up. By now, I was starting to get the feeling that nothing was going to come of this (my sixth sense by now is quite well attuned to episodes of this sort). The project sat on the backburner for several months until I e-mailed John asking him what was going on (and giving him an ultimatum of sorts). I received this in reply. Game over.

5) In February 2008, I got this from an agent at United Agents:

...I absolutely loved it. It is smart and witty and unsettling.

...I’d love to read anything else you might want an agent to sell and I’d love to meet, if you’re still looking for representation.

Er, let’s think about this for a second – yes please!

Then: complete and utter silence for months. I chased up Mr Agent on a couple of occasions - he was always politeness and charm personified, but still nothing doing. Is it worth another chase? Probably not.

(Apropos of nothing at all, United Agents represent Henry Naylor: a couple of friends of mine were on the same Cambridge Footlights revue as Mister Naylor, and had a frankly uncalled for rhyme whenever his name arose in conversation: “Henry Naylor, Henry Naylor; about as funny as Vlad the Impaler.” Honestly, there’s just no need for it (*chortle*)).

6) “Notable Producer X”: I am wary of blogging too much about this at the moment, as I might say something I'll regret (as if that's ever stopped me before).

7) BBC Writersroom: a couple of months ago I got a lovely letter from Writersoom with a couple of pages of notes saying how much they liked the script and inviting me to send my next grand opus in (which I duly did, only for it to come back a month later – they’d already read it, you see. Oops).

Strangely enough, I wrote this in a post on 30th July 2007:

... if you want to know where NOT to send your speculative scripts, then stay tuned – I seem to have an almost supernatural knack for ferreting out production companies for whom procrastination is a profitable pastime...

In a bizarrely circuitous fashion, over a year later I’m back to where I started from - which really does go to show that if you want a successful screenwriting career, keep one eye permanently glued on Unfit for Print. Whatever I do, do the exact opposite: you really can’t go wrong.

I'm a Loser, Baby...

So the scores are on the doors for the next round of Red Planet. And as Paul Campbell points out, the entire Scribodome and its dog are through – everyone that is, except me.*

As Chester Babcock might say:

Cock.

There – that feels better already.

Huge congratulations to everyone who made it through (too many to mention here, but you know who you are, you lucky swines!), and commiserations to me. I suppose I ought to start on that supernatural period piece I’ve been planning for the last couple of minutes (dystopian sci-fi being hopelessly outré this year, of course) ;-)

Ah well – time for a beer.
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*And Lucy and Elinor and Rach, of course. Commiserations, guys – I feel your pain. *sob*

METLAB Gets Credit Crunched!

Things have been very quiet on the Metlab front for the last few months (what with me being busy elsewhere with Red Planet, Sharps and that unnameable treatment), so I thought I’d give John Sweeney a prod. Got the following e-mail today:

Thanks for your thoughts. I have given the matter a lot of thought and because of the changes brought about by the current economic situation, our potential investors no longer being available, I think it best that we do what you suggest and draw a line under this episode of Metlab...

So there we have it.

I think the next step here is to write a post about the many and varied hoops that my poor ickle METLAB script has jumped through over the last couple of years – it ain’t pleasant reading, but at the least it’ll be entertaining...

Dude, You Won!

Stevyn Colgan directed me here to a Six Word Story Contest, which I duly entered with the following:

Second coming: Jesus descends from mothership.

And it won!

The prize? Free books! Huzzar!

As you were.

Scenes from The Wire

I’m currently re-watching all five seasons of The Wire via the gift of the DVD box set (I’m generous to myself like that). Problem is I get all obsessive-compulsive about it and watch an entire season over the course of 48 hours, which means I forget to do essential household chores such as watching Apparitions or anything currently emanating from the Jungle (saints preserve us).

My favourite scene from season 2 comes in episode 8, Duck and Cover. After being thrown out of the marital home, McNulty (since demoted from detective to harbour patrol) goes on a monumental bender. After promising a bartender that he has no intention of driving home, he does just does that. Swinging round a corner, McNulty completely misjudges it, and slams his car into a concrete underpass support. He gets out, and drunkenly tries to figure out how he didn’t make the corner. He gets back in the car, backs it up, and has another go. This time he hits the concrete support with much greater force than before, smashing the passenger side window and cutting his hand.

If all the scene did was to demonstrate McNulty’s pig-headedness, it would still be great – but it does so much more than that. It almost serves as an overarching metaphor as to exactly how McNulty lives his life: first time round, McNulty can’t help but fuck things up. Second time round, he simply repeats his previous error, which makes his fuck-up even greater than before. The metaphor is underlined by the fact that this scene sits slap bang in the middle of an attempted reconciliation between McNulty and his wife and a drunken shag with a waitress. This is superlative writing (by George P Pelecanos) that makes its point without resorting to heavy handed exposition or even a great deal of explanatory dialogue. The sequence of events spells things out just enough.

I love The Wire – then again, it’s a hard show not to love.

My DVD Shelf

I nabbed this from Scott the Reader:

I visit your house/apartment, and you spot me looking at your DVD/VHS shelf.

1. What's on there that you instantly force me to borrow, because it's a great movie and you figure I haven't seen it?

2. What you do also lend me, because even though it's not considered a classic, it's a personal favorite?

3. What movie is on there that you have no rational explanation for owning, and which you try to slide under the couch while I'm distracted?

1. Last Year at Marienbad – directed by Alain Resnais from a script by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Not to everybody’s taste I suspect, but the script is a masterclass in opacity and ambiguity, i.e., how far can you take a narrative and still make people say, ‘Huh?’

2. Halloween III – with a script by Nigel Kneale (that he eventually disowned due to the amount of violence in the finished product), this is outlandish and demented with the best ending of any film ever in the history of everything. So there.

3. Hard Cash – the only reason I can think of for owning this is because it came free with one of these DVD player deals, where five godawful straight to video flicks are thrown in as some kind of enticement. Honestly, it’s so awful it’s not even funny. Not so much straight to video as straight to the recycling bin.

Right - your turn. Yes, you, over there. No use hiding, I can see you (and for god’s sake take your finger out of your nose - it's really not very becoming).

I'm Confused (So No Change There Then)

At the risk of sounding like a doofus, didn’t Apparitions seem, well, you know, a little bit complicated?

Perhaps it might help if I tried to summarise what the devil (see what I did there?) was going on:

A young sufferer of leprosy, Vimal, prays to an image of Mother Theresa at the same time as the little saintly nun shuffles off this mortal coil. And whaddya know, hallelujah, he's cured! At exactly the same time in London, Liam and his wife conceive their daughter, Donna, who, ten years later, seeks out the exorcist Father Jacob (Martin Shaw). Liam is nuts, a fervent atheist who just happens to be possessed. In turn, Liam believes his daughter is also ‘possessed’, but by the spirit of Mother Theresa, which makes Liam froth at the mouth a bit. Meanwhile, Vimal has now ended up in the same seminary as Father Jacob, where he is taunted by a homeless man, who informs him that it wasn’t Mother Theresa who cured him of his leprosy – it was Satan. Cripes! Vimal is eventually relieved of his skin in a sex sauna after helping Jacob with his exorcism of Liam.

Got that? Good. ‘Cos I didn’t.

It’s not as if the basic premise is difficult to understand. It’s just that the two main narrative threads – Jacob’s run-ins with Liam and Vimal desperately trying to hang on to his Devil-donated skin – didn’t really seem to be related. In fact it was like watching two distant cousins in blindfolds blundering about and occasionally smacking into each other. It didn’t help that Apparitions started with Vimal’s story, which was little more than a sub-plot. Still, it gave an excuse for a truly gruesome skinning at the episode’s conclusion.

I can appreciate that many narratives might sound daft when reduced to a summary, but Apparitions truly is completely bonkers. Is it frightening? Not really. And that’s mostly because I found it too complicated, due to the fact that there was too much flippin’ plot. If you’re going to saturate a 60 minute drama with two significant narrative strands, it would be handy if they actually ran into each other every now and again.

Or maybe I’m just a doofus, who knows?

Friday Night Muzak - The Go! Team

Just about to go and watch Apparitions (good old Sky Plus). Wish me luck.

Memery Goodness

I got tagged by the bloggingly prodigious Stevyn Colgan – it’s a good one, but I can’t guarantee to stick to the thirty word limit (perhaps the meme police will come get me – here’s hoping, I love a good scrap).

Sod Richard and Judy. Sod Oprah. What would you advise people to read? Name your favourite:

(a) Fiction book
(b) Autobiography
(c) Non-fiction book
(d) A fourth book of your choice from any genre.

Explain why the books are essential reads in no more than 30 words per book.

a) Fiction: Jonathan Meades, Pompey: “the sleaze epic”. A great, big sprawling rambunctious romp which takes in Portsmouth, the origins of HIV, and an insane sojourn in Belgium; one of the most inventive novels I’ve ever read. In addition, Jonathan Meades has written one of the best short stories ever: Filthy English, at turns enticing and repellent. Read it and be appalled.

b) Autobiography: John Lydon: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. Forget the gurning loonpanted fruitcake of Jungle and butter advert fame. In his day, John Lydon was at the forefront of a huge sonic revolution – and I’m not talking about the Sex Pistols here.

c) Non-fiction: Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine. Some sections of this book – in particular the parts regarding the South African banking system and its part in apartheid, will literally take your breath away. If you thought that post-apartheid South Africa was somehow finding its feet, think again. Super scary.

d) The Fourth book: JM Coetzee: Disgrace. I prefer my ‘entertainment’ to be served up with a large side order of shock and awe (or a shovel round the back of the head, whatever you prefer). Just when you think you’ve got Coetzee taped, he pulls a series of unexpected narrative left turns that leave you wondering why all literary fiction can’t be this good. The ending is sad, profoundly unsettling and bleak in a way that no film could ever match.

Right, I tag Lawrence (what is it about Lawrence’s blog? Every time I go there, I always end up finding something both hilarious and genuinely demented), Rachel (honestly, Rach, you gotta calm down on the project front: Doctor Chip suggests more time on Lolcat and perhaps the odd Airfix kit), Potdoll (who I’m glad to say now addresses her readers as ‘Happy Knickers’) and Lucy (in need of a relaxing post after taking great big chunks out of Shooting People for the last couple of weeks).

Race Against Time

After having read Rachel’s and Lawrence’s current project list, I’m starting to seriously ponder two things:

a) In order to find the time, they have obviously made some sort of pact with the Great Satan himself (Noel Edmonds, in case you were wondering)

b) I am a lazy, unmotivated arse.

How do they do it? Jiggered if I know. Suffice to say, I’ve spent the last three months or so writing and rewriting my Red Planet entry. Even if it doesn’t get through the first cut, it’s something I want to keep working on (I’m even considering writing a second episode, fer chrissakes).

The timescale for this year’s Red Planet suited me quite well, as it happened – I rewrote the first ten pages about half a dozen times before I had something I was happy with, which I did in parallel with a rough first draft. By the time the deadline loomed, it was ready for a good kicking courtesy of Adrian Reynolds. To be fair, Adrian offered up more in the way of what he terms ‘coaching’ than a strict reader’s report which again, suited me just fine. A couple of Adrian’s suggestions really resonated, and I’ve used his sage words as fuel to inform a second draft, essentially a page one rewrite. Let’s face it, first drafts are crap: mine are always overwritten, chock full of exposition, static conversations and weird, jerky pacing. In any rewrite, I can usually zero in on these types of occurrences and start to pull apart and put back together scenes with a more focused eye. Now, at the end of the second draft (it’s taken about a month), I’ll go out again for another read with a different reader. Then another rewrite probably. And then it just might be bordering on the ‘OK’. You get the idea. Just as well I prefer rewriting to the grunt work of getting a first draft down on the page.

There we have it: four months work essentially. I’ve been tinkering with that treatment a little bit as well, but I’m not doing anything further on it until I get something in writing (an MOU would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath). But that’s another story...

So tell me guys (I’m looking at you, Rachel and Lawrence): how do you do it? Do you share some sort of fancy machine that somehow elongates time? If so, do you want to swap it for mine that seems to do exactly the opposite (on a trial basis, of course. I’ll let you have yours back if you ask nicely). ;-)

Swish Meeting Room

Day job wise, I’ve had meetings all over (Miami, Paris, Amsterdam, Swindon), usually in so-called “meeting rooms” where the overriding colour scheme is beige. So it made a pleasant change to go to a meeting here last Friday - the café at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Nice, innit? They do a mean sandwich as well, by the way...

Googletastic

Below is a list of Google search phrases that for some reason bring people to this esteemed blog (I haven’t done one of these for a while now, but these were just too good/random/borderline demented to pass up):

Second hand octaver pedal in Bournemouth – what’s an octaver pedal? And the last time I went to Bournemouth was to see James Blunt (don’t ask).

Super scary things to print – happy to be of assistance! Try this, or this, or even this.

Pic of Bruce Forsythe wife – doing what? Knitting? Rinsing out Bruce’s rug? Watching old age creep up on her? ;-) Honestly, people: you have to be more specific.

Genre is rude word – you know something? It probably is. However, ‘arse’ is much ruder and can be used to greater effect.

Pictures of Anna Torv in underwear – I had no idea that Anna Torv was Rupert Murdoch’s niece. Not that it matters in the search for pictures of her in her underwear of course, but I just thought I’d mention it (thank god it’s Anna Torv underwear pictures that bring people here rather than ones of Rupert Murdoch *shudder*).

You are a tit – I think that’s enough search items for one day.

War on Reality

Contains spoilers for Spooks, Series 7, Episode 1

Don’t get me wrong, I love Spooks – I love it so much I’ll even watch it in French (and my French is notoriously rubbish). But as Adrian Reynolds has pointed out in insightful fashion, there’s something a bit ‘smoke and mirrors’ about the new series - and I can see what he means. This resides predominantly in the ever-so-slightly clunky plot mechanics. Hmmm – thinking about it, perhaps that’s a little unfair: ‘clunky’ is the wrong word. When you consider the way that writers Neil Cross and Ben Richards handle the various thorny problems that a Spooks narrative throws at them, you start to realise what a finely tuned machine the whole thing really is. It may well all be smoke and mirrors, but you don’t actually realise until way after the closing credits – which in my book, makes it a pretty major achievement.

Let’s face it, most narratives are going to contain some stray thread of implausibility or lapse in logic that, once worried and pulled at, means that the whole thing is going to unravel like a demented cat’s cradle. However, Spooks seems to be a special case. Last week’s opener started from a point that could have easily been totally implausible, but - due to some superlative writing - didn’t feel artificial or contrived: well, not that much.

Private Andy Sullivan is kidnapped by an al-Qaeda cell and threatened with a spot of decapitation unless Remembrance Day is cancelled. In a show of ballsy Brit bravura, Sullivan refuses to read out his captors’ pre-written statement, forcing them to read it out themselves. Once in receipt of the offending broadcast, the Spooks team is able to match the voice pattern of one of Sullivan’s captors against ones they have on electronic file – this inevitably puts them on the trail of the cell and its nefarious backers.

Taking this at face value, there doesn’t seem to be much wrong with it – and indeed, there isn’t. But the logic Nazi that resides deep in my psyche couldn’t quite shake the thought that it just seemed a teensy bit contrived. The fact that one of Sullivan’s captors is forced to read out his own written statement direct to camera is the conceit that essentially sets the narrative in motion – without the voice to match to a suspect on their spiffy CGI database, the Spooks team would have been on a hiding to nothing straight from the off. I’m not a connoisseur of kidnap videos by any stretch, but I can’t imagine there’s any way on god’s green earth that any self-respecting al-Qaeda member would read out his own list of demands on a video which every security service in the western hemisphere would be queuing up to analyse with one of those weird toothcomb things.

Like I said – I’m a logic Nazi. It’s a problem – unfortunately not one that can be treated with any known medication (I’ve tried the odd anti-psychotic, but they don’t work either).

However, all credit to the writers – at least they get this little implausibility out of the way quickly.

Which then neatly leads on to the next teensy tiny problem:

Even though Spooks is grounded heavily in an instantly recognisable world, it’s almost as if that world is too real. So Spooks compensates for uncomfortable reality by giving everything an overwhelmingly positive spin, and throws in a bit of wish fulfilment to boot as well: kidnap victims are rescued unscathed, terror plots are successfully foiled with no civilian casualties, and MI5 agents have the public’s best interests at heart. Reality itself is far more horrific, random and mundane than anything Spooks could throw at us. But then again, it’s just fiction - right? Why would anyone want pesky reality playing a part in proceedings?

At least Spooks has the good sense to up the ante every now and again and kill off one of its main characters - which sort of begs the question: how much reality can we really take? I love Spooks, but every now and again, it would be nice to see how the team deal with the fall out from a full-on terrorist outrage (inasmuch as terrorist outrages can ever really be described as ‘nice’) ;-)

Dead Good

Contains spoilers for Dead Set, Hammer House of Horror

Over the last ten days or so I’ve been catching up with various episodes from the Hammer House of Horror series currently airing over on ITV3 – and what a treat they are. The three I’ve caught so far – Charlie Boy, The Thirteenth Reunion and Silent Scream (see here for further details on the series) – have been grim, desolate fun (although they may look a little hokey by modern standards). However, the one thing that these three episodes have in common is that they are all unremittingly bleak, which is a quality I don’t think you see often enough in modern horror.

A little while back I read something (probably on a blog somewhere, I forget) that suggested that all narratives needed to possess a certain degree of hope to make them meaningful and worthwhile experiences, as if drama is some sort of route to 'self-improvement' – this is something that the Hammer House of Horror holds no truck with whatsoever. Each episode ends on a decidedly downbeat note, where hope is taken outside and given a good kicking on the basis that that is where true horror lies: to witness the protagonist of Charlie Boy die through no real fault of his own is both disturbing and unsettling, which is surely what any respectable horror narrative should be aiming for. The Hammer series does this with a frightening regularity, and mostly without any unnecessary gore (which usually isn’t scary in the slightest).

One of my favourite films is My Little Eye, which has an ending so bleak that it made me feel physically unwell – which I think is a good thing. Throw in Session 9 and Blair Witch, and you have a triumvirate of some of the bleakest, most morbid films ever made (is it simply a coincidence that all three films are all shot on video? Maybe there’s something about the everyday, ‘homemade’ nature of the medium that makes these films genuinely unsettling).

So with these films in mind, it gives me great pleasure to announce that bleak is back with a vengeance, in the shape of the Charlie Brooker penned Dead Set, showing on E4 at the moment (last episode tonight). The pilot episode was terrific: unnerving and, above all else, genuinely frightening (again, shot mostly on digital video by the look of things). Like the Hammer House of Horror, Dead Set’s milieu is contemporary Britain, a recognisable scenario to anyone who’s seen more than ten minutes of Big Brother. However, Dead Set doesn’t go out of its way to satirise reality TV – if you’re looking for satire, then no doubt you’ll find it, but there’s more to Dead Set than simply putting the boot into Big Brother and its ilk. Even before the zombies show up (sprinting this way and that in true 28 Days Later stylee), the studio setting is bleak enough: a kind of claustrophobic maze where stressed out producers bark orders at interns, who are only too happy to be involved in the subterranean hell of TV production.

Also, Brooker seems to have got the tone just right – in today’s Guardian, Anne Billson says this:

Because horror movies tend to approach their themes more obliquely than other genres, they often succeed in getting under our skin where more self-consciously "serious" mainstream treatments of contemporary issues fail to cause a dent. Horror films draw on metaphors that are not polished and hermetically sealed, but misshapen or amorphous, like the monsters themselves, which leaves all the more room for individuals to interpret them on a personal level.

Brooker understands this all too well, and that’s what makes Dead Set such powerful viewing. Its narrative doesn’t labour the point with regards to reality TV, but at its core there’s something dark, twisted and nihilistic: witness the treatment of Davina McCall. Rather sportingly, Davina gets bitten in the throat early on by a member of the undead, and spends the first two episodes banging her head unthinkingly on a door in an attempt to get at Patrick the producer. Of course there‘s a certain glee in doing this to a well known TV celebrity, but at the same time, Brooker uses Davina’s familiarity to paint something bleak and ultimately hopeless. Hope be damned - when TV is as good as this, who needs it?

Guilty Pleasures, Part 6 - 60 Minute Makeover

Terri Dwyer (the posh bird of Hollyoaks fame) presents a show on daytime TV entitled 60 Minute Makeover*, which does exactly what it says on the tin: a swarm of builders, painters, decorators, chippies and sparkies (and that bloke from Big Brother) descend upon a house deserving of a little interior design TV magic. The property on Thursday’s show looked like an MI5 safe house; by the time the team had finished, it looked like Joe 90’s crash pad, all dizzying optic wallpaper and retina scorching fluorescence.

Ordinarily, I try and avoid shows like this as they’re all essentially the same: moving wallpaper, I suppose you’d call it. However, what made Thursday’s edition so riveting was that the recipient of the makeover (Umar) had absolutely no idea who Terri Dwyer was or what the hell the show was all about. Terri and her enormous team greeted Umar with a huge banner that screamed ’60 Minute Makeover’ in foot high letters. As Terri gaily proclaimed what they’d all been doing with themselves for the past hour, Umar looked completely baffled: “It’s a programme, right?” he said, wondering who the hell all these people with the cheesy grins gathering round him were. Even when he was treated to a tour of his own made over house he looked as if he’d just stumbled out of a war zone.

Perhaps we are now getting to the point where there are simply too many celebrities. Half the point of a show such as 60MM (which sounds like a sequel to 8MM) is that there should be at least some flicker of recognition as the recipient realises they’ve been ‘had’: much hilarity and realisation ensues. In the good old days of Changing Rooms, this was a given. Nowadays, nobody has a clue who these presenters are.

However, watching good people like Umar struggle to figure out what the devil is going on and who the hell Terri Dwyer is is superb entertainment in my book; it’s similar to the feeling I get when I inadvertently catch CelebAir – I mean, Michelle Marsh? Dan O’Connor? Amy Lamé? Who are these people? Maybe I need to start watching more daytime TV to catch up.
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*Note to self: for Christ’s sake, stop watching so much daytime TV.

Never Mind the Quality, Feel the Length

I’m not sure if I like Silent Witness or not. For the most part, it’s the older brother of Bonekickers, inasmuch as it spins stories out of a seemingly sedentary occupation. Pathology and archaeology both deal (mostly) with the dead, and there’s your challenge: how do you make a drama where your plot is partially driven by people who can’t answer back? Bonekickers continually wrestled with this question, and didn’t altogether do a massively convincing job (mostly because it seemed unsure as to what it wanted to be: teatime romp, or post-watershed ‘issue’ drama). Silent Witness is more assured, as it figured this question out a long time ago. Rather than simply popping up to proclaim foul play and chewing on the obligatory pathologist’s sandwich, Dr Leo Dalton’s team usually find themselves right in the centre of the action – mostly due to the addition of the hard-nosed, no-nonsense copper, DI McKenzie.

Next problem: you’ve got two hours of prime time TV to fill – does a story such as the recent Judgement penned by Christian Spurrier need two hours to tell its story?

I don’t think it does.

It’s been covered elsewhere of course, but Jane Tranter’s parting shot before heading off to LA (which can be found here) seems a hugely strange way in which to talk about the BBC’s ‘single’ drama output:

An audience doesn't think “great, a single drama's on tonight”.

(For an alternative view on this, see a David Hare rant here).

Rather than taking issue with the ‘fetishisation’ of the single drama, perhaps it might be opportune to talk about the fetishisation of the series itself – or, for the purposes of this post, the two-parter. Many ITV dramas (Midsomer Murders, A Touch of Frost) wind up their stories in a single evening – granted, it’s still two hours of prime time hitched to a drama ‘brand’, but at least you don’t have to give up two evenings to catch the whole damn thing. That said, perhaps it’s worth pondering why a drama such as Silent Witness is shown in two halves. News at Ten occupies an immoveable place in the BBC schedule, which means that everything else has to gravitate around it, and the many gruesome autopsy scenes means that Silent Witness is not exactly pre-watershed fare. Regardless of the fact that a lot of TV drama mentioned here doesn’t really justify a two hour running time, this must put programme makers in a bit of a quandary. Judgement certainly didn’t need two hours, but the schedule *sort of* demands that it does. What’s the alternative? An hour one night, followed by thirty minutes the next? That wouldn’t work. Two hours seems to be the default setting, so two hours is what you get, whether the drama deserves it or not.

The other problem is that drama is not immune from branding. Silent Witness is now in its twelfth season and has been on our screens since 1996; in ad-speak, it would be described as a ‘strong brand’, and there’s nothing wrong with that – it’s probably the ‘hook’ that gets people watching in the first place. As with any brand, there are a series of identifying details that should be immediately recognisable: with Silent Witness, this identifier is partially contained within the title itself. The problem is that drama series often seem hampered by their reliance on these ‘signifiers’ – it’s almost as if there’s a checklist of branded bits that have to be ticked off before recognition kicks in. With single dramas such as The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall (strangely enough, another two hour drama but one that fully justified its running time) this isn’t so much of a problem, and the drama seems stronger as a result. However, single dramas probably don’t achieve such a high ‘brand recognition’ as series do, which is a huge shame (but not exactly a problem that can’t be remedied, I think).

Perhaps Tranter’s comments come down to nothing more than the holy grail of viewing figures: David Hare’s My Zinc Bed picked up a derisory one million viewers (about 4.5% of the overall audience) when it was broadcast on BBC2 at the back end of August, despite having a cast that featured Jonathan Pryce, Uma Thurman and Paddy Considine – all this says to me is that if you don’t have an instantly recognisable drama ‘brand’, you have to rely upon starry name actors, a strategy that simply didn’t work with My Zinc Bed.

Is the solution more single drama? Probably not. Maybe it’s a question of giving writers greater freedoms in the stories they choose to tell without being constrained by ‘branding’ concerns (and also giving writers other than David Hare and Stephen Poliakoff a crack of the whip). However, given the woeful performance of My Zinc Bed, it looks as if the big drama brands are here to stay (that said, a new series of Spooks starts on Monday, which has at least been one series that the BBC seems to get consistently right).

BBC Mess with Space/Time Continuum

Strictly Come Dancing is doing my head in, but probably not in a way you’d expect...

All filming is obviously done during the course of a single day, but in order to squeeze as much air time out of it as possible, the BBC spread the results of the filming across two evenings (the main ham twirling is done on a Saturday, then there’s the painfully prolonged results show on the Sunday). The only problem is that during Sunday's show, everyone pretends that they've re-convened and that it’s being filmed live (the only non-cunning difference between the Saturday and Sunday shows is that Tess Daly is wearing a different frock).

Now this is hardly a scandal along the lines of last year’s Blue Peter pussy outrage, but it has a peculiar effect inasmuch as it starts to make me doubt my own sanity. That, and the effect it must be having on the space/time continuum. I mean, there are people out there filming a show who are pretending that they’re doing it twenty four hours later than they really are (or maybe they aren’t, in which case I must be mental). Over on ITV, The X-Factor wraps everything up in a single evening, with the results show following hard on the heels on the live show (perhaps the BBC figured that their target audience would all be safely tucked up in bed with their cocoa by 10.35pm, and therefore too knackered to hang about to find out that Gary Rhodes is a borderline psychopath).

The upshot of this is that if the very fabric of the universe is ripped apart in the next couple of weeks, I’m going to blame Strictly Come Dancing (oh, and whilst we’re about it, I’ll blame The X-Factor as well – it gets blamed for everything else, so no-one will notice if we tack the end of the world onto the list as well ;-)).

Friday Night Muzak - The National

Codeword: Demented

Before I recount this story, let me just say that this sort of thing happens to me ALL THE TIME. I’m under no illusion that at the outset of any ‘writing career’, you’ve got to be pretty relentless when it comes to chasing down work, but the big difference with this one was how much it made me laugh (interspersed with a good degree of, ‘Oh, shit! Whatever next?’). I will try and be as discrete and polite as I possibly can be, so apologies in advance if you think I’m being coy – I just don’t want to upset anyone unnecessarily here, but perhaps it’s unavoidable at the end of the day - who knows?

Back in July this year, I responded to a highly unusual script call (through the Shooting People screenwriting bulletin, I think). Four times out of five I don’t even receive a reply, but on this occasion I did. The script I offered as a writing sample wasn’t exactly a 100% fit for the requirement, but it seemed unusual enough for the recipient (who we’ll call ‘Naomi’) to give it a whirl. And she liked it. It wasn’t quite what she had been tasked to find, but still – she stated she would be very happy to pass it on to some producers and directors ‘over here’.

I whizzed over another script and Naomi read that one as well. She liked it, and asked if I had optioned it to anyone? Uh, nope – not since I last checked anyway ;-)

In the meantime, I had a brainwave (a rare occurrence round these ‘ere parts) and plugged Naomi’s name into imdb.com. Turns out she’s an actress based in Los Angeles – a few minor credits, and then a role in this, directed by none than...

Uwe Boll.

Uh-oh.

It’s a living, as they say.

A couple of days later, Naomi e-mailed me to say she had passed one of my scripts onto the director Pitof. For the uninitiated, Pitof (or Jean-Christopher Comar to use his real name) was the visual effects designer for one of my favourite movies of all time, Delicatessen. He moved into directing with Vidocq in 2001 before re-locating to the States some time later where he directed...

Catwoman.

Uh-oh.

All this really shows is that you have absolutely no control over who reads your scripts – and indeed, why would you want any at this stage? Once the things are out there, it’s all you can do to hope that they’re not being used to prop open fire exits or being used as murder weapons or something.

That said, I’m reminded of a great Adrian Reynolds post here – I’m obviously a long way off from writing treatments set in the world of cage fighting and starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, but a boy can dream, eh? ;-)

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!