Broad Thoughts from a Home

January Update

2012-01-31T09:15:00.004Z

Happy New End of January!
Yes, um, I've been doing other stuff. I hope 2012 is treating you well so far. I've spend most of it in that funny writing and researching dance. You've a deadline but you don't feel entirely ready to fly so you're reading 'round at the same time as you're writing up your thoughts. Slowly, over the process your words get less provisional, the research tells you less and less you didn't already know, the deadline looms up and your confidence grows.

The thing I'm writing now has recently been announced, but it hasn't been announced it's by me, yet. Quite right too, I've only just delivered the first draft there's so much that can happen still down the line. It is however a great and slightly alarming boost to the system to see something you haven't finished yet already up for sale. It was the same when I was writing my book, and cover redesigns kept being emailed me. It all feels a bit unreal, but does encourage you to take care at busy junctions lest a bus suddenly overrules the slightly previous publicity material.
I'm quite pleased with it, though I've already spotted one small change I need to make due to shifting the setting of it a couple of months, but that can wait 'til I get notes back.

So next there's something else completed but unannounced, a couple of projects for me and trying to get an idea together for another possible bit of work.
The trick is going to be fitting everything in and getting a bit of exercise in. I've been a bit of a slug the last 3 or 4 months, it's time to get a bit of light and energy.
Hopefully, I'll have some more to tell you next month.

Counter-Measures

2011-12-13T10:33:00.003Z

I've not posted anything here for a while because I've found nothing I've wanted to say at length that someone else wasn't saying better (and really who needs another 'blog saying I've put the weight back on I lost after last time I put it on and am trying to lose it again?) and I've been unable to say anything about the things I've been doing that haven't been announced yet.

One of them is announced now, so I'm very happy to say I'm one of the four authors of the Counter-Measures series of audio plays from Big Finish Productions. It's a Doctor Who spin-off using a trio of characters that appeared in the series in 1988, and it's firmly set in 1964.
I'm quite pleased with the way my script came out, it's been a while since I exercised the radio drama writing muscles, and was absolutely delighted by how well the recording attended went.

I won't say too much about it now, but the cast are top drawer. Doctor Who fans will remember Simon Williams', Pamela Salem's and Karen Gledhill's performances from the telly and, if they were quite devoted fans back then, the extra layers given to them in Ben Aaronovitch's novelisation of the story, and the actors brought both back beautifully and moved the characters on, during my day in studio.
They're bolstered in this new series by the wonderfully witty Hugh Ross, as new regular character Sir Tobias Kinsella, and he fits in effortlessly, establishing an instant chemistry with the team that delighted me.
My episode also features Big Finish regulars John Banks and Helen Goldwyn demonstrating just some of their versatility, and Stephen Greif giving a spot on reading of a character I'd described as a cross between Alan Sugar and Ken Campbell. I'd expected an actor to go with a voice a bit like one or the other with that brief, but he amazingly found the bloke who sounded like both of them at once.

Anyway, all the details that are available at present are here. More will come nearer release date, and I'm sure I'll let you know the minute a trailer goes up online.

"Onwards and upwards!"

August Company

2011-08-02T20:59:00.005+01:00

Here we are then, breaking the silence again just 7 months on. What can I report on? Not very much, I've two projects underway that started up in the Spring that I can't say a thing about at the moment, and a bunch of plans for later in the year when they're out of the way. I won't say what they are because you always look an idiot when real life turns out differently.

Most of the 'what I'm doing' and 'what are my half-baked thoughts about things' content that used to fill these pages is now filleted up and smeared over Twitter. You're welcome to type "You're wrong, dull and an idiot." at me there. I 'tweet' as @ianzpotter.

The Faction Paradox book came out to almost universally positive reviews earlier in the year. It's easy enough to google them (apart from the stuff on Gallifreybase you need to sign up to view). There was actually one review that was a bit unkind about several stories, which is probably the most fun to read, even if the reviewer now seems upset that it's been commented on by people who can view but not post on their forum. Disappointingly, even that broadly negative review seemed to regard my work as competent.

Hey ho. On we go.

Tentative Return

2010-12-28T17:55:00.002Z

Been a while, hope you're all well. I'll try to post here a bit more often next year.
Latest news? I should have a new short story coming up for Obverse Books' Faction Paradox collection in 2011, first draft's just about sorted.
Erm... I revisited Jungle Jeremy, an old script of mine, on Audioboo to get some sound design practice in again. I hadn't done a really big project since 2007 and I miss it. It starts here, It's a period adventure parody in six five minute long pieces and I'm quite pleased with how it worked out for a hobby piece. Each section has a link to the next under it if you make it past the initial set up.
Will write again soon!

Anti-Social Media

2010-07-24T16:49:00.002+01:00

Hello.

How much time do you have? It turns out it's a limited amount, and yet somehow everything has to get done in it.

I've noticed I've been posting a lot less on here in the last year or so, and I think that's partly because of Facebook, which started off as a fabulous way for me to keep in touch with people and maintain the illusion of office chit-chat while working in splendid isolation but seems to have slowly turned into a devourer of both work and leisure time. It's dangerously full of instant gratification, distractions, campaigns and really fascinating and funny people in far too many time-zones all conspiring to lure you away from your true course, and, as a bonus, eating up the slack time you'd have spent writing an occasional "weblog" in bite-size status update chunks.

It's got particularly wearying the last few weeks as I've been researching and tentatively writing bits of a play, and have reached the stage where research has become a delaying tactic keeping me from to the main business of actually writing and Facebook has become what I do in the breaks between the delaying activity.

So, as a little experiment I've decided to give Facebook up for a bit and see how the working days shape up without it. Next week will be Facebook free, almost as if my life is some annoying lifestyle article in a quality broadsheet that assumes you live the same media-saturated life as the author. Twitter's going too, it's even more littered with links for the butterfly-brained than Facebook and far less like real conversations.

We'll see how it goes. Who knows, the extra time this e-cold turkey buys me may even allow me time to complete a half finished AudioBoo sitting in pieces on my hard disk or complete this sentence eve

Dramarama

2010-07-01T16:37:00.002+01:00

Just returned from the TV Drama Writers Festival in Leeds, a really interesting couple of days (some of which was video recorded and I expect will end up on the BBC Writersroom page fairly soon).

It was really nice to catch up and chat with some writers and producers I'd met before and meet a few people for the first time, among them Dan Tetsell, the script editor of Radio 7's NewsJack who's put some things of mine into the show, even if not all of them made into the transmitted episodes!
I also discovered a heartbreaking missed opportunity relating to last year's Bill Mitchell radio documentary, a very famous actor's daughter had 'phoned up after transmission asking why he hadn't been asked to contribute. If we'd known he was a mate of Bill's we would have gone to him like a shot!

Tributes to Alan Plater were, of course paid and quite right too. I only met him once, quite briefly, and always wanted to meet him again. A very warm, approachable and supremely talented man, he was also wonderfully indiscreet about the film star Ava Gardner within minutes of our meeting. How brilliant is that? Funny, clever and nice. Never take that rare combination for granted.

There were some great sessions across the two days with Toby Whithouse, Tony Jordan, Alice Nutter and Jed Mercurio among those giving some serious food for thought., and you can glean a flavour of them from Twitter where Jason Arnopp in particular has been reported some of the pull out quotes, I found John Yorke's presentation on popular series very interesting this morning and full of farmore really useful practical advice than I'd expected. If it doesn't end up detailed elsewhere or on the BBC pages, I'll write up some of my notes at some point. I've also become fixated on the idea that documentary maker Adam Curtis who spoke at the event is a young Oliver Postgate, they share the same gentle patrician toned narration voice and Curtis even has a slight look of the great man. I now desperately want to see a Curtis film in the cut up collage style of his The Power of Nightmares using only bits of old Small Films shows (The Power of Bagpuss?)

Hats off to all involved. Having given a presentation to young writers recently I can easily imagine just how much more daunting mounting two days of the things to battle-weary veterans would be.
Particularly pleased to have found myself having new drama ideas as a result of being there. Sometimes you only find out what you think when you find you're saying it aloud to someone else...

It's Only A Model! Sshh!

2010-06-11T13:14:00.004+01:00

From what I've read, mainly press bumph, Chris Chibnall's Camelot (apparently an extension of abandoned early thoughts for what became the Merlin TV series) seems to be another wrong way to do a King Arthur series, though I could easily be stupidly wrong, as usual.

I should stress that for my money the only two really good King Arthur TV shows were Andrew Davies' Sunday serial The Legend of King Arthur from 1979 and the RSC Morte D'Arthur from 1984, which was essentially a beautifully illustrated monologue with actors as moving pictures behind John Barton's finely judged reading of the end of Malory.

For me, it should be a Precinct Drama with Camelot as the big standing set- lots of writers, big ensemble cast, a new quest of the week every time, and a running back-story at court that comes together at the series end, an anthology drama series with shared secondary characters like Clocking Off.

It should be made like The Bill or Doctors with several episodes in production simultaneously, all using different leads and crews and there really shouldn't be a house style, it could be political, allegorical, gritty, funny or fantastical as each quest required.

I'd like Jimmy McGovern to show-run it as The Table, with an initial run of 8 x 60min, please. Bring it to me for Autumn 2012, ta.

Housekeeping

2010-05-31T11:40:00.001+01:00

I'm going to start moderating comments. Sorry, just too much spam now.

It's a Question of Time - The Mystery of Karen Shuttleworth's Age

2010-05-30T23:37:00.000+01:00

1970 was a busy year for John Shuttleworth, perhaps the busiest we know of - he triumphed as Wishee Washee at the Dinnington Alhambra, married, became a widower, was involved in a crazy road accident and met his second wife recuperating. The other key dates in his life are somewhat harder to judge.
It's clear his sole agent Ken Worthington doesn't move in next door until some point after his 1973 New Faces appearance but we never establish exactly when.

We also know that Darren, John's son is a teenager legally allowed to work in Victoria Wine by 1993. We can extrapolate a birth date somewhere around 1974-1975 from this. We also know John's younger daughter Karen was inspired by Band Aid in December 1984 to offer her tangerine to the starving. As Karen was then aged 10 it appears Karen was also born before the end of 1974, meaning there's probably around a year between the pair in age. However, at the time of the Europigeon TV special in 1998 Karen is still at school (despite apparently being 24 years old). One might argue that Europigeon involves several scenes clearly recreated for TV that had we'd previous heard occurring for real on the radio in 1994, but that still leaves us with a 20 year old schoolgirl Karen.

This can perhaps be fudged if we assume John has merely claimed Karen was on a school trip at the time of Europigeon to excuse her absence from proceedings. Perhaps he wishes to obscure details of her life to avoid his celebrity impacting on her existence, perhaps John claimed she was 10 at the time of her 1984 charitable gesture simply because it scanned better.
We know that Karen has now finally left both school and home and although Shuttleworth time seems to move slower than normal time we can tentatively assume she's now somewhere between the ages of 28 and 36. It is rumoured we may learn more of her circumstances as this current series continues.

However with John and Mary celebrating their silver wedding anniversary in 2003 everything gets completely mucked up. Oof.

April is the Cruellest Month

2010-04-29T16:18:00.002+01:00

I haven't so much let April slip by like March did, as not tell you- my loyal readers who so eagerly fill my comments box with non European characters that I instinctively mistrust, what I've been up to.

Well, I've displaced some of this 'bloggery time to Audioboo.fm. You can find my posting there at audioboo.fm/ianzpotter, I like the five minute limit of it, and I may dabble in talking directly onto the thing like most users more in future, at the moment I'm mainly posting old recordings and new short bits of work there. Of course this development has also sent me into the dread clutches of twitter where most Audioboo users seem to spend their real lives (there I'm at twitter.com/ianzpotter).

I've spent the last few weeks getting cross about the standard of political discourse in the country and have fled on a number of occasions to the BBC World Service - in the daytime, when Radio 4 is still on! Unbelievable!
It's been reassuring to hear news about the Greek economy and German politics and massive oil slicks rather than bulletins entirely devoted to dissecting the fallout from the entrapment of a politician who has been dismissive of someone in private.

You can also find this rather ace trail on there a lot at the moment.
It's the work of Ben Motley who used to produce the Comedy Club for Radio 7. I expect he'll get prestigious trailer awards for it.

The last couple of days I've spent working up a little audio demo for a comedy pilot, which has been interesting and helped remind me just how bloody useless vocoders are for most sound design jobs. More on that if anything comes from it.

Hope you're enjoying the new Doctor Who. I am. Episodes 1 and 4 have both been great, with episodes 2 and 3 only marred for me by some hurried, gappy plotting here and there, some surprisingly static direction and of course those rather odd shaped new Daleks which look distinctly clunky in profile. The regulars are great.

Next week I'll be presenting the Q&A for the new Chris Morris film, Four Lions at the Sheffield Showroom with producer and Warp boss Mark Herbert, so I'm looking forward to that a lot.

I think those are your highlights. The most intriguing development is this, though... Is it returning through the Darkness? http://bonkst.tumblr.com/ Search me.

Time Marches On...

2010-03-31T23:21:00.002+01:00

Seem to have mislaid March. Not quite sure how that happened. It was full of stuff, I just seem not to have told you about it. Highlights were friends having a baby, seeing Richard Herring give his Hitler Moustache and the Northern Lights sort of glow slightly. I also attended a rather interesting conference about radio production, discovered the interesting, if currently slightly underpopulated, world of Audioboo and had a few sort of ideas.
Hardly seems 31 days worth though, does it? Must do better.

My Answers to the BBC Strategy Review Consultation

2010-03-05T20:06:00.006Z

This is very long, but if you're bored enough to want to know what I think and feel, here it is in detail.
If you want to know the questions I'm responding to you'll have to do the thing yourself.

https://consultations.external.bbc.co.uk/departments/bbc/bbc-strategy-review/consultation/consult_view

I agree with only two of the principles unreservedly- putting quality first and guaranteeing access to licence fee payers. Of course judgements of 'quality' are necessarily subjective, which makes the principle difficult to pin down.

Objective 2's talk "stopping things in some areas" is too vague to make it a useful principle and when coupled the concept of "value for money" in Objective 4 becomes a dangerous one, if misinterpreted to mean the BBC must produce only output aimed at larger audiences.
Together they set a disturbing precedent for the Corporation.
The BBC and the commercial broadcasters work as correctives to each other, thus my feeling is that while having a place as a broadcaster to audiences of 10 million and above the BBC has to recognise that with media fragmentation there are now many more people not listening to or viewing the big populist programmes and it has a vital role in supporting the 'niche' audiences which a straightforward commercial broadcaster, primarily governed by a need to make money, would resist.

For this reason I have to reject objectives 2 and 4.

Objective 5 is a meaningless open phrase, which can be interpreted as either cutting back or expanding areas of operation. It is 'management speech' which I find unhelpful. If, as I assume, it is a euphemistic phrase to cover cutting back on BBC services, it should be expressed more boldly and honestly. I think there is an argument for pulling back on some areas of operation which broadly replicate advertising funded broadcasting.

The BBC should

Reflect the diversity of voices of our country

Be the home for both intelligent broadcast and popular entertainment

Provide services which set standards for high quality output across the fragmenting digital market place.

Increase the accessibility of its wide ranging archive holdings and ensure the continued production of a similarly broad output in future.

Put the interests of its licence fee payers above the complaints of competitors.

TV Current Affairs output has been weakened. Panorama is a shadow of the programme it was. Tabloid, personality led and afraid to deal with issues of complexity.

I would also say that BBC One daytime programming is insufficiently distinguishable from its commercial competitors. However I appreciate the costs in producing quality TV for the smaller daytime audiences are considerable.
Given the problems commercial broadcasters claim to have at present, I'd suggest that if the BBC is overstretched financially then reducing daytime TV output might be a valid alternative. Does the BBC really have to be broadcasting across the whole day on two channels given that the majority of people accessing BBC output during normal working hours are using the radio, web, CBBC or CBeebies?

Children's Radio considers to be a disaster. Since the demise of the old Radio 5 it has been shunted around the schedule like an unwanted public service obligation. It occurs to me that some of the many, many hours Radio 5 Live Extra is broadcasting a loop of highlights could be put to better use allowing children a chance to learn the valuable skill of imaginative listening.
Its current shunting onto BBC Radio 7 at hours that force it to be consumed via iPlayer alone is an absurdity.

More authored drama on television. The growth of the series and serial as dominant forms of TV drama and the growth of a commissioning culture that seeks to smooth off the idiosyncrasies of writers has resulted in a surfeit of technically competent copyists of popular forms while stifling a range of interesting voices.
A single drama slot in the traditions of The Wednesday Play and Play for Today would go some way to restoring challenging TV drama as something the BBC produces rather than buys from HBO.

Children's TV now needs to reclaim some of its older viewers, if Blast and Switch are going so that there is a valid alternative for younger teens to the output of commercial broadcasters. Older teens have BBC THREE as well as E4 but the younger teens were taken out of CBBC's remit when Blast and Switch were introduced.

BBC ONE is adequate at present. The popular drama and comedy from Spooks and Doctor Who and QI to Outnumbered works well but I think both the Breakfast and Daytime schedules are insufficiently distinct from ITV1 and Channel 4 offerings.
Current Affairs is also poorly served on ONE, and the clash of BBC and ITN bulletins as 10PM is an unfortunate result of the confusion of market forces, public service and the dictates of watershed scheduling.
I also feel ONE should look at its late night film schedule, increasingly composed of fairly recent but often quite poor output. Audiences after 11pm at night are unlikely to be scared of older output which may often be of greater 'quality' (again that difficult word to measure). I don't know when I last saw a black and white film on BBC ONE, yet I regularly rent them on DVD and often go to see them at the cinema, it seems sad the BBC which gave me much of my cinematic education seems reluctant to do so for future generations.

BBC TWO has lost some of its identity since many of its natural evening programmes became BBC FOUR originated shows repeated there.
The saga of the poor treatment of the documentary film strand Storyville does not need to be rehearsed here. I welcome the pledge that distinctive comedy is to have a home on TWO again. The identity of TWO as a more adventurous comedy commissioner has been somewhat muddied by the shows shared with THREE and FOUR or 'promoted' to ONE. The confidence to schedule programmes in fixed positions would of course be welcomed. The recent development of the 'post Newsnight ' slot for comedies that weren't drawing audiences in their original timeslot speaks volumes for the crisis of confidence at TWO!

THREE is naturally a confused channel, it's the nature of the audience it covers! I find much of its factual output patronising, but I understand that these kind of Entertainment Features shows are considered to be the best way to reach a youth audience. The 'fanzine' shows built on the back of more mainstream show 'brands' are also somewhat formulaic, but some of the drama and comedy output is of an excellent standard.

BBC FOUR is sadly only about a third of a channel, most of the output is of an excellent quality and aimed squarely at viewers like me, but for financial reasons it all has to be repeated far too often. I wouldn't however want the station to have it's output re-merged into BBC TWO simply because now TWO's identity has shifted to exclude the majority of FOUR style programming I believe it will be nigh on impossible to put the genie back in the bottle.

BBC PARLIAMENT broadcasts some occasionally interesting output and often fascinating archive material. Obviously the current content is often out of its control! I particularly enjoyed the broadcast of Stephen Fry's speech in defense of the BBC's core values some time ago. It's a rousing, heartfelt declaration of what's good about the Corporation that I hope staff at all levels at the BBC can take on board, particularly when feeling beleaguered by attacks from the commercial media sector! One of the Corporation's many valuable niche services.

Red Button content rarely works on my Digibox so I'm unable to judge it beyond that level.

The output of Radio 1 and 2 is depressingly personality led, anodyne and musically unadventurous. It is perhaps too like commercial radio if the BBC management's current argument that it should not be damaging radio competitors is to be taken seriously.

Radio 1 last had me as a regular listener when the Evening Sessions ended around 2002. My listening in the last 8 years has not encouraged me to return often since. I absolutely accept that Radio 1 has to continue to cater to its core audience of young pop music fans interested in celebrity culture and pop music and understand that change to that remit to attract listeners in their 30s and above would cause changes to the identity of the station that should be resisted.

Radio 1Xtra I have listened to less than half an hour of. It was unclear to me what its remit was beyond a broad perception it was to cover the catch all 'Music of a Black Origin' which the very chart orientated Radio 1 wasn't catering for. It's unclear to me if this distinction would be retained under the proposed changes to output which talk about forging closer links between 1 and 1Xtra. Cynically, I suspect that just means reducing the amount of unique output generated for 1Xtra.

I welcome the presence of popular culture documentaries and Mark Radcliffe's warm, intelligent programme in the evenings on Radio 2. However I turn to them only when other broadcasting offers no better alternative. I find the comedy output on Radio 2 distinctly uninspiring, having last found myself engaged by a 2 show when That Was Then, This Is Now aired in January 2008.
The BBC's management's pledge to better serve its existing older audience for Radio 2 seems wise. The channel does seem confused at present not knowing who it's talking too.

Radio 3 I listen to only occasionally, mainly for Early Music, some of its spoken word Arts coverage and occasional drama. I have no complaints about its output, when I listen to it I find it of the very highest quality, it is simply a station that I desire to listen too only occasionally.

Radio 4 is a station I've been a fan of since childhood, though I personally regret the increasing star-led homogeneity of its comedy output, the 11PM slots were once trumpeted as experimental though they rarely are now, and although find the consumers affairs output unlistenable I find the rest of it generally excellent.
I would suggest that the combativeness of the regular presenters of Today and Any Questions is less effective in generating useful discussion than the playful but direct approach of Eddie Mair on PM. Sometimes they make heat rather than light and they could learn a lot from his approach. Seasoned media operators know they have limited time on air, and often find a row serves them better than a calm debate.

Radio 5Live, I listen to only for football commentary, and have only the partisan debates about perceived bias that all fans have when an ill informed pundit talks unfavourably about their team.

5 Live Sports Extra, seems to primarily broadcast the same as 5 or extended looping trailers for what's coming up.
If the BBC does plan to reduce spending on sports rights this seems a white elephant for the brief periods it is in operation.
I must confess this may be because of my individual usage of media- when I want to follow more than one sports event at once I turn to the BBC Website text summaries if by a computer, or Sky Sports News if by a television. If I'm near neither, I've no access to a digital radio.

6 Music is the only music radio station I listen too regularly, being sufficiently intelligent, amusing, and diverse to keep me from using the Last.FM website to discover new music.

BBC Radio 7 remains an engaging station though its limited resources have meant that its previous distinct commissioning of new comedy is now greatly reduced and the library of cleared archive it has to draw on is too small and too often repeated. It has recently begun to draw more on BBC local output and independently produced new drama which can be acquired cheaply, but are regrettably not always to the standard of some of its other output. The unwelcome development of rapid repeats of Radio 4 output is also regrettable, it reduces the uniqueness of the station, making it just a way to extend a show's iPlayer life at times! I strongly suspect this is also driven by finances.
The talk of rebranding Radio 7 as Radio 4 Extra leads me to fear a further reduction of the station's distinctiveness under the new proposals.

BBC Asian Network, I have listened too only for several hours, hearing a few weeks of the soap opera Silver Street and some lively discussion and music programmes. Although I'm not Desi, I'm interested in a range of cultures and a wide variety of music. I can't really honestly judge the station on my limited listening, and I'm not its primary audience. I'm not aware of any similar station where I live (in Sheffield) which worries me if it is lost. Will only areas with very large Asian population have a regional alternative if the service goes?

The BBC World Service- I occasionally listen too, more after Radio 4 close down that by DAB or Digibox. I'm aware it's resources have been cut back, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has as much interest in it as the BBC itself. I welcome the work it does, reporting international news in a way no domestic service covers and doing the value work of spreading the best of the BBC and Britain to a huge and understandably diverse audience. The new station branding with a voice declaiming BBC is less easy on the ears than Lillibulero but that's the concern of a British late night listener more than it is the core audience's!

Local TV and Radio I consume very irregularly, their very soft magazine news output and playlists similar to Radio 2 daytime output don't draw me in and so I'm ill-placed to judge these services.

The BBC's web pages are, I find, invaluable for news, the iPlayer, Sports commentary and increasingly podcasts.
The ongoing release of archive collections is also a very welcome feature.
The various fora are occasionally useful but as is the nature of such beasts often ridiculous combative places, generating more heat than light like the Today programme at its worst!

Not exclusively.
I have to strongly object to number 5.

The event that brings large groups together, often excludes more people than it includes. There are large portions of the population for whom state occasions, major religious festivals and sporting occasions hold no interest. The BBC should always have room for reflecting our diversity. The big 'unifying' Christmas Day hits on BBC ONE are watched by a minority of the population. There are always more of us wanting to do, watch, read, or listen to something else. We are not a Monoculture.
If the BBC fixates on reaching mass audiences, it reduces its claim to speak for us all.
It is a difficult balance obviously- the BBC will always be attacked by rivals for being either too popular or too esoteric, but it must strive for that balance.
There are sometimes big events that the BBC must choose to ignore.

These proposed changes are symptomatic of what troubles me in the current management's vision of the BBC.
They are confused, and self-contradictory and play into the hands of those who oppose public service.

Firstly, they aim to make cuts to radio and new media while leaving television the medium that can most easily absorb cuts untouched.

Secondly they fly in the face of preparing the country for digital switch-over across media.

Thirdly, they have confused rationale behind them as publicly expressed (the rationale are so confusing one might suspect that there are other reasons behind those being publicly stated. The cause celebre of 6 Music, is a station which we're being told is both too niche and too like other offerings (it clearly fits neither Radio 1 or 2 demographics and prominent figures in both commercial radio and the music industry refute claims that the private sector can offer anything comparable).

Fourthly, the empty words 'doing less things better' does not tally with my vision of the BBC. Some of the things the BBC is doing very well indeed and cost-effectively are amongst those now under threat and are services I believe reflect what should be the Corporation's core ethos. The blandness of the statement allows a multitude of interpretations, dividing objectors into those who dislike one type of programming or another, offering a variety of alternative sacrificial lambs for the chop. The principle being espoused has no relation to the actions being proposed. If money needs to be spread more thinly, all the huge changes you're making to radio could be paid for by having News 24 carry on a bit longer in the morning or BBC ONE close down for an hour in the afternoon. A cynic might think a difficult decision like this has been avoided because of how it would play in the media, when 'fringe' interests in digital radio can be picked off individually.

Individually, these proposed cutbacks would deprive me of one of my favourite radio stations 6 Music and begin the process of destroying the unique identity of one of my other favourites, BBC Radio 7, but that is not my primary concern. Thoselosses are symptoms of what I believe to be a wrong headed approach to the Corporation's future.

I think the current review has naively gambled to court short-term popularity with politicians while neglecting to serve the greater good of the BBC and the public,

I would expect Digital TV and DAB radio transmission to be rolled out across the UK with a full range of channels to make switchover worthwhile rather than an exercise in selling radio bandwidth!
I would also expect that the analogue transmissions of radio and TV continue until there is sufficient take up of the receiving technology to make switch over practical. It's not enough that there are transmitters covering everywhere, you have to make people want the receivers! By cutting digital content you slow the take up of new services, transmission and content are connected!
I welcome the iPlayer, with the failure of Project Kangaroo expect to see further and further commercial challenges to this popular and core BBC service. It should be defended vociferously, as it is likely to be the next public service challenged for having a commercial impact.

The TV Heaven facility at NMeM and the BFI's Mediatheque building on it, have proven a desire for the general public as well as specialist researchers to have greater access to archive programming.
The BBC has done good work building on this with the online archive collections. It is regrettable that the useful accessible version of the BBC's INFAX catalogue was taken off line. Information is sometimes just as useful as the programme content itself.
Greater access to archive will almost certainly require dedicated broadcast channels (like 6 Music and Radio 7 ironically), and an expansion of the BBC's online presence (again I'm sure the irony won't escape you).
It will also require money. Rights don't come cheap. During a period of proposed cost-cutting and axeing and rebranding archive services I don't see how the laudable aim of making our broadcast heritage more accessible can be met.

Regrettably, there is no easy way of squaring this with "doing fewer things better".

I am not concerned about the BBC's value for money. I'm not sure why you think I am.
I am however concerned about the value for money of SKY packages, which is why I don't use them. It might at some point be worth spending some time drawing up some detailed price comparisons for the services. I doubt many newspapers would run them, but it would be instructive to those who could find media outlets that would print them.

Not all of them.

Pop is a ridiculous label for the diversity of Radio 1, Radio 2 and 6 Music's output, it assumes a homogeneity of output that simply isn't the case. I strongly disagree with this.

I am not a teenager and have not used Switch or Blast! but I am nervous about the dismissal of teenage programming as 'niche' and the Director-General's reassurance that teens can get their programming for C4 and E4. Everyone who ends up paying the license fee used to be a teenager and teenagers deserve a chance to find a part of the BBC that serves them.

There is a valid argument for the reduction of imported film and drama if alternative programming of similar quality can be made or bought from within the UK. In the fragmented TV market place it is pointless getting in a bidding war with Channel 4 or Five for output that will air to most viewers here regardless, if it is of decent quality.

Similarly, for the BBC to stop competing for some sports rights might help end the hyperinflation in that sector. However this may come into conflict with the avowed desire to screen major events expressed in the proposals.
Personally, I believe it may be time to relinquish all live TV Football for other providers to compete for. It could mean I'd be unable to watch it in my own home again, which I would personally regret, but I think the sacrifice worthwhile for the future of the BBC.

BBC local TV and radio seem to be already stretched to near breaking point so I think it wise not to attempt further expansion at present.

Focussing a website is an interesting challenge, they tend to sprawl by their nature. I'm not convinced the recent creation of a permanent website for every programme linked to its iPlayer page has been either useful or successful for example. If the BBC is under pressure to provide less to its web-users I think the website has to evolve reactively to its use. If services are to be lost it should be through a slow period of atrophy based on the use of the pages rather than a top-down decision of which areas should be axed. Responding to users is always the key to managing change.

I believe that having gone as far as it has from what it once was the Radio Times could be sold off. It might well benefit both parties if the corporation and magazine were publicly separated.

There will be in years to come increased calls to sell off the entirety of the BBC's commercial subsidiary BBC Worldwide.
That's far too big an argument to be bundled into this consultation, but if the Corporation is to thrive while facing commercial opposition it is a debate that will need to be addressed. Management will need to carefully prepare strategies, arguments and defences if it wishes to preserve this key asset.

trust.enquiries@bbc.co.uk

2010-03-02T11:17:00.002Z

6 Music closure

I emailed the duty office when this was leaked last week and received information relating to the station's last review which was, of course, out of date, though the messages of praise for the station were pleasing, as, in the few years they've been on air, 6 Music and Radio 7 have joined Radio 4 as my stations of choice.

Now that the Director General has publicly stated his intentions can I ask that the Trust considers its role as representative of the BBC's audience and challenges his plans?

6 Music is the BBC's only music station to take the popular culture of the last 50 years seriously. Radio 2 and Radio 1 are dominated by personalities and cautious playlists in a way that closely replicates commercial stations. 6Music has no counterpart in the private sector because it is core public service broadcasting, it is, simply, as Radio 3 is to Classic FM.
The growth of the station is impressive given the take up and roll out of digital radio, its cost per listener is one of the smallest of the DAB stations.
The signal sent out by closing one of the BBC's unique assets and choosing to reduce the Corporation's presence in New Media, may please the opponents of the BBC as a public service provider of diverse output, but it would be a sad day for those of us who believe the survival of BBC and its high standards is vital if we are to maintain the health of our broadcasting sector.

Although I'm not a core user of the Asian Network, Blast or the BBC's websites I can see they too are about serving diverse audiences to a high standard, surely the BBC's number one objective in a fragmenting marketplace. I would argue daytime BBC One television actually serves the public far less effectively, and might be a more economic sacrifice if sacrifice must be seen to be made.

For over a decade I was a curator at what is now the National Media Museum and I've written extensively on the broadcasting of the last 60 years, and I worry about the political naivety displayed in the plans related today.
If the BBC is to continue to serve us then it has to prioritise the provision of output that is not replicated elsewhere. Please reject the short-termist thinking behind this decision that I honestly believe imperils the BBC's reputation and future.

Yours faithfully

Ian Potter

EDITED TO ADD- this was written before it became clear the preferred address for responses to the Digital Strategy was srconsultation@bbc.co.uk. I sent it there as well, just for safety.

Dad, what's a 'Father and Son'? Well, it's a very specific sort of sketch with a hugely elaborate set up, piling up lots of information up front...

2010-02-20T17:07:00.005Z

This week I've been reading a lunatically good book. Let's be honest though, you need something approaching my level of lunacy to really appreciate it.

It's "Prime Minister You Wanted to See Me?": A History of "Week Ending" by Ian Greaves and Justin Lewis.

Week Ending was of course BBC Radio 4's long-running, only occasionally funny,topical comedy show. Anyone was allowed to write for it, and I was one of the thousands who did, like many of its contributors sending in sketches by post on a Monday or Tuesday that I hoped might still just be topical by the weekend (towards the programme's end I'd graduated to faxing sketches often as late as a Wednesday). It was where we began to learn the form.

The book kicks off with a brilliant and lovingly researched extended essay on the series and its history with some lovely script extracts and then kicks into over-drive with lists, great big detailed lists, an index, and pleasing nerdery on Week Ending spin-offs, spoofs and music.
It's alarming just how many tightly coiled memories reading it unravels.
Perhaps the greatest joy in it is the listing of sketch and newsline titles, tantalising reminders of past political and cultural concerns, sometimes functional, sometimes punning or obscure, sometimes absolutely undecipherable.
It's also allowed me to map precisely the Week Ending contributions of three ex-colleagues,three Facebook friends, all sorts of writer heroes including Douglas Adams, Tony Sarchet, Marshall and Renwick and of course Tim Hincks of Endemol, and discover that my first ever broadcast sketch was performed by Josh Darcy, the guy who organised the celebrations of Ken Campbell at the Metafex festival in 2008.

Somehow, reading it made me feel having had a second sketch recorded for Radio 7's Newsjack recorded and then cut before transmission a week or so back was a good thing- part of a continuum, for me and BBC radio.

"Like I said..."

2010-02-10T10:09:00.008Z

"Like I said..." has to be the single piece of dialogue I most loathe.

It turns up a lot these days on TV and Radio drama and I've taken vehemently against it.
Perhaps it's my problem, not the line's, but here anyway are my top reasons for hating it-

1. It often doesn't fit the character who's supposed to be saying it.
For example, almost any character who's over 40, or who we're expected to believe is 'posh' (ie. a baddie), is more likely to go with "As I said," (or possibly "as I say") instead.
It's, to my ears, quite a young character's line, and not one I usually expect to hear authority figures use.

2. It's so self-conscious, a character referring to themselves and their actions as though standing back, summing themselves up.
Sometimes that's fine. Mainly, it isn't.
Most characters are driven by forces they don't understand, and as soon as they start talking like this they're on a journey towards either being the kind of complex, realistic, slightly dull people who never get anything done, or unutterably smug and self-regarding cartoon characters- the kind of people who know they're a major character and are acting up.

3. It quite often precedes those horrible bits when you see the writer peeking through and you'd rather not.
"Like I said, that apparently throwaway line before is actually so thematically important I'm going to repeat it now, revealing its significance." I hear gears grind and don't like it.

4. You can normally cut it and lose nothing (bar my annoyance).

5. I'm irrational and ridiculous, but, like I said, "perhaps it's my problem, not the line's."

Repeat 'Til Fade

2010-02-06T13:47:00.007Z

Hello, I'm back, please feign awareness of my absence, and the year is already accelerating downhill towards Spring.

Lovely break in Cuba, of which I may speak when I have something suitably pithy and glib to reductively label it with.
I've also come back lighter than I went (I got absolutely massive over the Summer and Autumn last year), this is a good fact, thanks to my continued work with a revolutionary diet plan- less food, more exercise, no alcohol. Who would have ever thought a crackpot scheme like that could work?

Anyway, I'm back with a new idea to work on (as well as some old ones to keep flogging away at), so I'll probably continue being a rubbish correspondent for a little while, but while you're waiting for all-new mildly disappointing material from me I've come back to discover BBC Radio 7 is re-running No Tomatoes again, some of my mildly disappointing 2007 material, a fourth airing (which I believe now, means I'm due some extra money). Episode 2 is still on-line until about midnight on Sunday.

Hope to have more for you soon.

Welcome back Potter

2010-01-14T19:30:00.005Z

I think it was John Lennon who once sang-
"So this is January the 14th, and what have you done? Missed the 12th day of Christmas by a good week for one."
I think that was what he sang, at least once anyway. I wasn't really listening (a bit like anyone who thinks John and Yoko whisper greetings to each other at the start of the slightly modified single version of this ditty- listen again but with your volume dangerously high, and while you're at it check if your copy of Desire by Bob Dylan, of course you have one, you bought it as a 'Columbia- Nice Price' release, is one of the ones where you can hear Emmylou Harris saying a swear in the fade-out of Oh Sister).

So, what have I done? Well, I've watched the snow obviously, gone for some vigorous walks in the stuff, written some jokes, looked at dispiriting football on the telly, lost a little bit of the evil extra weight I've acquired gradually over the last year.
Not that much really- in fact it seems to me to me like I've lived my life like a candle in the kitchen drawer, only occasionally useful and mainly just taking up room.
I think it was me who once sang that.

Essentially I've been gearing up and rarely getting further than an hour's walk away from the house, or getting more than four pages of anything written in a day.
That all changes soon though, because I'm about to go on holiday for two weeks and thus write much, much less, much, much further away from the house! Hooray!

Today, I excitingly got an email to say something short I'd written at the start of the week had been recorded for the radio (for the open writers sketch show Newsjack), which was nice. It has however now hit the metaphorical cutting room floor. Still, a few hours mild anticipation of some pocket money is better than not being thought good enough to be recorded at all. No, really it is, ever so slightly.

Marking Time

2009-12-31T12:25:00.002Z

It seems inevitable now, that after three years decently holding back we're going to start calling the next decade the Teenies or Teens.
I don't like it but I imagine people who lived through the Roaring Twenties and Swinging Sixties and didn't do much of either have similar feelings about those labels. I can't control it so I'll just have to deal with it, perhaps pointlessly moaning on a 'blog about it.

Obviously, we need labels because names are simpler than things, you know, what with things being so big and full of stuff (even the very small things). It's akin to our desire to find patterns behind events. Heads MUST come up next, it's been tails three times, two things have gone wrong for me, I'm going to have a BAD day. Actually, that last one often works because people end up wandering around with their bad day filters on, seeking out things to be negative about and often generating them by dealing with them like that.

So, when we come to the end of the packages of time we give weight to, months, years, decades we need some labels to pack them up with. A few good things happened to me this year and a few bad ones too. I've had a good year, and a good decade, and I'm going to get up tomorrow and have another.
I hope you do too.

A Christmas Gift For You

2009-12-19T01:19:00.005Z

Thanks to Stuart at Obverse Books for hosting.

There's now an mp3 doodah you can get at from here by all sorts of means. Click on the title if, like me, you don't understand most of them.

Do humour me in the serial- there's some bits need sorting out in the slapped together sound design. I have vague thoughts that come the serial end I might do a stand alone version with some of the dodgier bits reworked. We shall see.

It's half an hour of advertisement funded prattle! Enjoy to the limit of your abilities, oh and buy Obverse books obviously...

Merry Eczema!

Perfect Christmas Gifts for them as likes those kind of things...

2009-12-18T22:51:00.005Z

... and won't mind that there's little chance of getting them before Christmas now.

The rather lovely Doctor Who short story collections I had stories in (and the ones I didn't for that matter) are on sale now at a never to repeated knock down price of a fiver a time, as the company that produced them's fiction license runs out. There's also a huge bumper book featuring the editors' choices of best stories available for a tenner (It's a huuuuuge book), but the crucial point is- you have to buy them before midnight on the 31st of December (when we celebrate ten years of the planet being inside out).
These be the volumes-
Zodiac,
Companions,
Muses,
A Christmas Treasury,
Farewells,
and the big bumper best of book Re:Collections which features my story from Companions.

Also available now, new writing by me, from Obverse Books in
The Panda Book of Horror which I hear has already made it
through the post to some parts of the country!

And thanks to the kindness of those fools at Obverse Books I should also be able to offer you a silly little free gift here soon.

Ho blumming ho.

Montezuma's Revenge

2009-11-30T15:17:00.005Z

We went to see the Moctezuma show at the British Museum this weekend, and pop in on the Staffordshire Hoard upstairs (which hopefully will find a better permanent home in the Midlands before too long), and highly enjoyable it was too. I was surprised how much came back from our honeymoon in Mexico a decade ago, and there was a pleasing combination of big artefacts, interesting details and thoughtful scripting, unafraid to flag up up areas of uncertainty and possible problems with some of the source texts for its story.

The Christianisation of Aztec artefacts brought back very clearly the sight of a young girl from a shanty town stealthily begarlanding a stone at the Mayan ruins of Coba while a Catholic Mass was performed in a nearby shack- the same fusing of traditions that gives us shrines to the Virgin Mary, and Christian holidays exactly where strangely similar pagan alternatives existed.

One particularly interesting detail that slowly emerged going around the show was the Aztecs' offering of images to the Chthonic gods (it's a lovely looking word isn't it? It just means underground but is worth learning for Scrabble) on the underside of things- on boundary markers, beneath sculptures, on the bottom of incense burners etc.
It shows a deep attachment to the power of the Earth and opens up an imaginative world we don't often engage with – it's easy for us to imagine people drawing patterns on a plain for Sky Gods to look at, but we rarely flip the idea over.

Do go if you get the chance.

One nerdy criticism I'd have is that the big AV projections didn't really do much for me- and I became suspicious of the sound design for them with constant repetition. There was a single plaintive trumpet note repeated which I became more and more convinced was actually from the famous old recording of King Tutankhamun's trumpet, and thus, while evocative and historical and all that, was somehow cheating.

You've probably heard Tutankhamun's trumpet yourself, possibly here, maybe on an old BBC Chronicle documentary, or perhaps more likely (given my readers) being used by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Delia Derbyshire built a piece around it, it stood in for the Atlantean trumpets in Doctor Who – The Time Monster and was also used for the Magrathean answer machine in the radio version of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I admire you for already knowing all that and am backing away slowly.

November Spawned A Monster

2009-11-30T14:20:00.008Z

The obligatory Doctor Who review. Look away now.

The ancient, wise and astonishingly rarely morally conflicted alien hero, Doctor Who is on Mars where an all-conquering force of nature now threatens to break loose of its home world and remake a whole planet in its image. Can the Doctor save the Flood from the threat of Humanity?
Only kidding. That's one step too far and while I suspect the subtext may have been there in the script of The Waters of Mars at some point (co-author Phil Ford has after all written for Captain Scarlet, another family friendly science fiction tale of aliens fighting back against human invaders where you can't really blame them) the Doctor is excused moral relativism this time because Time and History have capital letters to be maintained.
Man must win and these specific people must die to make sure they do because... they must.

The Waters of Mars is of course a companion piece to last year's The Fires of Pompeii (the echoing of the titles quite possibly deliberate) and finally makes explicit on screen what some of us more dull and earnest fans have been wittering about away from the the telly for some decades- the rules the Doctor claims bind his actions in history apply in the future too, it's just you'd never know it normally and he never seems to mention it.

In fact pretty much the only implausible rule of Doctor Who now left unexposed and rationalised by the Russell T Davies series is why no one ever immediately shoots our hero when he arrives inexplicably at their high security base in the middle of a crisis.
No one's smile is that winning, though the take on the traditional
'Hello, I'm the Doctor, just breezing in.'
'We wave guns but don't shoot you on this space station.'
sequence here is rather engaging.

Once the Doomedness of everyone is established the mood darkens somewhat, and the Doctor spends far longer than you'd expect, or screen-writing guides would recommend, Refusing the Call to Action.
Normally he'll just want to go fishing, or nose around and it'll take him being captured, losing the Ship, being piqued by some mystery or, every now and then, seeing some terrible injustice to force him into being a hero. That's usually sorted within 10 minutes. Here he spends a very long time not quite walking away or getting involved, which leads to a bit of a sag in the tale. If the colonists' suspicion of him had led to him being incarcerated and having to prove himself as Wet Heck broke out that might have been avoided but I guess the key here was to impress on us the inherent decency of the crew, which meant keeping them on the Doctor's side.
It's perhaps a shame that that opportunity was lost because it'd have offered the Doctor a selfish reason to want to walk away, an obstacle to overcome before he could and a relationship with the base commander to build in the process, that might have made his final decision to rip up the rule book we'd just found out about slightly better earned.

The problem is that balancing that with the required family friendly thrills of an hour long TV slot is trickier, and it appears the last talky, psychologically honest Doctor Who story, Midnight, performed rather better with the oldies than it did with the younger audience the programme requires.
This is the show which the 'audience of 8 to 80' cliché was made for after all, and, for all dullards like me might want a touch more grounding here and there to sell some of the fantasy elements better, a lot of the audience is quite happy with the fantasy as it stands and could easily get fractious waiting for the next fire-breathing dragon to fly by, while someone explained the species' evolutionary biology for me. It mainly seems to be about dissolving rocks in their stomachs to produce a great deal of hydrogen which they can then either ignite or use as an aid to flight.

Of course, once the Doctor has made his decision, we fogies get something rather interesting in the last act. The Doctor is suddenly 'heroically' doing everything we think he shouldn't, and we get more of those cold arrogant flashes in Tennant's portrayal of the character that seem to make cynical chaps cheer and ladies swoon.
It's a fabulous finale (albeit featuring slightly fumbled visual grammar in the Countdown to Doom sequence – there are some rules of Time you don't break and chief among them is giving just enough time for the escape to be plausibly imagined before cutting away to the big Foooom), and the coda to it is better again. The arrogant Masterly Doctor is marvellously put in his place by Commander Adelaide, and the moment at which your belief she's about to shoot the Doctor gives way to realising she's doing something a bit more extraordinary is a great one, reminding me of the heart-breaking domestic sacrifices of Russell T Davies' The Second Coming.
It's the bleakest Doctor Who death for the greater good since... well, since the similarly handled one in Torchwood earlier in the year, a world away emotionally from the odd Thal nobly cutting a safety rope or Pex jumping through a doorway clutching Richard Briers' reputation.
I honestly think that's as grim as this show can go though- this is the edge of family viewing for me. Further moody introspection, for all long term fans might embrace it (or indeed rejoice at a show with fewer cute robots and more scary zombies) spells ratings doom (quite possibly with a Capital).
The one time the TV show forget that in the past, it ended up a niche cult programme scheduled against British TV's other great '8 to 80' war horse Coronation Street mopping up a few die-hard fans and soap refuseniks.
It has to be a ride first and an examination of how roller coasters work second.

Wiping away the dust

2009-11-26T20:30:00.004Z

Just a quick post because I haven't done one in a while and my parents were beginning to think I was dead and make arrangements.
I seem to have little to report for November.
More soon.

Archive on 4: Capering With Ken Campbell

2009-10-27T09:43:00.002Z

From the Radio 4 website-

"Saturday, 20:00 on BBC Radio 4

Ian McMillan explores the world of the actor and director Ken Campbell, who died in 2008.

Campbell's acting credits included Fawlty Towers, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Brookside, Law and Order and In Sickness and In Health, as well as performing one-man shows. He also directed theatrical events, including the nine-hour Illuminatus trilogy, a 22-hour production of The Warp and Macbeth in pidgin English.

His daughter, Daisy, gives Ian McMillan a tour of Ken's home in Essex, where he didn't have a bedroom and had a parrot run in every room. He also talks to Campbell's manager Colin Watkeys, theatre director Richard Eyre, fan and collaborator Ian Potter and fellow actors Julia McKenzie and Jim Broadbent."

I'm inordinately proud that some of my fannery seems to have made the edit. I don't know if any of the gig Ken did for me will be in there, I do hope so.

The Panda Book of Horror

2009-10-23T12:54:00.005+01:00

I've another short story coming out!

It's in the Iris Wildthyme collection The Panda Book of Horror.
If you don't know Iris she's a sort of chaotic bag lady who travels through time and space barging into other people's stories and messing them up. A comedy, magic realist, science fantasy, label rejecting force of nature. She's sort of a Doctor Who spin-off character but actually she spun into Doctor Who from earlier novels and has spun back out.
She's created by the very clever Paul Magrs who has co-edited this collection with the extraordinarily svelte Stuart Douglas, who you may have seen around the internet arguing passionately with people about Doctor Who as if either his or their opinions actually mattered.
It was largely to meet Paul and Stuart that I went to Manchester the other week.

Here's their press-release:

Ding Ding! All aboard! Room for a little 'un at the back!

Iris, Panda and their transtemporal double decker Routemaster bus are just about ready to leave the terminus and set out on their most terrifying adventures yet!

Yes, The Panda Book of Horror will soon be on its way to the printers, with a publication date in mid November 2009!

Along for the ride this time are...

Paul Magrs
Mark Clapham
Mark Michalowski
Simon Guerrier
Ian Potter
Dale Smith
Phil Craggs
Eddie Robson
Nicholas Nada
Blair Bidmead
Matt Kimpton
Mark Morris
Jac Rayner & Orna Petit

Many of these names will be known to Who book fans from the Virgin, BBC, Telos and Big Finish ranges, but new to Who fiction are Nix Nada and Blair Bidmead, both of whom submitted stories via the Obverse website, and Phil Craggs, fiction editor of blankpages magazine. As for Orna Petit, who can say? All we know is Jac insisted and who are we to argue...

With cover art by Paul Magrs and a pretty damn nifty pastiche of the original Pan Books of Horror design by Cody Schell, we think you'll enjoy The Panda Book of Horror...though perhaps enjoy is the wrong word...

Available for pre-order soon from Obverse Books - why not buy a copy of the Celestial Omnibus while you're waiting

I've read work by a lot of these writers and really rate them, and I've been lucky enough to read the two stories by Matt Kimpton and Jacqueline Rayner and Orna Petit in this collection (Matt and Jac are good pretend e-friends), both of which I thought were really funny.
I was disappointed not to bump into Orna at Manchester, I thought she was going to be there but no-one I know saw her. I think she knows Jac from some kind of weird Prisoner Cell Block H thing that I've decided not to ask about. Anyway, I rather like her writing style and thought you could tell she was French writing in English somehow from some of it, though Stuart now tells me she's actually Flemish.

Anyway- buy the book, the bits I've seen by others are a hoot!

Can you Ken Ken?

2009-10-23T11:28:00.010+01:00

So, the back end of September and the majority of October- they weren't very eventful were they?

No.

They're certainly not deserving of a rambling "What I did on my holidays" style travelogue...

September, I can't really remember my excuses for not posting here, except I did another draft on my sitcom idea which I think may have taken the thing off in another direction (largely by not quite being right in the direction it was actually going) we shall see what the next draft brings.
Then there was some fiddling around sorting out the Ken Campbell event in Sheffield on October the 10th, which I really enjoyed doing.
Audience wasn't massive and the cinema will have made a loss on it, but the enthusiasm of those who came was marvellous, including a few people who hadn't really known Ken's work but left with an understanding of why those who love it do so. I count that as a victory. I was also blown away by how good Peter Hall's Aquarius interview with Ken was from 1977, a real archive gem.
It was a particular bonus that Jeff Merrifield a collaborator, chum and chronicler of Ken of long standing was there to add his thoughts to mine, film-maker Sheridan Thayer's and critic Michael Coveney's, and we press-ganged him into joining the discussions. Michael and Jeff are both writing books on Ken which I think together will produce an illuminating portrait of this enantiodromatic figure.
Jeff has some great Ken stuff for sale here, and copies of Sheridan's documentary on Ken which is full of wonders are currently up for sale on Ebay.

Sunday the 11th saw me in Manchester for a Doctor Who book event, which I attended mainly to meet a couple of people who've been generous enough to pay me for silly words lately (more on this later). Met loads of nice folk and Ken reared his head again here. When I explained what I'd being doing the day before Andrew Cartmel, the Doctor Who script editor for the final years of the original series, and I was pleased to discover a lovely guy, fondly recalled Ken's legendary Doctor Who audition. I told Andrew how Steve Roberts at the BBC had thought they had it on tape last year only discover it wasn't on transferring the recording (this seems to date back to Doctor Who Magazine producer John Freeman misidentifying another auditionee on a VHS some years ago). Andrew then wondered if Ken's take had actually being recorded at all, saying he remembered him coming into the office and doing his piece but wasn't sure if it'd been caught on camera, so this mythical scary bull-like performance may have never captured at all, save in the memories of those who were there.

Monday the 12th involved more Ken because I went down to the National Theatre for Beyond Our Ken, the tribute to him staged at the Olivier.
I was there a bit early and accidentally messed up writer Robert Shearman's working day (which can involve a degree of pacing around the South Bank thinking and mumbling sometimes) by greeting him warmly and then remembering we've only really met a couple of times and there's no earthly reason for him to recall me while he was pinning the Muse down. The cures of email and Facebook contact. It isn't like real friendship at all, you can live in a book with a chap and your short stories never even talk! Unfortunately, my failed socialising meant the actor Steven Elder (who was caffeinating himself nearby) also spotted Rob, and Rob being polite put down his Muse chasing for a while to be nice at us in turn.
I later heard Steven on the 'phone excitedly telling someone what Rob was working on but I shan't pass it on, mainly because I only heard some of it.
Rob told me he's writing about Russia at the moment so that's clearly a play for the Royal Shakespeare Company. One for the theatricals there.

The actual Ken tribute that evening was an incredible show, allegedly 2 and a bit hours long but stretching to the correctly ridiculous Ken lengths in the performance. John Sessions compered with great wit and charm, Toby Jones, Alan Cox and Chris Fairbank presented extracts from Pigspurt that gave a spine to the show and from which hung sketches from Pilk's Madhouse, Ken Campbell's Roadshow, archive extracts, scenes from The Warp, Illuminatus!, Clowns on a School Outing, Skungpoomery, Makbed, and Nina Conti's riffing on The History of Comedy Part 1. The event culminated in Richard Eyre's announcement of a Ken Campbell bursary for deranged theatre practitioners, a moving tribute from Warren Mitchell and improvisation from Ken's last troupe The School of Night. There was much hilarity and a fair amount of weeping too. Lovely.
Three pathetically personal tear jerks came from rediscovering the two National Theatre booklets Ken gave me credits in and seeing a Ken clip on the big screen with him wearing the T-shirt I made him. Clearly it'd been a regular in the wardrobe around the time of the Hyphenator! show.
I had a lovely talk afterwards with Sylvester McCoy, discussing a project Andrew Cartmel had mentioned the day before, telling him how great I thought his clowning was in Big Jim and the Figaro Club, and chatting about our mutual friend Polly who I was off to see a few days later.
It was 1am as I passed under Big Ben to the sound of people saying "You mean St Stephen's Tower". Luckily, I was passing under the chiming bell Big Ben and couldn't hear the wrong pedants.
This stupidly overstuffed weekend which culminated in a hang around at Victoria Coach Station 'til 8am took a little recuperating from.

The next weekend I was in Bristol to do some improv with a mate (Simon- the other half of the aforementioned Polly) at the Bristol Old Vic as part of their improv festival (no Ken connections here, unless you count his School of Night and Showstopper people playing there in the same festival). It went surprisingly well, if leaving me a bit skinted with the whole getting a train to Bristol from Sheffield nonsense (London you can do ridiculously cheapily if you're prepared to stand around for four or five hours in the middle of the night waiting for Victoria Coach station to reopen). Simon has an account of the event here, which is accurate except for claiming I leaped into performing, when I was in fact dragged up when my actor refused to read the phonetic Glaswegian I'd written for her. I was astonished by how easy I found the comedy song impro- rhymes, sense and everything, and I feel my Glaswegian went well too. The idiot children seemed impressed anyway.
We may well do similar things again.

Rounding off the major events of the last few days I was back at the Sheffield Showroom on Wednesday introducing Southern Softies a film by Graham Fellows in the guise of John Shuttleworth and hosting a Q&A session with Mr Fellows afterwards. He's a very thoughtful, and warm guy with a perfectionism and attention to detail that's clear from his work, and I felt gave really interesting answers to everyone's questions. Sometimes performers can be a bit glib or mechanical in these sessions but he showed a remarkable candour and freshness, I thought. Being funny helps, obviously.

Ken Campbell sneaked in here as well, Graham had worked for him in a Liverpool Everyman revival of his kids' play Old King Cole (playing the same part that one of my other favourite comedy performers Richard Herring did at one of his first Edinburgh Festivals- coincidence? Almost certainly.), but we mainly talked about Ken Worthington, the subject of the song that this post takes its name from.

Perhaps the best thing about the last few weeks is not having had the time to experience any Liverpool Football Club games as they actually happened.

The Gold of Troy

2009-09-16T10:05:00.009+01:00

Years ago, when I worked in Bradford I was excited to realise that my workplace briefly featured in one of the greatest pieces of TV drama ever.

There it is, hiding behind John Woodvine. The drama is of course Edge of Darkness.

I was privileged to speak to its author once. I was trying to persuade him to do an event with us. At the time he was reluctant to talk about anything but the film project he was then working on and eventually decided he didn't want to come up and discuss his past work with us.
Troy Kennedy Martin was always interested in moving forward, I think.

In the 1960s he brought a filmic pace and a new dash of psychological and procedural reality to police drama with Z Cars, worked with John McGrath and Ken Loach on the series Diary of A Young Man which strove to push the form of TV drama, and wrote an influential article 'Nats Go Home' about employing techniques beyond naturalism in television.

He worked widely through the 1970s, notably on his brother Ian's creation The Sweeney, one of a revolutionary series of dramas from Thames Television's Euston Films that took mainstream British TV out of the studios and on to the streets.

In the 1980s came the piece I think of as his masterpiece- Edge of Darkness, which combined nuclear paranoia, ecological awareness and an ambiguous mysticism to astonishing effect. It is a cold war thriller where the real villain isn't one side or the other, it's the military industrial complex as a whole and it's the whole planet they're opposed to. The series is currently being remade as a movie by its original director, but I can't imagine it will have anything like the same impact reduced down for cinema.

I suspect many popular obituaries, if and when they arrive, will major on the cinema films Troy Kennedy Martin wrote, primarily The Italian Job and Kelly's Heroes, but for me his legacy isn't what he put on the big screen, it's how he stretched the box.

An Afternoon Without Ken Campbell

2009-08-26T17:58:00.002+01:00

I'm pleased to finally announce a personal project that's been bubbling along for a little while.
On Saturday, October the 10th we'll be mounting an event celebrating the actor, writer and director Ken Campbell at the Showroom Cinema, Sheffield.

Ken who died suddenly in 2008 was one of the most inspiring, hilarious and mind-expanding figures in British theatre and his work from the 1970s on has influenced a whole generation of performers and creators.
We'll look back over his incredible career with our guests, the theatre critic Michael Coveney and the film-maker Sheridan Thayer and over three hours of film, much of it unseen in public for over 25 years.

The screenings will include-

'Firework Man', the 1977 feature on Ken for the ITV arts programme 'Aquarius',
'No Problem- The Theatre of Ken Campbell', a 1981 documentary going behind the scenes of Ken's famous theatre productions of 'The Warp' and 'The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' with input from the writers of both, Neil Oram and Douglas Adams,
and
'Antic Visionary'- The World of Ken Campbell', Sheridan Thayer's amazing 2003 feature length profile of Ken, featuring interviews with many of his friends, colleagues and fans. Sir Peter Hall, Robert McKee, Brian Aldiss, Sylvester McCoy, Jim Broadbent, Bill Drummond, Bill Nighy and Nina Conti to name just a few all contribute to this superb portrait of the man and his work.

Come and be entertained, challenged and, hopefully, inspired by a legend!

Tickets are £10 (£6.50 concessions).

Two further tributes to Ken follow later in the month, an evening celebrating his work at the National Theatre on the 12th of October: 'Beyond Our Ken - The Multiverse of Ken Campbell'
and an hour long 'Archive on 4' feature for Radio 4 presented by poet Ian McMillan on the 31st of October.

Latest BBC Press Office Blurb

2009-08-14T20:13:00.006+01:00

Hello. Radio promotion time again. So here's another programme you'd probably not know I'd had any involvement with if this didn't exist. The good news is this is the last of them for now.
It's stayed pretty close to my original proposal though sadly there are a few interesting strands that had to be dropped or really trimmed back on from what we recorded to fit the final time-slot.

A dragon at Barnsley train station.

A poet at Barnsley train station.

In Search Of The Wantley Dragon
Sunday 30 August
4.30-5.00pm BBC RADIO 4

Poet Ian McMillan is on a quest to find the "Dragon of Wantley". In his search, he uncovers long-forgotten, violent disputes, a knight clad in locally made armour, pantomimes, operettas and the dragon's den.

The Dragon Of Wantley is a 17th-century comic poem that was a literary sensation for more than 200 years. It's a bawdy tale, told in rhyming couplets, about a Sheffield knight who defeats a dragon that's devouring everything, even children.

In its day, the Yorkshire-based story was as famous as that of Robin Hood – but more than 100 years ago it vanished without trace.

Ian's pursuit of the Wantley Dragon leads him to discover a hero protected by local steel and a dragon that might actually be a dubious landowner. The trail takes him to meet the dragon's family and he also learns of vandalism and threats in the 1590s, and hears how the story reached Covent Garden, becoming not only an operetta, but also a circus performance and several pantomimes.

Ian's quest soon takes him out to the dragon's den – an eerily quiet cave hidden on a little-known Yorkshire hillside.

Please note: This programme was originally billed in BBC Week 34 Radio Programme Information on Sunday 23 August.

Presenter/Ian McMillan, Producer/Russell Crewe

A dragon in print.

The Dragon's Den, a cave on Wharncliffe Crags.

Feedback (sans Chris Dunkleyofthefinancialtimes or Roger BoltonofTVjournalismrelatingtotheIRA fame)

2009-08-06T11:57:00.007+01:00

A little more feedback for the radio play has trickled forth, you know, beyond friends and relatives being polite- "it sounded like he had lovely shoes on," that kind of thing.

Firstly, a couple of days ago a comics artist and writer named David Baillie, who I must stress to regular readers was not Dask in 'The Robots of Death', got in touch with some extremely kind appreciative words. He's written for 2000AD for money and everything (I've merely made some of the noises of Judge Dredd's fists for money), so, actually, that's quite a thing in my world.
Then, if that wasn't excitement enough, yesterday I stumbled across (ed."vanity-googled up") a very nice review on a new weblog entirely devoted to radio drama reviews, written by radio writer Paul May.
I really hope he keeps doing these. There aren't many places on-line where people talk about radio plays at all, and it's rare to find other dramatists at it, so it's a joy to be at the start of what looks a really promising resource.

In other news, I have mainly spent the last three months putting on weight as a result of a gruelling sitting at desks and recovering from all that exhausting sitting with a glass of wine regime and am tentatively stepping back into the world of exercise. It has to be tentative to start with, I want to be sure I don't buckle.

"Third verse, same as the first."

Afternoons and Coffeespoons

2009-07-30T11:26:00.003+01:00

Well the Afternoon Play is on the iPlayer and there's been a little bit of feedback, one person on Twitter and another on the Radio 4 forum have both learned the derivation of the word antimacassar from the play.
The person on the forum also thinks the play's worth listening to if low on comedy (it's been billed and announced as a comedy all over the place), another listener agreed with the lack of comedy and felt the production just about held the play together.
On listening to the finished piece I'm inclined to agree. The production and playing is very good, the writing not so, and I desperately wish the piece wasn't being presented as a comedy. The bits of Charles Trenet inserted in the edit seem to make the gulf between the comic and tragic greater.

Truth is, when initially pitched the word 'comedy' was used,though sadness was obviously always in there, but when first written as a comedy it came in way too short, partly because a chunk of plot about Frank getting mixed up about two different sets of road work from my story breakdown had been dropped as too confusing, though that wouldn't have filled the gap alone.
The piece drifted further from humour after the absurd ending I was building to in which Frank is blissfully relieved of the burden of his history in a gas explosion was rejected as ridiculous by everyone but me (probably because I didn't do it well enough), and it became clear there wasn't a lot of narrative drive to what was essentially a small journey.
A lot of meandering banter went and a new plot was developed based on Nick and his threat to Frank, as a consequence everything ended up a hell of a lot less chucklesome.
I guess however it was still down on the Radio 4 system as a comedy despite us moving away from the genre through the rewrites.

Do give it a listen if you're so inclined. It's well produced and a lot of very good people worked on it, but don't expect many laughs.

Predictable Ideas

2009-07-22T15:33:00.006+01:00

Do writers' ideas get nicked?

Yes, definitely, there are a few industry horror stories about this, none of which I'd be wise to repeat, but it's not going on half as often as you might think.

You might recall a few months back I sent in some radio sketches to the BBC which got me to a workshop with David Mitchell and Mitchell and Webb's producer Gareth Edwards. Today I watched a Mitchell and Webb sketch on the iPlayer which used the same basic idea as one of those sketches. Was it nicked?
No.
When we went to the workshop the Mitchell and Webb series had finished recording. What had happened was that I and whoever wrote the TV sketch had both had a fairly obvious joke idea occur to us that hadn't been 'done' yet.
Predictive text on mobile phones makes predictions.
It's nothing amazing, it was an idea waiting to be had and used, it has probably occurred to hundreds and hundreds of people and the TV writer and I tackled it in different ways. That's how it is with ideas.

Similarly, this weekend Radio 4 begins a series I'm really looking forward to called Soho Stories covering some of the ground of my TV history book from last year, hosted by and featuring several of the people I interviewed for it. Did the series nick my idea?
No.
The book wasn't my initial idea, a large part of the story of the period the series covers has been told before by Michael Darlow, the history is out there waiting to be used and the people I interviewed have more connection to that history than I do. They made it!

There are only so many ideas out there, you can use them to make something that's yours, but they're not yours themselves, they'll go around occurring to everyone.

Also on the radio next week is an Afternoon Play I wrote which is full of ideas from all over the place. All of them original, though I bet not all originally mine.

Things Club

2009-07-10T19:15:00.000+01:00

Thing 1- Torchwood. I skipped about a third of series 2, and wish I'd skipped a further third to be honest, because I thought the show, always a bit uncertain in tone, had totally derailed. So, it's been an absolute delight that it's been so very good this week, to the point of not quite seeming to be Torchwood.
Two of the very naffest things in the show were summarily disposed of in episode 1 of this curtailed third series, and in its new remixed form the show treads a very nice line, playing with its enjoyable remaining absurdities and telling a story of real adult intensity. I wonder if this is a last glorious hoorah, or paves the way for a reformatted reinvention of the series.

Thing 2- My friendoid Matt Kimpton (who I like to claim I discovered as a writer and have attempted ever since to foist on others) has been invited to attend a writing masterclass for CBBC in a BBC Writersroom competition. This is particularly impressive because there were something like 700 entries and I know some other very successful and talented writers also entered the competition. See, everyone? He is good. I'm really glad I didn't enter it, it's lovely to still be able to imagine I'm better than him.

Thing 3- I was briefly perplexed this afternoon to find The British Comedy Guide has lots of mysterious details about my upcoming Radio 4 play I'd told no one, including transmission date, some of the plot and the always alarming claim that it's a 'comedy drama'. I then realised the details must be up at the BBC Press Office, and they are!
So here they are here too...

Afternoon Play –
Antimacassars And Ylang Ylang Conditioner
Monday 27 July
2.15-3.00pm BBC RADIO 4

Russell Dixon stars in this Afternoon Play offering by Ian Potter, a comedy about old age and loneliness.

Frank lives on his own and just about copes. He has an obsession with coffee and, one day, when he thinks he has run out, he goes to the shop to buy some more, but it becomes a real odyssey.

His glasses break when he tries to tie his shoelaces and two young "scallies" offer to help him.

Producer/Gary Brown

BBC Radio 4 Publicity

I'm not absolutely sure it is a comedy, it probably does have sufficient minutes and sufficiently few jokes to qualify as a comedy drama, though.
Lummee.

Radio Days

2009-07-02T12:28:00.001+01:00

Hello again, more radio stuff I'm afraid, but we're coming to the end of it for a bit.

First of all I recorded my third week of Radio 7 Comedy Club links in London on Monday. Probably not quite as silly as some of my earlier ones but we still had some fun and I hope I've managed to continue the tradition of interacting awkwardly with the programmes with surprise starts and ends just like the creators intended Radio 4 announcers to do first time 'round.
We had one tiny edit made to a show this week. Interesting really- it was one of the lazy, unkind and not hugely controversial remarks it was alright to make about Michael Jackson when alive. Just a throwaway line, but it suddenly sounded slightly poor taste now he's dead.
Had you heard about that? It may not have made the news near you.

My personal preference would have been to try and contextualise the gag as exactly what everyone said when he was alive, but the danger with that is it requires your audience to be uniformly adult and sensible, which isn't something you can ever assume of audiences really. I'm sure the line will be reinstated by the time of the next repeat, anyway.

Tuesday saw me in Manchester for the first of two recording days on my Radio 4 Afternoon Play, and not telling anyone it was my birthday because that would just have made it even weirder.
Now, if I told you one of my cast had played Michael Murray in Bleasdale's GBH you'd be impressed wouldn't you?
You'd think, 'That's Robert Lindsay, Ian's got a fabulous actor there!'
You'd be only half right though, he was a fabulous actor but this was the chap who played Michael Murray as a child in GBH, he was a child himself at the time so it was slightly easier for him.
All my actors were fabulous actually, and I always think it's interesting seeing the different approaches different actors take, layering aspects of themselves and a variety of performance styles on a script.

None were one of the 'star names' that'd been talked about at times as I was writing the play, though truth be told that was quite a relief because I think real star presence like that could have unbalanced what's quite a small scale piece. One of the names mentioned did really help me develop the voice of the lead, so I'm glad the names were mentioned, not that you'll ever hear them here!

My lead was played by Russell Dixon, one of those actors you've seen in all sorts of supporting roles in TV drama, and who I've heard in an awful lot of radio over the years. I nearly worked with him once before, when he was the director's first thought to play an elderly fork in my ten minute radio monologue Made In Sheffield, but, as is so often the way, he was unavailable and it was great to finally work with him. He got all the comedy and emotion and energy I hoped for in the role and brought a tear to a few eyes in the control room turning in a beautifully judged performance I truthfully can't imagine bettered.
Stephen Hoyle had the second biggest role (it was he who was Michael Murray in an earlier life) and really did wonders vocally, giving so much to sell his role and bringing a real intelligence and sensitivity to it. He was playing younger than his age, though not as young as Michael Murray, and I bought it totally, he was far better than my words!
Reece Noi probably had the trickiest role, basically the third lead, playing a quite unsympathetic part without masses to latch on to, but I think he gave a really interestingly nuanced take on it, which I think adds something to the shifting power relationships in the play and I'm looking forward to hearing it in the finished version a lot.
Sue Ryding did wonders with quite a small role really, bringing a humanity to it to the point where I felt we needed to change her final credit. She was so nearly just 'The Dog Lady' but by the end I felt we needed to use her character's name because she'd made the role much more than the plot function that suggests.
Greg Wood, I wrote so little for that we only had him one day which I'm sad about because I loved what he brought to his couple of scenes, not least the way he used his voice to suggest quite a different physicality. He seemed to swell out from being a lean young feller into a kind of burly middle-aged Eddie Yeats type when he went behind the mike, which was spot on for the part.
We only had Balvinder Sopal for one recording day too, though she was also there for our first read through on Tuesday). Balvinder is one of the stars of the BBC Asian Network soap Silver Street, and I worked with her very briefly a few years ago when I had her bursting balloons and throwing gravel around in a short play that was more about stage effects than acting that we did at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds and Bradford's Theatre in the Mill.
She plays a shopkeeper whose name sadly vanished in edits of the play, she still says it once actually, but it's blink and you miss it. When it was first suggested I make my shopkeeper Asian, I'd been nervous about writing the cliché and keen to avoid terrible faux pas in what's a very small role, so I was really happy to have Bal there reassuring me that I'd done okay with the tiny little bit of Punglish I sneaked in for her, and giving this cameo part such life.
In the play's two smallest roles was Matt McGuirk doubling up, hilariously as one virtually monosyllabic character and really scarily in a second, far more voluble, one. He was another really superb actor and possesses a real vocal flexibility and a brilliant sense for rhythm and pace.

So, in short, I was pleased!

Listening at home you probably won't be aware of the work of Eloise Whitmore (though you'll hear her), Paul Cargill, Carrie Rooney or Gary Brown who made the recording go so smoothly, but they were all hugely impressive, fiendishly efficient but really good fun to be around. I'd been lucky enough to have Paul there for No Tomatoes which we recorded in the same studio, but it was my first time watching the others at work. I may talk about some of what they did at a later date but right now I think it runs the risk of spoiling a few moments in the play. Ideally, I reckon you should always experience the trick at least once before you know how it's done!

Anyway, the play is called Anti-Macassars and Ylang-Ylang Conditioner, honestly there's a reason, and it goes out on, I think, Monday the 27th of July at 2.15pm in Radio 4's coveted 'Torchwood on the wireless in the afternoons' slot.
It's not a perfect play, the writing's not all that I'd want, I found it tough to do, but I was very pleasantly surprised by how very much better it was made by the team who worked on it with me. There are all sorts of laughs and moments of tension and sadness that had so much more power than I expected, and I'm very proud to have been involved in the production. It was a great birthday treat.

Radio Radio

2009-06-22T19:42:00.000+01:00

Just a few quickies- the Bill Mitchell programme also got a nice review in The Stage and Television Today, was an iPlayer pick in the Telegraph and was featured on Radio 4's Pick of the Week (marvellous, incorruptible Pick of the Week). It makes me very happy to have Gillian Reynolds (radio critic of the Telegraph) praise something I've been involved in, I imagine working on a TV show that Nancy Bank-Smith enjoyed brings a similar warm glow.

I met Gillian Reynolds once, years ago in my TV curator incarnation, and she was great fun. We had a good old chin-wag about everything from Peter Hawkins (the then recently departed voice of British Childhood) to the legendary TSW opening night show, the full astonishing wonder of which I thought only nerdy gents of my age knew. She knows her stuff!

Tonight sees the beginning of my stint as stand-in presenter for Alex Riley in the Comedy Club slot on BBC Radio 7, this now runs to three weeks rather than two by the way. I've greatly enjoyed acting up for this, it's ten 'til midnight Monday to Friday and gets giddier as it goes on.

If you want to listen to all my links you're scary and I thank you. You'll need to either listen live or get savvy using realplayer links though (check out the Beebotron site if you need help) as the opening half hour doesn't go on iPlayer with my bits attached for arcane and dull reasons related to not wasting precious resources.

I'll be mainly watching The Wire.

Cat Fight

2009-06-20T14:55:00.000+01:00

Bill Mitchell - The Man Who Wrestled Pumas... Probably went out on Radio 4 on Thursday and seems to have gone down quite well, you can catch it still on the iPlayer for the next 5 days. Use this link with realplayer if you're outside the UK. Yesterday it spent a little time as the most popular BBC radio factual show on there, which says something or other- possibly that people like factual shows but not so much the ones about big important world changing facts.

The show garnered quite a bit of publicity. There were a couple of nice trailers that were played out regularly, and I'm told promotion by Steve Wright on Radio 2. In print there was a little article in the Radio Times featuring Bill looking across the page towards the I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue article and preview pieces in The Guardian, Observer, Times and Telegraph. All were terrifyingly positive, bar The Times wishing as an aside that there could have been more archive in the show. Those of us involved wished that as well, with there being a couple of pieces it was frustrating not to be able to feature in the end.

Response seems to have been pretty positive too. Googling around, people on messageboards, Twitter and so on seems to reveal general enthusiasm and The Guardian ran a glowing review of the show on Friday.

Amazingly, the one question I've been dreading (bar where's your writers credit- answer, mainly right here- Radio 4 isn't obliged to offer them on these kind of shows) has only come up once, when a friend asked 'Wrestled pumas? In what sense wrestled pumas?'
Ah. Well, lovely title isn't it? In this sense...

Initially, the documentary was pitched as someone, possibly even me unless Radio 4 felt a star narrator was needed, learning about Bill.
To accompany my initial pitch I'd located an audio interview with him, a good obituary and a few CDs with some lovely DJ sound bytes and out-takes that we were sadly unable to clear for broadcast but best of all was a tantalising entry on Bill in an old book on advertising The Tuppenny Punch and Judy Show, under his photo the caption claimed-
"Once he wrestled pumas now he caresses words"

Because it was clear that Bill had told a number of tall and colourful tales about his life as he developed his hard man persona, this seemed a good hook. Was this true, or just Bill making extravagant claims?
One of the ideas was we'd ask interviewees if they knew anything about this. The result could be a montage telling us 'Definitely, in Madrid in 1962' or something, 'I've no idea', 'rings a vague bell', 'wouldn't be surprised' or 'no'. Except it didn't really work out that way, and once it was decided a proper celebrity narrator who'd known Bill was needed, the journey of discovery idea gave way to straight biography and I wrote the script to serve Bill's life story, the archive we knew we could use and the interviews producer Paul Hardy had put together. The cliffhanger of whether Bill had wrestled pumas or not was left, well not so much hanging as unraised beyond the title... I did suggest that we might retitle the show Bill Mitchell- the Man Who Didn't Have to Try... Too Hard but hang it all- 'Wrestled Pumas' that's brilliant isn't it?

If you do want a definite answer on whether Bill puma-wrestled or not, I can tell you that in the course of making the programme we came to firmly believe that he did.

Probably.

Fallen through a time warp- it's a fragment of June

2009-06-19T01:47:00.004+01:00

This looks like a draft of an entry embarked on and forgotten about in mid June, (while waiting for a bus I suspect). I think I repeat some of the things said here but I'm publishing it anyway (after my rediscovering it in August), in the interests of not chucking away a half thought through feeble joke, a couple of observations and a stray opinion. Enjoy.

I've been in TV's glamorous London the last two days, though I was mainly working in wireless's ugly London myself.

Blimey, for a boy fron the sticks London is glamorous. I took the 'wrong' train to Lewisham by mistake on Wednesday, what a good idea that was- tourist boom town London all on one line, Gherkin, Cutty Sark, Canary Wharf... it was like being in Cardiff with iconic cutaways. Fab.
It was a smashing pair of days, I stayed over with a lovely couple, briefly sitting on Nicola Bryant's old cushions I'm told (insert gag at will), and also met up with the famous Robert Davy from not in Coupling, a gestalt entity which makes me laugh so much I can't believe it hasn't had a fabulously entertaining wedding day for me to enjoy yet, each to their own.

While not being social this week I was mainly recording links for BBC Radio 7's Comedy Club, the only downer being having to chuck a lot of 'it's my last Wednesday' type links when I was offered a third fill in week presenting. I can handle those kind of rewrites.

In other rewrite news my Radio 4 play is now done and willl record soon. If it ends up any good at all then praise is definitely owed to producer Gary Brown for nurturing it, developing it and nudging it along on the way.

Oh and by the way, as someone who's spent a bit of time reading up on the various daft, ideologically suspect and ill-thought through bits of broadcasting legislation of the last half century I find myself very disappointed by the Digital Britain report. If ITV and Channel 4 can no wonder work as commercially funded public service organisations despite having massively diluted their public service remit I personally believe they should be allowed to go to the wall and have their popular properties sold on.
Unbelievably the BBC works... and better than most.

An Unsatisfyingly Incomplete Pot Pourri of Teasers

2009-06-11T21:31:00.000+01:00

I'm now into the final draft of my radio play, there may be some polishing after this, but beyond that, this is it- more later.

I have recently said 'yes' to writing a short story- more later.

There were two exciting and different trailers for the Bill Mitchell documentary on Radio 4 today (at midday and 6.30pm if you're interested)- more later.

I had an absolute hoot yesterday recording my first week of links for BBC Radio 7's Comedy Club (very different in tone from the Sunday Drama and Comedy Catch Up slot I did the other week which I feel struggled to get a handle on). I'll be hosting it 10 'til Midnight, Monday to Friday from 23rd of June to the 3rd of July- more later.

Deferred gratification was today decreed worse than obviously flagged subversion of form for comic effect- tough. Sue me.

At a wireless near you from a week on Thursday...

2009-06-09T23:55:00.000+01:00

BBC RADIO 4 Thursday 18 June 2009

Bill Mitchell – The Man Who Wrestled Pumas...Probably
Thursday 18 June
11.30am-12.00noon BBC RADIO 4

Miriam Margolyes profiles the life of the late Bill Mitchell, the gravelly baritone who informed people that the latest blockbusters would be "at cinemas near you from Sunday"; that a certain brand of lager was probably the best in the world; and that a type of aftershave was for men who didn't have to try too hard.
Born in Canada, Mitchell apparently developed his trademark voice either as a result of suffering mumps as a child or by falling from a tree and damaging his windpipe. He admitted that the heavy drinking and smoking which began in his teens helped preserve his voice and drove his excessive lifestyle.
Mitchell's voiceover career began in the late Sixties with a recommendation by Patrick Allen, the then undisputed voiceover king, and a Pan Am advert showcasing Mitchell's Orson Welles impression. This impression ultimately mutated into his trademark sound.
Mitchell died in August 1997 but his name remains ranked as one of the greats within the advertising industry, with his voice still impersonated by other artists today.
The programme features contributions from: musicians Zoot Money and Kenny Clayton; fellow voiceover and creative Chris Sandford; industry moguls Nick Angell and Rob Townsend; and Bill's daughter, Amanda McAllister.
Presenter/Miriam Margolyes, Producer/Paul Hardy
BBC Radio 4 Publicity

See also pages 7, 119 & 131 of the new RadioTimes.

It's coming, it's Zor-tastic and it doesn't mention Frontier on Space. Blame me, I came up with the idea and wrote the script.

Substitute

2009-06-04T23:33:00.000+01:00

It's a funny old life isn't it? Well really it's largely miserable but it does have enough funny bits in it to make it manageable I'd say.

I've been working fairly hard the last few weeks and feeling a little glum after the recent death of a relative. Not unexpected sadly and not someone we'd been close with for some years, but no matter how inevitable the loss you're still never emotionally ready and I surprised myself by how raw and sharp my grief felt when I had to explain my flatness to someone. Oddly, I've studiously avoided telling friends about the loss, trying to jolly along as usual. You think they don't need to hear it, it's not worth mentioning and, you know, after a few days like that you say to yourself 'Well, why would you bring it up now?'
And of course now here I am writing about it publicly to strangers rather than mentioning it more privately to mates. There's some kind of ridiculous compartmentalism going on here, isn't there- like having the first class bit on trains to Leeds which are only better than standard class to the extent of having plug sockets and being much less full.

I'm still deep in play rewrites (original peculiar title is staying, by the way. It has the advantage of being quirky and zingy which none of my not great replacement ideas were) and my God, I'm getting good notes, pushing me sharply and intelligently towards getting something together which I simply couldn't do on my own. I think I've learn more on this play than on any other piece of writing I've done, and that's come from the rewriting process which I've not really experienced properly before.
Previously, things I've done have tended to either be good enough to use or not good enough- the end, but, with this play, commissioned from a precis and then gradually worked up, I've finally had the experience of trying to get something from 'not good enough' but paid for up to 'good enough' through reworking. Hopefully I'll manage to do that.

In the meantime, I've just done another little job, one I never really expected to have and didn't go out hunting for, and have rather enjoyed it.
I've become a radio announcer. Now, I'm not the world's best speaker, I don't have a voice that says 'this is the BBC' to me but here I am anyway, doing some stand in slots for BBC Radio 7, mainly introducing comedy shows and, even better, mainly introducing ones I like.
This all came about after I nipped down to do my No Tomatoes chunner last month and I guess ended up talking with a bit of passion and knowledge about radio and comedy while we chatted.
Anyway, the upshot is I'll be presenting two 4 hour Sunday afternoon slots this weekend and next, introducing some lovely old comedy shows. Even better the second slot also contains one of my absolute favourite radio plays ever- Odysseus on an Iceberg by Alick Rowe from 1985 which I taped off Radio 4 on its original broadcast all those years ago and have on cassette to this day (it's the only survivor of my home taping from that era to still be with me, 24 years on).

I've tried to bring a tiny little bit of my broadcast history knowledge in lightly to leaven the effect of my droning on, it is, after all, the thing I've got going for me.
Do listen if you can bear it. I start a bit earnest I think but hopefully I loosen up. If BBC Radio 7 can bear it once they've listened back to me, I may be doing a little bit more of the same kind of thing later this month, but I'll only tell you about that if they don't mysteriously change their minds nearer the time...

Truly I am a Jack of All Trades and Master of None, all hyphens and little of worth to connect with them. Author cum comedy writer slash drama writer cum sound designer slash performer cum researcher slash broadcaster,
I'm utterly cum-slashed aren't I?

Untitled

2009-05-08T14:51:00.001+01:00

Draft three of the radio play is underway which is good. Helpful notes and more tantalising blue-sky casting suggestions having emerged from draft two in which I both got slightly lost and thankfully slightly found again.
It does need a new title now though. It's been labouring under one that was given it at commission which didn't really apply even then, and does even less now, it currently has a slightly blah one I gave it so I didn't have to look at the other one in all the page headers, but it requires something a little better.
I suspect a disproportionate amount of time will be spent sorting those few words at the end of this draft. They are after all the play's first calling card, mind if the title was followed by "starring blue-sky casting suggestion" that would be draw enough in my book.

I'm also pleased that the first draft of my telly sitcom idea went down pretty well with the producer I sent it to. It was really an experiment to see if what I wanted to do worked and get a handle on the characters and situation and we both think we buy it. A chat with the producer today suggested a couple of things to tweak, which I absolutely agreed on, and I shared an idea I'd had to give one of the characters more of an individual voice which also seemed to go down well.
I'll get on to draft two of that after play draft three and we'll see how we go from there.
Baby steps still, lots of falls still between here and anywhere, and indeed nowhere. Looking forward to it.
The sitcom does has a title, though whether that will need to change too, who knows.
It's called Skill or in my head the slightly more grand "Ian Potter's Skill", entirely in tribute to "Terry Nation's Blake's 7" which always used to be written on Blake's 7 stuff, and not at all because it sounds like someone praising me.
I wonder if the proposed Sky Blake's 7 will end up being called Sky One's Terry Nation's Blake's 7? If it happens it will be in my house.

Great wobbling nebulae!

2009-05-06T09:52:00.000+01:00

And suddenly it's May...

Busy little time of late- documentary one is in the bag for broadcast in October, which will be on us all too soon at this rate. Documentary two is coming along. I've written a draft script for our presenter (excellent choice again) but things will obviously need to change not least because there are a few bits of archive to finalise, and the absence or presence of them will obviously affect the shape of the piece.

The interview with Dick Mills at Sensoria was good fun, he was virtually self-propelled in the end. After a good chat beforehand and prodding at various areas that interested me in our discussion, it was pretty much a case of give him and the audience a couple of nudges and away they went together. He's a very young 74.

The last few days have seen me writing a pilot sitcom script which I'd had ideas bubbling for but no time to write since probably September. Clearly, I'd thought a lot more about the thing than I reckoned because a fairly workable first draft came out without much pain over four days writing and the script is finally on the desk of the producer I proposed it to, pleading needily for love.

Today sees the beginning of work on draft three of my radio play, as my producer on that and I discuss his notes on draft two and plan the way forward. Hooray!

After that there are thoughts for future documentaries, a few possibilities emerging to talk about things I love passionately for very little money (an emerging career speciality of mine) and a pile of nebulous 'who knows'. Can you pile nebulous things? Not easily I wouldn't think.

The very best thing I've done lately was make an asparagus, leek and onion quiche. Caramelise the onion, add a bit of garlic and a spoon of mustard, and stack your nebulae carefully, those are my life tips.

You'll be pleased to know I'm not on Twitter.

Day Tripper

2009-04-21T16:32:00.002+01:00

Long old day yesterday- I'd forgotten how much the National Express coach from Sheffield to London and back in one day saps you- it's about 7 hours on the coach for around 8 hours in the capital. It is however very, very cheap (and inexplicably even cheaper if you buy two singles rather than a return for the same times).
I was down plugging No Tomatoes- doing a little interview with BBC Radio 7 presenter Penny Haslam that will be chopped up in teensy usable slices and scattered thinly over the airwaves in the next few weeks. Six or eight minutes maximum I'd imagine.
Now, that seems a short time to justify a trip to London doesn't it?
It is, which was why I'd also arranged another appointment at Broadcasting House, talking to one of the arts producers I've previously done items for on Front Row, offering up a bit of archive material for a currently unannounced Radio 4 programme and chatting in the studio about the background to it.
Interestingly, I find it much easier to talk about other people and their work than I do about me and mine. Not what you'd expect eh, long suffering reader?

While I was in London I had a little free time and discovered two interesting things.
The first was that No Tomatoes episode 2 was at that point the most listened to entertainment programme on BBC Radio 7's iPlayer page (and something like fourth or fifth most listened to on the station overall) and as a consequence was on the very front page of the iPlayer representing 7 and claiming to be a radio highlight! It's certainly better than episode 1 by my reckoning.

It's also definitely getting much better publicity this time, with really well crafted on-air trailers, and nice little images on the Radio 7 homepage, and all this before Penny's interrogation of me is cast piecemeal into the ether.
The fact I've started getting email from strangers about it again suggests a heightened awareness too.

The second thing I learned was the full contents listing for the final Big Finish published Doctor Who Short Trips story collection, a lovely fiction range that's now coming to an end. It's a best of retrospective cunningly titled Re:Collections.

< Geeky Who bit >
I'm in it, as are several friends- virtual, actual and bothual. In particular I recommend you Matt Kimpton's Life After Queth- he should have got a slew of Doctor Who gigs on the basis of this debut, funny, moving, tricksy with time and beautifully written. The story features Doctor Who's very best giant telekinetic alien woodlouse and introduces a whole new race of space armadilloids.
Truth be told I'm there under slightly false pretenses because the very best entry in the volume my story came from is definitely Paul Magrs' Kept Safe and Sound. However, I believe the rules for the collection were one story per author and Paul had already been ear-marked for inclusion for a story from another volume, allowing me to sneak in in his place.
I'd also recommend Jonathan Morris' story The Thief of Sherwood even though it is NOT CANON and contains a very unlikely fictional edit occurring in an early 1960s BBC videotape show, and Steve Lyons' All Our Christmasses, a lovely satirical fable which was so prescient of 'Pirate Planet' episode 4 Spannergate and the evil that scandalous interference released into the world.
< /Geeky Who bit >

Great cover, isn't it?
I came back from London with horrible dandruff, which I'm going to blame the coach air-conditioning for, while being glad I didn't wear headphones during the radio interviews just in case I'm wrong.

Different Days

2009-04-15T19:25:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, I went out, as you do, to a train station, as you do, and met a poet there, which I don't often. We then went off to a colossal steelworks, visited a local history archive, listened to an academic sing folk, popped into an old vicarage for tea with aristocracy, then travelled through a field of gambolling lambs to enter a dragon's cave.
I got all my drinks paid for all day. How brill was that?
By the time I returned home I had two reasons to visit Broadcasting House next week.
The only things that went wrong with the day were that I ate some jalapeno peppers that evening which unsettled my night and that, despite my confident assertion that Liverpool were capable of beating Chelsea 4-2, they didn't. They could have though so my assertion stands and they tried heroically in an astonishing game.
Usually humdrummery really.

Today was harder. The usual horror of the Hillsborough anniversary took me right back to 20 years ago when three of my relatives were in that ground and I was manning the 'phone in Sheffield to many more, waiting to see if they came home. They did, others were not so lucky.
When they eventually managed to return the police were still claiming fans had broken in through the gate that they'd opened to crisis manage the crush which poorly planned crowd management had caused. They just moved the crush, creating a deadly bottle neck and treated those trying to escape it as criminals.
My father, who'd seen the gates opened, 'phoned the local radio when he got back and told them the police were misleading the media.
Because he was well-spoken, articulate and corroborating other testimony the person he was speaking to simply called out “We've got comformation. Run with it!” and did, without even checking his name.

Today, I saw a policeman on the news defending the actions of an un-numbered officer attacking a female demonstrator in London with a baton, explaining that we didn't necessarily know what provocation he'd received and whether he was hitting this woman to fend off others nearby who were 'demonstrating against him'.
The lessons of 20 years ago have not been fully learned. The public en-masse are not necessarily the enemy of the police.

Radiophony

2009-04-04T13:52:00.002+01:00

Apologies for recent radio silence- I've been busy juggling hot knives and metaphors.
I'm deep in radio play re-writes and late too. I've found it hard. It's been a bit like like picking at a scab or a simile, you start with one little bit and the whole thing slowly unravels on you in a way scabs don't as a consequence.

Other than that the recording date looms for In Search of the Wantley Dragon and I'm doing a location recce and a pre-interview with one of the key contributers over the next couple of days and also developing a few things with the Showroom Cinema in Sheffield- you remember, where I saw most of Control (and all of Pandora's Box).
Too early to talk about those but before/if they happen I'll definitely be interviewing Dick Mills of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop there on the 27th of April, a boyhood hero for a nerd like me obviously- the man who did Major Bloodnok's Stomach, The Penargilon Kangaroo Relocation Drive and of course Atomic Reactor Runs Wild.
I will ask him about glow-pots and wobbulators until people flee.

Also from 11pm on Sunday the 12th BBC Radio 7 is re-running No Tomatoes. I expect this will be the last time they run it. They've paid the actors for three plays only, so unless they renegotiate to bring the performance rights in line with the script rights (they're allowed another two airings of those) that's probably that. So if by some freak of chance you've missed it up to now this may well be your 'last chance to miss'.

Oddly moving...

2009-03-18T19:17:00.000Z

I had a look at the fan page for Ken Campbell this afternoon. As I've come to expect one of my photos of Ken performing for my stag do in 1997 was there. He's wearing a T-shirt I made for him as a silly thank you. I then scrolled through a few more photos and found him wearing the same T-shirt in the last run of photos there about 10 years later.
Still a hero. Still barging unbidden into dreams. Still moving me to laughter and tears.

Going for the Jocular

2009-03-10T00:14:00.000Z

A very interesting day today, if a long one. Up at 6am, out the house at 7, not home 'til just before midnight, a train, a taxi and 9 hours on National Express coaches entirely populated by bronchial tributes to Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy in the middle. The reason for all this being that there comedy writing masterclass with David Mitchell at Broadcasting House in the afternoon.

There were 15 of us there, selected from 900 or so applicants apparently, and I was pleased to find myself sitting by another of Gill Isles' protégées quite by chance,
The afternoon, which focused on sketch writing, broke down into an illustrated talk on types of funny from Gareth Edwards, the BBC's head of radio comedy, a discussion between Gareth and David (resplendent in a range of complementary browns from the Colour Me Autumnal range and quite as nice a chap as you'd hope) followed by questions from the group, a mock writer's meeting for a topical sketch show involving us all, and a little ever so slightly stilted socialising at the end.

All pretty good fun and useful too, though I'm not sure the mock meeting was an entirely comfortable part of proceedings for most of us, because a) we hadn't known it was happening in advance and were thus unprepared, and b) we seemed to be mainly shy solo writers rather than habitual team writers with shared history that would have allowed us to bounce ideas around more easily. Possibly the slightly stilted socialising should have happened first,
I was gobbier than I needed to be in this part of proceedings to compensate for finding it awkward, for which I apologise if you were one of the others present. It was either that or clam up entirely.
I got homework from this bit for my pains, so that'll teach me, and have had to buy a copy of OK magazine for research on the way home. I felt soiled.
I concealed it as best I could in a copy of the new Doctor Who Magazine which I perversely feel is a more acceptable public purchase and then read that on the way home instead. There's a piece by Andrew Pixley on the 60s Dalek series that nearly was in there, which is great if you like that kind of thing, and I definitely do.

A Tale of Two Mitchells

2009-03-05T19:17:00.000Z

A good day.

Firstly, I ran further, faster and longer than I did on Monday. I'm inching slowly back towards the fitness level I was at a year ago, before I piled on a depressingly large amount of weight in a hilarious typing at great length and drinking to get to sleep afterwards experiment.

Secondly, documentary producer Paul (who I'm meeting in sunny Bradford tomorrow) has made an exciting little breakthrough on the Bill Mitchell documentary.

Thirdly, I've been invited to a comedy writing masterclass with David Mitchell next week.

I'm particularly pleased about the third because it came from sending off three sketches written on spec to the BBC Writersroom in a day or two in February. No attached rubric, no CV, just the sketches.

Comedy is incredibly easy to fail at, all it requires to be bad comedy is someone not being amused. A drama can actually get by quite well and be considered a moderate success without extracting any noises from the audience, jokes don't survive so well on rapt silence (so if you're ever amused in a comedy audience please remember a hundred wry knowing smiles sounds like death but a giggle's a victory).

So it's a genuine comfort to get even slight approval from strangers and know someone somewhere in the BBC finds me moderately amusing and I might even be allowed a go at jokes on the radio again one day.

Chevron and Fanfare

2009-03-04T16:31:00.001Z

So farewell then the Yorkshire TV studios on the Kirkstall Road, Leeds.
My inlaws saw Countdown there, it did make them happy.
I spent a few happy times there myself. Oh the sights I saw- the scene dock doors from which Dusty Bin still beamed down like the residing Numen of the place, the monthly update of the caption at the end of the Catherine Cookson obituary, mechanical advert cart carousels, grumpy continuity announcers, the empty studios graced by Rag Dolly Anna, Hadleigh, those two ladies off Farmhouse Kitchen, Miriam Stoppard, Rob Buckley and Magnus Pyke and the one truly great ITV sitcom Rising Damp, the URSA telecine suite, the archive full of unseen extra Whicker in Haiti and Yellowthread Street, wonders unimaginable.
Here it was that Whiteley was bitten by a ferret and made for life. Here there was once a village called Beckinsdale. Here Jess Yates stole chunks of sets from The Main Chance to make Stars on Sunday look better. Here Rory told the Kwackers his stories. Here Junior Showtime troubled camera crews more than it should. Here Les Dawson and John Cleese bridged the Oxbridge/Clubland divide.
Yorkshire was never quite the ITV company Baverstock dreamed of, but it deserves our respect for what it was.

Message in a Bottle

2009-03-04T13:08:00.000Z

Dear Pughs,

Hi, hope you're well. In about 1992 you lived in the Bowden Court halls in central Manchester. You may recall we went to the Ozric Tentacles gig at the International II which Google suggests was probably on the 23rd of November 1991 (when the Universe was less than half its present size and Doctor Who was only 33 years old). After the gig I seem to recall you talked a fair amount about Tom Lehrer, Professor Colin Blakemore, the Liberal Democrat Party, and played us some Scott Walker, 13th Floor Elevators and quite possibly some KLF or Orb related ambient bits and pieces all rather nicely mixed on the fly in your flat.

Obviously, at that time we both hung out a bit at the Grot bar, and I believe it was there that I lent you my copy of the collected Watchmen, signed by Alan Moore and David Gibbons.
Not signed to me, just signed. I didn't know them so it seemed silly somehow, sillier even than queuing at Odyssey 7 book shop for the book to be signed anonymously. I didn't really get the idea of autographs then, as you can tell. I just wanted to see the men who'd done it and be grateful in front of them.

Anyhow, I know I said when I lent it you that I was in no rush for its return, but I do quite fancy another look at it now if you've finished reading it.
How have the last seventeen and a bit years treated you?

All the best

Ian

Writing Exercise

2009-03-03T18:18:00.000Z

I’m running again, which is almost exactly like writing in a number of respects:

It doesn’t need half the specialist equipment some people make on.

You spend ages putting off doing it.

You spend a lot of time warming up beforehand and warming down afterwards, some of this is actually slightly different to the whole putting off thing.

It’s actually a little unpleasant to do and particularly unenjoyable at the beginning.

Even though it hurts it does begin to be fun in a perverse way while you’re doing it.

You get more from if you’ve got targets in mind, and can measure your achievements against those.

It’s often easier to do if there’s someone observing you from a little way off making you feel guilty if you stop.

You do get better with practise but it never stops being particularly unenjoyable at the start.

You often feel a pleasant sense of achievement when you stop and look back at what you’ve done, although quite soon you’ll be beginning to pick away at yourself, analysing how exactly you’ve been deficient in your performance.

It always takes longer to do than you think.

The main difference is that running doesn’t seem to make you quite as fat as writing.

And on we jog.

Chasing the Dragon

2009-02-16T16:58:00.000Z

Just a quick note (blown on my own trumpet) to say I had my first meeting with regard to my second Radio 4 documentary on Friday the 13th, no triskaidekaphobia on this production, and that in the light of that I can say two things I wasn't certain I could before.

It's called In Search of the Wantley Dragon it'll be in Radio 4's poetry slot (so airing twice in one week, it's like those Week Ending glory days all over again, and not at all like having No Tomatoes air sometime around both 11pm and 4am, oh no) and our presenter is the very marvellous Ian McMillan- a man so affable, he's ended up with most of Northern England's aff. That's how affed he's been.

Broadcast is in August I believe if you'd like to plan your holidays accordingly.

Other tedious writers' weblogs detailing professional minutiae but little of real interest beyond that are available.

Snowed Under

2009-02-04T18:18:00.000Z

Well, February's gathering a bit of speed.
I've got a handful of sketches to write in the next couple of weeks, a treatment to work up for a thing I'd accidentally forgotten about for a few days until I started a things to do list a couple of mins back (whoops), meetings to sort for my documentaries and play, and a draft of a script idea that I've had festering a while to write, to see if I can make work.

So what do I do? Update this thing.

Good feedback on the first draft of my play today, except one thing. I've monstrously underwritten. What I thought was a nice tight 45 mins with some nice mysterious lacunae, isn't. It's probably more like a busy half hour. We'll be meeting to see where some more words might come from. There are some obvious candidates in the lacunae, but I suspect they're best unfilled and we'll be better off expanding on a couple of smaller characters and finding a handful of new moments. Whoops.
It'll sort.
It's so unlike me- I usually overwrite amd have to cut back.

In other news- London paralysed by freak fluffy rain. Ian gets about North of England as usual on undisrupted public transport. News media not so interested in the latter story.

The Criminal Genius of Fritz Lang

2009-01-22T11:40:00.000Z

The Testament of Doctor Mabuse is an odd film. It's like one of those Shakespeare 'problem plays' or REAL LIFE where you're not quite sure of the genre.
So, first off it's a sequel to two early Fritz Lang films- Doctor Mabuse, the Gambler and M, the one a story of an evil criminal mastermind with a supernatural talent for mesmerism, the other a thriller following the hunt for a psychologically disturbed child killer. You can see immediately where the problem might be.

It's got suspense, big explosions, a couple of great action set pieces, redemption, comedy crooks, a grumpy copper who gets results, bizarre Edgar Allan Poe/Sir Arthur Conan Doyle era forensics where a typewriter clue is disregarded as worthless but there's a lot of messing around with messages on scratched glass and ballistics analysis is an astonishingly exact science.
Then there's an amazingly creepy scene with a man being possessed by a ghost (a ghost later seen to open doors in a manner which denies convenient psychological rationalisation).
It's basically got everything chucked in that you might fancy in an exciting ride, but it doesn't all quite hang together satisfactorily.

It's not helped that the villain's behaviour, hiding in the shadows transmitting messages to his underground network of hoods by radio, setting elaborate bomb traps with stupidly long countdowns and rigging his door knob to a recording of his voice saying “Go away!” have all been pinched by later far pulpier series and serials - King of the Rocket Men, that ghastly Demons episode last week and of course Doctor Who and Tanni in an exciting adventure with a Powerful Enemy.
The bomb bit is actually slightly stupider than the bit in Demons, if you can believe that, though it combines the rising waters and ticking timer threats far more interestingly and has the advantage of resolving its stupid fantasy peril in a sensible way.

What M and The Testament of Doctor Mabuse share beyond Lohmann, their endearing Police Commissar lead, is a sense of a country in which criminality flourishes and is highly organised- in an era of mass unemployment (when even Labour Exchange clerks are short on funds) it's suggested turning to crime is the only way out for some.
Real or imagined this powerful underground black economy seems to turn up time and again in the little German film and literature between the Wars I know. Certainly, the hyper-inflation of Weimar Germany appears to hang heavily on the film, a large part of Mabuse's plan to destabilise the State is built on circulating counterfeit money, he just has to spoil it all with artsy jewel thievery and mass poison gas attacks.
Top tip for any modern terrorists reading- destroying the banking system from within might just be more effective that some of that old fashioned bomb stuff. You probably know this and have been doing it for a while, of course.

Mabuse defeats himself in the end, which is handy because being essentially an idea, an idea that anyone might house, makes him rather hard to defeat otherwise. Quite why he chooses to give up, when all that's really gone wrong is that he's lost a few of his more rubbish henchmen isn't entirely clear, perhaps he's only really interested in destruction and doesn't really know what to follow his schemes up with, perhaps he's retreated to draw up fresh plans to replace those we see him tearing up at the end, perhaps his high profile but failed attack on the public will bring more anarchy than a successful attack would.
Lang was keen after fleeing Germany to say the film, suppressed by the Nazis, was a coded attack on Hitler, and yes it does feature an incarcerated mad man drawing up a plan for revenge on the world, which at a squint might be writing Mein Kampf in jail, and there is a moment at which Mabuse is reported to have said “I am the State!”, but it's a bit of a push.

Admittedly, coded attacks do have to be a bit obscure, but I suspect the film was genuinely banned for its exciting depiction of acts of terrorism against the State rather than for hinting the State and its violent opponents might be cut from similar cloth.

'Round Hereish be a Dragon's Bones

2009-01-16T13:09:00.001Z

My other Radio 4 documentary proposal is now definitely happening, which is rather good- what's interesting is it'll be happening broadly simultaneously with my first one and rewrites for my play. The freelance life is a cycle of feast-famine- one way or another you're always being told to get stuffed.

More info as it becomes solid, but at the moment I can safely say it's a literary detective story (though not in the way The Moonstone is, it's about following the fortunes of a piece of literature) it's called The Wantley Dragon and has a great presenter lined up.

Wikipedia and Brewer's Phrase and Fable will give you a clue as to what it's all about (and might help you make a good guess at who our presenter is, actually) but there's a lot more going on than the entries there tell!

Memento Morley

2009-01-15T18:50:00.000Z

What with the continual deaths of the people who built the media world we grew up in and seem to us part of the furniture of our lives, this could easily turn into one of those 'weblog's which constantly marks the passing of great actors, writers and directors and so forth.
I haven't written about Pinter or McGoohan here because there are others better qualified to talk of them, and besides you already know exactly who they are and what they meant to you just by reading those two surnames alone, and I didn't write about Ron Asheton, the man behind those incredible Stooges riffs, because I was away (and what could I add but a redundant extra 'wow'?).

There is however a lovely little story I was told some years ago about Angela Morley, the great and prolific radio, TV and film composer, arranger and conductor who has just died, that I'd like to pass on here, because I don't know if anyone else will.

Angela, who as Wally Stott wrote the Hancock's Half Hour theme amongst countless other pieces before her 1972 sex change, was to be interviewed over the telephone by a great expert on and enthusiast for broadcast music, who'd been given her number.
The expert rang the number and a very male voice answered. “I'm calling for Angela Morley,” the expert explained, uncertain if he was in fact already speaking to her. 'Oh right,' said the male voice, 'I'll get her for you,' and then casually called out 'Dad! It's for you.'

An illuminating interview later followed, but what I like is the caller's initial careful wariness in approaching the potentially awkward area of Angela's gender countered by the family's complete acceptance of it as utterly normal. I think it's a little story everyone comes out of well.

Doctor Who fans to create peculiar DVD sales spike... again

2009-01-03T20:48:00.000Z

Matt Smith is the new Doctor Who*!
I'm really rather pleased. Much more interesting casting than expected and the BBC 2/World Productions series Party Animals is going to get a bit more of the attention it deserved.
Watch it- but watch it as a drama first and a Doctor showcase second. Though you know; unlucky in love, committed old school socialist, overshadowed by his family's high flyers- all those could work.

*Yes, it is his name, read the credits for the first 18 years.

In The Year 2008 (Exordium and Terminus)

2008-12-31T01:39:00.000Z

Tricky cove- Johnny 2008.

Big achievements obviously, I wrote a book for one, which I've had some nice feedback on*, I won two commissions for Radio 4, met loads of fabulous people (characters, heroes, new friends and old), and I had a few lovely breaks away, but there have also been real negatives too.

Working on the book I ended up doing no exercise for about two thirds of the year, eating badly, sleeping too little and getting to be the fattest, sweatiest, wheeziest blob I've ever been in my whole fat, sweaty, wheezy career. Straight after that came the shock of Ken Campbell's death which I really wasn't ready for at all and which has rather coloured the rest of my year, and compounded my usual winter blues.
Comedy seems to have stalled a bit for me this year, sadly it seems BBC Radio 7 have no interest in a No Tomatoes series 2 at the mo (though there was lovely feedback on the messageboards, management didn't appear keen to return our calls, which even the most ardent suitor eventually takes as a hint of some kind), so it's drama and documentary for a bit I fear, though I do have an idea for a sitcom I want to try and work up in early 2009.

So, onwards and upwards. Jollity, exercise, productivity and money await in the future somewhere between here and the final entropic collapse of all we pin meaning on into lukewarm Universal blah.
This message may or may not have been influenced by the cheery outlook of Charlie Brooker and my rediscovery of the 1989 Swans album The Drowning World.

*If by some accident you've not yet bought the book there's an opportunity to win copies coming up in early January 2009 at the very lovely Off The Telly "blog".

Happy New Year, chums. Sunshine's on the way.

Hey there, authenticity fans!

2008-12-18T13:22:00.000Z

"There's a blaze of light in every word;
It doesn't matter which you heard,
The holy, or the broken Hallelujah!"

Leonard Cohen gets the last word in first on covers in the original version of 'Hallelujah' on Various Positions, you know, the version from before John Cale's cover for the tribute albumI'm Your Fan album reconstructed the song using alternative rejected verses (some of which Cohen sang live) into what has become the now definitive version (like Hendrix's rejigging of ’All Along the Watchtower').
Cale's take on the song is the original version of it as it's currently known, right down to the singing 'you' instead of 'yah' (thus mucking up the rhymes) and the lyric tweaks that Buckley mimics.

I'm glad you like the Buckley version, but for me there are two guys in the queue due praise ahead of Buckley if you're coming on all purist and criticising later covers.

Let the kids have their charts- another cover won't break this song. If a Jewish Buddhist can write a hymn that Christians, Agnostics and Atheists all think is theirs, it's a song with a bit of strength in it.

Can we imagine the sort of people that might live on a star like this? Let us go very close. Let us look and listen very carefully and perhaps...

2008-12-09T17:29:00.001Z

I was a little disappointed a few weeks back when the Independent newspaper decided to turn a quote from Anne Wood in The Rise and Rise of the Independents into a item in its media gossip column, trying to make some of her comments about the way Michael Grade has historically dealt with children's TV into something which I felt belittled her grievance at the confused priorities of a market-driven yet nominally public service broadcasters. The item didn't take her or her argument seriously, concocting a frothy jokey piece based on a clash of personalities rather than ideologies- silly story teller versus pragmatic business man. As it happens Wood is a very pragmatic and successful business operator herself, you have to be to survive and thrive in the kids' TV environment we have now.

Parliament will be discussing children's TV again shortly, I fully expect to see that painted in some quarters as a heated debate on whether the right honourable member opposite remembers the names of all the Animal Kwackers, or that one with the ghost who... etc.

Well let's personalise this one as well. There's a reason why we should be taking the future of Children's television seriously, and that was illustrated by the fact that Oliver Postgate is being mourned today by people from at the very least their twenties to their fifties who know him only through his TV creations. His shows helped create the world views of a good two generations.
That's important stuff, and if, as at present, survival in the kid's TV world relies on producing programmes at a loss hoping that a profit might be turned on associated merchandise and global sales I fear the programmes that we see in future will suffer, and there's a danger that the imaginary worlds that are created for our children, and which help shape them, will be cheapened and commercialised by the process.

Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin's Smallfilms was a cottage industry, with the personalities of its founders writ large in all it did. In those days merchandising meant books, annuals and comic strips (written and illustrated by Postgate and Firmin themselves). If you wanted a Clanger doll you knitted your own. Those days are long gone.
The series Clangers and Bagpuss are merchandised now as they never were in the years they were first screened and are now part of the brand management company Coolabi PLC's catalogue of properties. They are making money like never before, the sad truth is that the characters and stories they featured would certainly not have developed as they did if we'd had the children's TV market of today 50 years ago.

In short, if in future the sector can only support the heavily market researched, big money backed shows with a battery of associated merchandising that can be bought cheap, the individual creativity of people like Postgate and Firmin will be squeezed out and have its rough edges knocked off. To give another example- Wallace and Gromit (currently fronting the Christmas Radio Times) were not created by a committee second guessing what might prove most acceptable to the biggest worldwide audience but by one man (a Postgate and Firmin fan too, I should add) making a student film.

Postgate and Firmin offered surprise and delight, quirky tales from a favourite pair of quirky uncles, part of a diverse rage of voices that Children's TV supported then. Would you rather your child was read bedtime stories by real people or a committee? Committees produce some very good things, obviously, but I'd like to see them invent a Soup Dragon.

The Animal Kwackers were Bongo, Rory, Boots and Twang, I think the one with the ghost was either Come Back, Lucy or Nobody's House, you've not really given me enough to go on.

Coming to You Live

2008-11-28T09:05:00.001Z

About 50 years ago, William 'Ted' Kotcheff, one of the Canadians who shook up UK TV was directing a TV drama. He was one of quite a few Canadian TV guys who came to the UK in the 1950s to teach us how to make exciting telly with adverts in. Because none of us had seen Canadian telly at the time, this was pre-videotape (invented by Ampex in 1957 and coming to the UK in 1959), a fair few of them were able to come over and do this, convincing our industry bigwigs that Canadian telly must be a good model for our ITV, if only because it was in English, it wasn't American and you had to imagine the rest.

On November 30th 1958 (not the 28th as many sources have it) Ted Kotcheff was directing a live Armchair Theatre for ABC from an old cinema in Didsbury in Manchester which they'd turned into a studio. It was a play called Underground about World War III breaking out- Nuclear attack on London, survivors down in the Underground tunnels, all that, and because it was live, the actors would be nipping off behind the scenery whenever they went off to cover themselves in masonry dust and so on.
The now notable actors Peter Bowles, and Warren Mitchell were both in the play, along with a guy called Gareth Jones, a young plump Welsh actor. Gareth explains he's feeling a bit dicky as he's applying the powder between sequences, and then, in front of everyone, as he returns to the action Gareth collapses and dies mid-performance.

Luckily there's an ad break coming up, the remaining scene is muddled through (thankfully it appears it's one low on lines from Gareth) and during the commercials Kotcheff and his assistants, Verity Lambert and James Gatward gather the actors 'round. They tell them Gareth has just fainted and break up his character's plot functions between the rest of the cast. They ask them to busk it and tell the camera men to shoot the play like a football match- just follow the action. The rest of the play is staggered through as a semi-improvised piece, at the end of which Kotcheff announces Jones' death to the cast.

Now in the theatre an actor dies, and generally they take it as a sign you can end the show,
So why did Kotcheff carry on? Some reckon he did it just to show he could, in a piece of adrenaline aided bravado. Some have whimsically suggested he found himself possessed by a desire to take poor Gareth Jones' disappearing life as he slumped to the ground and pickle it in radio waves, beam an impression of his essence out through the Winter Hill transmitter across the stars, and into eternity, though primarily to homes in the North Wales, Greater Manchester and Merseyside area, and somehow keep him alive.

It was this kind of woolly techno-spiritualist thinking about electronically recording a dying man that partially informed my poor joke radio show the other day. The other part of it was inspired by a story told by someone from the British Sound Archive a few years back. They're 'phoned up at work by someone asking if they have any recordings of death rattles. They go to the database and say 'Yes, we've two, one 2 minutes 12 seconds and another 3 minutes and 8.' 'I've got those already,' says the caller in disgust. I've been wondering about what kind of guy a death rattle collector might be ever since.

I have a suspicion, looking at related TV disasters of the time, that Kotcheff actually kept going for rather more prosaic economic and practical reasons. He was told to. Armchair Theatre was a big audience puller and there was a lot of revenue to be gained in its ad breaks, if you stop a show like that halfway through, that audience goes and you lose the money.

I suspect there was nothing in the can on hand to fill the play's remaining time that wouldn't have disgruntled viewers more than a rather improvised finale to the drama they were already watching so that's what they got. This was ITV four years in and they needed the money badly, much like now.

There's a great example around the same period which I've alluded to here before where ITV finishes its presentation of Hamlet before the play ends. They need to get in the commercials before the end of the hour to make them peak time ads and get the top rate for them, so they fade to black in the middle of a speech and pop on a Kia-ora advert. This is Peter Brook's famous production with Paul Scofield, prestigious stuff, ruined, half the required corpses still standing. Legend is Lew Grade the ATV mogul is watching at home and he's furious. He phones up presentation and demands “What the hell happened? What happened?” and the guy on duty replies “Oh, they all died in the end, sir.”

Ted Kotcheff now produces the TV series Law and Order in the US, his most famous credits are probably First Blood the initial Rambo film and Weekend at Bernie's a film in which people try to pass a dead man off as still alive which you can't help imagining might have been informed by that night 50 years ago when Kotcheff did it for real.

“I'm writing to complain about both this blasphemous programme and the ghastly provincial voiced clown it foist upon us...”

2008-11-25T20:46:00.000Z

For 4 weeks in March and April 1973 what appears to have been a quite astonishing radio comedy was aired (on Radio 3 of all places) which I've only recently learned about (initially from a letter of complaint in The Listener).

The series- 'Topping Wheeze' seems to have been based around a remarkably dark concept. As far as I can glean, it deals with a murderous comedian Maxwell Armley (played by Jake Thackray!) who having once accidentally laughed a man to death and being touched by the beatific sight of the corpse's smile, for some reason embarks on a killing spree determined to capture the sound of people's souls being released in their dying last gasps on tape. Don't ask me why, it seems to be a sort of macabre audio play on Powell's 'Peeping Tom'.

The accessible documentation surviving in the BBC Written Archive at Caversham (it looks possible there's more that's as yet deemed unreleasable) suggests that he eventually plans and stages a live wireless sketch show full of tightly timed catchphrases and reincorporated gags building in crescendo to a finale with an unbearable(!) 8 jokes a minute which causes mass asphyxiation amongst its studio audience, and presumably listeners at home (it's unclear). However angry listener correspondence in the same programme folder claiming the show defames Tommy Handley and offensively parodies Roman Catholic doctrine suggests the series may have strayed somewhat from this initial outline.
Unsurprisingly, no tapes survive, unless you know better...

Anyhow from contemporary listings we can also glean this-
The show aired at around 9.15pm (though Radio 3 timings are notoriously prone to slippage) on the 24th March to 14 April 1973 also featured Ron Pember and Margaret Westbury and was written by Bob and Barbara Boulton and produced by Paul Bradley (not the one who later went on to play Nigel in EastEnders).

The Radio Times plot precises also give us the following tiny hints.
Part 1- Corpsing. Maxwell Armley is an unhappy comedian, weary of life until he accidentally hits on the perfect joke.
Part 2- Die Laughing. Max hits trouble in a northern Working Man's Club when the rattle-gag fails.
Part 3- Killing Joke. The great broadcast begins to take shape, but Maxwell faces danger in the shape of a investigating policeman with no apparent sense of humour.
Part 4- Reincorporation. A last gasp return for the departed leaves Maxwell questioning his calling. Is surviving on tape the key?

Anyone remember this one at all? I think there might be an interesting article for comedy archivists in it. I reckon if we manage to piece enough facts and obscure details together this previously unheard of piece might well be reappraised as a lost classic.

Breaking Radio Silence

2008-11-21T11:57:00.002Z

It's been a tricky couple of weeks in Lake Wobegon.

I did my Ken thing, which went okay, I wasn't script solid enough to fly solo, so the book floated around in my hand, leading to both a couple of fluffed bits and a couple of nice bits that surprised me. People were nice, appreciative, kind and asked interesting questions but almost as soon as it was over I began to feel rather snotted up, and, after a horrible delayed journey back from Liverpool Lime Street getting home in the early hours, the next couple of days were devoted to achey, man-fluey, feeling out of it introspection.
Since then, with my mind already on the fragility of existence, there seems to have been quite a run of people at death's door, suffering grim degenerative conditions and dying unexpectedly all around us. The end of last week was particularly bad for this.

In cheerier news, my book is definitely out and as I write is topping the amazon.co.uk TV History and Criticism section- though given the volatility of that sales chart I suspect you only need to sell about two copies a week to do that. By now I imagine an out of print Most Haunted tie-in book WHICH SHOULD NOT BE IN THAT CATEGORY will have pipped it again by virtue of someone getting a second hand copy for a Derek Acorah signing session somewhere.

Actually a book about Telly Cars is beating it now. It'll be Jordan's third volume of autobiography next.

In not very exciting to anyone much but I know my readership news BBC Radio 7 (as it now is) is playing Delia Derbyshire and Barry Bermange's Dreams and Peter Howell's Inferno Revisited as part of a Radiophonic Workshop tribute on December the 20th. This should excite half of you because they're interesting pieces of radio work, half of you because Howell first uses that running music from The Five Doctors in his piece (and I think recycles a couple of Meglos stings) and a third of you for both reasons*.

There's lots of sound and fury and a brilliant bit of silence in Howell's play.

*I assume a readership of 6 obviously.

A better post will follow next week.

The storm clouds gather...

2008-10-29T11:41:00.001Z

I'm finding reasons not to write the next bit of my play at the moment, just scribbling ideas, making notes, mulling things over, reading other people's stuff, caffeinating myself, knowing there's the dam burst coming soon. It looks a lot like doing nothing from the outside, which it sort of is- but it's more not doing the wrong something. Well, not yet, anyway.

This week's news- book apparently at printers, doing tax return, having a nice hot bath, working out what to do with green tomatoes without falling into cliche, looking at the last six beautiful apples left on the tree, all too high to reach without hilarious risk-taking (maybe later), I also have a documentary idea through stage 1 of the latest Radio 4 offers round, which is both neat and interesting considering I deliberately didn't submit it. Guess I must have been not doing the wrong something there, too.

It's the calm before the storm I tell you.

Crack of thunder... frenzied typing commences. It was a dark and stormy etc.

Sound and Vision

2008-10-06T14:12:00.001+01:00

Here's what's on the back cover of my book (cheapo Optical Character Recognition software willing):

"THE RISE AND RISE OF THE INDEPENDENTS
A TELEVISION HISTORY

British TV beyond the broadcasters

Independent television production has been one of the great British business successes of recent years

The Rise and Rise of the Independents reveals the forces behind its growth through the stories of the people who pioneered it and those who profited from it. This once very precarious occupation became an international success far surpassing anything the British Film Industry - despite its billions of pounds in grants, subsidies and tax breaks - has achieved in recent years.

From the US communist-backed adventures of the 1950s Robin Hood to Robin Hood's 21st Century adventures filmed in former communist Hungary, it's a business story with surprising twists and tums.

It's a story of left wing idealists and free market economists, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, union leaders and union busters, and a shift in power from the broadcasters
to the producers, but above all, of programme makers making their art their own business.

From light entertainment to documentaries, drama to youth programmes, game shows to Reality TV, The Rise and Rise of the Independents tells the story of the people and their programmes, and the luck, judgement, lobbying and legislation that made UK TV what it is today.

Featuring interviews with many of the pioneers of this new TV age - including Sophie Balhetchet Peler Bazalgette, Peter Bennett~Jones, Jane Featherstone, Nick Fraser, Tony Garnett, James Gatward, Colin Gilbert, David Graham, Paul Jackson, Jane Lighting, Allan McKeown, Steve Morrison, Jimmy Mulville, Charlie Parsons, Terence Ryan, Nicola Shindler, Paul Smifh, David Swift, Patrick Uden, Beryl Vertue and Anne Wood, The Rise and Rise of the Independents explores how the industry got where it is today and where its leading lights see it heading next."

It's about 320 pages and 150,000 words (excluding footnotes) and also has a jolly nice cover:

If you're interested you should be able to get it either direct from the publisher, or from all the other usual sources (ISBN 13-978-0-9554943-2-1,
price seems to be widely variable as is the way these days).

Dear Diary

2008-10-06T12:21:00.001+01:00

I thought I ought to essay a brief entry here after a lengthy radio silence of Third Programme proportions.

In that time I wrote a couple of drafts of 'blog entries that may well still appear here in time (the typed up versons went astray, I'll have to return to scribbled train journey jottings if I'm going to revive them), went up to Liverpool to plot a bit of a series of Ken Campbell events as part of the Biennial. It's been lovely meeting others touched by the man in different ways and glimpsing some of the different facets he presented us and that we drew from him. A remarkable figure, who I wish I'd managed to turn more of my friends onto (I think a couple were unlucky to see some of his lesser performances, as it happens). I think the fact the Facebook page "Ken Campbell Changed My Life" has over 300 members now says something.
Anyhow, more on that in November. Suffice to say I'll be giving a talk which will be somewhere between a lecture and a performance, precisely where depending on the audience. I've written a 4,000 word draft which I'm fairly happy with, good jokes, all true facts, and I hope a decent tribute.

I've also pitched another documentary and two series ideas at Radio 4, hopefully at least one of which will happen, and started properly thinking about my Afternoon Play. There are vague promises of ridiculously starry casting for this, though that'll be dependent ultimately on me writing something good enough and of course artist availability, so it could easily end up featuring The Speaking Clock and Timmy Mallett (not denigrating either artist). It's for airing next July I think, recording currently planned for mid-June, so it'll be much later before there's a lot more to say.

Closer to home I've also started operating a 'one in, two out' policy for books. I've too many books in the house that I'm never going to read again, and there's a few long-term unread ones that I reckon will stay that way so it's time to shed some baggage.
Today an old Arthur C Clarke book with a truly shocking back blurb joined the charity box- "Here are glimpses of the worlds of the future, of a decade, a century, even a millenia from now..." Two mistakes in just one word, what we'd put up with from publishers in 1983.

Talking of back blurbs, we've finalised the one for my book, and having jumped through the various editorial and legal hoops it's finally headed to the publishers. I'll give that a post of its own shortly.

All this and fun with the juicer, varnishing furniture, harvesting apples and tomatoes and, since we started getting a veg box, learning what celeriac is for. It's all gripping stuff, isn't it?

Oh and congrats on the new job if you still pop by here, Malevich! Just read about that today, sounds excellent to me.

This is not a full stop. This is a hyphen coming straight at you.

2008-09-06T13:14:00.000+01:00

Hello. While I was away where the internet don't shine and incoming calls are hard to pick up I lost another hero. This time though, I was lucky enough to have known him too.
I probably first became aware of Ken Campbell in the early 1980s, a shadowy figure who it progressively turned out was woven into the story of so much I loved- theatre, Liverpool, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, conspiracy theories, urban legends, Doctor Who, the KLF, esoteric physics, ridiculous hoaxes and general mucking about... wait a minute or delve a foot or two deeper into anything that caught your eye and there would be Ken, staring back. Geoffrey Perkins, as you may know, once had to impersonate Ken in order to get a radio performance out of Ken that came over Kennish. That's a good Ken story, as typical is his response when I asked if it was true 'Yeah. Probably.'

I first saw him perfom on stage at the Library Theatre in Manchester in the early 1990s in one of the most thrilling pieces of theatre I've ever seen- Pigspurt or Six Pigs From Happiness, a virtuoso one man show, that went from Bad Manners to Ken Dodd via Philip K Dick and pulled out of me more species of laughter than anything I'd ever seen before, my snigger, my bellow, my guffaw and probaby a few more besides, and managed to provide food for thought as well. I left him a note among his stage paraphenalia after I saw his follow up show Jamais Vu, in which I suggested a few extra links to his Cathars and Cathode Ray Tube conspiracy, and he 'phoned me up for a chat. For a few years after that, London became a place I mainly went to do things that would allow me to pop in on Ken afterwards. Calls to and from Ken were great sources of fun and wonder, and I hugely enjoyed discovering bits and pieces for Ken on Elizabethan clowns and Egyptian pygmies, tracking down old telly of his, or doing drawings for him and discovering his new obsessions. Ken calls were commissions, calls to misadventure.

Ken also supplied me with several more highlights of my theatre going life in that time, an amazing performance of his show Mystery Bruises at Manchester's Royal Exchange, a beautiful intimate version of his History of Comedy Part 1 – Ventriloquism in the Crucible, Sheffield which towered above the same show at the National where I felt it was slightly lost and a bespoke version of Theatre Stories he presented at a cyber-cafe for my stag do, which will be a long treasured memory.

I saw less of him over the last few years particularly after he moved out to Essex, but I was very pleased to catch up him last December at a great gig at the British Library, and was very touched that he spotted me in the audience and asked me not to rush off at the end. We had a lovely chat, promised to keep in touch, and he introduced me to one of the chaps there as his 'friend, Ian' which was something I felt very privileged to be. I don't remember now when he first called me that rather than a 'fan' it may well have been backstage at some theatre to help justify and dignify my presence there to some stage door border guard, but the title remains a badge of honour.

He was a warm, funny, mischievous, exciting, intelligent and challenging human being, I utterly adored him, and now he's gone.

The thing is though, remembering Ken now, for all the tears I've shed for what won't happen next (how dare the world have shunted him off before the big CERN gnothing gnowing gnockabout next week?), is basically a joyous thing, because pretty much all my memories of him are of laughter, wonder and at times utterly transcendent hysteria and I can find nothing there to be sad about whatsoever. He was a force of nature, and I'm not actually convinced being dead will curtail his activities so much as redirect the way Kenness is expressed in the world. His example and influence have enabled me to do a lot over these last few years that I would never have done without him, and I've decided the best way to honour him in the years to come is remain open for incoming calls and be ready to receive my next commission.
Don't rest, Ken- it isn't you.

So farewell then, Mike Flex

2008-08-29T21:41:00.000+01:00

Very sorry to hear about the death of Geoffrey Perkins today. Another hero of mine from the world of comedy, Hitch-Hikers', Mornington Crescent, Radio Active... how could I not love him? And that was just the start of his career. Just this morning his index entry was one of the last tasks on my book, one of the references was to Jimmy Mulville talking about what a nice man he was.
I met him maybe three or four times very briefly when he was BBC Head of Comedy and I was an archive searching underling, our longest exhange was about the sheer bulk of stuff I was taking back up North after a summer at the BBC. He seemed as nice as everyone said.

The Intro and the Outro

2008-08-20T10:23:00.000+01:00

I'm finally beginning to end one project- excitingly, it ended up 50 per cent longer than I'd initially planned, less excitingly, it took 50 per cent longer to complete. The blurb behind the link is now somewhat out of date, the book is going to be much more house bricky, now. I'm pretty pleased with it. It's been a labour of love and a lot of hard labour.
I think we're looking at a November launch, more as I know it. I just have to ask the fast moving world of the media to stop moving for a couple of months now, please.
There are still eyes to be crossed and teas to be dotted through the days, but the slow business of stopping is in hand, and I'm starting on some other things, for the first time in ages.

It looks like the contract's about to come through for my Afternoon Play but I'm probably not going to write in earnest on it until I've met up with the producer in a couple of weeks, I've also got a couple of sitcom ideas I'd like to play with- one is a fairly well worked out radio proposal, another is a slightly less focused TV one, an idea for a book I've been wanting to whip into shape for a bit, and I suspect documentary research will start up soon.

Starting is much fun than ending- bit more daunting, more chance to go horribly wrong, but all that potential, and you know starting things is so much quicker. Let's see how it all gets on.

In radio rerun news the Radio Times is now billing No Tomatoes as 'Language based comedy', which given it's on the radio is probably for the best. This is a marked improvement on the previous billing of 'Experimental comedy' which I can't help feeling has an unspoken suggestion of failure about it.

You can hear the language and share in the experiment

here in the UK, or here in the rest of the world.

degiinnx

2008-08-12T11:02:00.000+01:00

am 3
amazed 19
at 5
by 15
done 25
harder 10
hello 1
I 2
I'm 18
indexing 4
is 9
it 8
might 13
moment 7
reading 22
still 21
than 11
the 6, 16
think 14
this 23
way 17
well 24
you 12, 26
you're 20

More crowd-pleasing German Expressionism

2008-08-11T10:11:00.000+01:00

M

You look at two thirds of this film, and you're looking at an episode of Taggart or Prime Suspect, perhaps Cracker. A serial killer is on the loose in the city, the people are terrified, the press are doing rather nicely out of it - printing mail from the killer and flooding the streets with extra editions, the police are clueless and their bosses are leaning on them to get a result. We follow their investigation and the killer in a race against time. All so-so sofa fare, so far.
Except, this is a 1931 German film not a 1990s ITV police procedural, one of the earliest talkies and, in the hands of Fritz Lang, a bit of a wonder.
If you've seen Metropolis at any of its various lengths or speeds, even with the addition of Pat Benatar and colouring in, you can't help being attuned to Lang's vision of the city and of class. The towering tenement at the film's opening has no elevator and a water pump in the square below, making you wonder if it has running water either, and you can't help being reminded that that really is how our cities' poor once lived. This is also a city in which industry has died, the derelict state of the warehouse of the film's climax is pointedly highlighted, the beggars are unionised, organised crime has more resources than the police, and yet the bank is protected by an elaborate security system which can draw the police in minutes, even at the height of a city wide murder hunt.
The use of sound is really impressive, pretty much every successful film audio technique is here from the off, intercutting dialogue, incongruous juxtapositions of image and sound, the whistled tune that tells us the killer is around before we see him, all great stuff, even if now a couple of the deliberately mute sequences now seem oddly lacking.
Peter Lorre is of course excellent, resembling some strange Orson Welles, Tony Hancock, Pete Doherty combo, all big eyes, round face and full lips, like a world weary baby with a penchant for long coats and hats, he doesn't seem to do much at first, but there's a powerful cumulative effect to this performance.
Cinematically, the whole thing feels very contemporary, bar a couple of frankly silly low angle shots, and the screen ratio is also jolly exciting for the likes of me, still chanting 4:3 good, 16:9 bad, it's almost completely square. I never got bored and looked at the black bits at the screen edges once.
Perhaps the one big weakness in the film naturalistically is that the people's court that appears towards the end feels rather out of place after a couple of superb demonstrations of the nature of mob justice, early on. Given what we know of human nature and what we see in the film, particularly when a fare dodge nearly gets lynched when Chinese whispers identify him as the murderer on the loose, it seems unlikely the killer would have lived for more than minutes after his discovery. This isn't a naturalistic film though, and its right the film's underpinning ideas get this slightly unrealistic outing, even if now seems a touch 'on the nose'.
Incidentally, for a late expressionist, early film noir (take your pick) movie about the hunt for a child killer, this is surprisingly funny, which no one's ever suggested to me, before. A lot of the scenes with the criminal underworld are quite broadly comic, including a quite lengthy sequence in which the police raid an illegal nightclub.
The heavy shadow of the Nazis hangs over the film of course, this is Weimar Germany in collapse on screen, which perhaps makes me more uncomfortable with the suggestion that a city's crooks and pan handlers might be all part of a secret and structured order- it's a little too close to the lies that allow whole classes of people to be demonised, declared subhuman, and eliminated, but that's also part of what makes the film live. There's a queasy lack of moral high ground, anywhere, and the final shot warns us that none of our cures for our social ills and illnesses are better than their prevention.
You should see this, the emotional tone is surprisingly broad and there's genuine suspense too, in which your sympathies shift in sometimes unexpected directions. If for nothing else, you need to see it for an utterly superb shot of a man smoking a cigar in a pipe. Recommended.

Old jokes

2008-07-30T18:28:00.000+01:00

If you read this I expect I've probably already let you know that No Tomatoes is being rerun at the mo, but you never know...

You can catch it via the iPlayer these days at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b007zh4d
if you're interested.

It now comes with a free picture of a cute dog, which I like to think is progress.

Buy A New Subwoofer

2008-07-23T16:15:00.000+01:00

It must be true... probably.

"Bill Mitchell: The Man Who Wrestled Pumas – Radio 4

Bill Mitchell, voice-over artist, owned the booming baritone who told us Carlsberg was “probably” the best lager in the world, and that Denim was “for men who didn’t have to try too hard”. This sharply-angled documentary explores a bygone age in the creative industries embedded in bravado and macho insecurity – a world created by men for men."

http://www.smoothoperations.com/news.htm

Just me, then?

2008-07-22T21:31:00.000+01:00

Halliwell and Orton as depicted in the film Prick Up Your Ears.

Ernie and Bert, yesterday.

Are they, perhaps, related?

Answers to last March's cryptic quiz...

2008-07-18T08:27:00.000+01:00

Ian was listening to the build up tapes for Delia Derbyshire's Blue Veils and Golden Sands.

Ian was listening to the build up tapes for Delia Derbyshire's Blue Veils and Golden Sands.

Amazing stuff.

The winner receives a limited edition Golden Hare by Lindt and Kit Williams.

Honestly people, the clues were all there.

There's finally been a press release about this great, great collection.

Eddie Mair gets giddy on the PM blog
The Telegraph uses the word 'posterity'.
The Times muses on 'irrevocable decay' and calls Delia a 'hopeless alcoholic'.

That probably tells you something.

More Radio 4

2008-07-17T13:46:00.001+01:00

It's getting silly now.
Positive noises about my second Radio 4 documentary pitch, which hasn't been picked up due to a shortage of slots suggesting the commissioner really liked it and that it may be picked up either 'out of round' or in the next wave of commissioning. Listen to me with all my jargon.

Obviously, we've heard similar before when BBC7 asked us to pitch No Tomatoes 2, pleaded lack of slots, asked us to resubmit next time and by then had gone off it, but this sounds a good grain more hopeful.

I bet it's because I've turned 40. I am become Radio 4, the Maintainer of Worlds.

Stuff about writing

2008-07-14T14:32:00.001+01:00

Very sad to learn last night that Paul Makin, the writer of the incredible sitcom Nightingales died last week. Paul wrote a lot for Alomo and I was gushing in my praise of him to Allan McKeown just a few months ago while researching my telly book. Get hold of the series if you're a fan of cerebral comedy that's funny peculiar as well as ha ha.
It stars David Threlfall, Robin Lindsay and James Ellis, TV royalty all, and was produced by Esta Charkham who I found utterly charming and very smart at my first and only paid SF convention visit (I've sneaked in the bar of a couple since) Fan Aid North. It's got Brendan from Moreton Harwood in it too.

In further it must be the time of year Radio 4 depresses half the sociopathic and virtually autistic middle-aged men in Britain news, I've heard back about my Afternoon Play.
They've bought it!

Like you should buy Nightingales.

Votretalgia**

2008-07-11T20:38:00.001+01:00

How are your memories of 1979? If you're old enough to have any I'd suggest- wonky. They're over-detailed in some areas, vague and hazy in others. Without a briefing from an assistant director and a quick look at the clip you're due to recall on the monitor you may struggle.

My memories of 1979, aren't so much about the rise of Thatcher or the specific crapness of being 10 to 11, which is what I was mainly being that year, so much as how brilliant Doctor Who was, which of course with the exception of the 'one brief shining moment'* of City of Death it really wasn't that year.
The other important thing you simply *must* remember from 1979 is the sheer magisterial genius of Amii Stewart's cover of 'Knock on Wood', particularly in conjunction with that video (or promo film as they called them then, even when, like this one, they were soooo totally video), with the fractal howlround cloak and head-dress. It is spectacular. Go to YouTube now, leave a data trail that the Man will use to get at you, go now, do it! I'm ever so grateful to the assistant director for reminding me of it and playing that clip just now.

Oddly, in my messy memories of Doctor Who back then it was a serious drama in which all the science made sense.

Do you see where we're going now, children? I found the conclusion of Doctor Who over the last three weeks to be probably the most satisfying of the recent run.
Now, I know this is heresy, I know the job of a fan is to hate more deeply and more perversely than any untrained casual viewer ever could... and yet, and yet- I really liked it.
I cheered, I laughed, I was moved. Now, I agree the big old planet moving, multiverse mushing plot didn't really hold together too well, but oh, the human stories, the little touches, for some people these things (along with peculiarly lumpen speeches about well-prepared meals) are what Doctor Who is all about. It may have been over-detailed in some areas, vague and hazy in others but it was memorable for me and for all the right reasons... I think.
You see, I reckon we've had Doctor Who with worse science and plotting than this many times, but we've rarely had a series that has touched our little bubbling lumps of heart before.

Hang onto the feeling, it was good, really- it'll never be quite your ideal series I know, because it never was quite that show, really- you're a fan, you've spent decades misremembering it, but hey grab the good and enjoy it now, unbelievably it was the most popular chunk of Who since that shining moment in 1979 when ITV was just light classical music.

I don't mind if you don't like it obviously, with luck you'll have a chance to reappraise it radically in 19 years time, just don't be cross that I did.

Meanwhile, in 1979 nostalgia news, Radio 4 have commissioned my documentary about Bill Mitchell- the gravelly voice over man of choice of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
I'm delighted, I like to have at least one job of work to stick on the CV a year.
I'd quite like to call it The Man Who Wrestled Pumas... Probably, I doubt we will though. Touch wood, eh? Tukka ta tukka ta tukka ta tukka- better knock knock knock on wood... (repeat 'til "earworm'ed)

Radio 4 is now officially allowed to the 1970s now, you know? They're doing plays about punk now everyone involved is elderly and jaundiced like proper Radio 4 folk. There's probably an utterly ghastly ITV1 studio sitcom in doing something about old punks actually, it'd probably have to pilot on Radio 2 first, mind.

*Camelot, as nearly quoted by Doctor 10nent last week.

** Obviously, in retrospect, I should have had the foresight to name this posting after Nostalgia by the Buzzcocks, that would have been loads better. Everything's better in retrospect- even foresight.

Dull Thoughts from a Fan

2008-06-21T11:18:00.000+01:00

One of my legion, well phalanxes, well tiny little patrols of legionaries like in Asterix, of readers has just commented on my recent lack of posting here. This is because I don't have a humorous cat, and am currently mainly concentrating on writing stuff about big media corporations it is quite important to do adequately, so I can get both paid and not sued.

However, there is time now as I sit on a railway platform (well a bench thereon) to prattle about Doctor Who which is my inner comedy feline. Yes, it's partway through review of the year time again.

Partners in Crime I seriously adored, apart from a sequence with the Doctor trying to counter the baddies' plan by messing about with their computer, his sonic screwdriver and two beacon devices. This sequence lost me because the desire to fudge through the technological bit as quickly as possible meant while the stakes were clear the actual logic of what was going on was just one magic wand stroke too many for me, your mileage may vary. This was compounded by an annoying Hitchcock zoom in the same scene, which we get again in The Unicorn and the Wasp. I think it's a device that's become a little cheapened by repetition in adverts and sitcoms etc., and is so anti-naturalistic that I think it should really be saved for really earth shattering moments of revelation. It is of course best employed by Scorsese very very slowly in that diner scene in Goodfellas.

Fires of Pompeii was good too but marred by the fact that I found myself preferring the audio story Fires of Vulcan with Bonnie Langford and Sylvester McCoy and no monsters, which looks frankly absurd written down but is true all the same. I also wish it hadn't had the line about the people of Pompeii turning to stone too early. Seems a shame that Doctor Who Confidential now has to be the source of more accurate factual info about what happened to the Pompeiians rather than the parent show, and I couldn't help feeling there was something poor taste about populating this genuine disaster with alien fire beasties, this is almost certainly just me. Nice twist that to save the world, you kill the city though.

Planet of the Ood, I enjoyed a lot, apart from the singing, which I wish had been, if not more alien at least less Western. Poor old Ood with their wireless broadband networked brains, lucky they'd evolved somewhere without natural predators, really.

The Sontaran Stratagem/The Burning Sky were largely inoffensive, except for the frankly rubbish use of last minute noble self sacrifice sequence 71a, which actually worked better with Pex in a fumbled long shot on tuppence happenny twenty years ago (then, it was merely ghastly), and the implausible hundred mile an hour winds of flame, which sadly resulted in no incinerated birds (good job the bees had already vanished eh, kids?). Didn't hate it and liked Christopher Ryan a lot, but a bit so what? All just a bit predictable and probably only really enjoyable for me while Donna wanders about the Sontaran ship (well maybe until she hides in the convenient alcove, why do alien ship designers insist on including these?).

The Unicorn and the Wasp, was enjoyable enough while not really emotionally involving, as in Christie you never quite believed any of the characters were real people whose passing you should mourn, but I did like the nesting flashbacks (how I wish they'd been old optical film ripples rather than video though) and the handling of the Colonel's big reveal moment. The big mystery unanswered of course is why Christie appears to have vanished in the Summer in Doctor Who land (answer- so we can have tea on the lawn and wasps).

The Doctor's Daughter, strikes me as a basically sound script, apart from one slightly overwrought speech, in which the Doctor blatantly lies about whether he'd use weapons or not, which is let down by editorial decisions- I think the planet's situation can only begin to make sense on screen if the guns used are seen to either vapourise or turn bodies to dust or skeletons, and we see explicitly the replicator turning people out at different ages.
Real shame, missed opportunity, and a real letdown to find we're not getting an actual proper daughter either. Liked the Martha and the bubble dialogue sequences a lot though, even if I'm puzzled at how easily a water breathing fish man drowns.

Silence in the Library/ Forest of the Dead are a pair of interesting and ambitious episodes, but with possibly one plot strand too many and which are slightly undermined by the solution to much of the mystery being a bit too obviously seeded in episode one, even more so than in The Empty Child. The slightly lame bit where the unstoppable baddies are talked down, is a bit of a swizz too and it doesn't help that the Doctor spends a bit too much time being thicker than the viewers either, but there's a lot here to make one very excited about the show's future. Loved Donna's dream life, particularly the jump cut and the self aware fake kids, and liked Miss Evangelista's death a great deal as well, even if was just a tad too long drawn out for me to accept the crew saw this as a normal part of life in their time.

Midnight, was very enjoyable too, and it was great to have both a proper RTD story again, and a no monsters episode at last. I really hope this rule can be further loosened in years to come, they are the biggest limitation on the show's format at present.
Obviously, the whole thing makes no real sense other than mythically, and the self sacrifice resolution is as annoying as ever, but it's so nicely done and well acted, and technically the sound work is brilliant. I once had to synch up two actors speaking at once at hideous length, and it's damn hard work (particularly because half the time they weren't in proper synch, were misreading the lines, skipping bits, or pronouncing them differently, but that's another story. Unsurprisingly it was hard for people to tell how long I'd laboured to get anything approaching the desired effect!)
I think if it had been me writing this, I might have attempted to resolve the climax with a 'phone call from Donna- the outer world breaking in with something that couldn't be repeated and controlled, and maybe even climax with Sky forced to lip synch along to 'Do It Again' forever. However, if it was me it would all have been even more rubbish than that getting there, so be thankful.

So, this year so far I think only once truly short of competent, when The Doctor's Daughter is undermined by its presentation, some genuinely spooky, funny, exciting, and moving bits, but not, Partners in Crime excepted, getting me up and cheering yet. So not as good as the best of last year's yet (the Cornell Moffat three in a row) or as unsatisfactory as its worst (hello 42).

If only there was to be some kind of epic, bombastic finale, with lots of crying, and fan pleasing nonsense and general public pleasing bonkersness to give the season a final dramatic push.
I'm so pleased we all know so little about what's to come. I might be exploding with excitement if there were lots of intriguing rumours flying around and press releases talking about Davros etc.

Humph and George

2008-04-26T01:55:00.000+01:00

I’ve been lucky enough in my medium-sized life to see two surprisingly long-lived Jazz men perform, Humphrey Lyttelton and George Melly.
Humph was presenting I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue and building his increasing frailty and stumbling delivery into the act just as another of my radio comedy heroes Peter Jones had in his latter years on Just A Minute.
Harry Hill sang ‘The Ugly Duckling’ to the tune of ‘I Can’t Live if Living is Without You’ that night. It was one of the happiest of my life.
Nice one, Humph.

Melly, I adored too, particularly for the delicious omnisexual geriatric flirtation he and Maggi Hambling used to indulge in on a fairly snobby Channel 4 quiz show on the arts. Only a pair of surrealists with a shared passion for Max Wall and less genuine sexual attraction than Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis could have produced such screen magic.
When I saw Melly live he was incoherent, slurring, incompetent, but then the band started and he sang- note, pause, word perfect, sublime.

He told one great joke about getting old that night, if rather badly.
Now he was getting on he found he was having to come down to the loo more often in the night, sometimes several times, and thus, in one such middle of the night trip, had been delighted to discover his wife had set up a system in the downstairs toilet whereby the light came on as soon as he opened the door.
‘Excellent,’ he thought, and was rather happily relieving himself until his wife came up behind him and said ‘George, did you know you’re pissing in the fridge?’

I think Humph would have liked that one,

One down, three in contention, with one left to go

2008-04-21T13:19:00.001+01:00

Well No Tomatoes seems to have fallen at the 'presumably, just not liked enough by the commissioner' hurdle, now, so that looks fairly categorically that.

Maybe, one day it'll come back. Yes. One day. Probably not. Until then just go forward making vague promises only ever followed up on in unpopular tie-in novels and prove to me a paraphrase is as close to a correct line reading as will makes no mends by the end of an episode, when you can't go back and re-edit of course, yes, yes, my boy. Hmm?

Meanwhile, my hurdle clipping play has reached the final Radio 4 commissioning barrier, unexpectedly accompanied by two documentary ideas I threw in a bit back to a colleague pitching for freelance factual work.
One of them is about an actor with a very particular talent and another is about a piece of slightly scatological 17th century literature. The usual stuff, you know.

Now read on. From here on in, it's either getting paid or not getting paid.

4, 5 & 6

2008-04-17T08:49:00.000+01:00

Such is the state of Wednesday evening telly that the best that was on offer for the likes of me yesterday was probably Five employing Paul McGann (and his curiously placed vocal stresses that make it sound like he's constantly being surprised or losing his short term memory) to talk about The Real Indiana Jones.
The amazing revelation here was there wasn't one, he's pretend. However this populist hook did give Five the opportunity to talk about Nazis, Cathars and the Grail which are all core Five documentary topics, and show a surprisingly stirring trailer for the new film, featuring an old man doing amazing feats, right at the end. Job done.

I do find McGann's voice-over delivery oddly hypnotic, because idiosyncratic as it is (like Australian Questioning Intonation breaking out at random all over the place) it does sometimes make you imagine he's genuinely intrigued and marvelling about the subject he's talking about, rather than making you wonder when exactly he first saw the script.
Sometimes the line readings on science documentaries do rather give away that he doesn't know what the script is about and is just clinging to a word in the sentence he can emphasise to give coherence, but this is understandable; he's an actor not an astrophysicist, damn it! It does, however, mean script writers really should be careful with their use of 'actually's and 'in fact's because they'll tend to be heavily overlayed with wonder to the detriment of the sense of surrounding sentences.
Anyway, what a guy, what a voice.

Given that was my analogue terrestrial highlight (though I watched it digitally obviously- I wouldn't want to miss the edges of the film clips) I went looking for a bit of entertainment on Freeview too, which led me to The Prisoner.

Now, I like The Prisoner a lot, it's gripping, intriguing, only occasionally dreadfully silly, looks gorgeous and has a really riveting lead- MacGoohan's intensity just demands attention, but I last saw it properly when the VHS releases came out at the back end of the 1980s on the Channel 5 label (not to be confused with Five which used to be a different Channel 5, keep up).
The only episode I've seen with any regularity since has been a mp2 copy of a Beta SP copy of a low band u-matic copy of a rather grubby ITC library sales print of the first episode 'Arrival'.
So imagine my amazement at how colourful the newly mastered film print ITV4 was showing was. It was a riot of colour, hammy stage fights, reused footage and music cues and more exciting clashes of 1960s Edwardian revivalist and Modernist stylings than you're ever likely to meet outside Brighton Beach on a Bank Holiday Monday.

Just one thing though, given I'd only ever seen the series before on VHS, a multi-generation copy of a poor film print and snowy Channel 4 re-runs (we always had quite a soft fizzy looking Channel 4 signal in the 80s, so much so I thought this was part of its remit to challenge viewers), I'd never really noticed Number 6 wore a dark navy jersey under his black blazer.
Now I knew he did from photos in magazines about TV shows with spandex and spaceships in them, but the full horror had never quite hit me. It doesn't go! It looks horrid, and it never used to.
In poor light I've been known to accidentally put on dark navy and black myself, but Number 6's dimensionally transcendent house is so well lit I can't believe he'd make this kind of error. Certainly not every week. Not when he's so cool.

My suspicion is that the creators of The Prisoner didn't really want the jarring contrast we can now see between navy and black to be so obvious. I suspect they were after a broadly black upper body, and used the dark navy to subtly stop McGoohan's torso becoming an undifferentiated block of black, knowing full well that our telly screens would never reveal the actual difference in colour. Whoops, they do now.

Black and Navy? Brr. No wonder he wanted to escape, they might as well have put him in double denim.
Be seeing you? Not in that you won't.

Ignorance is Strength

2008-04-03T12:16:00.000+01:00

Even in the rarefied climes I inhabit, halfway up Rather Liking British Television Mountain, there are still noises that waft to me from the valley below now and again that tend to annoy me.

Quality American Television
This one’s one of the biggies. At some point it was decided in TV criticism circles that Quality Television is a phenomenon that was created at some point in the 80s and 90s when HBO started making dramas outside the US network system that were glossily produced, cinematic in scope and intelligently written. This gets my goat because this is then alleged to have influenced things in UK TV that happened before it- a move from studio to OB and often filmed production, changes in cutting style etc.
Not only does this rewrite history, it also overplays the influence of US TV on the UK, and assumes an automatic superiority of film over TV. '16:9 ratio good, 4:3 bad.' It is forgotten that UK TV once had a form of its own between theatre and radio- intimate and character driven (which suited the domestic setting in which it was consumed just fine). More like film is not necessarily better, and an obsession with filmic concerns leads to a devaluing of what TV did when it simply wasn’t film and simply couldn’t be either.

It’s Just Television
I’m sure you’ve heard people dismiss the output which comes into almost every home in the country and fills our evenings with news, sport, comedy, drama, discussion and music in this way. Sadly, I’ve even heard people who work in television say the same. It’s just television.
That’s right, damn a work by the means of its delivery. The rather sniffy attitude is that none of the background to our lives is worthy of consideration. The worry is, is that when TV is made and consumed with that outlook, no attempt to challenge or be challenged is made, and of course, all that old stuff, some of which isn’t even in colour, or speedily edited and doesn’t even fill the whole of your modern set properly is somehow inferior, because it isn’t quick and easy enough anymore.
It’s just old books. It’s just some old drawings. That isn’t an attitude you normally get.
One of the reasons I think TV suffered until lately in critical analysis is that TV studies arose as a subset of film studies, at a point when film studies was rather wedded to the idea of film as an auteur’s medium in which the director was (rather like the creator of those old books and drawings) a single artist using a tool to create art, which as a bonus critics could also use as a kind of parlour game to explore his or her (but usually his) drives, obsessions and interests.
TV on the other hand was production line stuff, which had insufficient thought and time involved to allow the director this role, particularly as his (not hers often) role in the creative process tended to be much more limited than a cinema director’s. The TV director was a mere hired hand.
Thankfully, as film studies has grown up, going through its rather solipsistic stroppy teen era in which it assumed everything you looked at was merely a series of ambiguous symbols you could use to analyse the way you yourself looked at the world, the idea that film is a collaborative medium in which different authors worked either together or against each other (and even writers were in someway involved) has slowly become more prominent. This has given TV a chance to be taken, sort of, seriously at last, but the damage will be slow to undo. We have a whole generation of arts graduates running the country who have been conditioned to be as snotty about the medium and its history as the general public and jaded industry professionals.

It’s not a patch on the (insert other medium) version
I suspect this is the reason the BBC’s DVD release of the 1954 version of Nineteen Eighty-Four continues to be blocked by the Orwell estate. The estate doesn’t respect the television medium, and so judge the TV show against the novel and find it wanting.
Firstly, the play (remember when it was TV plays not films?) explicitly imposes a then topical post-nuclear framework on the future it depicts which is ambiguous at best in the book, in which the alleged nuclear war is referred to in a piece of faked anti-state propaganda, that most readers (and all film versions) tend to skim through.
I can’t help imagining that the keepers of the Orwell flame sat around expectantly on initial transmission and immediately despaired at the opening narration, seeming to turn the serious art of Orwell into nothing but cheap science fiction (see the previous Clarke post for more about this), possibly even mumbling “Dear Lord, it's a travesty, I'm surprised it even did the title in words rather than in numbers!” to themselves.
Closeness to the text, would seem to be a serious consideration (because we know ‘books- good, adaptations of books to work in other terms- double-plus ungood’).
This appears to be why the 1956 cinema version of Nineteen Eighty-Four has also been suppressed by the estate. It takes serious liberties with the book, and you can’t have liberties being taken with Big Brother, can you? The estate had similar concerns with the ending of the Halas and Batchelor Animal Farm apparently, which tried to make a satisfying cinematic climax out of that undeniably superb prose ending, which really just wouldn’t have translated so well into pictures.
Secondly, the drama is undeniably creaky in parts if you go in expecting your TV drama to be like a trip to the pictures, and what seems to have particularly caused problems for any release over the years is that there is a very close adaptation of the book available in colour, a film too. This was for years the preferred version- it’s even got John Hurt and Richard Burton in it, who are proper actors.
There’s now reportedly another film version on the way to become the definitive adaptation, and it seems a DVD of some such scratchy old telly version coming out any time near that would confuse, and perhaps weaken, the Nineteen Eighty-Four brand.

Of course we, we band of brothers, we happy few, obsessed with telly, probably mainly as a result of the cheap fantasy and vaudeville turns it brought into our parlours when we were too young to know any better, know the BBC’s 1984 to be important.

Questions in the House, comments from the Palace, sleepy rats covered in cocoa, live presentations and the fact we only have take two, wind up gramophones, the lost paperweight, Peter Cushing being undervalued as a telly actor before he was undervalued as a film one, Donald Pleasence (also in the suppressed film version, fact fans), Nigel Kneale, Rudolf Cartier, Wilfrid flipping Brambell... it’s all here!

This is a cultural document, a work of art in a lost form, and almost entirely composed of a whole string of our favourite anecdotes. We could Christopher Frayling our way through this whole piece like it was a culturally important Italian made Western or something (I love him by the way, he’s top) if necessary.

British telly matters, Orwell estate! It’s part of our history, don't try to rewrite it, it isn’t all your tacky rubbish for the proles like Big Brother and Room 101 you know. Oh hang on…

Mind, Diamond Dogs is probably better Bowie for your non-collaboration so thanks for that, I guess.

This entry is to be passed to the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, for revision.

How Annoying

2008-04-01T09:39:00.000+01:00

Last night, while my PC was switched off, someone sent at least a hundred emails from fake users using my home page's domain name. Tsk.
It seems none of these emails were to real people I actually I know, my address book hasn't been got at as far as I can tell, it's just part of one of my addresses has been pilfered, for some drive-by indiscriminate leafleting.

The fake users of my domain that were generated were fairly obviously made up, thankfully- eg. "Slasher"- like that's a real name (if that is your real name don't contact me, trace your parents) so, hopefully, any real people the messages might reach will realise this stuff was just 'bot-generated junk, but it's still a lot of noise thrown into the system to try and catch that one unwary customer somewhere for whatever they're trying to sell using emails from faked addresses.
It's the equivalent of fishing with dynamite in a lake that's already been somewhat over fished with explosives (and its main consequence seems to have been a lot of "come on, this is obvious spam" auto response messages and big wodge of "undeliverables", because it seems the addressees are largely made up randomly too, finding their way to me this morning).
Tiresome, and just the kind of thing that puts you off swimming.

Unfortunately, because an address at the recently hot-wired and twocked domain name is what I use for contacts from Blogger, it may be I fail to spot any feedback here for a bit. Bear with me. Unless your name is Slasher, I'm almost certainly not replying to you.

Oh my God, it's full of stars...

2008-03-22T20:35:00.000Z

In obituary-land of late I have found my friends divided between those who mourned the passing of Anthony Minghella and those who marked the passing of Arthur C Clarke, and similarly between those who marked the loss of Paul Scofield and those who mourned for Brian “Mr Foggy Barraclough” Wilde.

It’s the high art, low art thing, of course, and the tidying of lives into boxes posthumously.
I’ve heard little mention of Minghella script editing Grange Hill (vital popular drama for twenty years of children- low art), or of Paul Scofield’s appearance in a presentation of highlights from Hamlet rudely cut short by a Kia-ora advert (for ATV therefore low art, even with Peter Brook on board), or Wilde’s appearances in Elizabeth R or Play for Today (not massively popular comedy series and therefore high art).

Furthermore, I’ve just heard a BBC World Service arts show say there was another loss to the world of film (after discussing Minghella), Arthur C Clarke, though he worked in quite another genre, science fiction, and got annoyed.

Let’s get this straight- Arthur C Clarke may have co-written a famous movie, but he was not from the world of film because of that, and Anthony Minghella wrote fantasy, just like Clarke- The Storyteller and The Greek Myths and Truly, Madly, Deeply are in the same genre as Clarke*.

Now high art chaps may well want to say “No, no, they’re using metaphor, they’re not actually fantasy, they’re using fantastic trappings to explore reality.”
Newsflash- this is not unknown in the world of fantasy fiction- those Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Angela Carter and George Orwell pieces aren’t proper literature using the tropes of fantasy, they are it.
Similarly, Clarke was not attempting to predict the future in his books with dates in the title but explore ideas, and his butting up of the transcendent and spiritual with the world of rivets and physics is at the heart of some of his most memorable work.
Everyone who’s ever read The Nine Billion Names of God knows it’s a fable, an exploration of where we put faith and science, and, as I’ve read Simon Guerrier discuss recently, an attractively open ended fable that tells us a great deal about us as readers.

If I may posit a Fourth Clarke’s Law posthumously: “Any sufficiently advanced science fiction is indistinguishable from literature and any sufficiently advanced popular culture is indistinguishable from art”.
Get over it, ghetto-makers. Porridge is as good as King Lear, don't make me choose.

The idea for this post was given to me by an enigmatic piece of pure geometry sitting incongruously on a stone age plain, or possibly by observing the geometry in nature and trying to make sense of it.

*Mind, they were telly really, weren’t they? Not legit cinema films.
Oh and if you don't think science fiction and fantasy are the same thing you've forgotten Clarke's Third Law and need to ask yourself how come they're always tucked away together in the same corner of 'proper' bookshops.

Citiest People

2008-03-19T14:57:00.000Z

I have of late found myself fairly often in and around London's Soho, popularly considered to be a regular den of both regular and irregular iniquity and independent television production companies, though as any fule (and Mr Sherlock Holmes) kno the countryside beats the town for iniquity every time.

To be honest, I think Covent Garden is actually seedier than Soho. There's a street there in which I recently saw not only a quite sizable whirl of what looked very much like fresh human excrement perched on a convenient knee-high pipe jutting from a wall but a whole shop devoted to nothing but Tintin (I think it's called Bloom Street, they've probably got rid of the pooh by now, but I bet the shop's still there), however, I digress.

When I'm around Soho I often shop on that nearby street of dreams, Tottenham Court Road. At one end you can fetishise books, at the other, electronics goods. In the middle you can feel good about yourself by not going to Burger King or We Will Rock You and wonder where exactly you're supposed to admire the monumental bulk of Centre Point from, exactly.
Yesterday, I was down the electronics end, just beyond the bit where you might turn left to discover the British Film Institute or a gaggle of middle-aged Doctor Who fans loitering around (and on occasion both).
I was in Maplin's attempting to buy a replacement aerial for my wind up digital radio, the old one had broken in a freak "me lifting it up by the aerial" accident (would it hurt to have a carry handle on a wind up radio? It'd make the winding easier if you could easily hold the thing in your other hand while powering it up).

I think Maplin's HQ is in Barnsley actually, which realistically should be easier for me to get to, but, unrealistically, isn't.
In an ideal world, I'd have bought my new aerial from Barnsley via the Maplin's website (though in a really ideal world there'd have be a handle on the radio that meant it hadn't lost its aerial and giraffes would talk but let's not get greedy) but the website uses so much arcane specification talk to describe its aerials that it fills a potential purchaser like me with technofear and convinces him any purchase he makes will be a foolish mistake.

So, it was I was in London's glittering arse-end instead, buying an aerial the old fashioned way with actual money and a visual aid- my broken aerial to Cinderella-slipper up against all the shop's many ugly sister antennae. I got one I thought would do in the end, but not before witnessing something I found a little odd- a young man on roller blades asking the assistant if they sold Geiger counters, he was a bit unkempt verging on crusty, and, though it shames me to admit it, immediately set off my highly specialised "Oh my God, he's planning to construct a dirty bomb" alarms.

The Maplin's man said they didn't have any in store but they might have some on their website. He went to a terminal to search, and I went to pay. As I did, I heard the customer admitting he was unsure whether you spelled Geiger "ei" or "ie". I so nearly got involved, but decided not to.
Admitting to knowing something about radiation measurement in central London whilst wearing a rucksack with wires coming out of it (if only for m'iRiver) struck me as unwise, and besides I had to go and ask telly people stupid questions.

How naive I was, in the city you can wear roller blades in a shop and try to buy a Geiger counter in the high street without seeming even slightly suspiciously odd. You can even go to see We Will Rock You without being put on a list.
In the country, where the real iniquity lies, indoor roller blades alone could get you in trouble, but at least the streets are Tintin free.

I hope the Geiger counter section of the Maplin's website, if there is one, is more user-friendly than the aerials one. I'm not convinced roller boy had done a lot of research, which reassures me that if he is planning to produce a dirty bomb, he'll get caught googling it first.
By the way, if you've come here by googling "dirty bomb" in the hope of finding out how to make one, can I suggest politely that I'd rather you didn't? A discreet bowel movement in a busy London shopping street will probably get your disgruntlement over just as well. Thanks.

PS Obviously, despite being accompanied by my old un, I still bought the wrong aerial.

The Play's the Thing (or Wave, it depends how you look at it)

2008-03-14T20:26:00.000Z

To confuse things… do you remember the goat doors? My radio play pitch? Oh you must, it’s a mere mouse scroll down from here, maybe a click too.
Well, it’s got more complicated, now. The commissioner liked my log-line more than the attached pitch. It was a jolly good eye-catching log-line that only 20% covered the play, so he suggested I should pitch the play that goes with that log-line instead. So I have and it's now much more like itself.
It’s a harder play to write and despite having been liked at pithy sentence length it may not appeal so much when expanded on.
So, I’ve kind of clipped the bar getting over this hurdle, and am now tackling the next hurdle in a slightly different way instead- straddling rather than Fosberry flopping if you’d like to mess up your sporting imagery.

In terms of goat doors you might consider me as having opened the first door, only to find what's beyond it is still in a state of quantum indeterminacy. That might of course be counter-intuitive nonsense, but I’m not going to judge.
It’s in the pre-offers round anyhow, which basically means it's in the phase of being offered to be offered, which makes much more sense, particularly if you're a bit Zen and that.
To look on this positively- the idea changing radically as a result of being looked at get continuing to progress is eminently quantum, and this is probably as good for the odds of getting through to the next stage as changing doors for no good reason on a quiz show is. Those goats should sue over The Weakest Link, what a pinch.

This post was brought to you by populist factual books from the late 1980s that attempt to explain that Quantum stuff is simultaneously dead easy and a bit like exotic mystical thinking. This is both very hard and easy to believe, though obviously not simultaneously.

Colonel K

2008-03-11T18:16:00.000Z

A little over a year ago, so it turns out, KFC (the company formerly known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, before deciding the world fried might be becoming a bit of a hard sell these days) changed its logo. I didn't notice because while KFC had apparently advertised the change to low orbital surveillance satellites from the Nevada desert, I'd somehow neglected to be in low orbit or on any of the agenda setting websites showing the resultant images, which are so popular with the hip, young secretively seasoned fried chicken consuming demographic.

The realisation has only just reached me because a recent bus journey took me past two KFCs in fairly quick succession, a funky new one and a tired, old, unchanged since the late 90s one.

You know what, the last 10 years have been kinder to Colonel Sanders than they have to me- he's got younger and I think a little bit more hip, with his "jacket off, apron on" attitude and "down wiv da kidz" jaunty trapezoid backing. He also has to my eye a ghost of young Rolf Harris and particularly cheery Desmond Tutu about his expression, and may even have shed a pound or two in weight.
When I was a lad he was making cameos in Little House on the Prairie which was what simultaneously a quarter of a century and a century and a bit ago, though to be fair he was also writing his company name in full, Wimpy was a sit down restaurant with waitresses, and Pizza Hut didn't deliver and had a sensible hut roof rather than some squiffy faux scribbled nonsense on its logo.

Good for him, as a puritan lefty killjoy I obviously wish his empire had not spread so far as to have two branches within a five minute bus ride half a world from Kentucky (or K as it's now known), and that his TV adverts weren't a) so desperately transparently constructed to imply it was okay for young parents to succumb to kids' pressure and buy his wares instead of making real food, and that they could be both middle class and skinny if they did, and b) so rubbish, but he's looking well on it.

It would be nice if he'd managed Elvis better too, obviously.

Cantabrigia et Mamucium et Caesaromagus CXXIII

2008-02-27T10:56:00.000Z

This has come out of book research, but almost certainly won’t make the book, and is too good not to share.

I’m a fan of Alan Garner (in particular Elidor and Red Shift had a massive effect on me at opposite ends of my school career). I’m also a fan of Hat Trick productions. Imagine my delight to find just how they intersect.

Alan Garner used to send Hat Trick boss Jimmy Mulville faxes in Latin! That is like so way cool.

A few more details to populate the story- Hat Trick was exploring acquiring rights to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen* a while back. At a meeting with Mulville Garner said he didn’t watch much telly- but he had really liked a comedy show in which the cast had spoken perfect demotic Latin. This was Chelmsford 123, Hat Trick’s first show, a pleasingly Garnerish coincidence, “I wrote that!” Mulville said and no doubt much ice was broken as a result...
Consequently, as negotiations continued, Garner sent Mulville faxes regarding the project in Classical Latin.

Unfortunately, although Mulville had studied Classics at university** his Latin was now a bit rusty, and his perfect demotic Latin had been constructed with the aid of a friend from university days***, and thus to read Garner’s faxes he not only had to hold up the shiny heat sensitive paper and squint at the slightly ‘pages from Ceefax’ed letters like normal people had to “back in the day”, he also had to take it ‘round to his friend.

I had a letter from Alan Garner once, which was great but possibly the very best thing about it was that, after his house name at the top, he gave an OS map reference rather than a street address- that’s proper living in the country for you that is.

*the book I like to think which every visitor to Alderley Edge holds in their head at all times, unless they’re the kind of fool who just goes there to lie in the grass near Jodrell Bank and hum Paddy Kingsland to themselves- I’ve met one. Fool didn’t regenerate- he’d forgotten the scene he was attempting to replicate was a nasty studio recreation, set somewhere poncy like Cambridge and made up.

** at somewhere with a fictional radio telescope and Footlights. Like me Mulville did Latin at ‘A’ level at a comprehensive school that still remembered being a grammar school (unlike me he worked hard enough to pass).

*** I think we’ve established where, punters. While we’re cleaning up the university careers, Garner went to university in Oxford (he was a contemporary of Dennis Potter you know). I went to Manchester, in part for all the theatre there, in part because of The Smiths, and just possibly because Alan Garner had made the city sound magical in Elidor. The non-regenerating tripper to Alderley Edge amd environs went to the real Cambridge. He can still be seen there today on occasion, I suspect dressed as Skagra more often than not (see poncy and made up).

Poison Door

2008-02-20T16:56:00.000Z

Not a lot going on right now-
I'm tired, cricky-necked and sore-throated, all of which are probably symptoms of a rare and deadly syndrome known as Obvious Evidence of Something Serious in Retrospect but Nothing you Notice as Out of the Ordinary at the Time Syndrome.
It's closely related to the hacking cough developed in period dramas (as a precursor of Decorous Consumption) that audiences pick up like a badly dropped murder mystery clue, and characters never notice, being unaware that they are in a rather streamlined version of reality in which most things that happen are either significant, or off stage by virtue of being too expensive.
Anyhow, suffering from OESSRNNOOT as it's called by professional observers and lackadaisical sufferers, I seem to have been thinking and doing little of note this week.

Main points of interest-
I have read a script of a forthcoming BBC telly show and enjoyed it, which is nice. Means I'll be an absolute pain when it comes on, saying "here comes a good bit" over and over, but still, I'd probably have been an absolute pain anyway. More later.
I'll be interested to discover who they get to play Instantly Recognisable and Charismatic Man for two lines of dialogue and ten seconds of screen time, though. They'll either have to pull in a favour, or get lucky.
Mark Gatiss might just pull it off, with the right wig, hard-staring and half-smiling except then there'd be that "hang on wasn't that just..." brain freeze for everyone watching, either him or Benedict Cumberbatch who played Stephen Hawking a couple of years back (and always reminds me of Yakult's good bacteria yoghurt geek).
His mum is Wanda Ventham apparently, not, you might have thought, the kind of woman who'd name her son as if he was a minor character in Round the Horne. Mind Wanda Ventham sounds a quite plausible Horne-y name now I think about it.

My Afternoon Play pitch is good enough to be discussed with a commissioner in a couple of weeks time, which means the next stage is either a knockback or invitation to expand the idea, which then will result in either a knockback or commission. Under the powers vested in me by positive thinking I make that a 1 in 4 chance of it getting done. I am thinking positively for a change because I've been told changing my mind now and again somehow confuses Monty Hall, the goats and the nature of reality.
I'm unconvinced.
Or am I?
It is sad that my main awareness of Monty Hall is as a result of his hosting this non-existent edition of Let's Make A Deal.
Or is it?
That's enough of that now, surely?
Or is it?

I am having the occasional drink again now, but enjoying sobriety more, and having just had Radio 4 blather on to me about the silent undetectable curse of liver disease that smiteth you without warning and displayeth symptoms only when it is far too late (bwahahaha), I may continue to go easy.
Or shall I?
Coughs weakly and goes easy into that good night.

Long-Distance Operator

2008-02-15T13:18:00.000Z

Right then, where are we?

Exhausted, four interviews in the last seven days which isn’t bad except that required around 40 hours travelling and three nights without sleep (though to be fair you can get about an hour in, in fits and starts on the 1.45 am coach).
Unfortunately this means I’ve hardly written a thing because I’ve been so busy gathering further info, and am exhibiting tell-tale signs of vague. I would forget my metaphors if they weren’t screwed on.

Best interviews have to have been Beryl Vertue and Anne Wood who are personal heroes of some standing, and didn’t let me down. Funny how much of the world revolves erratically around Spike, from Pob's Programme to Saturday Night Fever…
It was also pretty damned cool to see what I assume was the actual "Vitruvian Man" model used for the World In Action titles at All3Media.

In frustrating Radio 4 news, I probably won’t be doing a Classic Serial because I have no drama experience for 4. I’m pitching an Afternoon Play now. This may well hit the usual wall of indifference too. We shall see. There will come a point soon where you could just re-run this entry with changed programme and people names. Annoying to have wasted time banging against a wall that was now apparently not as hard as all that for me only to find it was actually just as hard after all.

There was also a faint sniff of some sound design work this week, but after doing a short demo I was asked to do something more complex I simply didn’t have time for, and, given this would be on spec and there was no brief other than “make it a bit like this other company’s stuff” I thought it was wiser to leave it and just let that other company do the work.

So that’s all positive, isn’t it?

Oh, just remembered the line in that magazine review a few weeks back- the “The” should have been in italics, I’m told. That actually makes it even better, don't you think?

Man in a Suitcase

2008-02-06T19:13:00.000Z

And now a message from Tuesday morning...

I'm knackered to the point of being mechanically reclaimed meat this morning- A human peperami without even the faint resemblance to those cheesy string things (which are probably just as full of processed pseudofood gunkery) that seem a bit friendlier.

Kids'll eat anything if it's marketed by an anthropomorphic version of itself with Aardman style googly eyes, won't they? Dip Marty Feldman in chocolate, he wouldn't last five minutes at the school gates (though to be honest, I suspect he wouldn't last too long at school gates undipped either).

"Pseudofood gunkery" there's a googlewhack for you.

Another is "google jetsam" (probably), which is my newly minted coinage for those surprise messages from unexpected sources you sometimes seem to get after posting on your weblog. For example, in my ongoing and pointless "name postings after vaguely apt tracks in my mp3 collection" campaign I headed a post 'All Nighter' a while back, and almost immediately thereafter received spam to the weblog mail address offering me drugs that would help me stay up all night.
Unlike most offers of drugs to keep me up these messages were apparently aimed at helping me revise for exams. Some Technorati grazing cowbot was ruminating on my messages it seems. No, that does make sense, read it slowly. I deleted the spam, I wasn't going to bite, not even if it'd been spam with googly eyes and the voice of Ade Edmondson.

This is why I often avoid using real people's full names in this weblog. I'm aware some of the trails get followed, and I'd rather let the world know the ins and outs of my dodgy music taste than everyone I know, meet or work with.
It's notable that I get more responses if I mention famous people, and I then feel bad for luring the unwary here under false pretenses with little signs saying Lindsay Lohan, Anthony Stewart Head, Sir Agravaine, Eduardo Paolozzi, Cab Calloway or Prentis Hancock which end up letting the searchers down.

I get over it though.

Today, I am mainly knackered because I got up at 5 am to go and see a TV producer and director, married to an ex-Hammer star whose father was a notable TV writer of the 50s, 60s and 70s. Now people who are interested in this kind of thing will know who that is immediately, but bots probably won't (unless I mention the F***** F*** connection). That's much more how it should be, you can unpack their identity if it's your bag (statutory "try to thematically justify the title" sentence).

Maybe I should go back and remove the names of people in past entries, making this weblog less of a cyber celeb seekers cyber siren song? Maybe I should go easier on the assonance? Maybe I should be sleeping not typing right now. People tend to be more forgiving of dreams that aren't really about anything, don't hang together properly and end abruptly without

No Rest

2008-01-28T16:31:00.000Z

Okay, it's a very quick one this time- just headlines really.

In mysterious radio adaptation news- none, but still not bad news. rights situation was being checked last I heard. I had some ideas about how it should be done watching Easy Rider last night.
Interesting film, and I liked the ending a lot. Some really annoyingly arty cutting that hits its peak in an LSD sequence that outstayed its welcome for me, but generally a worthwhile watch. Quite low on plot but Pete Fonda and his bike look cool, Nicholson and Hopper aren't quite their established deranged personae, a couple of soundtrack elements are just great- It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) and Born to be Wild which just feels ridiculously good and fresh here.
Most interesting aspects of the film for me- Phil Spector's cameo in the world's most publicly exposed drugs deal near the start and Toni Basil in the gap on her CV between an Elvis movie and kitsch '80s pop fame.

In radio comedy news, things may be more hopeful than I thought. Nothing concrete yet but No Tomatoes series 2 may still fly, and better still, after I've finished this book rather while I'm still writing it. More when/if I know more.

In writing this book news, lots of interviews coming up, which is great because it delays the period when I have nothing to do but type, which is the most tricky bit of any writing, and they're fabulous big names.

In not drinking in January news- I've not been drinking in January and appear to have sloughed off enough pounds to consider not drinking some more.

In unrelated but I mentioned it a few weeks ago news, 1500ish words of mine about Hughie Green, Hancock, Howerd and the Steptoes will be getting published by my ex-employer's journal. Don't know exactly when but it's to tie in with the upcoming BBC4 dramas about them all (which I think have made a brilliant decision in casting David Walliams as Howerd).

Now the weather. Ho hum.

Picture This

2008-01-22T15:10:00.000Z

Blimey, the tiny media world I orbit is imploding. I've long been of the belief that there are actually only about two hundred people in Britain really and they all double up (I'm assuming I'm either not really a person or I missed the briefing the day this was all organised) but this afternoon's post convinced me. Pop Culture is eating itself (starting with Paul Morley).

I'd ordered a few books via bookfinder.com (no financially beneficial hyperlink- it's just for fun) last week. They're to help me with the book I'm working on, and at least one was going to be handy when discussing the career of a director of commercials, some of whose archive I started cataloging a few years ago. The director in question had once employed one of my previous interviewees and his son now works with another interviewee whose sister I went to University with. Kremlinologists should be able to provide all the required names now.

Anyhow, a few of the books arrived today and I opened up the biggest of the packages to find not only the book I was after inside, but lots of sellotaped newsprint too. I ripped it open and discovered my book had been wrapped in a magazine showing a picture of someone I used to work with. It was a picture of the editor with a little Q and A below it.

Bizarrely, the picture looked at first glance exactly like a photo I'd once taken of them in the house Gerry Thunderbirds Anderson grew up in in Hackney (none of us knew he'd grown up there at the time- I was only there transporting Play School 's Humpty down to a reunion with Floella Benjamin in a cardboard box full of acid free tissue paper- Humpty not Floella).

I was momentarily rather befuddled- two separate parts of my life were colliding. It was a bit like when you naively invite people you know in different capacities together- and find that not only do they not get on but that you are incapable of satisfying what is wanted of you by all present. I'm sure I've mentioned that heart sink before, if not (and indeed if) it's the story of my life. These things should not co-exist I thought.

Then I had a bit more of a think- I never express amazement when things I buy aren't wrapped in pictures of people I know and that happens far more often. I was buying a media related book from a bookshop that probably specialises in media related stuff and it was a media related magazine that my ex-colleague from a media related organisation was now editing. I think it was free too, so they probably had loads of copies for wrapping purposes. What seemed an incredible coincidence was just the kind of thing that happens all the time in a relatively small closed system. Britain/media/arts/academia is ultimately a Venn diagram with a tiny little intersection.

Still, makes you think, if only about the way you think.

In Media Res

2008-01-17T18:01:00.001Z

Followers of my fast track media lifestyle, delayed, derailed and regularly replaced by buses as it is, will recall that I met Peter Bazalgette in December. At the time I didn't mention that on meeting me then he said "We've met before haven't we?"
We hadn't, though I suggested he might possibly have seen me in the grim ill thought through Channel 5 television show my ex-employers forced me to do, shortly before I resigned. Luckily he hadn't seen it. He was however kind enough to echo my feelings about the show's presenter and we moved on.

Well, on Monday, fresh from seeing Paul Jackson, the comedy producer du nos jours I'd say if French and pushed, at that ITV, I passed Bazalgette walking down Gray's Inn Road- quite possibly heading for that ITV himself.
He gave me a cheery hello as he passed, which I matched with an amazed one. Bazalgette remembered me!

Now, either this shows what a great pro and smooth operator he is, remembering and swapping pleasantries with all and sundry, or I look a bit like someone he can't quite place- maybe some embittered researcher or runner on a failed Zeppotron project, or a would be bottom level celeb who agreed to do something wacky for something late night and digital once, and he's now mistaken me for them twice.
Credit to the man either way, it's a nice human touch, to give the time of day to people you're pretty sure you've met, but aren't quite sure how.

Before I saw Paul Jackson, I was texting the producer of BBC Three's Ideal in ITV reception, just as Ash Atalla headed through the Fort Knox secure end turnstile and said good morning to Jon Snow, which I think you'll agree is so very nearly show biz that I could just be one of those failed Zeppetronites or sub-celebs... if I worked at it.
I say Fort Knox, it's more like a tube station but they're similar enough these days, though I suspect you're more likely to meet Honor Blackman at ITV or Fort Knox than an Underground barrier.
ITV visitors have passes that are one trip only and snatched away as they exit, staffers have exciting Oyster card like passes that let them go in and out at will. This system allows the company to be confident of exactly who's in there and prevents the rest of us keeping any Mr Benn style mementos of our adventure and is to be applauded.

Ash Atalla was one of the producers of The Office, of course. You may remember him best as a presenter of Channel 4's Freak Out, but that's just you being willfully obscure, which I like you all the more for.
Ash once called me up with some comments on a script when he was a comedy development reader for the BBC, I forget what the comments were, bar "no ta", they were constructive certainly, but you could almost hear his glee at catching the answer 'phone rather than a real disappointed writer, it must be an awful job having to develop comedy writers. No one wants to hear the word "but".
I later sat a desk next to Ash, working on the forgettable BBC Choice comedy chat show that came before the forgettable BBC 3 comedy chat show on which Matt Lucas and David Walliams did the Lou Reed and Andy Warhol sketches that became Lou and Andy in Little Britain.
That's one pretty fast track and derailed life style, eh?

"What's it like being famous?"
"Well, it's not like in your day, you know."

No no- maybe, maybe later, but no now

2008-01-11T15:50:00.001Z

As I kind of expected, despite the enthusiasm of others, No Tomatoes series 2 has been turned down, for now at least (which is certainly a subset of forever).
I never thought it was the shoe-in others seemed to, to be honest (despite 7 apparently asking us to offer a second series), and my suspicion mounted when it got put on the internal Sony longlist last week.
There was, I suspected, a good reason it wasn't already there alongside Spats another 7 new commission... Paranoia or something less sinister...?

Anyway, the feedback is nicely anonymous- a reduction in newly commissioned comedy slots for 7 means it can't be fitted in, but it would be reconsidered if resubmitted in the next offers round.
So no one's saying my ideas are vile and their execution execrable (not in print anyway) which is a relief, and there's some sort of appeal process apparently, but I think it's safe to say the show's dead, for the time being at least.

It does take the pressure off me slightly (in every way bar financially) as I trog along on my book writing. I don't have to leap straight back into 'attempting to be funny' after my slog along in 'striving to be true', now- but is rather a shame for the hard working people who were the BBC's Manchester Comedy Department (now defunct).

On the plus side, I had fun earlier this week writing on one of my favourite topics "troubled telly light entertainment fellers of the 1960s" for my old employers in Bradford (and money, I should add) and I saw a review from Andrew Pixley (Mr Archive) for my last bit of telly book writery today- "Ian Potter presents the best explanation of how 1960s technology shaped the series" he says, which saves you £3.99 or a sheepish flick through the mags in WH Smith finding said review. If you don't know what "the series" is I'm amazed you're here.

Off with the motley, and on.

It's great being straight... yeah

2008-01-07T13:24:00.000Z

Like a terrible old cliche, I've stopped drinking this January. However, I don't think I've ever done it before, so it's all new to me, and there is much to be said for sobriety, you know- energy, clarity of thought, hardly walking into anything, erm that other one, you know, memory.
There's a natural high to be had in not taking a regular depressant of an evening and walking around being smugly self-righteous instead. If you want to be a terrible old bore too, and you're reading this which is a good start, you should try it.

Went down to Allan McKeown's last week to talk cutting the hair of Rex Harrison's wife, Auf Wiedersehen Pet, Nightingales and points in between (of which there are some). Entertaining man, and on the way back I managed to pick up Jeremy Isaacs autobiography for under a quid, which was an unexpected bonus, given that I'd ummed over buying it a few times for much more from bookfinder.com.
I managed to avoid being there while Tracey Ullman was, which is probably good because I might have gushed, but her imminent arrival hung over my hour there like a Popular Entertainer of Damocles

Today, I've got to call Charlie Parsons, and avoid talking at nerdish length about Club X but I've just had to stop and say excitedly (but goodness me, so very soberly) that my little radio show is on a long list, to go on a short list to be nominated for not getting an award in the end after all that.
Imagine- me in a position to fail at one hurdle or another on the way to getting a Sony! Nearly as exciting as my two opportunities to do thrilling things that fell through at the back end of 2007- some telly script editing and a LE writing placement at Radio 4 (and about as likely to come to fruition).

Still, I love Sony me, I use loads of their stuff and the only bit that ever annoys me slightly is all the little interstitial disclaimer bits and animated logos I have to sit through when trying to watch an episode of Seinfeld on DVD.
It'd be nice if Sony could be prevailed upon to love me back, and maybe cut that legalese bit about none of the opinions being Sony's fault if you put the "Notes About Nothing" option on, too.

More again later in the week, when I'll know if I have a series 2 or not, and will discover how sobriety measures up against a great desire to celebrate or blot out disappointment.

And Finally

2007-12-31T13:21:00.000Z

I think on balance I’ve had rather a good year (Sturgeon’s Law notwithstanding), certainly writing about it here has helped, this little sounding off forum substituting for some of the social aspects of office life I found myself missing about a year back.

Professionally, I’m much nearer my goals now (actually one of my longest held professional ambitions was fulfilled in 2007- see most posts passim), the mortgage (a word that must seem even more depressing if you're French) is dwindling and I’ve been so much happier than I was in 2006, so that's all got to be good.
I hope you’ve had a good year too and we’ll carry on having fun next year.

Don’t be a stranger.

Ian

New Year’s Resolution

2007-12-31T13:20:00.000Z

1152 x 864 pixels.

Sophistry and Fractions- a review of the year

2007-12-31T13:15:00.000Z

I first heard Sturgeon’s Law about 15 years ago. It goes like this “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” I think that’s as true of 2007 as is was of 1992 or whenever it was.

It’s a useful rule of thumb for creative people (the law was originally only applied to works of art before it was realised it works for Real Life too), as they cast their envious eyes over the work of others and it helps them sleep. However, and here I’d probably need a freaky maths bore to help out a bit on the stats, I can’t help wondering if Sturgeon’s Law itself is ninety percent crap as well.
If so, well either everything’s completely crap or (I think) only 9 percent crap, which would be nice, as long as we trust Sturgeon’s Law.
The only problem of course is that we don’t, and are thus likely to get into one of those tiresome recursions I’m so fond of that allow tortoises to beat Achilles in running races without them even waiting for him to have a nap like they do with hares.

So there you are, a review of the year- I’m not sure what it was like, I have a suspicion, but if I explore any deeper I’ll only get more confused.
Points out this is the human condition in microcosm, types out stage directions, smiles wanly like an Alan Bennett vicar and waits for fade out.