Newsy newsy news

Hello, you've been very polite about not caring much about what I've been up to recently, so to reward you I'm going to tell you in tedious detail.
There's no winning, is there?

1) I've been writing something else for Big Finish, and the first draft is finally away, so I'm looking forward to licking that into shape over the next few weeks.  Also, while you've not been looking here there's been a splendid cover released for my Big Finish Doctor Who audio coming later this year.

 

You can pre-order it here at it a reduced price before November. I heard a little trailer using some of the audio from it recently and the actors sound in fabulous form. I'm really looking forward to hearing the finished product.

2) I've written a story for the forthcoming Obverse Book story collection edited by Philip Purser-Hallard as well. This has a rather fabulous cover too, and a lovely list of contributors I'm delighted to be part of.

Iris is a fun character to write for, she's a bizarre force of nature who barges into other people's stories and tidies or messes them up as suits her.  This collection has a brilliant idea behind it, with Iris exploring a succession of fictional representations of Mars. I picked the most contrary one I could think of for my pitch.. It seemed right.
Obverse haven't put an order link up for the book yet (I think it's out in August), but you can read more about it at Phil's site here.

3) I've had a nice little running gag sketch recorded for Radio 4's That Show What You Wrote. I'm rather pleased about this because I had to come up with ideas very quickly over a few days to get them in before deadline, and this was one of two sketches I came up with that I really loved. More on that later whether it survives to the broadcast edit or not. I've missed writing radio comedy.

4) A few weeks ago Matthew J. Elliott and I recorded another RiffTrax commentary, which is currently in the States for approval. Fingers crossed. We had a few technical issues with our last one which made it a bit fiddly, and took a bit of the spontaneity and fun out of proceedings, so I'm hoping this has gone better and needs less post-production work.

5) I ran a half marathon for charity. This one.

You can still donate and help my good causes now if you'd like to. They're excellent causes, as you can see here.

New things...

Hello, how are you doing? I'm pleased. Particularly if you just contrarily ignored the accepted social form and told me you weren't doing well. I'm all the more pleased for not having heard it.Anyway that's the niceties out the way. It's time to return to the one sided business of me telling you what I'm up to.

Number 1:
The Alchemists is out there and being reviewed. The response is far more positive than I'd feared. There's a lovely review on Amazon.co.uk, nice ones on Sci-fi Bulletin and Doc Oho Reviews, good ratings on Goodreads (I didn't tell you I've dipped a toe in Goodreads, did I?), and some others scattered around that are more measured. It was always thus.

One disappointment a couple of people had is that it wasn't a play about Doctor Who fighting the Nazis and it wasn't darker in tone. I understand, that but in the end I wrote the play I could and a grim piece about fighting the Nazis wasn't the story I felt I could write. Most of the reasons why are about Doctor Who.
Firstly, in a Companion Chronicle for Susan alone (and there are sensible historic and dramatic reasons for making her the solo companion), I couldn't really make the early Doctor the straightforward hero that kind of story would require.
Secondly, the Doctor Who licence is for family appropriate entertainment (the treatment of the Suffragist and Suffragette prisoners in the play The Suffering is the example I'm always reminded of, of real awful history that needed toning down to be acceptable for Who), so any more brutal content, and it's a brutal history, would be tricky to cover. There is darkness in The Alchemists of course, but most of it is beneath the surface. There are things our unworldly narrator sees and reports without understanding that are awful...
Thirdly, I personally feel Doctor Who has presented a bit of a cartoon World War II in recent years that I'd not be entirely comfortable about adding to. For me, and for the flavour of Doctor Who I was writing here, David Whitaker's mention of the impossibility of killing Hitler in the prologue to The Crusaders novel sat better than his comic TV appearance in 2011's Let's Kill Hitler. I wanted to deal with real history on a more human scale, and all the history in the play is true. Even the somewhat bizarre and fantastical McGuffin was a real plan to save Germany from post-World War I ruin. My gut feeling is if you want Doctor Who against inhuman Nazi monsters, you already have the Daleks.

Number 2:
A little over a year ago, a writer friend of mine died, sillily young, and we've put together a book in his memory and to aid people with Cystic Fibrosis, the condition he lived with which led to his early death. You'll be able to buy it as an ebook here soon, with a hard copy available after that.
It's a book written by people he knew, liked, had worked with and others he'd not met working in the same realms of mind-bending fantasy, whimsy and creepy that he did. Not surprisingly, there will be a few names in there Doctor Who fans of a more literary bent know.

It's called Storyteller- A Found Book and it's for Matt. I've written one story and I like to feel I had a small hand in another because I brought the authors together.
The notion behind it is rather fun, it's a whole list of "other titles you may enjoy" from the back of a genuine old book, except now those titles have had to detach themselves from their old stories and make themselves new ones from scratch. Here's the content listing...

Strangers from the Sea –  George Mann
Moon Eyes – Stuart Douglas
Grandad with Snails – Nick Campbell
Seal Morning – Cody Quijano-Schell
Put Out More Flags – Sarah Hadley
The Hanging Tree – Cavan Scott
Honey in the Horn – Mark Manley
The Devil’s Children – Richard Wright
Harlic – A Story of a Grey Seal – Simon Bucher-Jones
Doctor Syn – Ian Potter
The Samurai’s Daughter – Andy Smillie
Black Mischief – Elizabeth Evershed
The Unicorn Leacock – Orna Petit and Jacqueline Rayner

Everyone's written these stories for nothing and it's for a great cause.

Number 3:
Just over a week ago I recorded a piece with Matthew J Elliott, the British writer of American radio, mystery fiction expert, and quickfire gag man who I've come to know through a mutual friend. It's for the US company RiffTrax and should soon be available from their website, I'll let you know when it is. It's a comic commentary to accompany a movie. If you know the series Mystery Science Theater 3000 you know the kind of thing it is already. If not, think of it as a director's commentary almost entirely composed of gags, that sit on top of a film but doesn't prevent you following it. It's an extra layer of enjoyment, which to be honest this particular film needs. It's an odd little piece called King of Kong Island which includes many peculiar pleasures and delights but you really do need a bit of help if you're going to watch it all the way through.

Number 4:
I have been announced as doing some more Doctor Who! Next year, I have a 4 episode audio adventure coming out for the wonderful Maureen O'Brien and Peter Purves, and a really smashing guest cast which is yet to be revealed (though one of them has actually announced their involvement on Twitter). It's called The Bounty of Ceres and is an attempt to imagine the 60s TARDIS crew in something approaching the hard SF of Arthur C Clarke. Writing it, I deliberately imagined which bits would have to have been done on film or using Kirby Wires or would just have looked awful on the TV budget of the day. Then, I wrote them anyway, knowing on audio they'd look amazing. You can pre-order that one here.

Right, I'd better go and make some other things for you to buy or not. See you soon!

Promotional Messages

Hello, hello! Sit down, get yourself comfy! Reach for your credit card. It's been too long.
Today is International "Did You Know There Is Stuff You Can Buy?" Day, the anniversary of which is celebrated daily in most parts of the world.
But wait, that's not all!
There's also some free stuff (but nothing like as much).

Free thing 1: No Tomatoes
A BBC Radio 4 Extra repeat run of my BBC 7 (eeh, those were the days) sketch show commences on Tuesday the 26th of March.  Go here to read all about it with my name everywhere or here if you'd rather minimise my involvement but be one click nearer playing the episodes.
No Tomatoes can be listened to for free on demand on iPlayer radio anywhere in the world (each episode available for a week after transmission). Free! It is an excellent bargain at that price.

Free thing 2: A Trailer
Do you see how the amount you get for nothing plummets as you go down the list?
My Doctor Who audio play The Alchemists has a trailer, and you can hear it for absolutely nothing by clicking the "Listen to Trailer" button on this page (also an excellent page to buy it from). It's set in 1930s Berlin, involved a truck load of research and has nothing to do with the synopsis someone's put up for it on Wikipedia! They've quite intelligently extrapolated from the blurb but, erm, completely made their own story up (citation needed).
The Alchemists is now out in August, having been unlucky with a couple of delays since it was first announced however long ago it was. One was an actor availability issue that pushed recording back and the other was a last minute technical issue which meant the CD wouldn't be ready in time for the revised release date. It's all glamour, isn't it?

Not that dear stuff 1: Things by me on Amazon.co.uk
Look at this lovely list! There's lots of Doctor Who related stuff here- fictional, factual, passing quite near Doctor Who and waving, and the book I wrote on UK TV History focusing on the independent production sector, which is properly all grown up and not even a teeny bit about Doctor Who.
All the items are at marvellous competitive prices due to Amazon's policy of not paying the tax it should and only accepting stock at evilly discounted prices. I will of course get stuff all or next to stuff all for any of these purchases. Maybe, if you get some of this not dear stuff this way you should think about getting some of the stuff that actually helps smaller companies survive directly from them.

Stuff that will be pretty good value for money that you can't quite order yet 1: A short story
I'm writing a story set in Phil Purser-Hallard's City of the Saved Universe (which he maintains is mainly this Universe plus some stuff that hasn't happened yet). It's in a category all of it's own of original Science Fiction that waves at a Universe that nods and winks to the Doctor Who one. There's a bit of a preview here in lieu of Obverse Books, the lovely independent publishers behind it, managing to monetise your interest in it and bunging up an order page.

Stuff that was free as a download you need to pay more to get hold of in CD form 1: The Revenants
My audio drama that was given away with Doctor Who Magazine in mp3 form is soon to be yours to own in a format audiophiles don't dislike quite as much. It's being offered as part of a deluxe Doctor Who CD boxset. You can get the 2 CD multiple Doctor audio adventure separately cheaper, but for spending a bit more dosh it'll also come in really lovely packaging along with 2 CD documentaries (one about the adventure's making and the other about the history of Big Finish, the company that makes the Doctor Who audios) and my play.
This is however a limited edition so I suspect if you don't go for it this year it'll be tricky to get hold of in years to come. You can buy that here.

Stuff that is freely given and is thus valued as worthless 1: My Love to All of You.
No, really. I'm proud of you for getting this far down this litany of self promotion. Thank you.

There, that was nearly fun, wasn't it?
I've recently had some casting news on future plays which has made me very happy indeed, but I can't say much now. One of the people involved has mentioned it on the internet, but even I couldn't find it until I really hunted, so I suspect you won't either. I had the advantage of knowing their name. All will become clear.
I know people like to find out stuff in advance (and that's pretty much the only reason you've got this far down this list) but it's probably better to wait and avoid the anticipointment of piecing together something in your head that real life then fails to match. That person who made up their own version of The Alchemists on Wikipedia is going to feel very let down for starters...

Sykes and a... Gift

I imagine there's been a lot of talk in the recent obituaries of Eric Sykes about his silent or at least silentish works from The Plank to The Big Freeze, but to me they're not the core of his work. As well as being a gifted and shrewd physical comedian, Eric was a writer and a prolific one.

He wrote comedy for all the greats of his age- Frankie Howerd, Tony Hancock, The Goons, as well as vast quantities of Educating Archie, the radio hit of its day, long before penning his own hugely popular TV sitcoms Sykes and a... and Sykes. It's not over-stressing things to say British comedy was reshaped by him. Without Eric there'd have been no Associated London Scripts, and without Associated London Scripts there'd be hardly anything worth having.

In some ways the silents represent Eric's weakest work because they fall back on fairly broad and sometimes rather hackneyed comedy and some star names that can sell them, and the reason for that is that they weren't scripted, so much as put together as loose scenarios and then made up as they were shot. I think it shows. Eric's forte was in sketch and sitcom structure rather than film plotting, they don't really build, and the lack of organisation and troubled production that lead to definitely comes through on later entries like The Big Freeze. It's the work of a man who could come up with ideas quickly and plentifully and get away without structuring them too much, starting to struggle. The Plank is wonderful but it let him get away with a working method that brought diminishing returns.

Go to Eric's scripting work for his true genius. Seek out his Frankie Howerd monologues and his 60s TV work in particular. The BBC DVD The Best of Sykes does a fair job in giving you a flavour of the latter alongside his more often seen 70s series. The Network Sykes DVD will give you an even better idea of his 70s work and a hint of just how fraught it all was behind the scenes.

Eric wasn't a complete saint, but who is? He could definitely be intolerant and definitely held grudges as the regrettable absence of any mention of his long time manager Beryl Vertue in his autobiography attests, but he was undeniably brilliant.

I was lucky enough to spend several hours with him a few years ago, interviewing him with an audience and later dining with him, my wife and his agent, Norma. He was a dream interviewee, I was able to ask him a few comedy anorak questions and cue up some stories I was sure he'd get a big response with, and away he went, flying- a man who could hardly see or hear making hundreds howl with laughter. He was clearly lifted by the adrenaline, the applause and our love.

He was charming afterwards at dinner too, if occasionally indiscreet in that way only a rather deaf man who's known hundreds of famous people very well can be, but also revealed a little more of the more complex man behind his cheery, always on stage persona. The bottom line is he was lovely.

He was magnificent, you know.

 Photograph- Paul Thompson, National Media Museum.

The End of an Era

I made this and, because a few people have been kind about it, I thought I'd bung it here too, just in case you read this but don't follow my Facebook and Twitter witterings. Could happen. Unlikely, but you never know. Apologies if you've seen it three times now and are heartily sick of it.

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

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.

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...

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.

Repeat 'Til Fade

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.

Can you Ken Ken?

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.

Predictable Ideas

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.

Substitute

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

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.

Radiophony

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'.

Going for the Jocular

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

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.

Snowed Under

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.