Matters arising...

There's a few of these, I'm afraid.

Number one, I've been writing a fair bit recently which means there are things I need to beg you to buy, things to reassure you are in the pipeline and things to darkly hint at that I haven't actually finished yet.
Anyway, there are two Doctor Who spin-offs (in the very loosest sense of those hyphenated words) that I've been involved with out now.
They're both built around female supporting characters from Doctor Who, but when they're at the centre of their own stories they inhabit quite different universes.
The first of these is the Iris collection I mentioned last time edited by Paul Dale Smith.



You can buy that here or go and read Paul talk about it in detail over here. It's a very quirky, British kind of literary fantasy that enjoys messing about with the nature of fiction. It's playful, it's weird, it gets dark now and then and it also gets very silly.

The second is Vienna- Series 3. Vienna's an audio science fiction series about a once ruthless assassin and bounty hunter who's become something a little more morally complex. She's the titular Vienna and is played with great wit and cool by Chase Masterson who some of you may work for her Star Trek appearances.
Vienna is Jonny Morris' baby, but this third series he kindly invited three other writers to work with him as script editor. He came up with a clever series arc and some basic situations and let us fly with them.
One great thing about Vienna for me is how it manages to feels a very natural melding of those great Robert Sheckley and Philip K Dick era literary SF books and the big action SF movies based on them (except Freejack which is the most monstrous wreck you could possibly make out of Sheckley's Immortality Inc.). There's action, satire, spectacle and a willingness to follow through on hard SF concepts. Vienna's always been interesting about identity, and that's something I've wanted to play with in my story, as you will discover if you buy it...



You can do your buying here, or read Jonny mentioning this as one of his many things coming out here.

Pipeline and as yet unwritten projects definitely involve more Doctor Who, submarines, a RiffTrax Presents release recorded last year, some short fiction, the Festival of Britain and a lengthy piece of factual writing. More later...

Number two, I'm running the Hadrian's Wall Half Marathon again this year- but this year I'm going to be faster. Training's going well and my weight's coming down nicely after quite a sedentary period in 2015.
I'm seeking sponsorship again too, for three charities this year.
They are the Cystic Fibrosis Trust and Invest in ME as before, and the Sheffield Hospitals Charity. The first two have supported friends and people in positions like them and the latter is to assist the hospitals who are helping my wife walk again after her severe leg injury in January 2015. There's a lot the hospitals do that isn't covered by core NHS budgets, and I want to support anything that makes that work easier for them.
If you can sponsor any of these causes you'd make me very happy indeed, and probably make me run quicker. There's a sponsorship link here.

Number three, the National Media Museum is under fire again. It is losing vital funding, staff, and collections, and the Science Museum management that should be working to make it stronger seems intent on stripping it of its assets, broad appeal and curatorial expertise, making it a shadow of the organisation it once was. It feels like a closure by stealth to be honest, and it makes me angry.
I worked at the Museum under its previous name and what's being done to do it at present feels like an insult to its audiences and all those people I worked with.
There's some background here, and petitions you might sign if you'd care to here and here, but I'm afraid signing petitions isn't going to win this battle. This is just the beginning of a long hard fight against philistinism in high places.

Right, that's my bits done. Any other business?

Matters arising...

There are a few of these so I'm going to be brief.

First of all I've a new short story out in Philip Purser-Hallard's collection More Tales of the City.
Now, you may know a book with that title already, this is not that. Philip in an act of contrarian heroism has named both the short story collections in his constructed world, The City of the Saved, after Armistead Maupin books.
The world Philip has constructed is quite a thing- it's a heaven within our reality (as much as we can have one) jammed in somewhere near the zero point at the back end of our universe. Everyone who has ever lived is back (or at least believes themselves to be to a degree that makes it rude to argue) and there are quite a few people who've never lived there too.
The setting makes all sorts of unlikely things possible and absolutely refuses to allow a lot of the things that are usually quite likely in stories. Mine is a sort a detective story.  You'll see if you read it.
You can buy the book now in electronic form direct from the publisher, with the print edition following shortly (I expect Amazon will get 'round to fleecing the publisher later) or read more about it on Philip's site.

Secondly, I'm currently working with another writer on something that's a bit of a departure for me. It's comic, there's performance involved (it's been a while) and it's in a genre that seems to be a bit of a cult in the US but hasn't to my knowledge really taken off here in the UK yet and that's all the teasing you get 'til it's finished.

Thirdly, I've started running again (which may be the most overused phrase in this 'blog after "I've written", or "I'm sorry") and from a stupid, wheezing 'stop after 10 minutes' start I've managed to get back to 2 hour long runs remarkably quickly. I've found turning it into a game I play against myself really helps (partly because I get to win) and also found myself entering a really interesting creative space on certain parts of my circuit. I worked out an entire short radio play while zoning out last week crossing over a footbridge. Good old liminal spaces...

Fourthly, talking of playing games, liminal spaces, creativity and bridges makes it impossible not to mention the loss of Iain Banks here, an author whose writing and outlook on life I find it hard not to admire. I met him once, very briefly, while working on a TV show in Edinburgh and it goes without saying I found he was just as smashing as everyone else who encountered him is saying. A deeply sad loss. He had a lot more fun to share.

Fifthly, the organisation that helped put me in a position to work on that TV show, and even gave me a sabbatical to do so and welcomed me back afterwards, is under threat.
The National Media Museum, which was the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television when I worked there, is one of three museums in the North of England run by the Science Museum and under threat of closure due to government funding cuts.
All the museums under threat have their plus points, but the National Media Museum is a place I hold very dear. It has unique collections and incredible staff and has achieved national and international acclaim despite tiny resources for nearly 30 years.
It has battled on despite a series of ever deepening cuts over the last 5 years, losing key personnel and festivals, staff taking pay cuts, and being unable to fund redevelopment and renovation and the reward for this appears to be the possibility of disappearing completely. I really don't think that's on.
If you feel similarly, you can support all the Northern museums here and the National Media Museum in particular here. I hope you do.

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.

Montezuma's Revenge

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.

The Gold of Troy

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.

No no- maybe, maybe later, but no now

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.

Paperback Writer

Where's the month gone? I had it in my hand just five minutes back.
Most of it has gone in book research and then a chunk of it in long emails and 'phone conversations as I start arranging interviews. It's with some alarm I realise I'm about to meet some of the most talented and wealthy people in UK TV over the next two weeks including a couple of personal heroes.

One of the personal heroes I would have dearly loved to talk to properly for the book (we spoke incredibly briefly once at a conference) has of course just died. A number of the people I'll be talking to are women who've reshaped the TV industry, and there's no denying Verity Lambert led them from the front. Her Thames career alone produced some of the landmarks of TV drama, now remember she was the first producer of Doctor Who and what she achieved with her own company, GBH, Jonathan Creek, Eldorado (no, read around, after its tricky start it ended up a very good show.

Talking of meeting personal heroes, last week I did have a brief chat to Terrance Dicks at the National Media Museum, shortly before he had a very long and entertaining chat on stage with Tim Neal, the co-author of The Target Book a guide to those Doctor Who novelisations that so influenced the imaginations of a generation of excitable young men before video recorders went and spoilt it all.

Terrance says half the TV industry seem to tell him his Making of Doctor Who book was partly responisble for them ending up in it! Somehow I don't think I'll be seeking to confirm this with my interviewees, though I bet one or two of them have given it a flick through. I also had the ridiculous pleasure of reintroducing myself Andrew Pixley again, who I've been bumping into on and off since about 1984 when we were both in Sheffield. He was kind enough to praise my chapter in Time and Relative Dissertations in Space about... the making of Doctor Who which drew heavily on his incredible research into the making of Doctor Who.

There's a pattern emerging here.

The Unexamined Life...

...is apparently not worth living. Can't say I'd noticed to be honest, but then I wasn't looking, was I?

I only really became aware just how true this was when on Friday I lost my pedometer two half-hour walks and three train journeys from home, and realised all my accumulated steps counted for nothing if they went unrecorded.
Happily, I found it at home on my pillow that evening like a high-tech hotel chocolate. I have a suspicion this was the work of those particular elves/elemental forces who move stuff about the house you're looking for, before later replacing it somewhere unlikely you know you've already looked. If God's in the gaps and the Devil's in the details, minor household deities have probably been sniggering unseen in our drawers since the Romans named them Lares. The deities, not the drawers.

Modern physics tells us observation shapes the Cosmos, so who knows, maybe the Universe does muck about a bit like this when we're not looking. Maybe, that's why an unexamined life isn't worth living? If you're not looking, all the gubbins you're after gets hidden, and you have to go around making your special 'summoning mimes' to find things.
This is called boot-strapping- do a good enough tin opener or scissor mime as you pace around the kitchen, opening and lifting things at random and you'll invoke one.

Anyhow, what I started off intending to say was that an empty weblog is a sign of an unexamined life, and so I better start putting that right if I want to make something worthwhile of it. The weblog, not the- oh hang on, I've done that joke. Lots.

Well, since my last entry I've spent a few more days back in Bradford researching the telly book, which I've now had the advance for (hurrah!), and it's all quite nice. As usual, when you do this kind of archive trawling you keep finding out fascinating things that are of no use for your current project.
Did you know for example that Leonard Rossiter, Richard Beckinsale and Don Warrington recorded an 8 minute promo for Betamax in 1978 in which Philip and Alan explain the VCR to Rigsby. Be honest, how much do you want to see that, right now? Apparently, it was only distributed to salesrooms not to the public.
What do you mean "you already have it, and can provide Youtube links?" You're scaring me.

Another notable development since I last wrote here is that Death has come back from a holiday and been on double-time, taking loads of cool people and Antonioni whose famous film I've still not seen. I'll miss him mainly for his fabulous stammer inducing surname. So, to make these people's lives worthwhile I'll give them a quick examination for you.

Ian's list of the work of recently dead people to seek out:

Mike Reid - severe-faced soldier in The War Machines obviously.

Ingmar Bergman - Smiles of a Summer Night.
If you read this weblog you're either, arty, campy or desperately nostalgic so this should work quite nicely, ticking all your variously demanding boxes. It is funny, romantic and bitter-sweet, and should help dismiss any ideas you might have that he's one-note Nordic misery. It's also the missing link between A Midsummer Night's Dream and A Little Night Music if, you know, you're a friend of Billy Elliot.
I hate that film, by the way (caught an annoying chunk again last night), but then I have a massive Lee Hall blind spot I think. I just feel emotionally exploited by Spoonface Steinberg and I Luv You, Billy Spud etc., which seem just a little too obvious in the ladling of sentiment into the mouths of babes for me. I also resent having to sit all the way through a movie full of Marc Bolan just knowing "Ride A White Swan" is going to be crassly combined with Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake as a coup d'obvious at the end. All a touch "on the nose", I find.
If Smiles of A Summer Night works for you, you might find that the much longer and more varied in mood Fanny and Alexander makes you smile too. After that it does get a bit bleaker, but some of it's still amazingly cheerful- even the 'Dance of Death' sequence in The Seventh Seal is quite uplifting (do bear in mind I think Leonard Cohen's funny and find a lot of Edvard Munch uplifting too, your version of cheerful may vary).

Lee Hazlewood - Some Velvet Morning.
I've been haunted by this song since hearing a fragile weird cover on Mark Radcliffe's Out On Blue Six (an anagrammatic tribute to a certain Louise Buxton apparently), that I've never been able to track down. The envelope I scribbled details on suggests it was by Big Star but that was probably just the next act on. Anyhow, this was the only version I've heard that makes the sickly swoony tempo change into the 'Phaedra' bit work properly (and I've heard a lot of covers since, believe me). It was probably Lydia Lunch's version but it doesn't sound how I remember that take on it. Thin White Rope's version is okay too, Bobbie and Kate's is best avoided for me. This is a track in severe need of Saint Etienneing one day.

Tony Wilson - Earthbound by To Hell With Burgundy.
It's danceable folk music really, and I've picked it because it's peculiar, pretty and a bit different to what you'd expect. Not everything Factory produced was quite so sweaty and indiscriminately in love with you as people recall (I lived in Manchester for seven years and went to Hacienda about four times, and two of those were to see Spacemen 3 and The pre-ecstatic Shamen supporting All About Eve, so I can speak for the people at the edge, man). Obviously, Wilson's biggest achievement is So It Goes the show that made the legend, but let's also mention Be What You Wanna Be by ACR, because all the tribute air play's going Mondays, New Order, Joy Division at the mo and it's a decent track. Mainly though, Wilson strikes me as like that largely shambolic quiz show he did with Frank Sidebottom on- good in parts but making it up on the spot. Self-belief and taking chances can take you an amazing way, people will invent your masterplan in retrospect from the best bits. Good on him for what he achieved and for having the chutzpah to make it happen..

Phil Drabble - The One Man and his Dog signature tune. Evocative, rural, idyllic and in a jaunty late seventies synth styley? Nostalgoverload!

There- that was worth doing, wasn't it?

The Theme from S-Express

Here we are then in sunny August, your date and weather may vary, and I'm back at my old place of work in Bradford doing some research for a book on telly companies, using the fantastic library they have there that I never had enough opportunity to use while I worked there.

Don’t it always seem to go that you don't use what you’ve got
‘til you've gone? (They paid Joni Mitchell to promote a cruddy coffee shop).

It's like time's gone funny again. I'm spending more time there now I'm not there than I was there when I was there (Now you miss my helpful commas, eh? Never diss my punctuation again).

I've also handed out a few copies of No Tomatoes to people and am getting nice comments back (reassuringly, people are having different favourite bits, which means it must appeal slightly, in slightly different ways, to different people who know me a bit and feel obliged to be polite), which is probably good.
By the way, I'm now assured the BBC7 TX dates are 24/9/07, 1/10/07, 8/10/07 15/10/07 22/10/07 and 29/10/07 at the ever popular times of 11 o'clock at night 4 the following morning and on the internet for a week after, if you can remember. These are plum spots for comedy I'm informed (though you can't swear because 4 o'clock in the morning is pre-watershed, true, it's like 10 million years BC in that respect). I told you time had gone funny again.

Incidentally, I was in a Starbucks the other day (it was a social thing, I'll planting a rain forest of smug somewhere to offset the gaffe and atone) and ordered a double espresso, (I've given up using the word 'doppio', it doesn't help) and was asked, as usual, if I knew an "eXpresso" was "just, a small strong black coffee".
"Yes! I do, that's why I ordered it and used the correct bloody name for the thing, stop asking! Is it part of your moronic training that you're obliged to say this? Is it part of your script, designed to prevent any genuine interaction with your customers and thus enable the Starbucks experience to be uniformly bland and aggravating whereever you are in the world?" I might have screamed, if I could have been arsed.

My blood metaphorically boiled and, poetically speaking, made a satisfying hissing gurgle, as steam, quite literally (here meaning "didn't actually") came out of me.
"Not everyone thinks coffee is milky stuff with syrup and froth and chocolate nonsense chucked in!" I didn't yell, politely.

Gawd, imagine if an over reliance on coffee made me tetchy and short-tempered? I'd probably have over-reacted.

Thursday (here's why I did not go to work today)

Nostalgia, like neuralgia, is a pain you seem to suffer from increasingly as you get older. I had a great dollop of it yesterday on a trip to the old workplace to see Alan Bennett, his film ‘The History Boys’ and a lot of old work friends and colleagues.

Mr Bennett chatted amiably about film and filming for forty minutes or so and was all you'd hope really. Then he made his excuses and left us to enjoy his film.

Great '80s soundtrack, lovely performances, though, unsurprisingly, very wordy, with the play of recurring images in dialogue the chief delight in the writing. The film follows a group of rather peculiar ‘80s Sheffield 6th formers (who film doesn't really disguise are a bit old to be in school still) who all seem to be very open and liberal about homosexuality in a way I don't recall South Yorkshire schoolboys of the time being at all.

This is the where, for me, cinema really suffers in comparison to theatre and radio, which can set their own rules. We come to film with expectations of naturalism that are hard to shake, because it looks so very like real life most of the time. Movies can end up struggling to get away with the murder they might like to in terms of creating their own worlds and conventions as a result.

One can't help feeling there might be a fair bit of idealised ‘50s Leeds in this idealised ‘80s Sheffield too. Bennett, as we, know came from the 'North' to study history at Oxford, much like his heroes, and it's impossible not to wonder if there’s a hint of autobiography in the piece, no matter how wary we are about such instincts. We don’t like to think our fictions are really all made up, somehow.

Whatever, it was genuinely moving, and extremely funny. Perhaps the oddest nostalgia inducing moment for me was the prominently displayed poster for the Crucible Theatre's early '80s production of Hamlet in the school, the programme for which lurks in a drawer not far from where I sit now. Real Proustian biccie mo.
Kevin 'Curly Watts' Kennedy was one of the gravediggers, I recall.

Afterwards, to the pub with a terribly large number of people, many of whom were far too lovely to me for words. Much beer downed and lots of cobblers talked, a few hugs exchanged and gossip swapped. Home by midnight by two trains and a brisk walk, quite pleasantly beer-sloshed in a way I’ve not been for a good while. Nowadays, if aiming for that level of inebriation I’d tend to head for wine. The two forms are rather different. I think I prefer wine now, it’s mellower and less hard on the bladder when walking cold streets at the witching hour.

Like the ‘80s of the film, the workplace wasn't quite as I remembered it ( I'm at one remove from the place now, and, I suspect, see it more as its public does these days), but close enough to make me smile and remember the happier moments more than the bleak ones. The people are any organisation's best asset and most of the people there are sensational, no matter what name the place has or what structure is being applied to it, it’s nothing without them.

Eee, the Plague Years- best days of our lives. We were poor, being wiped out arbitrarily and viciously by an unforgiving and unreasoning force and covered in suppurating boils but we were happy.