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.

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.

Archive on 4: Capering With Ken Campbell

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.

Latest BBC Press Office Blurb

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Day Tripper

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.

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'.

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.

Chasing the Dragon

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

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.

'Round Hereish be a Dragon's Bones

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!