Things you may have missed...

Since I was last here (previous post excepted) a few things have happened, often despite me, but I've also managed to do a bit of work in between them.

Matthew J Elliott and I have written and recorded a few more riffs for Rifftrax- Hangar 18, Planet Outlaws and Snowbeast (and as I mentioned in the last entry we've more ready to go). I think we've hit quite a nice vein now and I'm very excited about the upcoming riffs which I think include some of the funniest work. Do not feel you have to pop in here and tell me if you later disagree.

I also wrote a book. A whole book on a single four episode Doctor Who story. Seriously, it's longer than the script and the novelisation. The Black Archive 16: Carnival of Monsters comes from those excellent people at Obverse books and is full of analysis of the story and its themes, thoughts on empire, class, race, language, writer Robert Holmes' life and how it may have influenced his work, and important things you didn't even know you didn't know about the production, like the proper order it should have been shown in and how very, very different the first script was.

For Big Finish I wrote an episode of Survivors, the post-Apocalyptic story of people trying to be decent and thrive in a ruined world which I was quite pleased with. I tried to follow the 1970s series tone quite faithfully, and also had fun populating an insular village entirely with family names from a local 19th century census in pursuit of a genuine small town feeling. That was already written when I mothballed the blog, but hadn't been announced.
That was followed by my Doctor Who Short Trip The British Invasion which had been announced but wasn't scheduled at the time. That was a joy to write and research, all the history and geography is true and everything I say about the alien menace is defensible(!). It's also blessed with a rather beautiful reading from Wendy Padbury.

 

After that came a further episode of the Doctor Who spin-off The New Counter-Measures which comes out next year after being recorded in July 2017, an episode of the revived 1980s Hard SF police series Star Cops, and a Doctor Who Early Adventure- An Ideal World. I'll probably talk more about all of those later.

I've also audio edited and sound designed some projects for them again- three of their Short Trips Doctor Who stories, How to Win Planets and Influence People, Mel-evolent and the forthcoming The Devil's Footprints.

It probably looks more like the sum of an afternoon's work to you than 20 months but you can only take the work you're offered and only do it if you have the time!

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 Only A Model! Sshh!

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

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

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

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

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

"Like I said..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November Spawned A Monster

The obligatory Doctor Who review. Look away now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Chevron and Fanfare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming to You Live

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sound and Vision

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

"THE RISE AND RISE OF THE INDEPENDENTS
A TELEVISION HISTORY

British TV beyond the broadcasters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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.

Stuff about writing

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

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

Like you should buy Nightingales.

4, 5 & 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ignorance is Strength

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cantabrigia et Mamucium et Caesaromagus CXXIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poison Door

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

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

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

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

Man in a Suitcase

And now a message from Tuesday morning...

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

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

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

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

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

I get over it though.

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

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