Promotional New Year's Messages

Hello,
I hope you are well. I've had a rotten year following things I believed in being systematically destroyed and people I loved and admired dying. Professionally, it was much better, damn that faint praise.

So last year, after Vienna series 3 came out, I had another Rifftrax Presents release with Matthew J Elliott Flight to Mars, which was a lot of fun and I think strikes the nice balance of being a movie that's just about watchable without a riff over the top and having some nice silly jokes layer on it.
You may disagree. I'd not be surprised or disappointed. There's another riff close to recording right now. We'd have liked to have got it out last year, but life kept getting in the way.

I also wrote three Doctor Who audio stories, one released, two due for release in 2017, The Becoming, The British Invasion and Cortex Fire, an episode of the Doctor Who spin off The New Counter-Measures, a play for another audio series that hasn't been announced yet and two episodes of the audio reconstructions of missing episodes of The Avengers, Death on the Slipway and Dragonsfield.

The last project is a really interesting one, because in the case of both stories I did the scripts are missing and the reconstructions rely on TV listings, brief synopses and surviving photographs, primarily tele-snaps, an off air record of the show as it went out, in the case of these episodes about 80 over an hour of TV.

Obviously, they will never be the same as the original show, and there has to be a lot of educated guess work involved but my aim with the two I adapted was to mirror the approach of the episodes of The Avengers that survive or we have scripts for from that first year of production and to adhere closely to the style of the two original writers James Mitchell and Terence Feely, looking at how they approached both their later Avengers episodes and their other work before and after this period.
It proved instructive and when an additional season 1 episode was recovered later in the year I was quite pleased by how stylistically close it was to what we'd done. I hope if you listen to the plays our deep respect for all the cast and crew for this incredible series comes through.

Oh, and I did my half marathon. Not as quickly as I would have liked but I got there.

Happy New Year!

Matters arising...

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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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.

Matters arising...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Writing Exercise

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

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

You spend ages putting off doing it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It always takes longer to do than you think.

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

And on we jog.

Tune Marr, Pun Morrissey

I got new shoes on Saturday, proper serious outdoor ones that can clamber over mountains and everything, it’s like driving a 4x4 through the suburbs having a pair of these for cities, but we’re reaching the time of year it’s good to have waterproof stuff on your feet with a tread and I feel the lure of healthy trudging through mud with my cheeks turning red with wind-burn.

I’ve also got a CamelBak (tm) for running, which is a thrilling mini-rucksack thing with a small pocket for your keys and soundtrack emulation device and a two litre bag of water swilling around inside it that you can swig from through a tube. It’s like a pregnancy sympathy belly you wear backwards essentially.

Theoretically, this will allow me to run longer than I’d normally feel comfortable doing with the bonus of hands-free hydration, tinny motivational tunes and a dead weight on my back to match that around my front. I can’t help worrying I’ll start urinating on the move like Paula Radcliffe only much slower and fatter if I overuse it though. I’m sure there’s a happy medium to be struck somewhere.
I suspect I’m just the man to oscillate wildly between extremes before finally finding it.

Blogging about blogging, the last refuge of a navel-gazer

This weblog as I will insist on calling it (conjoining the words web and log was a big enough step for someone like me) serves a very useful purpose for me- like my pedometer it's an external regulator of me- it makes me explore what I'm doing and thinking, and often actually firms up what that is.

Like most people, I suspect, I don't know what I think about a subject until after I've heard myself talk about it, and generally find when I do listen to myself I don't know a damned thing about anything. So these entries form a sort of exercise regime for my mushy thinking and communicating, firming up my ideas and opinions in public just as I attempt to firm up my flab when exercising physically.

Just as with physical exercise I set myself arbitrary targets to hit- I must run for more than half an hour/I must produce nine entries a month, and I do it in public so once I've started I feel obliged to carry on, even when it's painful.
Letting myself down or showing myself up in public would be horrendous.
Basically, I'm in the process of creating observers to measure myself by, and if occasionally that means making an idiot of myself in clear view that's what I have to do.

Hopefully, in the process I'm exercising my mental muscles a bit and behaving more like the me I'd like to be (another imaginary observer) would.

Interesting meeting today- I found myself publicly unenthused about my sitcom idea King Coney, which was a relief, because although it uses one of my writing styles quite nicely it's not a style I'd particularly want to listen to in half hour chunks, let alone write half hour chunks of. My lack of passion allowed my producer to express similar uncertainty and I've quite happily written the thing off.
Funnily enough though, letting the thing I was uncomfortable writing go, unlocked the germ of something I fancied writing much more on the way back home.

There we go- mandatory ninth entry of the month completed. I feel better for it, at least.

Northern Sky

You know this new iRiver thing is derailing my "weblog" titling (someone has to pretentiously give the full name and it might as well be me, I still put an apostrophe at the front of 'phone). Everything's a song title these days.

Anyhow, it is now officially Summertime, the height of the cotton and jumpiness of the fish 'round here confirms it, the evenings are lighter, and 'oop' here in 'the Northcountry' as them 'doon' there in 'the Smoke' like to say, this has translated into beautiful skies, (the most beautiful skies, as a matter of fact, they go on forever...) that you can get for free and are better than most of the current telly.

Now, I'll wager there's a million and one weblogs about this in the UK at the mo, but I don't care because it's marvellous, and it'll be even better when I've worked out exactly when I should be sleeping (does this get fiddlier with age?) and yesterday I had my first run since a rather embarrassing fall on the stairs a couple of weeks back that meant I hurt my ribs too much to even think about deep breathing without the aid of paracetemol.

Don't run in-doors in socks. It bears repeating. The rule is barefoot or shoes- the "oh, just a nice wool-nylon mix foot covering for warmth" compromise can be deadly if you decide to just nip up to the study for something without sufficient thought.

Anyhow, the run was fabulous, really cleared what we'll euphemistically call the 'cobwebs', because you don't want to visualise what I really coughed up from my lungs after a fortnight without a jog. Quite why you're trying to picture it in all its sticky, sickly-coloured, globular horror now is beyond me.

You're a bit contrary, aren't you?

Thanks for reading.

Ooh, while I'm here... I went to the most amazing discount place in the West Midlands at the weekend, new wool cashmere coat, casual jacket, shirt, Max Bygraves biography (just because, alright), Arnold Brown (genius!) single cassette in double cassette packing (good old Laughing Stock, they used to love doing that), and the following DVDs- the complete Robin of Sherwood series 3 (2 volumes), The Singing Ringing Tree, The Goodies... At Last, Press Gang (series 1), A Very Peculiar Practice (series 1), and The Complete Ripping Yarns. The DVDs were all between £1.99 and £7.99, and there were a fair number of other Network archive TV DVDs there too. I wonder if that means they're making next to no money at all and can't shift most of these splendid things anywhere else? I hope not.

If you're nearish-by, I'll sort you out the name and location of the place, because it was top, and should still be so even after my raiding party, particularly if you never quite got around to buying the Sykes, Star Cops, Hazell, Public Eye and Special Branch DVDs a while back and think you might want to.

I know the sadness of my audience. I think I may be responsible for some of it.

In sketch show news, I'm just completing my demo of episode 3 which (for my particularly sad audience members) includes a mention of Gabrielle Drake in lycra in one sketch that still makes me hoot aloud even though I wrote it- a rare thing, that.
Her brother wrote the lovely title song for this post that I suspect will be today's soundtrack now.

Cry me iRiver (and let rip the Doge of Venice)

My trusty iRiver iFP-190TC (or iRiver iFP-190T as I call him for short) is becoming less and less trusty. He's now I think nearly 4 years old, which in electronic consumer durables is actually pretty durable, translating as "it was taken to the vet to 'go and live on a farm' two years back, why are you still dragging its sorry carcase 'round on a lead?" in dog years.

As listening to stuff on it is my outboard stamina generator when I run, and I've just started running again, I need a new one or I'll end up too obese to be let out of doors (even really wide ones) unless its for some BBC Three/five/ITV1 piece of fat voyeurism, you know the things- those entertainment 'documentaries', like freak shows only a touch tawdry.

I've found from experience that you can't always run near old ladies or school girls who you can't let see you wheezing to a halt, so an electronic device that you can use to help cajole yourself into keeping on 'just 'til the end of the next track' or until you've done more than 30 minutes is really handy, and, when used in conjunction with a pedometer, can help you pass for someone with real backbone and discipline if viewed from a distance, and not someone with an unhealthy need to measure out everything with gadgets and compete against himself to actually get a sweat on.

I've decided to gamble on another iRiver because I irrationally dislike iPods (they're so darn popular and the lack of replaceable batteries is immoral etc.), I have already given Sony and Creative Labs quite enough of my money and because I could get the iRiver H10 20GB quite cheaply by virtue of it being a hideously untrendy bit of kit now it's over a year old, and because it seems to have a bit of a bad rep.

I suspect (and hope) this is because it was initially released with horrendously bad firmware, reports vary, but it seems to have had its teething problems mixed-metaphored out. Hopefully it'll be fine for my needs and as the last known user of a Psion REVO I'm used to finding things folk disparage nowadays more than adequate for my needs.
You shall of course hear me whinge if I have bought a pup, half-suspecting it to be one, just because it was cheap. Still if it I have, there should be a touch of schadenfreude to be wrung from reading about it, so fingers crossed, eh?

This new device is costing less than the old one and has about 40 times the storage capacity, which must clearly be wrong and a sign that the end days are upon us. I'm going to have to run marathons to bloody run the thing dry, and given the apparent proximity of the end days, I'm not sure I'll have time.

The Small Intricate Life of Ian Z Potter

Not an unpleasant existence this you know...

Today, I've had a quick skim through the new 'Doctor Who Magazine', which, like the show it's based on, takes itself lightly and its audience seriously and is always a treat, and watched some of the 1972 'Till Death Us Do Part' series on DVD, which is squarely in the period of Johnny Speight's writing I like least.

There are some sharp lines and great moments but so much around them is ill-focused and all-licenced that it make you feel most uncomfortable viewing it. My suspicion is that the bottle (which Speight hit hard in the late 60s) may have excessively lubricated his creativity at this time, and dampened his critical faculties, and because the scripts flail around without clear point, making it easier for the Alfs of this world to believe that he and his views are being celebrated as much as vilified. The 60s 'Till Death's (and indeed Speight's 60s TV plays) I've read and seen are, by and large, much sharper pieces, though still flabby by modern standards, and I honestly believe 'In Sickness and In Health' is a far superior show for being properly structured and having a clearer authorial point of view. It also features the Demiurge-like sub-genius that is Ken Campbell too, so it scores higher there as well.

I've also booked up to see Alan Bennett give a talk at my old work place, which should be a double treat if I can catch up with a few folk and I've been for a half hour run which has left me feeling more alert and healthy than I have for weeks.

So now at 4.25 pm I'm going to have a bath and start some work that I'm really looking forward to!

I love these days. I think I must have been sent them in error.