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.

It's Grim Up North, Pt.1

It's been a bit damp 'round my parts this week. That'll be the excitement of going to record my radio show next week, oh and the unprecedented flooding of Sheffield (beaten only by the precedent of the Great Sheffield Flood which happened in 1864, but that doesn't count because, although it killed 270 people, it was down to poor environmental management and not an Act of Gaia. After all, you can't compare mis-managing a great big dam until it bursts with systematically cocking up the eco-system, in any way).

Anyhow, we got off very lightly. We live in one of the higher bits of a town called High Green* (where the Arctic Monkeys come from, kids) which being a high bit of a high bit had most of Monday's torrential rain drain away from it. The next town down, Chapeltown is at the bottom of a hill, so, regrettably, some of the four foot of water swilling about down there, closing off our local train line, the motorway and flooding houses was rightfully ours.

This week, in not on the news news, I have had to cut one gag from m'show which uses bleeped dialogue and rewrite another, because current BBC policy on bleeped dialogue prohibits their comedic use (silly ****s) and rephrase a reference to the mouth of a popular TV entertainer (I think my discussion of the diabolist activity of a well-known stage conjuror has been let through, though).
I also apparently have a joke which requires vetting by Russell T Davies in Cardiff...

It's incredibly anodyne, but now Doctor Who is a big brand, it's possible that even a passing reference to a rubbish old Doctor Who monster (in a comedy-drama, say, not a sketch show), may require a Cardiff approval and a payment made to the writer who created the thing and rather hoped it wouldn't look as rubbish as it eventually did over twenty years ago, so I've heard, anyhow...

*Over coming weblogs entries Ian will reveal progressively more and more details of his personal life in a series that builds week by week into a lavish guide to fraudulently gaining access to his personal details you'll want to keep and exploit. Next week- his house number and three digit Visa security code and the uncrackable combinations on our suitcase padlocks.