Well, I’ve been bashing around some ideas for Afternoon Plays and failing to grab my radio drama producer’s imagination for a bit, when suddenly comes the suggestion- do you have any science fiction thoughts?
You know what? At the moment I have absolutely none.
None that will lend themselves to an Afternoon Play audience, anyhow. I think good radio is so often about people and good SF is so often about ideas that finding a story that includes real emotion and a new SF idea seems almost insurmountable.
So often SF radio seems to be built on quite old and rubbish twists like “A ha, but the humans are actually monsters, we tricked you, you see because you couldn’t see what they looked like.” An ancient swizz of a reveal, so Antediluvian that it might as well be-
“It is our duty to populate this new world then, Commander.”
“If we’re going to do that you better stop calling me Commander! It’s Adam, Miss Goodbody.”
“Eve, call me Eve.”
Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!
Either that or it's some kind of space operatic runaroundery featuring Paul Temple style urgent acting and tinfoil and tinsel jargon sprinkled on the dialogue. Impressively, James Follett managed to do both in Earthsearch.
Must come up with something clever, with a plot and real people you can pitch in one or two sentences that hasn’t been done. Eeek.
Maybe I could adapt my Doctor Who short stories? Doomed romance with couple ending up in parallel worlds? Doctor Who gives Shakespeare ideas? Doctor Who in an unhappy love story? Doctor Who receives the gift of peace at Christmas? Involved stuff featuring the mountains above the citadel on Gallifrey with a lot of nonsense about time rewriting itself and enemies vanishing into paradox at the end?
No, those are unbroadcastably daft ideas.
Thursday, 23 August 2007
Monday, 13 August 2007
Coal to Diamonds
Oh yeah and I wrote a radio sitcom pilot- I knew I'd been doing something.
It's called King Coney, but I may have still have to sit on it quite hard to make it shine.
It's called King Coney, but I may have still have to sit on it quite hard to make it shine.
In the beginning was the word and the word was Logos
New BBC Radio branding unveiled. Can't say I'm utterly sold- a bizarre combo of individuality and uniformity, I think.
Who said the pictures were better on radio? 4 and 7 both look a bit daft to me. I'll be imagining the old logos floating in mid-air when I listen from now on.
I wonder why the World Service has escaped the rebrand? Because BBC Radio World Service with a little globe in a circle would look and sound rubbish?
Who said the pictures were better on radio? 4 and 7 both look a bit daft to me. I'll be imagining the old logos floating in mid-air when I listen from now on.
I wonder why the World Service has escaped the rebrand? Because BBC Radio World Service with a little globe in a circle would look and sound rubbish?
The Unexamined Life...
...is apparently not worth living. Can't say I'd noticed to be honest, but then I wasn't looking, was I?
I only really became aware just how true this was when on Friday I lost my pedometer two half-hour walks and three train journeys from home, and realised all my accumulated steps counted for nothing if they went unrecorded.
Happily, I found it at home on my pillow that evening like a high-tech hotel chocolate. I have a suspicion this was the work of those particular elves/elemental forces who move stuff about the house you're looking for, before later replacing it somewhere unlikely you know you've already looked. If God's in the gaps and the Devil's in the details, minor household deities have probably been sniggering unseen in our drawers since the Romans named them Lares. The deities, not the drawers.
Modern physics tells us observation shapes the Cosmos, so who knows, maybe the Universe does muck about a bit like this when we're not looking. Maybe, that's why an unexamined life isn't worth living? If you're not looking, all the gubbins you're after gets hidden, and you have to go around making your special 'summoning mimes' to find things.
This is called boot-strapping- do a good enough tin opener or scissor mime as you pace around the kitchen, opening and lifting things at random and you'll invoke one.
Anyhow, what I started off intending to say was that an empty weblog is a sign of an unexamined life, and so I better start putting that right if I want to make something worthwhile of it. The weblog, not the- oh hang on, I've done that joke. Lots.
Well, since my last entry I've spent a few more days back in Bradford researching the telly book, which I've now had the advance for (hurrah!), and it's all quite nice. As usual, when you do this kind of archive trawling you keep finding out fascinating things that are of no use for your current project.
Did you know for example that Leonard Rossiter, Richard Beckinsale and Don Warrington recorded an 8 minute promo for Betamax in 1978 in which Philip and Alan explain the VCR to Rigsby. Be honest, how much do you want to see that, right now? Apparently, it was only distributed to salesrooms not to the public.
What do you mean "you already have it, and can provide Youtube links?" You're scaring me.
Another notable development since I last wrote here is that Death has come back from a holiday and been on double-time, taking loads of cool people and Antonioni whose famous film I've still not seen. I'll miss him mainly for his fabulous stammer inducing surname. So, to make these people's lives worthwhile I'll give them a quick examination for you.
Ian's list of the work of recently dead people to seek out:
Mike Reid - severe-faced soldier in The War Machines obviously.
Ingmar Bergman - Smiles of a Summer Night.
If you read this weblog you're either, arty, campy or desperately nostalgic so this should work quite nicely, ticking all your variously demanding boxes. It is funny, romantic and bitter-sweet, and should help dismiss any ideas you might have that he's one-note Nordic misery. It's also the missing link between A Midsummer Night's Dream and A Little Night Music if, you know, you're a friend of Billy Elliot.
I hate that film, by the way (caught an annoying chunk again last night), but then I have a massive Lee Hall blind spot I think. I just feel emotionally exploited by Spoonface Steinberg and I Luv You, Billy Spud etc., which seem just a little too obvious in the ladling of sentiment into the mouths of babes for me. I also resent having to sit all the way through a movie full of Marc Bolan just knowing "Ride A White Swan" is going to be crassly combined with Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake as a coup d'obvious at the end. All a touch "on the nose", I find.
If Smiles of A Summer Night works for you, you might find that the much longer and more varied in mood Fanny and Alexander makes you smile too. After that it does get a bit bleaker, but some of it's still amazingly cheerful- even the 'Dance of Death' sequence in The Seventh Seal is quite uplifting (do bear in mind I think Leonard Cohen's funny and find a lot of Edvard Munch uplifting too, your version of cheerful may vary).
Lee Hazlewood - Some Velvet Morning.
I've been haunted by this song since hearing a fragile weird cover on Mark Radcliffe's Out On Blue Six (an anagrammatic tribute to a certain Louise Buxton apparently), that I've never been able to track down. The envelope I scribbled details on suggests it was by Big Star but that was probably just the next act on. Anyhow, this was the only version I've heard that makes the sickly swoony tempo change into the 'Phaedra' bit work properly (and I've heard a lot of covers since, believe me). It was probably Lydia Lunch's version but it doesn't sound how I remember that take on it. Thin White Rope's version is okay too, Bobbie and Kate's is best avoided for me. This is a track in severe need of Saint Etienneing one day.
Tony Wilson - Earthbound by To Hell With Burgundy.
It's danceable folk music really, and I've picked it because it's peculiar, pretty and a bit different to what you'd expect. Not everything Factory produced was quite so sweaty and indiscriminately in love with you as people recall (I lived in Manchester for seven years and went to Hacienda about four times, and two of those were to see Spacemen 3 and The pre-ecstatic Shamen supporting All About Eve, so I can speak for the people at the edge, man). Obviously, Wilson's biggest achievement is So It Goes the show that made the legend, but let's also mention Be What You Wanna Be by ACR, because all the tribute air play's going Mondays, New Order, Joy Division at the mo and it's a decent track. Mainly though, Wilson strikes me as like that largely shambolic quiz show he did with Frank Sidebottom on- good in parts but making it up on the spot. Self-belief and taking chances can take you an amazing way, people will invent your masterplan in retrospect from the best bits. Good on him for what he achieved and for having the chutzpah to make it happen..
Phil Drabble - The One Man and his Dog signature tune. Evocative, rural, idyllic and in a jaunty late seventies synth styley? Nostalgoverload!
There- that was worth doing, wasn't it?
I only really became aware just how true this was when on Friday I lost my pedometer two half-hour walks and three train journeys from home, and realised all my accumulated steps counted for nothing if they went unrecorded.
Happily, I found it at home on my pillow that evening like a high-tech hotel chocolate. I have a suspicion this was the work of those particular elves/elemental forces who move stuff about the house you're looking for, before later replacing it somewhere unlikely you know you've already looked. If God's in the gaps and the Devil's in the details, minor household deities have probably been sniggering unseen in our drawers since the Romans named them Lares. The deities, not the drawers.
Modern physics tells us observation shapes the Cosmos, so who knows, maybe the Universe does muck about a bit like this when we're not looking. Maybe, that's why an unexamined life isn't worth living? If you're not looking, all the gubbins you're after gets hidden, and you have to go around making your special 'summoning mimes' to find things.
This is called boot-strapping- do a good enough tin opener or scissor mime as you pace around the kitchen, opening and lifting things at random and you'll invoke one.
Anyhow, what I started off intending to say was that an empty weblog is a sign of an unexamined life, and so I better start putting that right if I want to make something worthwhile of it. The weblog, not the- oh hang on, I've done that joke. Lots.
Well, since my last entry I've spent a few more days back in Bradford researching the telly book, which I've now had the advance for (hurrah!), and it's all quite nice. As usual, when you do this kind of archive trawling you keep finding out fascinating things that are of no use for your current project.
Did you know for example that Leonard Rossiter, Richard Beckinsale and Don Warrington recorded an 8 minute promo for Betamax in 1978 in which Philip and Alan explain the VCR to Rigsby. Be honest, how much do you want to see that, right now? Apparently, it was only distributed to salesrooms not to the public.
What do you mean "you already have it, and can provide Youtube links?" You're scaring me.
Another notable development since I last wrote here is that Death has come back from a holiday and been on double-time, taking loads of cool people and Antonioni whose famous film I've still not seen. I'll miss him mainly for his fabulous stammer inducing surname. So, to make these people's lives worthwhile I'll give them a quick examination for you.
Ian's list of the work of recently dead people to seek out:
Mike Reid - severe-faced soldier in The War Machines obviously.
Ingmar Bergman - Smiles of a Summer Night.
If you read this weblog you're either, arty, campy or desperately nostalgic so this should work quite nicely, ticking all your variously demanding boxes. It is funny, romantic and bitter-sweet, and should help dismiss any ideas you might have that he's one-note Nordic misery. It's also the missing link between A Midsummer Night's Dream and A Little Night Music if, you know, you're a friend of Billy Elliot.
I hate that film, by the way (caught an annoying chunk again last night), but then I have a massive Lee Hall blind spot I think. I just feel emotionally exploited by Spoonface Steinberg and I Luv You, Billy Spud etc., which seem just a little too obvious in the ladling of sentiment into the mouths of babes for me. I also resent having to sit all the way through a movie full of Marc Bolan just knowing "Ride A White Swan" is going to be crassly combined with Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake as a coup d'obvious at the end. All a touch "on the nose", I find.
If Smiles of A Summer Night works for you, you might find that the much longer and more varied in mood Fanny and Alexander makes you smile too. After that it does get a bit bleaker, but some of it's still amazingly cheerful- even the 'Dance of Death' sequence in The Seventh Seal is quite uplifting (do bear in mind I think Leonard Cohen's funny and find a lot of Edvard Munch uplifting too, your version of cheerful may vary).
Lee Hazlewood - Some Velvet Morning.
I've been haunted by this song since hearing a fragile weird cover on Mark Radcliffe's Out On Blue Six (an anagrammatic tribute to a certain Louise Buxton apparently), that I've never been able to track down. The envelope I scribbled details on suggests it was by Big Star but that was probably just the next act on. Anyhow, this was the only version I've heard that makes the sickly swoony tempo change into the 'Phaedra' bit work properly (and I've heard a lot of covers since, believe me). It was probably Lydia Lunch's version but it doesn't sound how I remember that take on it. Thin White Rope's version is okay too, Bobbie and Kate's is best avoided for me. This is a track in severe need of Saint Etienneing one day.
Tony Wilson - Earthbound by To Hell With Burgundy.
It's danceable folk music really, and I've picked it because it's peculiar, pretty and a bit different to what you'd expect. Not everything Factory produced was quite so sweaty and indiscriminately in love with you as people recall (I lived in Manchester for seven years and went to Hacienda about four times, and two of those were to see Spacemen 3 and The pre-ecstatic Shamen supporting All About Eve, so I can speak for the people at the edge, man). Obviously, Wilson's biggest achievement is So It Goes the show that made the legend, but let's also mention Be What You Wanna Be by ACR, because all the tribute air play's going Mondays, New Order, Joy Division at the mo and it's a decent track. Mainly though, Wilson strikes me as like that largely shambolic quiz show he did with Frank Sidebottom on- good in parts but making it up on the spot. Self-belief and taking chances can take you an amazing way, people will invent your masterplan in retrospect from the best bits. Good on him for what he achieved and for having the chutzpah to make it happen..
Phil Drabble - The One Man and his Dog signature tune. Evocative, rural, idyllic and in a jaunty late seventies synth styley? Nostalgoverload!
There- that was worth doing, wasn't it?
Thursday, 2 August 2007
The Theme from S-Express
Here we are then in sunny August, your date and weather may vary, and I'm back at my old place of work in Bradford doing some research for a book on telly companies, using the fantastic library they have there that I never had enough opportunity to use while I worked there.
Don’t it always seem to go that you don't use what you’ve got
‘til you've gone? (They paid Joni Mitchell to promote a cruddy coffee shop).
It's like time's gone funny again. I'm spending more time there now I'm not there than I was there when I was there (Now you miss my helpful commas, eh? Never diss my punctuation again).
I've also handed out a few copies of No Tomatoes to people and am getting nice comments back (reassuringly, people are having different favourite bits, which means it must appeal slightly, in slightly different ways, to different people who know me a bit and feel obliged to be polite), which is probably good.
By the way, I'm now assured the BBC7 TX dates are 24/9/07, 1/10/07, 8/10/07 15/10/07 22/10/07 and 29/10/07 at the ever popular times of 11 o'clock at night 4 the following morning and on the internet for a week after, if you can remember. These are plum spots for comedy I'm informed (though you can't swear because 4 o'clock in the morning is pre-watershed, true, it's like 10 million years BC in that respect). I told you time had gone funny again.
Incidentally, I was in a Starbucks the other day (it was a social thing, I'll planting a rain forest of smug somewhere to offset the gaffe and atone) and ordered a double espresso, (I've given up using the word 'doppio', it doesn't help) and was asked, as usual, if I knew an "eXpresso" was "just, a small strong black coffee".
"Yes! I do, that's why I ordered it and used the correct bloody name for the thing, stop asking! Is it part of your moronic training that you're obliged to say this? Is it part of your script, designed to prevent any genuine interaction with your customers and thus enable the Starbucks experience to be uniformly bland and aggravating whereever you are in the world?" I might have screamed, if I could have been arsed.
My blood metaphorically boiled and, poetically speaking, made a satisfying hissing gurgle, as steam, quite literally (here meaning "didn't actually") came out of me.
"Not everyone thinks coffee is milky stuff with syrup and froth and chocolate nonsense chucked in!" I didn't yell, politely.
Gawd, imagine if an over reliance on coffee made me tetchy and short-tempered? I'd probably have over-reacted.
Don’t it always seem to go that you don't use what you’ve got
‘til you've gone? (They paid Joni Mitchell to promote a cruddy coffee shop).
It's like time's gone funny again. I'm spending more time there now I'm not there than I was there when I was there (Now you miss my helpful commas, eh? Never diss my punctuation again).
I've also handed out a few copies of No Tomatoes to people and am getting nice comments back (reassuringly, people are having different favourite bits, which means it must appeal slightly, in slightly different ways, to different people who know me a bit and feel obliged to be polite), which is probably good.
By the way, I'm now assured the BBC7 TX dates are 24/9/07, 1/10/07, 8/10/07 15/10/07 22/10/07 and 29/10/07 at the ever popular times of 11 o'clock at night 4 the following morning and on the internet for a week after, if you can remember. These are plum spots for comedy I'm informed (though you can't swear because 4 o'clock in the morning is pre-watershed, true, it's like 10 million years BC in that respect). I told you time had gone funny again.
Incidentally, I was in a Starbucks the other day (it was a social thing, I'll planting a rain forest of smug somewhere to offset the gaffe and atone) and ordered a double espresso, (I've given up using the word 'doppio', it doesn't help) and was asked, as usual, if I knew an "eXpresso" was "just, a small strong black coffee".
"Yes! I do, that's why I ordered it and used the correct bloody name for the thing, stop asking! Is it part of your moronic training that you're obliged to say this? Is it part of your script, designed to prevent any genuine interaction with your customers and thus enable the Starbucks experience to be uniformly bland and aggravating whereever you are in the world?" I might have screamed, if I could have been arsed.
My blood metaphorically boiled and, poetically speaking, made a satisfying hissing gurgle, as steam, quite literally (here meaning "didn't actually") came out of me.
"Not everyone thinks coffee is milky stuff with syrup and froth and chocolate nonsense chucked in!" I didn't yell, politely.
Gawd, imagine if an over reliance on coffee made me tetchy and short-tempered? I'd probably have over-reacted.
Monday, 30 July 2007
Random Opinion Generator
I quite like doing radio, no one has to look at me, it's done quick and often live and it's usually less rubbish than the tiny bits of telly I've been involved with. It's quite reassuring to find I can talk coherently off the cuff and be understood by people who can't see my lips moving too, but what is strange is how eager you become to have views on everything as soon as the transmission light goes on. You become a hyper-opinionated caricature of yourself because there's nothing worse than being dull, disengaged or just failing to fill the silence.
You begin to suspect that some of the more unpleasant "shock jocks" might even be quite nice in real life when not raising their personalities and voices and my blood pressure on air. Time must be filled and listeners connected with, and I suspect it's far easier to do that by going a bit extreme, than by being sensible, understated and reasonable.
I wonder if this is how Lord Haw-Haw started?
That's what went wrong then- nothing interesting enough happened to be worth an entry, how dull. Maybe I should be attempting to lift my on-line personality into caricature too? It's either that or witter on about nothing much to fill the time in.
Oh hang on, false dichotomy- wittering on about nothing is my personality.
You begin to suspect that some of the more unpleasant "shock jocks" might even be quite nice in real life when not raising their personalities and voices and my blood pressure on air. Time must be filled and listeners connected with, and I suspect it's far easier to do that by going a bit extreme, than by being sensible, understated and reasonable.
I wonder if this is how Lord Haw-Haw started?
That's what went wrong then- nothing interesting enough happened to be worth an entry, how dull. Maybe I should be attempting to lift my on-line personality into caricature too? It's either that or witter on about nothing much to fill the time in.
Oh hang on, false dichotomy- wittering on about nothing is my personality.
Wednesday, 25 July 2007
Latest BBC dishonesty shocker
The idiot who says "Good luck, everyone." on the National Lottery doesn't mean it, and hasn't even thought it through properly.
How can everyone be lucky any how? Just supposing they were, the consequences would be disastrous anyway- they'd either all end up winning a proportion of the jackpot smaller than their initial stake money, or bankrupting Camelot by winning larger numbers of the smaller fixed amount prizes than had been budgeted for.
Doesn't add up.
Furthermore, I have reason to suspect that Lottery HQ is in fact not a real building but a crude computer generated facsimile and doesn't even have real helicopters with searchlights flying over it (unlike our neck of the woods on a Saturday night).
I do hope the BBC reconsiders and puts an end to this wicked deception of the credulous...
How can everyone be lucky any how? Just supposing they were, the consequences would be disastrous anyway- they'd either all end up winning a proportion of the jackpot smaller than their initial stake money, or bankrupting Camelot by winning larger numbers of the smaller fixed amount prizes than had been budgeted for.
Doesn't add up.
Furthermore, I have reason to suspect that Lottery HQ is in fact not a real building but a crude computer generated facsimile and doesn't even have real helicopters with searchlights flying over it (unlike our neck of the woods on a Saturday night).
I do hope the BBC reconsiders and puts an end to this wicked deception of the credulous...
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