Substitute

It's a funny old life isn't it? Well really it's largely miserable but it does have enough funny bits in it to make it manageable I'd say.

I've been working fairly hard the last few weeks and feeling a little glum after the recent death of a relative. Not unexpected sadly and not someone we'd been close with for some years, but no matter how inevitable the loss you're still never emotionally ready and I surprised myself by how raw and sharp my grief felt when I had to explain my flatness to someone. Oddly, I've studiously avoided telling friends about the loss, trying to jolly along as usual. You think they don't need to hear it, it's not worth mentioning and, you know, after a few days like that you say to yourself 'Well, why would you bring it up now?'
And of course now here I am writing about it publicly to strangers rather than mentioning it more privately to mates. There's some kind of ridiculous compartmentalism going on here, isn't there- like having the first class bit on trains to Leeds which are only better than standard class to the extent of having plug sockets and being much less full.

I'm still deep in play rewrites (original peculiar title is staying, by the way. It has the advantage of being quirky and zingy which none of my not great replacement ideas were) and my God, I'm getting good notes, pushing me sharply and intelligently towards getting something together which I simply couldn't do on my own. I think I've learn more on this play than on any other piece of writing I've done, and that's come from the rewriting process which I've not really experienced properly before.
Previously, things I've done have tended to either be good enough to use or not good enough- the end, but, with this play, commissioned from a precis and then gradually worked up, I've finally had the experience of trying to get something from 'not good enough' but paid for up to 'good enough' through reworking. Hopefully I'll manage to do that.

In the meantime, I've just done another little job, one I never really expected to have and didn't go out hunting for, and have rather enjoyed it.
I've become a radio announcer. Now, I'm not the world's best speaker, I don't have a voice that says 'this is the BBC' to me but here I am anyway, doing some stand in slots for BBC Radio 7, mainly introducing comedy shows and, even better, mainly introducing ones I like.
This all came about after I nipped down to do my No Tomatoes chunner last month and I guess ended up talking with a bit of passion and knowledge about radio and comedy while we chatted.
Anyway, the upshot is I'll be presenting two 4 hour Sunday afternoon slots this weekend and next, introducing some lovely old comedy shows. Even better the second slot also contains one of my absolute favourite radio plays ever- Odysseus on an Iceberg by Alick Rowe from 1985 which I taped off Radio 4 on its original broadcast all those years ago and have on cassette to this day (it's the only survivor of my home taping from that era to still be with me, 24 years on).

I've tried to bring a tiny little bit of my broadcast history knowledge in lightly to leaven the effect of my droning on, it is, after all, the thing I've got going for me.
Do listen if you can bear it. I start a bit earnest I think but hopefully I loosen up. If BBC Radio 7 can bear it once they've listened back to me, I may be doing a little bit more of the same kind of thing later this month, but I'll only tell you about that if they don't mysteriously change their minds nearer the time...

Truly I am a Jack of All Trades and Master of None, all hyphens and little of worth to connect with them. Author cum comedy writer slash drama writer cum sound designer slash performer cum researcher slash broadcaster,
I'm utterly cum-slashed aren't I?

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.

Great wobbling nebulae!

And suddenly it's May...

Busy little time of late- documentary one is in the bag for broadcast in October, which will be on us all too soon at this rate. Documentary two is coming along. I've written a draft script for our presenter (excellent choice again) but things will obviously need to change not least because there are a few bits of archive to finalise, and the absence or presence of them will obviously affect the shape of the piece.

The interview with Dick Mills at Sensoria was good fun, he was virtually self-propelled in the end. After a good chat beforehand and prodding at various areas that interested me in our discussion, it was pretty much a case of give him and the audience a couple of nudges and away they went together. He's a very young 74.

The last few days have seen me writing a pilot sitcom script which I'd had ideas bubbling for but no time to write since probably September. Clearly, I'd thought a lot more about the thing than I reckoned because a fairly workable first draft came out without much pain over four days writing and the script is finally on the desk of the producer I proposed it to, pleading needily for love.

Today sees the beginning of work on draft three of my radio play, as my producer on that and I discuss his notes on draft two and plan the way forward. Hooray!

After that there are thoughts for future documentaries, a few possibilities emerging to talk about things I love passionately for very little money (an emerging career speciality of mine) and a pile of nebulous 'who knows'. Can you pile nebulous things? Not easily I wouldn't think.

The very best thing I've done lately was make an asparagus, leek and onion quiche. Caramelise the onion, add a bit of garlic and a spoon of mustard, and stack your nebulae carefully, those are my life tips.

You'll be pleased to know I'm not on Twitter.

Day Tripper

Long old day yesterday- I'd forgotten how much the National Express coach from Sheffield to London and back in one day saps you- it's about 7 hours on the coach for around 8 hours in the capital. It is however very, very cheap (and inexplicably even cheaper if you buy two singles rather than a return for the same times).
I was down plugging No Tomatoes- doing a little interview with BBC Radio 7 presenter Penny Haslam that will be chopped up in teensy usable slices and scattered thinly over the airwaves in the next few weeks. Six or eight minutes maximum I'd imagine.
Now, that seems a short time to justify a trip to London doesn't it?
It is, which was why I'd also arranged another appointment at Broadcasting House, talking to one of the arts producers I've previously done items for on Front Row, offering up a bit of archive material for a currently unannounced Radio 4 programme and chatting in the studio about the background to it.
Interestingly, I find it much easier to talk about other people and their work than I do about me and mine. Not what you'd expect eh, long suffering reader?

While I was in London I had a little free time and discovered two interesting things.
The first was that No Tomatoes episode 2 was at that point the most listened to entertainment programme on BBC Radio 7's iPlayer page (and something like fourth or fifth most listened to on the station overall) and as a consequence was on the very front page of the iPlayer representing 7 and claiming to be a radio highlight! It's certainly better than episode 1 by my reckoning.


It's also definitely getting much better publicity this time, with really well crafted on-air trailers, and nice little images on the Radio 7 homepage, and all this before Penny's interrogation of me is cast piecemeal into the ether.
The fact I've started getting email from strangers about it again suggests a heightened awareness too.

The second thing I learned was the full contents listing for the final Big Finish published Doctor Who Short Trips story collection, a lovely fiction range that's now coming to an end. It's a best of retrospective cunningly titled Re:Collections.

< Geeky Who bit >
I'm in it, as are several friends- virtual, actual and bothual. In particular I recommend you Matt Kimpton's Life After Queth- he should have got a slew of Doctor Who gigs on the basis of this debut, funny, moving, tricksy with time and beautifully written. The story features Doctor Who's very best giant telekinetic alien woodlouse and introduces a whole new race of space armadilloids.
Truth be told I'm there under slightly false pretenses because the very best entry in the volume my story came from is definitely Paul Magrs' Kept Safe and Sound. However, I believe the rules for the collection were one story per author and Paul had already been ear-marked for inclusion for a story from another volume, allowing me to sneak in in his place.
I'd also recommend Jonathan Morris' story The Thief of Sherwood even though it is NOT CANON and contains a very unlikely fictional edit occurring in an early 1960s BBC videotape show, and Steve Lyons' All Our Christmasses, a lovely satirical fable which was so prescient of 'Pirate Planet' episode 4 Spannergate and the evil that scandalous interference released into the world.
< /Geeky Who bit >

Great cover, isn't it?
I came back from London with horrible dandruff, which I'm going to blame the coach air-conditioning for, while being glad I didn't wear headphones during the radio interviews just in case I'm wrong.

Different Days

Yesterday, I went out, as you do, to a train station, as you do, and met a poet there, which I don't often. We then went off to a colossal steelworks, visited a local history archive, listened to an academic sing folk, popped into an old vicarage for tea with aristocracy, then travelled through a field of gambolling lambs to enter a dragon's cave.
I got all my drinks paid for all day. How brill was that?
By the time I returned home I had two reasons to visit Broadcasting House next week.
The only things that went wrong with the day were that I ate some jalapeno peppers that evening which unsettled my night and that, despite my confident assertion that Liverpool were capable of beating Chelsea 4-2, they didn't. They could have though so my assertion stands and they tried heroically in an astonishing game.
Usually humdrummery really.

Today was harder. The usual horror of the Hillsborough anniversary took me right back to 20 years ago when three of my relatives were in that ground and I was manning the 'phone in Sheffield to many more, waiting to see if they came home. They did, others were not so lucky.
When they eventually managed to return the police were still claiming fans had broken in through the gate that they'd opened to crisis manage the crush which poorly planned crowd management had caused. They just moved the crush, creating a deadly bottle neck and treated those trying to escape it as criminals.
My father, who'd seen the gates opened, 'phoned the local radio when he got back and told them the police were misleading the media.
Because he was well-spoken, articulate and corroborating other testimony the person he was speaking to simply called out “We've got comformation. Run with it!” and did, without even checking his name.

Today, I saw a policeman on the news defending the actions of an un-numbered officer attacking a female demonstrator in London with a baton, explaining that we didn't necessarily know what provocation he'd received and whether he was hitting this woman to fend off others nearby who were 'demonstrating against him'.
The lessons of 20 years ago have not been fully learned. The public en-masse are not necessarily the enemy of the police.

Radiophony

Apologies for recent radio silence- I've been busy juggling hot knives and metaphors.
I'm deep in radio play re-writes and late too. I've found it hard. It's been a bit like like picking at a scab or a simile, you start with one little bit and the whole thing slowly unravels on you in a way scabs don't as a consequence.

Other than that the recording date looms for In Search of the Wantley Dragon and I'm doing a location recce and a pre-interview with one of the key contributers over the next couple of days and also developing a few things with the Showroom Cinema in Sheffield- you remember, where I saw most of Control (and all of Pandora's Box).
Too early to talk about those but before/if they happen I'll definitely be interviewing Dick Mills of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop there on the 27th of April, a boyhood hero for a nerd like me obviously- the man who did Major Bloodnok's Stomach, The Penargilon Kangaroo Relocation Drive and of course Atomic Reactor Runs Wild.
I will ask him about glow-pots and wobbulators until people flee.

Also from 11pm on Sunday the 12th BBC Radio 7 is re-running No Tomatoes. I expect this will be the last time they run it. They've paid the actors for three plays only, so unless they renegotiate to bring the performance rights in line with the script rights (they're allowed another two airings of those) that's probably that. So if by some freak of chance you've missed it up to now this may well be your 'last chance to miss'.

Oddly moving...

I had a look at the fan page for Ken Campbell this afternoon. As I've come to expect one of my photos of Ken performing for my stag do in 1997 was there. He's wearing a T-shirt I made for him as a silly thank you. I then scrolled through a few more photos and found him wearing the same T-shirt in the last run of photos there about 10 years later.
Still a hero. Still barging unbidden into dreams. Still moving me to laughter and tears.