Slight Return

I’ve been a bad blogger. I’ve let myself down, and let my blog gather dust, letting it resemble one of those un-updated pop group websites that has ‘New album due in 2008’ as the latest item in the ‘News’ section. So I’m sorry about that, it’s been a cause of constant, but very mild, and very ignorable, irritation for me over the past few months too.

My excuse is, of course, that I’ve been busy. I’ve written and re-written about seven or eight hours’* worth of scripts over the past three months, plus a 10,000 word article for Doctor Who Magazine, so it’s not as if I’ve been lounging on a chaise longue waiting for inspiration to strike. The thing is, it’s very difficult to justify the time to write a blog if you have somebody who has paid you money to write something waiting for you to hand it in. It just doesn’t look professional if, rather than working on the thing that you’re meant to be working on, which has a deadline stampeding towards you and studios booked and actors pencilled, instead you’re writing a blog on your top ten favourite twist endings in Brotherhood of Man songs or doing something utterly superfluous like reviewing the latest James Bond film.

So that’s the reason. Because it looks bad, and I don’t want the people who I’m supposed to be writing for to see me frittering away my creative-typing time rather than giving paid work priority. I don’t want to give them cause to wonder what it is they are paying me for. I want them to have the (entirely correct) impression that I am working hard on whatever it is I have been contracted to do, slaving away into the evenings, nights and early mornings, burning candles at both ends and not going out to the pub, cinema or theatre or playing endless Killer Sudokus. Which I am not doing.

Oddly, this rule doesn’t seem to apply to twitter, which has been an outlet for the ever-growing stockpile of marginally amusing trivia that fills my brain. And if you have one safety-valve outlet, you don’t get the pressure build-up that requires another. It’s all a question of plumbing. And while, yes, I should be too busy to tweet (and sometimes, thankfully, get so into The Writing Zone that  I don’t) I’d defend it in two ways.

Firstly, that it’s not really writing as such, but more the equivalent of telling a joke to the bloke sitting opposite you at the office based on what you’ve just heard on the radio. As a freelancer, thankfully I am spared the social rigmarole of office life – the relentless bloody birthday cards - and I can’t write if I can hear a squirrel clearing its throat in the back garden, never mind cope with music or a prattling DJ, so for radio read ‘the BBC news website, the Media Guardian website and, at a push, Chortle’. But nevertheless there is that need to discuss, to feel connected, and to have a social outlet for the fruitless guff that would otherwise clog up the cogs of the mental machinery.

Following on from that, reason two, is that it’s a useful reminder that when you’re writing, you’re writing for an audience, a throng of punters, and it’s good to have that pressure, that feeling that there’s a thousand people sitting in the auditorium with their arms folded and ‘I’ve had a shit day, amuse me’ expressions on their faces. It’s good to be conscious that what you’re writing will have readers, listeners or viewers, because sometimes it can feel like the only people you’re writing for are the producers or script editors of the project.

That’s why it’s so important to write with the hope (if not the certainty) that what you’re writing will get seen, heard or read, that it will get published in some form, because it’s bloody hard to motivate yourself to spend days, weeks, months on a script if you think that the only person in the world who will ever read it will be one producer who will take six months to get around to it and won’t be giving it their full attention when they do and who will only be reading it to look for reasons to reject it. I’m not bemoaning the state of the world – I’ll save that for another day – just saying how difficult it is to motivate yourself to go through that process when you have other people offering you money to write stuff that will actually be read, heard or seen. ‘Get paid and get made’ always has to take priority.

* This sounds vague. I’m not vague about how much I’m written, I’m just vague on how many hours and minutes it will turn out to be.

Two Minute Warning

Oh goodness. Haven’t written a blog for ages. How remiss of me.

It’s particularly remiss because in the last few weeks I’ve had a couple of Big Finish audios released. Which is terrifically exciting, as I’m sure you’ll be aware if you follow me on twitter where I have been puffing them up without interruption.

 

The first to be released was Doctor Who: Protect and Survive, an adventure for the 7th Doctor (Sylvester McCoy), Ace (Sophie Aldred) and Hex (Philip Olivier). It guest-stars Ian Hogg, Elizabeth Bennett and Peter Egan (probably best known for leaning over a garden fence with a mug of tea saying ‘Hello, Martin’ in Ever Decreasing Circles). As the title may suggest, it concerns the prelude and aftermath of nuclear war, despite being set in early November 1989 when, as I’m sure all you history buffs know, a nuclear war didn’t actually take place. So something is mysteriously amiss...

Nuclear war is kind of an obsession of mine. Not a good one, not a constructive one, but more the source of a great number of nightmares. When I used to live in Lewisham there was a train that would sometimes go past with a thunderous bang just as the first brilliant beams of dawn were breaking through my bedroom window, and every time that happened, I woke up convinced that the world was ending and that I had no more than a dozen seconds left to live. And then I woke up properly and remembered that no, it was that train going past again, and that perhaps I should move.

 

But I think most people who grew up in the 70s and 80s have a fear of nuclear war. It’s probably exaggerating to say it was an ever-present threat but it was occasionally present. TV dramas like Threads and The Day After didn’t help, nor did all the documentaries making it clear that in the event of a nuclear war, the people killed in the explosion would be the lucky ones.

It’s a grim and depressing subject, and one that personally terrifies me, so why did I choose to write about it? Well, I hoped that it might be therapeutic and lay the ghost a little bit (in the same way that Touched By An Angel made me feel a little less angst-filled and regret about my time at university). And partly because I thought it would challenge me. And it did. It was incredibly difficult to write. Just to sit down and go to that grim and depressing place was an effort. And to avoid my normal habits of sticking in comic relief and instead concentrate on the characters, on keeping it small-scale, intimate, claustrophobic. 

The other main influence was Waiting For Godot and the works of Harold Pinter, to attempt to write a Doctor Who story in that particularly bleak, minimalist idiom, with that feeling of the otherworldly and isolation. Where characters are talking but where the meaning is obscure or absurd, where people are trapped in repeating rituals.

I’ve listened to the first half and it is quite difficult to listen to. No, not difficult. Harrowing. Because the cast, the director and the sound and music guy have all elevated and amplified the content of the script so much, really bringing out the emotion, the sense of dread, the terror, that it’s actually pretty bloody terrifying to listen to. Particularly if you have a particular fear of nuclear war. That’s the big irony; I write down my nightmares, other people turn them into plays, and then I listen to them back and my nightmares become even more terrifying. So not remotely therapeutic after all.

But that’s what I was aiming for, so I can’t complain. I’m very proud of it, it’s a very strong drama, and all those hours of mentally putting myself in that grim and depressing place to write it seem worthwhile. It was difficult, but quite often the things that are difficult turn out to be the best, because you’ve had to work harder.

Doctor Who: Protect And Survive can be ordered here.

The second audio to be released was Dark Shadows: Operation Victor, which was thankfully much more fun to write. It concerns everyone’s favourite immortal, Quentin Collins, being despatched on a mission into Nazi Germany in 1945 to investigate some mysterious experiments.  Like all of Dark Shadows, it’s a spooky, camp romp along the very edge of good taste, drawing on all sorts of pulp horror movies and stories. It’s a lot of fun, full of outrageous twists and turns, and again the cast, director and sound guy have all played a blinder.

(For more on Dark Shadows, please check out issue 41 of Vortex which features an article about the story.)

Dark Shadows: Operation Victor can be ordered here.

Seven Years

How remiss of me. It’s taken me over a week to plug the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine. The irony being that I’m responsible for... goes away and checks... 20 pages of it. Which is far too many, clearly, but what can you do? Plus Tom says some terribly nice things about my Eagle-Award-Winning work on the comic strip in the Letter From The Editor and an audio I wrote gets a very positive review and another one gets previewed...  I’m bloody ubiquitous. There is no escaping me.

The reason I’ve taken over nearly a quarter of the magazine is that I’ve contributed two articles, written months apart but coincidentally scheduled for the same edition. The first article is called 49 Up! and like the ITV TV show of the similar name it goes through Doctor Who’s history in seven-year intervals, exploring the state of the show – and television – at the time, what the people making the show were trying to do, what difficulties they were facing and so forth. Essentially it’s a potted history of Doctor Who with a few major omissions (because of the seven-year interval) – so no Patrick Troughton era, no Sylvester McCoy, no Paul McGann movie, no Faction Paradox, no Sabbath, and sadly no mention of Big Finish’s glorious run from 1999-2003 (when their Paul McGann audios were the official continuation of the TV series.) But despite that it covers most of the major turning points in the show’s history, it’s near-cancellation in the early 70’s, it’s high-point of popularity with Tom Baker, the complacency and indulgence of the mid 80’s, Russell T Davies’ fantastic reinvention and the current glossy-and-frantic incarnation under Moffat. It was a bit of a toughie to write, as it required a fair bit of research, making sure my opinions were not totally unfounded, and trying my best to find a new angle on things that have been written about before; for instance, there’s a neat parallel between the show’s origins, where the BBC decide to make the episodes 25 minutes long with a mid-way fade-to-black in order to make the show attractive to foreign commercial broadcasters, and the show’s current international appeal, where it is one of the BBC’s biggest money-earners... but they only own it now because it was created in-house by staff producers, script editors and writers back in 1963. And so on.

The article has gone down fairly well; some people love it, and have very kindly told me so over twitter. Other people aren’t so keen, feeling that the article was unfairly negative on the BBC books (of which I wrote three, but even their books most ardent admirer would have to admit that 1998 wasn’t their finest year) or that the article didn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know. Which is fair enough, I suppose, though in researching it I did try to bring to light things which haven’t been discussed much in the past; the debt Doctor Who owes to the novel Guardians Of Time, for instance.

In my defence, if any defence were needed, I hope that my other article is some compensation, as it’s a Fact Of Fiction on the 2005 story Dalek and is chock-full of facts which have never been made public before. The writer of the story, Robert Shearman, was kind enough to share all the drafts of the story with me, and to consent to an interview, and as a result the feature is probably the most extensive and thorough article ever written about the Doctor Who writing/re-drafting process. No fact has been left unmentioned (though the magazine’s editors did cut a ‘blooper’ that I’d spotted!). In putting together the article I gained a new, deeper appreciation for the episode – an episode I loved – and an appreciation of how much time and effort both Robert and Russell T Davies put into it.  The end result looks effortlessly simple when the process leading to it was anything but.

This is the fifth Fact Of Fiction I’ve done; the fun thing about the feature is that although it’s ostensibly about what-happened-in-a-Doctor-Who-story, in the effort to find out new things I’ve gone on little voyages of discovery about topics as diverse as life in 16^th century London and 20^th century brutalist architecture, as well as finding an excuse to interview Russell T Davies and to share my many fascinating theories about The Keys Of Marinus. At some point I hope to do a few more; Marco Polo is the next on the list.