Monday 18th February 2013

In the middle of auditions for our improvised play, A Beginning, A Muddle, And An End, which will be performed in May, as part of the Brighton Festival Fringe. I've had over twenty people rock up to the auditions, which is a remarkably good result. Over the last couple of years, I've been directing scripted pieces, and had a decent enough turn out for auditions, but the numbers turning up to these auditions genuinely surprised me. You'd think people would be a lot more scared by volunteering to get involved in a production where they really won't know what they're going to be doing even by the second, third or fourth night of the run. This is what quite a few people (who aren't auditioning) seem not to be able to get quite clear on: BME will be an entirely improvised piece (as opposed to devised). It's a fact that's already waking me up in the middle of the night.

I have to keep the cast relatively small, but that still means I could go as high as eight. I haven't quite decided yet (and won't do so until the end of the week). Whatever happens, I'm going to have to turn away people whose auditions and previous work I've really quite enjoyed. This is one of the more difficult aspects of directing anything, and it's not something I'm looking forward to, particularly if there's anyone who - clearly talented and charismatic - gets turned down, and asks the deathly question 'why?'. There's not always a clear and logical answer.

Also this week, we had our first meeting for Three Kinds Of Me, which is being revived for the Fringe. There's going to be a lot of juggling of timetables (I'm having to find a way to essentially rehearse two plays at the same time. That's ok, because I'm only in that situation until late March. When I add a third, and then a fourth production into the mix). There's also the fact that Sarah Charsley, who has written and will perform 3KM, will have to adapt the script into a fringe-friendly hour. That's not impossible, since the original only ran at about a hour twenty, but editing isn't simply a case of hacking off a number of pages so that you can make the timings work. If you cut what seems to be the least relevant piece of dialogue, then what's left can seem weighted all o one particular subject, and the play ends up being about something that you didn't quite intend. Well, we begin rehearsals for 3KM in March, so it won't be too long before the new version takes shape.

This morning, I sent off a couple of sketches to the BBC radio show Newsjack. The sketches I sent last week didn't make the cut, which is obviously a bit of a knock. Added to that, I couldn't really think of anything to do a funny sketch about. I had a couple of angry rants about the Sun's front page on Friday morning, as well as the Daily Mail publishing photographs of an actresses sonogram of her unborn baby (really), but, needless to say, neither of those stories lent themselves particularly well to a programme that is, despite any topicality or satire, is more impish than hard hitting. Plus, I couldn't get away from the fact that the real life events were more ridiculous and sad than any sketch I could contrive to write. I managed a couple of things, however, and managed to post them just before the deadline. While my inner editor told me that they were awful (and therefore, should I really be wasting the readers' time with them), I recognised that they were at least OK, and might be better than I personally thought they were. Plus, I kept at the forefront of my mind the possibility that the quality of the thousands of other submissions that newsjack would receive woolly be at least equal, if not worse, than my effort, and in any case the amount of submissions in week 2 was reasonably likely to drop off quite dramatically.

Finally, tomorrow, at the Marlbourgh Theatre in Brighton, I'm going to attempt a bit of improv that I'm going to find absolutely bloody terrifying. The idea is that I'm going to make up a story on the spot, and tell it, Jackanory style, in front of a paying audience. I'll get a character name, a location, and then tell a story - hopefully coherently - in about 10 minutes, which is going to be a heart-attack-inducingly long time. I won't have any jokes or improv games to fall back on, and not will I be able to rely on fellow improvisers. One of the biggest rules of improv is making sure that you listen. Not only will I have nobody to listen to, but, as I have increasingly discovered recently, I'm not even capable of listening to myself.

Monday 4th February 2013

I only had a couple of dates this month into which I could slot the auditions for the improvised play that I'm going to be directing at the NVT this May. Well, actually, I could have held some auditions on the Thursday after next, but I imagine that not that many people would have liked to have come out on Valentine's night. The first available date was February the 8th, and it was only this weekend that I realised that that was actually this week, and I hadn't done anything particular about the auditions - like actually telling anyone. This meant that there were lots of frantic typing out of audition notices that need to be printed out and delivered to the NVT, with the full knowledge that none of them will get delivered to members before the first audition. I remain confident that I will be at least this organised throughout the entire production.

In fact, I almost missed the deadline to knock up some kind of basic image for the fringe brochure, as it is meant to be all done and dusted by today (Monday). Since the whole idea for this production is that it's meant to be a completely different and entirely improvised play each night, it's not exactly as if there's a unifying image - or even theme - that we can sell the production on. My mind was a complete blank, which isn't exactly a great frame of mind for someone who's meant to be training up a group of improvisers for the next couple of months. Luckily, I was able to throw a panicked phone call to Tamsin Fraser, who has created a great many of the posters for New Venture Theatre productions (including the brilliant ones for Four Play and Medea). Given no time whatsoever, she was able to turn around a lovely image inspired by (read: in spite of) by incoherent ramblings.

Over the weekend, I was able to join in with a friends birthday celebrations, at a bar in Brighton called The Hope. It's a very popular and cool place, and as a consequence, I had never been before. As well as being slightly overwhelmed by just how good looking the birthday girl's friends all were (and, indeed, the birthday girl herself), I was very engaged by how friendly the bar was. I don't think I've ever really been to a bar or a pub where a complete stranger just strikes up a causal, friendly conversation. Admittedly, that may have more to do with the types of places I usually do my drinking (and definitely has something to do with the fact that I spent a couple of years working behind the bar of a Wetherspoons), but this was pretty much new to me. It was the kind of place that the opener 'Mate, are you looking at my girlfriend?' would be followed by 'Yes, she's gorgeous, you make a lovely couple,'

Having said that, I did find myself dancing with a girl because, seemingly, her boyfriend didn't want to. There's a couple of factors at play here, not least the minor issue that I have no idea how to dance (actually, there's also the issue that I have no idea how to respond when approached by an attractive woman, but we won't dwell for too long on that). The other factor is that the fact that this girl picked me up (at one point quite literally; it was some kind of jive, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't the one leading) led to at least some degree of tension between her and her non-dancing boyfriend. I only know this anecdotally, since my back was to them when they were having their 'discussion'. I kept my back to them throughout this because, while I already knew that I can't really dance, it remains true that I thus far am able to use my legs for walking and stuff like that, and I was pretty keen to keep things that way. Things were apparently resolved, however, because the girl took me dancing once more (literally, out of approximately eighty men in the room, quite possibly the worst dance partner she could have gone for), and her boyfriend did a good show of applauding gamely at the end. And didn't give me a black eye, which I think we can put in the 'plus' column.

In the meantime, I'm still struggling to get 'Broom Handle', a short story I've been tinkering with for a few months, to quite work. It's sci-fi, or more accurately speculative fiction, a genre that I do t have a great deal of experience in writing, and there's far too much exposition going on at the moment. I think the emotional pay-off at the end still works, but the journey there is very baggy and saggy (in fact, 'baggy and saggy' is about the level of far too many paragraphs, and it's not even like I'm writing Bagpuss slash fiction). I think I've worked out the solution to give the story a bit more pace, but I've not yet quite worked out to apply that solution. As I've mentioned before, it would be easy and very tempting to just junk the whole thing in now - it's only 4,000 words or so - but the fact that there's an incoming deadline is a great leveller. That said, I'm glad that the deadline is not until the end of March, since I think it will take me roughly that long to wrestle the damn thing into some kind of legible prose.

Sunday 3 February 2013

I've just come to the rather startling realisation that I'm going to be directing four different things this Spring, all at the same time. Three of them will be in the Brighton Festival Fringe, and the fourth will be about a month after that. This might be what people are going on about when they accuse me of taking too much on.

The first thing is a revival - my friend Sarah Charsley wrote and performed her own script Three Kinds Of Me last year, and graciously allowed me to hinder her in the productions realisation. She's making the same mistake again for the fringe, and we're adapting the production to fit into a hour's space as per the usual demands of the festival. Three Kinds Of Me will be performed at The Warren (we just got the venue confirmed this week) and it looks to be very exciting. I'll be fascinated to see how we adapt a script that was created with one venue in mind (the NVT), and alter it significantly (but on the other hand, seemingly not at all) for a whole new venue complete with it's own dimensions and technical specs. I know that this is what professional productions have to do all the time, but I've never claimed to be in any way professional.

Speaking of the NVT, my second fringe production will be staged there, just a week after Three Kinds Of Me (which will make the production weeks of both interesting, to say the least). It's going to be an entirely improvised play, with a completely new story/play each night. It's at this point that many people react with suspicion, assuming that there must be some kind of 'cheat', or key scenes that stay the same each night. This isn't the case. The cast will rock up on stage each night with absolutely no idea of what they're going to be doing over the following hour. Now, you might argue that's largely true of some scripted plays, and I'm not going to argue with you on that score, but the fact remains that this is already one of the most terrifying productions I've been involved with, and it hasn't even started yet. And I speak as someone who's already directed Greek tragedy. There's a couple of audition dates, the first of which is this Friday (the 8th). If I get enough people along to the audition, I'm hoping to audition people together in hour long slots (you know, 7 til 8, 8 til 9, 9 til 10), so please get in touch if you're thinking about trying out for the production, and I'll let you know what's going on.

The other two productions are both with the youth theatre I work with - the PQA - and the first is a 10 minute play competition. I'll come up with more details as soon as they're confirmed, but generally, if you know any budding playwrights between the ages of 10 and 17, there's a chance for them to script a 10 minute play that will be performed by professional actors at the Old Courtroom in Brighton towards the end of the Fringe Festival. We'll also throw in a master lass with a BAFTA winning playwright to really get you kick started.

The other thing I'm working on with the youth theatre is a musical. For someone who isn't a particular musical fan (and indeed cannot sing) I find myself directing a fair amount of musicals. Well, I say musical. The last one was We Will Rock You. Which was actually great fun, although I did find myself rewriting significant amounts. Not because I'm that power hungry, but because they send you out the same version of the script no matter who you are, and they make no changes in the youth version, leaving you to edit out all the blow job gags (of which there are a fair amount). I felt that some edits were needed before I let the kids loose on it. Luckily, I don't think that there's quite as many of those sort of jokes in The Wiz. Not as far as I can remember, anyway.

Finally, I've spent this morning re-reading my latest draft of a short story called Broom Handle, a thing that I originally started last year. And, by God, it's terrible. Well, it's not terrible, but it's very clunky. The idea itself isn't too bad, and I like the characters, but it's very exposition heavy, and it takes too long to get to the point - which it currently needs to, because there's a lot to explain, otherwise the point that it's currently taking too long to get too will be - well, pointless. It's an odd read, because I can still see the potential for the finished product, but because it's currently frankly not very good, it's a bit of a dispiriting read. It would be extraordinary easy just to give up on it now as far too much effort. Luckily, however, the themes and ideas in it fit terrifyingly well into an upcoming competition with cash prize and inclusion in anthology, so that serves very well as some kind of incentive. It's probably about three drafts away from whatever version I finally send off as an entry. We'll see how it all goes ..

Sunday 13th January 2013

Well, I now know that I have absolutely no idea how search engines work. I always thought that they were un-intelligent, to use a, well, un-intelligent word. I always believed that they couldn't think for themselves, that they could only do what they were told. This appears not to be the case. Here's the thing. A couple of times a week, I post a link to the improv classes that I run in Brighton. At the moment, I've got two a week, one at the Duke Box Theatre, which is at the the back of the Iron Duke, (that's on Sunday nights, at 7.00), and another one on Mondays, which is at the New Venture Theatre.

All I do is go to the relevant website, copy the address in the address bar, and paste it into my link. Job done. Anyone seeing me advertise my wares on Facebook will click the link, and be taken to the acting class page of the NVT website. Similarly, anyone who clicks onto the link if they find it on twitter will also be taken to the same page. However, despite the fact that I use the same link wherever I paste it to, anyone that clicks the same link if they see it on LinkedIn will find themselves on the website of ... a Christian fellowship in California. I'm not sure I understand why. I mean, I get that there's different organisations on the planet with the same name (there's a New Venture Theatre in Louisiana that I occasionally think the NVT should do some kind of exchange program with, for instance), but it's a bit odd that LinkedIn actually manage to rewire and indeed rewrite the destination code of what was in the original address. I mean, how? As I said, I thought computers were essentially dumb; they couldn't do anything unless they received a direct instruction. Perhaps this is the first sign that they're about to throw over their human overlords. Skynet will achieve free will this year. Or something like that.

I'm managing to see films quite regularly this year so far. So far, I've been underwhelmed by the opportunity to see The Hobbit (and I'm getting reports back that it ain't that great), and I get the impression that Les Mis is a film I should really go to see with someone who's really going to be into it, so last night's film was The Impossible, inspired by the events of the 2004 tsunami. It's a very well made film, but I have a good few problems with it, not least that the real life family whose plight we follow are played by white actors. The family is in real life Spanish, as indeed the director, script and film is, despite the fact that it feels quite Hollywood. You'd think that since most of the talent was Spanish, they might have ignored the lure of an increased audience that McGregor and Watts will bring, and avoid the continued 'white-washing' of non causcian stories. It's certainly a film that pays respect to the victims of that disaster, but it still at times feels somewhat exploitative and 'too-soon' in a way that, for instance, United 93 did not. It certainly uses a couple of cheap tricks, like an extraordinarily cute blonde crying child, and, it seems likely, the shifting around of certain events in the survivors timeline to heighten dramatic tension towards the end of the film. It's a emotional wringer of a film, that to its credit never feels like a 'disaster movie', but it still feels like an uneasy option for your local mulitiplex (I couldn't help noticing that, once the credits had rolled, people had left their sacks of expensive popcorn, entirely untouched). The two leads are excellent, but they would probably both agree that it shouldn't be their names over the title: that honour should really go Tom Holland, who plays the part of the eldest son, at the start of the story still essentially short tempered and easily annoyed (in other words, a teenage boy), and to whom the film essentially belongs.

Tuesday 8 January 2012

I first heard about it on Radio 4. There was this almost unbridled sense of glee as we were told that, for the first time in ten years, Bowie had released a new single. Or maybe it was Bowie, rather than Bowie. In all the excitement, there seemed to be even more than the usual two ways to say the name. ( it's pronounced Bowie, by the way). Over on Twitter, the delirium was at fever pitch. It was all tears, Oh My Gods, and tweets delivered mainly in CAPS. There didn't seem to be one negative tweet. There wasn't even one of those tiresome ones where the person doesn't care at all (but nonetheless feels compelled to tell everyone that they don't care).

What everyone enthusing had in common, it seemed - apart from, obviously, their enthusiasm - was a certain lower age limit. It was tough to find anyone under the age of, say, 35. Not that you'd know it from the levels of near hysteria that were bubbling over the Internet like boiling milk in an ignored saucepan (no, I have no idea where that metaphor came from, either). It didn't seem that much different from the sort of reaction you'd get if Justin Bieber had announced a new song, or different haircut, or maybe a safety guard for paparazzi. Alright, maybe not that last one. But you get the point. And whereas the tears and screams that attend a Biever news story seem worthy of some kind of derision, it appeared that to cry on hearing the new David Bowie single for the first time, as many claimed to do, was much more socially acceptable. Part of the reasoning behind this is somewhat obvious (it's Bowie, duh), but you do wonder if all the kids are looking at the 40 year olds with the tight lipped tension that is usually reserved for when you see your dad dancing to Ultravox at your cousin's wedding.

Anyway, it's good news, and certainly a better twitter trend than Justin himself was having this week: #cutforbieber is as depressing and horrifying as you think it is. Bowie remains someone who is innovative and inspirational, which sounds an easy and lazy comment to make until you consider how uneasily embarrassed people appear to find themselves with Macca lately. It shouldn't happen - he's a freaking Beatle, for cryin' out loud - but when he closed the Olympics, we all felt confused and upset: this should have been the gig of a lifetime. But oddly, it just felt like your aging Music teacher attempting to play the cool card by doing a mash-up of Gangham Style and Smack My Bitch Up.

Monday 7th January 2013

Last night's Iron Clad Improv went well, although, to be honest, it wasn't quite as well attended as I would've liked. That's to be expected, though; it's early days yet, both in terms of Iron Clad itself, but also the actual year: it's been a long while since most people have last been paid, and in these dark cold days of January, everyone's just struggling to get through the month. All that said, however, it was as I've mentioned a pretty good start back in the season, with lots of silly short form games.

Tonight, I'm running the first of three long form improv workshops at the New Venture Theatre in Brighton. I'm aware that there might be a few people reading this blog who aren't exactly sure what the difference between short and long form improv. I will probably talk about this another time, certainly as the May performances kick in, but I'm loathe to get into it right now, not because I feel that I'll get it wrong (alright, maybe that a bit), but also because there's so much brittle dissent even within the 'improv community' as to what the 'right' or 'wrong' way to do improv is. There's a well repeated and well meaning mantra that indicates that the first rule of improv is that ..... there's no rules. Which is all lovely and gorgeous and actually something I can get behind, but it's too easily exploited by people who just wanna be a bit lazy, and do uninspired, flabby and unformed improv. I've seen quite enough of that. Hell, I've been involved with enough of that. Double-hell, I've been responsible for enough of that.

Anyway, we're starting three sessions at the NVT for long form tonight, which promises to go well, judging by the amount of interest people have signalled already. At the very least, it's a slightly different reaction to the one I get when people hear what show I'm directing for the Brighton Festival Fringe this year (short version: my cast will rock up to the stage each night with absolutely no idea or plan of what play or even story they're about to perform). To be fair, I got much the same kind of reaction last year when I said I was directing Medea. Clearly there's a part of me that gets off that kind of reaction, and it's useless trying to claim otherwise. Even so, I have tentatively been on the lookout for a 'simple'/'traditional' script over the last couple of months. Or, indeed, being directed by someone else - acting, in other words, which I haven't done for almost a year now, and am just about beginning to miss.

However, in my research today about long form, I spotted an ad for a one-day workshop in London. It's in February, so too late to be useful for my January workshops, but if I can get together the cash, it will be very useful to reassess my own skills prior to directing the May show. Even though I'm not what is sometimes called a 'working actor' (anyone who's seen me on stage might question if even one of those two words are appropriate), but I always enjoy the idea of going back to training, even if it's merely polishing up existing skills. Another persons approach or viewpoint can serve as very valuable. And it's always great to meet up with other people who are going through roughly the same creative things you are.

That in mind, I'm doing another meet up tomorrow (Tuesday) - it's the first one, and I have no idea what it's going to be like. I get the impression it's a social event for procrastinating writers, in which - well, I suppose you can pretty much guess what the aim is. People who should be writing meet up (at the Marlbourgh Pub in Brighton, which has a lovely theatre upstairs), and after sharing hellos and drinks, pull out their various manuscripts, and - well, write. That thing that they don't actually get around to at home, because there's a box set to catch up with, or washing that needs doing, or a cat that needs de-clawing (I don't actually know about that last one). Just being in the presence of other writers silently scratching pen to paper (or fingers to scalp) is a great spur, particularly as there isn't, as far as I know, any requirement to share your work with others at the end of the night.

Currently, I'm writing this blog in my local coffee shop, which always seems to be tuned into the oddest radio station ever. Normally, there's a slight over balance in the amount of Gloria Estefan they play. Today, it seems to be all about the obscure Tiffany songs. Although, if you begin to query quite how I'm able to recognise Tiffany songs if they're that obscure, then I'm not sure I've got a satisfactory answer for you.

Sunday 6th January 2012

This is it, then, my last real day off for the first section of 2013. Well, I have the first in a new series of improv workshops starting tonight at 7.00 (http://thisisandrewallen.weebly.com/ironclad-improv.html), but you get the idea. Ideas have been kicking around successfully for a week or so now, I've had lots of alluring conversations with various people about just how possible, how reasonable, it would be to sign up to casting agencies and the like, and I fully have faith in work tomorrow having the ability to kick those ideas in the teeth, and steal its wallet. And possibly write something rude on the toilet wall. I'm no longer sure that I'm still talking metaphorically.

The reason I'm choosing to openly moan about it is an attempt, perversely, to keep it at bay. This blog has so far been updated daily (we'll see how long that lasts, shall we?), and that's only because it's an attempt to keep some kind of writing going on every single day. That doesn't mean that the writing is necessarily going to be any good, but it does enable me to sharpen my pencil, so to speak. It's so easy, otherwise, particularly if the main thrust of your physical and emotional energy goes into the day job, to allow two, three days to go by without actually doing anything creative. You just don't have the energy. And if three days go by, it may as well be five - the full working week. By that time, you've got to the weekend, and you feel that you deserve a rest. Then, of course, you're back to work. Before you know it, a year has gone, and that script you keep telling everybody that you're going to finish still hasn't been started.

Of course, a blog is simply a much more public way of doing that. Much more embarrassing, and deliberately so. I don't kid myself that a great many people read this blog (although the number goes up slightly when I'm doing a Doctor Who feature), but I'm always slightly startled when people I know mention to me, in person, that they actually read my blog. There's the old joke about the guy talking to everybody about the novel that he's writing ... year after year, after year. Eventually, people stop listening, since it's obvious to all (with the possible exception of the writer themselves) that they're never actually going to write the damn thing. They become - deservedly so - an object of derision.

Is that what I'm trying to do, then, with this blog? Set myself up as an object of ridicule? You wouldn't have thought that I would have had to look that hard for such opportunities. But I rather think I am. Or at least, give myself less wriggle room to avoid finishing that script/short story/theatre project/whatever. I always argue that I'm not quite where I want to be because my job doesn't quite let me be where I need to be, and I don't have enough of a financial cushion to simply jump ship. Now, that's all true; it's not simply a self-blinkering excuse. But, however inarguable it is - I mean, when it comes down to the harsh facts, I'm right - it doesn't change the facts that - well, that the facts aren't going to change. You have to work within the boundaries you're given, up to the point when you discover (or, more likely, are able to engineer) the way to break those boundaries.

Of course,it's the new year vibe making me think this way, and I sincerely hope I can continue the momentum throughout the next couple of months. But the other thing that's focussing me is the undeniable fact of me hitting 40 this year. I'm not much of a one for birthdays, and rarely draw attention to them. I feel so strongly about this that I made a point of removing my birthday details from Facebook a couple of years ago: I remember being startled one year by a stream of people putting birthday greetings on my wall. I had at least two minutes of honestly believing that people had remembered my birthday before realising that it had come up automatically on their news feed, and that others had merely seen them post Happy Birthday on my wall. While the sentiment was lovely and appreciated, it was essentially meaningless: for my money, I'd be more taken by someone who, in mid conversation in late October, suddenly went 'Oh, hang on, did I forget your birthday?'. I'd consider that more a more genuine and heartfelt birthday greeting than twenty people who simply jabbed in two words onto my Facebook wall just because they saw someone else do it. Maybe I'm just reading too much into things, being too grumpy. This is why I don't have too much of a problem about turning forty, basically because I appear to have been born at the age of 43.

But a couple of people have already said that I should mark the passing of time this birthday, particularly as I generally avoid doing so at every other one. But, it's not like 40 is even a 'special' birthday in any way; it's only of merit in the way that it's a neat rounding up of a number. I'm not even sure what 40 year olds are meant to do these days. When I was a kid, a 40 year old had a mid life crisis and worried about what sort of lad their daughter was marrying. Now, it seems, more and more 40 year olds haven't actually left home yet.

Saturday January 5th 2013

My neck has locked in, I'm getting tension headaches, and I'm feeling far too fatigued. It's clear what the cause is: it's time to go back to work. I'm loathe to moan too much about going back to work, since it's already January 5th, and I remember only too well working at pubs and clubs and suchlike, having to work straight through the holiday season without a break, and being intensely nettled when a customer both moaned about having to go back to work, and, at the same time, sneered at me because they assumed, wrongly, that I'd just had a week off. On the other hand, this happened so often that I guess I don't feel so bad about whining that I had to go back to work today. It was painful.

Apart from anything else, I ended up having to cycle in driving sleet. That's the problem with this time of year; the weather is still dreadful, but you no longer have Christmas to look forward to. I was getting close to my destination when a car stopped, a friend got out, and offered me a lift. I ended up declining, because I really was so close to where I was going, but I was struck by the two acts of kindness. The first act of kindness was, obviously, the offer of a lift, but the second act was the fact that she took time to overtake me slightly, come to a stop, and get out of her car to attract my attention. You know, as opposed to what most anybody else would've done, which would have been to inch the car very close to my bicycle, and then suddenly hit the car horn, thereby almost making me veer off into the ditch. I've genuinely lost count of how many times this has happened. I know people are just trying to say hello (at least, I hope they are, the possibility that they're deliberately attempting to drive me off the road isn't one that I'm really willing to contemplate right now), but I wish they wouldn't, or at least find a more effective method that driving up really close, and then suddenly hitting their horn. It's really rather scary. Since car horns are meant to signify a sudden and immediate risk of danger, it is, to say the very least, somewhat startling to have one blaring in your ear without warning while you're cycling along.

Of course, the car horn is very rarely used for its original purpose any more. More usually, it's used to signify anger when the driver doesn't agree with the way another road user has used the road, to bully the car in front when it's taken longer than 1.6 seconds to react to the traffic lights changing, or, oddly, as a replacement for the words 'hello' or 'goodbye'. I don't get this. It's bad enough when someone parks their car outside a house a hits the horn to alert their friend, and therefore everyone else in the street, that they've arrived, but the thing I've never been able to understand is when somebody hits their horn in farewell, making a big BEEP sound as they drive away. It makes no sense , since it seems to suggest that, as they left the house, they simply forgot to say 'goodbye': you know, that they were day chatting with their family in the lounge, when they suddenly got up wordlessly, walked out of the house, got into the car, and finally looked up to the window at the front of the house to see the confused faces of their loved ones peering questioningly at them. Of course, they think. I knew there was something I'd forgotten. There's no point in going all the way back in now, of course: rather than bothering to vocalise a farewell, they hit the car horn. This is obviously the only rational explanation for their actions.

Doctor Who at 50: The Tribe Of Gum

And so here we are, at the remaining three episodes of the very first Doctor Who adventure, sometimes known as An Unearthly Child, occasionally called 100,000 BC, variously referred to as The Tribe Of Gum, and more commonly thought of as the story that hardly anyone bothers to watch once they’ve got past the iconic first episode.
For a series that returns so often to certain time zones (Victorian London at Christmastime, for instance), it’s perhaps odd that The Doctor and his crew have only really bumped into cavemen just the once, in the very first story. Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor does actually meet another caveman much later, but that doesn’t really count, since the caveman is out of his own time – which just so happens to be Victorian London.

The templates for the early series are formatted right here. It doesn’t matter that the show itself will go through a fair amount of personality changes before the year is out – all out sci-fi, US style Saturday afternoon serial, and at one point, something very close to Argento – the cast already know the parts they’re meant to play: The Doctor is the strange alien, Susan is a slave to her emotions, and Barbara is the one that expels a great deal of energy into keeping everybody sane. In addition, we have Ian as the resourceful hero. It’s a role that doesn’t always do him favours, however: Because he’s so entirely practical, he isn’t quite able to cope when things don’t go his way, or when he doesn’t understand what’s going on (like being transported hundreds of thousands of years before his birth, for instance). Barbara, for all her careful composure, is much more skilled at simply reacting – bending to the will of events that threaten to entirely demolish Ian’s comprehension.

It’s a small thing, but nobody points out that the TARDIS has travelled in space as well as time, (albeit a few thousand miles, rather than several light years) somewhat giving the impression that the Tribe Of Gum’s cave is in the rough location of Coal Hill School as opposed to, say, Africa. The Doctor’s muttering about the chameleon circuit not working – that the spaceship is still in the shape of a London Police Box – actually raises more questions than it answers. You wonder what The Doctor and Susan were doing in 1960’s London for six months. Remembrance Of The Daleks will attempt to suggest that he’s busy burying the Hand of Omega, but this doesn’t really make sense for a being that’s apparently on the run from the Timelords in a spaceship that he has a) stolen, and b) cannot fully control. And, indeed, why is it in the shape of a Police Box? If the whole point of a Chameleon Circuit is to blend the TARDIS into its immediate surroundings, then it has failed on every level: in the previous episode, Ian takes time to remind us that Police Boxes aren’t found in junkyards, that they’re more commonly glimpsed in the streets. Which prompts the reasonable (if Reading-Into-Things-A-Bit-Too-Deeply) question here: why the hell is the TARDIS disguised as a Police Box? It brings to mind the rather odd possibility that the TARDIS initially landed elsewhere, and The Doctor, needing to park it elsewhere but not trusting his own piloting skills enough to keep them on twentieth century Earth, having to resort to some heavy lifting with Susan down a Sixties high street. It’s also fascinating to note that The Doctor keeps all the TARDIS ‘codes’ in a notebook. He’s got one of the most advanced modes of transport in the universe, but he only knows how to use it because of some pencil-scrawled notes.
But meanwhile, the gang are being ganged up on by a tribe of remarkably well-spoken cavemen. (although, it’s equally likely that the TARDIS translation circuits are simply altering the tribe’s grunts into well-mannered English, because that’s the language that Ian and Barbara speak, and will therefore understand more readily. It’s presumably why most of the characters in the seventies adventures talk like energy conscious vegetarians, and a high percentage of the girls since 2009 are very flirty and self assured. While we’re on that, if the TARDIS has immediately begun to translate for Ian and Barbara, it means that either The Doctor or the TARDIS itself has already decided to trust the humans (which makes The Doctor’s line in The Snowmen – ‘I never know why, I just know’ even more poetic). It also suggests that The Doctor himself isn’t actually speaking English – which, in turn, indicates that Susan has to learn English on order to survive a term at Coal Hill.
It could go terribly wrong for the show at this point, to have the main villains a bunch of grunting men in animal skins. But the delay on any kind of futuristic environment will make Skaro even more shocking when it does eventually show up, and this racing around prehistoric caves works much better as a bonding exercise for Team TARDIS than The Daleks would (where, being on a futuristic planet inhabited by aliens would mean that Ian and Barbara would feel the need to defer much more to The Doctor, and if the first story had been Planet Of The Giants - as originally intended - then the humans would have likely spotted a lot more quickly that they had never actually left Earth, meaning that the power balance would have then shifted too far back in their direction.

It’s also a clever piece of scripting that, despite what fan memory might suggest, the TARDIS crew don’t actually invent fire for the tribe: brilliantly, the tribe have already created fire, they simply have lost the skill. It’s reasonable to assume that the tribe would have re-discovered fire without Ian’s help: what the ship’s crew actually give to the savages is the concept of liberty and grace. As this story is pretty accurate in terms of the era it is set in - literally, 100,000 years ago - we can be confident that the TARDIS crew are witnessing modern man arrive. And – more importantly than anything to do with fire – may have been responsible nudging modern man into existence.

And it’s worth pointing out again that The Doctor here, calculating, unemotional, panicky, incapable sometimes of furthering the plot and saving everybody, is probably a lot closer to his true character, and not like the one he will constantly strive to be. After all, Tennant’s Doctor will be at pains to remind us that what he has truly done is ‘run away,’ and Eccelston’s Doctor, in one of his first adventures, will simply shut his eyes when faced with danger, and wait to be killed. Here, however, it’s the proximity to two humans that force him to deal with some higher emotions and feelings. We know that Ian and Barbara are not the first humans he’s come into contact with (not if we believe that he’s a regular tea drinker at Mike’s café, anyway), but they are the first that he seems to have the time for. The first story in this series is understandably always sold as a tale of wonder for two disbelieving humans, but viewed within the scope of a fifty year series, it’s as much a tale about The Doctor barely managing to keep up with the surprising and amazing human beings he’s got himself involved with. There’s lots of debate as to whether The Tribe Of Gum really works as the first Doctor Who story, whether or not everybody wouldn’t have been better off if the action had immediately jetted off to Skaro. For my money, it’s actually a great benefit to throw the TARDIS kids off at the deep end in a story that has not much story apart from grim, mud-smeared survival. The very final story of the classic series will take that word as its title, and it’s all the crew will be able to think about for the next couple of weeks. While their attention is diverted elsewhere, they’ll discover that they have – almost accidentally – become friends.

Next time, we’re off to a Dead Planet, to meet some Nazi Dustbins who call themselves The Daleks.

Whatever The Weather, We'll Have Something To Talk About

I was very fond of the somewhat portentous way the BBC delivered the news this morning. After weeks of speculation, they declared, it's been announced that 2012 was not in fact the wettest year since records began. A perfectly timed pause, just long enough for you to think that they were about to go onto the next item. Then: 'It was the second wettest'. The reason, apparently, why it felt like it was in fact the wettest year of all time (all gags about Fifty Shades Of Gray aside) was allegedly because of the sheer variety of the weather throughout the year. I always thought that such variety, such unpredictability, was the only reliable factor of British weather.

But we always seem to be surprised by the rain. No matter that it's meant to be a British cliche, rain appears to always surprise as a much as a season finale to Breaking Bad. No matter that pretty much any film set in London, whether by UK or US filmmakers, is required by cliche law to have a downpour at some point ("Is it still raining? I hadn't noticed") - either that, or a street shrouded in fog - despite all of that, you can pretty much guarantee that, the next time you're at work, and it starts to rain, everyone will display open mouthed astonishment at the window. 'Look, it's raining,' someone will say in an awe struck voice to another. Their colleague will nod sagely, as if they have never seen such a thing before. 'Look at it come down,' they will reply, thereby signalling that they have at least a rudimentary grasp of how both rain and gravity work. A third work colleague will usually pass at this point. 'They said on the weather that it would rain,' they will intone thoughtfully, providing a pause long enough for everyone to come to the conclusion that they are about to voice: '... And look at it. It is.' Everyone will look, a little longer, at the sheets of water slashing down, fascinated, perhaps thinking that they'll never get to see such a wondrous sight again in their lifetimes.

Obviously, I'm being slightly too harsh. The weather is something for people who aren't exactly friends to talk about and to share in common, and generally speaking, your work colleagues aren't exactly your friends. Weather, therefore, is a reasonably safe subject to discuss, since politics are an unwise topic to bring up (unless your work colleagues are actually politicians, in which case such discussions are probably actively avoided), and your private romantic life is always going to be discussed, but only when you're not actually in the room.

So called 'safe' conversations are - well, safe, but they're not always the most interesting, and certainly not if we continually resort to talking about the weather. And if you think that's a bit rich, since I've just filled up a blog talking about exactly that, well then, I'm not going to argue with you. Or maybe I am. It might make the conversation more interesting.