Monday 28th December 2015

Enjoying the ongoing adaptation of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. What with that, Doctor Who, Meet The Midwife and a Victorian-era Sherlock later this week, it really seems that the BBC have reached Peak BBC this Christmas. Appropriately enough, And Then There Were None is Agatha achieving Peak Christie, with a bunch of disparate strangers trapped together in an old dark house (which, in turn, is located on a remote island). Soon, people start getting murdered, and it’s only a matter of time (and, literally, a process of elimination) before the murderer is revealed, by which time it’s far too late anyway. It’s a device that I used myself for Four Play, although I had to rely on somewhat more contrived reasons to keep everyone in the same house.

Sarah Phelps has done a spectacular job of adapting the story, smartly keeping everything drenched in the Christie mythos, while allowing the characters to break free into relative realism as much as possible. So, while everyone speaks with a stiff, buttoned up manner in polite company (at least, before people start getting bumped off), as soon as the genders are divided – the men wandering off for cigars and war stories – their language becomes a lot more loose and louche. Not only does it add to the realism, but once you understand that each character is themselves presenting a character, it immediately makes everyone more suspect.

I first read And Then There Were None about ten years ago, and haven’t returned to it since. That means that while I remember the central clever rug pull that Christie delivers at the end and could essentially spoil the ending if I wanted to, I can’t recall a certain fine detail that’s fairly important, so I’m going into episode three fairly blind, enjoying the ride as things (and bodies) fall into place. What I do remember is that there are two different versions of the story. At least, I think there are, I’m deliberately not checking the facts on Wikipedia so that I can retain my slight levels of plot blindness for as long as possible. But my recollection is that there is one ending for the novel, which is smart, fiendish, and a stage version, which – well, isn’t. If memory serves, the play is also by Christie, but cheats and fumbles the ending. It’s an understandable and even forgivable fudge – the writer of a novel has a lot more freedom: the author can dictate their voice over proceedings, and alert your attention in particular places. A playwright is (generally) limited to what characters are saying out loud. That’s not always true for every play, but it certainly tends to be the case in a genre that by its very nature is propelled by exposition (‘you may be wondering why I have gathered you all here’).

So on screen, it would appear that the stage (but clumsy) version would be the way to go. But Phelps’ version so far has been so witty and smart, I have every faith that she’ll stand on the shoulders of the original novel, and deliver the ending that is clever, breathtaking – and frankly, bloody cheeky.  

Thursday 24th December 2015

Taking advantage of the lull before the (Christmas) storm in order to prep all manner of things for 2016. I'm in the odd position of turning things down (or at the very least postponing them), which I've never had the intelligence to do before. But that doesn't mean things aren't going to be horrifically busy in the first quarter of the year. Two things will be happening in the same month (March): we have Cast Iron VII, which will be the next batch of short plays - ten minutes long or so - produced at the DukeBox Theatre in Hove. We've been doing Cast Iron Theatre for a couple of years now, and I've been overwhelmed by the support we continually get from our audiences. We're currently seeking new plays - and also actors and directors - for our next shows. The dates are still to be confirmed, but the deadline for the scripts will be in early January (ideally, everyone will have started rehearsals by mid January).
Also in March, Cast Iron Theatre is curating an event for International Woman's Day. Called Not Just The Companion, it will be an evening of women performers parts that are traditionally male. As you may already be aware, there's a huge imbalance in roles that are iconic for men, versus similar for women. This is not reflected in the number of hugely talented women both in the professional and amateur world who are simply not served by sometimes unsatisfying and / or undemanding roles. Quite often, women can be reduced to playing wives and girlfriends, without having agency of their own. Not Just The Companion is a (very) small attempt to begin to redress that balance. More details as we go along.

Nanowrimo: Coming Up For Air

As well as hacking out a couple of thousand words a day for Nanowrimo, I had also intended to keep a blog talking about what problems and story blocks I was encountering. The idea, nebulous as it may have been, was that I discussed various kinks in the story (even as no one was listening, which was at least very likely), I would be able to recognise the solutions to whatever narrative problems I was having by seeing them at one step removed, by the simple method of just talking about them.

Of course, it didn’t quite work out like that. I haven’t been able to keep a blog detailing the progress of my novel in progress, simply because it hasn’t. I did about a thousand and a half words on the first day (which was an effortful hack job) before real life got in the way, and I haven’t been able to commit any more time to the damn thing. Some of that is the same reason why many other nanowrimers (is that what we call ourselves? I haven’t checked) fall by the wayside as the month goes on – full time job, etc. Actually, I will go as far as to say (to be arrogant enough to say, in fact) that if you ever set out to complete Nanowrimo, and you didn’t have a full time job and/or a family to occupy your time, then you probably don’t deserve to be a writer. I mean, there are people I know who are hitting their targets every single day. And they have a full time job. And a family. And it’s not like they’re neglecting any of their duties, or locking themselves away with the laptop for hours on end (maybe just a hour), but the point remains, they’ve got a lot of demands on their time, and they’re still hitting their targets.

Me? Yeah, I’m way behind. We’re on Day 10, and I still haven’t reached 2,000 words. That’s pretty much fatal, especially when you consider that I’m working seven days a week, and some evenings. (why the hell are you wasting your time/word count coughing up into a blog then, I hear you ask. I can hear you ask, incidentally, because I’ve got a particularly febrile imagination that’s just starved of affirmation. Well, we’ll come to that.) In the big race to November 30^th, 50,000 words strapped under our belts, I’m quite dangerously behind. I’m like the kid that you chose last in track, and I’m doing a half-hearted jog roughly sixteen miles behind everybody else, too wheezy to ask anyone to wait. What am I saying? I’m not like that kid. I was that kid. But anyway.

It would be very easy at this point to throw in the towel, to give up. To not finish the damn thing. It would be an intelligent move, too: I’m curating an evening of short plays in December, and seeking other scripts for a thing in March. Added to that, I’m working on something for International Woman’s Day (also in March), and there’s an open air theatre script, another script for next Christmas, possibly something for the Brighton Fringe and ohgodwritingitalldownlikethat makes me realise just how many projects I’m juggling at the moment. And, it’s worth remembering that all of these things are going to result in little or no money (more often the latter). So, it would be a smart move to junk the NanoWrimo work in progress: I don’t win anything, it’s reasonably unlikely to be read by anyone anytime soon, and it’s very likely, if and when it gets finished, to be reasonably terrible. So then, the question is: what’s the point? What do I get out of it?

The short answer is, of course, not much. At least not immediately. But the real point I’ve already mentioned, albeit in a throwaway fashion. NanoWrimo gives you the purpose – the excuse, even – to finish your damn stuff. Yes, I could put all my attention on the other projects right now (and it’s not like I’m exactly ignoring them, I put some work into them every single day), but one of the major challenges of having so many creative projects on the boil with hazily defined intentions and even vaguer deadlines is that every single one of those projects becomes a distraction – the Shiny New Thing. This is the problem when a project becomes slightly too hard, when it stops being fun: maybe you finally have to do some research, or you’ve already written all the exciting sexy stuff – now you have to write all the boring, nuts and bolts expostiony stuff (and then put lots of effort into it not sounding remotely boring, or indeed expostiony). It is then obviously very easy to get distracted by the other Shiny New Thing, the piece of work which still needs the fun explosion scene to be written, the project where three hours of work don’t seem like work. The net result is that you end up with lots of work that has some fun scenes in them, but are ultimately incomplete. And here’s the kicker: those fun scenes aren’t nearly as fun as you think they are, because they won’t have the set up (and probably not the resolution) that is required to make them truly succeed. You know the set up, it’s in your head, but nobody cares about the big explosion if they don’t know about the people causing it / trying to stop it / caught in the middle of it.

So, to have an excuse to actually FINISH YOUR DAMN STUFF is a good thing. Rather than bailing on something when it becomes just a bit difficult, you are forced to commit to finishing. The deadline is arbitrary, the pressure to finish is entirely fictitious.  But you’ll know. YOU’LL KNOW. And if you’ve announced that you’re embarking on NanoWrimo, other people know, too. And that, in theory, shames you into having to complete your draft. This, I suspect, is the reason why so many ‘writers’ (speech marks intentional) can’t help talking about their work in progress at parties. Obviously a big part of it is that talking about a good idea is much more exciting that having to edit and redraft it, but I think another big pull is the belief that if you announce it to the world, you are making a verbal contract that you can’t back down from. Of course, this doesn’t actually work: people can and do back down from such verbal contracts. And that, I think, is where NanoWrimo comes into play – it makes it sort of ‘official’, and more particularly, since you only have a month to play with (and not one of those pesky thirty one day months, neither), you absolutely can’t think to yourself ‘well, it’s not going so well, I’ll do it next month’. Because next month is too late.

So, yeah. Why am I wasting time (and words) on this blog when I could be filling up a word count on the novel? Mainly it’s because I have already spent such a long time away from it. I’m not expecting this novel to be any good in its first draft (I’m not even expecting it to be readable), partially because I will be making it up as I go along (not necessarily a good idea), and partially I don’t have any genre-supports (thriller, horror, suspense) to help me bridge any gaps in storytelling. So, whenever I’m away from the computer, it’s a vast, impossible project. Too much to cope with, and it makes my mind shrivel in fear. But – and this is what I remember from the last time I did NanoWrimo, when I was away from the computer for about a week – once I was able to get back into the writing – by the simple and frankly underrated act of just putting one word after the after – the rest of the world just fell away. Once I started writing one word, the insurmountable mountain became a tarmacked road. Listen, I don’t have to worry about editing and polishing until December.

So this blog has just been a starter, reminding me that I can still put one word after the other, and they don’t even have to be particularly interesting. If I can do this, I can get stuck back into the book.

Alright, then. I’m going in.  

What's in store for Doctor Who spin off Class?

Here's the text of a piece I wrote for Cultbox (complete with my embarrassing Shoreditch is near London error): http://www.cultbox.co.uk/features/opinion/doctor-who-spin-off-speculation-returning-to-coal-hill-school-in-class

Class has been announced as the latest spin-off series from Doctor Who, centred on the kids of Coal Hill School fighting aliens.
Sort of like The Sarah Jane Adventures without the comforting presence of Sarah Jane Smith. Within the BBC, as a product, such a show makes complete sense – a new genre show for young adults that will have a built in audience for the first episode, from trusted hand Patrick Ness.
Within the narrative of the Whoniverse, however, more justification may be required to explain why this secondary school is a magnet for monsters – and Joss Whedon has already got the copyright on any Hellmouths in the district.
Let’s take a look at why this little school in Shoreditch has suddenly become so important…

The Shoreditch Incident

Coal Hill School and its environs have always been important to the mythology of Doctor Who, and now, with Class, even more so.
The programme essentially started there, of course, with teachers Ian and Barbara worried about their brilliant young pupil Susan. The school was a major stronghold in the battle against Davros and the Imperial Faction in ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’.
This new show very likely won’t (and shouldn’t) be doing too much looking backward over the past fifty years of Doctor Who, but since Coal Hill is now the one single location on Earth aside from a UNIT base in the 1970s 1980s classic series that we have now returned to most often, it gains a certain totemic allure.
Basically, what’s so special about Coal Hill? It isn’t (as far as we know) built on a time rift. It doesn’t have a sparky journalist and her alien super computer living in it. Why – narratively – are we returning there?
One clue is to ask another question: why were we there in the first place? The usual line is that back in 1963, The Doctor was busy making repairs to his spaceship. Common wisdom holds that he was attempting to fix the chameleon circuit, but that’s demonstrably untrue: as soon the TARDIS lands on prehistoric Earth, The Doctor (William Hartnell) voices a surprised reaction that it’s still a police box.
Even more pointed is Ian’s take when first seeing it: it clearly looks out of place in a junkyard – if it’s meant to fit in anywhere, it should be on a street corner down the road. This suggests the amusing image of The Doctor and Susan lugging a heavy Police Box down the King’s Road in the early sixties.
Later episodes suggest that Hartnell’s Doctor was busy looking after a insanely powerful Time Lord device (The Hand Of Omega), but still the question remains: why Shoreditch? Why Coal Hill School? What’s so important about this part of London? And will we ever go back in time to the original hill of coal?

Good Place To Put Things, Cellars

While it’s a fair bet that Class will largely ignore Doctor Who (aside from a few cameos at some point, we’d expect), it may be that there are clues in the parent programme that justify its existence (it’s actually more likely that Class won’t need to justify its existence, but then we wouldn’t have an article to read here, so shush).
There may even be some DNA in an even earlier programme. In Quatermass and the Pit, a brilliant scientist is called in to investigate ghostly goings on in a disused underground rail station – Hobbs End – and deduces that there are no ghosts around, but instead that there are aliens buried deep underground. Hobbs End is located in Wembley, which is just down the road from … Shoreditch.

Hand The Class Over To Her

It is very likely that the older students try to scare the new kids with Coal Hill’s very own ghost story – the tale of a brilliant, weird girl who suddenly disappeared without trace one November evening and never returned.
Rumour has it that if you say ‘Susan Foreman’ to the mirror three times, she will appear and chase you (it’s okay though, if you run fast enough, she’ll simply trip over a tree branch).
It’s telling that The Doctor has never told companion Clara Oswald about his own links with the school, and it’s also odd that Clara, with access to a time machine, has never asked to see what her school looked like before she was born (the answer being that it has looked like at least three completely different buildings in fifty years).

You’ve Ruined It, It Was My Coal Hill School Tie

It’s already been noted that Ian Chesterton is currently on the board of governors, as seen in ‘The Day of the Doctor’. Presumably he and Barbara managed to deflect any awkward police enquiry relating to their disappearance on the same day as Susan Foreman.
In some ways, it makes sense: teaching as a young man in the 1960s suggests that Ian is already fairly local to the area, and after three years of travelling across four dimensions, it’s logical that he’d want to stay somewhere that felt very much like home.
If Ian (and Barbara) did indeed grow up in Shoreditch, it’s at least possible that their great-grandparents might have been locals during the Jack The Ripper attacks. While it’s not likely that a children’s television programme would touch that storyline, it does again lend some weight to the idea that the energy surrounding Coal Hill’s postcode is in some way important.
Perhaps Ian has remained involved with the school not because of some misplaced nostalgia for the school that he may have attended as a child (he does wear the old school tie, after all), but because he’s aware of something strange in the neighbourhood, and it’s the only place he can be certain of successfully waiting for a grumpy old white haired man in a Police Box. Seeing him in a Rupert Giles mentor role would certainly bump up the ratings amongst the old fan base.

Who You Calling Small?

One of the most tantalising rumours before The Sarah Jane Adventures came to an end was that Ace – Sophie Aldred – might cameo in an episode. That didn’t happen, but there’s no reason why we couldn’t get our very own pyromaniac Dorothy McShane to guest in Class.
Her appearance would have added frisson, since Ace has form with aliens and a bit of minor vandalism at Coal Hill, and she might even try to get in touch with an elderly Judith Winters (look her up).
Ace would certainly be an expert that the class of Class would want to get in touch with for some tips on how to defend themselves against alien onslaught – although OFSTED wouldn’t look too kindly on any use of Nitro 9.

They’re Children. John Smith Wouldn’t Want Them To Fight, Never Mind The Doctor

Steven Moffat already has a school-based show on his CV – Chalk.
While he’s not the main writer on the show, it’s tempting to wonder if the title Class has any meaning beyond the obvious. Torchwood was an anagram, while The Sarah Jane Adventures is fairly self-explanatory.
As a title, Class left first responders on Twitter fairly underwhelmed. If this show is about a gang of kids (led by Courtney Woods, perhaps?) forming their own ‘Scooby Gang’ against the onslaught of aliens attacking an unprotected Earth, the ‘Class’ that we follow could be the Doctor Who version of Dumbledore’s Army.
It’s also worth pointing out that Earth could be unprotected in Class because 2016 is when – according to rumour – when there will be a lot less Doctor Who onscreen.
‘Class’ could also simply be a bit of teen slang, suggesting perhaps that many of the menaces that the kids fight will be metaphors for teen life, from online avatars turning out to be demons to boyfriends changing into complete monsters after you’ve kissed them (and yes, we know that Buffy The Vampire Slayer already did both of those almost twenty years ago).
In the end, however, all of the above may prove to be entirely irrelevant beyond fan fiction and online speculative articles. Whatever happens, Class promises to be a show that will be smart, funny and relevant – and just may have a guest appearance from The Doctor himself.
 

Doctor Who Spin Off: What About Missy?

Over the weekend, Doctor Who’s Missy, Michelle Gomez, was engaging in an entertaining Q&A on twitter. Almost inevitably, the possibility of a spin-off series for Missy was mooted, something that Gomez sounded enthusiastic about. There have of course been spin-off series from Doctor Who before – two of them being led by the great Elisabeth Sladen -  and every so often, rumours of new offshoots are mooted. Indeed, in the middle of this very article being written, the BBC announced Class – Coal Hill School fighting off monsters (could a cameo from Ian Chesterson be too much to hope for?). Usually though, many fail to materialise, and it’s easy to see why: either they’d be far too expansive and expensive to realise on screen on a BBC budget (which is why we should all be eternally grateful to the Big Finish audio dramas), or there simply isn’t enough story to sustain a supporting character – however entertaining and popular – in their own series that would be different enough from Doctor Who to justify their own series (so, there won’t be any Jenny: Daughter In Space any time soon). Despite all that, former Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies managed to knock two enormously successful shows out of the park, riding on the Doctor’s coattails and making Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures instantly recognisable brands.

Now that current showrunner Steven Moffatt has announced his own spinoff series – which at first glance, sounds like it could be The Sarah Jane Adventures with an expanded cast, it seems reasonably unlikely that Missy will indeed get her own series anytime soon. In some ways, that’s easy to stomach – Michelle Gomez is far too good an actress to necessarily want to be shackled to a single character for the next few years – but it’s instructive to note that The Mistress is about the best choice to pick from Doctor Who to front a spinoff, even more so than Clara, who is quite the most well written character Moffatt has written (yes she is, stop complaining at the back).

At first glance, River Song is perhaps the most obvious choice to be chosen to headline her own series, but that’s wrong for two reasons. Firstly, it suggests the rather ugly idea that there’s only room for one genre TV show to be headlined by a strong female lead, but it’s the second reason that’s most compelling. River’s entire MO is her enigma. Indeed, her catchphrase is a teasing ‘spoilers!’. She is playing a universal poker game in which she holds all the cards. It has never occurred to River that she’s not the star of her own show, even when everything she does is to serve The Doctor. The difference with Missy is that she simply doesn’t give a damn. The main reason why she doesn’t let us in on her plans is because she is – like The Doctor – mostly making it up as she goes along. It’s also worth considering what kind of show would best serve River, and it’s frankly difficult to imagine one in which she exists as a character with true agency. It’s an unfortunate fact that despite the power hair and smart talk, River Song is a character that literally only exists because of The Doctor – she is born to murder him, dies to save him, and even after death hangs around to haunt him. The only show that River Song makes sense in is Doctor Who. Perhaps it’s more helpful to ask what sort of show can take on a spin-off character.

It’s instructive, therefore to look to where it has worked before: namely, The Sarah Jane Adventures, and that certainly seems to be the spirit invoked by first impressions of Class. The Sarah Jane Adventures has many things to recommend it, but by far the most important is the significant charisma of the lead, Elisabeth Sladen. What is undeniable is that The Mistress also has considerable (if gleefully warped) charm. You can be very sure that right now there are hundreds of kids across the world working all possible hours to create their own Missy costume for Halloween this year. Of course it should be acknowledged that The Sarah Jane Adventures is a CBBC television series, and a spinoff show in this mould featuring the latest incarnation of The Master will require some mental dexterity on our part to accept Missy as the lead of a children’s television series. She is, after all, an unapologetic mass murdering psychopath with a bit of a kink. This, by anyone’s reckoning, is a difficult sell as the heroine of a kid’s TV show. But, at the risk of stating the obvious: the same character originally appeared in a kid’s TV show.

(By the way, it’s unimportant when you believe the character was first introduced: back in Terror Of The Autons as The Master, or as Missy in Deep Breath are equally valid, although it’s understandable if you consider all incarnations called ‘The Master’ to be fundamentally different from any incarnation called ‘The Mistress’. Having said that, those who can’t get on board with Gomez being a true Master are quite possibly watching the wrong show.)

The Mistress would excel in a spin off show aimed at young kids simply because of (in spite of) the fact that she didn’t belong there. Perversely, putting her in an environment like a CBBC show where she would undoubtedly have to be neutered would be genuinely compelling. The Mistress works best as a caged animal, and seeing her frustrated, smashing up against the glass until it cracks would be enormously fun to watch. The Pertwee era would be a good model here: trap a frustrated timelord on Earth, tethered to an organisation they had no particular love for, while robbing them of most of their power and none of their intelligence. It hardly needs pointing out that in this show, The Mistress wouldn’t be allowed to kill as many people (if any) as she does in Doctor Who: but rather than be a narrative nightmare, the BBC contractual obligations of stopping Missy killing the supporting cast would be easily attended to by smart writers, as was proved with the likes of Spike’s chip back in the days of Buffy.

One complaint currently levelled at The Mistress in series nine of Doctor Who states that she has swapped her icy menace of last year for a more broad pantomime villain approach. This is both accurate, and misses the point. Of course Missy is acting like a panto bad guy: she’s not the debonair hypnotist with the hazily defined intention of taking over the world, nor is she the snarling camp with a unexpected talent in hopscotch. Like a cat who already knows it’s going to kill the mouse, The Mistress would happily spend an afternoon delivering an Armageddon to a developing planet .. only to travel back twenty four hours to do it all again. Moffat’s script is careful to warn us not to get too distracted by the arch enemies arch camp, as evidenced in the scene when she demands a bevy of snipers on her – and manages to kill them anyway, seemingly in response to a slight from Clara.

This, incidentally, underscores an important aspect to the Michelle Gomez version of The Master. Compared to her, the Delgado and Ainley incarnations seem a little … how can we put this? A bit thick. This is no criticism of the Masters in the classic series, but rather a recognition that as Moriarty to the Doctor’s Sherlock, their character development was often reduced to moustache twirling while exiting stage left. Pretty much every plan that The Master concocts in the classic series is doomed to failure because it’s self-evidentially stupid and mainly powered by his own vanity with an over reliance on playing in the dressing up box. Interestingly, the strongest contender for exception to this rule is Survival, where The Master’s plan is refreshingly small scale, and – crucially – he’s not entirely in complete control of his faculties. His plan arguably has the highest success rate of the classic series, so it’s appropriate that as a result The Doctor is mostly off screen for the next fifteen years. The John Simm incarnation of The Master, incidentally, largely gets a pass on this criticism of stupidity, if only because his Master is quite demonstrably insane, and his plans, while wacky, are comparatively coherent – they’re all about returning the world to a status quo that The Master feels able to operate within.

By contrast, the Mistress (there’s genuinely no good reason that we can see to refer to her with just one consistent name even if the official BBC one is Missy: Michelle Gomez has proved she owns all three) is quite clearly the cleverest thing in the room, and it’s evidenced by just how silly she is. The Master is often sold as the dark mirror image of The Doctor, and there’s no clearer proof than this than the scene where she taunts Clara to stab her in the back (allowing her the opportunity she was denied in Death In Heaven). The look on Missy’s face isn’t evil: it’s frustrated boredom. Yes, it’s true that if Clara had indeed attempted to attack her, then Missy would have snapped her neck in a heartsbeat, but it’s clear that she’s genuinely hopeful that Clara might be the one to cure her boredom.

It’s not for a kid’s television show to carry the weight of all representation (actually, it is, but that’s more pressure than most shows are equipped to cope with), but it bears softly repeating that one of the many joys of The Sarah Jane Adventures was having a show aimed at schoolkids that placed a woman in her fifties front and centre. In a world where, this sort of move is certainly rare, and still considered brave. There’s also the not incidental point that is treated by everybody as entirely incidental: that Missy used to be a man. Members of the transgender community may not necessarily have chosen a mad murderer to be a representative of that community,  but it’s absolutely vital that Missy’s past gender is known by everybody, and important to absolutely nobody. Everyone simply accepts who she is without question.  

This is why a broad strokes kid’s show would work so well for Missy: simply because she doesn’t belong there, and would spend the entire series smashing up against the constraints. It’s Michelle Gomez’s electric eyed performance that would whirlwind around, impossible to control, delirious and unpredictable. In the meantime, we have Class, (which of course we will discuss at length very soon), and it’s too early to see how the world of Doctor Who can match in with the universe of OFSTED inspections, but we should certainly hope for the best. Say something nice, in fact.

Time And Tide Melt The Snowman

Some portions of this entry have appeared elsewhere.
After slightly too much procrastination, I've managed to do some writing. Well, sort of. I've had a couple of days off. Well, sort of. Having a day off is a spectacularly rare occurrence for me, and that's not just exaggerated hyperbole or a plea for sympathy. Well, maybe the second one a little bit. But, generally speaking, it remains true that I don't usually have a full 24 hours straight in which I'm not earmarked for something. Usually, obviously, it's the full time job, but if it's not, then it's delivering workshops, or taking rehearsals, or .. well, whatever. People will spot me stumbling incoherently from one appointment to the next, smile indulgently, and tell me 'well, it's your choice ..' as if they think I actually have a choice. Seriously, if I didn't spend my 'spare' time trying to create stuff, I would probably get quite depressed.
Obviously, however, this means that the time in which I try to create stuff is severely limited. I might have to do an edit on a play within a 15 minute tea break, which isn't exactly the most conducive of environments. And anybody who thinks that they can get some writing done on the commute clearly isn't a regular on the Southern railway at 5.00pm.
Occasionally, some rock legend informs us how it only took three minutes to knock out their greatest, most famous song. They suggest a three minute pop hit took only those three minutes to create - an irritatingly perfect stream of consciousness of verses and choruses with absolutely no error or rewrite.
But three minutes of genius never takes just three minutes, does it? When singers and writers create their three minute best sellers, it takes a lot longer than 180 seconds. They've woken up - probably a fair bit later than the average cab driver or shelf stacker - worked their way through toast, newspapers, and perhaps something with a bit of bacon in it. They've ambled across town to meet whoever it is they're collaborating with, had a bit of a gossip, had lunch, strummed a few notes, knocked ideas back and forth, come up with a pretty good idea for a song (in three minutes), got distracted by Countdown, checked that the song was actually as good as they thought it was, refined it, popped down to the pub with the vague idea that they'll write it properly tomorrow.
It's about where your head is at. What space you're in. There's no way you can write your great novel if you have to spend all week selling £1 frozen meals to unimpressed customers. We all need to support ourselves, obviously, but arguably, in order to be in any way creative means having the chance to withdraw from that demand occasionally.
I'm not sure that I've known anyone who's had any success in the creative industries without having some kind of help along the way, whether it's a couple of train fares paid, or some patience regarding that month's rent. Time really is money: you have to pay for it.
We're told that George Orwell and his contemporaries managed to create great novels while working as bank clerks and the like. But they did have TB and revolutions to inspire them. Whereas my inspirations tend to be restricted to shopping in Lidl and being born in Croydon.
Right now, I'm managing to get some stuff done, although it's mainly editing. I have a short story to deliver, which is supposed to be 1,500 words. The original manuscript was around 3,000. It's gone through about six edits, each cut being more impossibly deep than the last. To quote Tarantino, it's now cut not only to the bone, but past the bone. It's been amazing that I've been able to retain any of the humour or dream-like quality of the original: it's certainly been an education experience in discovering just how much you can edit after thinking 'no, I can't possibly cut any more'. That said, I don't think I can possibly edit any more.
In addition, I'm attempting to write some sketches. As I've spoken about before, sketch comedy is something that I'm really wanting to solve: I often come away from watching / listening to sketch comedy really inspired to write my own, admittedly sometimes buoyed by the fact that what I see / hear isn't always wholly successful in its aims. Of course, then I try to write some sketches myself, and it is savagely proved to me that it's not nearly as easy as it looks. Plus, what I'm trying to write is topical sketch comedy, which is almost Da Vinci Code like in my (lack of) ability to crack. After staring at a blank screen for two hours, I finally come up with a halfway decent idea, only to discover, after a quick sweep of NewsBiscuit or DailyMash, that someone else has got to the gag before I have, and done it better.
But I won't give up. I still have six minutes spare in March, I'm fine.

Ticket prices for the musical Elf - opening in London this Christmas - have been released, and the average price is around £250. Per ticket. So if you're the sort of family so beloved of detergent adverts - two parents, two kids - it will cost you around a thousand pounds just to get in through the door. And that's assuming that you live in the doorway of the theatre, and so have no travel costs to consider.
It is, obviously, too much for a family ticket to a Christmas musical that presumably lasts less than three hours. On average, a trip for the same family to Disneyland Paris for two days costs almost half that. And that includes a couple of rooms and breakfast. A 1k ticket price puts a lot of pressure on the creative team. I'm not sure that I'd want to be the writer(s) on that show. The expectations for the musical will be so significant, so huge, that it's reasonably unlikely that anyone sitting in the stalls are going to be truly blown away by what they see. Particularly if they already know that they're going to have to be hitch-hiking for the journey home.
Clearly the production will want to be awe-inspiring and magical. It's a Christmas-based show performed during the Christmas period, inspired by a genuine modern classic, and it's a fair bet that their fake snow will cost as much as the entire annual budget of many regional theatres. And while it's true that you can produce a lot of magical glitter for very little, audiences are arguably ever more demanding.
I don't get up to London theatre as much as I'd like to, simply because it's already too expensive for me. My budget dictates that as soon as we get past £25, maybe £35 a seat, I'm probably going to turn around and make my excuses. My excuses largely being that as much as I'd like to see Miss Saigon, I'd also like to eat this week. But here's the thing: £35 a ticket (for the cheap seats) isn't of itself overpriced. Obviously, many London theatres are around a thousand seats or more, and so even if each ticket is just £5, that will be (hang on - where's my calculator) five thousand pounds coming through the box office. And yet. That's not a clear five thousand for the theatre: each actor has to be paid Equity rates, as does every stage manager, costume fitter, sound and light operators, riggers, set designers, writers, musicians, ushers, and the many others on each production that I'm failing to list here. As much as I can't really afford any ticket over £40, I also am impressed that any major London production is able to let tickets go for anything less. I suppose we can thank the 'early adopters' - those people who do pay full whack for a show, allowing the rest of us to get a ticket for much less. Although if you do get a £10 ticket on the front seat, it is considered polite to keep your mouth shut about it, just on the off-chance that you're sitting next to a family of four that don't know how they're getting home tonight.

Calm Before The Storms

Taking advantage of the fact that I still have a couple of days off in order to get some writing down. Some of this is pure admin – answering emails, sorting out rehearsals and the like for the next bunch of Cast Iron Theatre performances – but a fair amount is to do with actual, ‘real’ writing. I always get in this sort of mood after I come back from visiting the Edinburgh fringe. Now that I’m back down south, I’m back on a normal civilian timetable, with no real understanding or appreciation of what my friends up in Scotland are still going through. And these people are performers – they were beginning to get more than a bit stir crazy when I left almost a week ago. They’ve been doing shows on a daily basis – sometimes twice daily, sometimes three times a day .. and I still think to myself that this is the sort of business that I want to get involved in? I am probably a glutton for punishment.

One of the things I’ve been working on this morning is an old novel that I managed to dig up. Well, I say novel. That’s probably a reasonably generous term. I hacked it out in under a month during a Nanowrimo – the annual event that gets you to commit to writing down 50,000 words in thirty days. At that, at least, I succeeded – with less than a minute to spare before the deadline, with aching typing hands on an unresponsive laptop, in between sets at a comedy gig I was appearing at that night. And in all fairness, despite my self-effacing dismissal of it, it’s not actually terrible. Well, obviously, it’s awful: it was hacked out in thirty days by someone who was making up the story as they went along while holding down a fulltime job, teaching acting classes, and directing plays. But, in real terms (and accepting all the above), it hangs together reasonably well as at least a first draft, or more accurately what might be called Draft Zero. Never to be shown to anyone, ever. To be honest, I have seen completed novels thrown up (now there’s a Freudian slip) onto the kindle that did not read as well as my incoherent hackery.

As well as doing the edit on that novel (because, actually, it might be worth salvaging once it has undergone a rewrite or twelve), I am completing some short stories, and a kid’s play for next summer. This is, in some ways, the part of the year that I love the most – when I have more than two consecutive hours in which to write. Right now, my mind is reasonably clear and not at all deranged: I can see how it’s possible to get the next draft of the novel finished by next month, the children’s play drafted by the end of the year, and a bunch of short stories bundled together by January. But that’s basically because I have time at the moment. I should acknowledge that I have exactly this conversation with myself around this time of year, every single year. Like a Tinder date with someone with a great profile pic who reveals themselves to be a bit racist, it’s initially thrilling, but ultimately disappointing. Because it’s a fair bet that – once again – once next week rolls into view, my timetable will be so packed that I won’t have enough space in my head to concentrate on as much writing stuff as I’d like to at any one point. How people who have not only a full time job, but also families cope, I’ve no idea.

I’m also managing to read a bit at the moment. While up at Edinburgh, we saw (amongst others) Bridget Christie and Robin Ince, both of whom were signing copies of their books. I’m a sucker for a book signing. Not necessarily because it’s a chance to meet the author (although that’s clearly part of it), but I somewhat over-romantically like the idea of putting the money directly into writer’s pocket., more or less. I’m loving A Book For Her, which is sort of like a stand up’s memoir mixed with the book Half The Sky (which is where I first read about the charity The Girl Generation), which is smart, funny, and makes me wish I’d caught shows like A Ant live. Robin Ince’s book is a collection of short horror stories written by various comedians. It opens with a pair of brilliantly nasty stories – one by Reece Shearsmith, and a genuinely upsetting one by Sara Pascoe. Again, it’s something that’s compelling me to get the hell on with my own collection. Not that it’s just frustrated writers like me that struggle under the yoke of procrastination. I was amused / not amused to catch an old episode of Mock The Week on Dave (where else?) where the stand up comic Ed Byrne provided a question for the answer ‘Four Years’ with the enquiry ‘How long have I been “writing” my sit-com?’ The wry and bitter grin he gave suggested that he wasn’t exactly joking.

Some Self Imposed Rules For Reviewing

I know quite a few people who are professional stand ups, actors, writers and directors. Occasionally, they are all of those, and more. What unites a great many of them is their shared hatred of reviewers. If it’s not hatred, then it’s a sense of bored dismissal, an agreement that reviewers generally don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Their dislike includes the reviewers who actually like them, and give them positive write-ups, which seems at least fair. Another thing that all these performers share is the knowledge that I myself am an occasional reviewer, which as you might imagine, comes up reasonably rarely in conversation, presumably in a failed attempt to avoid any awkwardness.

What then, is the point of a reviewer? Or perhaps more crucially, what is the point of being a reviewer? Is it just to see shows for free? Absolutely not (Obviously it is that a little bit). Is it a misplaced confidence in the importance of your own opinion and voice? Ditto, and (ditto). For me, it’s increasingly about my own learning. I myself am an actor, director, writer (at least that’s what I tell myself), and it’s fascinating to see what other people are doing with the same ideas that I’m working on in any given year. Plus, it’s just interesting to have a conversation about whatever it is you’ve just seen. It doesn’t even matter that, in the whirlwind of the internet, not many people are going to listen. Let’s be honest: that’s how usual conversations work, too.

There are certainly different types of reviewers, ones that are funny, ones that are incoherent, ones that simply retell the plot of what they see, and ones that are desperate to show off how much they know. I’m still trying to work out what kind of reviewer I want to be, and I suspect that up until now I’ve been all of those things. Well, perhaps not the first one. What I think a reviewer has no choice about is that they have to be interesting to read. That’s all a review is, after all: a collection of words in the same space. And as such, the only purpose – the only point – is to have those words read. So they may as well be at least not boring.

To that end, I try to impose upon myself certain rules when writing a review. These rules do not (and should not) apply to every single reviewer, and indeed I’m pretty sure I’ve failed at a couple of these rules in more than a few reviews, particularly when it’s the middle of the fringe festival and I’m trying to write six reviews in half as many hours and my thesaurus has given up trying to give me alternatives for ‘compelling’. But as self-imposed rules go, I think they’re pretty sound, and I share them with you now in the interests of making myself a better writer, and possibly filling up another blog entry.

·         Say Something Nice. I think it’s extraordinarily rare that you’ll sit through something that doesn’t have something to recommend it. It may be a production that has somehow missed the central message of its own script, but there may be a supporting actress that is always magnetic to watch. I’m not saying that you have to lie – after all, there are potentially audience members who are reading your review in order to sway their decision as to where to go tonight, and it won’t do anyone any favours if you say only good things when it’s actually a pretty shoddy production – but if you can’t find something positive to say (even if it’s a piece of backhanded hackery like ‘I liked what they were trying to achieve’), then you’re probably in the wrong job. Your parents managed the old ‘well, the set was impressive’ lie at your first production of Jocasta Baby Killer, so you can find something nice to say about the LX design. Oh, and by the way: when I say that you might be sitting through a bad production – do sit through it. Until the end. Yes, I know audiences say that life is too short for bad theatre, and if you leave early you might get hold of the good bratwursts before the stall sells out, but they have the excuse of being the public, and the public are expected to be rude. If you’re reviewing – for a newspaper, or for an online blog read only by you – you stay until the bows. It’s the only way to write an accurate review.

·         Say Something Quotable.  This gets at the heart of what the point of a reviewer is, I think. Your words are your stock in trade, even if you’re an unpaid freelance. I have read plenty of beautifully written reviews, full of fulsome praise, excitedly claiming the show as the best thing the reviewer has seen … but the review itself is useless. Because of the way that the sentences are structured, there’s nothing that the media team can cut and paste to use on posters. And, despite what you may think, most groups are wary of editing quotes from reviews to make more sense in shorter form. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen, however. It still has to be true, however. You need to tread a very fine line between being nice and quotable, and just hacking out a line that’s so relentlessly positive that you know it’s going to be used on the poster. Just remember, if it’s on the poster, your name is attached to it.

·         Say Something Funny (Or Interesting). I have problems with this, I admit. Despite that, I think it’s the most important of my own self-imposed rules. Local press are notoriously bad at filling up most of their word count with a bland synopsis of the plot. That’s not a review: that’s a bland synopsis of the plot. What I try to do in my reviews (and probably increasingly fail at, the deeper into a month long fringe I get) is to have a discussion. There are plenty of reviewers who are excellent at reporting what happened on stage, or how successful the costume choices were, and on occasion, I will be one of those reviewers. But I also like to be a bit chatty in my reviews, veer off subject slightly (as much as my editor will allow me), and discuss my own, personal reaction to what I’ve seen. I don’t mean that I’ll use the word ‘I’ in my reviews (the reviewer is the least interesting aspect of their own review), but I like to treat the reviews as an extension of the types of conversations I imagine audience members to be having on the way out of a show. At the most extreme end of this rule is benign arrogance: I would like to think that one day, some readers are reading my reviews for my voice, regardless of what show I’m reviewing.

·         Say Something Helpful. This is probably the most contentious of my self-imposed rules and certainly the one that I do the least. It again hits back at the heart of what the point of being a reviewer is. Is it liking the sound of your own voice? Or is it being some sort of half-assed dramaturg? Those two possibilities, I admit, are not exactly alien to one another. There is certainly some kind of arrogance in anybody – a reviewer, an audience member, an uninvited harasser on twitter – telling you that you ‘should have done it like this’ Presumably the stand up, the writer, the actors company, whatever – has spent several months making their show the best it can be. The last thing they need is some hack (who hasn’t spent several months making their show the best it can be) coming in and giving their unwarranted opinion. And yet. If there is an aspect of the show that frustrates you – pace, a sexist script, or a confusing ending, for instance, then I think it’s appropriate to discuss that in your review. After all, it is entirely possible that you are absolutely correct in your judgement, and if that’s the case, it’s only fair on both the audiences, and more importantly, the performers, that you bring it to light. If you’re wrong, then fair enough, all the other reviews will highlight that, and you will be ostracised as you deserve. But if you are correct, it may well be that your review is the first time they’ve had a problem that has been nagging them all through production defined, and your critique may be the thing that jumpstarts them from a mediocre show to a great one. And you will have helped, perhaps. Just remember point one. Say something nice.

·         Don’t Say What It’s About. I hate spoilers. I have a whole essay to bore you with another time about spoilers. It’s cheap, nasty and lazy. Essentially, by giving away parts of the plot – particularly the surprising and exciting bits – you are highlighting that you don’t actually know what to write about, that you don’t have an opinion. When you give away plot points in your review, you are filling up your word count by basically cutting and pasting the good work that someone else has done, and passing it off as your own. This is very cheap writing. I understand that some reviewers want to show off that they’ve ‘got it’, or that they have understood the more obscure references (I myself have sailed perilously close to this more than once), or indeed to communicate to the performer that they laughed (or cried) in all the right places. I understand also that it’s challenging to talk about a show that you’ve really loved (or hated) without discussing what’s happened onstage. But, not to labour the point too much, if you are telling me what the story is, then you are not discussing the production. If you are telling me the plot (Prince’s dad gets killed, he fails to do anything about it for three hours), then you are not telling me anything that I couldn’t read in a script, or probably in the company’s own flyer. I recognise that you don’t want your review to be too opaque or obscure, but if you can’t write five hundred words without giving away the ending or blowing all the best jokes, then perhaps reviewing isn’t for you.

So. Those are the rules that I attempt to impose upon myself in each review. As I’ve indicated, I more than occasionally fail. But I do try. It’s important to remember that reviews are not disposable and throwaway, despite what my performer friends might say and hope. It’s important to remember that the reviews one writes will actually be read by at least one person. And as such, there’s a certain responsibility. Now, that’s a rather portentous and pretentious line on which to end, but it has the ring of truth to it. Reviewing isn’t just about the sound of your own voice and seeing lots of shows for free. (I’ve already told you it is, a bit.)

All of Us Are In The Gutter ...

Up at the Edinburgh Fringe, star ratings are everything. At least, that’s what we keep being told in opinion pieces like this one. Obviously, they’re useful to plaster on the promotional material when indecisive potential audiences are drowning in flyers on the Royal Mile or panicking outside the Half Price Hut. The problem is, of course, that nobody nowadays seems to listen to – or even have basic respect for – any star rating below four. Which makes the whole thing nonsensical.

 

In all honesty, there’s nothing essentially wrong with star ratings, it’s just that absolutely nobody – with no exceptions whatsoever – knows how to employ them. Three star ratings are now a badge of dishonour, and there isn’t a theatre company who would feel happy using them in its press. This, clearly, is just a little bit silly: it suggests that the absolute baseline of credibility is four stars and above, ignoring anything below. That means we ignore almost 75% of the possible opinion. That’s like saying that nobody under the age of fifty is worth listening to. Yes, I’m well aware that some of you have no problem with that. But we’re missing out here. The very existence of three stars at the end of a review should indicate something of value. Three stars worth of value, in fact. Hell, you don’t even get three stars on your badge in McDonald’s without seriously impressing the management.

 

Let’s look at things in reverse order. Five stars is the easiest to discuss, since, like standing in a line at for a show at the fringe that doesn’t have relatives of members of the company in it, it’s simply near-impossible to achieve. Five stars should be indicative of the very best of someone’s career: literally, it can’t get any better than this. That being said, we’ve all been guilty of throwing away five stars when we probably shouldn’t have. Even I have to confess doing so when overtired, distracted by a pretty face in a supporting role, and jacked up on far too many Tangtastics.

 

Following that then, is Four Stars. Four Stars is what we should be calling unmissable, what a few too many of us actually think is a five star rating. These are the shows that we excitedly tweet about on the way out, of the venue, the ones that we recommend to our friends when the show tours locally. But they are still not five stars. A four star show is merely excellent. Excellent is something to be proud of. What’s happened, of course, is that in recent years, we have got ourselves trapped in a ‘X Factor’ mentality – apparently, things have to be life changingly brilliant, or grimly awful. We’ve become embarrassed by thinking anything in between. We are now bewilderingly shy of being able to rave about something that we find wonderful while at the same time acknowledging that it needs improvement.

 

If all the above is true (cough: it is), this means that Three Stars is not, as we have tricked ourselves into believing, mundane and invisible, a rating to be embarrassed by. No, three stars is – or, in my not so humble opinion, should be – simply a very good show. As I’ve argued before, in any other industry you have to work damn hard to get three stars. Soldiers returning from battle are continually baffled by the amount of young dance troupes petulantly rejecting their three stars at the fringe.

 

If we accept that a three star rating is actually a hard-won compliment rather than a dismissal, then two and one star ratings can begin to make a lot more sense. A two star rating is for a show that is essentially sound, but fatally or near-fatally flawed by a couple of bad choices: perhaps the lead is horrifically miscast, or the dialogue is overwritten. What those two stars tell you however (or, should tell you, in this alternate universe I’ve just made up), particularly in an environment as volatile and cauldron-bubbly as the fringe, is that although this show has some way to go before improvement, it is still worth your time: the company deserves your attention and feedback so that they can continue to grow.

 

Which leaves us with the one star review. In this version of the world, a one star review would be exactly what it should sound like: a show with at least some merit. Yes, a one star show would be undeniably poor. It might be incoherent, or the jokes would be indistinguishable from the twitter feed of that old school friend you keep meaning to delete – but that one star would suggest that there was at least one saving grace: intelligent direction, perhaps, attempting to throw light on a half-baked script, or a clever set design.

 

I understand completely that I’m a lone voice. The star ratings aren’t going anywhere anytime soon unless you write – as I indeed do – for a site like FringeReview, which has adopted a policy of ‘if you can’t beat them, then refuse point blank to join them’, and has eschewed star ratings altogether. Equally, for those sites and publications that are still using star ratings, companies are only ever going to be interested in ratings of four and five, which, as I’ve pointlessly argued is insane. So it’s down to us to argue more eloquently in our reviews. Now, I’ve been known to dismiss myself as an online hack, but what I’m hacking still has some merit. Well, if not merit, certainly weight. Reviews are at their best when they are a discussion, the development of the reviewer’s own reaction to whatever it is they have seen in the theatre. It’s not good that we can have our arguments and thoughts reduced down into what is essentially a very unimaginative line of emojis. If star ratings are like a reviewer’s version of Schrödinger’s Cat – simultaneously meaningless and vital – then what we write below the line needs to be carefully considered. Lest we forget, the reviewers themselves can now punished (or rewarded) with star-style ratings, via sites like FringePig. A few more of those plastered over reviewer’s profiles could do more to change the ratings system than anything else ..