Here’s the thing. And it is a thing. I’m in a stealing mood. I don’t know why, I think it’s maybe because I just had my first experience of hanging with litigators and winning, baby, winning.

Do you notice how I can’t say “baby”?

But I was thinking of doing something bad. It was even bad in two parts. I might go so far as to call it Evil. Well, no, that’s too harsh. Call it Evil-.

Evil- part 1: Jason Arnopp said this thing the other week about looking at key drama moments in his blog, really exploring what makes us writers want to write. He hasn’t done a huge amount of this yet, though there is this about Apparitions. I would like to steal his idea. Don’t copy me. If you do this too, it becomes an internet meme and where’s the Evil- in that?

But, wait, Evil- part 2: I was actually thinking of popping something up onto YouTube so that I could point you at it and claim, all innocent-like, that it was a wonderful coincidence that some Evil+ person should rip it off and put it up there at that precise same moment.

Only, someone has. Not this very minute, but not an awfully long time ago. Somewhen back in August this year.

So. They’ve done the ripping off, I’ve acknowledged that I’m stealing from your man Jason Arnopp, let’s play our game.

If you know me at all, you know the joy of drama for me is in people talking. I might have them in helicopters, I’m not immune to some of yer action, but ultimately it’s where two people shouting at each other can take us. And you’ll not be surprised that my favourite writers are ones who are hot on dialogue and rhythms of speech, language, such as Carrie Fisher. Wait, I need to stop that sentence for a sec: I’ll resume the list of favourite linguistic writers after this public service announcement. I just checked Carrie Fisher’s website and it’s alright, but it hasn’t been updated since the dawn of time. However, she has a new book out any second now so it’ll probably get some welly into the site. And if it doesn’t, you can just buy her book. If I love writers who play with language, I adore good titles even more. Her book’s an autobiography called Wishful Drinking.

I was going to rattle off a lot of names but I can see you’re in a hurry. Let me cut to one: Aaron Sorkin. You know this fella for his dialogue. Maybe for a lot of other things, but dialogue and in fact dialogue at speed, right? While walking? If you’re thinking of The West Wing, ratch it up a notch and you’ve got Sports Night. The same lightspeed dialogue exchanges but even faster because the show was only half an hour.

If we met in a bar, and had run out of conversation so much and so fast that you were reduced to asking me what car/vegetable/animal I would be, I would steer you to this topic instead. My favourite Sports Night scene. Please remember that this is a fast, fast show, that its verve and wit and ferociously powerful way of grabbing you is famously down to the dialogue. Now have a look at the opening to season 2, episode 1, Special Powers by Aaron Sorkin. Whoever put this on YouTube put the first ten minutes up but I just want you to watch the top 90 seconds.

Have a look right here.

What did you think? Admit it, you know I meant up to “It’s been 90 days” but you carried right on watching.

There is something special about the opening moments of a new season. You need to be confident but not cocky, you need to know you’re good and be as good as you think you are. And you need to seduce people in. The very first episode of Sports Night did it with a smash-bang start, throwing you right into the action, but this second run took 45 seconds before there was any dialogue at all. Without commercials, the show runs 22 minutes and Aaron Sorkin chose to take 90 seconds before there was any meaningful dialogue. And this in a show where every script typically ran 20 pages longer than standard because of the volume of dialogue.

I think that’s quite brave, I think it’s quite wonderful. And I’d forgotten that while he subverted expectations of what Sports Night would be like, Sports Night itself was subverting what sitcoms were meant to be like. This is less obvious now because so many shows work the same way but in its day (1999/2000) this was a multi-camera sitcom yet done like no other had been. Sports Night looks like a film, not another variant on the I Love Lucy standard three-wall set and four-camera shoot.

For instance, watch that first shot again of Casey McCall (Peter Krause) throwing paper into a bin: you know, you just know it took a hell of a long time to get that looking so perfect. But now name any other sitcom of the period that would spend the effort.

I’d like to know if you hadn’t seen the show before and yet this drew you in: when I saw that clip I’d already seen 20+ episodes so the relationship it was describing was very familiar to me. I think it works regardless, but you can never unwatch something to find out.

The clip also has that music, She Will Have Her Way by Neill Finn. I watched the episode on the new DVD set and then rewound it, pointed my iPhone at the screen and tapped on Shazam to find out what the music was and buy it over iTunes. Normally I don’t rate Aaron Sorkin’s music choices; they’re often superb but equally often just a bit smaltzy for me. But here, I’d never heard the track before and I’ve heard it an awful lot since.

Aaron Sorkin has got dialogue, yes, but he’s got pace and rhythm too. I find it very hard to slow down, it’s as if I want to throw things at you until you like one. But I’m consciously taking a breath, looking for the visual way to showcase dialogue, the way to lead you in to a story in as fresh and new a way as I can, looking to steal an approach and an idea I admire greatly.

Listen, whoever did the YouTube thing, you know they put the whole episode up, doncha? Watch it if ye may, but then buy the DVD set, okay? Some 40-odd episodes and it’s a gem.

Hang on, I started this hours ago and kept nipping off to check out Carrie Fisher websites for you. (The others I was going to include were Paul Auster, Dar Williams, Suzanne Vega, by the way.)

I think someone’s stolen my evening. How did they do that?

William

Okay, you can tell this isn’t going to be my most precise piece of maths since I wrote a feature on how to model the UK economy in Excel*. And perhaps the first clue to how many decimal places of accuracy I’m aiming for will come when you reach the word “Wikipedia”.

Wikipedia – that didn’t take long; I thought you’d trust me at least a little longer – says the world’s population is growing at 75 million people per year. Now, I make that 0.007 people every minute. So that’s 1,428.6 minutes per person. Most people will tell you it takes three minutes and nine months to make a person, but you heard the truth here first: it’s 23 hours, 48 minutes, 57 seconds.

Now, that leaves you 11 minutes and 3 seconds to relax at the end of the day, but that’s not what I’m looking for.

Instead, there’s a news report today saying that spam email senders get one response for every 12.5 million emails they send.

And I can’t join the dots. I so want to be able to say to you that therefore this means there is one sucker born every 9.7 seconds or something, but I’ve got one statistic in this hand, the other in that one, and I can’t bring the two together. I think that part of it is that I’m missing an episode here, we don’t have a comparative time basis for the two: do I need to know how long it takes ’em to send 12.5m emails? I think I do. I think I need to know how many they send per annum to conclusively figure it out.

Unless you know better. And can now take part in this Build a Reasonably Pointless But Faux Informative Punchline contest that I’ve just decided to come up with.

People, I got CSE grade 1 Maths: I’m far from proud of this, but I’m just saying. Any help welcomed.

William
*PS I really did do that, model the UK economy in Excel version 5. I think I’ve told you this before, but the economy’s been on my mind a bit recently, I’ve been carrying some worry about whether my maths in that feature had any impact anywhere.

As soon as you’ve read this, I’m off: first to various family bits but thence to Leeds and a performance of a play of mine.

Also other people’s; it’s another festival of new writing, as I’m sure I’ve told you before. So compared to Innocence it’s a very small thing, but then compared to Innocence it’s been a much easier and slicker process. I go tonight looking forward to it and I’m grateful to the theatre because this rounds out my drama year with a good production.

Bit nervous, actually. I always am, now: I thought it would get easier but this is my fourth production and I’m not going to be relaxed until it’s done.

I would say that when you’re starting out scriptwriting, you get so many rejections that the process becomes a battleground where you’re trying to succeed on the page and your audience is the producer, the director, the script editor, the theatre’s literary editor. You start to think of your audience as that one person, not the audience you should be aiming for, and your focus is on that A4 sheet, not the final theatre/film/radio production. So when something goes through and will play out in front of a paying crowd, it’s terribly unsettling.

I would say that because I suspect it’s true. But I also feel the same unsettled surprise over my journalism, which has been going steadily well for a very long time now. This week a reader phoned Radio Times to complain about my absence in the On This Day column but, I’m told, was too shy to speak to me when the that was offered. I had a tremendously chuffing email from a favourite editor. And I’ve now had so many emails about how I shouldn’t drop the UK DVD Review podcast that I am struggling to reply to them all.

All fantastic. A tough year’s getting a lot better.

Bugger, I’m late. Could you read faster in future? Off to Leeds we go.

William

But I understand other people love her. And even for me, this is a gem: watch the unaired pilot episode of I Love Lucy.

And since it became one of the most enormously successful sitcoms of all time, you just know it had a rocky start.

Via Metafilter.

William

Here’s a thing. I do radio podcast show, it’s been very successful for me, getting into the iTunes top 20 of all podcasts in all categories, worldwide. Startling success. But it’s been going for a while, I’ve done over 160 editions now and I have been thinking it’s in the endgame.

Especially since we’re approaching the show’s busiest time. It’s a DVD review podcast but November is heavy with a poll of the year. I’m proud of this: I do not now or have I ever given a stuff that Indiana Jones gets X votes or sells Y copies, I publicly distort the chart by how passionate voters have been. The math is rubbish, the statistical analysis isn’t worth a damn, but we get ten DVDs that are each raved about by listeners. Ten DVDs that are their Sports Nights, their Battlestars.

And we do this list together, it’s has the feel of a conspiracy between me and the listener, with the aim that it comes out early, say December 10. It’s in time for us all to hear a top ten where every entry is there by passion and it’s in time for us to buy them for Christmas. I especially love DVDs that I didn’t like yet others adored. And then I get the most effusive, persuasive listener on to the show to make their case.

Couldn’t love that episode any more than I do.

But it’s also off the charts harder to produce than any other edition, and the ones that set up this voting aren’t picnics either. For lots of reasons I have been looking at whether it’s time to end the show and it’d make a tough couple of months easier if I dropped it now rather than later.

Only, this morning I watched the final Sports Night. And watched it again with the commentary, making me very late. And exactly as Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme were ending, I mean on the second of the last word, my iPhone pinged with an email from a listener saying how much they’d enjoyed my most recent edition.

You send these things out into the ether and though you obviously want listeners, it’s such a surprise when you learn there are any. I was talking the other night about the abusive emails I’ve had, we’ve all had, in journalism and how it feels as if the senders don’t realise there’s a real person at the other end. (Because oftentimes I’ve replied and got back nothing short of an embarrassed “um” kind of reply and an about-face on whatever the topic was.) But maybe I’m the same, apparently I’m the same: as much work as you put into something, the conceptual leap that it might actually get the audience you want is beyond me.

It’s much easier to end a show if you don’t think it’s being listened to. Equally, you can’t just extend something beyond its natural life because it has an audience. But equally 2, the sequel, you can’t go back. There’s a gag on that Sports Night commentary about now doing a movie of it, and for an instant there I wanted that. But I really don’t think you can go back: when it’s gone, it’s gone and anything else you try to do has to be its own self, it can’t ever be part of what’s gone.

It’s not like I don’t get quite a bit of email about the podcast. But this one, coming in a precisely that second when I was lamenting how there was no more Sports Night, it gave me a buzz.

So I don’t know if I’ll wrap up my show but I’m going to think about it more and not so casually throw it away.

William

My “Harvest Festival, PI” leads off the final night of the Carriageworks Theatre’s new writing festival.

That would be Saturday, November 1, so if you’re in Leeds, come wave. They’re saying tickets are selling fast, but that could just be to make me feel fantastic.

William

Entertainment Weekly in the States was asking for your vote on who should be the next President of the United States: Jed Bartlet, Laura Roslin, David Palmer or Mackenzie Allen.

I say was because I thought I was pointing this out to you while there was still time to vote: maybe there is but now I go back to their page, I get neither a voting form nor a table of results. Hopefully your mileage will vary.

If not, let me tell you that when I looked earlier today, The West Wing’s Jed Bartlet was winning, I think he had 42% of the vote compared to 32% for his nearest rival. Can’t remember who that was. But running third at the time was Battlestar Galactica’s Laura Roslin and I voted for her.

I’m wondering if I did that because she’s a woman. I think it’s cringingly embarrassing that America has never had a woman President and that the UK’s only had one woman Prime Minister. But then I completely ignored Commander in Chief’s Mackenzie Allen (Geena Davis). So maybe it’s that I never watched C-in-C, that David Palmer was President on 24 so long ago that I couldn’t remember his first name without looking him up. And that Roslin hasn’t let me down by being written by someone else after four seasons.

But C-in-C was an interesting example of what I think is quite a new phenomenon in US TV drama: the dizzying height and the dizzying fall, all done at speed. You’re used to shows dying, even especially being yanked off the air within a few episodes. But Commander in Chief came out like an instant hit – and then by the end of the first season, it was dying. Joan of Arcadia boomed into life and looked set for a long run which maybe it deserved but somehow nobody bothered tuning in for the second season.

I know that’s only two examples but I did have a third until this paragraph. Can’t fathom where my head was going. But is it too early to ask if long-running series have had their day?

Yes.

Okay, well, I only asked. You can be quite cutting sometimes.

I think Jed Bartlet is going to win and it was a joy to read Aaron Sorkin’s account of a fictitious conversation between Bartlet and Obama. (You’re going to have to explain to me why I used the word fictitious there: when only one character in a conversation is real, it’s either fictitious or time to phone for help.) If you missed that, it was in The New York Times.

I write to you with a new monitor on my Mac. Just wanted to share that.

William

I just like the term, I want to share it with you and since I thought it up, I want to say it like this: criticism on toast(TM).

You’ve had praise sandwiches, we all have. If you’ve just read the worst script imaginable, and you’re obligated to comment helpfully, you find a few good things to say at the top, a few good ones to leave to the bottom, and you try to make the filling in between helpful but thin. When the script is so bad that you just have to get out fast, you use a praise sandwich.

I’ve been sent many a sandwich. It shouldn’t work: as soon as you read an opening line that goes “Your typing is immaculate”, you know you’re in trouble. Perhaps it’s just me, and how I’m a sucker for being praised for my typing (oh, if you only knew I was serious there), but I read this opening line of death and I am simultaneously aware I’m in for a beating but also mollified.

Once I read a script so bad I had to go take a two-hour bath to think up something good to say about it for the bread in the praise sandwich. And I still failed. In the end, I made up something: I said the opening was just like XXXXXX and then I went on to praise XXXXXX for a paragraph instead.

But the other day I got my first of a brand new type of script report, a type I am going to call criticism on toast. Because it went straight in on this doesn’t work, that doesn’t work, what were you thinking here and this is rubbish. Then it ended with comments about great gags, it praised me on the way out. Without the slightest doubt, this praise at the end was as false as the praise I give at the top and bottom when I don’t like something. But because it came last, I liked it and let myself believe it.

If I were cleverer, I’d have written this entry criticising you at the top and then building to the praise you so thoroughly deserve at the bottom. But I’m not, so I didn’t.

William

This coming Sunday’s UK DVD Review is probably going to be about comparing Grosse Pointe Blank with what’s being called its spiritual sequel: War, Inc.

As I understand it, a spiritual sequel is a sequel in all ways bar any financial or legal ones. And yes, if you watch this new DVD you cannot doubt that its DNA is in Grosse Pointe. Unless you haven’t seen the earlier film, in which case you can doubt all you like, doubt with gusto. But I do very strongly recommend that you watch Grosse Pointe Blank recommend you watch it; not so much so that we can discuss and debate, but just so that you can have a good time and not spend your money on War, Inc.

Ooops, given away a bit of the review there.

But for reasons I may jabber on about in the show, I’ve spent a lot of time analysing and comparing the two films. And I don’t want to share any of that with you.

Except this. Because this is about the writing of the earlier, better film. It’s something that won’t come up in the podcast, but it’s something that I’ve often kept in mind when writing. First, let me explain that this is the story of a hitman going home for his ten year high school reunion and that the film came out in 1997, now let me quote you from the revised first draft of the screenplay, by Tom Jankiewicz, DV deVincentis & SK Boatman & John Cusack:

INT. GYM – NIGHT

Martin and Debi enter and pause to take in the entire scene… Alumni are dancing.

ARLENE: Welcome back! I’m Arlene Oslott-Joseph.
MARTIN: I’m Martin Blank.
DEBI: Debi Newberry.

Debi heads off into the gym, smiling back as she strands Martin. Arlene rises. They have little to say. Martin wasn’t part of her crowd.

ARLENE: Marty, you haven’t changed a bit!
MARTIN: Don’t say that.

Arlene gives him a NAMETAG. As a special torture, the tags have YEARBOOK PHOTOS. Martin looks at the name tag uncomfortably.

ARLENE: We had pictures put on, that way everybody knows who everybody was!

I don’t like this segment. Part of it is unquestionably because it’s not what’s in the film and, by whatever mysterious process it is, things that were not in the final cut always read poorer than things that were. Mind you, oftentimes that’s why they were cut.

I don’t have a later draft of the script so I can’t compare the stage directions but if you’ll allow me, I’ll write my own sufficient that you can see what’s going on. Here’s how that same scene played out in the final film.

INT. GROSSE POINT HIGH SCHOOL

Enter Martin and Debi.

ARLENE: Welcome back Pointers! It’s Arlene Oslott-Joseph!
MARTIN: Hi!
DEBI: Hi.
MARTIN: How are you?
ARLENE: I’m good…

Awkward pause: she doesn’t recognise them.

MARTIN: Martin. Blank.
ARLENE: Oh, Martin Blank, yes. [PICKS UP HIS PICTURE NAMETAG] My, you haven’t changed a bit.
MARTIN: Don’t say that!

Awkward pause: she does recognise Debi.

ARLENE: Hi, Debi, just love your show.
DEBI: Oh, thanks, well, you’re our demographic.
MARTIN: You got married, Arlene.
ARLENE: Yes I did, and three children. It’s really neat.
MARTIN: Yeah.
ARLENE: I had the yearbook pictures put on so everybody knows who everybody was!
MARTIN: Special torture!

Lots going on there that wasn’t before, some of which you’re not going to get from reading a segment, but what was a flat scene has some life and blood in it.

And most important of all, it takes that “special torture” line and puts it where we can see it.

The very first script I wrote got this comment from Alan Plater (hey, if you’re going to ask advice, start from the top): he said that he had laughed aloud at the stage directions but the audience never sees those. When I managed to move the gags into dialogue, he called it a great step for writerkind.

Some day I should get a copy of War, Inc and see if they ignored his advice as much as it seems.

William

Earlier this week I recorded my first narration for a DVD documentary. Can’t tell you what it is yet because I don’t think the DVD has been officially announced; as soon as it is, I’ll get you a link because hopefully you’ll want to buy it. And if you do, of course it’s going to be because of me, not the title itself.

I can tell you, quite seriously, that the documentary is first class. I had a really good time playing back an almost-final assembly of the thing and then I had to go ruin it by talking all the way through. Don’t you hate people like me?

But if I shouldn’t tell you what it is (and I’m going to be honest here and say there is a Very Easy Way to find out and it involves a judicious use of the @ symbol), I can tell you that it’s even harder to narrate than I had expected – and I’d expected it to be hard. By the end of the recording, my teeth felt looser, vibrated out of kilter. And I can tell you that of course it’s immense fun: could you imagine my finding it dull?

I especially like how I didn’t write the script, there was no writing involved at all, my only contribution was my voice. So the other day I get a little success from my photography, then I got news of another play being put on, then I’m a voice guy, and in a kind of mix of prose and picture research, I was today commissioned for a Doctor Who Adventures feature. Am I multimedia or what?

But you’re wondering about the subject of this blog. And it’s just this. Despite this being a vocal gig, despite all this other non-writing work, a great joy was found in coining a new phrase. I was asked to be more peppy but not hammy so I did it pepperonily.

Feel free to use this term wherever you may.

I’m in a blathery mood this week, aren’t I?
William