I’d just like your company for a while, can we do that? Normally when I write to you it’s first thing on a Friday morning and actually it’s not that different now: wait one second… there, it’s just gone midnight on Thursday night. Midnight when it’s raining heavily outside, I’m by a fire, I’ve got tea and toast, and I’ve just finished a 15-hour working day.
Look, I’m actually getting a bit weary of remembering things, I’d rather be doing something new. And lately it’s been all memory. The other day I drove to London on my own but accompanied by about thirty events I remembered from previous drives to the BBC. Plus I’ve been watching a lot of archive television and shuddering at the thought it’s an archive now.
Sometimes the two collide, such as how I’ve just finished rewatching the first season of Mad About You from 1992/93 and it is inextricably tied to my time on BBC Ceefax and then on Radio Times. I remember an editor on RT who didn’t like the show and I remember watching an episode on a newsroom’s tiny monitor.
Today though, or tonight rather, I’m remembering a sensation and that’s what I want to enjoy with you.
I can’t define it, I can just describe the circumstances, which go thisaway. It’s late, obviously, that’s crucial, and the day has been long but you’ve achieved something, you’ve created something. It might be something no one else thinks is worth doing, but you do and you’ve done it. What’s more, you’ve done it with other people who are on that blurry line between colleague and friend.
And then you’re all at someone’s kitchen table. Big table, half a dozen people, all talking together, all splitting off briefly into this smaller group or that larger conversation, and all drinking tea. Maybe I just mix with the wrong crowd there, but the tea is important, more important and more useful, more needed, that alcohol would have been.
It’s the sense that you all did something together and that you played your part. That you lived up to what everyone in this group did, what they all needed.
And, I now think, it could also be that there has to be radio involved somewhere. I think I associate this feeling and that circumstance with BBC Radio WM, I know it definitely started for me earlier with BHBN hospital radio.
I spent tonight editing a podcast for a client.
Hosted it, recorded it, now edited it. That’s as close to radio as I can get, yet it’s also got to be just about as far away from the radio I knew as you can be. Two people speaking on the show, and then just me and my Mac pulling it together. Plenty of editing, no sign of the old tape and chinagraph pencils and razor blades, just a point and a click.
But the same muscles in shaping audio. The same way you know when this cut is right and that one isn’t.
I don’t really miss the way radio used to be edited, although somewhere in my office I have a tape block that you used to use for this and which nobody now can fathom what it’s for. I definitely didn’t miss stringing tape around my neck to remember which bit was which, although I do have several reels of tape in my office.
What I miss is sitting around the table with you afterwards. Thanks for giving me that through this.
There’s a pizza restaurant in London, I forget the name but it’s right in the Leicester Square theatre area. Its walls are covered with quotes, not one of which is from theatre, every one of which is from films –– and every one of which is wrong.
That’s because each famous line from a movie is attributed on these wall plaques to the actor who said it. Who said it. Didn’t write it, didn’t think it up, just said it. I have pointed out to the restaurant that I’ve said all of these quotes too, they should give me plaque.
They’re going to get back to me.
I’d understand it if they credited the line to the character and the movie, but they don’t do either. It is solely the quote and then the actor’s name.
And I think it’s tied to how you’ve seen a bizarrely frantic need for people to believe actors make up everything themselves. That can be clear in how often people or the media ask, I don’t know, Peter Mayhew just how much he’s really like Chewbacca. Or it can be more specific: actors are regularly asked if they came up with this or that superb line.
No, they didn’t.
Drama is collaboration and an excellent actor can certainly, in the moment, in the character, come up with a great line. They can’t come up with two, they can’t come up with entire scenes and dramas, and they can well come up with a line that’s brilliant in this scene but entirely screws up the ending of the movie.
I don’t actually say that to criticise, either. I know of actors who are practically proud that they only read their lines in a script and to hell with what every other character has to say, and I know of actors who are extremely successful while being like that. They’re just crap, though, what can you do?
A tremendous actor will work that script, will understand everything in it and – this is quite hard to say as a writer, but it’s true – by the end, they will indeed know their character better than you do. I still don’t trust anyone who claims “my character wouldn’t say that”, and I still do suspect they really mean “I can’t pronounce that word”. Which has happened to me.
But if you and I both accept the practicality that drama is collaboration and that everyone is working to the same goal, let me zero in on why this is really all bothering me today.
It’s partly because it bothers me all the time. The desire on the part of audiences for the actor to have made up their lines, the need for them to have done it. Two or three times now, I’ve been told of a stage show where the cast go madly off script and ad lib like crazy. Each time the person who told me this said that it made their night, that it made the show come alive so very much more than if it had been written.
And then six months later, I catch the same show further on in its tour and every single ad lib is precisely the same.
Because they were written.
Of course they were.
Which means I could be wrong here, but I just saw something I think was ad libbed – and I liked it.
I’m rewatching Mad About You, the quite bizarrely underrated 1990s sitcom by Paul Reiser and Danny Jacobson. In “Togetherness”, an episode by Steve Paymer, there’s an end titles sequence that appears to be ad libbed. It’s nothing to do with the episode, it is a callback to an equally unrelated pre-titles gag, but the studio audience roars extra hard and co-star Helen Hunt appears to break character over it.
Let me just say here that this is Helen Hunt. She’s an Oscar-winning actor, she’s a director, a producer, and a writer. If she wants to make you think she’s genuinely laughing about something, she can do it.
So I could be wrong here. Or, to use a famous line written for the show, this may not be the most right I’ve ever been.
Plus, I’ve skipped over telling you what the gag was because a) it doesn’t matter and 2) I didn’t understand it. Truly, there’s this moment, everyone loves it, I haven’t the faintest idea what it means or why it’s funny. You just know that it was something topical and perhaps that’s why I think it was ad libbed.
I’ve now looked it up and yes, it was a reference to a separate role Hunt had just played in the month that episode was recorded.
So, okay, it was a topical reference that the studio audience would get and I, thirty years later, could not. And which actually the TV viewing audience some weeks or months after the recording might not have been able to get either. That’s definitely why it was in the end titles and not a gag in the actual episode, that’s possibly why I think it was ad libbed.
But what surprises me is that I enjoyed it. I don’t understand it, and yet I enjoyed it.
Not to reveal that I have been thinking about this for four days now, but I’ve been thinking about it for four days now. The best I’ve got, the furthest I’ve got, is that I enjoyed the momentary sense of looking behind the curtain, of seeing more than the show’s writers and cast and crew presented to us.
I think when we like a show, we form a relationship with it. It’s a peculiar one since the show has never heard of us, but it’s also a quite intimate one and seeing something behind the curtain, seeing something from the wings, it’s like we’re being allowed in more than other people. It’s like our special relationship with the show is somehow affirmed.
I don’t get how we can respond like this, how we can take a real or imagined ad lib, see that it’s revealing a show is constructed, contrived, and then ignore the constructors and the contrivers and think the actors make it up. I don’t get how we can correctly know characters and yet so many people take that to mean they know the actors.
But, okay, maybe I do now understand the appeal of ad libs.
I did not realise how a table can soak up the people who sat at it, can eat up all of the events that surrounded it, and then release them all again like a battery. I was going to say I hadn’t realised this happens until just about now, a couple of days ago.
But what I really realised this week was that every time I think of Shirley Rubinstein and Alan Plater, I think of them at a particular table. It was a dinner table, longer than it was wide, and I ate with them at it many times, but we also just talked there a lot.
Alan died in 2010 and when Shirley died in 2017 and I was at the funeral, I was standing by that table when I asked to go see Alan’s office one last time. That was a tremendous space, you’d love it: just saying that makes it sound large and I don’t mean that, I mean it was perfect. Somehow a split-level office, with Alan writing in the lower part, Shirley working in the upper. You had to go through Shirley’s bit to step down into Alan’s and even visiting it, it felt like climbing down into a nest.
Just stepping down into it, you felt ready to write.
That split level office must surely still be there, though I’ve no idea who lives in that house now or what they may have done with the office. But the split-level part, that has to still be there.
Whereas I thought the table was gone forever.
Earlier this week, though, I was at a school and by more chance and social media algorithms than I’d have thought possible, an old friend found out I was going. And that I would therefore be about 15 minutes away from this woman I hadn’t seen in so long. Hadn’t seen since Shirley’s funeral in 2017.
I might even forgive Facebook’s machinations for how it meant I ended up having a great time with her. But throughout the afternoon, as deep into conversation and tea as I was, there was also this.
She now has Alan and Shirley’s table.
I choked when she told me.
I stroked it, actually stroked it. And absolutely had to sit at the same spot I used to.
*I have no favourite football team. I would struggle to name a football team. Not true: if invited, I would very quickly name a team something like “Overpaid”.
But next week I am spending a day in a school for the first time since before the pandemic, and the subject is non-fiction. At some point before lunch I am going to point out to approximately 30 pupils from something 5 schools, that they have never heard of me before. That they are unlikely to ever hear of me again.
Yet they also now know how to find out something about me.
The thing I will ask them to find out about me over lunch is what my favourite football team is. I can think of two ways for them to find out and this is one of them. The other is to ask me. I am so hoping that someone will just ask me.
Being invited into a school is a privilege that I take extremely seriously. It’s on my mind a lot and if I’m saying much of this in order to have something the pupils can find online with a little effort, I’m also saying it to you because I am an idiot.
There I will be, next Tuesday, telling writers that you can always ask anyone, anything. That it is supremely easy to just ask them. And here I was last Tuesday, maybe Wednesday, telling someone else that since they wanted a particular thing from someone, they should ask.
I hope it was last Tuesday because that’s a nice balance of Tuesdays and because yesterday comes between them. And yes.
Yesterday, I had to ask someone for something. And I found it very hard.
Fair broke my arms trying to type when the stakes were so unnaturally high. I say unnatural because whatever the reason it was all so charged for me, it isn’t for them.
Maybe that’s what I should really be telling people next week. Whoever you’re asking is far less concerned, far less bothered, far less interested in the fact you’re asking, than you think. For good or bad reasons, for whatever reason, your mountain is not theirs.
So, I know this again and again, ask.
There’s a producer I want to contact and I’ve only got a US postal address for his company. I’m wondering whether I should just write a letter.
And now, talking to you, I realise there is nothing to stop my doing it but me, no one to say I can’t but me.
Also, it occurs to me that with my handwriting, I should probably type.
I am not trying to distract you or me from what’s going on in the UK and the relief that the Opposition party announced that they’d do the same crap as the government, just presumably crappier, though they were a little light on the details.
No, it’s actually vital that I talk with you about a failed project of mine. I urgently need to tell you about a radio project that went nowhere so long ago that I can’t remember. I want to say 1996, so I’m going to, but it could be earlier. Details are crucial, you see.
This is going to sound more than it was, but sometime around then I and a BBC Radio producer had a project we wanted Ken Dodd to do. It was a series, I think maybe five short episodes, that would’ve had Ken Dodd as a detective. A detective walking the mean streets of somewhere, Ken Dodd and his Diddymen, Ken Dodd with a revolver and a tickling stick.
It was a murder mystery comedy and if you remember Ken Dodd’s act and you have forgotten the title up above, you may enjoy being surprised that I called the show “Diddy Do It.”
I did write it, my writing was atrocious, but I can only guess that was why Ken Dodd turned us down. I never knew why, I’m not actually sure now that he even saw a script, but I do know when. Kind of. If it were 1996 when we did this, it was at least 1997 and maybe 1998 before he said no.
Dodd was famous for his comedy, of course, and also how his stage shows were brilliant, but would run so uncontrollably long that people would miss the last bus home. What was less known, because few needed to, was that he was also his own agent.
I want to say I was warned going in that this meant everything took a long time, but I could be guessing.
The one thing I can be certain of is what I called the first two episodes. You may not remember his act, you may pretend you’re too young to, but I am certain that no one else has ever done this.
Episode 1 was called “What a Beautiful Day It Is”. And episode 2 was also called “What a Beautiful Day It Is”.
Such a shame the episodes weren’t as good as their titles.
Twice in the last week – once with you, once on BBC Radio Foyle – I got to natter about how my two current TV obsessions are preposterously different. They’re the current Only Murders in the Building and the fifty-year-old The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Only, Only Murders is only about a podcast, right? So it only took me six episodes of Only to realise that surely, surely there would be a podcast about the show. Lying in the bath last night, I listened to the first episode and its interview with Only Murder co-creator, co-writer and all-showrunner, John Hoffman.
Pretty much just as the motion-sensor lights in the bathroom switched off, I sat up, splashing water onto the iPhone and, as it happens, turning the lights back on.
Because Hoffman was describing the process of writing this Only Murders series and he said that every single night during it, he would watch two episodes of another show.
Yes.
It was The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
I suppose both are comedies, though the Mary show was straight sitcom and Only Murders is comedy drama. I suppose both are half hours, but Mary is 25 minutes and Only Murders can go up to 35 if it likes.
There’s no connection in the subject, the tone, the characters, and yet I get it. Hoffman watched all seven seasons of the Mary show, two episodes a night and it fed into writing Only Murders in the Building.
I am taken by this because of the odds that the two shows I look forward to are the same two for this man I don’t know, and especially since do you have the faintest clue how many sitcoms or comedy dramas or just television programmes there have been in the last half a century? Go pick your own, Hoffman, I’ve got this one.
But then there is also this. On Tuesday, I read a script I wrote about 20 years ago and let’s say it was shite altogether.
“It was shite.”
However, it was also unquestionably me. I could hear my voice, see my tone, recognise certain descriptions and actually also particular patterns and ways of describing things.
And I could also see what prompted most of the script. A character says “you’ve got my vote” and I know Grosse Pointe Blank was on my mind. A description of mine includes the phrase “certain-sure” and I like that, I like the rhythm of it, I like the amplification-by-tautology, but I don’t like how I believed I’d thought of it in a script earlier this year. It’s scary that I’ve just found it again in a Self Distract blog from 2015 where I appear to obsess over the word “bollocks.”
Everything you know, everything you feel, goes into writing and then it only bloody comes out again, too. I don’t think it should come out as baldly, overtly obvious as it is with my scripts, but I used to like how I believed I could adapt to any house style, fit in with any production or any publication’s writing and now I’m glad that I can’t. I found my voice and apparently can’t shut up.
A friend told me once that she could recognise my writing in a particular piece that didn’t have a byline, that wasn’t meant to be one person’s writing. I liked that very much.
Though I’m pretty sure that was the same friend who this week told me she never watches my 58keys YouTube channel and she never reads this Self Distract.
This week, the UK government is telling television producers that they must only make terribly British shows. O-kay…
You think of all the things going on and going wrong in the world, you think of all of them just going wrong in the UK, and this is what the government focuses on. You could presume that it’s a front, a distraction, something they think we will go for while they get on with the serious business of running the country, and I’d be okay with that. I’d even be happy enough if I thought they were just insulting our intelligence. Insult me, fine, just run the country for the benefit of the people in it instead of solely, exclusively for the benefit of the people in the Cabinet.
Anyway. Deep breath.
The government did also fire the person who, presumably, was going to implement all of this terribly British crap. They fired him one hour before he was due to give a Royal Television Society speech about it.
His identikit replacement stood up at the RTS and read his speech. I’m not entirely sure she put any more effort into the project than he had.
We’ve been here before and it has scared me before.
David Cameron, when he was Prime Minister and had a spare moment between a bacon sandwich and destroying the union, told UK filmmakers to only make hits.
If you just said something along the lines of oh, for god’s sake, hang on, there’s a little more. He may have been shockingly stupid, but he did think to give us all an example. The King’s Speech. Make hits like The King’s Speech, he said, easy.
The King’s Speech is a very good film by David Seidler. It concerns a man most of the audience hasn’t heard of, who spends 90 minutes or so struggling to make one speech. I liked it very much, but it doesn’t really have Marvel Cinematic Universe written all over it.
Today anyone making The King’s Speech 9: Chelsea Drift would presumably be told to make it more terribly British.
That totality of stupidity, the stupidity without a sliver of daylight between the stupid bits, is here coupled to a totality of arrogance. I hear this and I think of international relations, the economy, the million things I do not understand about running a country and I have to conclude that neither does the government. If they’re this stupid about something I do know, I mean stupid to this degree and to a depth so deep only their arrogance is still visible, it’s hard not to conclude that they’re the same about everything.
So the UK government is laughable and in as far as anyone listens to the UK anymore, we are being laughed at.
Look, I would be ashamed to compare television production to Britain’s history of rather more gigantically regrettable moments, but stupidity and arrogance are always the ingredients.
And that is what we British do terribly.
Okay, no, I was going to stop there because that reversal of “terribly British” into “British do terribly” is an ending. Screw endings, though, I need something to lift me back up. I only get to talk you once a week, let’s not leave it like this.
Instead, let me tell you this. Lately television is the chief thing that have been getting me through the week. Specifically “Only Murders in the Building” and, while I wait the impossibly long seven days between episodes of that, I have at last been getting into “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” too.
One of those shows is so new it isn’t over yet. The other is fifty years old. Fifty. Half a century.
You can’t ever make something deliberately to last half a hundred years and counting. But you can try. And that would be damn sight better than setting out to make shows featuring red buses, village greens, or fucking afternoon tea.
I was booked to do a quick thing on a local BBC radio station yesterday and obviously whenever you do this, if you can, you listen to the show. Tune in a bit early, which is now amazingly easy because of live streaming over the internet, hear how your bit is being promoted, hear what else is going on.
It’s not always possible, you can be bouncing from station to station with no time in between. But I love it when I can do this because I think it makes my bit better. I can more engage with the show and the presenter and the listeners because I can do a callback to something they’ve just heard or said.
Fine. So far, so obvious. Only, this time as I’m listening away, it felt like I short-circuited. There was a fella on before me doing a review thing and it was abruptly like I’m simultaneously at my desk now and I’m sitting in a radio studio years ago. I used to do that, I said aloud.
There must’ve been at least a pixel of regret that I wasn’t still doing it, surely, but after the jolt of remembering, the main feeling was relief that I didn’t have to do it any more. It was something that took a hell of a lot of time and effort, time and effort that today I’m not that interested in. Not for that job, that role.
I am a lot older than the keen little William Gallagher who used to do those things, but I wonder if the difference is more than age. I wonder if it’s that I’m more selective. Back in the day, you say yes to everything or you do everything until someone says no.
Now I have a better idea of how much time and effort something is likely to take, and I suppose I can triage. You would hope so after a lot of years working, but sometimes I think things that are obvious still need saying, still need being brought to your own attention.
Such as this. I work early mornings, I would work late night except I crash out asleep, and I typically work through weekends. I’ve known for a long time that I need to give something up.
But it was listening to this fella that reminded me that I have given things up, that I can give them up, that we can move on.
I’m conscious that I think I’m juggling a lot and then I look at you and all you’re doing. I feel a bit feeble. But I am feeble, then, and I should own it. I need to focus more, stop spreading the effort and concentrate it better.
My first book was about the television drama “The Beiderbecke Affair” and it was for the British Film Institute. It was in their range of TV Classics and naturally, when you’ve done one, the only thing more likely than the publisher asking if you’d like to do another, is you asking the publisher if you can.
Even more than Beiderbecke, I wanted to write about “Lou Grant”. It didn’t fly and it didn’t fly for a dozen reasons from how the range almost never did US shows, to how the range wasn’t making money. But to make a pitch, I had to do a little bit of research.
That’s chiefly because if you are a publisher and you go to check whether there’s already a book on the proposed subject, you very quickly find that there is. My job was not only to convince the BFI that the topic was of value and that the chance of anyone buying a copy was good, but also that there was a reason for anyone else to do another book about this show.
To my mind, that was damn easy. This 1990s book about the making of “Lou Grant” is really an academic treatise. It sets out to explore whether the show and its “Los Angeles Tribune” newspaper setting was an accurate representation of real journalism at the time. The answer is: more than most. I’ve just saved you reading the book, although I’m denying you some fantastic access the writer had to key people involved.
As part of my own little initial stab at research, though, I created a few Google alerts. Any time something came up about “Lou Grant”, it would be added to the newsreader app I use constantly on my iPhone.
I think I originally created some alerts specifically for certain writers, but I would’ve abandoned that quite quickly. One of my favourite writers on the show is April Smith and if I remember getting alerts about her new novels, I know I got more news stories that contained lines like this: “In April, Smith said…”.
Forget setting an alert for Michelle Gallery. For a brief time I knew more about the opening hours of US art auction houses than is sensible.
But if I dropped those off after the book project failed to go, I somehow left the “Lou Grant” alert in place.
Consequently, over the years since, I have been alerted to the odd thing that some of the writers are doing now, and sometimes various television executives. There’s an excellent series of interviews with Grant Tinker about the show, for instance, and I’d not have found it otherwise.
Mostly I hear about cast, though. It’s through a Google alert that I got to watch Linda Kelsey performing a drama reading somewhere. Apparently it’s through a lack of Google alert that I can’t find that again now I want to show you. Bugger.
But if I found that a couple of years ago and if the Tinker interview is further back than that, there was one thing I could regularly count on my “Lou Grant” Google alert to keep turning up.
Ed Asner.
It seemed like very other week, it cannot be more than every other month, but I would get an alert of a news story about him performing a one-man show on stage somewhere. Or going to perform somewhere. Or maybe campaigning, or doing voiceovers, or just being interviewed an awful lot about the sheer volume of work he had done and the seemingly even greater volume of work he was now doing.
So it was a more of a jolt than I would have imagined to find out this week that he’s just died.
Just died. That’s like yeah, yeah, he just had to go do that dying thing, he’ll back in a minute. And there is a bit of me that would entirely believe that.
When I think about “Lou Grant” it’s usually about the writing, which I loved so much then that it made me want to become a writer. And which I admire so much more now that I am one. But back in the day, watching this series in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was of course the whole I was enjoying. The writing, the acting, the directing, the production, all of it.
Now I look back at it, I’ve a new appreciation for the set design. But I most definitely have a greater appreciation for the acting. It is all so naturalistic that I forgot then and I can still forget now that it is acting at all.
Tell a lie, it isn’t all so naturalistic. Ed Asner is far from that in the first episode. He’s so far from it that you feel he’s in a different series to everyone else. But then for that first edition and perhaps a few after it, he was.
Never before –– and significantly, never since –– has a half-hour sitcom spawned a one-hour drama. But that is what happened. Ed Asner played grumpy Lou Grant for seven years on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and then he played the more layered version of him on his own show for five.
So if Asner thinks he’s still in a comedy in episode one, you can understand it. Or you can now. Back then, I may not have consciously registered the different tone between him and the rest of the cast, but I felt it and wondered what was going on.
Oddly, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” never really played in the UK. Even more oddly, one of its sitcom spin-offs did: “Rhoda” was a hit here. So when this “Lou Grant” show started, I hadn’t the faintest idea that this character had any history.
I sound like I’m criticising Asner for how he performed in those early episodes and I suppose I am, but really I’m appreciating what a giant and unprecedented job he was in the middle of pulling off.
There’s a lot else to admire about the acting in the show, but that’s the element that sticks out at me. I thought that this and those constant alerts about new shows was the specific reason that I was so startled by Asner’s death even at age 91.
Here’s the thing, though. I’ve been thinking about this for days and the reason I’m jolted by his death is bigger than I thought. Any time anyone you’ve even heard of dies, of course you’re sad about it. When that someone is a direct connection back to your childhood, it’s of course more, even when that person has never heard of you.
But beyond that, there’s this. There are actors I like, actors I don’t. Certainly there are performances I relish and ones where I’m glad they didn’t do that to my script. I would not have said that there is any actor who has inspired me. I would not have said Ed Asner has. This show’s writers, certainly. I’m so single-minded-focused on writing that it’s writers or maybe certain producers I know enable certain writers who I credit.
“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was beyond a hit in the US. It was such a success that – cutting a story at least in half – CBS gave an on-air commitment to a spin-off for the Lou Grant character. You could dream of such a deal now, but such was the popularity of the comedy that CBS bought 13 episodes of “Lou Grant” straight off.
It was called an on-air commitment, but it was really pay or play. If CBS had aired the first couple of episodes to disastrous ratings, I’m sure they’d have pulled it and just eaten the enormous cost. Whatever their thinking was, the drama that made me a writer got on air and had 13 episodes in which to shake out things like that naturalistic versus more comedic acting.
I owe a debt, then, to the writers of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” a series I’ve barely seen and certainly hadn’t the slightest notion of back when I was starting to mount up this bill. Creator/writers Allan Burns and James L. Brooks became familiar names to me on screen through creating “Lou Grant”, along with Gene Reynolds. But CBS had such faith in writers that it had tried to fire Burns and Brooks when they were developing the Mary Tyler Moore series and it was only Grant Tinker’s intervention that prevented them being out on their ears.
Which means score one to Grant Tinker, but this also tells me that really CBS gave an on-air commitment to Ed Asner.
So a show that meant this much to me exists because of an actor’s performance in a series I didn’t know.
I struggle to bring myself to say that therefore I am a writer because of Ed Asner, but it isn’t half looking like that. I thought it was unusual enough to be able to pin one’s career down to a single moment like a TV show, but to pin it to a performance I hadn’t seen, that’s just eye-widening.
I’ve been having trouble with a script I’m writing. It is partly because I appear to be in it and while my cold writer’s head can see that’s necessary to tell this particular story, even I wouldn’t watch something about me.
But then there is also this. The script is about real people. I am a real person, I’m a real person who hasn’t had breakfast yet and is having difficulty remembering whether he’s shaved this fuzzy morning, but I don’t interest me. Beyond wondering why I’m writing my own dialogue, and then why I’m reading it back, I don’t concern me. Instead, it’s everyone else I’m worried about.
I have more research about the two other real people in the story than is even really feasible. Plus above all the facts and the documentation, they were my friends. No question, I’m armed and ready in that sense, but I’m a writer who’s also a journalist: I would give up an eye faster than I would make up a quote for a real person.
And now I’m going to have to make up entire speeches. Ouch, that’s revealing: I’m hiding in tenses and presumably because I am tense. The truth is that I already have made up entire speeches. I’ve written a two-page argument between me and one of these people. And that fight cuts into me, it hurts me, yet still I look at the page thinking he didn’t say that and nobody cares what I didn’t say back.
Except I had a dream the other night in which the late Alan Plater told me, in these precise words, “as long as it’s true, make it up”.
Then it’s like I planned what happened next. The reason I’m telling you this today, apart from how it’s pressing on my mind and I tell you everything, is that a play of Alan’s is to be re-staged at the Hampstead Theatre in London later this year. “Peggy for You” is about Alan’s first agent, Peggy Ramsay, and I read the script last night. Re-read: my copy of the published script turns out to be 21 years old.
It also turns out to be the true story of this eye-poppingly wild and wonderful woman, except it isn’t true at all. Except it is. It is an account of one day of her working life in the 1960s, completely made up, and therefore completely true.
I know because Alan’s introduction to the script says so.
“When I started writing the play, I heard her voice saying: ‘Just make sure it’s a pack of lies, dear.’ And it is. I did no research, but relied totally on a blend of memory, anecdote, myth and legend. The few elements that can be clearly identified could not possibly have happened on the day in question.”
Since Alan is one of the real people in my script, I think I should keep listening to him.
