Constraints are good for you

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There was a fashion once for novels to have subtitles – not as in “Pride & Prejudice II: The Revenge” but “Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus”. Please consider the following to be called:

Constraints are good for you, or, What’s Wrong with Community?

There is unfortunately a lot wrong with the new season 6 of Community but constraints and the lack of them is a big enough issue that you can identify it.

Community used to be on NBC television in the States and all network television shows have mandated running times. They’re getting shorter, but they’re mandated. To the second. Here in the UK, Russell T Davies once argued that he really needed a longer running time for a particular episode of Doctor Who and Julie Gardner persuaded BBC schedulers to allow it. But as good as she was, she could only pull that off because the show aired on Saturday nights. If it had been during the week there was no possibility whatsoever because the six o’clock news hour will always finish at 7pm and you’ll never guess when the ten o’clock news is on. Saturdays don’t have those two bricks in the schedule so there was room yet it was still a big job and a big ask to get the extension.

Especially since Doctor Who is sold around the world and every other network has the same constraints. I don’t know this but I’d bet money that Doctor Who episode now exists in two forms: the original UK extended one and an edited version that was shown around the world.

Community has stepped free of these constraints because it’s no longer on television, it’s online. Yahoo Screen made its single biggest splash on the web by buying the show and producing a new season. I think they also cocked it up, mind. If you’re in the UK, go to the UK Yahoo Screen website and you’ll see that you can exclusively watch episodes on that site – but you can’t. You can’t watch any episodes there, not one, because they made a deal with Sony Entertainment TV to air the show on Sky TV a day after its official release each week. Good for them getting some money for the show. But we’re on episode 12, we are three months into this and still the website for their single biggest property is wrong.

I am curious about that airing on an obscure, high-numbered Sky TV channel: from what I can see the episodes aren’t edited to fit the slot, they just take whatever time they take. And I do see that they take more time than they used to.

On NBC, each episode was 22 minutes – and a marvel, just a marvel with what they did in that time – whereas the new sixth season episodes will sometimes run to 26 minutes. I want to say a couple are longer but I can’t prove it.

The show still has financial constraints, its budget is its budget and you don’t get more cash just because you fancy running a little long this week. The length is now entirely an editorial decision and I think they’ve got lazy because they could.

Back in the first season, there was some change that meant they suddenly had to fill a few seconds under the end titles so they filmed little vignettes – if you know the show, it was usually the Troy and Abed routines – and added them to the episodes. They were funny, they were warm, they were daft and you liked them.

In season six, they’re gone but you regularly get an equally unrelated moment. You get a scene with characters who may have been mentioned in the show but usually not seen. You get something that’s tangentially related to the story but if you could have a very tangent, they are very tangential. A couple are fine and forgettable. Some are rather touching. But the rest are just dire.

No, they’re not just dire, they are dire and also very long.

Once when I raved about Community I mentioned that it was an episode about paintball that hooked me. Then I said that I’d just learned there was a sequel paintball story in the next season and it took will power, serious fighting will power, to stop myself from just leaping forward to that story. In comparison, there was a paintball episode in season 6 last week and when I heard it was coming, I actually said aloud: “Oh, no.”

It turned out to be fine. Not brilliant, not on a par with the previous ones, but a definite high point in this season – except the last three minutes are this other unrelated scene and it just made me wince.

Much of this run is liable to wincing. As in the poor season 4, you can see the actors acting and so many of the quirky things that happen feel forced. Chang falls over a hedge in episode 12 because it’s funny to have Chang fall over a hedge, not because anything got him there. Characters now react in a sitcom way not because the show is mocking sitcoms but because it is one.

So there is a lot that is disappointing about season 6, the so very much awaited and hoped-for season 6, but if you tried to fix it, the first thing you’d do is sort out the running time.

When you can’t go over 22 minutes, you have to lose material and that is hard. But it turns out that it is better than keeping that material in. You have scenes and lines you love but still it is better if they go. Maybe all I’m doing is paraphrasing William Faulkner’s line that ‘in writing, you must kill all your darlings’ but if so, then ironically I’m doing so at enormous length.

Next crisis

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Years and years ago, my therapist told me I over-think things. Not a day goes by that I don’t wonder: what did she really mean?

I do know that if you see me lost in thought, it is usually about whatever the next thing is that I have to do. I’ve often got to a party or a meal or a play and consciously thought right, got here, that’s done, what do I need to do tomorrow?

Do you do this too? I also queue up my worries. If I have a big event coming then the single way I have of ever getting it off my mind is to have another big event coming up before it. So I’ll come out of that first one probably feeling great – yesterday was event number 176 of which 10 were meh and 2 were ulcer-bursting awful – and I’m immediately fretting about the next one a week away.

But.

Two things. First, when I’m actually working at an event or a workshop or whatever, I’m right there in the moment for every single moment and there isn’t a whisper of a thought of the next thing from start to finish. I think this may be why I like producing and presenting events so much.

Second, this did happen to me again yesterday. The day was fun, I glowed out of there and through a tea with a friend and colleague from the event, I glowed into joining up with Angela and then right in the middle of a curry, wallop.

Angela looked at me just like you’re doing.

But the reason for saying this to you today, the reason for the But up there a few paragraphs ago, is that this changed. This went away.

We saw Dar Williams in concert at the Glee Club. She’s the artist I’ve said I wouldn’t kill to write like – but I’d maim. I adore her work, her music has meant a lot to me for a very long time and I’ve often seen her in concert. Every time has been good, but this one was great.

Whatever I was thinking about when I went into that concert, she took us all wherever she wanted to go.

I’m going to think about that.

It happened on my watch

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An editor I particularly liked working for once told me she knew I was serious about what I did because of my watch. This was Helen Hackworthy on Radio Times and she is smart. She’s the only editor who ever spotted that I signed off emails with a capital W when things were fine and a lowercase w when they really, really, really were not.

What she’d also seen was that when I’d sit down at that BBC desk, I would take off my watch and place it next to the keyboard. She saw that as my being conscious of time, determined to get things done, all sorts of professional things that I’d love to have been correct and I hope weren’t entirely wrong.

But they were a bit wrong.

Quite a lot wrong.

I used to take it off because that watch had a metal strap and it kept scraping against the keyboard.

I remember this, I know this, I remember Helen and I talking about it, I remember her laughing when I explained but I cannot remember that watch. I’ve had many watches over the years and – exactly like you, admit this now – I haven’t worn one regularly since I got a mobile phone.

Somewhere in the set of watches I’ve had there was that one with the metal strap and I know there was a Casio thing in the early 80s because the same watch is a plot point in the 1983 movie Blue Thunder. That was a helicopter adventure, an aerial paranoid thriller and apparently it’s going to be remade now with drones instead of the chopper. This is either modernising the tale or making it cheaper.

But of all the watches in all the bars in all the towns, there are three that matter to me. And they’re all in this shot.

watches

The one on the left there with the brown leather strap is the watch I was wearing when I first met Alan Plater and Shirley Rubinstein in the late 1980s. They became friends of mine but then, on that day, I was just meeting and interviewing Alan. I was all kinds of nervous: not just because he was already a writing hero to me but because this was my first big interview with anyone.

That man was so interesting in that interview that 25 years later or so, quotes from it were used in a set of DVD liner notes and about five years further on, I used quotes from it myself for my first book.

But for all that, there was this: the watch stopped working soon after I met Alan. I don’t know how to blame him but I do. Except that I kept the watch because of him and I quietly wore it again just one more time at his funeral in 2010.

See the watch in the middle of that shot? The one that looks like it says ‘now’ underneath the watch face hands? It does say now but it’s not underneath anything: there are no hands. That is it. The word now. I have to tell you, it is the most accurate watch I’ve ever had. Never have to wind it, either.

I do think it’s been losing a little time lately but I still wore it because I like it and because it was given to me by Angela.

But then it would be Angela who pointed out a few months ago that this watch’s time was up, so to speak, that its days were numbered. She said that as soon as the existence of the third one in that shot was announced. It’s an Apple Watch and I could do you a review here but instead let’s just take one fact about it.

Apart from the Now watch which I’ve worn a lot yet far from constantly, I have not had a regular watch since I got my phone in 1997. That’s over. I have a watch again and it has slipped into my life as if I’ve always had it on me.

My watches up to now, where I can remember them, have been reminders of things that have happened or of people who matter to me. Now my Apple Watch actually reminds me of things I have to make happen and it is how I keep in touch with those people. Quite literally keep in touch as you can send tap, tap, taps to fellow Apple Watch owners.

But it will also always remind me of buying Angela one at the same time. It will remind me of how hers came ages before mine. And now it will remind me of talking about this with you.

Don’t tell anyone that bit about my only taking my watch off because it scratches, okay? Who knows, maybe other editors projected qualities on to me like that.

Mourning after

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I didn’t believe there could be actually be a best news this day after the UK General Election, but it turns out there can be a worst.

A government actively against its own people. That’s not a govenment, it is an enemy in power.

The Conservatives are back in and while final numbers are still being counted, we can imagine how bad the next five years are going to be. We don’t know, but we can imagine and we’ll see what survives to the next election.

Hindsight will be in 2020.

A natter of life and death

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That’s all, just a natter and a blather. In the run up to a general election, my mind wanders around more than ever and chiefly it’s focusing on, grabbing on to, just about anything except politics. Just possibly not today.

I do remember my family worrying that I had no interest in the news when I was growing up. They’re sick of me now: I read hundreds of articles a day through my RSS reader and they aren’t sure what RSS is or why I like it so much. But, grief, the ability to just check out the headlines on your phone while you wait for the kettle to boil, it is beyond handy. I could go to each news site in turn on the phone’s web browser but what am I, a barbarian? The news comes to me, all of it, from everywhere.

There are myriad RSS newsreaders, by the way, and they’re available to you on any phone. I have an iPhone and swear by one called Reeder.

I also swear at a lot of the news I read. Maybe that’s what my family doesn’t like. But the consequence of RSS, swearing and – okay, okay – getting older is that I have never been so politically aware.

And therefore so politically depressed.

There is no party I want to vote for, no person nationally or locally that I want to see in power. No one. Well, I do delight in Nicola Sturgeon but I don’t know much about her nor is it physically possible to vote for a Scottish party here in England. She does just tick two boxes that make me happy: for one thing she’s an adult woman where the other leaders feel like schoolboys. For the other, the concept of Scotland being decisive in this general election is dramatically exquisite to me because of the previous bollocks about whether the country should split from the UK or not.

Don’t get me wrong, I still don’t know what I think about it leaving, I just see that I was right about what would happen if it stayed. Specifically if it stayed because of the promises made to it. I’ve written before about how England, UK and Conservative promises to the Scottish people sounded like a pissed boyfriend vowing to be better from now on. They never are, you know they never are, and these promises never would be, you knew they never would be. I barely listened to the promises: I knew they’d vanish after Scotland agreed to give it one more go.

Now, maybe – maybe – that boyfriend is going to need a favour.

I’m not usually right about politics yet sometimes it is obvious and I think unfortunately the obvious stuff is always bad. Prime Minister David Cameron made a comment recently about how abhorrent an idea it is that Scotland could have sway over the whole UK, that decisions made in one part of the nation could affect everyone. He makes decisions in one part of the nation that affect everyone. He makes those decisions in one room. It’s the Cabinet, which curiously enough seems to be the extent of his care when we’re not near an election: does policy X or Y personally benefit and profit someone in the Cabinet? Then we’ll do that.

You see how easy it is to be cynical? I’m not convinced it’s possible to be anything else at the moment. For the first time in my life I do see the logic in not voting at all. Our democratic system is arguably built to favour the incumbent, it’s certainly built to support the system itself and the furtherance of the status quo. I can see the argument that voting is supporting a system that feels theoretically right but practically broken.

In other words, I can see that voting only encourages them.

Nonetheless, I will vote. I cannot do anything else. Cannot.

This may seem a somewhat un-topical reason but amongst everything I think about democracy, amongst everything I want to see happen and everything that I fear will instead, I have to vote because of the Suffragettes.

Don’t get me started on the idiocy, the shameful idiocy that women haven’t just always had precisely the same right to vote as men. Don’t. I’ll go off on one about how human beings can so often create society structures that speak of equality and fairness, that have laws and standards and decency but also a giant bloody hole in them. Democracy for all, oh except women. Treat your neighbour as you would want them to treat you, oh except if they’re not the same sex, religion or race as you, then it’s fine, do what you want.

That’s not me going off on one, by the way. Me going off on one about this is a seven-hour lecture.

The Suffragettes did not support the system, they changed it. Think how impossible that seems now and dial back a century to how even more impossible it must’ve been then.

The system we have now is materially better than it was. Look at Nicola Sturgeon again: one hundred years ago she wouldn’t have been allowed to vote, now she’s head of a political party. Things are actually better. Genuinely, truthfully better.

Just don’t look at the standard of lying we get from politicians today. If I can see that this claim doesn’t match that claim – and doesn’t even come close to this fact – then the standard of pork pies is so low as to be insulting. If you’re going to tell me bollocks, at least put some effort into it.

And just don’t look at any debate, certainly never tune in to Question Time which has become about as bad as Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Parliament.

I’m going to vote but it will be for my best guess at the least worst option available and I have little confidence that I’ll get it right.

I’d like to see a Suffragette-level shake up of the system. But I’ll settle for us reevaluating Eton. We keep saying that’s a great school because we keep being told it is by our politicians who chiefly all went there.

A bastion of British education.

Schools are supposed to form you into an adult. Eton takes the child, makes a schoolboy, and stops. You can name politicians you like, you can point to adult and responsible things they do, but still when you hear them talk and argue, when you see what they do, what they achieve, the word that comes to mind is only similar to bastion.

Watch out

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It’s 24 April 2015 and today is the official launch of a new press release from Apple. Crowds of Apple fans will be lining up outside stores to get the new press release while legions of PC fans will be writing blogs about how Windows has always had press releases and in fact little else. I don’t disagree.

I have this slight push-pull thing about technology: I swear to you that I am not interested in hardware or software, only in what I can get to do with it. I’m into the work I can do, what I can write, what I can make, not in what setting does which. Yet I’m steeped in this stuff and it makes my life run. And there are business and drama issues in all this for me. One of which is the, to me, fascinating way that from today you can but also can’t buy the new Apple Watch.

Mainly, you can’t. Don’t bother going to an Apple Store. Well, you’ll be able to see them and I imagine there will be a way for Apple to take your money there but it’s likely to be via saying go use that Mac over there.

The Apple Watch has only been made available to order online. I can’t remember when these orders started but it was a couple of weeks ago and in theory if you were quick enough, you would today have a watch in your hands. I was quick enough: I knew I wanted one, I knew what I wanted, I ordered and I ordered quickly. My watch is still a few weeks away.

I don’t think there’s a way to see this as the slickest Apple release ever. But on the other wrist, I have been using an Apple Watch because I’m doing a thing that needed it. And they are good. I am going to be using the hell out of mine, when it finally gets here.

Except, I think when you first put one on, you rather wonder why you did. Until you do something, the watch face is black and blank. It looks a lot smaller than you expected but it’s also a bit meh. Then you move your wrist and the watch face switches on. Or you press a button to go do something. Then that screen is gorgeous. I mean, meh to wow.

But you’re meant to glance at this thing and you will, that’s exactly what you’ll do, just not at first. At first you’ll be looking at this constantly, waving it around like a new toy, and in some unconscious way trying to justify why you spent all this money. (The cheapest is £300, the most expensive is heading toward £10,000. The difference is solely in the materials used: aluminium for the cheaper one, gold for the most expensive. Everything else is the same, works the same, does the same things.)

So the first times that you lift it to look at that watch face, you will barely have finished thinking cor before it switches off again. No question, it would be better if the watch were visibly on all the time but, no question, it would run out of battery power in an hour instead of lasting all day. (I haven’t had one on for long enough in a straight run to know how long it lasts in practice but this is what I understand.)

I want to get my own and to get past the initial new toy feeling. I still have that sometimes with my three-year-old iPhone but I want to get to the point where I’m using it because I’m using it, not because I want to see what it does. I’ve seen what it does. Exhaustively, in fact.

And as I had to go through every setting – you know how much I love settings – I did find one key thing. The Apple Watch is a grower. You don’t have to learn how to use it, you don’t have to ever use every feature, but you will keep finding new bits, new things that make you glad you’ve got one. I’d be standing there with a checklist of what I had to try out and I’d keep going ooooh, I’m having that. I’m using that.

Sending Angela a message by just tapping on my watch and knowing that her watch will tap her. (When she gets hers: I bought us one each but they’re both weeks away.) Walking down a street being told with the smallest of nudges that it’s time to turn left. Getting one of those incessant emails and just seeing with a glance that it’s not one I need to deal with. Setting timers – I cook a lot and have no skill so I’m reliant on timings in recipes. I listen to a lot of things when I’m cooking and if the kettle’s boiling it’s so loud I can’t hear much worth a damn but now a tap on my watch will pause the radio or the music or the podcast and a tap will start it again.

I once counted that I took out my iPhone 200 times on a particular day. Apparently the average is 120. I can’t guess what the figures will be now, but the watch will surely decimate that. Especially if non-Apple apps work as well as the Apple ones: that’s something I’ve not been able to test yet and I am itching to see how my beloved OmniFocus works on it.

I’m not sure how well that will work and I’m not sure why Apple has struggled so much to do launch this watch on its launch day. But the one thing I am not in any doubt about is that I’m glad I’ve bought one.

I’m going to hell for this one

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I don’t think I’ve ever asked you about your religion. Never thought about it. Can’t see that it matters. But mine is going to come up today because I’ve just produced an event featuring kids from a Church of England school. I was commissioned by the vicar and because he also got Rowan Williams to come speak at it, I ended up having supper with the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury.

Also, it was in an Abbey.

You can see why I feel it’s relevant to tell you that I’m orthodox atheist.

Polesworth
Listen, I ‘fessed up immediately with Fr Philip Wells of Polesworth Abbey: I hadn’t thought of the orthodox atheist joke yet but I told him that I am “absent religion”. I would not have taken the gig without making that clear but while it didn’t matter to him, I found that it did to me.

This has been a couple of months in the making and throughout it all I was doing what I do, I was doing what you’d do, I was thinking about the brief, weighing up the timescales, seeing what resources there were, what resources I needed, what I could do, how the day and evening would run, all that usual stuff. I also went through my usual stuff of, frankly, fretting. I fret, I worry, I panic: this has to be good, this must be great. Whether I am up to the job or not, I am the one doing it and we don’t get to have a second go with anyone better if I get it wrong.

Nothing new there: that is an average day for me and I can only wish that I could get a little more blasé about things sometimes.

Mind you, if I did, maybe I would also get blasé about the result and when I left that Abbey last Wednesday night, I wasn’t blasé. I found I could flip a switch in my head and choose whether to be ecstatic or relieved. Overjoyed or exhausted.

What we did was a kind of mashup celebration of Polesworth Abbey’s history and the poet John Donne who has a deep connection with the place. Plus there is this book from 450 years ago which is written in that completely unreadable but beautiful ancient text and comes with a mystery. For there is a page missing in the middle. Stolen? Vandalised? Or just whoops, I spilt my tea, give me that?

Naturally we’ll never know but Fr Philip read me like, well, a book, and so the first thing he told me was about this and I was inescapably hooked. Hooked by the mystery, hooked by how this was something I could grab on to that was text, that was writing, and while it’s a religious book it is people communicating. It’s people writing with certain assumptions, certain presumptions that the reader has the same background, the same interests, that they share common cultural references and, yes, that they believe the same thing.

Plus I could see a joke.

Fr Philip wanted something to do with what could or perhaps should be on that missing page. So did I. Yet I couldn’t write it. I don’t know why but I could not pull off the voice of this writer, could not quite make something that worked despite a lot of trying. But Polesworth Abbey is home to a Young Writers’ Group led by Alex Townley for Writing West Midlands. It’s the same idea as the one I run in Burton and I’ve visited that group before so I knew both that they were smart and that of course they knew the Abbey.

Alex and her assistant Lindsay Bailey let me borrow the group for half an hour. Usually when you’re doing this you’re creating writing exercises, you’re finding new things for the groups to explore for themselves. “Not this time,” I told them. “This time it’s a job.” I briefed them on what I needed and they wrote it. Straight away. Right there in front of me while I watched. I could get used to that.

I asked them to write a serious prayer type of thing, showing them what was in the book already and describing the style. I did also ask them to do a very not serious one, a silly one. And they did. That is one smart group.

What they did was not just create that material for me to use in the event but they also relaxed me. I had a big chunk of work in the bag and so when I then went into Nethersole School near Polesworth Abbey, I could be relaxed about what I needed them to do. I also knew that I wasn’t alone in thinking this missing page lark was so fascinating. And, my lights, you should see what those school kids came up with. I can’t name names because they’re school kids and I won’t name names because there were too many good writers and I’d be bound to miss one out.

However, there was one who made me gasp. She is a poet. Apparently – because I asked about her afterwards – also talented in maths and science. I can’t tell you her name but I know it and I’m going to be looking out for her to follow her career.

Nethersole School kids and the Polesworth Abbey Young Writers’ groups did the hard work, they wrote the tough bits, my job was to link them all into an event. I’m more interested in what they did than what I do but so that you know, what I decided was that we’d have four simultaneous events running and overlapping, intersecting. In one room of the Abbey we had three kids performing all of the missing page extracts. In the main Abbey itself we had a drama group re-enacting the archaeological digs that have been making fascinating discoveries about Polesworth. Then at the top of the Abbey we had kids reading the poetry of John Donne plus work by Gregory Leadbetter that was written for Polesworth’s previous celebrations of Donne.

If you’re counting on your fingers, as I kept doing, that’s three. The fourth was to do with how there used to be an official hermit at Polesworth. You’ve just pictured a bloke with a beard hiding out in the woods and avoiding everyone but this was a woman who was required to look after the prayer books and to give advice when asked. And she was asked a lot. I imagined Benedicta Burton being a right grump about all this – so I wrote a script for her where she got to be grumpy and rude as she guided the audience around the other three events.

I really enjoyed writing that script but I was also aware that it was a tough gig for someone to perform: you’re learning quite a lot, you’re having to be just that right side of rude where it’s funny and not believed, plus you have to be a tour guide and control people.

So many people. This is something I got wrong. Fr Phillip told me to expect around 150 people – and I think on the night it was nearer 200 who turned up – but it’s one thing knowing the number and it’s another really grasping how many people that is. In the end, there were so many that we had to change the sequence of the tour so that we could avoid people seeing things they’d just accidentally walked past.

I had two Benedicta Burtons and one Benedict Burton and, I tell you, I was as proud as a parent: they did their parts with flair and verve and cheek and they adapted as soon as anything had to change. The readers made me very, very happy, the “archaeologists” were just wonderful, but the hermits were professionals. The two John Donne readers saw that there were so many people that we’d have problems getting through it all in time and offered to temporarily become extra Benedict Burton hermits. They didn’t know the part and still they offered and I used them immediately. They will go far.

Fr Phillip tells me that his favourite moment of the night is how those John Donne readers went back to their original jobs when they had finished the extra hermit roles and performed that poetry in front of the whole audience. Difficult poems, read well. I agree completely.

Except.

I am still addicted to that book with the missing page so when my four circling events were done and Fr Phillip got to deliver the news about the archaeology finds, as he got to introduce Rowan Williams, I got to have them both do something extra. Fr Philip performed the key John Donne poem, Riding Westwards, and explained the Abbey’s connection with the poet.

And then.

I’d picked out four of the missing page pieces and they read them to the whole audience at once. Fr Philip in his own Abbey, Rowan Williams with his stunning voice, they read the children’s work. The first was that brilliant serious piece from Nethersole School and the last was from a Polesworth Young Writer. I had more trouble picking that last one as there was so much to choose from but I knew I could only have one missing page prayer that had anything silly in it. Too much silliness robs the joke and there was this one that began so seriously, so very perfectly seriously, and then takes a left turn.

You’ll have to imagine this and you’ll have to imagine the night as it wasn’t filmed but picture the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury solemnly speaking about the last supper and the “eat this in memory of me” bit followed with perfect comic timing by “do you prefer white bread or wholemeal?” before zooming off into a bit about special offer bread prices in Asda and how they are next to all the “Frozen” toys.

That Polesworth Young Writer got gigantic laughs from the entire audience.

And I got one too.

Nobody knows this was me, well, apart from you, but I wrote a line for Rowan Williams. It was a line to bridge his move from the school kids’ work to his own speech and he was up for it. It was the joke I’d seen right at the start, the gag that had leapt into my head during the very first phone call from Fr Phillip.

I feel I may have overplayed this with you now but in context, on the night, following that delicious missing page prayer about Frozen and especially when delivered by Rowan Williams, it was my best script in ages. He just said:

Let it go.

I’ve written gags for an archbishop. What would my Roman Catholic school think of that?

Actually, what do I think of that? I told you that I’m more interested in what the kids did than what I had to do but I also began this with that line about going to hell. And I said all this mattered to me. It mattered as an event, it mattered to me as a way to get good people creating something good – no, dammit, something great – but it did also affect me and my atheism. I’m still here, I’ve not budged, but after so many years of completely forgetting religion even exists, I found it fascinating to watch a different world from so close up. Fascinating and illuminating.

Possibly also embarrassing. It’s not like I asked Rowan Williams “So what do you do, then?”. But at that supper, they did say grace and for just one moment I assumed she was another guest coming later.

Please don’t tell my mother.

Sorkin about a revolution

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Here’s the thing. I really do believe that Aaron Sorkin brought a revolution to television. He made the first hit political drama in decades, he got us worked up equally about massive issues and tiny relationships. He also writes dialogue like music which is deeply important to me and, I’d offer, to all drama.

Then he’s a celebrity for being a TV writer. The man does theatre and film too, but you know his name and you know he wrote The West Wing. There aren’t many TV writers who get known at all: where you may well have favourite novelists, it’s a lot less common to have favourite TV writers.

It’s not a giant leap to say that Sorkin by himself – and his writing teams – helped making television drama become the respected form it is. And it is respected. Film makers are turning to television and that’s got to be partly because they stopped being able to get funding for movies but it is also because TV at its best is a more compelling form of drama than most films at the moment. Mind you, I am fully in hope that this will change when the movies run out of superhero sequels. Any day now, any day.

But.

“Here’s the thing” is an Aaron Sorkin phrase. It’s entered my ideolect – wait, I didn’t know this term, is it already familiar to you? Your nation has a language or languages that its people speak; your region has a dialect that everyone around you shares; you have your own specific and personal ideolect.

Mine is replete with quotes and phrases that have stuck in my head and sometimes for no clear reason. Many are from Alan Plater, there are couple of Jack Rosenthal lines, some Doctor Who, some Paul Reiser, it goes on. That way I wrote ‘But’ on a line by itself is from Anton Chekhov. I’ve said this before: sometimes I’ll hear Angela laugh from another room as she’s watching some ancient film and suddenly there’s been a line that she has often heard me say. It’s got so that now I sometimes have lines of my own that keep bubbling up out of me then I feel obligated to add “and that was one of mine”.

Angela seems fine and/or resigned to all this now but she does wish that I hadn’t picked up this from Community: “Cool. Cool, cool, cool.” The joy when a friend said exactly that in an email to me the other day. I rushed to show Angela: see? it’s not just me.

But it is just me. As in, it’s me and it is not my characters. I have no doubt that I must unconsciously give my characters some of these lines or some of these repeated rhythms, but I fight against it and I believe I fight successfully.

Aaron Sorkin does not.

I’m actually okay with the way that characters in The West Wing talk like each other: I can see a close group picking up each other’s phrases and styles, I’m good with that.

Similarly, characters in Sports Night speak like each other. (Here’s how great Aaron Sorkin is: I watched a show with ‘sports’ in the title. I watched 45-odd episodes of it over a week – and I’ve watched them all again several times.)

What niggled at me was how the characters in Sports Night spoke an awful lot like the characters in The West Wing. What disgruntled me was that there are stories in Sports Night that get repeated close to verbatim in Sorkin’s later series. When it was Sports Night and The West Wing, I felt it was him using a good story in the far more successful show and I didn’t like it but I liked the stories, I liked how they were told. When it was Sports Night and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip then, well, not so much. A tale that had been genuinely romantic on Sports Night became nothing short of creepy on Studio 60.

Plus you can tell me that The West Wing was good after Sorkin left it but it wasn’t. I watched the next ten episodes and realised barely a word registered with me. I later learnt that one of those ten episodes was nominated for a writing Emmy and the only conclusion I could make was that it must’ve been one hell of a crap year for American television drama.

Repeated stories, identical-sounding characters, it was all infinitely better than the later and just plain ordinary years of The West Wing because the stories and most especially those identical forms of dialogue were so good. They would stir you and they would soar. I watched a West Wing with a fella who turned me afterwards and said he could’ve written that. No, he couldn’t. No more than I could. The brilliance of Sorkin’s writing is, I think, clear to see yet it’s also better and richer and deeper the more you look under the covers.

I wish I could write like that – but I can’t watch Sorkin’s stuff any more. His Studio 60 and The Newsroom have problems – some of which you can see immediately when you’re watching so you wonder how the makers missed them – but what prevents me watching is that the damn stories are the same and the damn dialogue is the same.

I’ve also said this before: I couldn’t accept Jeff Daniels as Will McAvoy because I can’t see him. He’s got West Wing, Studio 60 and Sports Night characters standing in front of him, getting in the way.

But then by the time The Newsroom came around, we had several videos that shaped what I think of Sorkin. A good one was a pixel-perfect parody called The Foodroom.

Then there was this which, interestingly to me, has two of I think the best writers on television performing in camera: Aaron Sorkin in a cameo with Tina Fey on her 30 Rock series:

But then the bad was Sorkinisms. It’s a video showing how many, many, many, many times he uses precisely the same words in all his series. I watched that and it depressed me. This week I saw the sequel video, Sorkinisms II and it’s worse. Worse enough that I am minded of all this over again and wanted to bleat at you.

The fella who does these YouTube videos says both that they are loving rather than mocking and that Aaron Sorkin has been great about them. I like that. Yet I don’t know that I can convey to you how disappointing it is to see such repetition. Well, I say that and yet I think you’ve worked out that I’m regarding this fella as a fallen hero. Make every character sound the same, don’t make every character sound the same, it’s completely up to you – except doing it to this extent, this rather extraordinary extent, is a problem.

Specifically this problem, for me: it means I can’t watch any more. The work I’ve already seen, that remains important to me, but I can’t make myself get through another Newsroom episode. Still, partly to try countering the Sorkinisms video and partly to explore what I think of Aaron Sorkin in order to pour my heart out to you like this, I just re-watched a West Wing episode called 17 People.

It is a bit of a come-on title: there’s a fact in the story that is uncovered by a character we learn is the 16th person to know so you do spend the hour wondering who the 17th will be. That’s a come on that becomes a bit of a cop out.

But otherwise 17 People is beautiful. So simple. The West Wing was way over budget at this time so it was mandated that the episode have no new guest cast, no location filming, no new sets. It was a bottle show, though the show’s sets were so expansive that it didn’t feel like one. Like the very best bottle shows, though, it was a series of people in rooms talking to one another.

That doesn’t sound great but it is entirely, fully, one hundred percent-ly my favourite form of drama. Two people arguing in a room – where both of them are right. Unbelievably powerful, unbelievably hard to pull off.

This episode is full of little else and though it’s 14 years since I first saw it – 14 years! – so the context of the surrounding episodes is gone, it is still strong. I’ll tell you: it made me cry, it was that exquisitely well done, that exquisitely perfect. The West Wing: Season 2, episode 18, 17 People.

Why did I have to see that Sorkinisms video? Why couldn’t I avoid thinking about how repetitive Sorkin is? And having seen this and been disheartened by it, why could I have not just avoided spoiling him for you?

There’s the thing.

The Adventures of Benshi in “Manhattan”

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Perhaps you already know or even practice this Japanese art form, but it was new to me: I thought Benshi was that lovable dog. A friend said no, it’s those tiny trees, isn’t it?

Benshi sees a spoken word performer standing by a cinema screen: he or she performs a piece while it shows a film. It began as a verbal equivalent of the caption cards you would get in silent movies but it expanded. Benshi performers apparently began describing the action in between the captions then over years began to basically talk about anything they liked.

I have really severe twitching problems with taking someone’s film and using it as stock footage behind my words. I know and I feel the work that went into making any film so just taking it feels like when you’re in school and they get you to make a loathsome time-wasting, busy-work collage and you pretend you’ve created something.

Then I’ve been a critic plus I’ve been on the receiving end of professional critics, I am sometimes hyper conscious of the line between creation and criticism, art and journalism. I get mithered over criticising a film because how dare I take a feature film, reduce it to 400 words and diss it?

But then if I can save you from ever seeing Johnny Mnemonic, then I’ve genuinely given something back to the community. I’ve taken one for the team so you don’t have to.

All of which swirls around my head like I don’t have enough to think about – and I’d like to say that all of which evaporated when Chris Swann asked if I’d like to do a Benshi as part of the Flatpack Film Festival here in Birmingham.

It sort of evaporated. It also sort of coalesced more: I thought maybe this was a way to actually explore what I fret about in all this. Plus, let’s be open here, it was the Flatpack Film Festival and I was very chuffed to be asked to contribute to that. Normally you have to, you know, make a film first.

I had, I think, seven weeks in which to come up with a short five-minute spot and you should’ve seen the work I went through. Nobody saw me, most especially not the audience at the event, because it all went wrong. At one point in the plotting I had assembled a rough cut of ten film clips, each movie with subtitles because I’d decided to do something about the intertextuality of media and because I don’t know what that means, I reckoned having some text on screen would cover it. I actually re-did some of the subtitles so that the films would be commenting back to me as I spoke.

I went off down the deepest rabbit hole to do with writing and text and what we read versus what we see. One tiny point was based around Star Wars: how many billions of people have seen that and believe it’s set in the future? Even though the very first frame is text saying “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”. But then Star Wars came out in 1977 and it was beaten to the Best Oscar for that year by Annie Hall – and rightly so, Annie Hall is much better. Only, Annie Hall has that famous subtitled scene.

Diane Keaton and Woody Allen are talking while the subtitles reveal what they’re really thinking as they try to impress each other. It’s simple, funny, clever and I don’t feel you can watch it now without the third layer of Woody Allen’s real-life relationships imposing. Not to dodge the issue but, well, yes, to dodge the issue with a quick summary, he lives with his adopted daughter.

Seven weeks of actual anguish over this and then with two days to go, I abandoned it all.

I realised that ten films, all with subtitles, some with altered subtitles where I’d have to precisely time my words to get the responses cued correctly, all with jokes in, some with serious stories, some with this thing where I want to prove that you read text but don’t register it, it was just a mess. It was a barrage of audio and video and if any one part of it worked, you’d never know because another three would drown it out.

I kept just one thought. This business of Woody Allen’s life: how, I feel, what we know and what we learn colours what we see and what we think. If you’re going to examine this business of how our reactions to a movie alter over time then Annie Hall is great because, for instance, I believe Diane Keaton spoke out defending Allen during the messiest times of his breakup from Mia Farrow.

However, there is also Manhattan.

Manhattan famously begins with a voiceover narration from one of its characters as we see utterly beautiful black and white photography of New York City and we hear George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Sweeping, soaring, inexpressibly wonderful music.

I can’t talk over that music. I can’t talk over someone’s film.

I can’t half talk about New York City, though.

So that’s what I did. I clipped the opening minutes of Manhattan and the Flatpack people muted it while I spoke about how this city has meant so much to me and always has, even before I’d visited. Then on my cue I shut up and they snap-faded the music up on a crescendo.

If I could do it again, I’d take longer: I read my piece too quickly. But after the anguish of trying to talk about movies, getting instead to pour it all out about New York City and do so in front of 40 people at the Flatpack Film Festival – to do so with a brevity I’ve not needed since writing Ceefax – I had a time.

Here’s my very short script and it’s followed by a YouTube clip of the real opening to Manhattan.

—

OVER OPENING OF “MANHATTAN”

“New York was his town. And it always would be.”

Wait. That’s actually what the film is saying right now. It’s a voiceover in Woody Allen’s Manhattan. That is a stark and beautiful film that in 1979 was… interesting for how it had Allen as a 40-year-old man in a relationship with a schoolgirl.

There you go. Now in 2015, knowing about Allen’s real-life relationship with his adopted daughter, every one of you just went eww.

The film hasn’t changed. We have. What we know changes what we think.

But films are also of their day and they tie us to that time. They tie us to how we felt when we first saw them.

I feel this. With Manhattan and every other film, every other TV show about New York, they formed me. New York is my favourite place in the world and it was so before I even went there. Because of film.

The monochrome beauty of Manhattan, the verve of West Side Story. The charm of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The colourful autumnal beauty of Hannah and Her Sisters – at one time my favourite movie of all. The meh of Die Hard with a Vengeance. The happy, peppy, perky New York of the TV show Fame. The cruel, cold, miserable New York of the film Fame.

I can’t justify what they did to me, I can’t explain it or understand it.

But when I step out onto those streets, I am taller. I’m also more English somehow. New York women hear my accent and say honey, you must be real smart.

New York men see New York women and sometimes think I’m a threat. Imagine that.

New York men and women. New York life. The smashing together of cultures. It’s what I like, it’s what I am.

New York is my town. And it always was.

Three asterisks and the truth

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I read a draft script the other day that included a scene where the lead character – I’m going to call her Susan Hare because she’s one of mine and I like the name – is startled.

SUSAN: What the f***!

That isn’t me being coy. That is what the script said. An F followed by three asterisks.

Just as an aside, when I worked on Radio Times magazine I remember hearing about the very rare times they included any swearing. It was always in a quote, obviously never in an RT journalist’s writing style, and it was usually wryly amusing but it was also always the first letter followed by asterisks or some combination of other symbols. And every time, readers would complain.

It’s just that sometimes they complained the there weren’t the correct number of asterisks or whatever. If you’re bothered by swearing, you’re bothered by swearing and I can’t do anything about that. But if you’re bothered enough by it to count the asterisks, disagree with the number and then complain to the BBC, there is something I can do. I can give you that look and then forget you.

Not that I swear all that much myself. No reason, I’m just PG-rated. But I’ve often had friends suddenly stop mid-sentence and apologise to me. What for? For swearing. Invariably, I hadn’t even noticed. Not because I wasn’t listening, but because it hadn’t bothered me enough to even be aware that bother was a possibility.

Besides, I’ve used Windows. I’ve heard worse, I’ve said worse.

What has really bothered me as I’ve spent a lot of hours on trains this week, is that idea of a scriptwriter typing an F and three asterisks. I don’t know the writer so I can’t ask but I’ve circled and circled around whether it was because they expected the actor to pronounce the asterisks as asterisks – which does seem unlikely – or whether they were afraid of upsetting anyone.

To which the only possible response is oh, for fuck’s sake.

You don’t have to have swearing in anything. You do have to have it if your characters would swear. There is that famous scene from The Wire where every single line, almost every single word, is fuck. It starts off without you being aware of it because that is what these characters would say. Then there’s just so many that you are very much aware that this is a cable show rather than network TV. Then you think about how it’s playing with the boundaries of television and giving us a slice of life.

But then unfortunately you just want them to please stop now, we got the joke an hour ago.

Maybe it’s because the scene has some detective work going on that takes about three minutes, or roughly three minutes longer than any real-life detective would take. Or fictional. Sherlock Holmes would’ve figured it out in a picosecond and be even now deducing the entire causal reality of the universe. Veronica Mars would’ve seen it and already left to do something about it. Though, true, the detectives in Luther would still be there five episodes later, scratching their heads.

Anyway.

Those three asterisks tell me a lot. It’s like the way asterisks are used to mean multiply in computers: three asterisks makes me think of multiplied multiplications, of powers of multiplications. Of geometric progressions of multiplication.

And this is where you get to after all that adding up aka all that riding around on trains pondering. The writer of this script that said f*** does not expect to ever be a real writer. In his or her bones, he or she is playing. This writer sees the film and television world as this thing which is easy but also where producers and actors have practically religious power. You, the humble poor writer – well, we are all poor, that’s true enough – present your script to the masters and mistresses of taste and power and art and more.

You daren’t offend them, no. You daren’t risk saying fuck when you are bowing before them. And I love that in this font that word looks more like bowling. Ten-pin bowling with the gods of drama, I’d be up for that.

I think I’m right and I think you agree but there is that bit I threw in about this writer thinking writing is easy. That gave you pause. I got to that because of this abdication of whether to asterisk or not: that tells me the writer thinks these decisions are made by others. Since what your characters say is beyond fundamental to every pixel of a story, they’re wrong. Since it is beyond difficult to do well but they don’t think they have to do it, they therefore must think scriptwriting is easy.

There’s no reason you should think it’s hard unless you’re actually doing it. Then you need to think it’s hard because you need to know you’ll be putting your back into this job for a long time.

Whatever writing you do, it is an odd kind of job and there are enough people wanting to do it – wanting to be writers without necessarily actually writing, thank you – that a little industry grows up around it. So for instance there are books and courses that belabour how you must format your script right on the page. Do it wrong and you’re out, they say.

Actually, do the formatting and the layout wrong and you have failed at the utter easiest part of the job. You’ve also telegraphed that you simply don’t read scripts or you would know what they look like. If you haven’t read a script, I don’t want to read yours because you just ain’t worth the time yet.

You can always and often tell all this, you can tell a writer is amateur and won’t be worth reading yet from one glance at the page.

But you can now also tell it from three asterisks.

All that from the word “f***”.