BBC radio 4

So anyway…

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Previously on Self Distract… my BBC Radio 4 play died. I didn’t tell you much more than that, partly because I was trying to be brave – I know it didn’t look like it, but you should’ve seen me when the news broke – but also because I just can’t tell you very much at all.

Nonetheless, I’ve been emailed and messaged a lot about what I did say, which just convinces me all the more that you talk about you and me to everyone. As it turns out, too, what everyone wanted to ask was the same:

1) Did I have a commission?

2) Can I use the play in some other way?

Yes, no,

I had the commission, we were in fact due to be recording the play next Thursday and it was going to be on BBC Radio 4 on June 7th. I had a small but all-star cast, an astounding cast, a really amazing cast.

But it died before we could get to record it. +

Anyway.

I have also had three pieces of good advice that I want to tell you in case they’re of use to you as well.

The very first good advice I got was when I was asked “so what are you writing today?” As in yep, the play is deep-friend toast and it ain’t ever coming back, but what are you writing now? That was pretty good.

Second, strip the play for parts. That’s not as possible as you’d think and yet actually, I’m frustratingly pleased with that. I believe the play would have sounded light and relaxed on the radio, but the more you poke at it, the more tightly wrapped it all is. Unstitch this bit at the start and that bit at the end falls apart.

I think that’s great writing, I can’t believe I pulled it off. But it does also mean that for the moment, I think there may be just one single exchange of dialogue that can be lifted out and that can just about work on its own.

But yes, damn right, I’m having that. Not one single clue where, but I’m having that.

And the last thing, which is possibly my favourite. Writer Gail Renard told me to subtly alter the names of people who killed the play, and then put them in a bloody murder story.

As I say this to you, I realise I’m not sure if bloody meant gory or just, you know, very. And I presume she meant a murder story, as in fiction, not a murder as in a newspaper story.

Probably best to check that.

Broken

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My BBC Radio 4 play is dead. Not my fault, not the BBC’s fault, and I can’t ever tell you why. It’s dead and by chance it died on precisely the 1,000th day since I began researching it.

There is no upside, there is no bright side. It is devastating to me and I see no chance of anything positive coming from the situation.

The same reasons that mean I can’t tell you why mean I also can’t ever explain this: it was the best thing I have written to date. Writers are supposed to dig deep and I went archaeological on this one, but I also had to go sideways. Nothing, not one single thing, about this play is remotely like anything I’ve written or tried to write before.

I mean the bones of it, the structure. I wouldn’t have even guessed that you could tell a story in this way, which is very likely a failure of my imagination. The story dictated it, the story drove it in this direction and in this form. I’m minded of Gromit laying track as the train races on, and so many times it all felt as frantic as that.

There were mornings when I’d wake up either sweating or shaking because the play was in me and it was that important. The chief reason I wrote it was to see whether it was physically possible to write it, and whether I was capable of doing it.

It was and I was, and I am proud of it. I’m conscious that my pride is just rather pointless.

I’ve said and thought before that nothing you write is wasted. That idea is being rather tested now, but still I do see that I’m a better writer for having written this. That isn’t enough. But it’s something.

Pronouncing sentence

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I’m hoping it’s the way you tell ’em, but I suspect it’s the way you read it. Please take a look at the following sentence, which is the sole thing I remember from an entire night of nightmares.

“I’m tired of boring people.”

Now, maybe it also depends how nice you are. I would like to think that you read that as meaning I, me, this fella right here in front of you, is weary of some other people who have in some way been continuously boring.

Except I read it as I, me, this guy, is weary of how much he bores everyone.

I did tell you it was a nightmare. I didn’t tell you it was five nights ago and I won’t tell you that I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time since thinking about it. But you can possibly guess.

As a result of spending a ridiculous amount of time thinking about it, though, I can definitively say that I’ve now thought back through everybody I’ve ever met. And there was only one man, a councillor I interviewed in Redditch, who was boring. Give him credit, he was clearly practicing to become boring professionally and I am certain he will have made it to the top.

Everybody is interesting. Everything is interesting, absolutely everything.

(Except football.)

But everything else, absolutely everything else is so interesting that I can’t get enough of it.

Apparently I also can’t shut up about it either. For it turns out that this is the 702nd Self Distract I’ve written to you.

I’m not sure how I missed that I’d got to 700, but then I’m equally unsure how in the world I got to 700. I will say, mind, that for the first while, Self Distract was less a letter to you and more some plugging of whatever work I’d just done on Radio Times or BBC Ceefax or BBC News Online or UK DVD Review.

Let’s rule out those few dull ones, then, and call this the 3rd Self Distract.

Or perhaps you and I can think of it as the first since BBC Radio 4 commissioned a play of mine. It’s less a play, more a sacred trust, and I’ve only wanted it for so many years that if they found out, they’d conclude I was a rubbish scriptwriter and take it back.

But while I can’t yet tell you, not even you, what the play is truly about, I can say that it’s based on an archive of letters. Even more letters than there have been Self Distracts, which appears to be saying something.

I think that’s interesting.

The world at 5am or so

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Write Brummie, the BBC Radio 4 documentary by Rosie Boulton that I’m featured in, aired this week and you can catch it on the BBC Sounds app. If you can find your way around that rather confusing app, that is, or if you cheat and just follow this link.

In it, I mention how it feels as if the world expands outwards during the morning. If you get up to work at 5am, it’s just you and a sense of no-one else going on, then slowly you become aware of movement around the city. I mentioned traffic and the bins and kids, but I think it’s also just plumbing.

I like that sense at 5am that the air is different, that it’s waiting. Air and wind have a long day ahead of them and they’re just taking a minute, eating some toast, before they have to get going.

And I’m obviously telling you this because of the documentary, but actually as I write to you now it’s a little before 7am and for once, it all feels the same. I’ve put the bins out, I’ve waved to a neighbour, if I stop typing I can hear traffic. And that very second I said this, I just heard a sound from next door’s pipes.

But mostly, it’s as still now as I’m used to earlier. Maybe Birmingham is having a lie-in.

It’s funny how a city has a personality, and possibly not funny how it doesn’t, it just has what we project onto it. Maybe we do this with people too, maybe nobody has a personality other than that we expect of them.

I’m simply conscious this week of how I would like to live in the Birmingham that is portrayed in the Write Brummie documentary and yet obviously I do. I know some of the other writers featured, I know the work of more of them, I certainly know and like every single place they mention.

Maybe it’s that when you string them together as Boulton did, it makes you reconsider what you know. Or maybe it makes you conscious of we all know so much, we hold so many thoughts and facts and feelings, that we see one whole mass of sensations and miss the the detail.

It’s possible that I’ve just found a long way around to say something about wood and trees.

Still, I want to be part of that documentary’s portrayal of my city, and yet I am.

I do also now want to be every one of the other writers in the show, and I especially want all their kitchen tables and crackling fires, but I’ll work on that.