cucumber writers

The Plumb Pudding in Danger

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Maybe as much as thirty years ago, I came across a political cartoon called “The Plumb Pudding in Danger” and I have wanted to use that as a title ever since.

Last Monday, I did.

It’s so long since I found that image that I can’t remember what I was doing or even much about it: I have to refer to my own script in order to tell you that it shows Napoleon and William Pitt the Younger carving up the world which is depicted as a plumb pudding.

James Gillray’s The Plumb Pudding in Danger (1805)

I had that image projected onto the wall at The Door theatre in the Birmingham Rep as part of Bad Choices, a night of plays by Cucumber Writers. Even if you’re as historically ill-informed as I am, you can see that cartoon is an ancient thing and I needed there to be no doubt that the play was present-day. So I had it as if it were on the wall of the office the play is set in – and next to it I had an image of Theresa May.

Or as the script says: “Theresa May or whoever is Prime Minister when we stage this.”

I wrote all this in the script and no doubt whoever directed the play would’ve had the images shown as described, but in this case that was me. I directed it.

It was my first time directing an evening of theatre so it was first proper time as a hyphenate. A writer-director.

Only, I also then ended up producing.

And as my Plumb Pudding script has a character who you only hear over speakers, I also acted the part offstage with a microphone.

Writer-director-producer-actor.

Just go back over those words, would you? How far through do you get before it stops sounding impressive and instead starts to seem a bit cheap?

It is fascinating, though, to briefly hold all these different perspectives in your head. I was sitting in the audience for most of the evening, more aware and more conscious, more in the moment than I can easily recall. Each beat of each play, examined. Each reaction from the audience.

It makes you oddly dispassionate, or at least it did me. So for instance, I think as a producer I fell short because I took my eye off the ball about promoting the evening enough. I concentrated on the material and making it happen. As a writer, I was good but there’s one character in my piece that I need to work on. As an actor, I was adequate on a microphone but if I’d actually shared the stage with my cast, I’d have been blown away.

And as a director, I was strong on the short plays and very clear about what I wanted, very able – I believe – to have everyone contributing. But we also had two poems in the mix and there I was out of my depth. I could direct some stagecraft, I could direct about pacing and where to aim or emphasise certain parts, but otherwise it was a poem. It rhymes, I thought. And that was my extent of expertise in it.

Those poems were by Rupi Lal. The other plays that I directed were by Louise Marshall and Emma Davis. There was one more play by Matthew Warburton that he brought in pre-directed so I could just relish watching that one.

He starred in his one with Kath Waters. My cast was Alan Wales, Deb McEwan and Dru Stephenson.

My co-producer was Angela Gallagher.

And if you want an night of theatre doing, these are the people you must get. I still and will always believe that it has to be on the page, but there were a hundred moments during rehearsals when I’d stop to just marvel at what the cast were doing with the material.

There were also a hundred thousand moments beforehand where I was sick to my stomach at the entire prospect of directing. But only you know that and as far as anyone else is concerned, when can I do it again?

Not reading scripts at all, no

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I still can’t really tell you her name. Thank you for the thoughts and comments about last week where I told you of a friend who’s died. I was touched, I kept pressing my hand to my chest as I read. And now we’ve just got to get through her funeral.

In the meantime, since you’ve been so nice, I’m going to regret what happens next. I’m going to tell you something insufferable. I have to tell you now while it’s still true and I promise that I’m going to be as annoyed at me as you are, but maybe that’ll spur me on.

It’s not the same thing but I am reminded of a tweet recently where Inc. magazine claimed that “the world’s most successful people start their day at 4am” – and JK Rowling replied with simply “Oh, piss off”.

Previously… I have belaboured here how I read 600-odd scripts last year. (For the record, it was 624 by New Year’s Eve.) I said that I didn’t know what to do this year, but presumably after all that reading, it should be writing.

This is what I decided. I would write scripts for half an hour every day in 2019, regardless of what else I was doing. Even if the day’s job was actually scriptwriting, I would do half an hour of a different script Every Single Day.

And this is the insufferable part that could fail at any moment. I have done. I know it’s only 25 January as I write to you, but I’ve done it 24 times so far. Once I think it was the first thing I did in a morning, before I started on various commissions. Once for certain it was 1am the next morning, after I’d finished a thing.

This did mean I finished my script for Bad Choices, an evening of plays at The Door in the Birmingham Rep next month by Cucumber Writers, and I’m going to be directing that night too. So that was useful, that was necessary, and because it had a deadline, it was also obvious that I would have to do it and this made the half-hour-a-day easier than it might’ve been.

Other than that, I dramatised one of my own short stories for no reason at all. Except that having turned a 2,000-word story into a 15-minute script, I discovered two new characters. Well, at least one of them is mentioned in the story but he’s now actually talking in the script along with another new one. I like them both so much that I may go back to add them to the prose story.

And you know how when you’re thinking of something, you see it everywhere. I’ve been thinking about scriptwriting and there was a discussion on Facebook about the best books on the subject. I’m not convinced there are any, really, as ones that tell you how to write tend to actually be telling you how that author writes. Since you’ve never heard of the author, they don’t appear to have written very well or at least not very successfully.

Yet there are books that I definitely like which are somehow on the periphery. They’re not how-to books but they are ones that help.

Such as the one I surprised myself by throwing in to that Facebook discussion. I recommended the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion by Terry J. Erdmann and Paula M. Block.

It is one of the very, very many books about the making of one of the very, very many Star Trek series. But it has a couple of thousand words about every single episode of the seven-year show and about eighty percent of that is about the writing. Most of it is very informative about the thinking behind a television series: the writers go into detail, for instance, about why a certain character was created and what the aim was.

Then there are many times when the writers are proud of their show and they tell you so – but at least as often, there are points when they are brutal. Yes, this character was brought in to do this but it didn’t work because we didn’t do this or we did do that. “What were we thinking?” they say of one episode.

It’s a fascinating read. It’s not an easy read because there is just so much and it’s a very hefty book to be carrying around to read between meetings. But it is very good.

Except for one thing.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is on Netflix so you could read about any episode and then go watch it. Except it’s a lot faster to read the scripts.

Yes. I skipped the first season because I remember the writing getting better from the second. But in this year of no longer reading a script per day, I have accidentally now read 81 of them.

Told you. Insufferable. Although I’ll say it now as I did last year, there are days when hiding away from the world in a good script or ten is very appealing.

Doing and not doing

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Don’t laugh now, but journalists are meant to be unbiased and impartial. They’re definitely not meant to get involved and do things.

It’s different with the kinds of feature articles I usually write but if I’ve written a news story and you can tell it’s me, I’ve failed. News is news.

Except of course it isn’t and while total disconnected impartiality is the goal, you know that’s not possible. It’s not possible in part because the very act of choosing what to cover is coloured by your own opinion of what’s important.

I’ve always also believed that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies to writing. That’s the quantum mechanics claim that you can’t measure something’s speed without affecting its direction and you can’t measure its direction without affecting its speed. Our act of looking at an event affects it.

It’s the old line: if you write about a terrorist attack, you are giving it the oxygen of publicity.

Nonetheless, the aim is detachment, the goal is impartiality, and I believe to this minute that this is right, that this is how it should be.

Except for three things that happened this week. One was simply that I listened to an interesting interview with a guy who has spent his entire career as a journalist covering a particular subject. The man is entertaining, he’s informative, but I came away feeling a little sorry for him. That’s all he’s ever done. Write about other people’s work.

Then I was recently asked to join Cucumber Writers, a producing writing group in the West Midlands and I’ve been talking with them this week about their future plans. But look what I did there: the first word describing this writing group was not writing, it was producing. This is a bunch of writers who have the same ambition of being produced that we all do, but they went ahead and produced themselves.

I swear they don’t see how great and rare that is. But it’s remarkable. I’ve shaken at writers who have huge dreams but won’t take small steps. And here’s this group that’s been producing new writing for five years now.

Strictly speaking, all of Cucumber Writers and this fella I heard interviewed spend their days writing. They’re observing events or human nature and communicating it to audiences through various forms of writing.

Yet it feels to me like Cucumber is actually doing something. It’s not a passive recitation of other people’s work, it is an act of creation.

Work that is created is surely work that is worth being described: I’m not going to knock the idea of coverage, of journalistic examination of a piece of work. I think about this far too much as I must’ve written 20,000 or more reviews of various things yet also my favourite films tend to be ones where I went in cold. Where I went in to the cinema having not read reviews.

I’ve also been reviewed a fair few times and that’s fascinating: you also learn how rare it is for a review to be worth reading, regardless of whether it’s a good or a bad one. The lack of meat, the lack of point in the majority of reviews is depressing. The – what’s the opposite of lack? Abundance? Thanks. The abundance of times a reviewer has said what I should’ve done with a piece is educational. Not because they’re right, but because regularly they don’t care about being wrong: they’re not examining a piece, they’re often advertising how much better they would’ve been. Yet they don’t go do anything, they just carry on advertising.

I believe that making is better than describing, though. I believe that it’s better to be crew than passenger. And in my most optimistic moments I believe that being both a writer and a journalist makes me better at both.

Mind you, the third thing that happened this week was that I read a quote saying “It’s better to walk ten thousand miles than to read ten thousand books”. And I just thought, bollocks.

You wait forty years…

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I did not set out to do this but when I realised what I was up to, I did it anyway. I had a play staged last week – unusually, I also acted in it – and pretty much the entire idea flew out of my typing fingers once I’d stolen the first line.

Now, to be fair here, the play performed is something like the sixth draft and I think now that at least two of those were entire blank-page rewrites. But from draft 2 onwards, I knew what I wanted and it is at least in gigantic part because I could hear the characters and I knew what the first line would be.

The only trouble is that I appear to have waited four decades to use that first line. Here’s a ten-second clip that I present to you as evidence.


 

The first segment is from forty years ago: Lou Grant, episode 1, Cophouse by Leon Tokatyan which aired in America on 20 September 1977. I don’t know when I saw it here in the UK but probably 1978. Still, 40 years or 39, that line has stuck in my head for no apparent reason. I mean, Lou Grant was and is special, there are issues it raised and characters it had that I can trace my current opinions and beliefs to. But “Excuse me, that’s my desk, okay?” can’t be one of them.

The second segment is from last Saturday. In Time by me.

For completeness, let me say that the first segment of that clip shows Ed Asner, sitting, as Lou Grant, and Robert Walden as Joe Rossi wanting his desk back. The second shows Nadi Kemp-Sayfi, sitting, as Jemima and William Gallagher as David, wanting his desk back.

That’s me. Forty years on, I am a writer. And maybe that shouldn’t be a surprise since it’s taken a fair bit of effort and work, but I’m also an actor. Maybe only this once. But I have acted alongside a real actor, I’ve acted alongside Nadi Kemp-Sayfi.

I don’t want to examine or think about how that happened because I’m afraid if I do, it won’t have done. Or that it somehow won’t have been the startling success it was.

But I tell you, it’s a Dear Diary moment. Thank you to Cucumber Writers for inviting me to join them for this one production.