dramatisation

Right now, wrong then

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I should have seen this one coming. Usually if someone changes my mind about something, they do it quickly and I can never see things the way I did a moment before. This time, this week, that did happen, but it was less a new idea, more a confirmation of what I now realise I’d been working towards.

Previously… I used to believe that a story idea belonged in the form you first thought of it. If you thought of a radio play idea, then trying to do it as a novel was contorting it. It was contrived, it was wrong. The idea, the story, and the form are all part of the same thing, I believed, and if you change any part, you are going against the grain of the whole. If you want a TV idea, go think of one, don’t distort a stage story.

The person who changed my mind this week didn’t listen to all of that and then conclude that I was talking bollocks. But she did disagree and she did point out why.

And I was left with nothing else to say but the truth: “Then I’m wrong, aren’t I?”

I don’t want to let go of the opinion entirely, except I do. Maybe I just want to hang on to how I think the medium is important.

This woman’s entirely persuasive examples were centred on dramatisations of books and how interesting it is to see the process of bringing something to a different form, of how it naturally brings out other aspects, how it gives other opportunities. The example I gave back to her was the same. Slow Horses is better on television than it is in the original books. Screenwriters Will Smith, Morwenna Banks and co haven’t lost any of the strengths of the novels, haven’t changed anything, but have made it richer somehow.

But then five years ago I had a chance to do a short stage version of a radio play that I’d been struggling with. Struggling so much that actually I only finished it last month. Central to the many problems was a certain point where I needed one character to encourage another, but they physically and literally cannot meet. I think my ultimate solution in the radio script is a bit of a fudge, but for stage, I just had one of them walk by the other and whisper.

Didn’t matter that it was physically impossible in terms of the plot. It was right. The stage format allowed me to let that happen and it was right.

Similarly, I have a new stage play that comes from a TV idea and theatre lets me do things television never could. That story must start simultaneously in two time periods and for TV, I’ve made one winter and one summer to give it a visual start to the difference, before you then separately piece together just how many years apart they are.

For theatre, I put my characters on a train and had a train guard announcing to one “arriving London, 1987”, and to the other “next stop, Hull, 2019.”

“Seems a long journey,” says one of my characters.

“Try doing it standing up,” says the guard.

A small warm exchange and a simple, direct telling the audience what’s going on, but also done in a way that gives you a flavour of what’s coming next. Using an aspect of theatre that is pure stagecraft, that would be out of place on radio, out of joint on television. Using the form the story is being told in.

Sometimes you can still be contorting and contriving as you move between forms. But now I think the medium is only part of the message.

Making a drama out of a book

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This might be the single most obscure piece of contract trivia you hear today, what with all the many pieces of contract trivia you come across every week. What could push it over the top into being the most obscure, though, is that it’s possibly also wrong. It definitely used to be true, though, so please give me that. And it’s this.

There is or was a financial difference between adaptation and dramatisation.

Strictly speaking, if you are hired to turn a novel into a TV show or film or theatre or radio, you are dramatising it. You are taking it from the page and bringing it into a dramatic form.

Adaptation is taking something from one dramatic form and turning it into another, or more recently, turning it into another version of the same thing. The 2021 film of West Side Story is an adaptation of the 1961 movie, which itself is an adaption of the 1957 stage musical, which is itself an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet from just a little bit before then.

As I say, I don’t know if there is still a difference in how much you get paid, but the job itself, the reason there are these two terms, that’s definitely still true, they are still definitely very different.

Dramatisation is like improv in how everyone new thinks they can do it. I’ve never done one, although at times I’ve pitched things: I’d like to see Margery Allingham’s Campion novels dramatised again, for instance, or James Blish’s Cities in Flight. Not because I think they’d be easy, not because I know I could do them, just because I want to watch, to spend more time in the worlds those authors created and I want to bring them to new audiences.

All of which is on my mind because I’ve been waiting all week for the next episode of Slow Horses on Apple TV+. Based on the book by Mick Herron, it’s dramatised by Will Smith, one of the writers of The Thick of It and Veep.

The show is made by See-Saw Films and I talked with them about a thing last year. It didn’t happen to work out, but along the way they told me they were making this and it sounded good, so from curiosity, I read the first novel in the series. Then the second. Third. Fourth. All of them. I’ve forgotten how many there are, they’ve rather run into one since I read each so close together, but they are very good, and I think that over the years, they have been badly misrepresented.

I mean in how the novels have always been described in articles about the books. Every article, every interview with author Herron, it all says that these are comedies about inept spies and that is so far from the truth that I sometimes wonder if I’m reading the same books. It reminds me of Brian Fremantle’s Charlie Muffin spy novels. ITV presented that as being a comedy, but you watch the Euston Films production written by Keith Waterhouse, and it is more tense than anything. I don’t just mean more tense than funny or anything else, I mean it’s also more tense than, say, James Bond ever gets.

Slow Horses has that tension. It is about these MI5 spies who’ve been banished because they did something so bad that they can’t continue working in the field, but not quite so bad that they could be fired. And some of them are indeed there because they did stupid things. The books are funny, sometimes laugh aloud funny, but the laugh is often a surprise in the middle of really fraught, tense, quite scary action.

I also began wondering whether the TV dramatisation would actually be a comedy, not just promoted as one, truly being one. I’ve read scripts before where on the page I’ve found them stark and tense, then on screen they manage to be that plus somehow a lot funnier. Maybe I was missing the gag in Herron’s novels.

Yet the strengths of the Slow Horses books for me, the reason I keep coming back for more, are partly that the characters and the story are compelling, but also that everything balances on this sliver of a knife edge between action and drudgery. The Slough House setting is oppressive in the books, quite vividly deadening, and held back from total shut-the-book boredom by solely the thinnest of lines.

I’m freelance so it is a very long time since I worked in an office, yet still the Slow Horses novels capture for me the atmosphere of a dreadful office on a worse day and the feel of it is like stupefying inactivity in 3D. Then suddenly – but, significantly, also naturally – there will be these moments of great action and suspense.

So just enough boredom to convey the purgatory these characters are in, just enough action to keep you compelled, the novels are remarkable for holding this tone and these changes so well. It’s really an accomplishment how the novels keep you believing this central idea that nothing happens at Slough House when, over and over again, a huge amount happens there.

I’m less keen on how too many characters in the novels are clearly based on familiar ones from other spy or crime stories. Not all of them, by no means all of them, but for instance there’s one recurring character who the moment you read about her, you know is Connie Sachs from Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy. More specifically, she starts out as the Beryl Reid portrayal of Sachs in the BBC dramatisation.

And then there is the lead character, Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman in the TV dramatisation. Reading the novels, there’s no mistake: Jackson Lamb is Andy Dalziel from Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe novels. Author Mick Herron has said so, publicly, and I didn’t need him to, it was that obvious.

I don’t think it is obvious in the TV show. Now you know, you’ll see if it you know the earlier character, but I think Will Smith’s dramatisation has done him better. He’s done the drudgery versus action superbly so far, too, and he, director James Hawes and production designer Tom Burton, have also conveyed that horrible Slough House building so well that we are intimately clear on even its very geography.

What I’m not sure about yet is whether Smith has done Roddy Ho well, or whether anyone actually can. Ho is the Slough House hacker character and in the novels, he is a joy because typically segments about him are in the first person and Ho believes himself to be a god amongst men. Herron shows us mortifying moments where Ho is embarrassed and even punched in the face, but does it through Ho reinterpreting those events as if he’s the hero. When people go quiet around him through revulsion, for instance, internally he’s crowing about how they are clearly awed into silence by his brilliance.

Again, it’s a great gag and the greatest thing about it is how Herron can keep going back to the same well and utterly delighting you every time.

But it is strong because it’s first person internal monologue and I don’t know if Smith can bring that out. In the first two episodes, I think he’s done a clever job of conveying this stark difference of opinion about Ho, between what Ho thinks of himself and what everyone else thinks of him, but maybe that’s the most that can be done.

I’m not watching this to study it all, though. Just as with the novels, I tried the first one out of curiosity, but I’m hooked, I’m watching this show because I like it enormously.

In fact, mostly I’m now waiting for episode 3 to find out what happens with Sid Baker and I’d like you to explain to me why I’m so anxious about her when I’ve already read the novel this is based on. Plus the – wait, let me check – grief, seven more novels after it. An eighth comes out later in 2022 and I’ll be having that.

Slow Horses, the TV drama by Will Smith, is the same story, literally the same story, as Slow Horses, the novel by Mick Herron.

The difference is, it’s been dramatised.

Only time can tell

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Late one night this week, stewing with a cold and unable to sleep for coughing, I started to watch Somewhere in Time on Netflix. Don’t look for it: the film has gone. Even though I am new to Netflix, I did know that this happens, I just didn’t know that it could happen before I finished watching something I’d started.

There’s something fitting about it disappearing like this. I have to be in exactly the right mood to watch it and that mood is a bubble that never lasts long. Maybe Netflix is the Brigadoon of online streaming video services and in another hundred years the film will reappear. For a few moments or preferably the film’s 1 hour 48 minute running time, it will be as if the movie had always been there.

It does feel a bit like that now: it was made in 1980, and you can tell, but originally it was partly a present-day film, mostly a period piece and so now it feels like two period pieces. If you don’t know the film, it’s written by Richard Matheson and stars Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. I think summarising the film diminishes it and that maybe that’s one reason it was a flop on release: it’s a time-travel romance. The film only succeeded, only became a huge hit, after it was seen knocking around cable TV channels in the States. So really it only became a hit after people saw it.

If you do know the film, that’s not what’s on my mind. The book is. I like the movie but for the most part it is a nicer version of the story, it has an innocent sweetness that is sometimes good but often just too much. In comparison, I feel like the original novel tore at me. By chance, this week I’ve been interviewed for a TV show about my life – I was chosen because of my brilliant and apparently unique availability – and thinking about myself, seeing that film, being caught in this cold, it somehow showed me that this novel is deeply important to me.

somewhere-in-timeThe novel is also by Matheson and it’s called Bid Time Return after Shakespeare’s line in Richard II: O, call back yesterday, bid time return. Or it was called that: most editions after 1980 rename it Somewhere in Time. It’s obviously about time and for whatever reason that has become a profound obsession for me in drama and fiction. I also know that it is the first romance novel I read and while I haven’t read that many more since, I’ve noticed that everything I write is imbued with this. It used to scare me a bit: you might not spot it but I can see time and romance – and, full disclosure, thrillers – in every single thing I write.

I just don’t see romance as slushy, I see it as dangerous. That unpredictable, unreasonable, impossible lurch in your life. I’m fascinated by the power of romance, the compulsion, the roaring way it changes who you are and exposes who you can be. I’m riveted by what in the hell makes us admit to someone that we fancy them – and by what it’s like when they feel the same. That’s not slush, that’s primacord explosive.

Picture me forming this opinion when I was around 15. I suspect hormones played a part but I also think it would’ve been around then that I found the novel. I wish I could remember the details but I think I read it and at first didn’t realise how it got into me. I do vividly remember wanting to re-read it and not having a copy. At the time, there was a science fiction bookshop in Birmingham called Andromeda and they didn’t have it in stock. Nowhere did.

I remember standing at the Andromeda counter, mentioning to the owner Rog Peyton that I was so disappointed to not be able to find a copy anywhere. And I remember him saying something like “Wait there”. This was an independent bookshop where you felt much of the stock was there because it was beloved by the staff and when I say they had a special place in their hearts for Bid Time Return, they actually had a special place in the back. Rog had kept perhaps three or four copies of the book to sell only to people who were specifically searching for it.

At this point the book must’ve been quite rare and out of print, though the edition he sold me had the film’s rather beautiful period illustration on the cover so the movie was out. Maybe it’s a sign of how poorly the film fared at first, certainly it was a sign that Rog didn’t want people to casually pick up the last copies and chuck them on a shelf to never read.

I say all this to you and I can see me in that shop, I can feel that paperback in my hands. The novel is the same story about a man who falls for a photograph of a woman –– so far, not so very unusual –– but discovers that the photo was taken sixty years ago. It’s a funny thing: you know they are going to meet and you don’t care how the time travel is done, yet it has to be done in a way that carries you along. Or at least in a way that doesn’t drop you out of the story. It’s a remarkably fine line and the film is fairly good at it but the novel kills you. You are in that story and you are feverish as Richard Collier of 1971 burns to reach Elise McKenna of 1912.

Then you also have to have their first meeting and even at 15 I thought bloody hell, Richard Matheson is a smart writer. I’m willing to spoil a lot of this for you as it’s over forty years since the novel came out and about thirty-six since the movie, but I won’t spoil that scene which works well in the film and perfectly in the novel. I also won’t go to the filming location and re-enact the moment but people do. A lot.

I want to spoil or maybe just a tiny bit heighten two other moments, though, and especially as I think they’re appropriate to writing. One is very much about books and the other is very much about visuals.

The first ties to this business of getting us to agree about time travel: we know it’s coming, you don’t have to really sell us but you must somehow make it fly. Matheson does all manner of things to set us up for this in the book and his film screenplay does many of the same things but quicker. Yet arguably it all turns on one moment of deeply believable despair as Richard Collier no longer believes or can even hope that he’ll ever do it.

Matheson brings us to a moment where we did not see this coming but we should’ve done: Richard is in a hotel and trying to get back in time to that same hotel sixty years ago. He goes hunting for the hotel’s guest books and in one of these dust-caked, mouldy old ledgers, there he is. His name, signed in as a guest in 1912. Matheson plays this as clinching proof for Richard, the thing that makes him believe and so makes him succeed but I keep thinking about that signature waiting there. Throughout Richard’s life, that line was in that ledger waiting for that moment of discovery. That line would not be in that ledger if he didn’t find it.

Then visually the entire plot turns on the photograph that Richard sees of Elise. The way it’s described in the novel and the feeling that is conveyed in the movie is that it seems as if in this photograph she looking at Richard. Even at 15 and certainly now at somewhat older, I’m thinking right, sure, he just fancies her, don’t try to make it slushy. But the punch, for me, comes much later when we find out that actually, yes, she is looking at him.

There’s a brief scene where Richard walks in on the photograph being taken and the moment of the lens click is the moment Elise has seen him. She is looking at him in that photo and if he hadn’t been there, the photo would’ve been different and maybe he would never have looked at it.

I’m biased because I love the novel, I like the movie and I think about all this far too much. But these are resonant moments that – I’m right, aren’t I? – only time can tell.

Read the film’s screenplay online
Buy Somewhere in Time the movie in the UK or in the US
Buy Bid Time Return/Somewhere in Time the novel in the UK or in the US