play

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.

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.

Talking and not talking

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In the middle of a six-hour workshop yesterday, I stopped to explore a thought about an issue that had been coming up throughout the day. “I offer,” I said, “that it is the people who can communicate, who can write and talk, who find it the hardest to do.”

I think I’m right. I was running the workshop for the Federation of Entertainment Unions which means for members of the NUJ, Equity, the Musician’s Union and the Writers’ Guild. Something like 20 or 25 professional freelancers in London. I adore – no, I love – running FEU workshops because of these people. The only stock a freelancer has, really, is time and these people choose to spend a working day with me.

Now, whenever someone elects to spend time with me, I’m honoured. I just had a thing where someone came within a pixel of flying over from the States to see me. As much as I would’ve liked to meet her, I was immensely relieved when plans changed because I get anxious enough when someone crosses a room in my direction.

But with the FEU workshops and these freelancers, it’s a business decision. They want something the FEU says I can give them – yesterday it was about blogging – and they’re here to get it. No playing around, no messing, no idle thought about maybe one day doing a blog. I think of it as playing with live ammunition: they need something, I have to show them whether blogging does or doesn’t do it, then I have to get them what they need to start.

If I talked bollocks for the first hour, I expect all 25 to walk out. If I speak brilliantly but they realise blogging or whatever isn’t what they need, I expect all 25 to leave early and get back to their work.

And actually, maybe no more so than yesterday because this was a really impressive group. Grief. One guy has his acting career but actually he’s really focused on social issues like care homes. One journalist is a Libya correspondent. And one is the woman who made that documentary about suffragette Emily Davison which showed she didn’t choose to be trampled to death, it wasn’t a suicide plan. I got to shake hands with someone who owns the sash Davison wore in that gigantically important moment.

So this was a room full of talented people. Talented creative types, people who apply their talent and their skills all the time. People who actually I picture as being on their feet and in action even though we spent most of the day sitting down.

And yet the thing that kept coming up over and over was that each one of them finds it crippingly hard, paralysingly hard, to talk about themselves and their work. These are people who for a living talk or write or act or perform and this was a difficulty you could see pressing on their chests.

I don’t have a solution and I do have the same problem. But I didn’t quite tell you the whole quote just now. This is what I really said:

“I offer that it is the people who can communicate, who can write and talk, who find it the hardest to do. And that it’s the people who can’t, who won’t shut up about themselves.”

Please don’t point out that I’m writing a blog about one sentence of mine, one thought. This isn’t me talking about myself, it’s you and I having a chat because you’re exactly the same, aren’t yoU?