scripts

Adjust your settings

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I was trying to get some work on a TV show once and I can’t even remember what it could possibly have been, but I do recall the producer. She said to me that the single most important thing in television drama is the setting. Now, I’m sitting there in her office thinking bollocks, character is immeasurably more important but, you know, I wanted the work, so I’m nodding away saying how interesting that thought is.

I know I didn’t get the work. And I know I still believe right down to every individual pixel of my soul that character comes top, but she had a point. She had more of a point than I appreciated at that time and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Especially so since this week I worked with a group specifically discussing how novels benefit from where they are set.

I think I’m probably going to find a way here to conclude that a story’s setting is a kind of character itself. Just one that doesn’t talk much. Or usually, anyway: there is a famous BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Wuthering Heights that is narrated by the house. I long to hear that.

But let’s see if we get to this setting-is-character lark and whether it works or is just my hoping to convince that producer she should’ve hired me.

Her point, if I’m understanding her correctly, is that the setting enables drama. So Albert Square in EastEnders, for instance, is naturally home to a fairly diverse group of characters. Different ages, wealth, backgrounds, jobs. Differences are what make the world interesting but they are also what makes for sparky drama: our situations put pressures on us that affect how we see things and what we do about them. Everything we’ve been taught and everything we’ve done affects who we are. So when you can find a setting that naturally puts different people together, it is potent.

My mind has just leapt from EastEnders to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and specifically why it was set up to be different to the other Trek shows. Ridiculously, Star Trek got to the point where everyone on the Enterprise was lovely and they all supported each other perfectly. No difference of opinion beyond which technobabble solution would save which entire civilisation this week. It was a conscious choice: Starfleet officers are heroes. So for Deep Space Nine, the producers had the show’s Federation be brought in to help recovery in a region rather battered by conflict.

The baddies with the noses, the Cardassians, had used local Bajoran people as slaves in their mining space station. Now they were gone and Starfleet took over the station like a UN envoy. So very consciously and actually very cleverly, this space station setting was potent. You had the heroes coming in, you had the surviving Bajorans wondering whether they were swapping one group’s slavery for another, and you had the Cardassians hovering around wanting to come back. Rather than a single group of nicey-nicey people, you had at least three distinct groups inescapably in conflict.

It was well done and it means that to me, Deep Space Nine, is the only satisfying Star Trek out of an awful lot of different versions. I could argue that this is down to the writing: I read all 170-odd scripts for this show, most of them before I’d seen the episodes, and they read like a novel, they were so interesting. Somehow I also read all 170-odd scripts for Star Trek: The Next Generation and they weren’t so good.

But then Deep Space Nine didn’t move so the problems faced this week continue next time. The Enterprise just pops off to save the day somewhere else.

So certainly the writing elevates DS9 but maybe it could because of the setting the writers created.

That’s not the same as the setting being a character, I’m struggling there. I’m not sure why I think I’m going to reach that point or why I’m focusing on it, yet I can already see that I’m regarding the place as important to the characters. If I want to tell a story about a school, the characters I have in there will inevitably be different if that school is Eton or if it’s in an inner city slum area.

Perhaps because I’m a scriptwriter, I have seen that I’ve avoided being specific about settings: this script is set in a city, that one in a village, and I’ve not bothered to say London or Little Writings on the Wry. Maybe I should have been specific. Certainly I’m going to be. For it occurs to me that the setting affects characters vastly more than I realised: if a place is comfortable, that tells me a lot about the people who stay. If it’s a foul place then it tells me a lot about the characters who go there.

Character and setting are intertwined. I want to go just a touch further and argue that settings have moods: an underground car park has a different disposition to a hayfield in the year 19summertime.

So settings have moods and feelings plus they are deeply entwined with characters. Go on, give it to me: your setting is a character. And excuse me while I go phone a producer.

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

Taking Time – the Movie

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Here’s a nice way to look at something: I can tell you that I’ve written my first short film and that it is a gorgeous piece of work that centres on my dramatic obsession about time and its passing, time and its inexorable movement, time and regret. That’s a nice way to look at it and it is in all ways true, except it isn’t.

Taking Time is a short film produced by Ian Kennedy, directed by Gabe Crozier and starring Denny Hodge. It was written by Ian Kennedy, Andy Conway, Liz John, Mark Brendan, Nicola Jones and me, William Gallagher. I am unquestionably the smallest part of that list but it’s a big deal to me.

Sitting in that cinema on Tuesday, seeing my section of our film and especially seeing my name on the credits, that was quite a moment. I’m reminded of the first time I was in a magazine, the first time I was in a newspaper, the first time I was on television, the first time I saw actors on TV saying my words, the first time I saw a cast doing that on stage, the first time I had a book of mine in my hands. I remember the first talk I gave, the first workshop I ran, the first time I went into a school. Really vivid, all of them, and my credit on that screen is there in my head forever.

Well, I hope so. For some reason I can’t remember the first time I was on radio. That startles me: I could make a good guess: it would be on BHBN, the Birmingham Hospital Broadcasting Network – hospital radio that at the time went out to twenty hospitals in the region – and possibly followed quite soon by BBC Radio WM. But I don’t know, can’t remember.

I’ll worry about that later. For now, I am just enjoying that I have a film out. Okay, it was premiered this week and it’s next showings will be in film festivals so I can’t yet point you to a screening time. And it’s not my film, I am that tiny cog.

No.

Bollocks to that.

I’m talking to you, I’m not writing a press release, so this is how it is: it is my movie. I wrote a film. It premiered this week.

You can read more about it on the Screenwriters’ Forum website where you’ll also find out about the Forum’s new script development workshops. That’s another excellent thing that Forum chair Ian Kennedy has introduced.

That’s a thought. You’re nice so you’re thinking I’m being modest about my contribution but no, I’m a cog. And here’s an example for you of where credit should really go. I used to be the chair of the Screenwriters’ Forum and in my last meeting I think I had about six members turn up plus we ran out of apple juice.

For new chair Ian Kennedy’s latest meeting, he had a full-house cinema audience and a movie with the whole thing covered by BBC Midlands Today.

But it’s still my film, right?

Thin film

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All week I’ve been looking forward to talking to you because – please wait for this and picture me savouring telling you – I’ve got a film coming out. Next Tuesday night, “Taking Time” gets its cinema premiere. I need you to know that actually my contribution is the smallest thing: this is a short film written by five writers and I think I account for about one minute of it. Still, it’s a minute. In a film.

I’m actually refusing to watch it before Tuesday because I want to walk into that cinema and enjoy it. But let me point you at details of the film because it’s also part of the launch of the Screenwriters Forum which you might be interested in. Otherwise, I’m going to tell you more about this next week instead, because something happened last night that I need to tell you. I’m not sure there’s anyone else I can talk to about this as it’s confidential. Plus you’ve already seen through the thin film that is my hard man tough guy image.

(Hang on. If the film is rubbish then I won’t mention it next week and we won’t speak of it ever again, okay?)

Anyway.

Late yesterday afternoon I ran a scriptwriting workshop in Stourbridge Library for Gavin Young. He’s a writer, performer, storyteller and at the moment also the Reader in Residence at the library who booked me for this talk. I had a blast. I hope everybody there did too, but I definitely had a blast and a half plus it came at the end of back to back workshops and deadlines. For me, it was like getting to natter with a group of fellow writing nutters. I did have to run away immediately afterwards to get back to writing deadlines, but it was the last event and it did feel like a long week was over.

It’s early evening in Stourbridge. A dark winter’s evening. Windy. Cold. And raining enough that I shouldn’t have got out my phone but when do I not get out my phone? There was an email waiting with the subject heading “A little bit of feedback for you”.

I can’t tell you very much at all as it’s to do with work I’ve been doing with school-age kids but because of who sent me it, I knew from her name and that subject what it was going to be about, I knew it was going to be from parents. I crossed my fingers as I tapped to open the message, hoping that this feedback was going to be okay.

It was.

There were just a very few short lines and if I could tell you what it was, you’d think that’s nice and I think you’d be pleased for me but you wouldn’t be gasping.

I didn’t gasp either.

But I stood in that road and I cried.

I’ve got one word for you

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Bollocks.

That’s the word. It’s not personal. But before I ask you to come along for a reasonably strident ramble about something, I want to examine that word.

Bollocks. You read that and you know I’m not an academic, I’m not writing a paper, I’m just talking to you. You don’t need to know me well to recognise that I say it quite a bit too, it’s part of my ideolect. (Countries have languages, towns have dialects, people have ideolects.) I think you read the word ‘bollocks’ and you have an idea of my age as well. Maybe you can’t pin it down to the month and day but you don’t think I’m 15 and you don’t think I’m 70. It’s a broad range, I agree, but it’s there.

You might get that I’m a man. It’s hard to judge this from in here where I said the word, but it feels more like a man saying it than a woman. It feels more British than it does, I don’t know, Indonesian.

There’s a tone in the word, too. It’s not exactly serious but it isn’t playing about either. Bollocks is a firm word, said with intent, it’s not a filler word like ‘well’. Nor is it strong like ‘fuck’. You can argue with a man who says bollocks, there’s often no talking to someone who’s saying fuck.

I did have a worry that you could think I was saying bollocks to you, somehow about you, but that came more from the headline up there where I said “I’ve got one word for you”. It’s possible to interpret that as meaning I have one word to describe you. On its own, though, if you’d just come in on that word bollocks then I believe that you would unthinkingly, unconsciously but immediately have thought this is a non-academic, firm but not overly serious, debatable point being made by a British man who isn’t a teenager and isn’t a pensioner.

I believe that but I know this: you would not have got any of that if what I’d actually written was “Insert Word Later”.

I have regular arguments about dialogue, especially dialogue in drama, and the short summary is that I’m right about it being vital and anyone who thinks it isn’t, is wrong. Told you I was strident. I’m struggling to think of anything else that I am so irrevocably black and white certain sure about. Tea and dark chocolate come close, but this is more important to me.

What previously I’ve said to you before and what I have argued in countless pubs is that if I don’t believe the dialogue you give a character, I don’t believe the character. It’s common for dialogue-haters to be plot-fans but what they miss is that if I don’t care about the characters, if I’m not interested in them, the plot is just the thing I have to get through before I can go home. Characters facing grave peril, I’m in. Characters whom I don’t believe in facing the same peril, well, let them die. What do I care?

The reason this is all on my mind now, though, is partly because it is always on my mind. I am a dialogue man and it’s one of only two things I will accept I’m good at. (The other is typing. Can’t touch me for typing.) I am immeasurably pleased and relieved to say this to you because my dialogue writing is responsible both for everything I get to write and for how successful any of it has been.

Dialogue is obvious in scripts but I’m really writing dialogue to you right now. Didn’t I just say bollocks? That’s dialogue.

Emails I write are really dialogue and so are articles. I can’t do it when the house style of a magazine is more formal but the rest of the time I can because I’m always doing the same thing. I’m trying to convey something to you. Talking.

That’s what dialogue is in scripts: I’ve heard arguments that say dialogue is pretty speeches when actually no, it’s people talking.

The other reason this is all on my mind now is that I recently went to a couple of sessions of the PowWow Writers’ Group in Birmingham. I don’t think the word dialogue came up once. We certainly didn’t have this bugbear argument, I could write you an advert for how interested the group is and what they’re doing. Yet there was something.

I think it was in the way that one thing which did come up was the idea that when you’re writing, you should just get the stuff written. Get it down, then you can work on it. All true. Writing is rewriting, editing is critical.

Hours later, I joined a dot. The people I’ve most argued with about dialogue, the ones who are plot fans and believe dialogue is pretty speeches, also reckon you can do it tomorrow. Get down the story and the plot, then just before you’re finished, you can go back to do a dialogue pass. You can make the speeches prettier later, it’s a tasty extra that you can worry about just before you print the thing out and look for some pink ribbon.

Can you bollocks.

Everything you’ve just read sprang from the word bollocks at the top. I could’ve begun with Insert Word Later and then gone on to all this but it wouldn’t be the same. The bounce, the rhythm, what I wanted to say to you and when would all be different. I’ll bet money it wouldn’t have been so strident, for one thing.

So let’s say you’re writing a character who is strident. A character who is also a non-academic, firm British man who isn’t a teenager and isn’t a pensioner. At one extreme, you end up writing dialogue like “Hello, William, my old British friend who I think should have gone into academia but I’ve been saying that to you since you were a teenager back in 1989”. At another extreme, you end up writing a narrator. Shudder. Or the single worst descriptive prose novels have ever known.

Or you could just say bollocks.

Say what?

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If you don’t know something, fine. If I don’t know something, fine. We’ll work it out together. Or more likely one of us will look it up and explain it to the other. It’s not like there is a shortage of places to look things up.

But if you’re a writer and your characters don’t know something, that’s gigantic.

relativity 001Follow. Around 1996, I read the pilot script to a US series called Relativity. Written and created by Jason Katims, it was from the makers of thirtysomething and My So-Called Life. Plus, it was a romance and I like romances, naturally I read it. And I enjoyed that script a lot. I wish it were still online that I could point you at it.

I enjoyed it enough that of course I wanted to see the final show and I was enough of a writer to be curious to see how they would stretch this romance out to seven years of 20-odd episodes a year. They didn’t, as it happens. I think they made 17 episodes before being cancelled. I didn’t see any of them. I must’ve seen something, must’ve seen the title sequence or something because I knew what the major characters looked like.

But actual episodes: none.

Last year I got very excited when the pilot episode found its way on to YouTube – except that my face fell when I saw it. Because the YouTube copy was dubbed into German.

Now, though, the whole series is up on Dailymotion. Doubtlessly less than legally but then if the show were ever going to get a commercial release I would’ve bought that a long time ago.

As it is, nineteen years later, I’m finally watching the episodes.

It’s not great. Certainly not on a par with MSCL or thirtysomething. It tries to deal with some serious topics but it doesn’t have the bite of those other shows. And characters I remember liking on the page feel a bit whiny on the screen.

But.

What knaws at me in every single episode is one line from the title sequence.

It’s a smart sequence. If you ever seen a Bedford Falls show like thirtysomething, you’ve got the idea already: a montage of scenes, credits on the bottom of screen, great music by WG Snuffy Walden in his pre-West Wing days. All that.

But as well as the visual montage of scenes, this sequence has an audio one. Clashing, overlapping, audible and barely audible, clear and obscured lines rush by you in a way that seems chaotic. In practice every line is placed pixel perfectly in time and in the stereo image because you never fail to hear the key lines and you always fail to hear the lesser stuff.

It’s the main characters talking about relativity. “Like Einstein… E=mc squared…” They’re explaining what relativity is and quickly pushing the point. One key example is “the things you think you can’t do, you can do” which is just so far away from the definition of relativity that it belongs in a different series.

But then bam. The last line.

It’s said by the series star, Kimberley Williams, in character as Isabel Lukens. This show is primarily a romance but it’s really weighted toward her rather than her guy, Leo Roth (David Conrad). So this is your most important actor in the show’s most important role and she has the most important position in your entire title sequence. And she says:

“I have no idea what relativity means”

Then sodding look it up.

She says it with a laugh, with that kind of gosh, how could anyone be expected to know this stuff type of laugh.

If Isabel Lukens did not know what relativity meant despite having seemingly constant conversations about it, the character would be stupid. Not uninformed, stupid. Worse: passively stupid. She doesn’t know what a word means even though she’s just been discussing it. Couldn’t be bothered to either look the bleedin’ thing up or to listen to the people discussing it with her. Ignorant in every sense.

But Isabel is not speaking for herself. She says this to allow us to not know what relativity means. It’s okay not to know. In fact, gosh, who could know?

That one line is the most outrageously insulting line I can think of in TV title sequences. I don’t mean this because I know what relativity means, I mean because the makers assume we don’t – and the makers assume we need reassurance that this is not a bad thing.

I feel examining one line from a cancelled TV series of 19 years ago might be overkill. But I also feel that there is something in here about all of television and how all of it has gone down the reassuring ignorance route.

Didn’t we used to look up to TV characters? Was I just young? Detectives and heroes and all that, they were smart and they were cool and then something happened. I think it was around the time when computers became commonplace. Suddenly we hit the moment when we, the viewing public, knew more about this stuff than the TV characters did.

We knew and we know more than they are allowed to know.

TV characters are rarely allowed to be clever, certainly they are even more rarely allowed to think. Now thinking is a tough one to show visually – yes, I’m thinking Sherlock too but not every show can do what that does – so you can understand the problem. But if the plot requires a clever character, that character will not be the hero.

More, that character will be mocked for being clever. Just as you can’t be a woman doctor without a white coat, stethoscope and a clipboard, so you cannot be a clever character of either sex unless you wear glasses. And get kidded for being in some way socially awkward. Kidded by the cool-as-all-hell action hero, for preference.

We are expected to feel superior to the clever clogs. The expectation is that we will need to feel superior or we’ll stop watching.

I think I’ll make it to the end of Relativity but just four episodes in, that single line is threatening to stop me watching.

Hide the card

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There’s this thing I don’t have a word or a phrase for and I’d like to have, so I’m going to talk it over with you and see where we get. Also, it relates in part to a TV series that is presumably coming to the UK soon, so, you know, hang on in here, work with me on this.

I believe that writers can sense a good idea, somehow smell it. Taste it. So far, so obvious: we all recognise when something has potential. But we taste the full strength of that idea and – this is the key bit – we know just how great and effective and powerful it will be when we’ve worked out how to tell it to you.

I need an example. Try this. I’m working on a theatre project and after a very intense meeting about all sorts of things to it, I mentioned the ending. I don’t have the script, I haven’t written an outline. As it happens, I can recite to you the opening scenes but after that we have about ninety minutes of I-have-no-idea until we reach the last moments and specifically the last line.

Given who I was working with, I was happy to tell them everything and I needed to in order to get the job done, but I wouldn’t tell them that line. Alan Plater once wrote about a TV idea that he “knows the A and the Z and has a rough idea of B to about K”. I’ve got A, B and Z. So there I am, sitting in a pub, having discussed a project that I’ve worked on for at least 17 months and there is no chance you’ll see before 2016, and I will not tell the ending because I know it sounds weak without the beginning and middle.

Yet.

I struggled to say that I even had an ending because I literally struggled to say, to speak. I got choked up thinking of it. And I do every time. I can remember where I was the moment I first thought of it – I was on a bus going by the Birmingham Rep – and I choked.

I know I’ll get you.

I just have no idea how.

So assuming that I’m right, what is the right phrase for… tasting the idea, smelling the idea, sensing it? The ability to feel the full force of something that has no force until I’ve written everything that takes you on that specific trip from here to there.

I do know that it is tied in to what you reveal and when. (There’s that Suzanne Vega line from Pornographer’s Dream: “What she reveals / and what she conceals / is the key to our pleasure”)

There is a right moment for a story to bring you a particular key fact. Up until then it has to have other great ideas, it has to lead you down other lines that are equally good, equally interesting, but which you can pull away as you reveal the real… something.

The biggest TV drama surprise I can think of was a moment in Battlestar Galactica that I will not spoil even now. But if you saw the show, yes, I mean that one, that moment. And when it was airing, the creator Ronald D Moore used to do a podcast audio commentary: ten or more years on, I can remember him describing this scene as we watched. And he used the term “hide the card”. He kept repeating it – “hide the card, hide the card” – like it was a conjuring trick.

I suppose it was, I suppose all this is, but it feels cheapening to call it that.

What he specifically meant was that in this particular scene, we were set up to expect many, many things and it fulfilled them all. It seemed to tell us everything, if it had just done what we believed it was doing it would’ve been strong and effective but he didn’t reveal his hand until the last moment. I actually jumped out of my seat.

It was a shocking moment and the shock came as much from how brilliantly set up and misdirected we were as it is from what actually happened in that moment.

That’s the thing I think writers have. We know what that moment is going to feel like even when we haven’t set it up yet. Our job then is to set it up properly. Our difficulty is getting you to the point we sensed.

It is fracking hard. (I have got to watch that show again.)

And I think you can get it very easily, very badly wrong. This is why this is on my mind today, this is where the new TV show comes in.

It’s a comedy called A to Z – no connection with Alan’s comment – which is the first time I have ever tuned in to anything because of the cast. It’s a romcom, and I like romcoms a lot, this time starring Cristin Milioti. Also Andrew Lofland but I’d not heard of him. Milioti was remarkable in the final season of How I Met Your Mother which broke every storytelling sense I’ve got in how after eight years of never showing us the Mother of the title, made her the star of the ninth year. I think the writing of that was bold and supremely well done, I thought Milioti played the part terrifically, I was sorry it was the final season.

So her back in a new romcom, I gave it a go.

It’s not great. It’s also cancelled. It made A to about M. I’d have said that to you anyway, just as a gag, but it’s pretty much literally true too: each episode was named after a letter of the alphabet. The pilot was called “A is for Acquaintances”, for instance. Each week, a narrator would explain that “this television programme is the comprehensive account of their relationship… from A to Z.” She explains this a lot.

Quick setup. A stands for Andrew, who works at an online dating agency. Z is Zelda, which is the name you would only ever give a character if you really, really had to have her begin with that letter. No other reason possible.

We have no idea who the narrator is. Think of How I Met Your Mother’s narration by Old Ted, except that we don’t know who is speaking. I saw five episodes, I think, and we never knew, despite getting quite a lot of narration. I assumed that the narrator was just a device and a lazy one at that.

Is it hiding the card that actually yes, the narrator is a real character and we just haven’t been told yet?

No.

A draft script for the pilot episode of A to Z by Ben Queen is now online at Lee Thomson’s brilliant TV Scripts site and you can read it right now.

If you do, then the first line you read will be:

Our NARRATOR is female, in her 50s. Think Diane Keaton (or someone equally cool if that person exists)

Twenty-six pages later, Andrew has a folder of material about the online dating agency – here called Crush, changed in production to Wallflower – and:

He opens the file. Inside are press clippings about ‘Crush’ from its origins. We maybe see a glimpse of its founder JULIET MADDOX (who will turn out to be our NARRATOR).

Twenty-six pages. And over those twenty-six pages, our NARRATOR has twenty-nine speeches.

If you’re thinking that’s fine, it let us dangle before telling us, look at that direction again.

We maybe see a glimpse of its founder JULIET MADDOX (who will turn out to be our NARRATOR).

Nearly thirty pages and very nearly thirty speeches in, viewers do not learn who the narrator is. In the episode as aired, there is a file folder, he is carrying it, it does have newspaper clippings (about an online site? seriously?) but he doesn’t open it, it isn’t referred to, the whole exchange of dialogue about it is cut. The sole way to know that it’s about the narrator and who that will be is to read the script. I actually said aloud “Oh, okay” when I read that.

You need to hide the card, sure. But you have to have the card in play. Or you won’t get the audience to that great point you’ve smelled and tasted and sensed from the start. Maybe because they won’t stick with you that long, maybe because your show is cancelled before you get around to it.

The Book Groups

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The plural is important. I’ve been waiting to show you The Book Groups for months. It’s a short story that I was commissioned to write – actually my first-ever commissioned short prose – for the West Midlands Readers’ Network. That’s an organisation which does a just unfathomably huge and wide range of work with readers, libraries and anything to do with books. I think this is their best idea: they commission six writers and then pair them up with six reading groups.

I got a group in Combrook, near Stratford on Avon. (Actually, they might disagree with that definition. Sorry. It’s just that the two times I went, I pointed the car at Stratford and it seemed to work out.)

So I got to see the group twice. The first time I went to sit in on one of their meetings and have a natter about what we all particularly like in fiction. It started so sensibly. I took proper notes. Lots of notes. You should see the notes. More ideas than I could capture. Every author in the programme says this is exactly what happened with them and their group: you come away dizzy with information and perplexed about how to fashion a short story that covers all of these points. That addresses all the groups’ preferences.

It’s easy.

You ignore them.

I didn’t mean to.

I really didn’t mean to. I took that first night very seriously – as daft and funny and full of chocolate fingers as it was, I also took it seriously – and so it was with some guilt that I ignored everything.

Everything except one tiny point. I think literally the tiniest point. It turns out that this gorgeous little village actually has two book groups. And I could not get it out of my head. What if the groups were rivals?

I’ve not had this before: driving home, it was as if the story were pounding at the inside my head, wanting to get out. I refused to listen, I concentrated on the drive and I refused to listen and I will not listen, okay? Enough. The next morning, it was as if I were shaking to get this written. I’ve had that plenty of times on deadline but here it was pushing, shaking, pounding its way out. I can clearly remember the moment when I thought – and maybe even said aloud – okay. Okay. I’ll do it. I’ll write this story about rival book groups, are you happy now?

The plan was that I’d write this tale, get it done and out of my head, then I would go to the notes and start doing the job properly. I’m all for doing jobs properly and as I say, I took this seriously. The Combrook group is so nice there was a moment when I could’ve stopped being a city boy and moved there. They deserved a story that fit all we’d said, that covered the characters and the village, that was a proper job.

And instead they get The Book Groups.

Because once it was written, I just liked it too much. I felt I hadn’t touched the research and yet I’d also spent the research. It was all in this story even as none of it was in this story.

So this is about book groups and I want to tell you that nobody from Combrook is in it. Not from either of their groups. That was one thing I stressed when I went back to read them the tale. The other thing I stressed was that I’d like my seat to be nearest the door in case there was trouble.

I think I can tell you that they loved it. They stood up this week at an event and said so. On Wednesday, there was a presentation to all of the groups of the book we made. Six authors, six groups, six stories and about eighty people gathered in the Library of Birmingham. I know five of the tales were superb. I think mine is too. You don’t often hear me say that, do you?

One more thing? My tale is narrated in the first-person by the leader of a book group. So it’s a short story but it sounds like a script to me. Something I’ve not really understood and yet have been rather proud of is that actors have often told me my scripts are easy to learn because the dialogue is good. How could I not be proud of that? I get it now, though. Because I learnt my story and I learnt it very easily. I didn’t read it at the presentation, I performed it.

Or at least, I preformed the start. We could only read a few minutes of the tale at the event, there wasn’t time for all six stories to be read in full and anyway, we wanted you to grab the limited-edition book.

I long to read the whole story to you. To perform it. Combrook called it “Alan Bennett chic lit”, which made me shatter with pride. My sister said it made her picture Hyacinth Bucket. I admitted I sometimes channeled Les Dawson. If I could come around your house and perform this to you, I would. I can’t even get you a copy of the book now – but I can show you the story. In full.

Sorry: I really intended to write you a single paragraph of explanation and then simply reprint the story. I even thought that would make this week’s Self Distract a quick job. But this story, getting to write this story and then this week to get to act it, it’s been a highlight of my year and I had to tell you.

I could’ve told you faster, mind. Your tea’s gone cold. Go get another mug and a biscuit. Because here’s The Book Groups.

William

—

THE BOOK GROUPS

by William Gallagher

Our little Book Group isn’t perfect, I’ve never said it is. Ask my husband. He’ll tell you it takes quite some running. But it is our group.

And we were first.

Susie Farrow can say all she likes, I started ours six months before hers. And she only did it because she couldn’t get into mine. It’s not my fault I’m popular. And we can only have so many chairs, that must be obvious to the meanest intelligence. I understand she’s disappointed, of course I do, but that’s no excuse for running around claiming it was all her idea. I ask you. She even got that in the newspaper. Back in Plant a Tree year. “Susie Farrow runs the village’s first reading group and plants trees”. The Parish Observer.

Not very observant if you ask me.

I’ve been in the Parish Observer now. I’ve been in all the newspapers. And you don’t see me bragging.

It’s about standards.

We have standards here in my group. I insist on it. But that doesn’t mean we are exclusive. We do welcome new people, of course we do. When there’s room. I mean, we let in Henry, how is that being exclusive? He arrived just after Sally Moon passed away so there was a vacancy, but that’s beside the point. He wanted to join and we let him, no questions asked. We don’t vet people. We don’t check their income and everybody has a secret past in banking, I’m hardly impressed by that.

Some of us have commented, just in passing, that Henry is good-looking but I don’t see it myself. I love my husband. It’s so much easier when you’re married and can get back to books. I don’t envy these young ones chasing men all the time, I really don’t.

No, the problem with Henry is that none of us in the Reading Group are quite sure he can read.

I suspected it first when we discussed Bleak House and he looked quite blank. Fair enough, I thought, it was a challenging read, perhaps it was too soon. So I went the other way for our next one, I chose an easy book for us. The Da Vinci Code. It’s a terrible book. But sometimes those are best because you can have a really good time discussing how terrible the writing is, how schoolboy the descriptions are.

I was right, too. Henry was much more lively in that session, he got quite animated. Waving his arms about. Touching knees. I don’t like that myself. My husband never gets animated. It’s easy to say what you think without touching, that’s what we say. But it takes all sorts. So long as they’ve read the book.

And I was just sure he hadn’t. I went out of the room to replenish the chocolate fingers and did he say thanks when I came back in? Or was he in mid-sentence talking about Tom Hanks? I pretended I thought it was thanks and the group did give a little laugh. I confess I am quite funny, but I don’t like the group to get boisterous. My husband watches the football upstairs while we’re here and it’s just easier if we keep things a little quiet. “You are a reading group after all,” he says.

When they’d gone and he was off to his bedroom, I rented the film version off Netflix to check it out. It’s a terrible film.

We should’ve had a film group.

Some of the things Henry had said were definitely from the film and not in the book. Well, I say definitely. It was very late when I watched it and we had drunk quite a bit of wine – we are always respectable, I will not tolerate drunken behaviour, someone has to stay sober in our house – so I might be wrong. I’d have to watch the film again and I’m not that concerned.

I think Henry has a little thing for me.

I don’t say anything. Let the girls fuss over him. It’s them I’m thinking of, really. I know they’d be disappointed if I asked him to leave the group. So, never let it be said that I turned anyone away.

Not since 1989 anyway when Amy Rogers said that about Pride and Prejudice and, well, I think we all knew I simply had no choice.

She’s with them now. The other group. I’m sure they get our post.

Still, once you get something in your head, it is hard to stop it festering. And at each meeting, Henry would only ever suggest books that have been made into films. Mind you, what book hasn’t now? But a couple of months ago, before all this unpleasantness, I decided we should pick a John Irving novel. Something meaty for the run up to Christmas, you know? I went through Amazon and I looked up every book on IMDb to see what had been filmed and what hadn’t. I love the internet. You can read how to do anything on there.

Anything. I miss it.

Then at the next meeting, I proposed A Prayer for Owen Meany. I expected to see Henry nipping off to the bathroom again to look it up on his phone but no. He agreed right away. Said he’d never heard of it but if I recommended it, we should definitely read it.

I mustn’t encourage him, I won’t.

Everybody was quite frosty to me that evening, it was most unusual. But I’m not there to be liked. I’m there to get us reading good books and then having a good time talking about them. It’s important. It binds us together, there is nothing like reading. And I really do believe that our little group is a key part of what makes our village special. Makes it a community.

I was walking through our village a few days after the meeting, just past where the post office used to be. It was the last shop in the village and it closed down twenty years ago. Either the Post Office closed it down because of fraud or Environmental Health did for something else. If I ever knew, I forget. But it’s on my way to the brook and everybody knows I take a walk to the brook each morning.

You can’t go anywhere here without bumping into two or three people you simply have to talk to. It’s why we like it here. My husband isn’t much of a talker. It’s easier to get conversation out of a stone! But I do like talking with people, I do like knowing what’s going on. I do like eve-rybody mucking in, everybody cheery together. We’re not some anonymous city, I couldn’t bear that.

So I wasn’t surprised to see Henry walking up to his Jaguar. He was pleased to see me. He can be sweet like that. I look at his excited, out of breath face and I haven’t the heart to tease him about his reading.

But it just shows that you never know what people are really like be-cause he said to me, he said: “I’m so glad you picked that book. Great, isn’t it?”

Then he was gone, I didn’t see where he drove.

Primarily because here comes Susie Farrow, overdressed as usual. She’s out of breath too but I don’t think it’s excitement at seeing me. She’s unfit. Unfit to run a book group, I say. That’s my little joke. Still, it comes to something when a girl her age is red and panting. I ignore that, of course, and just give her a short but polite enough nod.

She sees the book in my hand. “Oh, I heard you were reading that. Sad ending, isn’t it?”

That woman has not spoken a word to me since I turned her away from the group and the first thing she says is to spoil a book. It’s meanness, that’s what it is. And it’s to boast. Of course she’s read it. Of course her book group has read it, hasn’t everyone?

Bad enough that I’m going to see her at the village Christmas party. I walk on and put Susie Farrow out of my head.

I wear a little tinsel hat and I give a little speech about how our lovely reading groups are such good friends. I say something like it every year and it always gets a polite little round of applause. One year even my husband joined in. It was easy to get him to come that Christmas, I’d actually organised sponsorship and he came to support me. To this day, people ask how I got a company to sponsor our little do.

I’ll tell you, though, because it’s about quality. It’s because our group is best. I know it and so does everyone else, including the brewery. So it’s no harm being gracious at the party. I am gracious. I’m not “up myself”. Whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Still, it is about standards and I do think that we should all play our part. Especially in our village. And this year it was so obvious that Susie Farrow thinks she’s superior. She was right there in front of the stage before I was called up to make my speech but then I couldn’t see her when I went to start. I always like to catch her eye during my speech and let her know I know that our group was first. But this time she had walked out. She had actually walked out. Fresh air, said one of the girls. Can’t take the heat, I said. I was pleased with that.

My gaze went to Henry. He’s dependable. Even if he can’t read. I hardly had to look at him before he understood me and was heading out after Susie Farrow. He didn’t get her back in time for the end of my speech but as I say he’s dependable, it doesn’t make him a miracle worker. And they had clearly had words outside. They came back in looking so angry and it was obvious how they avoided each other for the rest of the night.

I’m proud of Henry. Standing up for me like that.

I’m sure he has a little thing for me.

I mustn’t encourage him. I won’t encourage him. But there is something there. I can’t deny it.

My husband came to pick me up. It was easy to get him to do that, it was on his way back from the club. When I came out, Henry was talking to him. He saw me and slapped my husband on the back. “Here she is, you lucky fella.” I’m just saying what he said.

My husband never says anything like that.

Maybe that was why it was so easy.

I was surprised how many people came to his funeral. But then I am a figure here, it’s silly to be modest about it. They all turned out to support me. They’ve not been quite so good since. I really thought Henry would be here every day but I haven’t seen him once. But I expect he’ll make up for it when I’m out.

I tell you, though, it’s really the girls I’m disappointed in. I haven’t seen any of them, either.

I have seen Susie Farrow.

Of course Susie Farrow came to visit me.

She said she was here to build fences, she said she was here because she didn’t know I’d got it in me. She said we could be friends when I get out. Got to stick together. Us girls. “Very well,” I said. “Let’s talk like friends. Who’s given you that ring?”
She wouldn’t tell me.

All front, all talk, that Susie Farrow.

But I’ll give her this, she did bring me a book. She says that she and Henry had a meeting, representing the two book groups, to discuss what to bring me. That will be Henry’s doing, I’m certain. The book is The Wimbledon Poisoner and Susie Farrow says it’s a joke. I’ve never been one for comedy but I thank her for the thought. And I’ll check it out later, I’m sure there’ll be a message in it for me.

Do you know, there are quite few ladies here who I’ve seen reading at recreation. I should start a group. I’m going to start a book group, just for us.

We won’t be the first group, obviously. But you’ll see. We’ll be the best.

Community Script Writing 101

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This is going to read like a long and unqualified hymn of praise to a particular TV show but actually, I think it’s about confidence and verve and talent. But you have a point about it being long: grab some tea and a couple of biscuits, would you?

Follow. I have recently binged through the first three seasons of Community (Amazon UK, Amazon US). It’s a US sitcom set in a college, and my wife, Angela, has not binged through it at all. Most episodes, perhaps 70% of them, have left me agog enough that I’ve gone to her insisting that she would not believe what the show had just done.

For instance, she came back one evening and I was blinking at the screen. I told her they’d just done an amazing episode with paintball. Uh-huh, she didn’t say but she could’ve done. Not long afterwards, I was telling her that they’ve done an entire episode with stop-motion animation. They did a perfect pastiche of Law & Order. One episode is almost completely done as a 1990s 8-bit computer game with the characters drawn as Super Mario-like graphic sprites. There is an entire episode produced in the painstakingly precise style of a National Geographic or History Channel documentary but what it’s documenting is a pillow fight. Another apparently straight episode splits off into six alternative timelines with each being worse than the one before.

That’s nice, she also didn’t say but could’ve done.

Community isn’t her thing but what I want to focus on here is me and how I would tell her about it. How poorly I would tell her.

You can so easily praise Community for doing these stunts that it comes across, I think, as a comedy that does stunts. Let’s do a spaghetti western this week. Whoop-de-doo.

Plenty of series do pastiche episodes. I’m trying to remember specific examples but I just have this general shrug: I do remember The Young Ones doing University Challenge supremely well, and Press Gang did a kind of Doctor Who that was quite touching, but otherwise, shrug. It feels like a cheap idea, it feels like a stunt. Make this episode be a western and that alone will be hilarious.

But.

When Community did that paintball episode, I was beside myself with its audacity and true imagination. That episode turned this series from a funny, self-aware comedy about a group of students at an adult education college into – well, I don’t know. Within its 21 minute running time, the entire show changed from one of type of sitcom into something like a feature-film epic. Every character under extreme, just extreme pressure; allegiances formed and betrayed; plots made and failed; friendships won and lost.

Also, there was paintball.

The college becomes a war zone with paintball guns and it is very, very funny but it’s also so very, very serious. You feel like you’re seeing characters in their true colours, and it just happens that those true colours are red, blue, orange, green and yellow paint.

It is riveting and I was just agog.

When I learnt that the show was going to do it again in the next season, I was actually excited. It was an effort to not skip straight to that.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why this worked and why a pastiche could be so much more than an empty parody. I’m afraid I think that it’s down to the talent, the verve and the imagination of the makers. Damn them. How can I steal talent, verve and imagination? Bastards.

It’s not that the show is perfect. This is unfair of me but a DVD extra put me off a little: the first one I watched had series creator Dan Harmon narrating a series of clips which had fart noises added. There’s puerile and there’s seriously? you bothered to make that?

I saw that quite early on in my watching, before I was hooked and in fact before the first paintball episode which truly is a series-changing, series-defining moment. So it did put me off and that was unfair because I think there’s really only one puerile joke in the actual episodes. There’s this monkey, right, and it’s a pretty good addition to the show: it is the catalyst for an episode set entirely in the main study room set. But its name is “Annie’s Boobs”.

That just doesn’t fit, for me. Doesn’t seem to fit Troy (Donald Glover), the character who named the monkey, and the start-stop reactions from Annie (Alison Brie) seem like cutaways instead of permanently, inherently part of her character.

Every show takes time to find its feet in its first few episodes and I’d put Annie’s Boobs down to this one working out Troy’s character except that the name persists.

It really interests me how the series visibly changed and developed its characters. Not in the sense of them growing and changing over time, though they do and though they should, but in the sense of the writers fixing what doesn’t quite work. Troy and Annie, for instance: Annie’s defining characteristic at the start is that she’s in love with Troy and he doesn’t realise. That’s going to be a series-lasting kind of thing, a series-long will they/won’t they, except that it isn’t. That’s cut off at the knees quite early on and it’s to the benefit of both characters.

One character that suffers from changes and fixing, though, is Britta (GIllian Jacobs).

At the very start, ie episode one, Britta is the reason the show exists. Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) is a disbarred lawyer having to get some college credits and really only being interested in “the hot blonde from Spanish class”. He creates a study group just for the two of them and it is so very much entirely to get her into bed that he is even lying about knowing any Spanish at all. It is therefore disastrous for him when other people come to the first ‘group’ meeting and, again, this is the start of a series-long will he/why would she kind of tale. They are the sexy not-yet-couple, they are the Sam and Diane of the show. (Which the series actually directly states. I mean directly: it names these Cheers characters in dialogue.)

Except this sexual tension is also dealt with.

After the first episode and certainly after the first season, I think Britta is sidelined and Annie is brought to the fore in her place. I’m uncomfortable with this: Annie becomes the centre of a lot of sexual attention but she’s meant to be 19 and substantially younger than anyone but Troy. Actor Alison Brie was about 26 when the show started, which helps me yet I still squirm a bit.

Whereas Britta loses this role as the centre of sexual attention and that should be good. For a series that specifically knows it is a sitcom and deliberately plays off sitcom tropes, she begins as very much the standard blonde sexy one and it’s good that there came to be more to her.

But Community is a comedy about this study group with seven people in it. Most of the time, it feels like a comedy about this study group with five people in it.

Pierce (Chevy Chase) is the member most overtly and deliberately left out:

JEFF: Annie, let’s not rehash this. The guy’s been a jerk all year.
ANNIE: He’s a jerk because we exclude him.
JEFF: We exclude him because he’s a jerk.

But watch any story from about halfway through the first season and you find that it’s typically about something that involves five of the group – sometimes it’s two stories and the group is divided – plus Britta doing something else. She orbits the group. In the A-B-C kind of storytelling ethos, she usually has the C story.

I can’t criticise the show for it: what this series does with its 21-minute running time is truly nothing short of miraculous. I honestly don’t think there is another show that goes as far and as imaginatively. You get taken to places that are beyond ridiculous and the steps that get you there are not convincing, they are not sensible, yet in the moment you completely believe that they are. When this group steps out of a space capsule – honestly, from a college class to a space re-entry in 21 minutes – you are actually cheering for them.

You triumphantly tell Angela that they made it safely back to Earth.

Uh-huh.

So if they can’t get every character in every story, I can’t criticise. I can lament, though.

I find the show inspiring, actually. I didn’t watch it to be a lesson in writing and I look at its imagination with only yearning, but it makes an astonishing job seem effortless and part of me wants to celebrate that.

Unfortunately, part of me wants to hang on to it and I can’t.

For I lied to you. I haven’t just seen the first three seasons, I’ve also seen half of the opening episode from season four.

It’s gone.

This verve and talent and imagination is gone.

Now, I knew as a media writer that Community had famously had a problem in its fourth season: creator Dan Harmon was fired as showrunner. And I know as a media writer that he got hired back for the fifth season. That’s why I’m going to make it through the fourth, just so I can see whether the fifth comes back. (It’s just been announced that there will be a sixth.)

I see your point that it is unfair of me to judge an entire season on the first ten minutes of its opening episode but I raise you that I only watched those first ten. Where previous episodes scooped me up and carried me at a thousand miles an hour, this one dropped me.

The clue is not in the writing or the story or the plot or the characters, though, it’s in the acting.

It’s the same cast for the fourth season and I have thought that the whole set of them is exquisitely good. But in this opener, the actors are acting.

You’ve seen this. Actors who don’t have good material to work from will go into a kind of mugging. They put their backs into it, they put their worth into it and they make the best they can of the job. I don’t criticise them for this, if I were an actor I hope that I would be good enough and care enough to do it too. But it’s visible. And what I see is that the material isn’t there.

As actors, they are hoping to pull something off with their performance. As a writer, I have a habit of believing that everything is on the written page. We’re all wrong. Shows fly when script and cast are at their best and are at each other’s side.

I saw and very much liked the pilot episode of Community many years ago. The pilot that now seems so ordinary compared to the delicious insanity of the series. I didn’t watch any more until a couple of months ago when writer Alex Townley loaned me the DVDs.

Naturally I’ve thanked her enthusiastically but she’s told me she feels a bit guilty. That she’s led me to the disappointment of the fourth season. And she described this fourth run as being “like fan fiction”. Ouch. It’s the perfect description: Community 4 feels like it’s written by fans who know all the rules of the show but didn’t create it, aren’t moving it forward, aren’t reaching deeper.

You need verve and talent to dig deeper and I think you need confidence too. Now, where exactly can I get me some of those?

Community is on DVD here on Amazon UK and there on Amazon US. I hope you love it as much as I do.

Finding Fame

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So there’s this thing about Thomas the Tank Engine. It doesn’t especially matter whether it’s a good or a poor TV show, what tends to happen regardless is that people love it when they’re very young. Then they go to school and wouldn’t be seen dead with a Thomas the Tank Engine lunchbox. Next, they get through the embarrassment and forget about the show but then many years later, they’re buying the DVDs in a nostalgia bin or joining the online Thomas forums.

Hopefully the quality of the show played in to one’s enjoying it when very young, but now that certainly has nothing to do with it: you’re watching that DVD and you aren’t seeing Thomas the Tank Engine, you are seeing yourself.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a complete episode.

But I appear to have gone through this cycle with Fame.

That’s Fame the TV show, not the film. It has always and forever been okay to like the film written by Christopher Gore and directed by Alan Parker. It seems to me that the film is much more about failure than it is about fame and that miserable bleakness plus some great music makes it pretty timeless.

Whereas my main memory of the TV series is that it was extremely bright and colourful and jazz-hands happy. These are all things that lend themselves to embarrassment so the show was always at risk of this but it did also come in 1982 when US television was mostly light, easy-watching fare. My beloved Lou Grant was cancelled the year before and while it was replaced on the schedule by Cagney and Lacey, while Family Ties started then too, while St Elsewhere began as well, most of the year was pretty bad. TJ Hooker started. The Happy Days spin-off Joanie Loves Chachi began its brief run. Bring ‘Em Back Alive. Remington Steele started in 1982 and much as I enjoy it, it was froth. And then there was Knight Rider.

But it’s funny how many of those titles you recognise. Three decades on and the only one you’re not sure of is Joanie Loves Chachi. Then, too, there is little question but that you know this line:

You want fame. Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying … in sweat.

I should write a line that gets remembered and quoted in 32 years time.

You’re expecting me to re-evaluate Fame and say that at least that it doesn’t deserve its cheesy reputation or perhaps that it actually deserves to be a classic. I don’t know. I am Thomas the Tank Engine-style blinded to it. But I re-found it by an odd route and it’s proved to be a route that has made me re-evaluate the series as a production. Maybe it’s because I’ve been involved in shows now, maybe because I’ve had to produce the odd thing, but I have a new and very great respect for how this TV series was made. How they physically made 136 episodes.

Every US TV show, especially of that time, was making up to 24 episodes per year but this series was making 24 musicals. A new musical every week. The ones I’ve been watching this week tended to have three musical numbers each: typically a solo song over some montage or other, plus some kind of dance-room-related tune and then usually a big, full production number with the large cast of regular dancers. If you only count the professional routines and not all the pro/celebrity dances, that’s more than we see each week on Strictly Come Dancing or its US equivalent Dancing with the Stars.

Doing that on a drama budget, doing that on a drama schedule, it makes me go pale. The writer in me is also immediately conscious of the impact that makes on your script. You have to stand up three musical numbers, you have to find a story that allows for these to happen naturally during your episode. It’s bloody hard and not every writer, not every episode, succeeds: even in the first few of the series that I’ve just watched, there are one that feel contrived. Nice tunes, but fudged into the story.

Then equally, there’s a writing issue of how long those songs or dances take. Three minutes each? Two? Call it two minutes apiece on average and you are still handing over six minutes of your fifty-minute running time to a musical interlude. Your story has to fit fifty minutes, has to deliver a big moment ahead of each of three commercial breaks and then resolve itself. Oh, and let’s have another one next week. And the week after.

I don’t think I was aware of all this in 1982, though I was already seeing television as something that is crafted rather than just a thing you half-watch in the evening. But I am aware of it now and that made the route I came back to Fame all the more interesting. Because I found it again through the scripts.

I have no clue, not one single clue, what I was looking for online last weekend but in that rabbit-hole kind of way, I found myself coming across Fame and specifically across The Kids from Fame Media Blog. It looks like it was designed in the 1980s and it’s tricky to find your way around. So tricky that while that’s the site’s front door, it’s just taken me a time to find the scripts I first stumbled across. But they’re here: the complete shooting scripts for Fame, beginning with the first season.

I read a lot of scripts, I enjoy reading scripts, I’m particularly interested in this set for how they approach the musical numbers. Some just have scene headings and a few lines of description like

91. BRIDGET’S AUDITION – PRODUCTION NUMBER

starts simply and builds as the corps of dancers from Lydia’s class move onto stage to back and accentuate Bridget’s routine. Leroy is her male ‘support’ dancer, helping her in lifts and turns, etc. The moves are intricate, always keeping Bridget in the forefront of the audience’s focus, leading to a final portion in which all the dancers fall away, leaving the performing arena to Bridget, allowing her to carve graceful shapes from thin air, in concert with Bruno’s music…

Let us all take a moment to imagine being Debbie Allen, not only having to learn her lines from the script as she starred as dance teacher Lydia Grant but also having to go uh-uh, graceful lines, right honey, and choreograph that number.

One script included all the lyrics to the various songs. It was really confusing: the lyrics were written out in all capital letters, very hard to read, and the way they were positioned in the script meant they were followed by dialogue that was clearly meant to precede them. But they did also include very familiar – to me from my radio work – cues and timings for how long the music would take.

And then another script just gives up and says, in total:

MUSIC #1 – TO BE ANNOUNCED

It’s funny how clearly you can see a show finding its feet through its scripts and just how they are written, what they tell the production. I’ve read entire series of scripts before to see how a show develops from start to end and it’s terribly instructive as well as interesting.

So as a writer, I recommend taking a look at the scripts. If you tell anyone we talked about this, tell ’em that I was very serious about production issues and script writing and the history of television, okay? Maybe you can tell them I admitted I’ve enjoyed watching the episodes and that I like the music.

But if you ever tell anyone that I had a gigantic crush on one of the Fame dancers, you’re off my Christmas card list and no mistake.