Slow Horses

The backside dilemma

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I’ve been working on the Writers’ Guild Awards for just about a year, so I got to go to the event last Monday. I will never show you pictures because they are startlingly visible evidence that I was even more ill than I thought.

Even so, even being ill, even being there not because I was nominated for anything but because it was work – I suppose it was work – the Writers’ Guild Awards event is the place to be. It is the room to get in if you possibly can and, if anything, I thought this year’s was the best of a remarkable run.

And although it didn’t win its category, “Slow Horses” by Will Smith was nominated and I am actually proud of that. I didn’t write that excellent show, I wasn’t a judge in that category, but I was the one who entered it into the awards.

But then, it’s such a strong show and the Writers’ Guild Awards ceremony is about the best British writing, it had to be entered, it had to be considered.

Consequently that wasn’t me, that was just necessary.

And although I worked on the awards for a year, obviously so did many people. Yet when it came to the night itself, all my jobs were long done and consequently out of all the people working there, I was the sole one who could relax with nothing to do.

I did end up with the odd task but still, the actual event on the night was neither one pixel better or worse because I was there.

So I had a great time, a really tremendous time, and the night was a success. Plus so far in 2023 I can point to various things I’ve learned already, various things I’ve made happen or just plain made, I can think of people I’ve met and things I’ve done.

I suppose.

Well, more than suppose, just before you and I started talking I actually made a list for myself of what I’ve done so far.

But.

I had to write that list because it still feels like we’re only just back working after Christmas and that nothing has happened, that I’ve done nothing. For some reason I am finding 2023 murderously difficult to get going in. Today is January 20 and suddenly, this very second writing to you, what occurs to me is that it’s therefore eight weeks since I had a haircut.

That’s my January. An absence of barbershops. It’s not an accomplishment.

So here’s the thing. Without question, I need to get up off my backside and bloody do something. Except I’m a writer, so what I need to do is sit that backside right down and write.

You see the dilemma.

Top Ten favourite scripts of 2022

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Previously on Self Distract… I’ve read scripts all my life and I love it, but since late December 2017, I’ve read at least one per day. Once a year I do a personal top ten for no very clear reason, although oddly it wasn’t until I wrote 2021’s list that I realised how thematically connected all ten were.

Anyway. Now, read on.

There’s obviously a week or two left of 2022 and I will continue to read a script every day, but up to this moment, I’ve read 515 during the year. That’s about typical, especially if I’ve been involved in any awards judging and I have again this year.

But otherwise, this has been an unusual year because – so far – 238 of the scripts I read were from the same show. Doctor Who. Chiefly the 1963-1989 version, though I’m only up to 1981, and some scattered reading of the revived series, scattered because I’ve already read those and usually was just going back to re-read good ones.

Speaking of good, as well as counting the scripts I read because that’s obviously vitally important to me for some reason, I do also make an extremely brief note next to each. Good. That word comes up a lot. Of the 238 Doctor Who scripts, a near majority were “good”, though there were some that were “a bit tedious”, others that were “fine” or “okay”.

Then there were five that I noted as being “very good” — and by coincidence, also five that I’ve listed as being “utter shite altogether”. Details on application.

None of the Doctor Who scripts made my personal top ten for the year, although Blink by Steven Moffat might’ve got in if it hadn’t been the fourth time I’d read it.

It’s not like my top 10 is significant, but then for completeness, it’s also definitely not in any way statistically valid. My top 10 for 2022, just for starters, contains only a single script that was actually written in 2022. The rest range across all of recorded history, making the list this year only because I happened to read them in 2022.

So don’t see this as judgement or pontification or anything remotely about me, other than how this is a way I can show you ten pieces of writing I think are brilliant – and include links out to nearly all of them. If you don’t happen to have read them already, I envy you having them ahead of you.

10. Justified: The I of the Storm by Dave Andron (read online on January 16)
9. Battlestar Galactica: Mini-Series by Ronald D. Moore (read part one, part two online on November 20 and 21)
8. Motherland: Pilot by Holly Walsh, Sharon Horgan, Graham Linehan, and Helen Linehan read online March 28)
7. My So-Called Life: Dancing in the Dark by Winnie Holzman (read online April 23)
6. Slow Horses: Failure’s Contagious by Will Smith (read December 6)
5. Lou Grant: Nazi by Robert Schlitt (read April 22)
4. Peggy for You by Alan Plater (read January 24, buy from Amazon)
3. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (read July 10, buy from Amazon)
2. CODA by Sian Heder, based on La Famille Bélier by Victoria Bedos, Thomas Bidegain, Stanislas Carré de Malberg and Éric Lartigau (read online February 12)
1. Derry Girls: Season 3 Special: The Agreement by Lisa McGee (read September 29)

Peggy for You and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead are stage plays, CODA is a film, and the rest are TV. Thank you to Hat Trick for the Derry Girls script, and Apple TV+ for Slow Horses.

Thanks too, to Charles Martin who got me a lot of 1970s and 1980s Doctor Who scripts. .

And most especially to possibly my favourite site on the internet, TV Writing. Only 20 of this year’s scripts came from there, and I am astonished because it’s usually so many more.

I expect it will be in 2023.

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.