Sweet Sorrow

Ten favourite scripts of 2021

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I read these and didn’t have to. Wait, no, some I did: award shows are back so there were 30 or so scripts I was required to read. But other than that, so far this year I’ve read 500 scripts for fun and that number, plus it being mid-December, means I feel ready to recommend some reading to you, if I may.

Of those 500, 13 were stage plays, 20 were films, 43 were radio and a mere 424 were TV. What I can’t count or even really manage to guess is how many were written or made in 2021. I would have to say that the answer is not many at all.

This reading is done for pleasure and it’s as I find what I can. Some of the scripts are definitely new, but you also know how long it takes scripts to reach the screen so “new” can still mean a couple of years old. And then at least one script is from 30 years back.

So there’s no statistical analysis here, no rule or reason, no rhyme or plan. But I would like you to know that I found these ten to be immensely good reads. Just to avoid having any semblance of a countdown, let me split this all into the medium that the script was for.

Except for radio. There were a lot of really great radio drama scripts but only a couple that could’ve poked up into my top ten for the year –– and those were part of the judging I did so it’s awkward naming them ahead of the ceremony.

STAGE

Fleabag by Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Sweet Sorrow by Alan Plater

Neither is available online, I’m afraid. I got them from my bookshelves and you’re welcome to pop round.

I do keep a note next to each script I read, the very briefest of lines, ranging from “Okay” upwards and really only so I can look back and re-read the best ones.

Next to Fleabag, which I read on February 14, 2021, I’ve just written the word “Fantastic”. And next to Sweet Sorrow, read on November 4, it says “So good I cried.”

FILM

Promising Young Woman by Emerald Fennell

“Left me shaking,” says my note on February 1. “Wonderful.”

TV
Frasier: Dinner Party by Jeffrey Richman
The Handmaid’s Tale: Offred by Bruce Miller
Inside No 9: The 12 Days of Christine by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith
Press Gang: There are Crocodiles by Steven Moffat
The Queen’s Gambit (Episode 1) by Scott Frank
Schmigadoon! (Pilot) by Cinco Paul & Ken Daurio
Stumptown: Forget it, Dex, it’s Stumptown by Jason Richman

Looking at that list, I think I might go for The Queen’s Gambit, read March 3, as the best. All I’ve written next to it is “So good” but of all the series here, it’s the one I wish I could read the rest of.

I’m surprised to see just how wrenching some of these are. I’d have said I read a lot of comedy this year because a) I needed to 2) they’re quite short and also, er, iii?) they can be so tightly written that it’s fascinating. But apparently I also found time on February 16 for The Handmaid’s Tale which was like reading a knife.

This is the year I finally got into Inside No 9 and I did so because of the scripts. I can remember laughing so much, so very much at A Quiet Night In by Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, that I felt light headed as I read it on June 4. But it’s their The 12 Days of Christine, June 6, that sticks with me for how moving it is.

Still, speaking of funny, I was elated on September 19 to find that the script to episode 1 of Schmigadoon! was online. This is a musical comedy about comedy musicals and every frame is a loving nod to a genre of movie I did not realise I knew so well.

Seriously, every frame. And every note. The very opening sound of the first episode made me smile and I can’t say I didn’t stop until the end of the last episode, but it was pretty close.

Whereas Stumptown was upsetting on June 10 – but in a different way to the rest. It is a simply excellent detective series and so much so that you realise how rare that actually is. What’s upsetting is that the pilot went to series, the series is superb, it earned a second series commission –– and was then cancelled before production could start.

It was a scheduling thing and a COVID thing, and if I don’t know the details, I know it was pretty much a tragedy. You do not get great detective shows very often.

I look at my note next to Stumptown and how it just says “Excellent”. I am so good at conveying the worth of a script, clearly.

Mind you, you should see the ones I’m not telling you about and that I never will. One had just had the words “Staggeringly shite” next to it, and that was on a pilot script for a show that then ran for years.

Clearly, I know my stuff.

 

Remember, remember, words can punch

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I am occasionally quite critical of my old school and that’s completely unfair. For one thing, it is entirely because of its teaching that I remember, remember the 5th of November and if that is less of a political education than it could have been, sometimes it can be all the politics I can take.

Then, of course, I can count the number of times I’ve needed to know that September hath thirty days. I can count because I presume I lean on this fact at most annually, but I won’t count because then I’d have to think about how many years it’s been since I was a schoolboy.

Apparently someone I was at school with is now in charge of the place. I want to assume he’s made it better, I keep wondering instead if he’s actually always been stuck there in some kind of purgatory.

Anyway. Something that would surprise my teenage self about what became of me is that I once had a request on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please. I presume my school taught us some poetry but not well enough to remember and certainly not enough to mean that with a combination of their teaching and whatever writing skill I have, that I can write any poetry at all.

I cannot, cannot write poetry and all of this is partly on my mind because tomorrow I’m running a workshop that is all about it. It occurs to me that you might well think now that I am keeping up the high standards of my school, but I promise you, no. I’ve got a poet helping me in the workshop. I say helping me, I’m going to throw the ball to her and then soak up every syllable she says.

I think a lot about syllables, I think even more about words, and it’s an enjoyable kind of thinking which it rather needs to be since I’ve yet to actually get anywhere with the thoughts. Especially not when the words and the syllables are poetry. I can do it with prose, if you give me some prose I can express why I do or don’t like it, and I can vocalise why I do or don’t like a script.

Not poetry.

I am incapable of assessing a poem, just physically unable to have any kind of coherent opinion. What I can have from poetry, though, is a slap to the face.

Last night I re-read “Sweet Sorrow”, a stage play by Alan Plater. A group of people are having their annual party celebrating the life of poet Philip Larkin when an unexpected guest comes to the door. It’s the late Philip Larkin. And the play reeks of being Alan’s tribute to his friend, but it’s also very simply – in every sense of that phrase – moving.

It features many of Larkin’s poems and you also realise in the last moments that the entire play really comes straight from one of them. Like the script says, I only know the famous one about what your parents do to you, but across two acts, I am shown very many more and shown so well that these could now be favourite poems of mine.

That’s not why I wanted to talk to you about this today.

No, the reason is that the play has a brief nod to another poet, Christina Rossetti. It features a few lines from her “When I am dead, my dearest” and, for me, specifically these:

And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

That’s it. That’s the poem I asked to be read on Poetry Please. I was at the live recording in the Birmingham Literature Festival and practically first met poet Jo Bell there because she was sitting next to me in the audience. I remember she knew to put a sympathetic, empathetic hand on my knee. I want to say she knew to hold my hand. Those two lines make me weep and I was sitting there, shaking.

Last night I was in my office, reading an old stage play by a friend I miss, and those lines are the ones that slap me.

I am actually crying right now, writing them to you.

This is what my school should have taught about poetry. I have a sense that they would’ve said, and surely my teenage self would have thought, that crying over a poem means you’re weak. Now I know that it means the words are strong.

And that’s what I really needed to learn. Not poetic structure, not the fact that Rossetti died 127 years ago, I’ll take all of that and know it’s interesting, but fuck explanations, the point is that words are so strong.