I loathe looking back at whatever tiny things I’ve done in my life: I want to be doing new tiny things. But this week I was — I want to say forced but that’s too much. I was enabled. Encouraged. Actually, I was just asked.<\/p>\n
And the thing is, recounting a certain thing in a new context has somehow changed my memory of it. Not really, not completely, but some of the wiring in my head has been nudged into a better place.<\/p>\n
Follow. This is the true version: I wrote on the 2001 television revival of Crossroads and it was a profoundly bad experience. I was fired from it.<\/p>\n
Okay, I didn’t do it well enough, I didn’t write well enough. And actually I was so damaged by this apparent proof that I was a failure as a writer that for five years afterwards, I was doing all the usual things of pursuing writing work, even getting a lot of it in some fields, but it was like I was pretending. I knew I couldn’t write: it had been proven.<\/p>\n
I remember that this period was five years because then I somehow earned a place on a writing masterclass kind of thing. We had workshops on radio, theatre, something else I’ve forgotten, and television. I only went to the TV one because otherwise I’d be wasting a space someone else, an actual writer, could have used. And it was like that anvil was lifted because it was there that I learned everyone got fired from that show. And it was there that I learned I had done close to everything the way I should have done. Not the writing, clearly, but how I took it, what I did, I was pretty close to good.<\/p>\n
Truly, I felt lighter leaving that room. But if it helped me simply gigantically, that day didn’t change that I had been fired, it didn’t change how bad an experience it had all been.<\/p>\n
Fast forward to this week when Crossroads star Tony Adams died. I was asked to talk about Crossroads on BBC CWR who somehow remembered that I’d written for the show. BBC Radio WM didn’t know that and were audibly delighted when I explained why, yes, I did know something about it.<\/p>\n
Naturally, the point of talking on these two stations was Tony Adams, it was hardly going to be me, and of course neither show I was on had time to be a therapy session.<\/p>\n
So I’m on there, talking enthusiastically about the series and — true — how impressed I was when I was given the original brief about what was going to be done with Adams’s character. I had a good time on the radio, I think I did it well, I enjoyed myself hugely.<\/p>\n
I enjoyed talking about Crossroads.<\/p>\n
For twenty years it’s been a pain point. For about six minutes this week, it was fun.<\/p>\n
And I swear to you those few minutes have changed me. I can now look back — well, not happily, but I can look back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I loathe looking back at whatever tiny things I’ve done in my life: I want to be doing new tiny … Continue reading