Drama Writing
I went to the London Film School Screenwriters Showcase on Monday night, at the ICA (that wonderful white building on the Mall). This is an event designed to promote the work of students on the LFS Screenwriters Course, now in its 3rd successful year. The film-making students who come to LFS - directors, producers, cinematographers - all make short films which get prestigious industry screenings. And this Showcase is an inspired endeavour to give the screenwriters a similar high profile end-of-course show.
It's harder, of course - a film can be screened in front of an audience, but a script can't be put on public display. It has to be savoured privately. But the organisers of the showcase assembled a cast of first rate actors who read scenes from each of the screenplays, and the results were exhilarating and genuinely dramatic.
I know from experience what a joy it is for a writer to see words take flesh, when actors perform them. But the innovation this year was to get the writers themselves to introduce and pitch the projects, and then in most cases to read the scene directions too. Some writers even went off book and described the action to the audience as if they could actually see the scene taking place.
The intention was to involve the writers closely in the showcase at all levels, and at the same time to tacitly promote the idea of the screenwriters as Authors of their own work. For novelists, who are by definition also Authors, this seems a modest ambition. But for screenwriters - used to the weird workings of the auteur theory of cinema - it's immensely important and empowering.
And in every case, the writers who presented their own work carried with them a charisma and a vivid personality that was also very clearly evident in their writing. This is why book readings work; even writers who aren't public speakers convey a tone and an essence of self that is at the heart of what they have written.
Brian Dunnigan, the talented and slyly mischievous director of the course, gave a charming speech; Ben Gibson, head of the school, proved once again that he is a champion of the writer's voice; and Margaret Glover, tutor and writer, inspired everyone.
I've been teaching at the London Film School for three years now; it's a fabulous place to be, buzzing with energy, and populated with a diverse range of students from all over the world. And every term, a vast number of short films are shot and edited and screened there, making it one of the most prolific film studios in the UK.
Remarkably, the LFS is sponsored by Cobra beer, and so every event is furnished with copious supplies of free alcohol. This, of course, has no bearing whatsoever on my commitment to the school and its courses...
There is a famous list, compiled in Hollywood, defining all the people involved in the making of a feature film according to their status. The star is at the the top, with the most status; the director comes second; the guy who runs the hot dog stall outside the studio lot comes somewhere near the bottom; and last of all, of course, comes the screenwriter. And this is a fair reflection of how the biz generally works...
But events like the Screenwriters Showcase give me hope that it is, after all, worth writing for the screen.
For those who follow such things, I'll now give a full list of all those who honed their screenwriting craft at the LFS last year:
Jimmy Ruzicka
Ines Braga
Nina Mitrovic
Stavros Pamballis
Francia Fernandez
Matthew O'Connor
Lucia Lopez
Santiago Faz
Vivienne Westbrook
Pinyada Asahi
Francesca Zeeman
Hrafnkell Stefansson
Amos Soffian
Gabriel Vallejo
and last but by no means least,
Andres Llorente.
Last night's Writer's Guild forum on fantasy and science fiction writing proved a great success. We had a full house of interested writers, many of them non-Guild members (there was a large contingent from the London Film School, where I'm a part-time lecturer.) And the panel debate was, I felt, though I'm biased of course, lively and very informative.
Ashley Pharaoh was there to talk about Life on Mars, and he showed a splendid clip which demonstrates the show's amazing stylistic range - from naturalism to surrealism to out and out verbal comedy. There was a stunning exchange between John Simm and Philip Glenister, in which Glenister's character splurges a smorsgabod of offensive homophobic terms.
Ashley thinks of the show as imaginative writing rather than 'sci fi' per se. And the chair for the evening, Edel Brosnan, described it as 'uncanny' writing which is a lovely word to use.
The point though is that this is a show which has challenged the stranglehold of social realism and police procedural in British television. It manages to be a great cop show - but it is also allowed to be weird, and strange, and philosophical, and thought-provoking.
And is it SF? On the basis of what happens in the final episode of the last series, I'd say yes; but the power of the show was always the way it made the ambiguity of its own reality a part of the story. Is this actually happening or is it just fantasy? And of course what we saw in the final ep may just have been another dream...! So I guess in many ways the show this is closest to is Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective - which was also a detective drama, and a mystery, but played beautifully with our ideas about what is real and what is imagined.
Phil Ford spoke about his experiences writing and script editing for shows like Dr Who, Torchwood, and The Sarah Jane Adventures. Phil is a life-long science fiction devotee, who has suddenly discovered there's now a sweet shop in his living room.
I spoke about my experiences working as a development executive for Scottish Television, when I was told in no uncertain terms by senior ITV execs that they were never going to do SF, because it was stupid....! And audiences wouldn't like it! Phil nodded vigorously at this point; he had obviously heard the same comments many times, in the days before Russell T. Davies's Dr Who. Phil has spent a career in TV swimming against the tide; but now the tide has changed...
And Phil showed a clip of the Sarah Jane show - the wonderful Gorgon episode - which had us spellbound.
The third panellist, Adrian Hodges, co-creator of the bold dinosaur series Primeval, spoke about how he approaches the task of creating 'worlds'. Adrian has written a huge amount of historical drama, including the BBC's splendid life of Charles II. But Adrian is adamant that documentary realism is not possible or desirable for a dramatist; you have to create a world that's credible, and accurate in its essentials, but which is also accessible and resonant for a modern audience. And for him there's no real difference in approach between writing an historical drama, a literary adapatation (he wrote the movie version of Michael Hastings' Tom and Viv) and dinosaur dramas.
Adrian also wrote The Lost World; so dinosaur drama really is a genre he has made his own!
I spoke about SF and fantasy in novels, and read a short excerpt from Debatable Space, which seemed to be well received. The excerpt features a line in which Lena bemoans the fact that in her far future world some people have been bio-engineered so that their excrement emerges wrapped in polythene - to ensure that their shit does not smell.
How, Lena wails, can I stay sane, knowing a thing like that?
I'm delighted that the Writers Guild have organised this forum, because it really does mark a seachange in the way genres like SF are perceived by the 'mainstream' media. For years, SF has been treated as 'not posh' (a phrase one of the panellists used.) But now TV execs have woken up to the fact that SF has a loyal and discerning audience, and that it's a genre which offers different and exciting ways of telling a story. Different and exciting and, quite often, more imaginative ways.
However, Adrian did make the telling point that there was a time when TV audiences were very forgiving of wobbly sets and poor special effects - in the days of I, Claudius, and the early Dr Who. But after the movie Star Wars, TV audiences got pickier; so one reason SF has been off British TV for so long is that our companies literally couldn't afford to make big SF epics like Star Trek or Stargate.
But that's changing, as the cost of CGI comes down. And for my money, the production values of a show like Battlestar Galactica seem to me equal and at times superior to the values we'd expect from a feature film. (When the Vipers fly out of the mother ship, it always send a shudder of awe down my spine.)
And, in my view, the potential of SF on television has barely been tapped. So I'm looking forward to even more bold new shows in the next few years. A British Heroes? Why not?
But the secret for me about creating a show like Heroes is that you don't start by copying an existing show - you create something genuinely new! So pale imitation superhero series interest me not so much; I'd much rather see shows that come from somewhere fresh, and unexpected, and original.
(For an edited verbatim account of the debate, click here.)
I recently did a Q & A for the Book Swede - great fun. If you fancy reading it, then click here.
Tonight was the UK screening of the last episode ever of The Sopranos. After the US screening, some viewers wrote in demanding their subscription to HBO back, so bitterly disappointed were they by the final ep. However, I found it well written, and moving, and intriguing. Without giving too much away, I would just say that it has an 'open' ending, genuinely so. But I wasn't disappointed at that; it's a show that's always been oblique, contrary, and unexpected, and to me it seems right that it ended that way.
The Sopranos is the show that broke all the rules - a genuinely hateful central character, vast amounts of subtextual storytelling, slow narrative pace, and character arcs that sometimes spanned years of real time. I loved the way that scenes would seem to ramble and lead nowhere, and yet would actually, and sneakily, advance the story. In one episode, Junior Soprano (Tony's Uncle) is teased during a golf match for his penchant for pleasuring ladies in a manner frowned upon by Italian Americans. It's a throwaway moment; but this small incident sowed the seeds for Junior's later attempts to murder his own nephew. Cunnilingus as a plot point; only in The Sopranos....
In some ways it was, for me, the most inconsistent of the great US TV series. Some eps were lame, some were pretentious; and even good eps (like the final ep) were sometimes marred by jerky bad editing, and poor matching of shots. But the characters were rich and gloriously awful and full of flaws; and the acting, always, was superb.
Why do we like Tony Soprano? Is it because he kills people? Is it because his life is more interesting than ours? Or is it because his life is actually just as crap and boring as everyone else's?
It's a show which managed to have its cake and eat it; it made us love and admire Tony and root for him to win, and it also made us despise his petty small mindedness, his bullying, his racism, his homophobia and his general nastiness.
In the movies, gangsters are glamorous; in real life, and in The Sopranos, gangsters are nasty little shits. And to be honest I've no idea how the show managed to make me despise and revile its main characters yet still draw me back week after week to watch them some more.
The last ep ended with an RIP logo; the R was an upturned gun. A nice final flourish.
Now, what the hell else do I watch, when I want dark, resonant, bloodthirsty, gripping drama?
I spent last weekend in Hebden Bridge, a startlingly beautiful town in Yorkshire with mill chimneys and clock towers and horribly, horribly steep hills. I was teaching on a workshop run by Screen Yorkshire for new and established screenwriters.
Jeremy Dyson of the League of Gentlemen was there too, giving a talk on how to write...he's an engagingly and delightfully grounded guy. He spoke about he and his pals took a show to Edinburgh, worked their socks off to make it good - and the rest was history. Success swooped and swept them away, and the success of the League has been remarkable.
But Jeremy has kept a clear understanding on what it's like to be on the other side of the wall, and judged his audience extremely well. A number of the would-be writers on the workshop had completed an MA in Screenwriting at Leeds Metropolitan University, in the hope it would lead to fame and fortune. And Jeremy was one of the first people to do that same course; and here is now, writing comedies for men dressed as big breasted women in Royston Vasey.
Jeremy spoke brilliantly and very honestly about what it is like to be a writer. It is basically very hard because you get out of bed, sit in front of the computer...then nothing happens. And when nothing happens, for hour after hour, day after day, it does become profoundly embarrassing. It is, I would surmise, a bit like being a gigolo who doesn't much like sex. It is horrible, and awful, and also petty, and humiliating. There is the blank page. There is the writer staring at it. It's not a bit like Clint Eastwood glaring at Lee Van Cleef. It is just basically....banal.
All writers know this. Clever writers use words like Writers Block to add dignity to the embarrassing phenomenon of creative impotence. And smart writers like Jeremy have a whole battery of techniques for conjuring up a creative mood in which the words happen. For Jeremy, it hinges around having a clear desk, a neat environment, and stopwatch techniques in which he forces himself to write 5 minutes of anything, however crap it may be. Then he takes a break. Then he writes for another 5 minutes. Then - and then, something takes off and magic comedy results. When the flow flows, it really flows.
After Jeremy's talk, the writers broke up into 3 groups of 5. I was teaching the TV drama group, who were full of pizzaz and optimism and paid me the enormous compliment of actually having heard of the first TV show I worked on, The Paradise Club. (It's a cult hit, but there's a ghastly rumour that all the tapes have been lost or hidden in some basement somewhere - though this is a show that cries out to be given a DVD release.)
Kathyrn O'Connor, head of development of the Northern office of Talkback Thames, came to talk to the writers about TV today, and gave great feedback on their stories. I gave my usual spiel about the fact that TV really has got more interesting - it used to be nothing but police procedurals, but now high concept and science fiction and weirdy and wacky are all in vogue, which means there is at least the possibility of drama that's excitingly different.
The projects pitched to me ranged from a cop show (by an actress with recent CAD room experience, ie being the person who sits behind a microphone telling the area car where to go) to teen drama (sexy, stylish, full of potential) to precinct drama to hugely ambitious melodrama. Interestingly, most of the writers doing the TV section of this SPARKS course have significant experience as writers, but are looking for human contact, and feedback, and career openings. The talent is out there...it's finding a way to connect that's so hard.
Later that weekend, at the instigation of script guru and my pal Simon van der Borgh, we did a pitching session in which all 15 writers had 15 minutes to pitch their idea to a scary panel including myself, Simon, Hugo Heppell (head of Screen Yorkshire) and Ann Tobin (senior lecturer at Leeds Met University.) As a joke, we compared it to the X Factor (I was cast as Louis of course.) In reality - it was alarmingly and terrifyingly like the X Factor. For a new writer, to walk in a room with four industry professionals and pitch a project which then gets ripped to shreds must be one of the most frightening experiences possible...and frankly, we pulled few punches in our critiques.
But we were nice with it; and the truth is, that degree of adrenalin does really help the creative process. I was amazed at how much the projects developed and grew after that Bunsen Burner process.
But then, of course, the follow up to that kind of scary pitching session has to involve TLC and slow, careful project development. Writers need a safe space in which to try out ideas; and they need room to spread their wings.
I love teaching; over and above the high quality work that results, the whole process is about getting the best out of people. And to be part of that process is a privilege.
SPARKS continues through the Autumn and into the early months of next year. I salute Screen Yorkshire for actually giving a damn about the new screenwriters in the region, and for giving them a chance to develop. Some will be better than others; some will have careers, some won't. But everyone gets an even break, which is all we can ask for in this wicked world.
My new radio drama BREAKING POINT is broadcast on Friday, 10th August, 9pm, on Radio 4...(For further info, see the blog ON THE RADIO DRAMA EXPERIENCE.)
If you miss it, you get another chance to listen via the BBC's wonderful Listen Again facility. For those who haven't used it before, just go to the BBC website (www.bbc.co.uk) and scroll down to Radio, then click on 'Listen to shows you've missed.' Then click on Radio 4, and scroll down the list of shows until you reach The Friday Play (under 'f'). The programme will be available on the internet for a week after its broadcast (TX) date.
Harry has been a very close and valued friend of mine for a number of years. I'm not blind to his many faults, but I've always regarded him as a man of integrity, and someone I could trust. So it came as a bitter blow to me when he calmly and coldly announced that he was personally responsible for the assassination of Princess Diana.
Harry then went on to explain, with ruthless logic, that she had to die because she was a liability to the British state. And he showed no qualms or remorse as he carefully explained how the 'hit' was managed.
Then I noticed that Adam Carter was hiding a smile, and I began to wonder - was this a wind-up? My guess was confirmed when Harry admitted that he was merely being ironical. Yes, he had been responsible for a worst-case-scenario exercise which explored ways of killing the Princess. But the death itself was an accident; not an MI5/MI6 conspiracy as some people foolishly believed.
My relief was mingled with chagrin, as I realised that I had once again got confused about the difference between reality and fiction...Because Harry Pearce is not in fact my friend. Nor have I ever met him; nor, in fact, does he exist. He's a fictional character in the hit BBC series Spooks; and the Princess Diana speech came in a Howard Brenton scripted episode at the end of series 4.
I've always admired Spooks since its first audacious series. But it is the later series which really capture my imagination, when the show developed an effortless ease and a deadly cutting edge. It's a show characterised by fabulously understated acting, in which a look or a grimace can speak a thousand volumes, and defined by high-octane storytelling in which twist follows twist and the energy level never dips.
I've been watching the show obsessively for the last few weeks, in preparation for a workshop in Bradford on film and television writing (organised by Hugo Heppel, of the enterprising regional screen agency, Screen Yorkshire.) Normally I'm used to teaching groups of 3 or 4; but on this occasion I was addressing a lecture hall of 100 + keen would-be writers. It was a nail-biting experience, but made easier because I shared the teaching load with the charismatic and fearless Simon Van Der Borgh, a screen writer, film analyst and teacher who (would you believe it! considering how amazingly young I look!!) was my student when I was a lecturer at the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield.
Simon analysed film structure and showed clips from the movie Sideways; I analysed television drama structure, and showed the Princess Diana episode of Spooks in its entirety. It was extraordinary to see how well the TV drama stood up to this kind of close scrutiny. The episode is virtually a stage play, taking place during a 'lockdown' in the series' standing set. And there's one prolonged scene which consists of a character (Zaf) talking us through how Diana died. There were no guns, no car chases, just one man talking and talking; but it was spell-binding...And the star of the episode was Lindsay Duncan, who gave a masterclass in scary menace.
Harry argues that it's not possible for men in his business to have friends - you can only have 'colleagues you would die for.' But so long as the show lasts, he'll continue to be my pal, and trusted guide through the evil machinations of global politics....
I love words. Words can be rapiers ("No one likes you.") They can be cudgels. ("You bastard, **** off.") They can caress, they can excite, they can provoke, they can appal.
And I love writers who love words. William Shakespeare. David Mamet. Robert Towne. Cole Porter. Ira Gershswin. Frank Loesser, who wrote the music and lyrics of Guys and Dolls. Damon Runyan, who wrote the stories which inspired Guys and Dolls, and who pioneered a baroque form of urban New York gangster speech which turned everyday dialogue into poetry. And David Milch, who stole from Loesser and Runyan profligately and superbly when he wrote the dialogue for his series NYPD Blue, in which Sipowicz's ornate and syntactically challenged version of English became known as Milch-speak, and was for many years the default dialect of the show.
And, of course, Aaron Sorkin, whose series The West Wing was the wittiest and most well written show on television for many years. Half the time, I have no idea what they are saying - but they say it so well.
Captain Jack Sparrow also loves words. He uses words the way he walks, with bizarre arm-flapping feminine grace. He oozes words, he spits words, he lobs words with his tongue. And he is from time to time given some of the best dialogue ever to grace a major studio blockbuster.
These thoughts are prompted by a Sunday afternoon visit to see the third in the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, At World's End. These movies are of course critically reviled (although my agent John Jarrold includes the first Pirates film in his all time Top Ten - and John really knows his movies.) But I find them hugely diverting, visually exhilarating, and very funny, despite the rambling and sometimes incoherent narratives of the last two films. (I suspect two runners carrying differently dated drafts of World's End collided in the corridor and mis-collated their scripts - this is the only way to explain some of the narrative oddities in this film.)
But the dialogue! It's delightful. In one scene, being asked to betray his friends and crew, Sparrow uses the word 'divulgatory'. Is there actually such a word? I neither know nor care. But in context, it's perfect - it's a word that slimes out of Sparrow, and the soft 'g' at its heart perfectly resonates with the 'ch' in 'treachery'.
Then, later, Sparrow has a great line - I haven't got the script so have to quote from fallible memory - when he describes a woman as 'the fury like which Hell hath no.'
The writers, Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, have two tongues each, firmly in their respective cheeks. Their approach to the screenplays is to concoct a period piratical tone that absorbs every conceivable cliche, but is handled with zest and wit and is a joy for actors to speak. In the first Pirates movie, Gibbs (the bosun with the preposterous sideburns), hears Elizabeth Swann singing, and speak to Norrington:
GIBBS
She was singing about pirates. Bad
luck to sing about pirates, with
us mired in this unnatural fog --
mark my words.
NORRINGTON
Consider them marked. On your way.
With 'us mired in this unnatural fog?' No wonder this character manages to steal his every scene; it's poetry, by the sloppy bucketful.
And later, Barbossa (original captain of The Black Pearl, played at pantomime pitch by the extraordinary Geoffrey Rush) has another lovely speech, after being spoken to patronisingly by Elizabeth.
BARBOSSA
There was a lot of long words in
there, miss, and we're not but
humble pirates. What is it you
want?
ELIZABETH
I want you to leave. And never
come back.
Barbossa and the pirates laugh.
BARBOSSA
I am disinclined to acquiesce to
your request.
(helpfully)
Means 'No.'
Words.
Let's respect them.
Monday 18th June
I've spent the weekend avidly reading the newspapers, and one story has me totally transfixed - the armed rising by Hamas in Gaza. On Monday morning I read the daily papers, absorbing the various stories that will dominate the week - Glastonbury, an EU conference, Blair and Brown, and so forth. My job this week is to write a 15 minute play based on one of these stories - but I don't yet know which one...
Then, when I arrive at Bush House, temporary home of BBC Radio Drama, I see a cluster of people on the pavement in a weekly vigil in honour of BBC journalist Alan Johnston, who is being held captive Gaza. It is a touching, and quietly shocking sight.
Inside Bush House, I'm involved in a brain-storming session with the creative team who currently run the innovative BBC show, From Fact to Fiction. Their brief is to create dramas inspired by current stories - and each of their dramas is conceived, written, recorded and broadcast in a week. By the end of Monday afternoon, we have resolved to write about a) Russia b) Gaza or c) something else...
Tuesday 19th June
I've been given an office in Bush House, in the palatial, luxurious radio drama offices overlooking the bins. I'm suddenly acutely aware that no one can do any work until I come up with an idea. Executive Producer Eoin O'Callaghan has a disarmingly laidback style ('No pressure, then,' he says, gripping my hand in a vice-like grip and staring ominously into my eyes.) The producer is the delightful energetic Sasha Yevtushenko, of Russian origin, and the composer-in-residence is Nicolai Abrahamsen. I lobby hard for the Gaza story, which I find has entered my blood. It's a tragic dilemma of a people divided by civil war, when they should be united in a common cause.
I spend the day researching on the web, and phone a Palestinian academic to get a potted history of the conflict. His cynicism is palpable; did Hamas jump, or were they encouraged to jump? I've spent all my life being hostile to conspiracy theories; now, in these troubled times, I will always tend to believe the worst of any global conflict. It's always about money, and power, and the needs of the very powerful; and the rest of us are pawns.
Wednesday 20th June
I write a 15 minute drama - it comes in a single burst, and I'm about a few hundred words short. My approach to the time constraint is to have as much story as I would put into a feature script. I have three entire storylines, interwoven, but with no action climaxes...these are brief snapshots of people in crisis.
The joy for me is that two of the actors in the Radio Drama rep company - John Dougall and Simon Treves - are already familiar to me, because they were in my play Breaking Point.
Thursday 21st June
This is the day I really started getting tense. What if the play doesn't work? What if my stories are glib, or untrue? I spend the day obsessively learning all I can about Gaza, downloading maps and imagining walks and learning what Gazans eat. I listen to a remarkable radio play called The Arab-Israeli Cookbook, which analyses the conflict by asking Israelis and Palestinians to cook a meal. And I read the blog of a Palestinian journalist trying to raise a child in a hell-zone. (Raising Yousuf, Unplugged.)
Ideally, I'd like to go to Gaza, spend months researching, and live and breathe the people and the place before putting pen to paper. But this kind of drama is all about immediacy....And it's fast, fast, fast.
Friday 22nd June
I meet the cast in the Green Room, opposite the legendary Studio N41. Simon seems genuinely pleased to see me; having been cast as an evil interrogator in the last play, it's a relief for him to be cast as an evil MI6 agent...
Jasmine Callan has a double role as a little girl, and the girl's Palestinian mother. And Souad Faress is compelling as the mother-in-law, based on all the mother-in-laws I know and have heard about.
The three stories seem to intertwine pretty well, and John and Simon savour every last vicious insult in their scenes together. Half way through recording Nicolai strolls in carrying a CD with the music he has been recording...it's that tight. Colin Guthrie and Keith Graham run the tech side of things - rather to my surprise, they seem to have swapped jobs since the last time I worked with them. Instead of being the Spot, Colin is operating the Panel and doing the Grams (sound database), while Keith is now the Spot, ie doing the spot effects such as rustling clothes, or cocking a rifle ominously.) These are multi-talented individuals....I leave at lunchtime, while Sasha sits down to do the edit.
Saturday 23rd June
It's 6.45pm and I'm in a taxi on my way to a party when someone remembers the play is being broadcast...the taxi driver kindly turns on the radio and I manage to catch the last few minutes of the play in real time. To my delight, the taxi driver laughs at the jokes...
Sunday, 25th June
And finally, I listen to the whole play, in an afternoon repeat...normally it takes 12-18 months for a radio play to go from commission stage to broadcast stage. With screenplays, it can take 5-10 years to get the script made. So it's a unique experience for me to go from 'haven't got a clue what to write about' to hearing the finished play, in just 6 days....
Friday, 18th May. I am in Bush House, temporary home of BBC Radio drama, waiting for the actors to arrive. This is the readthrough of my new piece Breaking Point, a Friday play about military interrogation. I've been researching and writing intensively for several months, and I am anxious to find out if the damn thing actually works.
The first actor I meet is Simon Treves, playing Colonel Reynolds in the play. Simon likes the piece, and is pleasingly flattering in the nicest kind of way, then asks if I've been in the Army. The answer - good heavens, no, they'd never have me! I have two left feet, two cack hands, no sense of direction, and I'm a snivelling coward. But it's reassuring to know that the story feels real.
The rest of the cast arrive - Naomi, Bertie, John and Elliot. John is a mild mannered man with an English accent who, once the readthrough begins, immediately reverts to his native Glaswegian and chills my bones with his portrayal of SAS man Danny.
The play is read, in a little room off the main offices, in a relaxed but committed way, and all goes well. I think back to the most embarrassing readthrough I ever experienced, for my play Rubato, when Nicholas Farrell was absent and I had to read in his role. I did so, giving, I felt, rather a decent performance till I reached the last section of the script when I remembered I had to sing three verses of a Destiny's Child song. I th0ught about ducking out, but chose to carry on, belted out the song with huge energy - and the actors fell about laughing. Oh boy.
On this occasion, blessed relief, I don't have to sing.
Saturday 19th May. We are in Studio N41 - an airless room in the bowels of Bush House. The process is, as always, efficiently, cheerful, and astonishingly fast. Two days to record a one hour play. It would take Francis Ford Coppola three months to cover the same amount of material. Toby, the director, is a hawklike, calming presence, and he gently talks the actors through the text and their approach until every line, every beat has a meaning for them. His great talent is not to impose an approach, but to coax the actors to imbue every moment with meaning.
Elliot, as Captain Starkey, is a cheerful, big man, brimming in testosterone and charm. His idea of relaxation is to cycle to Agincourt, as preparation for playing Henry V (later this year at the Royal Exchange). And as the day progresses, Elliot becomes increasingly scary and deranged; in his performance, I hasten to add, rather than in real life. John Dougall blasts through his role and suddenly, he's gone. He only has one scene; his part is played.
Sunday 20th May. And amazingly, we are half way through. Everyone is more relaxed, and I'm starting to feel that 'one big family' feeling which I find so totally addictive.
The play is about psychological manipulation, and how to 'break' people in interrogation. It's a subject I've researched thoroughly, and though I've invented elements of story, everything in the play is based on truth. And in the course of a day, Richard shows me a newspaper article about a German who lost his mind after experiencing US interrogation methods over a period of 5 months. As the play makes clear, this is not torture; it's far worse.
The last part of the day features long long scenes between Eliot and Naomi. They kiss, they quarrel, they experience post coital bliss; and at the end of the day they go home to their different families. This is the part of the process of writing I most love; seeing words become flesh, seeing the actors become the characters I created.
Toby points out that I've given this play exactly the same structure as our previous radio play, Blame (about industrial manslaughter.) In other words, there's a series of short scenes leading up to a very long climactic scene full of huge speeches. This is the great indulgence of radio; unlike cinema, where 'less is more' and the picture is worth more than a thousand words, the radio dramatist can write and write and write...
At 6.05 pm, the recording ends. The play is done. These are my favourite days in the year - after months of lonely slog, I get to sit on my backside and watch other people make the words come alive.
On the way home, I have a new idea for a radio drama...
Photos of the actors and technicians involved in the recording of Breaking Point can be found here.
Scripts of several other broadcast radio plays by Philip Palmer can be found in this other place.
Crime has been good to me over the years. One of my first and best jobs in television was as a script editor on the cult BBC series The Paradise Club, created by Murray Smith, starring Leslie Grantham and Don Henderson. It was a seedy London crime drama with shootings and heists and yakuza, set against a backdrop of deliciously improbable and larger than life characters. Murray was himself a larger than life character, who had served in the Foreign Legion and (so he claimed) had a close association with an SAS. As a member of a shooting club, Murray owned a gun, a formidable Sig Sauer which he once showed to me during a difficult script conference. He pointed it at me, smiled his evil smile, and even though I knew the gun was unloaded, I immediately modified my notes and told him what a great script it was – don't change a word, Murray!!!
After Paradise Club I worked for years as a regular writer on The Bill. Later I worked as a script editor on crime dramas like McCallum and Taggart, and wrote thrillers and noir film scripts. I spent a large part of one year hanging out with the West London murder squad, attending post mortems and drinking with coppers. I once spent an evening with an armed robber who had recently been abducted at gunpoint and hustled into the boot of a car, before being dumped on to the street in Glasgow. (I never had the courage to ask him why.) Another armed robber gave me a guided tour of all the banks and sports arenas he had armed robbed; only later did it occur to me that I would be appearing on the CCTV cameras loitering outside banks with a convicted blagger. 'Guv, who's that sinister looking Welsh bloke? Put him on the surveillance list…'
Then one day in the Science Museum, standing under a massive space rocket which hung from the ceiling, a vast phallic remnant of the days of space exploration, I had the germ of an idea that eventually evolved into Debatable Space. My aim was to write in a genre I love, with as much passion and bravura as I could muster. I wanted it to big, bold, and crazy (and in all honesty, I would say that it is.)
In writing Debatable Space, I became aware of the many differences between writing drama and writing prose – there are more words! Many many more words. (Actually, that really is the main difference. That, and the absence of producers, script editors and heads of drama all adding their wise and tactful insights to the evolving text.) I also experienced the joy of knowing that in telling this particular story, money was no object. This is a book with numerous space battles and bizarre aliens and black holes and flaring suns. If it were made as drama, it would cost the equivalent of 2,000,000,000 episodes of The Bill…
I also relished the freedom I felt I had to switch genres and styles, whenever the characters felt like a change. It's a book about slavery, and entrapment; but in writing it, I've never felt freer.
As well as being a book about evil, though, it's also a book about joy. One of my most truly joyful experiences in cinema was seeing the trailer for Raiders of the Lost Ark as a young man. It evoked the wonder of childhood, impossible stories of derring-do, and had a retro nostalgic tang that was fabulously compelling.
Debatable Space is born of a similar impulse. With Raiders, Lucas and Spielberg set out to make a movie that was like the movies they watched as kids. And in similar fashion, I wanted to write a story that evokes the spirit of wonder and delight that I remembered from reading science fiction as a boy. I'd buy and read a half dozen novels a week, and when I didn't have money I'd stand in W.H. Smith and read the books that way. I'd borrow SF novels from my Uncle Bob, who had shelves and shelves of them in his motor repair garage. And I'd lose myself in strange worlds, from A.E. Van Vogt to Asimov's Foundation universe, to the Known Space of Larry Niven.
It was Niven's vision of weird, witty aliens and a morally conflicted hero that has most haunted my memories. The cowardly puppeteers, the furry Kzinti, the space yachts propelled by the solar wind…that was my starting point. But in the process of evolution, Debatable Space became more than just a rip roaring space opera. It become a biography, and a political allegory (evil rich humans controlling an empire by means of remote control technology – hel-lo?) and an ensemble show about a bunch of misfits bonded by humour and a mission.
But does that mean I'm now a science fiction writer? Well yes I am, and proud to be so. But a large part of me is an unrepentant genre-buster, with a love of mixing it up as much as possible. I love Blade Runner – a science fiction film noir. Alien, of course, is an SF horror movie. And The Matrix is a science fiction allegory of Jesus. Bring it on…!
Genre-busting is one of the most lively strands in modern SF, too. Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Alastair Reynolds do wonderful things in the world of SF noir. The astonishing Neil Gaiman gets his books on the SF shelves but, so far as I can gauge, manages to be a genre all of his own. And Peter F. Hamilton, one of my favourite SF writers, seems to be a Victorian novelist writing triple decker novels with rich, bravura characters, who also has a penchant for aliens and techno-talk. (And his Gregor Mandel novels are of a course a fine example of the busted genre of SF detective novel, following in the tradition of Asimov's Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw.)
Casablanca was once described as a thriller, a love story, a political drama and a musical all rolled into one. And for me, one of the joys of SF is the freedom it offers to play with style and genre with complete abandon. Any story can be told in the SF genre, in any style, with any degree of political seriousness, or not, and with no limits on the degree of intellectual seriousness at work. So long as it's exciting, and extrapolative…it can be SF.
I worry, though, that after Debatable Space I will no longer be allowed to write in other genres without putting an extra 'M' in my name. But even so, after a writing career living on the proceeds of crime, it's a liberation to be a 'British SF author'.
To me, that's an invitation to have some serious fun...