Radio Writing
Many years ago I studied Anglo Saxon as a module at University, and could actually read and speak a few snippets of that of that long dead, resonant, rhythmic, repetitive, blood-drenched-battle filled ancient tongue. ('Biter was the baduraes, sword edg onfeng' - that's the only bit I can remember. Meaning 'Bitter was the battle, sword clashed against um, 'onfeng'? Lance? Forgive me, it was a long time ago.)
I also read Beowolf, in translation not in the original Anglo Saxon, and I remember finding it tough going. A wonderful core story - Grendel is the monster, but when he's killed, Grendel's Mother stalks the land - hilarious but chilling. And great passages of rhythmic epic writing. And I don't doubt Seamus Heaney's claims that it's one of the greatest poems ever written. But it is without doubt a tough read - very repetitive, and full of bragging alpha males.
And so I have to take my hat off to Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, for what they've done with their script for the Robert Zemeckis' directed Beowulf. They turn a turgid yarn into a ripping yarn. And without taking any credit away from Avary, surely it was Gaiman's influence that turned a macho blood-fest into a subtle dissection and critique of the nature of heroism? Quoting from memory: late in the story, Beowulf (Ray Winstone) says, 'Men are the monsters now,' beautifully turning a reactionary tale into a critique of war. And the extraordinary twist in the story, featuring a near-naked CGI Angelina Jolie, most certainly was not in the original....
This is, all in all, a very very smart movie. You wouldn't know that from the rather sniffy reviews, which all tactitly imply that Gaiman/Avary are playing fast and loose with a flawless classic, rather than making a magnificent hero's journey morality tale out of a dense and bloodthirsty and at times impenetrable text.
The final sequence is fabulous in every sense of the word - a brilliant tour de force spectacle every bit as thrilling as the best bits in the first Lord of the Rings.
There are flaws, as in every movie - Anthony Hopkins is fine as Hrothgar, but Robin Wright Penn makes an attempt at a matching Welsh accent that was ill-advised and, for a Welshman, deeply annoying. And John Malcovich? Um?
But I found this beautiful and spectacular and thought-provoking. And like The 300, this is a film which stretches the visual possibilities of film. It's eerie, at first, to see such almost-real CGI animations; but by the final climax I had suspended my disbelief totally, and could totally see why they just had to do it that way.
The nude scenes have been much mocked, because of the way the naughty bits are always cunningly concealed. I didn't mind that - am I really ready to see a CGI willy or vulva? I think not! And to my mind, it was very like the coy way nudity has always been handled in Marvel Comics, which I'm sure is the intended vibe. (But it still manages to be genuinely sexy. Especially Angelina as Grendel's mum! - quick, cool me down with swamp water immediately..!)
The 3 D experience added enormously to the richness of the experience. I remember seeing House of Wax in 3D in a cinema near Piccadilly Circus many moons ago. The modern incarnation of 3D is streets ahead of that - and for a spectacular movie like this creates a truly remarkable viewing experience.
'I've come to kill your monster!' says Ray Winstone/Beowulf in an early sequence. Good lad, off you go then....
And okay, that bit is maybe just a tiny bit unintentionally funny; though I wouldn't swear to that. Gaiman of course has the most delicious sense of humor, and he doesn't mind leavening drama and tragedy with belly laughs.
One of the pieces of writing I'm proudest of is my own adaptation of another literary classic for radio - Sir Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. (That also had a dragon, in fact...) The experience of making that was fabulous, though extremely risky; I kept closely to the story, but I iconoclastically wrote the whole thing in my own very different Hollywood-influenced style.
But at that time, I never would have imagined that these dusty greats of Eng Lit would start making their way into the multiplexes of the world....
I recently did a Q & A for the Book Swede - great fun. If you fancy reading it, then click here.
Rather to my surprise, I've won (or part won, or shared in the winning of) an award for my radio drama Gaza. It's the Clarion Award, which was given for the radio series From Fact to Fiction, to which I contributed one 15 minute episode.
Still, even a tiny minuscule chip off the edges of an award for a very short play is good enough for me. It beats my abject failure to win a BAFTA for my episode of the TV series Rebus (I was short-listed for the Best Newcomer award, but then some smarty-pants noticed that I'd had over a dozen Bill episodes broadcast, and hence wasn't strictly speaking a newcomer, and so I was de-nominated - sob!)
Anyway, I'm proud to have a stake in this glorious shard of an award, and thanks to Sasha and the rest of the team.
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.
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...