#23 - "Come on up, boys - I'm dead”
I'm having the pleasant issue of having had too many thoughts this week. It's a nice issue to have - whenever my head isn't quite working, I can go weeks without feeling like I've actually had a thought, so this is vastly preferable and I'll try and keep it marshalled.
I continued to work on the sci-fi pilot, although I had to take a step back from writing the script itself because I realised I had a problem: I had no idea what the place looked like. Well no, I had some idea of it, but the sketches in my mind were too loose. It was hard to imagine the connective tissue between scenes, there wasn't enough precision in the imagining. I ended up doing tonnes more research and grounding the locations in particular in real places. It's helped enormously and I even drew a new (terrible) map of the town, with the journey of the episode dotted on it. Exhausting work but rewarding. Such are the perils of world building.
I mentioned world building the other week as I started out on this show, didn't I? I find worlds so addictive. There's a real compulsion in them for me. Story and character are of course important, more so than anything when writing for television which is an utter plot monster. But it's always the worlds that keep me in a fiction.
I talked about that a little before here in regards to Star Wars before Rogue One came out:
https://vinayskpatel.wordpress.com/2016/12/12/youve-taken-your-first-step-into-a-larger-world-the-extended-star-wars-universe-alternate-narratives-me/
(If this sounds too nerdy, I promise it's worth clicking through just for the picture that's linked in the first line).
Reading that blog back, all of what I loved then I still love now. Details, dynamics, deviations from the reality I know, these are all the things I find thrilling. I believe I've mentioned my obsession with counter-factual history as a kid (I’m going to get very bad at this, I’ve the memory of a goldfish. So if I repeat too much, please give me the heads up).
I am also reminded that the very first feature length script I ever wrote was when I was fifteen, adapting The Matrix to the streets of Dartford, the town I went to school and spent a lot of my adolescence in. I full intended to shoot it with an old camcorder but, if I recall correctly, my best friend at the time insisted on his girlfriend playing Trinity and...and he kept changing girlfriends. A glimpse into the future of esoteric production problems...
Yesterday I got to meet and work with the cast of the HighTide/BBC Radio Three radio play I've written in conjunction with playwright Tallulah Brown. They're absolutely brilliant (Clare Perkins as a ghost mammoth!) and I'm thrilled to have their voices in my head as I rewrite today. Just having a person twinned to a character makes it infinitely easier for me to figure out how a character will not just speak but also act. I never really find my scripts until I can hear those voices.
I don't have a huge amount of experience of radio drama and my introduction to it was somewhat sidewards, by which I mean I never listened to Radio 4 growing up. But when I was maybe thirteen, I somehow found the BBC recording of Under Milk Wood. It's from 1963 (I think) and has Richard Burton as the narrator, though they've subsequently used his narration for other recordings because it's a bit hard to top. I'm assuming you know what Under Milk Wood is but if you don't, it's this gorgeous 'play for voices' written by Dylan Thomas that gives a portrait of a small Welsh town across a day. It's by turns gentle then creepy, romantic then cruel, sparky then soporific. Always humane and so deeply, inherently undramatic. World building at its finest.
I bloody adored it.
I'd listen to it on repeat on my long drives to Exeter for university. (You could get through it three times on the journey). I was fond of setting out early, just before the sun rose, and the characters of that town became my travelling companions. Later, I'd make my friends lie with my on the floor in the dark and listen to it together. Well. I tried. Only managed it the once. But you should totally do it. Make it your next party! Be That Guy/Gal!
Anyway, imagine my thrill when Jessica (the director of the radio plays) told me that the door in the studio we were in was USED IN UNDER MILK WOOD! I was meant to get a picture. I didn't get a picture. Will have to write more radio plays so I can do so.
For this one though, I've got my own Burton-esque narrator, a technique I've never really used before so it's been useful to grapple with it as a dramaturgical device. In a way it's been a test run for when I imminently start writing The Experimental Filmmaker (the play I'm putting together about George Lucas/the creation of Star Wars/the American1970s filmmaking scene). I've spoken with the director about employing a narrator figure for that and it's nice to have a handle on how I could use that.
Both a Doctor Who short story I've written and the radio play had announcements this week so I got to be the guy making obnoxious social media blasts about stuff I've got coming up. It always feels a bit icky doing that, more so when you've got more than one thing to put out into the world and even more so when you've - as I have - stepped back from social media a bit. I used to mock my friend for just coming back to Facebook to plug his plays but here I am with the shoe firmly on the other foot.
I'm now sort of back on Twitter and I haven't really missed it. Probably partly due to having other distractions in life, but I suspect it's also a little bit of fatigue. Twitter can sometimes feel like an eternal Freshers' Week and while I will always adore it for the friends it's made me and the connections and the world views, I'm not sure I can actively engage with it for long swathes of time anymore. My phone limits me to 15 minutes a day on it before cutting it off, but I've found myself going days without using even that meagre allocation. Some of my closer friends will laugh at me saying this considering how I've basically been a social media addict but I promise it's different this time, guys.
(Although admittedly I say that about quite a few things...)
Agh. Word limit. I wanted to say something about density of projects, how the research & thought that have gone into the HighTide radio play and the Who short are as intense as for much lengthier pieces and how that's mad and uneconomical but also enlivening. Someone remind me for next week?
P.S. Played football once more this week. Again, didn’t die. Again, have felt better. Don't slide tackle on a sand-based pitch, kids. But I can feel my fitness creeping back and that's something to be grateful for.
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