Channel Zero #8

Well, I hope you’ll forgive my not posting for a little while but as you know I managed to do my thumb in. Having popped it back in place and tried to continue as normal I wrote some long emails to various people and various notes and things and discovered something rather important…. I shouldn’t have done. While typing itself hasn’t been that bad, using the mouse has just been aggravating things to the nth degree. In the end I came to the conclusion it was best to not use mouses (ha!), keyboards and anything else that might be making the recovery slower than it did ought. The weird thing is that I can’t recall the last time I did a finger like this taking this long to recover after being popped back in… then again I was younger and it was the left hand any way- so I wasn’t using it nearly so much. Mind you I can’t bend that finger properly and at least my thumb is currently still bending properly. Stupid human body- if I was a skink I’d have regrown my thumb by now!

So, all this time away from laptops, blogs and so on has given me plenty of time to ponder deeper more meaningful things… like why cheese is a bit nasty. That was a lie by the way… there is no why… cheese just is nasty. Unless involved in an ongoing pizza interface scenario…

Actually, more importantly, I finally found my spine and submitted my story synopsis to the inimitable Lucy and she pointed out some pretty useful and important things which I am now trying to fix. She was, of course, too polite to actually write in her notes ‘you have made a rookie mistake you pillock!’ but she would have been right to do so! So, I’ve been trying to sort out this problem. It’s proving difficult because, while there are immediate solutions, I can’t help thinking that I have to find the one that I can live with. It would be easier if I could grasp a pen or pencil properly as well and just get on and scrawl my thoughts down quickly. Anyway, we learn from our mistakes, not our successes. And anyway, that’s why we do the sensible thing and use readers rather than asking our pets to give our stuff the quick once over. It’s also why I write story synopsises rather than just plunging into scripts. Why rewrite 110 pages when you could sort out the problems in rewriting just 8?

Muscle Of The Week (for MJ)…
The right ventricle… essential for all your sanguinary needs!

Music Of The Week
Just to mark me out as massively behind the times I nominate…

2004, The Grey Video. Directed by Ramon & Pedro.

“Encore” from The Grey Album by Dangermouse. (Click this link for the full story.) What you basically get is my favourite Beatles LP providing backing tracks for the words of my favourite collaborator on Rihanna’s Umbrella under the auspices of my favourite Gorillaz producer… I’ve only just found the ‘virtual album’ because for a long while EMI were too successful in removing it from the Interweb. Whether it should have been counted by so many critics’ as ‘best album of the year’ is another matter when 2004 turned up new albums from Björk, PJ Harvey, Leonard Cohen, The Killers’ Hot Fuss and Miss Kittin’s solo debut. I suspect there was an element of ‘I’ve got something that you don’t have’ to the decision. Anyway, this isn’t the best track from the album but it is the only official unofficial promo video for this deeply unofficial album. Visuals ‘sampled’ from A Hard Day’s Night- previously directed by the criminally neglected Richard Lester who was also responsible for Help!, How I Won The War, Robin & Marian, the great The Bed-Sitting Room, the brilliant The Knack and the perennially enjoyable Three and Four Musketeers. There is no getting away from the fact that those Musketeer films have to be some of the most purely enjoyable films ever made…

Bonus Music

Manic Street Preachers’ Door To The River (Live at Cardiff Homecoming, 18/11/02)

Something rather nice I found a few weeks ago. I was going to keep it to myself but that would be mean! Don’t know much about the provenance… except it looks like a TV broadcast and is a very rare public performance of this particular track here augmented by string orchestra.

Now for “television, the drug of the nation… breeding ignorance and feeding radiation…” possibly…

Saturday
BBC1: 11.40 pm: Below: a rather unnerving supernatural thriller set on a WWII submarine. Written and directed by that David Twohy…

Film4: 1.10 am: Dog Altogether and Shane’s World: award-winning short films from Paddy Considine and Shane Meadows.

Sunday
BBC1: 8.00 pm: The Passion: First part of a week-long version of what’s been called the Soap Opera version of The Passion story… hoorah, more soap!

BBC3: 9.00 pm: Gavin & Stacey: Series 2. Television Of The Week Two episodes back to back.

BBC1: 9.00 pm: The Last Enemy: Finale of the sleeper. (Why the Radio Times’ reviewer finds this so difficult to understand is beyond me- I would prefer it to be harder going.)

ITV: 11.15 pm: South Bank Show: Revolution 68: a revisiting of the anti-Vietnam Grovesnor Square protests; their context and consequences.

Monday
C4: 8.00 pm: Dispatches: Iraq- The Betrayal

C4: 9.00 pm: Battle For Haditha: Nick Broomfield’s would-be-controversial drama based on the true story of an Iraq War massacre perpetrated by US Marines. Broomfield’s film-making tends to be deeply biased (I wouldn’t know in this particular case) but at least he’s a film-maker who actually believes in something. And that’s something to be valued in these times.(Followed by a documentary on the same subject on More 4.)

Tuesday
BBC4: 9.00 pm: Auntie’s War On Smut: documentary starting the BBC Curse Of Comedy season.

Wednesday
BBC4: 9.00 pm: The Curse Of Steptoe: Drama of the creation of Steptoe & Son. Anybody that caught the Channel 4 documentary on the same subject should know how melancholy, and compelling, the story of Corbett and Brambell is.

BBC4: 11.05 pm: Mark Lawson Talks To Galton & Simpson

Thursday
BBC1: 9.00 pm: Ashes To Ashes

Good Friday
BBC1: 2.10 pm: A Grand Day Out: Wallace & Gromit... what more could anybody want?

BBC4: 7.00 pm: Mozart Requiem in D Minor: Mozart’s masterful, moving final work. The performance edition is not noted.

BBC4: 8.00 pm: Sacred Music: Part 1 of 4. The story of the development of Church music starting with the origins of polyphony.

BBC2: 10.30 pm: The Assassination Of Richard Nixon: based on true story film for which history has already provided the spoilers!

Channel Zero #6

Life still moderately dull… dull is still far better than attacked by giant killer kangaroos- exciting it may be but high on the to do list… I don’t think so!

I have finally decided to stop tinkering messing about with Untitled Conspiracy Thriller’s story and finally made the decision to actually get some opinion on it. I’m not entirely happy with the way it’s ended up. But it may just be paranoia. Untitled Revenge Thriller now starts to take the foreground in the frontal lobes which strangely is one of the places that domestic appliances will take the foreground in Untitled Revenge Thriller. Spooky!

Misheard quote of the week: While Friends burbled in the background I heard Joey quote, ‘badgers, we don’t need no steenking badgers’. Presumably this was from the previously unknown Treasure Of Chipping Sodbury… a tale of greed, madness and one farmers fight for possession of his land.

I’m still kicking myself for missing the Derek Jarman documentary: I may not like the guy’s films but I would have liked to have found out some more about the man himself. Presumably in this multi-channel hell it will be repeated before too long… On the other hand I was unexpectedly surprised by Freezing… even if it was only three episodes. Swings and roundabouts!

The new Sunday night drama, The Last Enemy, was pretty much as I feared: the sparks of interest and ideas that it touched tended to be crushes by the sheer length of the piece: to put this in perspective by the end of the first episode we knew someone was dead, there was a bad computer system, a disease and a possible conspiracy… this took an hour and a half… a half hour after the end of the programme the same channel showed Runaway Jury, which managed to present all facts, characters, deaths, conspiracy, etc. and wrap the whole thing up in less than two hours. While the one is the opener of a TV serial and the other a mainstream film it did serve to highlight the former’s big flaw. Again this was another programme featuring ‘top’ people: the top mathematician, the top doctors, the top government girlfriend, the top scientist… nobody I (or many) could remotely relate to. There were also two very obvious plot twists which I predicted about 10 and 25 minutes in- and I’m remarkably dense! However, it was that sheer length that was killing it- why is it that if a programme is important it slows right down and everything is imbued with meaning? However, despite these misgivings, something tells me though, a feeling, that it may well pick up greatly in episode two, especially when they bring Robert Carlyle into play. So, I’m suspecting perseverance may pay dividends.

So, even though I still don’t know whether this is of any use to man or beast, possible telebox heaven in the outer reaches of digital hell…

Saturday
BBC2: 12.35 am: Felicia’s Journey: a wonderful creepy low-key film from Atom Egoyan; disquieting and, for me, ultimately moving. Superbly judged performances from Bob Hoskins and Elaine Cassidy (so good in the unjustly maligned and highly enjoyable Ghost Squad) to a finely crafted script from Egoyan. Rarely has loneliness, lost love and isolation been so well captured.

Sunday
BBC1: 9.00 pm: The Last Enemy: the person in the Radio Times says appositely “I suspect it’s something Spooks would dispense with in a third of the time and with a lot more style”. Mind, they also say it’s “knotty” and that they “have no idea what’s going on”… Why? It’s hardly been difficult so far.

BBC2: 10.50 pm: Storyville: Dance With A Serial Killer

Monday
BBC1: 9.00 pm: Life In Cold Blood: Of course…

BBC4: 9.00 pm: Portillo On Thatcher: The Lady’s Not For Spurning: Portillo reportedly bashes Thatcher…

BBC2: 11.20 pm: A Satellite’s Tale: the story of satellite technology that may just remind me how geostationary satellites actually ‘do their thing’.

Tuesday
C4: 1.10 pm: Seven Days To Noon: a super little British thriller from the Boulting Brothers; the British take on the absurdity of the Cold War and M.A.D. Being old and worse, in black and white, it’s being shown in the middle of the day so that next to no-one can watch it.

BBC4: 9.00 pm: Storyville: Tito’s Ghost: Timely.

BBC1: 10.35 pm: Imagine: Richard Rogers, Inside Out: a profile of the architect behind the Pompidou Centre and Millennium Dome: whatever you think of the profligacy and waste the actual design and engineering of the place was nigh on unique.

Wednesday
BBC4: 9.00 pm: The Worlds Of Fantasy: The first documentary (of three) on the art of fantasy of writing with contributions from apparently anybody who is anybody: first part on child heroes and heroines and their enduring appeal. But why aren’t programmes like this on mainstream channels like BBC2?

ITV1: 10.35 pm: Dexter: Terrestrial showing of the highly regarded US show.

Thursday
BBC1: 9.00 pm: Ashes To Ashes: …and why not?

Friday
BBC2: 9.00 pm: Spartacus: drama-documentary on the rebel slave: no matter how entertaining and informative it may prove, I suspect Kubrick’s legacy may remain unchallenged.

BBC4: 9.00 pm: Rob Brydon’s Identity Crisis

BBC2: 2.05 am: Thirst: cracking Aussie vampire film to which I gave an honourable mention here.

Channel Zero #5

This week has been, er, less dull than the last one… my estimates tell me that at this rate the first week of July will be ‘moderately exciting’ which is a good thing and probably means I should steel myself and go to that there Screenwriter’s Festival malarkey.

UCT is proving vexatious: I have become uncertain about the whole premise of the story. Is anybody really interested in a film about ordinary people? Is it original enough? Does it have a single interesting twist in it? Should I kill some characters? I’ve heard it said that most spec-monkeys are scuppered by their sheer arrogance; their ‘I know everything’ attitude… I wish I had that luxury…

So, as UCT hoves ever closer to the inevitable moment when I must finally stop tinkering with the storyline and actually get people to assess where it needs changing, I find myself increasingly thinking of a new story… and, lo, a film shall come unto me and it shall be called ‘Untitled Revenge Thriller’ or URT to its friends. (I’m looking forward to the day I think up ‘Untitled Horror Thriller’- it may feature cows. Think about it people!) URT has a theme and initial premise (although a nifty new kink came to me the other day). It has a couple of characters. It even has a couple of desirable scenes. It may well be a bit violent.

Something I forgot to mention: I heard a programme about new foods on the radio a couple of weeks ago. They were talking to someone from a company in the West Country that has created something along the lines of a marmite biscuit or cracker. The creator of the biscuit gets a royalty on every biscuit sold. It worked out better than being a screenwriter. I never once imagined that there were royalties for food creator-monkeys. Strange thing, life!

Misheard lyric of the week
‘…and it hurts with every cup-cake’ by Robyn. For why?

Music of the week…



A & E, the first single from Goldfrapp’s new album, came along this week. It pretty much throws out the last couple of electro-clash/ electronica/ sleaze albums and finds a new sound for the (sort of) West Country band. To my mind it’s what would come of a mating between Portishead and All About Eve. Maybe. Parts of the vocal line and some of the bass refrain seem quite similar to U2’s I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, although with a different rhythm. It all bodes well for the forthcoming LP. It’s a disarmingly sweet song and is possibly the first time that a Goldfrapp song has had genuine warmth and emotion to it. It most calls to mind the feel of another U2 song, Ultraviolet from the Achtung Baby album. Both of them have that 4.30, summer morning feel to them… that moment of cool stillness, in a night when you haven’t wanted to sleep after a sweltering day when you haven’t wanted to do anything, when you’re just sitting and watching the sun start to tint the sky at the edge of your world.

As you’ll probably have noticed by now I have neglected to post the ‘Obligatory Ashes To Ashes Post’. This is because I am a mendacious old sod who doesn’t deliver. Or do I? I am mendacious. Or am I? Is this a lie? Who cares? Personally, I’m still feeling pulled in different directions over the programme.

The Baftas were the usual strange concoction of national pride and embarrassment; it’s as if we want an awards show but feel uncomfortable with notion that we might actually award something to ourselves and have to admit we’re actually quite good at something. I don’t mind that we don’t put on as slick a show as the Americans… it’s the mistakes that give character to a thing. But I wish it was just that bit better such as maybe a better script; a few more genuinely funny jokes. Thankfully Britain won a decent number… What did strike me, from the memorial list, was the number of genuinely talented Cinematographers who died in the last year: Alex Thomson (Branagh’s Hamlet, Alien 3, Excalibur); László Kovács (Easy Rider, Copycat); and last, but by no means, least the immensely talented Freddie Francis (The Innocents, The Elephant Man, The Straight Story). Inevitably, Juno took home the Original Screenplay mask. The strange thing about Juno, a film I’ve not seen yet, is that from all the clips which I have seen I’m not quite sure what the fuss is about. A lot has been made of the authenticity of the teenage dialogue (which may well date the film quite quickly- think The Wild One or Rebel Without A Cause) yet all this praise has come from critics who seem to be in their 30’s, 40’s, 50’s. I don’t know whether the dialogue is authentic… it sounds a touch forced to me but that could be because the clips are out of context and not within the flow. And anyway, I presume I’m not really the target audience… British male nearing their dotage, not sure it’s aimed at me… I’m just too square Daddio.

Had to give up on The Art Of Spain which is a shame as it was shaping up to be a good series. BBC4 is now breaking up so badly it might as well not exist… Worryingly, the digital freeview versions of Channel 5 and BBC News 24 are starting to break up as well. Just remember what they told us when they foisted this useless system on us: the picture is superior to analogue and would break down far less.

Television, television, television… to watch or not to watch…

Saturday
BBC2: 9.30 pm: The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada: I have it on good authority that this is a fine film…

BBC4: 10.00 pm: I Vitelloni: Fellini classic which I won’t be able to watch as it’s on BBC4…

C4: 3.45 am: The Cicerones: a short film from The League Of Gentlemen’s Jeremy Dyson… sort of supernatural-type thing…

Sunday
ITV1: 11.00 am: Columbo: Ashes To Ashes: While I love Columbo, I wouldn’t normally include it… but this amused me. Gene Hunt meets Columbo perhaps. “Don’t you come ‘ere with that ‘there’s just one more thing’, you American ponce.” I demand Columbo’s Life On Mars…

BBC1: 9.00 pm: The Last Enemy Pt. 1: New conspiracy thriller thing… this is pretty much the big TV of the week. ‘They’ are making comparisons with BBC’s State Of Play: not a good thing because, as a viewer, I found State Of Play pretty poor (as did most of the rest of the viewing public- I believe by the end of this prime-time Sunday night series it was pulling a mere 1.5 million viewers- though the critics raved which may have had more to do with the writer’s name). Another thing that The Last Enemy shares with State Of Play is sheer length: at five 85 minute episodes it is very, very long. That’s seven and a half hours. State Of Play had six hour-long episodes with precious little substance before limping to its vapid and meaningless anti-climax. Can The Last Enemy do any better? Strangely, the BBC’s (again!) The State Within was a damn fine piece of conspiratorial murk and yet was disliked by critics and viewers… although not hated by as many viewers as State Of Play. I was The State Within’s viewer. By the way, I do wonder if the makers know where their title comes from…

“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death”

-I Corinthians Ch. 15, V. 26.

BBC2: 1.10 am: Limbo: John Sayles drama. I find Sayles somewhat patchy but he’s often interesting at least and that’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharpened stick. It’s also nice to be able to mention an American film-maker who stands by his beliefs and works without Hollywood’s golden city walls.

Monday
BBC1: 9.00 pm: Life In Cold Blood: “I was sitting there and the TV started chucking out lizards… what’s your name?” “Mr. Lizard.”

C4: 9.00 pm: The Day Of The Kamikaze: Intriguing sounding documentary…

Tuesday
BBC2: 9.00 pm: Horizon: How To Live To 101: terribly unambitious target when you think about it… given how long people live now, by the time I reach old age I will be expecting no less than 130! If you plot increasing average Western life expectancy on a graph (which I did a couple of years ago when I found the figures) then extrapolate onwards I reckon I should be able live to about 135… see you in the solar-powered jet cars!

More4: 10.00 pm: True Stories: Derek: feature length documentary about Derek Jarman: interesting person, useless film-maker, brilliant garden designer.

Thursday
BBC1: 9.00 pm: Ashes To Ashes: Funk or funky? Discuss.

BBC2: 9.00 pm: That Mitchell And Webb Look: Can they finally make Thursday’s funny? I expect so.

Friday
BBC1: 12.25 am: Revelation: a sort of supernatural thriller… one of those minor films that just has something about it that makes it a touch interesting: possibly the sheer wilful, throw-anything-at-it, eccentric chutzpah of the whole enterprise. This 2001 film from Stuart Urban features an ancient artefact which contains the blood of Christ; genetic cloning; the bloodline of Christ; the eternal feminine and witchy sex rites; and a conspiracy passed down throughout the ages to destroy/ protect the Merovingian line by some of the greatest minds of Western culture including Isaac Newton… sound vaguely familiar?

My Little Empire

I just had another look at the second from last post and realised how terribly Victorian it all sounded. Like some long dead explorer’s diary entry…

‘…a strange and terrible melancholy has settled over all since we finished the last of Oates for our morning repast. I fear this could take some explaining back in the Mother country. Will have to think of something heroic to put in journal… and something new for the pot…’

So, the melancholy has lifted a touch and so on and so forth. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Time to stop whining.

The good news of the week has been the announcement of the new Bond Title, ‘A Quantum Of Silence’ (for those who live under a rock… on Mars… or just have better things to do). Which must have made everybody smile and scratch their collective heads in equal measure (for more ribaldry see here). And there’s a date posted for Portishead 3 (14-04-08).

The sad news of the week, though, has to be the death of the talented Heath Ledger. While Batman 2 has been filmed and, presumably, will be released on schedule, this does lead to the strong possibility that Terry Gilliam’s film The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus is in jeopardy.

Shiny thing of the week has to be Bjork’s Declare Independence Package. The first physical single from her latest LP. The package bears a striking similarity to a Babushka Doll… I’m not sure I’ve managed to get to the heart of it all yet!

For good or ill, UCT now has a full story which is currently (and hastily) being typed up: whether it’s any good is another matter entirely but it does have some characters and a purpose; and a beginning, a middle and an end which are all probably plus points in the general scheme of things….

…and my Gran found an old photo of my Great-Great-Grandfather taken, we think, in the 1890’s. He looked somewhat like Elgar with an enormous moustache. This sort of thing (direct-ish contact with history) always appeals to me. He worked in a pin-mill apparently (i.e. a mill that made steel pins of various sizes from lengths of steel wire).

Song Of A Wayfarer

“Home again, home again, jigitty jig, good evening JP.”

…was what I was singularly not welcomed back with… the one cat looked at me accusingly and the others just said ‘meh’ and went back to sleep… pragmatic things, cats, they care not who serves them as long as the quality of the service remains undiminished…

Of course, I completely neglected to mention I was going anywhere, didn’t I? I am a very person and shall pay someone to spank me later: did I say that out-loud? So, effectively I disappeared off the face of the earth for a while longer… in my defence, the trip did come upon me with something of a hurry. I went ‘Oop North’ for a week. ‘Oop North’ is like the West Country except colder, wetter and lumpier. And by God was it wet. Very wet. And at least it wasn’t that London… which is like nothing on earth and more akin to that which was thought under it: it’s loud, noisome, claustrophobic, dirty, too light at night and just too full of damn people who move too damn fast… often with your cash and cards… or with the blood-smeared knife they’ve just stabbed you with. No offence to all them lovely Londoners out there but how do you cope with it? My money’s on drinking. Anyway, you may just have guessed I’m not a big city sort of person. Except Leeds. Leeds is alright. To visit…

Right, so, my trip was a resounding success for a multitude of reasons. I have come to the conclusion that I have access to that most elusive and desired of things, that which I believe to be called ‘the writer buddy’. Then I journeyed further North, through the ice-fields and snow-storms, battling polar bears and militant penguins, to the city known only as Leeds where I caught up with some old (and hardy) friends. Also did some shopping aided by finding a shop closing down and selling off Tartan DVDs at two pound a time.

The most important part of the trip, however, was the discussion of UCT which, as I have expanded upon previously, has been languishing somewhat due to a lack of a sufficient ending. So, I had a decent conversation about the piece and suddenly things started to fall together mentally and, during a late night showing of Cape Fear, I worked up the day’s thoughts into a fair schematic of the ending. It’s not perfect by a long shot but is an ending; reasonably nifty and gives the rest of the story something to work towards and to which be tailored. On presentation of this to writer-munki it received a seal of approval and means I can now go full steam ahead… of course, he may just have been saying that to get me to never speak of this matter again. My other concerns are now taken up with whether the rest of the piece is too obvious (I can’t tell because I know how the story ends) and by the lack of a ticking clock. Ticking clocks aren’t essential but are recommended and create artificial tension where none otherwise exists.

I did a double bill in the main Leeds fleapit*: this is noteworthy as I tend not to go to cinemas as it means, firstly, expense; secondly, communing with humans, which gives me the heebie-jeebies and, lastly, means lurking in a darkened room for two hours with humans, any one of whom may well be heavily armed…** The films viewed were I Am Legend (2007, Francis Lawrence; SP, Mark Protosevich, Akiva Goldsman) and Enchanted (2007, Kevin Lima; SP, Bill Kelly). The former is a fine film- one of those ‘don’t mention the vampire’ stories that I think must have started with Channel 4’s excellent 1998 series Ultraviolet. Exciting, good jump moments, the always entertaining Will Smith, vampires, suspense: a thoroughly enjoyable film. Also worth mentioning, which has probably been mentioned ad nauseam in serious film magazines is the intriguing politico-religious subtext (not so sub- in some places). Ground Zero is mentioned at least three times, for example, and, while this term existed pre-9/11, the current connotations of the term can only draw the mind to the War Against Terror connexion. The continual battening down of hatches and pulling down of shutters; the withdrawal from the world: all these lead to a clear post-9/11, W.A.T. reading of the film… the nearest and clearest antecedent to I Am Legend seemed to me less The Omega Man and more The Village. If this is how Americans are currently feeling then it is concerning as, while I may not approve of everything the US does globally, I do know that this world more needs a co-operative, interacting and friendly US than not. And anyway all the Americans I’ve ever met have been thoroughly nice, decent and generous people: admittedly all these have passports and leave the country and are not those who stoned the Top Gear team! Personally, I’ve never been a big admirer of The Omega Man (1971, Boris Sagal; SP, John William Corrington, Joyce Hopper Corrington); it seems too ‘easy’ a film; too glib and just too ‘Hestony’. My real surprise came a couple of years back upon finding a copy of The Last Man On Earth (1964, Ubaldo Ragona; SP, William F. Leicester, Richard Matheson, Furio M. Monetti, Ubaldo Ragona) with Vincent Price; Price succeeds in curing the ham, the sparse setting and black and white photography producing a genuinely bleak and eerie feel which is entirely missing in The Omega Man and, to a lesser extent, I Am Legend. I would still adduce by dint of acting, direction, production values (etc.) that I Am Legend is by far the superior version, but assert that The Last Man On Earth should not be overlooked- and it does have the imprimatur of the original author. I am told by the chap I saw the Will Smith version with that the new film’s ending is completely different to the novel and inverts, changes and ultimately loses the essential point of the book. I wouldn’t know…

Enchanted, the second in the double bill, was something of a contrast… and I don’t care what mirth this choice provokes! It was that or The Kite Runner but at 11pm on a Saturday night 3 hours or Afghan misery isn’t high up the list of things you might be wanting to watch. There’s less to say about it apart from that it’s fun, enjoyable, doesn’t take itself too seriously and forced me to exit the cinema smiling… but that may also have been relief that I hadn’t been brutally stabbed in the dark!

So, after seven hundred miles of driving, the shocking discovery that if I empty the petrol tank and have to refill it this now costs over sixty quid… and to any curious Americans who’ve stumbled their way here that would be one hundred and twenty of your shiney dollars whereas the equivalent petrol at US pumps would probably have cost me about five dollars... or something... but I now have a bag of very cheap DVDs of probably very good films and an ending to UCT! So, all in all... a pretty good trip...

On coming home I discovered that now, not only does Gordon Brown want to know everything about you during life, he now wants possession of your body after death… his plan sounds good in theory but consider the implications: the State will own you for spare parts- like buying a second vintage car for parts. And they can now use pretty much anything: when you die you’ll need not so much a large coffin as a small Tesco carrier bag. But how long will it be before the State asserts ownership over you during your lifetime: claiming a lung, a kidney, a chunk of liver or a few pints of claret as and when required? Oh, and now we’re going to be force-fed cloned animals…

…but on the plus side a small herd of rare (and cheap eBay) vampire films had arrived for me when I got back… which was nice.

…and I brought the wet weather back with me… which wasn’t. We’re now facing Flood II: The Sequel. What fun. Don’t tell anyone I’m to blame… I do so hate it when the villagers hove into view with their pitchforks and torches…

*It’s not actually very fleapit-ish… it’s highly swanky and comfortable.
**I saw that documentary called The ABC Murders…

OK Computer

So what ‘very important thing’ shall I post about today? Global warming? Economic meltdown? Possible timetable for nuclear war? Nah! Let’s go with a post for people like me… idiots!

Or more precisely, this is a post for all those people like me who are normally quite sane and intelligent* but when confronted by technology turn into a particularly stupid two-year old. And so to a modern morality tale... or at least a modern tale with some sort of moral. Or maybe even a moral with some sort of modernity in its tale. Don’t ask me…

Sometimes my head is filled with luminous luxuriant thoughts brimming full of such magnificence and glory that the sun itself could be dimmed by them; of course, mainly my thoughts tend to burble along like a clear mountain stream with a song that sings of cats, music, cats, film, cats, music, cars, music, cats and cats… And, of course, sometimes my head is just filled with a sort of molasses-like drivel that makes no sense to man nor beast.

Of late my laptop slowed to a crawl… taking upwards of five to ten minutes to load a single web page, so I gave up trying, and at one point became so gummed up that it took over an hour to become unstuck again. Now, does my poor beleaguered head tell me to think through things logically and work out how to resolve them amicably for all parties concerned? Or does it tell me to run round the ramparts wailing and gnashing my teeth waving my fist angrily at a vengeful God? Give you a clue: wasn’t the former. Finally, the brain found some semblance of sanity and remembered what I used to do on a semi-regular basis. Before the rot set in.

And here comes the moral for all the technophobes and fellow idiots out there…

Laptops, and presumably other devices, have various things lurking around inside them. These things are sometimes put there to help. There is a thing called ‘Cache’. This needs clearing out on occasion. There is a thing called ‘cookies’. These should be eaten occasionally and the crumbs disposed into the midden. If you have an ‘Ad-aware’… use it. Oh, and properly turning off ‘the machine’ rather than always just shutting the lid for hibernation is a good way of clearing the virtual memory. And lo, when all these things had been accomplished, it was good: the laptop did work wonderfully and, indeed, the internet was not actually broken.

And the moral of the story? Sometimes it’s not just the technology that’s out to get us; sometimes it’s given a more than adequate helping hand by the fool with the opposable thumbs.

Of course, the good thing about all this is that I’ve been able to take a longer than usual break from the screen which has allowed my eyes to settle back to that whole being able to see properly thing.

So, onto other mindless trivia exciting** news. I’ve spent a good deal of the last couple of weeks worrying about the fluffiest of the cats (known variously as Billy or Flib but known to himself only by his own private cat name… the only thing he actually reacts to is the sound of a mousse lid being peeled back- he just can’t spell!). So, Bill Flib came in and settled to doing absolutely nothing for a couple of days having been out scrapping all night… He’d only managed to get a hole carved out of him the size of a marble… no blood but the world’s largest quantity of vile smelling pus. And so a trip to vet to get it looked at and a second trip to the vet because I decided to worry unnecessarily. The vet cleaned the wound with a cotton-bud and the thing went in and under the skin about an inch: watching inanimate objects entering living flash where they didn’t ought is a genuinely bizarre sight. So for a while he was more a pusycat. I was very surprised at how fast this managed to heal up: two weeks to go from gaping wound to mere scab. Staggering!

Other exciting*** non-news: a CD bought on the highly addictive eBay arrived. The Best Of X-Mal Deutschland, apparently pressed in Brazil^ but bought from a nice chap in Poland. Took a grand total of 5 days to arrive which is far faster than most Brits can manage. It’s very good- how’s that for reviewing prowess? And also arriving was a nice 5-disc Stravinsky set (Orchestre de la Suisse Romande conducted by Neeme Järvi) which was a present to me from me. And I’ve gone back to ‘Untitled Conspiracy Thriller’ (UCT) with the intention of making it work properly this time. I’ve gone back to first principles and the entire plot is now on small scraps of paper pinned to a board. Currently, the major problem is the missing last ten minutes: I don’t particularly want to ‘do a Schrader’. This ending issue also seems to have flummoxed those who’ve trodden this road before me. I know these things: I checked.

And in the immortal words of Columbo ‘just one more thing’: does anybody know if the woman in the Bold 3-in-1 advert is the lovely Nicola Bryant, formerly of Doctor Who…?

*You’ve never met me… you can’t contradict!
**Legal note: I’m using the word in the loosest possible meaning of the word.
***Again with the lies!
^Not sure how legitimate this actually is but the quality’s good as are the songs.

Digital Tension

So, I done gwain mi’ way down a’ Bris’l. Und oi presented them to mi’ works fer ther Digital Shorts, zo I did. None too major in general scheme o’ thing but o’ import to me, noneless. Journey o' underd mile starts wi’ a zingle step, so they do zay… ‘septin’ this case it were more a quick step down M5. Und this ‘ere Shorts thing been bein' a bit odd for me. After when it was firzt bein' announced I cudn think a zingle thing fer it. Nuttin’ come inta mi’ yud!

This lack of ideas continued for a couple of weeks. I noted, maybe, thirty different thought-trains but nothing like a full idea. I’d come settled for not entering anything. Then, with maybe ten days left, an idea came to me while I was asleep, fully formed with the structure, the characters, the dialogue, the whole thing in place. Of course, I was asleep at the time so when I woke up the next day there was a minor flaw: I could remember everything… except the dialogue. So, I wrote the thing (with rough dialogue) and prepared the entry from it, they solely wanted a synopsis after all, but I would have been preferring not to do it from something all arse-backwards! Then, I found a short I did a while back and prepared an entry from that too. I reckoned me it best to have not one good piece but two middling and get me a doubled chance of failure!

At the actual SW Screen office, there was a steady stream of entries coming in: I asked if there’d been many. There have. A lot. One bloke seemed to have a vast pile which either meant he’d not read the instructions or was handing in for a whole herd. Course, anybody with talent isn’t going to be posed a problem but I’ll wager that none of us really knows for certain whether we’ve been gifted this wise. Even if we had, would we really know? It’s one of those things that’s probably haunted every writer since the dawn of the chisel on the stone tablet… Ug the Caveman was heard muttering all day in his cave, ‘am I any good?’ Of the two submitted shorts, the older short was a take on horror and the brand-spanking new one wasn’t. The new one has a wonderfully pretentious Latin title that means ‘have mercy’. They’re both a bit (small ‘p’) political.

So, now I have four pieces lodged in various competitions for good or ill: Red Planet (like pretty much everybody), South West Screenwriter Development* and two for the Digital Shorts. Do I rate my chances? Not really but then I’m an eternal pessimist, so I wouldn’t! ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ as a great man once wrote. I have two longer and, in my humble opinion, much better short scripts waiting in the wings.

Now, for the first time in at least a couple of months I have some choices to make as to what to write next. It’s always slightly strange to have a freehand. The conspiracy thriller I mentioned before has gone west. I managed to get 40 pages in and realised it failed a simple test I have: would I actually watch this. Simple truth is I would have walked out after about fifteen minutes. The concept is not inherently bad, it’s just that it’s being written by some kind of fool who’s trying to bore the audience into submission: the start’s a bit dull, the middle is fine but the end is a muddled ill-thought through mess. I think the truth is that I’ve gotten too close to it so now is the time to set it aside and clear it from my head for a little while.

There are a number of things I’d like to write but I’m really not sure which: weird Vampire epic, Sci-fi Vampire Western, mad-cap comedy whatnot or a dark occult horror using a couple of characters from a previous script. However, I think my vote goes to the film about revenge. While preparing the Digital Shorts, bits of it seemed to rear their heads constantly telling me to get on and write them down. I’m not sure what details to mention about it so I’ll confine myself to saying it’s about a person who has a trauma and feels a deep need to kill some people: simple! The big problem is that the idea-monsters have demanded a stupidly complex triple three act structure all using the same character at different eras of their life at the same time to contrast against each other and all within a standard three act structure. I may be able to convince them that two are enough with maybe a flashback to the other. I don’t know whether they’ll buy it though. Cruel idea monsters!

I’ve also been maliciously neglecting to listen to a whole host of CDs I’ve bought over the last couple of months. Top of the pile would have to be:

• PJ Harvey’s White Chalk (good West Country lass),
• Siouxsie’s Mantaray,
• Bat For Lashes’ Fur & Gold,
• Maps’ We Can Create,
• Skeletal Family’s Burning Oil,
• Dot Allison’s Exaltation Of Larks,
• Primal Scream’s Live In Japan,
• Mahler’s Das Lied Von Der Erde (conducted by Karajan with Christa Ludwig),
• Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (conducted by Solti),
• Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 (Karajan again),
• Gorecki’s Beatus Vir (and some other choral works on an unbelievably obscure Polish record label)

…and so on and so on…

There’s also a couple of DVDs but music is my first and abiding love; film is my cruel and unrelenting mistress constantly demanding my attention…

There’s also about three weeks of post to come… quite a lot I suspect as I pre-order the new CD and vinyl releases online… really hope the Pistols 7s are not monumentally screwed from sitting under a ton of junkmail in the sorting office!

So, there you go a brief précis of my rather dull week. Now, there’s the Rugby final, the last round of the F1 with Mr. Lewis Hamilton, the return of the right-wing programme I love to hate/ hate to love, in other words, the excellent Spooks and the new series of Top Gear to look forward to…

*Or whatever it’s called. I prefer functional titles for these schemes. Screen Yorkshire is wackily calling their Digital Shorts scheme ‘Caught Short’ which is probably an amusing pun the first time then gets progressively grating and albatross like as the months pass and people keeping asking what you’re working on. A talented friend of mine didn’t that he was submitting for the Digital Shorts scheme!

Houston We Have A Problem! The Eagle Has Landed On The Red Planet!

...hopefully!

And lo! It came to pass that I got the old bounce-back for the 'ubiquitous competition'. So, I just re-sent (not resent- I don't hold grudges against it) my submission to the Red Planet People. (Martian Men! Not very covert declaring yourself as such but, hey, now we know there's Life On Mars.)

My submission is a 'supernatural thriller'. When I'm feeling smug I think it's the best thing since the invention of the tea bag, nay, the opposable thumb. Ah, the opposable thumb, the only thing that keeps us safe from our Feline Overlords. When I'm feeling less smug I spot the major problem: the words. There's too many of them. ('Very good, my dear Mozart, but far too many notes.')

Actually, there are 3 possible problems, none of which work in its favour:

1. Overwritten: too many words. Conjure up atmosphere sure but do I really require quite so many words to do it?
2. Passive Protagonist: if it was up to me (and it is- see not only smug but also arrogant) this wouldn't be a problem. Moreover, the protag. isn't actually passive... they're actively seeking to be passive... and they're not very good at it! (Conflict too!)
3. No Clear Antagonist: I shouldn't even have to explain why I'm annoyed at myself for thinking how bad this is: spot the antagonists in The Sixth Sense, Jacob's Ladder or The Station Agent and a herd of others.

I'm not going to try and sort these out for the time being. I have other things I want to be doing right now. To be precise, I want to write a 'conspiracy thriller'... with ordinary working class people in it. That in itself is surely controversial and political. Everything of this ilk that I see is full of people I find hard to identify with: love Enemy Of The State, Three Days Of The Condor, The Parallax View, The Pelican Brief, The China Syndrome et al. but I do find it hard sometimes to sympathize with the Lawyers, CIA Agents, etc. who populate these films and they all seem to come from rather rich backgrounds. So, I was thinking of doing something about someone from a more small-scale background: something about an underdog.

One of us.

Not one of them.

"This one's for the freaks, you're so beautiful." -Underdogs, MSP