Dear BBC,
I gather that the character of Nick Cotton is due to return to EastEnders at Christmas.
Please could you arrange it so that he doesn’t appear at the end of the Christmas afternoon episode, say “‘Allo, Ma” before the doom-doom-doom drums, with the scene being continued in the evening episode?
If nothing else, it would be worryingly similar to the “Hello, Princess” return of Den Watts in 2003.
Lots of love,
John
I’m once again calling on the techie expertise of you good people, I’m afraid, but you’re smart folks, and I like to think you might be happy to share your wisdom…
Can anyone out there recommend any writing templates which are compatible with Microsoft Office 2007 and Vista? The freebie BBC Scriptsmart templates, good though they are, seem to be incompatible with this set-up, and I’m having a hard time finding some comparable templates to download.
(Yes, yes, I know I’m a fool for not having a Mac, and I ought to splash out on Final Draft or something similar, but I have a PC and thus have to live with it, and I’d rather not lash out the £100+ on FD this side of Christmas.)
Any assistance much appreciated – I’ll owe you a drink (tea or something stronger, your choice).
Thanks!
You might already have seen about this, but if not (and I hadn’t until this morning), next Thursday (20th November), the BBC Writersroom are holding a free event on the subject of Radio Drama.
In attendance will be two writers who’ve written for radio (and stage and TV), Kwame Kwei-Armah and Sarah Daniels, and they’ll be answering questions.
The event starts at 6pm, at the Marylebone Conference Centre in London, and you have to book a ticket (though, as I say, they’re free) – full details on how to do this, and more information about the writers attending, can be found here.
I think I’ll be going along – anyone else likely to be there ? Do let me know…
To my mind, one of the few disappointments in all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original Sherlock Holmes tales is the introduction of his nemesis Professor Moriarty.
Professor James Moriarty first appears in The Adventure Of The Final Problem, in which Holmes is revealed to have been thwarting the plots of ‘the Napoleon of Crime’ for some time. Holmes and Watson flee England to escape retribution from Moriarty and his men. The two of them travel to Switzerland, and whilst walking near the Reichenbach Falls, Watson is called back to their hotel to assist someone who’s been taken ill. This is a ruse, and when Watson realises and returns to the mountain path, he finds a note from Holmes saying as much, and that he expects both he and Moriarty will fight to the death. Watson sees signs of a struggle on the path, and concludes that Holmes and Moriarty, whilst fighting, have fallen to their deaths.
I’m summarising it there (and inevitably losing a lot of the original tale’s skill and charm; if you haven’t read it, I urge you to do so), but that’s the general gist. It’s not a bad story in and of itself, and it’s pretty well-known that Doyle was trying to kill off Holmes in an impressive way so he could write other things, Holmes having become a millstone, albeit one which was a nice earner. The main problem – as opposed to the Final Problem – I have with it is that the introduction of Moriarty as Holmes’s polar opposite, and his demise at Reichenbach, all occur within the one story. Whilst Holmes is portrayed as having been aware of Moriarty’s nefarious ways for some time, the reader hasn’t really had much chance to sense that an arch-foe is on the move, and though later stories build the mythology of Moriarty’s wicked ways, we can only take Holmes’s word for it. Well, Holmes’s comments as reported via Watson through Doyle, but you know what I mean.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this recently because the novel I’m currently working on (more in my head than on the page at the moment, granted) The Body Orchard, features a return match between a deeply villainous chap and the detective who caught him last time. Part of the problem I’ve been mentally wrestling with has been that of establishing the stakes involved, and the backstory. I’m taking my cue somewhat from Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, wherein the reader hears much about Hannibal Lecter from his opposite number, Will Graham; Graham’s portrayed as an intelligent if troubled man, whose references to Lecter make it very clear that he’s a man who should never be underestimated or trusted, even for a moment. In much the same way as Holmes tells us that Moriarty’s a baddie of the highest order, we learn about the villain from a character who we’ve already started to root for or empathise with. Granted, Holmes is less human than Graham, but I think that the comparison’s a reasonable one. And there are other examples of characters, or events, being made portentous by more virtuous characters – Yoda’s line “You will be” in The Empire Strikes Back, and the Doctor’s look of panic at the end of the Doctor Who episode Turn Left, spring to mind, and I’m sure you can think of others.
So anyway, this is something that I’ve been mulling over recently – the challenge of making it clear that a villain is someone to be reckoned with, without having to show them running over blind orphans with a combine harvester. I’m feeling fairly comfortable with the solutions I’ve come up with, but now I have another question: since my villain is supposed to be so very clever indeed, how do I demonstrate that in a fashion that doesn’t look token or unconvincing? Holmes and Moriarty were only ever as smart as Doyle, and Will Graham and Lecter as intelligent as Thomas Harris (and in the book Hannibal, Lecter appears to have lost a lot of his intelligence, but I was ferociously disappointed with that book, and I won’t get into that now).
In exactly the same way, my characters always have the disadvantage of only ever being as clever as me, which – as is abundantly clear to anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis – means that if I portray them as, say, walking upright or using tools, they’re already pushing at the boundaries of my knowledge.
*With apologies to Bill Shaky (Macbeth Act 1, Scene 2)
…This is one such thing.
In an interview for the Writer’s Guild Magazine, writer James Moran aims a well-deserved kick at the groin of one of the most irritating and pervasive cliches about Doctor Who:
Question: Was it the old cliché of hiding behind the sofa as a kid?
Moran: […] while I did get scared a lot, I never hid behind the sofa (it was impossible, because our sofa was against the wall.) I don’t know how all these people claim to have hidden behind their sofas as kids, unless they all lived in massive, Friends-style apartments with the sofa in the middle of the room. I suspect many of them didn’t actually watch the show and are retconning their own childhood to jump on the bandwagon.
Mr Moran, I salute you.
What with this, and the fact that it’s now known by an audience of millions that Daleks can go upstairs, it must be a hell of a challenge for a lot of journalists to write about Who nowadays, eh?
…This is one such thing.
In an interview for the Writer’s Guild Magazine, writer James Moran aims a well-deserved kick at the groin of one of the most irritating and pervasive cliches about Doctor Who:
Question: Was it the old cliché of hiding behind the sofa as a kid?
Moran: […] while I did get scared a lot, I never hid behind the sofa (it was impossible, because our sofa was against the wall.) I don’t know how all these people claim to have hidden behind their sofas as kids, unless they all lived in massive, Friends-style apartments with the sofa in the middle of the room. I suspect many of them didn’t actually watch the show and are retconning their own childhood to jump on the bandwagon.
Mr Moran, I salute you.
What with this, and the fact that it’s now known by an audience of millions that Daleks can go upstairs, it must be a hell of a challenge for a lot of journalists to write about Who nowadays, eh?
As m’chum Steve has already recounted, on Friday night he and I went to see a filming of the Channel 4 comedy The IT Crowd. His post says a lot about the shows, so this is my more self-absorbed version of events (ahem).
It was a lot of fun, and the first time I’d seen a studio sitcom recorded in… hmm, come to think about it maybe it’s the first time ever, so it was fascinating to see how it was all done. It was filmed at Pinewood Studios, and it was startling – in the best way – to see how the offices and other rooms in the show look in reality and on screen.
Steve and I were the guests of my friend Sean, who’s IT Consultant for the show, so after Sean and the other cast and crew members had done the hard work, Steve and I stepped onto the set to help Sean with de-rigging, as it was the last show of the series. This felt kind of odd in itself – I’ve followed the show since it began, and so to be crawling round on the floor behind Roy and Moss’s desks and helping pull cables through the wall made me feel like I wasn’t quite in the real world any more (I felt like Eddie Valiant in Who Framed Roger Rabbit when he goes into Toontown).
Anyway, after we’d helped Sean do what was necessary, we were taken into the green room, where various members of the cast and crew were having a well-earned drink. Just inside the door, and looking surprisingly relaxed, was the writer-director Graham Linehan, who Sean kindly introduced me to, and explained to Graham that I’d contributed to one of the show’s websites.
Graham – and I’m going to call him by his first name because he’s a friendly chap and I don’t think he’d take offence – asked us if we’d had a good night, and specifically what we’d thought of a particular scene in the last episode, and it was very interesting to see that he’d thought of an angle on it which I hadn’t; very much a case of the creator being so in control of the material that he’s able to see things which someone who’s less steeped in it (me on this occasion) would miss. But he was friendly about it, and it was a genuine shame that I had to leg it early to get the last train home, as it would have been good to chat more.
I’ve barely touched on how funny the shows were – mainly because Steve’s covered them in more detail, and also for spoiler-related reasons – but they were very strong episodes, and all in all it made for a cracking night out, and I’m mega-grateful to Sean for getting us on the guest list.
If nothing else, looking at the size of the sets, all the lighting overhead, the cameras and mics pointing at the cast, and the number of people who were hard at work, it made me even more keen to continue with writing, given that everything in that studio was there because once, Graham Linehan sat down and typed ‘INT. OFFICE – DAY’…
I’ve written about National Novel Writing Month here before, and crikey o’blimey if November hasn’t come round again.
For those of you who haven’t heard of it, the basic idea is – yes – that you write an entire novel in a month; for the purposes of NaNoWriMo (as it’s known), a novel is anything upwards of 50,000 words, which works out at about 1500 words a day.
I’ve never really done it properly – I usually cheat and use it as a springboard to get on with a novel I’m already working on, and even that with mixed results – but I think it sounds like a great way to just get the ever-problematic first draft done, and there are lots of people around the globe doing it at the same time, which removes the isolation that often comes with writing.
It’s based in the USA, but it’s more International than National, with groups meeting up for ‘write-ins’ all over the place (there were definitely meetups here in London last year, for example).
So, if you fancy taking up the challenge, click on the link above to find out more – it costs nothing to participate, and all you need is something to write on/with and a willingness to be honest about your wordcount. I won’t be doing it as I have non-novel writing (there’s an ambiguous turn of phrase) to get on with, but if you do join in, let me know how it went – I know Laura‘s taking part, but are there any other takers?
NaNoWriMo runs until the end of November, so (glances at watch) you’ve only lost a minute so far (and we could attribute that to the time taken to read this post, right?)…
I wish I could claim that this post was going to live up to the promise of its title, and tell you absolutely everything you could ever need to know about screenwriting in a creative fashion, but brace yourself: it’s more of a pointer towards a site which not only rejoices under the above name, but which also offers a number of freebies of interest if you’re a writer.
Creative Screenwriting is a magazine, based in the USA, but sold in various locations around the globe, but if you can’t find a copy near you, you can still benefit from it, particularly in the following two ways…
Firstly, there’s a free weekly newsletter which you can subscribe to here. It tends to focus on the content of the current issue, but it also has the ‘headlines’ of writing-related news, and links to issues of interest. Certainly worth giving it a quick skim every week to see if anything in there catches your eye, I feel.
Secondly – and arguably more usefully – the magazine also issues regular podcasts, featuring interviews with a number of well-known writers. Specific ones I’ve enjoyed this week have been Q&As with the writers of Hot Fuzz, Zodiac and the Dark Knight, and I’m looking forward to the fruits of further rummages through the archive. You can find them at the magazine’s blog page, which is here.
On the basis of the material mentioned above, I fully intend to pick up a copy of the actual real-world magazine as soon as I find it, but of course it could well be that you good people already know all about it, and the above is very much a case of teaching one of your parents’ parents to produce a vacuum on the external surface of an unfertilised fowl ovum.
So, if the above is old news, then I apologise – but if not, well, then, I suggest you take a clicky-look!
Click here before the end of the day to download Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook talking about their joint work ‘Doctor Who – The Writer’s Tale’. As you may well know, this is a massive tome dealing with RTD’s work on the most recent series of Who, and this is an interesting talk about it. Simon Mayo hosts, and my opinion of him went up a bit on listening to this, as he asks some decent questions.
But be swift – this is the last of the seven days when the podcast’s available!
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