Category: Writing Page 17 of 24

Words. In Scripts, E-Mail Inboxes, On Webpages, And On The Printed Page. Words. Oh, How I Love Them…

On 20/06/2008

Officially speaking, today is the day when folks who’ve got through to the next round of the BBC Writersroom Sharps competition will get that bit of good news. So I suspect I won’t be the only person who’ll be checking their e-mail Inbox a fair bit today. Fingers crossed, and good luck to everyone else who entered – do let me know if you get through.

As David points out, the odds are actually quite good for Sharps entrants – Writersroom received around 600 scripts, and with 20 places in the next round, on a mathematical basis alone that gives each entrant a 1 in 30 chance. Inevitably, I liken this to being the one child chosen out of your class for something special, though that estimate of class size might just show how horribly out of touch with the kids I am.

However, as I said when Sharps was announced, I do wonder if Writersroom might have set themselves a very tight timescale in relation to notifying the next-stagers – the deadline was noon this Monday, and people are due to be told today if they’ve got through, which certainly needs a swift turnaround. I’ve had some reassurance in that they sent me an e-mail to acknowledge my script had been received, but I know that some other people (such as Lucy) haven’t yet heard – indeed, the Writersroom blog has actually asked that people who haven’t heard by next Monday let them know as much. I am, though, a little bemused how this will work, what with today being Announcement Day… hmm. Anyway, I guess they must have found a way to make it so folks aren’t penalised due to postal hassles. Certainly have to hope so.

In other BBC writing-related news, it seems that the aformentioned Writersroom is going on tour – click here for more details (though once again it was on David’s blog that I first read about this. Credit where it’s due).

If you can’t be bothered to click the links (which is understandable, as I’m well aware this post’s awash with them – and there’ll be several more before it’s over), then Edinburgh-dwelling writers should be aware that the BBC Writersroom will be visiting the Traverse Theatre next week, on Tuesday 24th June, between 5pm and 6.30pm. If you want to go, you need to be on the guest list, which you can do by e-mailing writersroom@bbc.co.uk.

For non-Edinburgers like me, there are also roadshows planned for Belfast, Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Cardiff, Leicester, London, Manchester and Sheffield, so it’ll be a case of keeping an eye out for announcements on the BBC Writersroom homepage, but I think it’ll be worth it. I certainly intend to go to the London one if I can.

Moving into the realms of non-BBC writing stuff, my entry for the Waterstones ‘What’s Your Story?’ competition is now available to view online. Click here and then go to the Gallery, where you can either see it on page 13 (well, that’s where it was last night) or you can search for it by my surname. If you do the latter, then I also recommend you search for the entries by Jason Arnopp and Laura Anderson, two friendly folks from the world of the blogternet who, as you can see, are not exactly shabby when it comes to the ol’ writing business.

My entry, I hasten to add, features a guest appearance from the left hand of my lovely fiancee; her engagement ring is just visible, which I hope will help scotch those rumours that I got her a ring from a gumball machine outside the newsagent. Though oddly enough, she seems to feel that giving her more shiny trinkets would be a good thing. Hmm. Anyway, as 4200 people entered that competition and there are only two slots for adult winners, the odds are slightly less favourable than 1 in 30, but it was an interesting exercise anyway. Can’t hurt, I like to think…

And finally in this post about the written word, I wanted to draw your attention to the fact that if you buy a copy of The Times from a High Street branch of WHSmith this week, you can also pick up a copy of the novel, ‘The End Of Mr Y’ by Scarlett Thomas for a mere £2.99. That’s a full fiver off the cover price, which can’t hurt given the current economic climate, right?

In the interest of honesty, I should say I haven’t read my copy yet, but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed Scarlett’s last three books*, and as she seems to be developing as a novelist with every successive book, I have no reason to think this one will disappoint. Granted, you have to buy The Times, which may not be your thing (it’s hardly mine, though some of the Review sections are pretty decent), but you can always lob that in the recycling box.

The offer only runs until Sunday, after which I gather another book will be offered in the same fashion. Not a bad way to try out unfamiliar authors, I’d say, or a bargainous way to buy books by those you already know and like.

*I’m not being overly familiar here, I like to think; Scarlett was kind enough to reply to an e-mail I sent her about her novel ‘Popco’, so I feel using her first name is okay. And anyway, this is a blog post, not an academic text, so ner.

Isn’t There Some Saying About The Cobbler’s Children Going Barefoot? (Or Is That A Load Of Cobblers?)

By John

On 12/06/2008

In Link, Personal, Uncategorized, Writing

It’s been a very busy week, what with the 9-5 job being hectic, and the run-up to the deadline for the BBC Sharps competition, but in a way, it’s kind of interesting to see just how far my brain can bend before it snaps.

I’m almost done with my Sharps entry now, with a final read-through and formatting sort-out tonight before it goes in the post tomorrow (along with Father’s Day stuff – consider this reminder a social service). I’ve rather enjoyed a lot of the work for the Sharps script, I have to say – I was slightly worried I might have left it a smidgin too late, and that I’d feel I was turning in something sub-par (which always allows for the line ‘ah, well, if I’m honest it wasn’t my best work’ in the face of rejection, though that’s a pretty limp consolation really), but I’ve actually been enjoying the process of writing it (barring a few format-related hassles); having let the ideas and characters stew in my head for a week or so, it’s really felt like a case of just typing it out.

And when the actual process of writing is as straightforward and enjoyable as that, it reminds me why I love to write; the the words just flow from noggin to page (or monitor), and I start to see connections between plotlines I had previously thought were unrelated, ideas for jokes seem to come out of nowhere, and it’s one of the finest, and funnest, feelings in the world. Granted, there are many times when it doesn’t go like that, but this week it’s been fun (apart from spending all day in front of a computer and then going home and spending the evening in fr – ah, you guessed it). That does mean, of course, that I’ve been slightly less mentally and physically able to post extensively here – the paradox of being fired up and excited about writing in all its forms, but a little bit too tired to actually sit and post much to m’blog in the last day or two (hence the title above).

Anyway, my Sharps item will go in the post tomorrow, and apparently those who’ve made it to the next stage should know within a week or so. Which is a pretty fast turnaround, and suggests that they might well be going by the standard practice of reading the first ten pages to assess whether or not to put the script through. If that is the case, maybe I should do a check and make sure that the first third is mind-grabbingly terrific… or perhaps I should affix some kind of irresistible bribe to one of the first ten pages? A fifty quid note, perhaps? A small chocolate bar? Maybe even a small, but saucy picture from my portfolio?

Actually, no, that last idea’s not appropriate, is it? After all, I want to advance on the basis of my writing abilities, not because of my appearance, people can be so catty if they think that’s how you’ve got where you are in life (see, no matter what you might have heard, I DID learn something from all that time at Law School).

Want To Be As Cool As Me? Of Course You Do. And One Way To Do This Is To Copy Me, And Buy This

By John

On 09/06/2008

In Link, Uncategorized, Writing

Back in March, I mentioned that Sarah J Peach was pulling together a book by bloggers in aid of War Child.

Well, just yesterday, the Peachster announced that the book has been compiled and completed, and is now available for your reading pleasure. It’s called ‘You’re Not The Only One’, features over a hundred bloggers sharing tales of things that have actually happened to they themselves personally, sports a rather spiffy cover, and is available to buy from Lulu.com by clicking here.

It only costs £12.50, and over half of that goes to War Child – in fact, if you’re all tech-savvy and like downloaded books, a whole £10 of that goes straight to the charity, which has to be a good thing, right? Tell all your friends about this, and do make sure to buy a copy yourself, as it sounds like a good read for a good cause.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, yes I did send in a submission for the book, but I didn’t make the final cut. Then again, Sarah’s recently announced she’s pregnant, so I think we can safely assume that the strange hormones which are now coursing through her system made her temporarily so woozy in the head she was unable to recognise it for the great writing it obviously was. Ahem.

Anyway, what are you lingering here for? Get on over to this page and buy yourself a copy (and then come back here, of course. I miss you so when you’re gone).

You Know That Recent Doctor Who Episode Set In Pompeii?

By John

On 06/06/2008

In Link, Uncategorized, Writing

Well, it was written by James Moran, who’s also written for Torchwood, and wrote the film Severance, and is doing stuff for Primeval. So, it’s probably fair to say that he knows things about writing for the screen (and about writing in general) which many of us who are trying to make a living by scribbling could learn from.

Fortunately, he’s shared a cluster of insights on his blog, and I heartily recommend you read it – go lookypoos, by clickykins here.

Sharps – The Writer’s Cut (Get A Bandage)

By John

On 05/06/2008

In Uncategorized, Writing

So, how are other people getting on with their entries for the BBC Sharps competition?

With just over a week to go before the final posting date (entries have to be in by noon on Monday 16th June), I think I’ve finally got the content of mine sorted out in my head, though taking that swirly mass of ideas and actually getting it into some vaguely coherent string of words on paper is, of course, the big challenge.

I don’t know how other people work, but I usually like to scribble down all the bits I want to put in a story in list form, then once I’ve come up with the story idea or structure that I think fits it best, and hopefully allows me to put in all the bits I like, then I decide the order of the scenes by shuffling them around until it all feels kind of right. Sometimes this is on post-it notes, other times on bits of card, and if the stationery is in short supply, then sometimes it’s just the ‘what goes in’ list modified to some kind of running order.

I’m roughly at this stage now – I know who my main character is (her name’s Carol, since you asked), the opening and closing lines of the piece, and pretty much what happens in between, but I need to put more flesh on this skeleton. Given the way my waistline’s expanded in recent years, this doesn’t appear to be a problem in literal terms, but I suspect it’ll be slightly more work in a metaphorical sense (though both processes share the feature of me needing substantial amounts of tea and cake). I’m hoping to finish off the structuring bit of it by the end of today (Thursday), and that leaves me a week to pour the words and events out of my head, which I think should be feasible – they’ve been percolating there a while now, after all.

The above isn’t always the way I work, mind; it tends to vary depending on a whole number of circumstances such as time and availability of tools and of course the nature of the piece itself, but at the moment, this one seems to be functioning okay for me. I’d be interested to know what methods you folks out there tend to use – longhand, straight to screen, lists, post-its, or are you all geniuses like Mozart who can just throw it down on the page and it’s exactly as you envisioned without the need for any changes? Do let me know, I’m genuinely curious…

And finally (for now) on this subject, I was privileged this week to cast my baby clues over a draft of Chip Smith’s script for Sharps (with his permission, I’m not some kind of weirdo… well, all right, I am, but not that kind of weirdo), and jolly good it was too. The standard, methinks, should be pretty high (not least because of the fairly broad nature of the brief allowing some imaginative leeway), so I think I shall have to try to bring a game, rather like on the last day of term at school..

Oh, hold on, the phrase is ‘bring my A-game’, isn’t it? Ah well, I’m sure you know what I mean.

I Didn’t Find Any ‘Man Stroke Woman’ Fan Slash Fiction, Though

By John

On 04/06/2008

In Link, Pictures, Uncategorized, Writing

Slightly spinning out of my thinking for this post, I was thinking about fan fiction – partly prompted by my recent discovery of the existence of the book depicted here.

The Killing Zone is not a particularly well-known James Bond ‘continuation novel’ – for a very simple reason; it seems that the author published it at his own expense and pretended it was officially licensed by the estate of Ian Fleming, which it wasn’t (and it seems unlikely it would have been, given that Bond dies in it – you can read the text of the book here). So really, it was little more than glorified fan fiction.

Fan fiction is something I find both understandable and mystifying; if you like to write and you like certain characters, I can see why you’d want to write stories using those characters (I mean, I have notes for an ‘Elseworlds’ Batman tale on file), but if you’re that keen to see the stories printed and they involve characters owned by someone else, I think you’d probably be better off trying to actually get them published either as stories with new characters or – if you’re hardworking and a little lucky – maybe even as part of the ‘canon’, as opposed to sticking them on the internet or similar. Sure, it’s all good writing practice to put one word after another in whatever form, and I’ve seen examples of fan fiction which have been genuinely good writing, but I can’t help thinking that some of that effort could be just as (if not more) profitably put to use in the creation of new characters.

Got an idea for a Bond story? Why not re-tool it with your own character – if the plot’s compelling enough, surely it would stand on its own merits, and you’d be free to do whatever you want without the constraints of ‘playing with someone else’s toys’ – or, as I think Warren Ellis once called it, “servicing copyrights”. Speaking of whom, Ellis did just this (aided by the terrific art of John Cassaday) to great effect in his comic series Planetary, which features a combination of out-of-copyright characters (Holmes and Dracula, for instance) and altered versions of characters, such as Doc Savage, who are still owned by other people or organisations. And of course these altered characters can have different traits from the originals as required by the plot.

One area of fan-made fiction which simply mystifies me, though, is ‘slash fiction’. When I first heard of it, I assumed it was rather grisly, like a slasher film, but in fact it comes from the punctuation involved; slash fiction is fan fiction which focuses mainly on romantic or sexual relationships between characters in an established setting, and the ‘slash’ is usually placed between the names – for example, Kirk/Spock. I gather it’s mainly written about male characters, and often by female writers (shades of Yaoi there). And a quick search of the internet for examples of it left my head a-spinning, quite frankly.

Kirk and Spock stuff was pretty prevalent, but if SF’s not your thing then you’ll be glad to know you can easily find another Shatner onscreen persona in contemporary garb in slash fiction about Boston Legal, and for those of you with longer memories for TV shows there was slash fiction detailing sex between The Equalizer and his former CIA boss. It was odd stuff to read – though I have to be honest and say that I didn’t read much of it for too long as my head was all confused by the motivations behind it: it was capably enough written (although a lot of the time the dialogue was dodgy), but my mind was pulled in two directions as it tried to reconcile the idea of these characters as having a ‘secret erotic life’ with the general themes of the ‘canonical’ stories as I understand them, and I just couldn’t align those things in my brain.

Though, thinking about it, I may simply have over-dosed on Shatnerian homoerotica whilst researching this blog post. Maybe that’s why the whole thing rather weirds me out.

As, in fact, did just typing the phrase ‘Shatnerian homoerotica’. Still, could make for some new visitors arriving here via strange searches on Google and its ilk. Hello, new and rather-niche-interested readers!

This Said, I Am Painfully Aware There’s A Paucity Of Decent Roles For Non-White And/Or Non-Male Actors In Many Films And TV Programmes

By John

On 27/05/2008

In Pictures, Twins, Uncategorized, Writing

I’m not really posting this as one of my ongoing ‘Twins’ series of posts, as the Denzil film came out a good five years before the Dalton film (1984 and 1989, film fans). But instead it reminded me of a topic which I’d been intending to post about for a while, and which is partly triggered by the fact that tomorrow is the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth.

When they were talking about the search for a new actor to portray Bond in the films, one thing which I heard several times was ‘they should do a black Bond’ or ‘they should do a female Bond’. Indeed, some folks suggested Colin Salmon should play Bond (he seems a pretty good actor, though having appeared in the films as another character might be seen as making this a bit weird, though then again it didn’t stop Joe Don Baker or Maud Adams), though offhand I can’t recall any casting suggestions being made for a woman to play Bond.

My feelings on this sort of thing (and this applies to suggestions of a female Doctor Who as well, really, though the regeneration aspect at least gives this a slight increase in story logic, if nothing else) are slightly mixed, but I think they tend to boil down to one word: why?

I can see the thinking behind it, and agree with it completely, that there aren’t really that many high-profile non-white or female characters in English-language films (or, indeed, other media), but taking an established character and making them black or female just doesn’t seem the way to remedy this, to my mind.

Taking a comic-based example, I think it’s probably fair to say that the best-known female superhero is Wonder Woman, who was created without reference to existing male superheroes. There are a number of female superheroes who are, effectively, female versions of well-known characters (for example, Spider-Woman or She-Hulk – and no, non-comic readers, I’m not making those up), but they’ve never really taken off, and I rather suspect that’s because their rather derivative origins are all too obvious. Wonder Woman, conversely, is a distinct character, not just a transparent copy.

And in the same way, just ‘making Bond a woman’ seems to be a pretty cheap way to try to make a character popular, as does making him black (similarly, I’m not quite sure if the ‘Ultimate’ Marvel comics version of Nick Fury is really that much more interesting by the change in his race, though I gather it did make the post-credits scene of ‘Iron Man’ inevitable).

Surely the right thing to do is to try to create a female or non-white characters who have their own appeal to an audience? It would certainly seem the more creative way to go about it.

It’s not necessarily easy to do that, sure, but I genuinely believe that characters like Jane Tennison or Blade are much more memorable for not just being knock-offs of existing figures. The origin of a character – in a story and also a more meta- sense – is always likely to be far more interesting if it’s not simply something like “Well, The Fall Guy was popular, so we just made Colt Seavers female and called her Stephanie Plum” (because I’m pretty sure that’s not what Janet Evanovich did, and her novels are wildly popular).

People seem to be pretty good at sussing out when stuff is calculated or even tokenistic, and so I think that trying to make characters popular or appealing by simply tweaking one aspect of a previous hit to re-sell to a different section of your perceived audience is a bit obvious, and will be spotted pretty quickly.

At least, I like to think it’s the case that audiences are smarter than they’re often assumed to be; on a purely selfish level, I’d like to think that because it’ll mean that there will be drama and comedy features that need scripts from people like me, and not just a never-ending slew of reality TV or makeover shows.

If All Else Fails, I Could Always Offer It To PublishAmerica*

By John

On 16/05/2008

In Link, Uncategorized, Writing

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I recently sent off some sample chapters of my novel ‘Human Noises’ to a literary agent, asking if they’d like to represent me.

They replied quite quickly, and this week I got a nice polite e-mail back saying that it wasn’t for them. Which is fine – in fact, I was rather pleased that they added a note to the effect that this sort of thing is very subjective, and that I should see what other agencies thought of it. I was planning on doing so anyway, but it was nice of them to add that it’s a subjective thing – which, of course, it is; one man’s Da Vinci Code is… well, okay, my Da Vinci Code, but you know what I mean – there are countless schadenfreude-filled reports of the people who rejected The Beatles, Fred Astaire, Joanne Rowling, and so on. Not that I’m saying my work is of that calibre, of course, but there’s some reassurance for the rest of us in the fact that even those folks knew what it was like to get a ‘thank you, but not for us’ reaction.

So I’m undeterred, and will find another vict- er, I mean agent to send it on to. It may well be that it’s going to be rejected by every agent in town until I’m forced to face the fact it’s unpublishable because it’s a load of garbage (you can reach your own conclusions by checking out the sample chapters here – feel free to let me know what you think), but until then I’ll be sending it out and hoping for some good news… and, of course, working on ‘The Body Orchard’, my next novel.

Well, it’s important to keep the words flowing, wouldn’t you agree?

*PublishAmerica very nearly published Atlanta Nights, so I like to think they might consider me.

I May Write A Pilot Starring A Close-Knit Group Of Ear Specialists In A West Country Hospital. Working Titles Are ‘Aural Sects’ And ‘Dolby City’.*

By John

On 02/05/2008

In Link, TV, Uncategorized, Writing

At the Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharaoh Q&A the other week, Kate Rowland of the BBC Writersroom said that they’d soon be kicking off a talent search called Sharps, and that people should keep their eyes on the website for further details.

So I did – and if you’re interested in writing, you should probably do the same, as there are often posts with details of writing competitions or other opportunities in a variety of bradcast media – and lo and behold, details of ‘Sharps’ have now been posted.

It seems pretty interesting to my mind – the brief is for a half-hour TV script on the topic of ‘the nation’s health’, which it seems you can interpret pretty broadly. After the entries have all been received and sorted, 20 writers will be selected for a workshop, and then eight of them will be asked to attend a week-long residential course with what sounds like a lot of mentoring, as well as £500. Loads of writing-based skills practice, and money? I suspect I won’t be the only one who’ll be sufficiently enticed to send something in.

I do wonder, though, if they may have made something of a rod for their own backs in regard to the period of time they’re allowing to complete the sifting process – the closing date is Monday 16 June, and people who’ve been shortlisted will be notified by the following Monday, 23 June. That would mean they’ll really have to churn through the submissions, especially as the workshop is currently scheduled for 28 June, the Saturday after that.

Still, that’s a logistical thing for the good people at the BBC to sort out, and certainly no reason not to enter, as far as I’m concerned. And given that known troublemaker Lucy has today sent a mass e-mail to those of us lucky enough to be listed in her virtual black book, drawing our attention to Sharps, I suspect that many other people who blog on such things may well be thinking of entering too.

Are you planning on having a go? Do feel free to post a comment, or e-mail me at john[at]johnsoanes.co.uk, I’d curious to know.

*I am very, VERY sorry about this.

In Which I Talk About How The Packaging And Presentation Can Detract From The Gift When It Ought To Increase Our Interest

By John

On 30/04/2008

In Link, TV, Uncategorized, Writing

I’m going to advance a theory, but first of all I want to perform a little experiment. A thought experiment, if you will. Okay, here we go: how do you react when I tell you the following?

“I’ve got a present for you – but I’m not going to tell you what it is. It’s a secret. You’ll have to wait and see.”

Now, if you’re anything like me – and if what follows is going to make any kind of sense whatsoever – you’ll have thought vaguely along the lines of ‘oooh, wonder what it is?’; which is, I think, perfectly natural and reasonable (if you didn’t react like that at all, the rest of this post will make me sound like a lunatic, which isn’t new, but it will undermine the point I’m trying to make, so you might want to bail out now before you start getting annoyed by what I have to say).

If someone tells you they’ve got you a present, I think it naturally triggers a number of questions in the mind: what is it? Where did they get it? Is it something I’ve mentioned I’d like? And so on. Arguably, receiving the present and opening it, and thus having it reduced from ‘potentially anything’ to ‘what it actually is’ can seem disappointing, as if all the possibilities have been swept away, and the present itself (no matter how exciting it is) something of a letdown. In my typically pretentious way, I think it’s rather like the Schrödinger’s Cat paradox with the various probabilities waves (or, for the purposes of my comparison, possibilities) collapsing to reveal the true state of things.

I genuinely believe that the human brain has an almost inbuilt tendency towards constructing some kind of narrative, or speculating on possible events; in the same way as we see shapes in clouds or faces in patterns on the curtains, I think that if you present people with a scenario or a set of circumstances, they’ll almost immediately start to wonder what came before or what happened afterwards. I think a lot of art relies on this – we wonder what La Giaconda is smiling at, or why she’d rather sink than call Brad for help, and even if the picture is specifically titled to let us know it’s The Lady of Shallott, the picture acts as a snapshot, a moment frozen in time from a longer narrative.

In his long-form essay Writing for Comics, Alan Moore does this brilliantly with William Holman Hunt’s painting The Hireling Shepherd, throwing out a number of ideas as to what might happen next, as if it were a frame in a film which might suddenly start rolling again. I doubt this theory could be applied to abstract art – it’s hard to imagine ‘what happens next’ in a Jackson Pollock painting – but I think that in representational art it holds true, probably due to the fact that anything depicted on a canvas is purportedly happening somewhere at some time, which inevitably leads the mind to wonder what preceded or what follows it.

Why am I thinking all this, you might wonder? Well, it’s for a typically mundane reason – I was watching Doctor Who the other night (blissfully unaware as I sat down to do so of Mr Arnopp’s cameo role) and when it got to the end of the episode, there was a ‘Next Week…’ snippet. Now, I don’t like these pseudo-trailers anyway – they seem to be fairly insulting to the writer of the episode that’s just finished as they imply that the episode hasn’t been of a sufficiently high quality to draw you back – but when the episode closes on a cliffhanger, it’s all the more daft to sneak-peek at the next episode; if you end the episode with large numbers of people in peril (as happened in DW on Saturday) and then show various people running around and shouting and so on, it’s pretty obvious that they’re not all going to die in the first ten seconds of the show, no matter what the cliffhanger suggested. It’s often called false peril, but I’d say that this is more like defused peril – and defused because someone, probably in branding and/or marketing, thinks that people need to know a bit of what’s coming next, that it’s the only way to draw them back. I disagree.

This isn’t entirely confined to fiction, as news programmes seem all too keen to tell us the key aspects of a story before going to their reporter live at the scene, who reiterates the key notes again before (if you’re lucky) adding in a detail or two and handing back to the studio. It feels like spoon-feeding, and more annoyingly it’s a waste of airtime (which may, unfortunately, be the reason for it – there are after all many minutes to fill for as little money as possible).

So, given my theory about an innate narrative tendency in the human brain, I think that the folks who ‘package’ and ‘brand’ TV shows in this way (all too often a very different job from actually making programmes) are missing the point quite dramatically. I feel people have a natural tendency to want to know what happens next, or (if they come in partway through a story) to invent ‘the story so far’ so as to catch up on what they’ve missed – if (and this is key) they’re sufficiently drawn in. Constantly reminding the viewer of what’s happened in the last few minutes (as seen in the moronic voice-overs in Dragon’s Den) or trying to keep us interested with ‘Coming Up’ stuff (especially in BBC shows where there are no ad breaks to encourage channel-hopping) actually undermines the content of the programme itself, and detracts from that which might actually attract viewers in the first place.

And it doesn’t work. I say this with a hearty chunk of confidence, because more and more of these tacky little tricks are in evidence on our TV screens all the time, and the prevalence of them is the clue; if they were drawing in and holding an audience, they wouldn’t be slapping these ‘coming up’ bits and ‘next time…’ trailers on the shows. The only programmes that I can think of which are thankfully devoid of this kind of nonsense are… any ideas? Yes, the soap operas.

Say what you like about the soaps – and after seeing last night’s episode I’d once again point to EastEnders’ enormous flaw in not having even one vaguely sympathetic character (or at least not one with a storyline at present) – they are absolutely brilliant at providing ‘the story so far’ as they go along. Sure, there are sometimes slightly clunky lines of dialogue like ‘So, how are you doing since your wife ran off with the milkman, Terry?’, but most of the time the necessary exposition is woven into the dialogue so seamlessly that it’s invisible, which is exactly as it should be. Stan Lee, co-creator of super-heroes such as Spider-Man and The X-Men, once said that every issue of a comic book is someone’s first issue, and this is true across most media; all episodes of soaps or dramas are someone’s first episode, and so the story so far, and the characters’ names and relationships, need to be established as quickly but discreetly as possible. Watch an episode of any long-running soap opera and watch out for how they do it, it’s quite instructive.

The soaps, which attract vast numbers of viewers, seem to be immune from this ‘previously on’/’coming up’-type nonsense, and yet in their attempts to attract the kind of audience share the soaps consistently command, the people who package programmes seem to think the best way is to market shows in a way that actually detracts from the content. I’m guessing the soaps don’t mess with their format on the grounds that isn’t broken so it doesn’t need fixing, but all too many other shows seem to try to fix it by breaking it even more.

The soaps, and many other forms of entertainment media, are based on the fact that, suitably lured in, people want to know what’s going to happen next. JJ Abrams, the creator of Alias and co-creator of Lost, is obviously a man who knows something about getting the viewers and keeping them interested, and talks about the effect ‘mystery’ can have in an interview which you can view via this page. Abrams says “maybe there are times where mystery is more important than knowledge,” and I’d not only agree with that, but I’d go further and say that people are more drawn to mysteries than they are to knowledge.

Who killed Laura Palmer? Who shot JR? Will Maddie and David / Sam and Diane/ Lois and Clark/ Ross and Rachel/ Smithy and Nessa get together? Questions, and mysteries, are often the aspects of stories and entertainment which draw us in and then draw us back for more. By constantly stating what happened before what you’re seeing now, reiterating what you’ve just seen, and giving you glimpses of what’s yet to come, the experience of not knowing what’s to come is as good as lost. It’s not that I don’t want to know the answer to the questions posed in the story, it’s just that I don’t necessarily want to know them quite yet. It’s slightly perverse, perhaps, but isn’t it more perverse that, as a species, we create stories of things that never happened to people who never were in places and times which weren’t as depicted, and then break these stories (writerly pun intended) into sections deliberately designed to keep people paying attention?

Well no, I don’t think it’s perverse at all. I believe – as I’ve said above – that it’s absolutely natural. To paraphrase Neil Gaiman’s introduction to one of his Sandman volumes, being alive is very much a case of trying to catch up on what’s gone before, and as we’ll leave long before the story comes to its end, the tendency to speculate and wonder about events (be they real or imaginary) is, as good as innate in humankind; and the stories which hold our attention best are those which know how to play on this tendency and then go on to provide a satisfying resolution.

Oh, and that present I mentioned I have for you? I think you’ll like it, but I’m out of space now – I’ll have to tell you about it another time.