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Saturday 30 May 2020

The Sentinel Case

...is the original title of my second Eleventh Hour story for the 2006 ITV series that starred Patrick Stewart and Ashley Jensen.

I've decided to add the script to my small library of downloadable PDFs because... well...


Rather than a coronavirus, the story concerns an outbreak of hemorrhagic smallpox. It was partly inspired by the last recorded smallpox death in the UK - the result of a lab escape at the University of Birmingham Medical School in 1978 - and a separate story of forgotten pathogens discovered in commercial cold storage.


My research was aided by the late Steve Connor, Science Editor of The Independent. The fun stopped there because the show as shot was not the show I wrote. So much so that I did something I've never done before or since; I walked off it.

So what you have here is the version you never saw, and not the one of which Robert May, former Chief Scientific Advisor to the Government, wrote in the Times Educational Supplement, 'the underlying epidemiological science is melodramatically misrepresented; (eg) "In 24 hours, the virus will be on every continent"... we need watchable dramas in which the science is done well.'


A couple of years later my story was adapted by Adam Targum for the JBTV remake of the show on CBS. It can now be streamed on Amazon. You're welcome to feel differently, but it's my preferred version.


Friday 29 May 2020

Donald Roy 1930-2020


Sad to hear that Donald Roy, founding head of Hull University's Drama Department, has died in Brighton at the age of 90. I was a Drama and English joint honours student in the mid-70s and  so many of the good things in my own life can be tracked back to that special time with that exceptional bunch of people.

Don excelled at marshalling a lineup of uniquely quirky but highly able people for his teaching staff, who between them fostered a we-can-do-anything atmosphere. When the department started, it was just Don on his own; it was only the third Drama Department of its kind in the country, but under his guidance it became the first to have its own fully-equipped teaching theatre and TV studio in The Gulbenkian Centre.

After his retirement the performance space was renamed The Donald Roy Theatre. The TV studio would later be revamped and named The Anthony Minghella Studio, for the late writer-director (and my fellow cast member in Don Roy's translation of Romain Weingarten's Akara; I was in drag as a French woman whose son was a dog, Tony was a frog who played the piano. Theatre of the Absurd. What can I say?)

The drama course was terrific, a deep dive into human history seen through the lens of performance and exploring its inextricable links with mythology, religion and social change. On top of that, the practical craft of production and the actual business behind show business. And on top of that, the very thing that people seem to think that drama students do to the exclusion of all else - a weekly session of fannying around in leotard and tights. The purpose of this, I now realise, was never to make us into actors. It was to give us an understanding of what performers do.

Which is not to say that the department didn't turn out its share of talent. When I tried to image-search for a photo of Don the screen filled with headshots of actors whose CVs all include early roles in the Donald Roy Theatre - quite the testament in itself.

So instead of Don's headshot, pictured is the performance space that bears his name.

UPDATE: With great thanks to Francesca Roy I can now add this image, said to be from an occasion when Don was presenting an honorary degree to Harold Pinter...

Monday 25 May 2020

Tales of Dark Fantasy 3






Advance review from Publishers Weekly; book launches August 2020, available for preorder now in both a trade hardcover and a limited edition signed by all the contributors.