Magic and Memorabilia

Along with Chris Moore I headed down the motorway to Memorabilia last weekend. There I met up with Good Dog, and we had our first decent chat since a fleeting hello at the NFT's South Bank Chimera event. I urged him to get blogging again. Which is slightly ironic, considering my own long periods of blog silence over recent months...

Memorabilia's a twice-yearly UK event where one of the halls in Birmingham's National Exhibition Centre gets turned into a giant dealers' room for mostly SF and media-related goods, old and new, along with a section of autograph-selling tables for mostly TV faces, mostly old. It probably pales by comparison with similar US events, but I enjoy a mooch and usually come home with a few stocking-fillers for friends and family.

I view the autograph tables with a mixture of cringe and curiosity... very few of the personalities involved get more than sporadic visits, and most spend the day fiddling with their pens and chatting with their neighbours. Some have solid achievements in their resumes, like lead roles in old shows, and they're the ones I feel for; but while I'd love to chat to Quiller's Michael Jayston or William Gaunt of The Champions, I come from a tradition where such appreciation is offered over a drink in a Convention bar, not fifteen quid on a table. And not when cheek-by-jowl with someone who did two days' work on Star Wars and has been blagging hotels and expenses off it ever since.

But then I think back to the time when @Audreydeuxpink and I stood in line for a picture and a word with the great Leslie Phillips, and I think, Oh, what the hell. Each to his own magic. But I suppose I feel a share of the pain when the magic falls flat.

As it happened, Good Dog was acting as minder to some of the better-known faces on the weekend's guest list. The organisers have got it together more since the early years when signers were just parked alone with no one looking after them, but I can still find it an uncomfortable spectacle when people with careers have put themselves out there and nobody's stopping by. I can remember The Man from Uncle's Robert Vaughn, alone at his table with no one else around him, looking like the most pissed-off man in the world while attendees tiptoed nervously past at a respectful distance.

That's a Brit thing, perhaps. But it's compounded by the way that the less experienced of the enthusiasts who organise fan weekends and conventions can sometimes show little idea of what's required of them as hosts, especially when their guests are ageing performers, often insecure and uncertain of their reception, lured with a promise of hospitality only to be cut loose to fend for themselves amongst strangers.

They're not those giants you see on the screen; they're rather more like you and me. And I know how I'd feel if it was me out there.

For a start, there was that book signing in Watford in 1989...

The Metropolis image is one of a range of brilliant movie posters created for screenings at San Francisco's Castro Theater and offered in hand printed, limited editions by Memorabilia exhibitor The Dark City Gallery. Those that may look a little dull on the website are actually printed on gold or silver stock, and have to be seen to be appreciated fully.

Chimera for Sale - Sold!

A note via the website from Stefan - who says he recalls being scared witless by Chimera, as well he might since he was nine years old at the time - sent me to check out this item at movie collectables and memorabilia dealer The Prop Store.


Here's the text, to save you from squinting:

An original ‘Chad’ creature mask used in the 1991 British TV mini-series Chimera, which was watched by over 21 million viewers. The misunderstood creature, created by combining human and ape DNA can be seen throughout the series after being brought up in a fertility clinic acting as a cover for the disturbing project. The full head mask is made from foam latex with prop hair, painted eyes and realistic yellow teeth and gums, the creature features both human and ape features, such as an elongated jaw from the apes, and the size with full head of long hair from the humans, and is a scary thing to behold. Due to its age it has lost its flexibility and as a result is crispy around the neck, and should be handled with care, however the main body of the piece still has integrity and is fairly solid. This piece is supported on a black wooden stand with metal rod, and stands at approximately 42cm (16.5”) tall.

I've no idea what the piece was selling for, as Stefan already had it reserved. My recall is that there were three full head masks created for the show, with every hair hand-stitched into the scalp. Each was a latex skin that fitted over a headpiece core moulded to actor Douglas Mann.

From the way it's painted I'd guess that it's the one used in the barn scene in episode four. I'd be fascinated to know where it's been for all these years. In the mid-90s, one of the Chad masks and costumes featured in a horror exhibition of TV and movie freaks and monsters on Blackpool's promenade - I went along and saw it there, a figure posed in a gloomy cellar like some latterday Elephant Man.

Around the time of filming, I asked sculptor Little John to give me a price for a resin cast finished in the style of some ancient Greek museum bronze. But then along came the tax bill for the script money, and my finances were scuppered for a while. At least I know that this one's heading for a good home.


UPDATE: The Chad 'closeup head' is in the hands of a private collector who's posted some pictures and details online. The closeup head had cable-articulated movement, with expressions created by offscreen operators. Due to wear and tear it's showing its age rather more than the Prop Store's model. You can see it here.

Science and Sensation

I love this. Under the headline, Experts Warn Over Humanising Apes, the Associated Press has put out a lengthy science piece which has been picked up by, among others, The Independent - in fact it's being reprinted everywhere, from Pravda to The York Advertiser. It begins

Action is needed now to prevent nightmarish "Planet Of The Apes" science ever turning from fiction to fact, according to a group of eminent experts.
Their report calls for a new rules to supervise sensitive research that involves humanising animals.
One area of concern is "Category Three" experiments which may raise "very strong ethical concerns" and should be banned.
An example given is the creation of primates with distinctly human characteristics, such as speech.

A tip of the hat to Chernin Entertainment and Twentieth Century Fox, for happening to launch their advance publicity for Rise of the Planet of the Apes in the very week that the story breaks... what are the chances, eh?

Here's how we did it in 1991.


I know for sure that this kind of sensationalism is an irritant to many working scientists, though maybe not to the extent that you'd think. Apparently there's an entire generation of computer designers inspired to their choice of career by 2001's murderous HAL 9000. How many people working in gene science today had their imaginations fired by the mayhem in Jurassic Park? And I know from my own experience that it's never hard to find a scientist ready to share a beer and speculate in the aid of some extreme worst-case scenario in their chosen field.

(Would that more producers would take advantage of this, instead of regarding such due diligence as, as one critical of my method put it to me, 'letting the tail wag the dog'.)

Science and sensation will always go together, not least because science can be pretty sensational in its own right. But there's more involved than simple awe and the contemplation of wonder; science is our age's way of connecting with myth, with those eternal patterns of human behaviour writ large and lurid in tales designed to captivate.

The coverage inspired by Chimera was, to put it mildly, highly speculative. Not that we didn't encourage it. But nor, in interview, did I ever try to blur the line between actual science and the concerns of the fiction we'd based on it. When the novel first came out I met with John Burke Davies, a reporter from The News of the World, whose editor had sent him to investigate or expose this charlatan who claimed to have inside information on the whereabouts of man-made monsters. Once it was established that I was claiming no such thing, our meeting turned into an eighteen-hour pub crawl around the journalistic haunts of Manchester. I remember drinking with sharply-dressed Sun reporters in a bar panelled with timber salvaged from an R101 airship. But that's all I remember.

The 'eminent experts' quoted in the AP release include Sir Paul Nurse, whose encouragement toward the creation of a pro-science show set me on the path to Eleventh Hour. As far as I can tell from the selected quotes, most of them are talking about the hazards and ethical issues of modifying gene functions at the cellular level, which is where the real science is at.

Dare I suggest that the raising of ape armies and the overthrow of mankind is best left to those of us who deal in that kind of thing.



Now available with added Andy Serkis.

Saturday Event

On Saturday I'm giving a talk-with-clips about my TV career at the Lass O'Gowrie on Charles Street in Manchester, and as the day gets closer I'm growing convinced that no one is going to turn up. If you've an events diary or similar feature and might be interested in giving it a mention, feel free to pass the information on.

I was born in Salford so this is a homecoming for me. I'll be covering ground from my start with Doctor Who through working with Brian Clemens on BUGS in the 90s with side-trips into TV horror and Rosemary & Thyme, right up to the experience of remaking Eleventh Hour in Hollywood for Jerry Bruckheimer (the first version, with Patrick Stewart, was shot in Manchester).

The talk's in an upstairs room of the Lass at 6.30, right after my old friend Bryan Talbot speaking about his Grandville graphic novels. It follows a day of events with Johnny Vegas, who I suspect will have no trouble pulling an audience.

Process and Procedure

Which ought to be the title of Jane Austen's unpublished crime novel...

It's the network pitching season in LA, and I just got back after an intense week with results that I should be able to tell you about sometime soon. After nine hours plus of breathing buggy plane air on the way home, I succumbed to a virus that's laid me out for the past three days. Emerging from the mental fog I find Good Dog back online with his personal list of movies that stand repeated viewing.

(In a separate post he also reports on the BFI South Bank Chimera screening.)

Reading these lists, compiled by various people as the meme hops from blog to blog, I'm struck by the sense of a common factor. The titles are diverse but none of the the films are stupid, and few are what you'd call chin-strokers either; and however they may differ, it's like there's something in their DNA that suggests a relatedness, however slight. Regardless of their genre, ninety per cent of the rewatchables can best be described as high entertainment executed with wit and intelligence. Call it the showbiz gene.

I'm not sure when entertainment became a dirty word, but somewhere in the second half of the last century it seems to have been redefined as the enemy of art. As far as the UK's concerned I suspect that, in a kind of back-door Orwellian move, the creation of the BBC's 'light entertainment' department helped to formalise the schism, defining an entire category of amusement without substance and separating it from more educated, more adult concerns.

In British TV drama, that seems to have led us into a commissioning culture where the showbiz gene's been bred out. The current crop of Drama execs make a buzzword out of 'passion', but approach scripts as texts rather than as blueprints for spectacle. With most new series, the kindest thing you can say is that you can see what they were trying for.

Much fuss has been made of the BBC's Sherlock, and for good reason; Sherlock has the gene, cropping up like a cheerful ginger in a clan of swarthy depressives. For me it's reminiscent of the first season of Jonathan Creek, a favourite of mine before the drawbacks of the one-to-write-them-all approach began to show. The giddiness with which Sherlock has been greeted reflects the parched landscape into which it fell.

In The Observer, former Guardian editor Peter Preston duly observed:

How would the primetime lords of American TV feel if they'd happened to make a series called Sherlock, about a modern Holmes, and won tremendous audiences and critical praise in the process?

Modest triumphalism? Not if the "series" in question was a mere three episodes, shown in the depths of summer, with nothing poised to come in the writing, let alone in the can. A pilot without a runway.

Which I think is where I came in. Here's how those 'primetime lords of American TV' go about it:

Now is the time of year when networks are hearing pitches from writer/producer teams. Many of those teams were formed when producers started taking meetings with writers in the Spring. At the networks, drama and comedy pitch separately. You get a half-hour slot to present your show and answer their questions.

Say you get lucky. What happens after that is kind of like Who Wants to be a Millionaire. The stakes increase as you ascend the ladder, and so do the chances of getting kicked off it. A successful pitch leads to a pilot script, which leads to a pilot. You have a matter of weeks to write before the pilot script goes into production; my producer friend Jeff Hayes completed shooting on the Rizzoli and Isles pilot in December of last year.

With the holidays out of the way, the networks begin to view and test the pilots and make final decisions on which of them to send to series. They have to juggle those decisions against which of their existing shows to recommission or cancel. By now we're into April and May. Once those decisions are made, it's staffing season. The successful teams start hiring writing staff and booking crews and directors, while the networks present the new shows to advertisers at the 'upfronts' around the beginning of June.

(Almost all drama is written by heavily collaborative writing staffs. The chances of standing outside the system and freelancing a script for an LA-based series are very small. I know I freelanced two Eleventh Hours but my position there was unique. Whoever I ask, on your behalf, about the way for a British writer to get any traction in Hollywood, the answer is always the same; relocate.)

The writers get a bit of a head start before cameras start rolling sometime around August. It's quiet on the lot, and you don't have to stand in line for lunch. You start by discussing the shape of the season and all the different ways it can be taken, before individual stories start to coalesce and get assigned.

Your first episode most likely goes out in the fall and your target is to make thirteen hours by the end of the year, at which point the network looks at the ratings and decides whether to commit to the 'back nine' to make up a full season of twenty-two episodes. If that happens, everyone (or sometimes a reduced writing staff) comes back to work in January for two or three months. Meanwhile, producers out there are meeting with writers to hear the next round of ideas...

It's relentless. But it gets it done. There's no dithering, there are no hesitant toe-in-the-water strategies. Our own system may not have the critical mass to match that kind of performance, but I think most UK writers will agree that our biggest frustration comes from commissioners' slowness in reaching decisions; they sit on scripts and keep their options open at our expense. Technically I'm still waiting for a straight 'no' on Oktober from the BBC, a decision I gave up waiting for when I took the show to ITV and made it over twelve years ago.

Last year I got an email from a director I'd once worked with, bemoaning the lack of available work at home and wondering if there might be any openings in LA. I told him that the timing was perfect, and the opportunities were certainly there; Terry McDonough had shot two Eleventh Hours and Bill Eagles was working on The Forgotten.

By the time his agent got around to following up, all the jobs were gone.

Radio Daze

I've had a heads-up to say that BBC Radio 7 will be airing my 90-minute adaptation of Chimera in two slots this coming Sunday (August 22nd) and again the following day... click here for the scheduled times, if that appeals to you.

And, tying in with my Quiller post below, I notice that all this week the same station has been running a serialised reading of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, and the reader is none other than Michael Jayston.

Bitch-slapped Bimbos and Silent Engineers (2)

Monday's Chimera screening had a satisfying turnout and the evening ran smoothly, with great atmosphere. There was an audience flyer which included the entirety of a long Time Out review from 1991 that I hadn't seen before (Fliss Coombes and Naomi Phillipson, handling publicity for Zenith and Anglia respectively, had sent me all the cuttings at the time, and to this day I've never looked at any of them). Dick Fiddy set the scene and then I did a very brief intro, probably recycling the same joke from nineteen years ago, and then off we went. Projection was excellent and the show looked and sounded better than I've ever seen it.

The source must have been a transmission master tape - it carried electronic cue dots, those tiny squares in the top right-hand corner of the image that give the Transmission Controller a minute's warning of an impending commercial break. It was a call to action for everyone involved in the next three and a half minutes - network engineers, telecine operators, VTR department, continuity announcer. I started my career in the Presentation suite, and the sight of a cue dot takes me right back.

After the first couple of episodes, there was a short interval. I went up to the green room where Lawrence Gordon Clark had just arrived and was signing DVD sleeves. He hasn't changed at all! And he was delighted with the evening, as was I. Especially since they gave us loads of beer and we were able to take it into the theatre for the second half.


During the Q&A at the end, it emerged that 50% of the audience were seeing the show for the first time. Others in the course of the evening spoke up about its impact on them at an impressionable age. The consensus seemed to be that the show still holds its own, and that Nigel Hess's melancholic score added a dimension of emotional complexity that was enhanced by theatrical presentation.

For my part, I think I actually appreciated it for the first time ever. Details I was unhappy with at the time kinda faded back into their proper places. It's like some big public sculpture where I finally got far enough away to turn back and see it as others experienced it, as a whole. I was taken aback by the degree to which it reflected and challenged the ethos of the late 80s, that greed-driven, ruthless, and anti-society era, far more so than if we'd set out with an actual agenda to engage with 'Thatcher's Britain'.

I met up for the first time with Good Dog, blogger extraordinaire whose true identity I've now taken a blood oath to protect, lest it interfere with his ability to fight crime. Malcolm Brown, friend and co-worker from my old Granada Presentation days, had come into town to be there, as had my daughter and one of her pals, and with Lawrence we went into the bar afterwards and stayed until they chucked us out.

Bitch-slapped Bimbos and Silent Engineers

Read on and all will be explained. After a fashion. I promise.

But first a reminder that this coming Monday (July 5th, 2010) they're screening all four episodes of Chimera at the BFI Southbank, formerly the National Film Theatre, followed by a Q&A with director Lawrence Gordon Clark and me.

The same day also sees the release of the Region 2 DVD. Sad news for the guy who's been selling pirated copies on eBay for the past few years, good for anyone who's been waiting for the real thing. And apparently some people have, which brightened my day when I heard it. When you work on a piece of TV drama you feel all revved-up and committed, like you're carving a monument for the ages; a few weeks after it's been on the air, it's more like you wrote it on water.

And if you're like me, you can't look at your own stuff with any objectivity. All you can see are the flaws and lapses, the things that you wish you'd handled better or could go back and fix. The same things that many critics take for their raw material. Critics have a remit to entertain, like everyone else who writes for money, and if you rush to them looking for affirmation you're looking in the wrong place.

So a writing career is a weird rollercoaster of elation and depression; the sheer joy of making a show, and the sense of gloom as it retreats into the past and the world's population doesn't line up to shake your hand and tearfully swear that what you wrote means more to them than the Bible. Followed by all the anxiety and ego involved in trying to set up another.

The fact is - and it's taken me a long time to find this out - your real audience is a silent one. A great, shy beast that rarely breaks cover, and is largely unaware of your existence. Indifferent to it, even. Yours is a name that just passes in the credits like everyone else's. What they care about is this moment in their lives where they were struck by what they saw and that they've remembered ever since.

To be the silent engineer of such a moment has a satisfaction to it. It's something apart from fame. Especially since fame used to be the consequence of doing something remarkable, but now it's not. It just means that some reality producer thinks that enough people will dislike you on sight to stick around to see you getting slapped.

I can remember a time before the VHS recorder when almost anything written for British TV had no afterlife at all. Repeats were despised by viewers and everything instantly became archive material, where the archive was seen as a wastebin of little value. That's why so much stuff got wiped or junked, prints burned, negatives recycled for their silver. Copies might be made for export but they were usually of crappy quality, converted to local standards or scanned (badly) to 16mm. Only Lew Grade's ITC shows and - perversely - some long-forgotten half-hour series of the 1950s still look good because they were shot on 35mm, in the way that Mathew Brady's full-plate civil war photographs are sharper and contain more rich detail than your last-year's holiday snaps.

Even when home recording had taken off, it was a while before TV's back catalogue became commercial. Distributors assumed that retail and rental were only going to work for movies. Chimera had a brief VHS existence in an over-truncated 'feature' version edited for export and retitled by its American distributors as (God help us) Monkey Boy. Other than that and the pirate versions, it's been unseen for most of the past couple of decades. At the time I shelled out for a couple of high-end tapes to make my own off-air copy, but it stayed on the shelf. I'm not in the habit of replaying my old stuff like some latter-day Norma Desmond.

But I got an advance copy of the two-disc set a couple of days ago, and I can give you a report. The transfer's sharp and clean and looks great. 'Contains moderate gore'. And as for the extras - far from being the silent engineer, I'm all over the DVD set like a clingy drunk.

There's a reason for this. It was my first big show and I was all over the production like a clingy drunk, too. Lawrence and everyone on the team made me welcome, and I took full advantage. I showed up everywhere with my video camera and when production wrapped, I made off with all the stills, slides and presskits I could carry. Add the script of the novel's 1985 radio adaptation and an on-camera interview that I did for a prescient Revelation Films around the time they were mastering their full-length Oktober release, and it's no surprise if I keep bobbing up in the extras like the world's biggest attention whore.

'Tain't so, honest. I'm more one for backing shyly into the limelight, protesting faintly as I go.

Chimera at the BFI

Here's some news... on Monday July 5th as part of the Future Human season, my 1990 miniseries Chimera is getting a screening at the BFI South Bank. A while back I was asked if I'd say a few words before it, but that's now expanded to become a Q&A with me and director Lawrence Gordon Clark.

Which feels weirdly symmetrical because back when the BFI South Bank was the National Film Theatre, they screened Chimera before it was broadcast. It was part of a season of new TV drama, and we did something similar then. I could probably dig out my twenty-year-old notes, if I made any, and give the same answers. Last I heard, they were planning to show the first two parts at about 6:30pm followed by a 30 minute break, and then the final two at 8.30pm.

The day of the screening coincides with the release of the Region 2 DVD. I have some details of those DVD extra features now. There are sleeve notes from me, Lawrence, and Executive Producer Archie Tait. There's an image gallery, and the original press kit for the show, and the script of an earlier radio adaptation of the source novel. There's also an on-camera interview that I did for Revelation a couple of years back when they first started pursuing the DVD rights.

In addition to that I've recorded some commentary for behind-the-scenes footage shot during the production. It's been tricky to juggle, with me being here and the editor working on the footage at the authoring house in London, and I haven't yet seen the results. But there's a look inside the workshop of effects house Image Animation, designers and creators of the hybrid prosthetic, along with coverage of the shooting of the episode one finale and stuff from the Yorkshire locations.

Future Human runs through July and August and there's a listing of the screenings and events here. Just take a look at some of the stuff they're presenting. 2001, Chris Marker's La Jetee, BBC 2's seminal series of sf adaptations Out of the Unknown, Silent Running, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Tarkovsky's Solaris... and also in July, a programme running in parallel, Brian Clemens, Auteur of the Avengers. Seeing my little show in there makes me feel like I crashed the A-list party of my dreams.

It just struck me that I was twenty-five when I wrote the book.

I need to sit here quietly for a while and think about that.

Evolution of an Idea

I've been organising my files and came across this short piece that I wrote about Eleventh Hour for some purpose or other.

With Chimera's impending DVD appearance (news on those features soon, I promise) I thought I'd put it out here. It offers a kind of join-the-dots demonstration of how my thinking went over the sixteen years that separated the two projects.

At the beginning of my career I wrote a miniseries called Chimera, a variant on the Frankenstein story with a cold-hearted scientist as its villain. It made some waves, and through various debates and public events brought me into contact with a lot of real-world science professionals.

I found that these scientists were, almost without exception, sharp, cultured, funny, and great late-night company. They were well-read, they listened to opera, they played musical instruments. Future Nobel prizewinner Paul Nurse was a motorbike nut (and was the guy who first encouraged me to dream up a real-science drama). Biologist Jack Cohen advised sf writers on alien-building and had a daughter who was a dancer. All were genuinely excited to be doing the work they did.

As much as these real scientists shaped my picture of Hood, they also shaped my attitude to science villains. The ruthless, 'playing God' stereotype, arguing that harm can be justified in the name of progress, is a cartoon.

Science's villains are the same recognisably human people as those regular scientists. But they become villains through regular human flaws, not by Nazi logic. They sell out, or screw up. They can bend the truth to suit their paymasters or the policymakers, and call it 'being realistic'. They can be reckless, they can underestimate danger, they can lie to cover their mistakes, they can take desperate measures to cover their lies. But science's villains are characterised by their human failings, not by single-minded immoral intent.

And often they won't even be scientists, but people who co-opt science to their own purposes. CEOs, charlatans, toxic waste dumpers, politicians, lobbyists, thieves, counterfeiters, scammers, conspiracy theorists, drug lords, mobsters.

People like the international hustler and would-be breakthrough human cloner who provided the model for the bad guy in my very first story.

Chimera on DVD

From Revelation Films with a launch date of May 24th, if you're interested... Chimera wasn't my first TV work but it was the one that upshifted my career and spoiled me for anything less than big-budget 'event' TV.

Few official details yet but the product description reads, First broadcast on British TV in 1991, Chimera is a controversial story about a plot to create a new breed of human, based on crossing the genetics of a man and an ape, and the attempts by the government to cover up their secret plans.

Revelation have been negotiating for the rights even since their launch of the Oktober DVD, when I recorded an interview for inclusion in the extras. They've had access to a lot of background material and it promises to make an interesting package. I'll write more about it and my memories of making the show as the launch gets nearer but for now, here's the Amazon link.

Television Q and A

How did you begin your career in television?

I was writing for radio at the time. It was a science fiction piece for Radio 4’s Saturday Night Theatre and Martin Jenkins, my producer, sent the script over to the Doctor Who production office. So out of the blue came this call to go over and talk to them.

Was it easy to find steady work writing for television?

I’ve never had steady work. The nearest to it was the time I spent on BUGS, where I wrote 10 shows over 3 seasons and acted as consultant on seasons 2 and 3. But even then it was a case of “one sale at a time.”

How much input did you find you had in a production of one of your screenplays?

That’s always going to vary. Once the script’s locked, there’s no reason to have the writer around except as a courtesy. You usually get a call when they’ve changed something and it’s caused them a problem and they need it fixed. If it’s something practical like a location they couldn’t get or a sequence that doesn’t work as planned, then great, that’s what I’m there for. If someone’s made a perverse change and failed to foresee the knock-on effect, I’m less sanguine.

How did you find you were treated by other members of the creative team when working on a project?

Again, that varies. In general I’ve been treated very well.

What was your biggest breakthrough in television?

I’d have to say Chimera. Prior to that I’d done just a couple of Whos and one episode of a crime show. Chimera took me from contributor to creator and put four hours of prime time drama on my CV.

Which gave you more creative input, being a writer or creator of a series?

It’s the difference between being paid to drive a car and being hired to design one. Actually that’s not entirely fair. But when you write for a series there’s a lot that isn’t on your shoulders. I can’t imagine why anyone might prefer that.

Were you ever frustrated by the workings of the television industry?

Daily! Dealing with the industry involves a whole separate set of issues from the act of writing.

Do you think writers are given enough credit when it comes to the creative process and audience appreciation?

Obviously I’m going to say no. But the fact is that there’s a very small number of names get on the front of a show and the writer’s place there can never be disputed. Although in feature films particularly, you get directors who encourage the notion that the writer’s role is to type up the director’s thoughts. One of the things holding back British TV is the resistance to a writer having a true executive producer role on a show.

What is your opinion of modern television drama?

On the plus side, it’s a relief to see that the drab hand of social realism is no longer holding it down. Throughout the 90s almost every British drama looked and played like an effing soap. And the kind of technology we’re getting now – HD, widescreen, downloads – is what I’ve spent my life waiting for. The downside is a lack of confidence and direction... of old-fashioned showmanship. Everybody wants to be edgy and relevant and issue-driven. And no one wants to see it.

What is your worst experience as a writer working within television?

Being excluded from a project I'd initiated.

What was your best experience as a writer working within modern television?

If I had to pick one moment, I’d say walking my dog down Gotham City’s main street on the Pinewood backlot after a meeting in the Chimera special effects workshop.

Which do you prefer, writing prose or screenplays for television?

Standard answer, and it’s always true... when I’m doing one, I yearn for the other.

Do you believe there is a big difference between writing for television and writing for feature films?

Yes. Mainly in choice of subject. A feature film is a one-off universal myth. TV’s a continuing parade.

Chimera photo by Stephen Morley

BUGS

I had a note this morning from Dave Young, architect of my website, to let me know that Play.com are offering all four seasons of the mid-90s action thriller series BUGS at £7.99 a pop in their New Year Sale.

(I mention the website business not because it's relevant, but because it's cheaper to hand out credit than payment.)

Bugs feels almost like a forgotten series now but for a while, back there, we owned Saturday nights. I can remember reading newspaper coverage of how ITV had been caught off-guard and were scrambling to find something remotely like it.

Which is kind of ironic, given that it was an ITV memo that started the whole thing. And that the entire tone and texture of the show were based directly on the kind of popular drama that had helped to define Independent Television through the 60s and into the 70s.

For me it began with a call from Stuart Doughty. Stuart had been the Presentation Department's Promotions Script Editor at Granada's Manchester studios when I'd worked there in the late '70s, and he was now a producer with Brian Eastman's Carnival Films. Carnival were/are one of the most successful of UK television's indie houses, with a back catalogue that includes Poirot, Jeeves & Wooster, and the original Traffik.

Stuart was aware of my genetics-on-the-rampage miniseries Chimera, and believed I could probably write technobollocks with the best of them. I remember that first meeting at the Carnival offices near the top of Ladbroke Grove; it was high summer and I turned up in shirt, shorts and basketball boots and must have seemed intent on talking myself out of the gig as I told them everything that I thought was wrong with the show concept. Their response was to commission a script, which rather took me unawares.

I didn't create Bugs. Brian and Stuart did, with a significant amount of development input and influence from Brian Clemens. Nor did I write the pilot; that was by Duncan Gould, so the show was pretty much fully-formed when I came to it.

The format had been put together in response to a memo sent out by ITV drama to all the indies, calling for submissions to fill a slot it had designated for an action series. (That's the arse-up way we've done TV since 1990, when the Broadcasting Bill ended the Darwinian system of competing regional companies and replaced it with a non-creative commissioning and scheduling body.)

Every indie in town prepared a pitch, and somehow the BBC got sight of Carnival's. They commissioned it on the spot, while ITV were still opening envelopes. A two-series commitment, no messing. It's rare.

It also caught everyone off-guard. I came along at the point where they were having problems extending the format into a multiple-story franchise, something they hadn't expected to be facing for a while. I fear that I was probably a bit precious about it at that stage; I wrote novels and created my own stuff for TV, after all, and probably felt that episode writing on someone else's show was a retrograde step.

But when I started thinking of it as a chance to shed the extra burden of authorship and get involved in making something like the old Republic serials, just pure, kinetic, forward-moving fun, that made a difference. Believing that my Bugs script would be a one-off with no follow-up, I chucked everything into the story that I could think of. I called the result Assassins, Inc and was turning around to clamber back onto my lofty pedestal when the phone rang again.

It was Stuart. I remember his words exactly: "Brian says that we'll take as many of these as you can possibly do."

And my reply: "Well, Stuart, I do have an idea that might make another story. But it would all depend on whether you could get me a submarine."

There was a pause. Then, in words chosen with great care:

"All I can say at this stage is that I can't see any reason why not."

Which led to the Season One story titled Down Among the Dead Men.

That was how it went with me. I tackled every story thinking it would be my last. I didn't warm to every aspect of the format - I suppose my natural urge was to Goth it up a bit to contrast/juxtapose with all the shiny docklands architecture - but I worked within the style and had more fun than any series writer can decently hope for. In our season one closer, Pulse, I introduced Jean Daniel, a smooth French-born villain who'd quit the Foreign Legion because he thought it was full of sissies. Gareth Marks played him with such evil joy that we brought him back in season two and had him underpin our series arc, in which Jean Daniel manipulates the stock market from his cell and buys the prison he's being held in.

My main contribution to season two was the Cyberax thread, a sequence of stories involving an online distributed intelligence and the first computer virus to cross the species barrier.

The BBC were unhappy with the increasingly science fictional direction the show was taking, and said so. Season three was commissioned with a directive for less sf, more relationships. I was given the job of setting that up. Craig McLachlan ('Ed') had been planning to leave the show and I gave him a spectacular demise at the end of the first season three episode, Blaze of Glory. But as season three went into production he agreed to stay, so Ed lived; and the character intended to replace him in the lineup, a young woman named Alex, was reworked to play a supporting role. I always liked Alex, and wished I could have done more with the character; but Craig brought so much bounce and energy to the show that I was glad to see him stay. Some of my best lines were actually his ad libs.

For my last story in season three, Renegades, I asked to be allowed to go back to the Cyberax story and give it closure. BBC or no BBC, Brian backed me on it and the result was one of my favourite episodes.

I wasn't involved in season four. I was off making Oktober by then. In the context of my career, I tend to think of Bugs as a massive sidebar. I didn't invent it, I don't own it, I can hardly hog the credit for it.

But for a while, it Entertained Our Nation.

The Nature of the Beast

Given that I'm a zillion miles from the action and not even an American writer, this isn't the place to come for front-line news on the WGA strike.

But what's going on out there is an important and necessary step in evolution that's going to affect us all, and we'll be feeling its effects sooner rather than later. Evolution is usually a long and slow process. But occasionally you get a vital adaptation being jump-started by some one-off event.

I reckon this strike is one such event. What's on the table is a necessary reconstruction of our industry's business model. Not the usual selling and distribution issues but the behind-the-scenes, vital-essence, imaginative gruntwork sector on which the entire citadel of entertainment endeavour is raised.

We're in a business that absorbs, develops and exploits new technologies with astonishing speed. But when it comes to the rightful channeling of income from new technologies, caution, delay, and outright avoidance are suddenly the orders of the day.

I'm not going to add my voice to those who portray the AMPTP as an organisation of mendacious, avaricious, unprincipled limbs of Satan (although I'll make an exception for anyone driving through the picket lines with obscene gestures at those whose inner lives provide the entire foundation for their own livelihoods.)

I'm not rushing to criticise because there's no point in despising the entrepreneurial class for simply doing what they do. It's the function of an entrepreneur to pay as little for a creator's work as they can possibly get away with, and to sell it to a customer for as much as they can possibly charge. And then to hold on to as much of the difference as their long arms can carry. That's the nature of the beast, and most of the time it suits us for them to be active and out there.

They'll give writers a fair deal on emergent technologies when they have to. Otherwise, they won't. Any more than you or I would feed unnecessary coins into a parking meter or pay more than the cover price for our daily newspaper.

Many's the producer for whom I've written and rewritten a proposal with no payment, my only recompense being the shrug he gives when the broadcaster turns it down. The system works that way because it can. He knows that if he tries the same thing with his electricity supplier, the lights will go out. His landlord will evict him. His broadband supplier will cut him off. So them, he pays in full without a second thought.

With that mindset, why address the shift in the revenue stream from traditional media to newer technology-driven systems if you don't have to?

The writers' strike presents the entrepreneurial sector with the necessary You Have To.

For that reason alone, the AMPTP should be grateful to the WGA. Downloading is going to be the dominant delivery system of the future, no question about it. But the AMPTP's entrepreneurial hardwiring is preventing it from coping with the change. By requiring them to cope, the WGA are enabling them to move forward.

The alternative would be a slow, steady, spreading rot of disaffection and inefficiency. When you let that happen in any field, something different arises and leaves you behind.

I'm not in the WGA, but I'm a former Northern Chair of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain and we're affiliated. Here in the UK we already have a basis for participation in download revenues, but it's in everyone's interests to see the principle made universal. No WGGB member will provide material for American production, and no non-member should be thinking of it either - try it, and when the dispute ends you'll be shut out of the US market for life.

I've been involved in three strikes in my time, and none was entered into lightly. One I can't really count; it was a building workers' strike and I was a student on a vacation job, so I wasn't putting my livelihood on the line the way that the real workers were. But I was also an ACTT member involved in the long ITV strike of 1979, and when I launched off as a freelance writer and joined the Guild in 1980 - partly as a result of the taste of the life that the ITV strike had given me - I was asked to withhold novelisation rights to my Doctor Who scripts as part of a campaign that led to UK publishing's first Minimum Terms Agreement.

OK, so it wasn't exactly the Gdansk shipyards. But it did bring a change for the better.

Too Much Monkey Business

There's been a lot of online coverage about the Cadbury's drumming gorilla ad... viral activity that felt spontaneous and justified at first but which (or maybe it's just me) is beginning to feel more than a little manipulative now.

After some speculation as to whether it was actually Phil Collins in the gorilla costume (duh?) it's been revealed that the wearer of the Stan Winston-created prosthetic suit is "a little-known actor called Garon Michael."

It turns out that Garon Michael is actually an ape movement specialist with a string of feature credits to his name. To my eye the 'little known' tag is an unnecessary putdown - far from being plucked from a deserved obscurity he's actually one of the go-to guys for this kind of job.

Sometimes you wonder if people realise that there's a whole other world behind what they're seeing on the screen. Back around 1990 I adapted my man-animal hybrid novel Chimera for ITV, and the crew included a primate movement and behaviour specialist named Peter Elliot. He worked closely with Dougie Mann, who wore the mask and played the role.

Peter was then, and continues to be, one of the top-ranked choreographer/performers in the field. His credits can be traced back to Greystoke and Quest for Fire, and he teaches animal study at London's Central School of Speech and Drama.

He can be seen on the right of the picture, talking to Paul O'Grady on one of the Chimera sets (I think it's the village hall in Kettlewell, Yorkshire, which we'd turned into an emergency morgue for the victims of a mass slaying. O'Grady played a sign language interpreter, some time before he became more widely-known for his Lily Savage persona).

Dougie Mann had also worked on Greystoke. I think I've got a shot of him without the mask somewhere and if I can dig it out, I'll post it. Whenever there's a Congo or a Gorillas in the Mist in production you'll find a whole community of these specialists being pulled together.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is, there's a lot more to it than just showing up and putting on the monkey suit.