The Entitlement Thing

The magazine Doctor Who Monthly runs a readers' poll every season. This year, one reader couldn't even wait until the end of the run before sharing. He gave every story the lowest possible mark ('Awful'), including those he hadn't seen. He hated every villain that wasn't a Dalek, and called for Matt Smith to be replaced and Steven Moffat to leave the show. Favourite special effect? "Not interested". Favourite line of dialogue? "None".

Editor Tom Spilsbury won't give any details, but did say that the reader is in his mid-40s. Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with a middle-aged man watching Doctor Who. It's a show for the kid in us all, and that's one of the reasons for its success. But anywhere past your teens and you're not the target audience, you're a guest. A welcome guest, for sure. But a guest needs to know how to behave.

There are aspects of the show that I think work well and others that rub me up the wrong way (coughRiverSongcough) but I wouldn't dream of getting exercised over them, nor of demanding that the show be retuned to my preferences. We can all have an opinion about what works and what doesn't but when it comes to what goes in, the young audience is the one that matters most.

I'll confess my unease at the recent BBC-backed convention that discouraged children from attending. It wasn't a cultural studies symposium, it was a fan convention. But an adults-only Who feels... wrong. Take the kids out of the equation, and it's like messing with the gravitational balance of the Whoniverse. To me the most joyous part about New Who is seeing adults and kids together, parents sharing and passing on their renewed sense of wonder, a cameraderie that crosses age barriers. Those adults who gather in pubs to discuss it amongst themselves are connecting over something that started inside them long ago.

If it's going down well with the kids in a way that doesn't suit some adults, that's a pity but it's not for us to hijack it, nor to pester the driver by clamouring for his personal attention. When the kids are turning away, that's when it becomes a serious matter for the showrunner to ponder. And it's bad enough having to deal with notes from executives, without viewers trying to get in on the act. When it comes to someone else's TV show I consider myself a consumer, not a stakeholder, and for very good reason. I don't seek to be given exactly what I want. I'm looking for discovery. The risk of disappointment is the necessary downside of wonder.

And disappointment seems to come very easily to many people, these days, with every new genre piece being released to the sound of sharpening knives. Our culture has become like a birthing pool full of crocodiles. There was a time when the response to new material was to invest in it, meet it halfway, go all the way to find something to love in it, should it happen to be a Plan 9 or a Robot Monster.

Now, like the twerp who logs in to Amazon and one-stars every piece of PC software because it won't run on his Mac, the default setting seems to be one of outrage that our specific expectations haven't been met.

And speaking as someone who spent a childhood lost in awe, oblivious to wires, zips, obvious model work, corny dialogue, and stories that didn't always make sense, I think we're the poorer for it.

Bernice Summerfield Did My Headshots

Seriously. Lisa Bowerman - aka Doctor Who's Bernice Summerfield - is a talented portrait photographer, specialising in actors' headshots. You'll find numerous examples of her work in the Spotlight directory of performers. She works with traditional film negative and natural light, moving to digital for delivery.


Photo credit: Lisa Bowerman

Okay, so Pitt and Clooney have nothing to worry about. But I love the way she takes honest shots with no flattery or fakery. And technically she's so good that you can zoom in to my eyeball at the highest resolution and see her with the camera reflected there.

For actors it's important to show who you are, not what skilful studio lighting could make you look like fifteen years ago. Having been on the other side of the audition table to hear actors read, I can say that sending in a misleading photo does no one any good at all. Rather than give you a head start, it suggests insecurity and, at worst, delusion.

Writers' headshots are a whole other field of study.

We need to have them but, being writers, we don't want to pay for them. Sometimes your publisher will commission some publicity stills but that doesn't always work out - Hodder & Stoughton once sent me to a man who specialised in photographing fruit for Marks & Spencer. Maybe they chose him because of the "&". I don't know what fruit he had in mind when he studied me - maybe Zombie Cucumber. We took the shots in his attic, with me lurking behind a wormy pillar or looking out around a peeling chimney wall. The result: I looked like a ghoul in the fourth stage of something terminal.

I fared no better when I decided to splash out on some shots of my own. I picked a local wedding photographer with a sideline in industrial work - he should have been good, he had a studio and everything. I asked for no diffusion but he thought he knew better. The results were well nigh unusable - not sharp enough for good reproduction and I looked like one of those primped 80s guys in Movies4Men softcore porn.

Don't tell me you don't know what I'm talking about.

My first professional headshot was for the jacket of Valley of Lights. I forget who put me onto him, but the photographer was Arthur Waite of Arthur Waite Publicity, a one-man operation in a poky studio behind Salford Cathedral just down the road from Granada TV. Arthur looked a little bit like Paul Daniels, as I recall... there was an electric fire warming the studio and a Sheltie lying on a dog bed in the corner. Arthur specialised in photographing Variety acts and advertising copy for The Stage. His portfolio included Ken Dodd, Tom O'Connor, and International Cabaret Stars Margo and Trevor.

I told him what I did and what I needed. He'd never had a writer for a client before. He thought it over then gave me the lighting he used for magicians, which I rather liked the idea of. I liked the work he did, as well.


Photo credit: Arthur Waite Publicity

Hey. I've not changed that much. Maybe I could get away with using this one...

A Hero's Update

Here's a page of reviews for A Hero's Journey, mine included.

Can you type with gritted teeth? The show played to full houses and even made money. My first piece of staged writing, longer ago than I'm willing to admit, was a similar venture that attracted exactly one review. And it was a stinker.

A Hero's Journey

A lightning strike on Brooligan Village has knocked out phones and broadband for the past ten days, which has put a crimp on my blogging and tweeting while forcing me to get some actual work done.

But here's where I'll be later this week. I have tickets for A Hero's Journey, an hour-long comedy playing from Wednesday to Friday in the Camden Fringe. It features the internal struggles of an embittered washed-up Doctor Who writer, and keep your smart remarks to yourself.

The lead character's a creative writing teacher with one professional credit - a pretentious Who spinoff novel (To Whit, a Dalek) - and an enormous chip on his shoulder. To be honest, he sounds like what we'd call around here, "a right arse". His angst follows him around in the form of a bad-angel version of the fifth Doctor. Imagine Play it Again, Sam with the Doc in place of Bogart, and you're probably halfway there.

The two writers are fans of the show, so we should be on safe ground. I know of at least three other former Who scribes who'll be in attendance, so an element of nervous hysteria amongst the audience is guaranteed.

Do I have any connection with the project? Kind of... the Associate Producer is @Audreydeuxpink, whom I'll probably have to disown when it's all over.

A Hero's Journey is by Stephen Jordan and Patrick Baker, at the Etcetera Theatre (above the Oxford Arms pub) on Camden High Street from August 17-19 at 7.30pm. Tickets are £8, available from Ticketweb and, I imagine, at the door.

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.

Manchester Events

Got a couple of things going on in Manchester in July, and as the month's speeding toward us I suppose I'd better a) mention something about them, and b) start getting psyched about what I'm going to do.

Both events take place at "Manchester's perfect pub" the Lass O'Gowrie near Oxford Road, and the first of them's Doctor Who-related; I don't do much Who stuff so it'll give me a chance to trot out my anecdote. Titled Vworp 4, the 'convention in a pub' runs from 9am until 6pm on Sunday, July 3rd, and confirmed guests include Bob Baker, Paul Tams, Dez Skinn, Adrian Salmon, Andrew Cartmel, Ben Aaronovich and "the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre performing an exclusive set of their Doctor Who material".

Tickets for the day are £19.95 and you can get them here.

Then on Saturday July 23rd, as part of the Lass O'Gowrie's ongoing Pub Fiction programme, there's just me for an hour in the Salmon Room from 6.30 to 7.30, most likely with a few video clips to talk around. Tickets for this are £5 (there's a capacity limit on the room so you can advance-book here to avoid disappointment - as if)

Just before me, at 5.30, there's an illustrated talk by old mate Bryan Talbot in which he'll be discussing his graphic novels Grandville and Grandville Mon Amour.

Then at 8pm they're screening a classic horror double bill of Night of the Demon and Vampire Circus. Despite the presence of lightweight B-movie import Dana Andrews and the show it/don't show it rubber monster controversy, this updated 50s retelling of M R James's Casting the Runes is well worth your attention - not least for Niall MacGinness's Dr Julian Karswell, a shaded and thoughtful take on an Aleister Crowley-style villain.

In fact if you cast an eye over the programme of events for the venue's month-long fringe festival, the Lass O'Gowrie is becoming a significant national hub for genre and genre-related activity.

Who Loves Ya

To quote The Fast Show, this week I has mostly been watching Doctor Who.

I hadn't seen the show in at least a couple of years and, frankly, I took one look at Matt Smith in pre-publicity and thought WTF? He's twelve! and so wasn't too encouraged to visit again. The enthusiasm of friends did little to influence me because, frankly again, I have some dear friends who often enthuse about total crap.

For me, relaunched Who had been rather like Jonathan Creek, a steady evolution from the fresh and ingenious to the forced and ludicrous. In Creek's case I think the explanation was simple, over-working its creator instead of putting him in charge of a crew. I have no theory for why I went off Who. It wasn't because of Tennant, who (in disagreement with Good Dog) I thought was pretty good.

It was just that the episodes piled up on my DVR and when they've been doing that for a while, you know the technology is trying to tell you something. I singled out Blink and watched that, but only because it was Moffat and Moffat always seemed to think at right-angles to the routine. Blink was exceptional. But exceptions don't change the landscape, they just stick out of it. And the landscape seemed increasingly to consist of stories that often didn't work coupled with a grating obsession with chav culture.

All of this left me with mixed feelings about the achievement of Russell T Davies. Because let's face it, he did something remarkable. These days you can't move in the BBC without someone telling you how hard they fought to help the show get back on the air. But the truth is that until its popular success, Doctor Who was an object of institutional disdain. Its fans were ridiculed as sad, arrested people in love with ropy makeup and wobbly scenery. But I've said it before. No one ever loved Doctor Who for its bargain-basement production values. They loved it in spite of them. Davies pulled out the core values of the show and delivered something smart, modern, new, and entirely familiar.

But I think it was some time around 2007 that we were walking one weekend in the Yorkshire Dales, and fell in for a mile or so with an American backpacker of around thirty years old who volunteered that he was a Doctor Who fan. I didn't mention that I had any connection with the show. I tend not to in those situations. Partly because my experience must seem like ancient history (I was 25 when I wrote Warriors' Gate) and partly because I don't want to be taken for a liar or, even worse, a smug twat.

But of RTD he said, "The episodes that he produced and didn't write are always better than the ones with his name on them." Which pretty much nailed the thought that I'd been circling around. I was letting stories that I didn't enjoy colour my appreciation of a producing triumph.

So, fast forward. Over the Easter weekend I borrowed the Season 5 boxed set, mainly to try out the new Blu-Ray player that I'm too cheap to buy discs for. I was only going to sample an episode but I've been charging through them at the rate of three a night. Smith's as good as they say. Better, even. I still think he's twelve but it's not the problem I imagined. It's a less sentimental, more honestly-felt show and I think Moffat's nailed it with his Peter Pan/Wendy take on the core characters and their situation.

OK, I'm back in. By Saturday I'll have caught up.

But here's something. While I was on hiatus from Who, I did watch Sherlock. And during my week-long blitz something jumped out at me.

They're the same characters. It's the same show.

The Avengers Guy

I had to miss last month's UK Fantasycon, but I'd already been asked to write an appreciation of Guest of Honour Brian Clemens for the Convention's programme book. Here's what I said.

It was one o'clock in the morning and I had stuff on my mind. I turned on the TV for distraction. In a '60s Geneva created from library footage and a crisply-photographed studio backlot, an international security agent who'd been missing for two days walked into his headquarters building and calmly shot one of his superiors. For the next hour, the stuff on my mind ceased to trouble me and the world was young again.

(Except, of course, when my world was young, there was no TV or much of anything else going on at one in the morning)

I hardly needed to look at the credits to know who'd written the episode. Brian Clemens was always the master of the arresting story hook, a Sensei among warriors in the screenwriting ranks. There's hardly a piece of classic British 'cult' TV that doesn't either have his fingerprints on it, or his DNA somewhere in it. Even The Prisoner, a show in which he had no actual hand, can be traced back to the Clemens-scripted Danger Man pilot in which both Patrick McGoohan's secret agent persona and the Portmeirion location made their first TV appearances.

For many people Brian Clemens will be, forever and above all else, the Avengers guy. But The Avengers is really just the most prominent peak in a career characterised by prodigious energy and inventiveness, coupled with an impeccable professionalism. In a field that can so easily be colonised by journeyman work, his writing always has a voice, an angle, an attitude.

Born in 1931, Clemens grew up in Croydon. After service in the army and work in advertising, he sold a single play to BBC Television which led to a stint as house screenwriter for the Danziger Brothers. Depending on your prejudice or your point of view, the Danzigers were low-rent exploitation producers or resourceful low-budget entertainment providers in the Roger Corman style. They supplied second features for British cinema bills and half-hour filmed series for UK and US television. While in their employ, Clemens developed a proficiency in writing to deadline around available resources, as the brothers seized opportunities to get some extra use out of sets, props and sometimes even paid-up performers from other, more expensive productions.

Those skills were widely used by Clemens in such series as Mark Saber and Richard the Lionheart for the Danzigers, while also moonlighting scripts for Sir Francis Drake, Ivanhoe and HG Wells' The Invisible Man. He once said, "At one time, all of British episodic television was written by about ten writers, and I was one of them." He credits the Danger Man pilot as his big break; renamed Secret Agent, the show was picked up for network screening in the US by CBS and blazed a trail for all of UK international production throughout the '60s.

Although Sidney Newman is often credited as the creative force behind The Avengers and other classic TV including Armchair Theatre and Doctor Who, his role was more accurately that of a godfather. Newman came up with the Avengers title, and the idea of doing something new with Ian Hendry's Police Surgeon character from an underperforming series. Clemens was again brought in at the pilot stage, and three seasons later took over full creative control of the series as it moved from electronic production to film. The mix that had been brewed up in the creaky and low-res live-action studio now exploded with the application of top-drawer production values. The result was unique and confident. It didn't so much mirror the swinging sixties, as play a major part in defining them.

Season four was the 1965 black-and-white season, with such classic episodes as The House that Jack Built, The Town of No Return, and the glorious and notorious A Touch of Brimstone. Season five went to colour and hit the same level of triumph with knobs on. But it's those episodes in 'sparkling black and white', as the American trailers described them, with their stark op-art world and King's Road sensibility, that made the first and deepest cut for me. There is a place forever in my heart where the door to Emma Peel's flat has a big eyeball on it.

Although Clemens freelanced scripts for just about every high-profile action show from Adam Adamant to The Persuaders, after The Avengers he was also a force as a producer. When he was making The New Avengers a TV Times profile made reference to "his sixth Ferrari" and "the exclusive privacy of his four acres in Bedfordshire". With the suspense anthology series Thriller he became that rare thing for a screenwriter, a marquee draw with his name linked to the title. The Professionals made as much of a mark on the '70s as The Avengers in the decade before it, and the sitcom My Wife Next Door brought him a BAFTA award.

When Brian Eastman's Carnival Films wanted a high-concept, pacy action show for BBC1 on Saturday evenings, they turned to Clemens for Bugs. The show ran for four series and gave me the opportunity to write the kind of TV I'd grown up on, and later to share the role of series consultant with one of my biggest professional heroes. Imagine that! Though we'd met at festivals by then, we never actually met on the show. I'm told that half the time our feedback was 100% in agreement, while the other half of the time our comments were in complete opposition. Which I suppose sounds kind of healthy.

But back to that late hour, a few nights ago. My one o'clock diversion did exactly as its author intended. It gave an hour's pleasure, and a valued respite from the ordinary. It was an episode of The Champions, the Heroes of its day. I understand that it was written during the brief period when Clemens was out of The Avengers (after Diana Rigg's last season, and before Linda Thorson's first) and before he had to go back in and sort out the mess they got into without him.

The Champions episode was typical of Clemens' contribution to other people's shows. It's as if he examined the underlying concept and set out to nail it just a little bit better than anyone else, in this case taking the main characters and setting them, Marvel-style, to use their powers against each other.

There's much I've missed out. I've said nothing about his sales to American TV and I've been skipping over feature work that includes See No Evil with Mia Farrow, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad for Ray Harryhausen, an excursion into writer/director territory with Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter for Hammer, The Watcher in the Woods for Disney. But check out his Internet Movie Database page; it lists over a hundred entries, many of them for multiple series writing credits, and it's still growing. The films are as eclectic a selection as the TV work, but all have the same stamp on them; Hitchcockian technique, with an irreverent light touch.

And if you were thinking of asking: no, he had nothing to do with that Avengers movie.

The loyal and eagle-eyed may have spotted a couple of paragraphs recycled from an earlier Avengers piece. And speaking of recycling, The Champions has been slated for a feature remake by Guillermo del Toro, and despite his current involvement with the Hobbit movie it's said to be still on the cards. Last I heard he was going to write, but not direct.

Travelling in Time

I'm seeing trailers for the new movie The Time Traveller's Wife (as we'd spell it in the UK), and they've reminded me that a while back I did some thinking around the uses of time travel in fiction and on the screen. And what's a blog for, if not to share?

The most obvious form is the 'paradox romp' like Back to the Future, where something in the past gets changed, and repairs have to be made to safeguard the present as we know it. There's a '70s Czech comedy called Tomorrow I shall Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea that involves defeated Nazis trying to go back and give the H-bomb to Hitler. The Terminator is one of these, inverting the concept so that the aim is to prevent an unpleasant future rather than preserve the timeline. NBC's Journeyman featured the same kind of action on a weekly basis, with Kevin McKidd going back to change individual lives for the better. Which is laudable but not half as much fun as killer robots. In Harlan Ellison's Star Trek episode City on the Edge of Forever, Kirk has to watch Joan Collins get hit by a car knowing that if he saves her, Hitler gets atomic weapons (again).

After that comes the 'story of ironic fulfilment', where someone travels back in time and becomes an essential part of history, for example by unintentionally starting the Great Fire of London. An extreme case here would be Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man, where the time traveller goes back to AD 28 hoping to meet the historical Jesus, only to end up taking on the role and being crucified. (In Garry Kilworth's Let's Go to Golgotha, time-tourists at the crucifixion are instructed not to change history and to join in the call for the release of Barrabas instead of Jesus; the protagonist realises that the baying crowd is comprised entirely of time tourists, and no-one from the actual era.)

Perhaps the most subtle riff on this theme is Chris Marker’s La Jetee, a French arthouse short told entirely in still images, in which a man is sent back from the future using his most powerful childhood memory as the means of focusing for his journey. The memory is that of seeing a man shot and killed at Orly airport moments after parting from his lover. Without realising it, he was witnessing his own death. The short was the basis for Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys. Often the most memorable thing about these tales is the resonance of their conclusions.

The simplest form of time travel narrative is the 'fish out of water' story where paradox and consequentiality don't much matter, and the pleasure is in a) having a present-day protagonist experiencing a past or future landscape, or b) seeing someone from another era experiencing ours. Life on Mars and Somewhere in Time fall into this category but the granddaddy would probably be A Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. Karl Alexander's Time After Time has H G Wells pursuing Jack the Ripper through present-day San Francisco.

And there are time travel stories that don’t involve actual time travel but achieve man-out-of-time scenarios by other means. In the Sixties the BBC made Adam Adamant Lives! In which an Edwardian adventurer frozen in 1902 was thawed out in Sixties swinging London. While being dismayed by just about every modern advance he encountered, he was also a walking 60s style icon. It was cheaply and sometimes quite shabbily made (an hour of TV, rehearsed for a week and then shot in 2 hours of studio time), but could be tremendous fun. It inspired/was ripped off liberally by Austin Powers to an extent that’s probably nuked its chances of ever being revived or remade. In Richard Ben Sapir's The Far Arena, a Roman gladiator is thawed out of a glacier and struggles to adapt to the modern world. It's a long novel with a promising concept in which not very much happens. The focus is on the detailed procedure of discovery, revival and adjustment. Very short on mayhem. The TV series New Amsterdam had its main character travel in time by living for 400 years, as in Highlander.

Probably the most robust way of doing a weekly time travel series for TV is to have a big machine, a team, and an agenda. Or a fault in the machine that repeatedly drops the main cast into new and dangerous situations. Time Tunnel immediately springs to mind, where the two leads bounce around time like a pinball table, every week showing up on the eve of some well-known historical event, while the 'control team' anchored in the present day mostly watch helplessly and occasionally manage to supply a warning or some vital information. In the UK we have our own Doctor Who, where the hero makes random jumps through time and space and happens upon a local adventure wherever he shows up. Originally this was because his time machine was busted and he’s hopping around trying to get home. In his current incarnation he’s the ultimate tourist, so far from his home that his home’s no longer there. Doctor Who mixes sf and historical episodes; my memory from when I worked on it is that the historical episodes were fewest in number but always drew the higher ratings. Quantum Leap, slated for a remake, had an everyman hero, again with no control over where he'd show up next. Sliders involved parallel worlds rather than time travel but it was pretty much the same kind of thing.

I understand that the late Michael Crichton's Timeline pretty much follows the machine/team/agenda model, although I haven't read the book or seen the movie. In series terms I can't help feeling that the Stargate franchise may have colonised the setup.

If the big machine isn't broken, then the key lies in the agenda. Jack Finney's Time and Again sends the hero back with a mystery to solve. But a weekly non-mythology series needs a weekly mystery. I've heard of – but never seen – a UPN show called Seven Days in which, after any national disaster, an agent is sent back in time (using Roswell technology) and has seven days to avert it. It's a neat idea.

My own modest contribution to the genre is the short story My Repeater (F&SF, Jan 2001), set in a near-future where time travel is available to all but used only by an obsessive few who waste their entire lives returning to the same moment in repeated attempts to perfect it.

Young Sherlock

Happy to see that my old friend Andy Lane is the writer chosen to helm a series of Young Sherlock Holmes adventures approved by the Estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

According to the announcement on the United Agents site, "The Colossal Schemes of Baron Maupertuis (is) due to be published in Spring 2010. The books will begin in the 1860s and will detail the life of a 14-year-old Sherlock Holmes."

The books will be published by Macmillan and the initial deal is for three novels.

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

Truth in Escapism

Andy Greenwood's comment on Crusoe and the Doctor, directing us onward to a fan's mashup of Doctor Who images cut to the music from the Happy Days title sequence, made me think.

In today's Guardian, playwright Mark Ravenhill writes:

"in the minds of many programme-makers, there now seems to be a crude binary option: you're either safe or you're edgy. And, since very few producers feel happy to say they want safe shows, practically everything we see on our screens believes it is edgy."

British TV's most successful all-ages drama is a decades-old format that makes no pretensions of edginess, of being issue-driven or of being in any way 'relevant', but which sets out to create simple escapist joy. And by doing that well, it draws a response from its audience that is both complex and transcendent.

Just to extend it - how edgy was Oliver Postgate? And how profound the life experience he brought to those who grew up with his work and who mourn him now?

But if you're looking to break into the business, don't bother learning from any of that.

Write about how grim it is to be buggered in prison. There's a vanishingly small audience for it, but you'll have a much better chance of seeing it commissioned.

Crusoe and The Doctor

I have no idea what brought this about. But it's neatly done and kind of beguiling.



Play it again. You know you want to.

Sound Effects and TV History

This link from Mark Ayres tells of plans to issue a CD box set celebrating the 50th anniversary of the BBC's now-defunct Radiophonic Workshop, pioneering in-house department responsible for themes and sound effects across a range of programmes.

Ah, that original version of the Doctor Who theme - described by my godson as "ghosts screaming on a rollercoaster".

Disbanded ten years ago, the Workshop's reputation is such that many people assume it's still in business. The Radiophonic Workshop is a reminder of the days when the BBC had an actual creative culture and wasn't just a services-buying bureaucracy. When Doctor Who finally returned to such resounding acclaim, what was one of the first things the BBC did?

They closed the Model Unit.

Mister Memory

Many years back I was interviewed by a reporter from the Manchester Evening News who asked me to sign a couple of Doctor Who books for his children. Later, when I was jotting down his contact details in my address book, I noted the names of the children as well.

I met him again more than a decade later. As it happened, I'd been transferring all my details to a new address book the week before. He introduced himself and I responded with, "Great to see you again. How are Rachel and Philip these days?"

Now there's one person on this planet who's convinced I must have a phenomenal memory for names. Everyone else, alas, soon picks up the truth.

You're Kidding Me

WTF - Torchwood Babies????

Out of the Unknown

The classic BBC anthology series. Only a few still exist, but when they first aired I watched them all. Best TVSF I've ever seen, because they treated the literary sources with the same fidelity and presumption of serious intent given to any classic adaptation. I've no doubt they'd appear creaky and flawed if I saw them now... but in their time and their context, they were damn-near perfect.

Of course, 'still exists' is a pretty flexible term, as evidenced by the truncated state of Little Black Bag, the Kornbluth story of which only a fragment survives.

Look at a 60s Twilight Zone now and it probably looks even better than it did back then, given that it's on stable and detailed 35mm film, probably remastered from an uncirculated print, and that both telecine scanning and TV sets have improved so much.

The BBC shot on tape, which it tended to wipe and re-use after a couple of showings. 16mm telerecordings were photographed off a screen for export to markets undiscriminating enough to accept them as broadcast quality, and these are what tend to survive.

It's a bit like burning the Book of Kells and keeping a photocopy. Where original tape does survive, it serves as a cruel reminder of what's been lost... Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape now looks far better on DVD than it ever did on our 70s TVs. One falls into the trap of thinking that because old British TV looks so bad, that's what we must have put up with back then.

The BBC now has a restoration unit, economically justified by the revenue potential of old Doctor Who material and staffed by people who you imagine would probably do the same work for nothing if you took their funding away. One of the tools they've developed is Vidfire, a means of taking the old telerecordings and interpolating false frames to restore some of the 'video look' of the original material. They can tweak the contrast, clean up frames, digitally remove hairs, stabilise the jitter of shrunken film, and are generally elevating technical turd-polishing to the status of an art.

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.

Crude, but Effective

Every little community has its in-jokes, and each community has its bottom-of-the-pecking order geek who catches on late and then fails to realise when everyone else has moved on. In the world of Doctor Who - which has become a big world again, due to the success of the TV series' revival - the fast-track to lamer status is to make cracks about wobbly sets and dodgy effects and watching from behind the sofa.

(I go back to the Hartnell days, and I never watched from behind the sofa. More likely my nose was four inches from the screen and I'd have to be picked up and moved so that others could see.)

Looking at some of the '80s stuff in the company of cast members a few days go, I was struck by something that I'd been far too self-absorbed to notice back when I worked on the show. Which is that everybody, but everybody involved, was reaching for something way beyond what the budgets, the available technology, and probably even our own abilities, could deliver. Back then I was in my mid-twenties and the Whos were my first writing job in TV. I fretted and railed and grew depressed at my failure to deliver something that might stand alongside the great sf that I'd grown up reading.

In my head, it was always perfect. But in your head, it always is.

What I can see now is the extent to which everybody took the base materials of 80s studio-made TV with its low technology (compared to today), crippling time schedules (compared to any time in history) and inadequate resources, and shot for the moon. That's in every department - sets, costume, effects, performance. Knowing what I now know about how TV is made, I realise that I was witnessing the spectacle of seasoned professionals trying to squeeze a quart of ambition into a half-pint pot of opportunity, and doing it on a timescale that doomed everyone to a world of "if only". I took everything for granted back then; only now do I see how hard others were pushing themselves for this under-appreciated, under-respected kids' science fiction show.

Of course the end result fell short. Under those circumstances, the only way you can ever ensure that it doesn't is to aim low. But as the proponents of 'poor theatre' have always asserted, when your resources are meagre then your audience will compensate with their own imagination.

That, I believe, was the true secret of the show's success. There never was a poorer theatre than the screen fare available to a science fiction fan, back in the days before screen sf was a universal commodity. A cardboard robot, a spaceship on a visible wire... these were the agents of awe. The point of it was that you looked past the flaws in the presentation and responded to the vision behind them.

We don't do that so much, now. The flaws aren't so obvious and I fear that our imaginations have grown seriously soft. I've heard people say, with some air of superiority, that the special effects in the new Who aren't all that great. Same with Primeval, and Torchwood, and Walking with Dinosaurs.

Well, point one. They f*cking are.

And point two, so f*cking what?