The Movies, Mr Fairbanks, and Me

Looking back, 1977 was a key year for me. I didn't rocket to fame, I didn't take British culture by storm - though I'm sure those were the dreams I was having at the time. What I did in '77 was to stage a play with a local amateur company (a talented bunch who deserved better material, if I'm honest), sell my first radio drama, and see my first book in print (a novelisation of said radio piece).

With all that going on, I thought I was the bee's nuts. I imagined I could do anything. In retrospect I was no shooting star, and in retrospect I'm grateful for that. I was getting the thing I didn't know I wanted; grounding for a sustainable career based in diversity. I've seen writers of my generation have a hit and disappear, or spend the rest of their careers struggling to match it, or be stuck repeating themselves until death offers a release.

For me, a different pattern emerged. I'd have a great year, then a shit year, then I'd reinvent the wheel. It's as bumpy as the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland, and fun in the same rough hazards-and-surprises kind of way.

In '77, I was going to write a musical. It was going to be about Doug Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, about the glory of silent cinema and the birth of superstardom, about the formation of United Artists and the end of an era with the coming of sound.

I know with the success of The Artist it's trendy to say so, but I've always loved silent film. From before the Thames Silents presentations, before Michael Bentine's Golden Silents on the BBC, all the way back at least to Bob Monkhouse's Mad Movies, intelligently presented from his own collection. The only Oscar I've ever held was Robert Youngson's, for The Days of Thrills and Laughter. Monkhouse was the real deal as a collector but I once had a modest collection of my own, starting in childhood with a 50' clip of Chaplin's Easy Street that came with a second-hand tinplate projector from Shawcross's of Eccles, local auction house and Aladdin's Cave.

As a teen I'd wash cars and blow my savings on Super 8 prints of the classics; my first and most-wanted was Metropolis, my most-watched were the Fairbanks costume spectaculars - Robin Hood, The Mark of Zorro, The Black Pirate - every one of them a veritable foundation document for a different action genre. The Blackhawk catalogue, Thunderbird Films, Perrys of Wimbledon, Derann of Dudley - these were the dealers of my dreams.

I had special affection for Blackhawk's The Thief of Bagdad, which I'd run with the accompanying piano improv soundtrack by Florence de Jong and Ena Baga. The music was recorded during a screening at the Academy One cinema, and issued on vinyl. I was going to add "issued on vinyl for geeks like me" but I was a dabbler, really, compared to some. I've an awful suspicion that my love for any subject is determined by the extent to which I can steal from it.

So in '77, heady with a droplet of success and firm in the delusion that I could tackle anything under the sun, I set my sights on Doug and Mary.

He was Hollywood's biggest male star, and she was "America's Sweetheart". Fairbanks was a graceful athlete of spontaneous creative instincts combined with great determination, while Pickford was as clearsighted in business as she was vulnerable onscreen. Their romance was genuine, their partnership golden, its ending a sad disengagement. There was a shape there; the key would be to find a theme.

In the late 70s Doug's only son, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, was living in London's Mayfair. It has to be tough following in the footsteps of such an iconic father but Douglas Jr had made his own mark, first with (in his words) "big roles in little pictures, and little roles in big pictures" and then, following distinguished war service, some big roles in big pictures and an active role in early international TV production. With all the confidence of an upstart, I wrote to him.

(By which I mean I wrote him a proper letter, not its modern, mass-emailed, hey-you-you're-famous-so-help-me-out equivalent.)

He wrote back, generously and at length, and more than once.

13th June, 1977.
Dear Mr Gallagher
Thank you very much for your courtesy in writing and I am proud and delighted that you would want to write something about my father’s career.

However, I do want to warn you that the idea had already occurred to two or three other people over the past fifteen or twenty years, and even though they have been well-known playwrights and theatre people the projects have come to nothing because, except for a couple of domestic problems, my father's life per se was not sufficently dramatic to justify a play. His career was indeed spectacular and he was unquestionably a great creative artist and producer but beyond that the material is not rich enough to sustain a complete play. Any detailing of domestic sidelights would be likely to lead to complications as some of the people are still living - such as my step-mother.

I have no personal objection to your trying to write such a play but I thought it only fair to warn you that others had come to a dead end working on the same idea. There have been two recent books about my father which I would recommend to your attention: “DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS, THE FIRST CELEBRITY” and "THE FAIRBANKS ALBUM", both by Richard Schickel. These are both well researched and accurate and make interesting reading but I do think they would be difficult to dramatize. The most theatrical part of my father’s life was on the screen rather than off.

Yours sincerely
Douglas Fairbanks

The hair rises slightly on the back of my neck as I read the reference to "my step-mother" - Mary Pickford was still living at the time, and stayed with us until the end of the decade.

As it happened I'd read the first of the Schickel books under its American title of His Picture in the Papers. I didn't keep copies of my own end of the correspondence, so I can't say what impression I was making. But I must have communicated at least some of my enthusiasm.

I mean, just look at this.

23rd June, 1977.
Dear Mr Gallagher,
I was most interested in your kind and informative reply to my letter and I will be most interested to follow your progress in your intended dramatization.

I must however invite your attention the fact that the "decline" of the careers of certain film artists after 1930 was due to a number of different reasons - unique to each individual - and not because of the problem of the market no longer providing the suitable outlet you refer to.

In the case of D. W. Griffith, for example, his own decline as a director began several years before that and had really nothing to do with either the advent of sound or the changes in corporate interests. It was merely that this very great talent had burnt itself out and his films, even in the middle 20s when he continued to have a free hand and satisfactory budgets, no longer enjoyed either public or critical support. The situation, despite everyone's goodwill, became too expensive and risky to go along with and no one appreciated this fact more than Griffith himself. Consequently the other partners of United Artists covered for him as best they could and he eventually retired from that association.

Keaton on the other hand was quite another "cup of tea” in so far as he had never really been completely his own master in terms of production and distribution. He was recognized within the profession as being one of the most gifted and original of all comedians but he was never too interested in business per se. Even when his silent films had begun to slump and he associated himself with Joseph Schenck (as a result of his marrying the sister of Norma Talmadge, who was then Mrs Schenck) in order that the burden of production would not fall on him, this did not work out. The introduction of sound films may have made some difference in the end, but it was not really the main problem, which was somewhat like that of Griffith in so far as the public no longer supported him in the way that they once had, and his prestige and drawing power- even at its height - could not compete with Chaplin's. It is only now in retrospect that we realize that he was actually in many ways Chaplin's equal as a mime, but it was not as fully appreciated then as it is now.

The case of my father and Chaplin was something else again. It was not that their careers "declined" because of the need to "reshape their careers" nor to the introduction of corporate interests entering the field. It was largely due to the fact that both Chaplin and my father had believed that their best medium was the purely pictorial or visual form of story-telling and that they did not really want to introduce or participate in sound films themselves. When they did so it was due almost entirely to their obligations to the company they had formed together, and they took relatively little interest and had little enthusiasm for what they did so long as they were meeting their responsibilities as partners. They had no objection to sound films made by others, and in fact enjoyed them immensely, but they did not really want to even try for themselves. Both Chaplin and my father had hoped to avoid the responsibility of making more films unless they were silent but could not do so and had to alter the original concept of United Artists and bring in others who would supply enough production to maintain the overhead costs of their distribution organizations. It was less them but more my stepmother, Mary Pickford, who actually went out and sought others to join United Artists - such as Joseph Schenck (mentioned above), who also later brought in Daryll Zanuck and later Samuel Goldwyn. But the short answer is that they were all professionally "tired" and preferred to let the original United Artists concept be altered, and hence gradually pulled out of production altogether. There was no real drive or wish to continue their careers as such because in fact they had none of them suffered any very severe reverses. They just lost interest and evolved a plan to expand their corporation so that they could "slide out" of their obligations and let others "carry the ball". Miss Pickford was the only one who really wanted to continue and so the various changes that took place over the next ten or more years at United Artists were usually opposed by her and she was the last one to sell out her shares. I know very well that my father could have - had he wanted to - continued to produce films of the same quality and of the same standard as before, but he quite openly admitted that he no longer had any desire or wish to.

The proof of my statement lies in the way he practically "cheated" in the making of his last few films. "Round the World in 80 Minutes" came about only as a result of putting together his films of a world tour he made - originally intended for a private record and later, when he realized that he must deliver something, he added some linking sequences on his return and put it out as if it had been planned that way from the first. Mr. Robinson Crusoe was never “planned” but came about as a result of a yachting cruise he made with some companions in the Pacific and, when they arrived in Tahiti and again he faced pressures from his partners and the distribution organization repeated its demands, he decided to use the cruise as the basis for a film. It was made in a relatively haphazard way and as a result of a snap decision to do something. Once again, additional scenes were made later upon his return and he was glad to be done with it. “Reaching for the Moon" and "Don Juan" commanded so little interest and enthusiasm from him and he was so wrapped up with other matters in his private life that he, for the first time since his first year in films, delegated practically all of the responsibility for production to others, managing thereby to divest himself of the chores he once enjoyed and to honour the agreement with his partners with the least trouble to himself.

In other words, what I am trying to suggest is that in these latter cases it was not that their careers declined for the reasons you suggest but because they had run out of ideas, used up their energies and really did not wish to adapt themselves to changes in the medium. They were delighted when new partners were brought in and they could sit back and let others carry the load that they had originally carried.

I trust the above will be of some interest and use to you as it is in fact a matter of record as to what happened.

Toward the end of the year Fairbanks went to Australia, touring his stage production of The Pleasure of His Company, but he took the trouble to have his assistant update me with his New York address for correspondence after the tour.

The last letter I have came from the Town House in Adelaide in the November of that year. I'd been telling him of some of the material that his advice had led me to, and he wrote:

I was most interested to read of the progress you have made wading through all that very dated and often unreliable material... X’s book is, as you suggest, a very good one in many ways and indeed it is one of the best although even here I have found numerous errors, some trivial and some serious. It is so awfully hard to be certain about anything concerned with such a self-disguising industry as the Motion Picture Industry.

With the best of wishes.
I am,
Sincerely,
DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS JNR.

It pretty much ended there because he'd been right from the beginning; despite my fascination with the subject, in the end I couldn't crack it.

But what a gentleman. I can only hope I showed an adequate appreciation of his kindness.

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...

My Start

It's only looking back that I realise how fortuitous my career timing was. With just one spec Saturday Night Theatre script it was like I stepped into radio's National Theatre. My very first producer (on The Humane Solution) was the legendary John Tydeman, who'd pretty much launched the careers of Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard. He was head of BBC radio drama and led a very small team of highly experienced producers.

Martin Jenkins produced my next (An Alternative to Suicide) and I think with one exception he directed everything I wrote for BBC radio thereafter. We got on really well. While I was still working for Granada he came up to Manchester and I took him to see the outdoor set for Coronation Street, of which he was a fan.

He obviously enjoyed the fact that my stuff was anything but social realism, and that it gave him opportunities to push the medium in all kinds of unusual ways. For my part, I got an enormous sense of uplift walking through the doors of Broadcasting House on Portland Place, feeling a connection with everything that had passed through those studios before. On Alternative, a science fiction piece starring Michael Jayston, I can remember the studio managers wiring up every piece of weird and extreme equipment in the building, tying up every channel and turntable. When I had to leave for my train they were still bringing in more.

(Without telling me, Martin sent the Alternative script over to the Doctor Who production office which was then in Threshold House, possibly the dullest, grimmest office building on the planet just a couple of doors away from the Shepherds Bush Empire. But that was the start of another story.)

I wasn't the biggest fan of radio drama in my growing-up years; that would be the 60s and for me the most meaningful radio of the time was the scripted comedy. We must have had terrible reception in the house because I can remember going out to the garage and lying on the scratchy back seat of my dad's Ford Popular to listen. The model didn't come with a radio but he'd installed his own and that's where I'd catch the block of comedy shows on a Sunday afternoon. The material was a mix of traditional and radical – Ken Dodd, The Navy Lark and The Clitheroe Kid alongside I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again and Round the Horne. Actually, in retrospect I'd move Ken Dodd into the radicals' camp. These days he's usually thought of as the last of the traditional variety performers, but on radio I remember him as a demented surrealist.

The drama that probably influenced me most in terms of what the medium could do, and what it ought to sound like, was a series of Sexton Blake stories dramatised by Donald Stuart. This was 1967, so I'd be 12 or 13. William Franklyn was terrific in the lead. In form and pacing they were almost cinematic, way more so than the TV of the time, where you were very limited in sets, staging, and coverage. Stuart had been writing Blake for story papers and pulps since the 20s but there was nothing dusty about his radio technique.

That spec script didn't come out of nowhere. Prior to my first BBC sale I'd written drama for Piccadilly Radio, a commercial station in Manchester, where my total lack of experience coupled with enthusiasm made me appealingly cheap. Piccadilly was a music station, but they'd made a commitment in their franchise application to deliver scripted content.

We made the episodes as a kind of co-operative, in the sense of everyone mucking-in and no money. Tony Hawkins was their commercials producer, and he produced. Pete Baker was the breakfast DJ and he handled the technical side. Our cast was drawn from the actors and voiceover people we worked with every day... Malcolm Brown, John Munday, Peter Wheeler, Chris Kay, Jim Pope, Charles Foster, Diana Mather, Colin Weston, Mike Hurley... a year or so later I roped many of the same people into making a short film which, if I'm lucky, will never see the light of day again.

Pete devised a method by which we'd use our limited time with the actors to get a clean voice recording, and then he'd prepare all the sound effects on the instant-start cartridges used for commercials and jingles. Then he'd re-record the voice track through the DJ's desk in the station's unused backup studio, varying the acoustics with equalisation and playing in all the effects in real time.

The serial was called The Last Rose of Summer, and Piccadilly traded it to other independent stations that were in the same pickle vis-a-vis their franchise commitments.

It was a different situation at the BBC. There it was a rehearse-record system. Different parts of the studio were furnished in different ways to produce different kinds of sound quality, and effects were either created live with props by a studio manager, or played-in from pre-cued vinyl recordings on one of a bank of turntables. Watching it all come together was like some great elaborate ballet resulting in auditory magic. This was my words getting the historic BBC treatment and I was living the dream. But Pete's method was ahead of its time and gave a comparable result, I've always thought.

I still get mail about The Last Rose of Summer. The master tapes are now in the North West Sound Archive and there are bootleg copies knocking around online, if you know how to find that kind of thing.

I mourn the dismantling of BBC radio drama production in its old form, simply because it was the nearest thing we'll ever have to a National Writing School. I was a 23-year-old from the provinces who sent in a spec script and from day one was treated with the same consideration as any experienced pro. The structure and dialogue skills I learned in radio have served me as an equal foundation for both prose and screenplay writing.

But while I mourn, affordable technology and new means of distribution mean that the 'co-op' approach that got me started is now available to anyone. If you want to make a play, you can make a play and put it online, podcast it, whatever. What's harder is that move from there up to the next level.

UPDATE:  I had an approach from BBC4Extra over the possibility of rebroadcasting the episodes. Mixed feelings from me over bringing such early work out of the past for present-day scrutiny... all of which is a bit moot because the initiative seems to have run aground on the question of rights, despite the agreement of all the involved parties. One thing we did establish, though - the North West Sound Archive say they don't have the tapes. Though on the upside, some of the bootlegs have proved to be of near broadcast quality.

On Method

For anyone fascinated by process, and I know I'm not alone, here's an example from Derren Brown's blog in which he records, with staged photographs, the evolution of a painted portrait. It has a relevance to writing that I'll explain in a moment.

For those from outside these shores who may not be familiar with Derren Brown's TV work, he's a magician and mentalist cut from the same cloth as Penn and Teller. He combines an Edwardian illusionist's showmanship with a modern sensibility. He tells you that he's about to deceive you and then compels your sense of wonder anyway.

I'd heard that he painted in his spare time. I may have assumed that he'd be one of those celebrity artists who paints like a chimp and gets bought by sycophant millionaires; if that's what I thought then I was wrong. Derren Brown is a talented painter with a deep grasp of craft, as this developing sequence shows.

Back in my teens I remember getting a valuable lesson from my school art teacher, Mr Chapman. Observing one of us (maybe me) starting off a drawing with some particular feature at a random spot on the paper and then spreading the detail outward like a growing crystal, he stopped the class and explained the simple basics of managing composition. Da Vinci didn't start with the Mona Lisa's eye and keep adding; he laid out the painting's broad blocks of shape first and then worked from big strokes to fine detail. Get the big structure right first; then steadily finesse it, keeping overall control.

A few years later I saw a series of TV programmes by convicted art forger Tom Keating, in each of which he reproduced step-by-step the techniques of various past masters. Genial, and with a love of his subject, Keating deconstructed each painter's journey from structure to detail. The sketches and inspirations that initiate a painting; the laying-out of an overall visual structure; the transfer of drawing onto canvas; the underpainting; the glazes; the final surfacing where the detail from those first sketches finds its place in the bigger scheme.

And the more I saw of other people's processes, the more I realised that at heart the arts are all the same. The sculptor who marks up the outside of a block of stone and then removes the chunks to establish a shape. The composer who orders and connects musical ideas to create a sense of progression and arrival before tackling orchestration. In every case, a sense of the big shape is the key to everything, like a builder pegging out the lines of a building on the ground before the first walls begin to rise.

My school had another art teacher, Mr Connolly. The writing lesson I got from him concerned telephone boxes. One morning he set us the task of drawing a regular red telephone box, the classic cast-iron design that could be seen on almost every street corner back then. I think I walked past at least two of them on my way to school every day. We all knew what they looked like so down our heads went, easy-peasy, scribbling away.

Seems we didn't know what a telephone box looked like at all.

No two depictions were the same and none was even close to life. We had no idea of the number of windows, of how the roof attached to the sides, what the signage was...

The second part of the lesson was to be sent out to look at the box that stood just a couple of hundred yards from the school and this time, to draw from direct observation.

Observation. It's part of the job. Not just of the physical world you're writing about but the details of life and living, of the shadings of human nature. You can get away without it, do no research, make stuff up, rely on the shared experiences of TV and other people's fiction to do the work for you; but that kind of attitude produces very soft fiction indeed. The kind you get from those naive writers who 'write from a trance-like state'.

I didn't keep up with the art. I liked to paint as long as I thought I was good at it. I realised that this affection had more vanity than love in it when I grasped how much more I had to learn. Instead of being eager to tackle the learning, I was deterred. Like so many, all I really wanted was to be told how good I already was.

Pipe Bursts

True story.

The late '70s weren't exactly the biplane-and-barnstorming days of television technology, although looking back from today it can sometimes seem like it. In Granada TV's Presentation Department we ran traffic control on live feeds both from network and our own studios, analog VT from two-inch tape, and an array of telecine machines that had gone missing from some museum. Whatever film you put on them, out came Arthur Askey.

Our tools and continuity aids were glass-mounted slides, cardboard captions, a clock in a brightly-lit box with some complicated swinging mirror arrangement, and a small team of continuity announcers (including friend-of-the-blog Malcolm Brown) ready to leap in and burble off-the-cuff with total confidence for however long it took for an on-air breakdown to be fixed, resolved, or otherwise dodged-around. Our workplace was a wall of TV screens and a vision mixing desk that I was told had been thrown out by the Post Office some ten years before.

(At that time the GPO handled the routing and switching of all telecommunications land lines, as well as the mail... that's how London's Post Office Tower got its name.)

Each day's commercials came on three, sometimes four 35mm reels that had to be assembled and then broken down daily by the Film Ops department. Everything ran to a schedule and the breaks were of an allotted length. The Sales people in London would work until the last minute to sell the available commercial time, but inevitably there would be some breaks - mostly in the afternoons, or late at night - that wouldn't be fully sold.

Sometimes we could just reconfigure the schedule on the hoof and make those breaks shorter. But mostly that wasn't an option... it could throw out your timings and cause problems further down the line. Or it would leave telecine or VT with insufficient time to run through the leader in the middle of a reel to line up the next part of whatever we were showing.

In those cases we had a book of Central Office of Information films that we could slot into the gaps. They were the same length and format as our commercials and they cost the company nothing to run. If you watched British TV back then, they'll be etched into your consciousness. French Frank, with Graham Stark, was a genuinely witty short about the safest way to reverse an articulated lorry. The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water was a safety warning aimed at children, so traumatising that we were forbidden to schedule it when children might be watching.

Then there was Pipe Bursts. My personal favourite.

The maximum length of an ITV break in the late '70s was three minutes and forty seconds. That was three and a half minutes of commercial time plus ten seconds' allowance for the fractional spaces in between ads and the reaction time of the controller. The last film clip in every break would have ten seconds of freeze-frame on the end, to bridge any final gap.

Pipe Bursts looked like a home movie shot by the kind of bloke who built his own caravan. I still can't decide whether it was genuinely inept, or a gonzo work of calculated amateur charm.

The 'freeze frame' consisted of everyone in the family standing as still as they could, for as long as they could.

Which wasn't very long.

Whenever there was a gap, and the choice was mine to make, I'd slot it in. By rolling everything tight and cutting fast, I could get to the end of a three-and-a-half minute break with almost the full ten seconds to spare.

Ten seconds is a looooooong time on a TV screen. Watch the little girl on the right.



Whoever uploaded this... if it was taken from live TV, chances are I was on shift at the time.

NB: For maximum cringe, click the lower right-hand corner of the Youtube box to view it fullscreen. Press Esc afterwards to return to normal.

In Sickness and in Stealth

Back in 1984 I travelled through Finland and Russia to research the book that would eventually become The Boat House. I say eventually because it was a far from easy road. Not the travelling, that was an adventure that I wouldn't have missed for anything. Helsinki, Joensuu, Savonlinna, the towns of Western Karelia... then onto the Leningrad train and into Soviet Russia, to sneak away from the Intourist guides and find the psychiatric prison hospital on Arsenal Street. Did you know that Russian trains depart without announcement, without a whistle, without even making a sound? I didn't, until I glanced back while stretching my legs on some little rural halt's platform to see mine leaving with all my luggage, money and passport but without me. I had to run on slippery ice and get the door open before I could scramble on board, which earned me a finger-wagging from the enormous babushka in charge of the carriage.

No, the problems started when I got home, turned yellow, and was diagnosed with Hepatitis A, the form that gets transmitted by faecal contamination in the food chain. I can't be sure of the source but if the chefs in the Hotel Europiskaya were as diligent and professional as the waiters, they probably couldn't tell the difference between the sliced ham and the toilet paper.

Believe me that you never really appreciate your liver until it shuts down on you. It goes hard, and it hurts. It leaves you listless and delirious and drained of energy, and recovery takes months. Mine did, anyway, but I couldn't afford an idle convalescence. My last published novel had flopped, the one I'd written right after it was still unsold, and I was broke. We lived in a small bungalow at the time, and it was about five paces from the bedroom to the room that I used as a study. For many weeks those five paces were about as much as I could manage in one go.

The first draft of The Boat House was written in those months. At the end of the process I looked back at what I'd done and became aware of two things. The bad news was that the manuscript read exactly like the ramblings of a sick person – it was shapeless, barely coherent and certainly unpublishable. But there was good news too, because I saw stuff in there that no well person could ever have come up with. The whole thing was like one long, sustained flood of vivid dream imagery.

So for the next few months I rewrote and reshaped, putting in the craft while trying to preserve that gift of tone. I had to be pretty ruthless with the material, and a lot of interesting stuff went by the wayside because it had no place in the new, tighter narrative scheme.

I suppose The Boat House has a special place in my affections. There have been several attempts to film it, including one by a Prominent British Director who raised finance on my screenplay and then replaced me with his non-writing office assistant.

Sometimes, the crashing of a project can bring more relief than disappointment.

Rewind

When I gave up the day job back in August 1980, we took half of the advance money from Chimera and set off for the US with the intention of stretching it out as far as we could and staying until it was gone. We travelled coast to coast and spent the main part of our time in Arizona, where I had the notion to set a novel. We'd passed through Phoenix going in the opposite direction two years before, and some aspect of the place had planted a hook in my mind.

It didn't quite work out as I'd planned. We stayed for several months and had a memorable time; gambling in Las Vegas, riding down the Grand Canyon on mules, walking the rim of Meteor Crater, riding night shifts with the Phoenix Police. But the novel never quite happened. The concept had preceded the experience, and in the light of the experience the concept seemed naïve. After a year or so I received a query from the Inland Revenue. They wanted to know about this trip that I'd claimed as an allowable tax expense. Where was the novel it was supposed to have led to?

I sent them my outlines and my unfinished drafts. Ah, they wrote back. Now we can see why you didn't get anywhere with it.

Everyone's a critic.

My Own First Film...

...was on Standard 8mm and held together with sticky tape. As a logistical exercise it had a certain magnificence, for which I can take no credit at all. As a piece of filmmaking it's barely watchable, which is entirely down to me.

But as a formative experience... priceless.

It was August 1974. Three of us set out with backpacks and a camera to get documentary footage on the history of theatre-building in Europe. Pat Monks was, like me, a second-year student at Hull University. We were on the Joint Honours, Drama and English course. Norm Randall was Sociology, but he'd taken a drama option in his first year and and it was there that we'd hatched our plan.


Hull's drama department wasn't some soft option where performer wannabees paint scenery and learn to juggle. There was a certain amount of fannying around in tights but at the heart of it was a solid academic study of theatre's social, anthropological and practical history. We started with Aeschylus and, over the three years, took it all the way to the (then) present day with the 'poor theatre' that was taking place in basements and back-rooms behind the Iron Curtain. Along the way we put on shows, learned the basics of lighting and stage management... the only one of us I recall painting scenery was Tim Reed, but that was his thing, and he went on to make an international career of it.

Anyway...

Norm and I got the ball rolling early in '73 and recruited Pat somewhere along the way. Our aim was to get to film as many of the key European sites as we could, covering the centuries from the Greek theatre at Epidaurus to the Bayreuth Opera House. We produced a prospectus, got the patronage of Lord Clark and Sir Alec Guinness (don't ask me how), and raised about eight hundred quid. It was enough to cover film, ferries, Interrail tickets, hostels and food. At 24, Norm was the grownup of the party. Given some of the giggles we had, I hesitate to say mature - Pat was younger but she was almost certainly the mature one. I was 19 and didn't have much of a clue about anything.

The camera was a Russian wind-up Quarz 5 that I found for fifteen quid in a second-hand shop on Anlaby Road. It was a thing of robust beauty and it weighed as much as a small car. I think the Soviets must have engineered their cameras out of White Dwarf Star metal. Ours ran wonderfully in all tests and broke down as soon as we hit France. The clutch on the take-up spool failed, which meant that exposed film would wodge up inside the camera body until it jammed. Wherever we went, I had to find a light-tight wardrobe that I could climb inside as a makeshift darkroom, to fix it without ruining what we had. Norm or Pat would have to hold the door closed in case I elbowed it open.

We started in the South of France with the magnificent Roman arenas in Nimes and Arles, where the brutal Van Gogh sunshine gave us guys an excuse to buy cowboy hats. It was at the awesome Roman theatre of Orange that I got my first taste of what was to become a major feature of my chosen life, which is the opportunity to cross barriers and mooch around behind the scenes. In Vicenza's Teatro Olympico I got to stand on its famous forced-perspective stage; in the Teatro Farnese the only visitors were the three of us and the Duke of Parma, down at the far end checking out his real estate.

It was in Delphi that we rolled in late, found the Youth Hostel full, and ended up sleeping on its roof. I woke to a magnificent sunrise and the realisation that I was about six inches away from a three-storey drop into the alley. Leaving Delphi was even trickier than getting in; it was in August '74 that Turkey landed an invasion force on Cyprus and the Greek army was mobilised overnight. We camped on the station platform for two days watching the troop transports going through, and finally hitched a ride in a cattle car with half a dozen civilian conscripts on their way to their mustering point at Thessaloniki, who insisted on sharing their food with us. At Thessaloniki we got the last, overcrowded train out to Vienna; two and a half days on the move spent dossing in the corridor as we crossed what was then Yugoslavia.

My main memory of Yugoslavia is of the kids who lined up along the embankments to wave, and then when we waved back they stoned the train. We reached Vienna tired and filthy, with nowhere to stay. Our contact there was Paul Stefanek of the Institut fur Theaterwissenschaft, based in the Hofburg Palace at the other end from the Spanish Riding School. Friendly, diffident, and an absolute hero, Paul gave us the gigantic palace key and we slept that night on the Institut floor, after inadvertently dining in a nearby brothel. The palace rooms were magnificent but the facilities were few; we took turns getting clean at a tiny kitchen sink with an Ascot water heater. To demonstrate my new-found maturity I put my anorak hood on my head and ran through the Hofburg in my underpants, as Batman. The final week of the journey, taking us through Salzburg, Munich and Bayreuth, was uneventful by comparison.

And the film? Ah, the film was a shambles. I shot as much as I could and I used everything I shot. But it looked great on my CV and since no prospective employer could be arsed to go to the trouble it would have taken to arrange a viewing, I was never found out.

'Cause People Say We Monkee Around

In the Comments section, Piers Beckley wrote of his old electronic typewriter: "I loved it, because it meant I didn't have to tippex or retype when I miskeyed... Finally got rid of it a couple of years ago after I realised I hadn't plugged it in for more than a decade and was never going to again."

Ah, Tippex... in my day I must have bought enough of it to pay for Mike Nesmith's swimming pool. I used to get it wholesale, by the box.

When I finally decided let go of my massive office-sized Adler, someone in the Crime Writers' Association was gathering unwanted typewriters for remote regions where they could still be put to good use. I drove it over to Robert Barnard's house in Yorkshire and took my daughter along for the ride. She'd be about six, I guess.

It was a summer Saturday and on the way back we stopped for some lunch in Ilkley and took a rowboat on the river. When it came time to hand it back I somehow managed to tip it and put us both in the water. Kid came home in a whole new outfit.

Happy days.

The Way the Future Is

I still like a book. I haven't been won over to e-reading yet but I've no doubt the day will come when I will, just as I retired my typewriter, my super 8 movie camera, and my Olympus stills camera when it became self-evident that I was sticking with them for the wrong reasons.

Stay with me, there's a lesson here.

My Olympus was a replacement for a super-slim 35mm pocket Ricoh that was stolen from my jacket on a location in the 90s. The Ricoh was a thing of beauty, aesthetically the nicest camera I've ever owned. The insurance company wouldn't reimburse me the value, but insisted that I go to a local camera store and get the manager to give me a written estimate for its current equivalent. They'd pay the store and I'd get a new camera.

Which is how I came to be stuck with Kodak's crappy 'APS system', which did more than anything else to push me forward into digital picture-making. APS was a desperate attempt to dress an old technology in new clothes. That it was doomed from the start was obvious to everyone except Kodak.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that Kodak must have known it too, but were forced by their heavy investment in film to go through the motions. APS required a new design of camera to take a new design of film cassette, which required specialised processing. Every stage of the system was expensive, it was laden with unnecessary bells and whistles, and with a negative area that was only 56% of a 35mm frame it gave inferior picture quality.

It seems to me that this kind of undignified tarting-up happens with every good but soon-to-be-outmoded technology. Anyone remember Polaroid's Polavision, the self-processing Super 8 cassette? The 'electronic typewriter', where you typed onto paper but it remembered your keystrokes and corrections and then typed it all out again? Super-VHS?

Now there's the Espresso Book Machine (link courtesy of the Writers' Guild blog). It's that long-anticipated device, a machine in a bookstore that prints your selection on the spot. I wish them well in their business but I can't help feeling that a familiar pattern is being played out all over again.

It's a seductive idea; old-fashioned books produced with the newest of new technology. There was a time when I saw print-on-demand as the way forward in preserving and making available every author's backlist, but I'm growing away from it. I love books as physical objects but a generic chunk of paper print does nothing for me at all. If a POD book has no more character than an e-book, then the e-book wins.

Outmoded technologies don't lose all value just because they no longer command the mass market. People still shoot Super 8 but for its specific aesthetic, not because it's their only option. Photographer and portraitist Lisa Bowerman uses film stock and natural light to luminous effect, then handles the images digitally. There's still a part of my heart that lusts after a classic 35mm Leica even though I know I'd get very little use from it... though it would still be way more relevant than my Olympus APS camera, which is basically hi-tech landfill.

There'll still be books, I reckon, but only those that give you something to care about. Otherwise it'll be a universe of reading material at your fingertips.

I'm not saying I like it... I just think that's the way it's going to be.

Johnny Hollywood, the Commentary

You may be curious as to why I appear to have a habit of interviewing myself, so the previous post could benefit from some explanation.

The first Johnny Hollywood entry came about as a result of a freelance journalist contacting me through my publisher to request an interview for a well-known magazine. I said okay, he sent me a list of his questions, and I imagine I must have put in an hour, maybe two, drafting the kind of responses I'd be happy to live with.

I never got to see the piece he wrote, but I gather that he'd canvassed about a dozen different writers with the same list of questions. From all the responses he cherry-picked selective quotes. Which is... well, it's not illegitimate. I'm not even saying it's wrong.

But I reckon it's pushing it, a bit.

Rather than see the words wasted, I shunted them onto the blog. A few weeks ago another interview request showed up in my mailbox. I didn't know the sender but she has a site for aspiring writers, from which it's obvious that she's sincere. Now, I never want to forget that my roots are in fandom - old-school fandom, the kind where the convention book rooms were huge and the screening programs tiny, of zines and apas that were often the nursery slopes for the next generation of pros. I'm conscious of my debt to the Bob Shaws and Rob Holdstocks of that world, so I try to behave as I think they would.

Well, as soon as I got a spare hour I fired off my responses, and despite a follow-up query it's been radio silence ever since. So I chopped out some early-career stuff you may have read before, and onto the blog it went.

So here's the outcome of that. In setting up a website and later a blog I made myself accessible, but maybe the internet now makes it too easy to get hold of people and some boundaries are called for. So if you want to ask me anything, ask me here, where it's personal.

But if you're setting out with Google and a list of boilerplate questions, looking to drum up some content from someone whose work you've never even read, from now on I'm gonna have to pass.

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.

In Shatner's Footsteps

I finally made it to the Batcave. My third attempt.

The Satnav was still insisting on directing me up closed roads through Griffith Park. This time, I made a hand-drawn map from Google instead. On the Canyon Road approach there was no signage and in the park itself no trail maps or any information at all.

So I set off up the main track. It climbed steeply for about a mile and a half until I was up level with the Hollywood sign, which is in the park not far away. At that point the track went two ways so I asked the next person if they knew which way the caves were.

He pointed back down the way I'd come... there was another trail from the parking lot, and I hadn't seen it. So I went all the way back down, and in the end all turned out for the best... the caves are no more than a ten-minute walk from the parking so as a hike, that would have been a bit of a squib.

The 'caves' are actually a short tunnel through an outcrop of rock in of a dead-ended canyon that's reckoned to be one of the most-used locations in Hollywood history... zillions of Westerns, The Lone Ranger, the old Kirk Alyn Superman serial, The Searchers, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, B-movie horrors like Robot Monster, the Douglas Fairbanks Robin Hood... as well as various alien planets in Star Trek.

The tunnel's outermost entrance was dressed to become the Batcave's exit in the '60s TV show. Each week, in the same recycled sequence, the Batmobile would emerge from the cave and head for 'Gotham City, 14 Miles'. The sequence was undercranked to speed up the action; the entrance is so narrow that Barris's Batmobile must have backed in with only a few inches' clearance.

(You can find my birthday Batmobile-stalking post here)

Standing in the canyon and looking back, you get the best-ever view of the Hollywood sign. The area is part of the 'Hollywoodland' development-that-never-was, which the sign was originally created to promote.

I suppose I could go and seek out 'stately Wayne manor' - there were reports that the building used for the exterior establishing shots burned down in 2005, but they were apparently mistaken. A lookalike building burned, but SWM was a few doors down the street.

Otherwise, I seem to have run out of Batstuff to look for.

Please Touch

So there we were, at the Getty Villa. It's quite a place. Situated on the Pacific Coast Highway between Santa Monica and Malibu, it's like the little-brother museum to the spectacular Getty Center.

The Getty Center's further inland, on a hilltop overlooking the Sepulveda Pass, and looking like Tony Stark's place in the Iron Man movies. You even reach it by a private monorail. The Villa, on the other hand, can't be seen from the road. That, plus the fact that you can't just show up but have to book a timed ticket online to get in, led me to expect something comparatively modest.

Idiot that I am.

The numbers are controlled because the access is tricky, but the museum isn't small and once you're in you can stay all day, if you're inclined. The villa was designed and built to house the classical artefacts of the Getty collection; vases, bronzes, marbles and frescoes, with the odd mummy or case of jewellery thrown in for good measure. The design is based on a country house in Herculaneum that was buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Right there, in the Malibu hills. A walk around it wipes away two thousand years or more, to give you a gut feeling of what complex, sophisticated people the creators and owners of these objects were.

The hillside setting incorporates a peristyle, one of those enclosed Roman gardens with a long pool where guys in togas chased concubines and people lay around eating grapes off the bunch. Or something like that.

When we go to a museum or a gallery we usually fix a time to meet and then wander off separately, so we can each browse at our own pace. In an alcove at the end of the peristyle, away from the main body of the museum, I found an alcove. In the alcove stood a tall marble statue, and on the wall by the statue was a plaque that read PLEASE TOUCH in both normal script and braille.

The marble was a 1920s copy of a Canova original. As the plaque went on to explain, the purpose in placing it there was to give people the opportunity to feel the various textures of the stone and to appreciate the work of the sculptor in a tactile way. In the main rooms of the museum there were few barriers and you could get right up close to the objects, but contact was forbidden... there were notices explaining how the grease and oils in skin can bollix up stone. I've seen those shiny-footed saints in Rome and I know that it's true.

But I didn't take advantage. Here's why.

Imagine you're at the Villa. You got your timed ticket and you've been walking around the galleries, and you're taking time out for a stroll to the end of the Roman garden. At the end of the peristyle you turn the corner to be confronted by the sight of a middle-aged English bloke standing on tiptoe with his eyes closed, running his hands all over this...


I believe my point is made.

Arise, Sir Hood

Congratulations to Sir Patrick Stewart, knighted today. He used the occasion to give credit to the English teacher who opened his eyes to literature and first encouraged him to perform.

It's no surprise; many a career in the arts can be traced back to the influence of a charismatic and inspiring figure in the classroom.

So Roy Bateman, if there's any slim chance you're reading this - thanks, and if you'll tell me where to send it I really will return the copy of Doctor Faustus that you lent me.

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.

The Simpsons and Me

If you read my 'back in LA' post a couple of weeks ago you'll know that while walking in one of the city's State Parks I was met by two Golden Retrievers, dripping wet and happy to share, closely followed by anxious family.

And if you read on into the comments section you'll know that's how I met Michael Price, Co-Executive Producer on The Simpsons.

Last Thursday found me back on the Fox lot, attending a Simpsons table read at Mike's invitation.

Table reads are becoming less common in drama, but in comedy they're a useful tool. The cast and production team sit around a big conference table and there are chairs around the outside of the room for about 30 invited guests who serve as a kind of tryout audience for the jokes. Immediately afterwards in the writers' room, the writing staff dive onto the script like seagulls on fresh roadkill and make it funnier.

It was over in less than an hour and great fun, though a little strange because the voices were all Homer and Bart & co but the people were the people. Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer phoned their parts in - literally, because both were off making movies and participated by speakerphone.

Matt Groening was there, too. If I was Matt Groening, I'd be in the Bahamas having delegated all the heavy lifting to a horde of carefully-selected Oompah Loompahs. But the fact that he wasn't is probably one of the reasons the show has lasted so long.

Bart signed my copy of the script. I wasn't certain if I should ask, but Nancy Cartwright came working the room. I won't give away anything about the story we heard, though it was cool to find out afterwards that my favourite joke was contributed by my host.

At least, that's what he said when I told him.

And there's a funny circularity about this whole thing that only struck me when it was over. One of the reasons I was so happy to see the Retrievers in the park was that our own is so far away, and anyone who's used to walking with a dog can't help finding a walk incomplete without one. It's like going to the Mall without your pants.

(I can tell you, next time I'll be sure and read the label on the cold medicine.)

The thing is, the dog I was missing used to be my dad's dog. We inherited her. Her name is Maggie because he was a big Simpsons fan.


This being California, a temporary resident can rent a dog - though when you add up membership and rental and induction costs, it would be cheaper to buy a puppy and a gun.

Bryan Talbot, Fantasycon GoH

It's thanks to my old friend Bryan Talbot that I could legitimately put 'model' on my CV, if I were so inclined... back when he was living in Preston and creating The Tale of One Bad Rat, Bryan pressed my entire family into service to help with the photoreference for some of the frames. That's me, the dodgy salesman who tries it on with Helen Potter and succeeds only in wrecking his car, the red 480 that I was driving at the time. My wife sat in for the adult Helen and my daughter posed as Helen-in-childhood. I'm the only one out of the three of us who's recognisable... which makes it rather a shame that these were my moustache-and-mullet days.


Not a bad souvenir of that time in our lives, though.

Now a mailout from the British Fantasy Society tells me that Bryan will be joining Garry Kilworth and Lisa Tuttle as a guest of honour at this year's Fantasycon in September. Here's what they say:

Bryan Talbot has produced underground and alternative comics, notably Brainstorm!, science fiction and superhero stories such as Judge Dredd, Nemesis the Warlock, Teknophage, The Nazz and Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight.

He’s worked on DC Vertigo titles including Hellblazer, Sandman, The Dreaming and Fables and has written and drawn the graphic novels for which he is best known: The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, Heart of Empire, The Tale of One Bad Rat, Alice in Sunderland and Grandville.

For more on all of that, Bryan's site is here.

I'm the Axeman, Baby

Let me get one thing straight. I'm no musician. I don't play, I don't perform. But I've owned a guitar since I was a teenager and, when no one's listening, I get pleasure from stumbling my way through the dozen or two chords that I learned back then. I could probably manage a tolerable Kumbayah at a campfire, but Hendrix I ain't.

I've toyed with the idea of picking up a second instrument to keep out here. So after a couple of days of unrelieved typing at the end of last week, for a diversion I went down to one of the big music stores in LA to mooch around and try some out. Not the best idea because it was a Saturday night and the place was full of guys showing off.

Some were encouragingly bad, but one or two were quite good. I found a quietish corner but, being used to the wider classical fretboard and nylon strings, I could barely hold down a chord on some of the models. I'm not really in the market yet because I don't know how long I'll be here for, but the looking's half the fun.

I overheard this woman talking to one of the staff about an instrument for her daughter. I left them to it while I gravitated to a little side-room where they keep their small selection of classical and flamenco guitars. After a few minutes she came over and started asking me stuff!

Seems the staff guy hadn't been too helpful because she'd wanted to know more about the classical models but he'd steered her away to the dreadnoughts and acoustic-electrics, saying that the narrow necks made them easier for small hands to play and no one really plays classical anyway.

So I explained what little I knew - the classical fretboard's wider but you hold the neck differently, the nylon strings are at a lower tension and are easier to fret, that the kind of guitar you choose should depend on the style you want to play and the kind of sound you want to make - and after a bit she went and got the sales guy again and made him show her a classical Ibanez.

She didn't seem to take my best piece of advice, though, which was to bring her daughter in and let her choose for herself. Because the guitar you choose is tied up with your image of the player you want to be.

Or maybe she did in the end... I snuck out before I could get dragged back into the conversation!

Back in LA

Last night's wrap party was great. I knew so many people there that I always had someone to talk to, unlike those vast BBC affairs where you just keep circulating because you don't want to stand on your own looking like a tool. There were loads of people I didn't know, as well, and some that I didn't know I knew, like Esrin, our network exec to whom I'd only ever spoken in conference calls.

The party took over an entire trendy nightclub right on Hollywood Boulevard, and we filled the place. It's so trendy that it has no sign, just an ill-lit doorway and a bouncer with a list of names on a clipboard. I circled past it about five times and only realised I'd found it when I spotted someone I knew going in. We'd used the interior as a strip club in episode 12. Jim Hilton had put together a gag reel that was projected in a loop on the wall. After 10.30 the club opened up to the public and I left as it filled up with strangers. I had no voice this morning.

I think this was the first wrap party I've ever actually made it to, and it was on Hollywood Boulevard on a Saturday night... one to remember! I drove home down Sunset feeling like the coolest guy on the planet.

In my rented Hyundai.

I have meetings early next week, but I'm getting in some research for a new book over the weekend. I drove out to the Paramount Ranch yesterday afternoon. It's a much-used Western location, now a state park. The 'western town' consists of a few wooden buildings left over from Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman and to be honest are about as impressive as the old Frontierland attraction in Morecambe, and about as realistic. I walked along the Coyote Trail and didn't see any coyotes, and it wasn't much of a trail either - by taking every option to extend it I managed to make it spin out to just over a mile, but I was hardly ever out of sight of the point I'd set out from. I managed to work up a bit of a sweat, though, so there was some point and exercise involved.

I found a second trail going out the other side, and that promised to be a mile and a half, so I set out again. After a couple of hundred yards I was met by two big dripping wet golden retrievers coming the other way, and a family desperately calling them back on the assumption that no stranger would welcome their attentions... we got talking as I fussed the dogs a bit. Turned out the bloke is a co-executive producer on The Simpsons! We chatted for a while and eventually the dogs got bored and wandered off.

The drive out along the freeway had been a tad dull, so on the way back I drove along Ventura Boulevard through Calabasas and Tarzana. Calabasas has a shopping plaza that loooks like it was built for King Ludwig of Bavaria. Tarzana came about when Edgar Rice Burroughs subdivided his land for development, but apart from the name it's hard to get much of a thrill from the association.

This afternoon I went to look at the barn where Cecil B DeMille shot The Squaw Man, now preserved as the Hollywood Heritage Museum. It's been moved about three times and now stands in the car park of the Hollywood Bowl. It's the kind of place I like, not too well organised, full of authentic bric a brac and fronted by a true enthusiast on the desk. The novel that I'm working on has themes touching on early Hollywood and the Old West; the idea sprang from my Wyoming trip a couple of years back, and it's caused me to seek out William S Hart's home and the Autry Museum. When there's another decent day I'll go and find the Fox Movie Ranch in Malibu State Park.

It's tough work, but someone has to take it on.