Adding a Character

Searching through some old emails I came across this one, written as part of the to-and-fro when I was finally freed up to be able to contribute to the US version of Eleventh Hour. Just as I started pitching the story that was to become the episode titled Subway, CBS came up with the idea of adding a third character to the team. This was my response. I think there's enough distance now that it won't matter if I share it. Not least because it gives me a chance to air some long-held views on the ways in which characters balance each other in series TV.

I'd urge care over this 'third member' question as it's one of those understandable concerns but with a potential to sabotage the fundamental dynamic of the show... imagine if THE X FILES had featured a 3-person team.

A long time ago I noticed a distinction between the shows I liked best and the ones that I still liked, but which stood in their shadow. The front-rank shows were built around single lead characters or were two-handers. Where a show featured a team of 3, the characters always seemed to fall into the same regular configuration; I called them the Father, the Lad, and the Desirable Tomboy. This applied regardless of gender.

The Father is the steady one, the responsible one, maybe older. Finds the cases or receives the orders and is perceived as the head of the team. The Lad is self-assured, impetuous, energetic, a different girlfriend every week. The Desirable Tomboy is intelligent and sexy but she holds herself sexually aloof. She has an unstated thing for the father. The Lad has a barely-concealed interest in her. The Father has relationships outside the team that we only ever get hints about.

(Example: every 'two guys and a gal' team show ever made)

The threesome is stable and it always works but the price of it is a formula-feeling show.

When first working on 11thH I had some ideas about an extended regular cast but always with a view to keeping the Hood/Rachel relationship of equals intact. Add a third corner to the team, and that will go. Hood will be pushed into being the Father.

So a third member needs to be distanced slightly so as not to become the third person in a marriage. I experimented with a senior figure within government, the man who recruited Hood and who protects him politically so that he can get on with what he does. But that was too far offstage and not very interesting.

So my other thought was for a kind of field facilitator, someone who gets sent out to rendezvous with Hood and Rachel in the field and provide them with stuff they may need or make local arrangements - source them a geiger counter, find and rent an aircraft hangar, open a channel of contact with some local activist group. Kind of a cross between Q showing up in Tokyo with a bunch of gadgets for James Bond, and a junior vice-president being sent out to a distant location to crack the studio whip, only to be drawn into the adventure of the shoot. So Hood may manipulate/charm him/her into playing an unwilling part in the week's adventure - a part which forms a separate thread to the Hood/Rachel story. More of a B story running parallel, ending with the supply of some vital piece of the jigsaw for the final act. Avoiding the obligation always to make this character part of the denouement. And used sparingly, to keep them fresh and so their participation doesn't start to feel obligatory and routine.

So what I'm suggesting is; third character fine, but not a fully equal member. A Bickley to their Mork and Mindy.

Here's how it works; what the network asks for, the network tends to get. In this case the outcome was the addition of Omar Benson Miller as Felix Lee. Subway marked his second appearance, so I had some hand in shaping his character. Felix was a hit with viewers and when the show wasn't renewed for a second season, Omar wasn't short of offers. Good for him.

But had we gone into a second season and there had been pressure for more and more of Felix, I'm in no doubt that the show would have grown less like Eleventh Hour, and more like other shows.

Which, at heart, is what networks tend to want.

Misheard in the Movies

Line heard in Don't Wait, Django, Shoot! a badly-dubbed spaghetti western on the low-rent movies4men channel last night: a character looks out of a window to see a man emerging from the building across the street.

The line was meant to be, "Here's a mouse coming out of its hole."

What we heard, thickly-accented, was, "He 'as a mouse coming out of 'is hole."

After Gutenberg...

I was thinking about writing a blog post on my trickiest-ever script assignment, and was scrolling through the news section of my old website trying to locate a particular item when I came across this review of The Painted Bride from The Washington Times.

The Painted Bride (Subterranean Press, $40, 181 pages) is veteran thriller-writer Stephen Gallagher's tense melodrama spun from the mysterious disappearance of auto dealer Frank Tanner's wife Carol, the stalled police investigation into Frank's possible guilt - and the complications ensuing from the obsessive actions of Carol's burnt-out, former drug-taking younger sister Molly, who knows Frank did away with his wife, and devotes her dwindling energies to protecting the children now in his care and bringing him to justice.

Mr. Gallagher expertly shifts among several characters' frazzled viewpoints, detailing the progress of Molly's "investigation" and Frank's suspicious evasive actions in crisp, quick scenes, making chilling use of a child's drawing of a woman in a red dress ("the painted bride"), leading toward a series of violent climaxes at a seaside ferry terminal, where crucial secrets are unearthed - and the paradoxical image of the nurturing parent as murdering monster is finally engaged and explained.

There's even a hint of the supernatural in an endangered child's anguished outcry... It's a neat capstone to an accomplished and suitably unpleasant shocker.

The print edition sold out and I've now priced it as the cheapest of my Kindle titles... if you got a device for Christmas and you've already downloaded all the free classics from Project Gutenberg (and why wouldn't you?), then you might want to give it a go.

(In England that's what we call a 'hard sell')

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.

Christmas, and a plug for my Kindle stuff

I reckon I must have had a happy childhood because most of my Christmas gifts seem to recall it in one way or another. I'm kinda shameless in the hints I drop but at least it makes me easy to buy for. How else could anyone know that my old Corgi Batmobile needed a nice repro box and liner? (Seven quid, handmade, from Twentieth Century Box UK. Lovely work, and there's no way this guy can be making any money out of it.)

If you're puzzling over a shiny new Kindle today and looking for something to download onto it, let me remind you with an equal lack of shame that I have mucho stuff online now - click here for the UK selection or here for a US link, or just hop on Amazon and search the Kindle store with my name.

The Danger List

My producers have now made an official announcement about the new show I've been developing for Fox, so I suppose it's OK to at least mention it... but as it's a work-in-progress, don't expect me to say too much about it just yet.

Mr Laurel and Mr Hardy (2)

UPDATE: Check out Andy Greenwood's contribution to the comments section on the original post. Apparently the Laurel and Hardy collection exists in two forms, and Amazon withdrew the set from sale for a while due to a customer complaint about the goods as described.

As far as I can see it's a packaging issue and not a disc quality issue; the first boxed set had better cases and booklet inserts, while the second set (which this is) has the same material with bare-bones packaging and no booklets.

If that's a problem for you, apologies if I've steered you wrong. Personally I still think it's a great buy.

Amazon has now revised the sales info and the set's available again, still bouncing around under the £30 mark. For my part, I feel that packaging rarely adds value to a DVD; I'd say never, but there will always be the glaring exception of my beloved King Kong in a tin. Which I note can currently be picked up in the US from Amazon sellers for around five dollars plus shipping.

Which low price suggests that the added value is personal to me, and hardly a market enhancement. The difference between, say, a vinyl LP in a well-designed sleeve, and a CD in an all-purpose jewel case with a disposable insert, mirrors a change in our perceptions. In making the packaging more generic and more convenient to themselves, distributors have hastened our changing attitude along. LPs were kinda lovely. But now when I buy movies or music, I don't particularly want them taking up space in my house.

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.

Terriers

By one means or another I try to keep up with at least the pilots of the new crop of each season's US TV shows, and in the current season one's been the standout for me - Terriers, from FX, starring Donal Logue (who I thought was miscast in Life but is perfect here) and Michael Raymond-James (who played the Cajun guy in season one of True Blood).

Imagine the Fred Ward/Kevin Bacon team from Tremors transplanted, along with their pickup truck, to scratch a living as unlicensed private eyes in a beachfront suburb of San Diego, and you'll have a sense of what it's about.

Not an exact sense, of course, because this isn't a high-concept drama; the private eye thing gives it genre credentials and offers the viewer a point of entry but once inside, it's a character-driven show. One of the questions you'll often hear in development is, "What's [insert name of main character]'s superpower?" These characters don't have any. They've got their wits and their good hearts and their tenacity, and they're written and played in such a way that they will - if you commit to the show and get to know them - win you over.

And therein lies the problem. Terriers is a critics' darling but almost no one has been watching, despite a pedigree that includes creator Ted Griffin (Oceans 11) and showrunner Shawn Ryan (The Shield) and a bunch of gorgeously-shot stories that balance intrigue and emotion. It's hard to win over an audience that doesn't show up.

Various reasons have been offered for the audience's failure to find the show (do you see what I did there?) Some blame the title, which I suppose doesn't help; it wasn't much of a hook for me, I know. Others blame a misleading/off-putting advance campaign, which I can't comment on because I didn't see it.

The latest argument I've heard is that Terriers is at odds with the FX 'brand'; though it seems to me to be a perfectly compatible companion in tone and content to Justified, FX's hit of a previous season.

As I write this, the show's first season is coming to a close and the prospect of a second is far from certain. I think FX would be mad to dump this gem. They'll search long and hard to find a property of this quality and it makes far more sense to regroup, try again, maybe with a 'special event' marathon rerun of the entire season, and get the marketing right this time.

UPDATE: 'Twas not to be. FX cancelled the show on December 5th.

Mr Laurel and Mr Hardy

I don't often do this, but there's an insane price for the complete Laurel and Hardy collection on Amazon right now; the boxed set originally retailed around two hundred quid. It includes foreign-language versions of some of the shorts made for export, with different supporting casts and, in some cases, extra routines and material.

Plus, these are the decently-mastered DVDs; there's plenty of L&H material out there, but with little guide to the quality of what you'll get.

Theatre Ghosts

How cool is this: the late Ian Richardson steps in to haunt the refurbished RSC theatre.

Of Candles and Darkness

Anybody remember the great Splatterpunk vs Quiet Horror debate? If not, consider yourself forgiven. It was a small storm in a small teacup, but we got a fair few convention panels out of it. At its best, splatterpunk was Clive Barker; at its worst, it was everybody who tried to write like Barker but lacked his gift. Depending on who you talked to, quiet horror was either outdated fodder for the old and incontinent, like tea dances and singalongs, or else it was the underappreciated craft of the genuine adept.

Looking back, I reckon it's fair to say that splatterpunk made more noise but quiet horror won. One was a fashion, the other a value. All those flayings and entrails seem like so much old hat now, but any writer with a brain is still trying to unpick the secrets of M R James and Shirley Jackson.

At the height of the controversy, Chris Morgan put together an anthology called Dark Fantasies and declared its pro-subtlety credo in an introduction titled No Slime, No Chain-Saws. I wrote a story called Life Line for the collection, and I'm glad that I did because it's had a career of its own way beyond that first publication. Adapted for radio, bought for TV's Chillers series (no, you didn't miss it – it was commissioned for the unmade second season, whose chances were nobbled by the strategy of using season one's episodes as irregular fillers between sports fixtures), then optioned for a feature but not made... then optioned for a feature again... finally to make it onto BBC1 as an expensive two-parter a couple of years ago.

I think it's travelled so well because Life Line's story conceit is such a potent one, and I'd be happy to take credit for it if I wasn't so sure that some thought very like it must cross everybody's mind at one time or another. The conceit; imagine if you could pick up the phone, dial the number of someone you've lost, and hear them answer. How small a step is it, to extend the boundaries of we can't see just that little bit farther, into what we can't know? Nothing visible changes; only the possibilities. The world still looks the same.

My dad's number is still on the speed-dial of my phone. He's been gone ten years. The number doesn't even exist any more, but I can't quite bring myself to erase it. Why? I know it sounds stupid, but it would be like blowing out the last candle in a vast darkness. Nothing says I have to do it, so I don't. I can't overcome the feeling that if I do, then he won't just be gone, but gone for good.