On My Radio

I love the radio ads for casino resorts and hotels here. They all end the same way:

"Please gamble responsibly."

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.

STFU, Parent

Whose blog is it, anyway?

My Favourite Headline

Some headlines just stick in your mind. Like BUDGIE DIES IN FIRE, from the Bolton Chronicle. The Chronicle was the local freesheet that was pushed through our letterbox once a week back when I was living in Bolton and working in Manchester. It featured several pages of classified ads filled out with a minumum of illiterate editorial matter written by school leavers on minimum wage.

Then there was the time that I'd been speaking at a booksellers' event in Guernsey. There was a stack of local newspapers on the hotel's reception desk and I noticed, as I was checking out, that the front page story of the week was headed MORE PIGEONS FOUND KILLED.

Not found dead, but found killed. And not for the first time... clearly a pigeon serial killer was stalking the island.

For a while my favourite headline was one that I found in a microfilmed copy of a New Orleans newspaper from 1903, when I was researching the project that eventually became The Kingdom of Bones. It was a story about a tense political situation in South America and the headline was, ALARMING REPORT COMES FROM COLON.

But I think it's been replaced by this one.

Chimera on DVD

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

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

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

Writers Who Direct

In Conversation: A Writer's Perspective is a projected series of author interviews edited by James Cooper. Volume One is available now and is a publication of The British Fantasy Society.

Contributors include Joe Lansdale, Graham Joyce, Ramsey Campbell, Mark Morris, and Tim Lebbon. My conversation with James was in the form of a series of emails over about a year, keeping the sense of a developing exchange rather than a simple Q and A.

This from our discussion of writers directing:

The experience of directing Oktober (a four-hour miniseries for ITV) was both exhilarating and harrowing. It was hugely time-consuming, and that’s partly one of the reasons why I haven’t done it again since. I wasn’t writing anything else or generating any new ideas at all for more than six months, and when I came out of it I virtually had to start engineering a comeback. Add together the prep time before it, and the time spent getting back up to speed with something new, and you’re pretty much talking about a couple of years out of the game. If you’re a full-time director, when you finish a job you move straight on to your next script; when you’re a writer, you have to go back up the mountain.

Having said that, I absolutely loved it. I mean, come on, for a while there I had my hands on the train set. Professionally it was the most taxing thing I’ve ever done. Imagine launching yourself out into something like that, in the certain knowledge that from day one you’ll be out of your depth. I had a terrific first assistant (industry veteran Roger Simons) to steer me in the day to day practicalities, and even those among the crew who clearly didn’t think I was up to much gave 110%.

How satisfied was I? I’m never satisfied. You know the old saying about, be careful what you wish for because you might just get it? Well, there’s a certain reality underlying it. The stuff’s always perfect in your head, but even when you get it down exactly as you visualised it, that’s the beginning of a journey, not the end of one. You’re then contending with a question that you’d never otherwise have to face... Well, I got what I intended, so why isn’t it having the effect that I imagined? And you want to make it over, do it again but different, incorporate what you learned, get it a bit closer to what you meant. And you can’t.

L A Song

I'm trying not to worry, but when the kid came to visit I caught her measuring up my apartment.

The End of the Road

If I see a worse film than 2012 this year it'll only be because Roland Emmerich rushes out another one... not that it wasn't well-made on every technical level, but it was of an order of dumb magnificence that pretty much took my breath away.

Its narrative intelligence was at the level of a simulator ride, and the bits that made it worth sticking through were exactly those moments where some vehicle or other was hurtling through a collapsing CGI landscape. Cusack, Ejiofor and company sell their terrible lines with such commitment that they ought to be the front-runners in every awards race that's going. Any halfway decent actor can find motivation in a good script and play their role sincerely; it takes a titan of the profession to bring conviction to shit like this.

One example. Some organisation is charging a billion dollars per passenger for a place on an ark that will let the purchaser ride out the complete destruction of all civilization on earth.

Er... why? That includes the banking system and all currency, folks.

And would you want to trust your life to the design and engineering skills of someone who couldn't even think that one through?

Apparently people have been calling radio stations in the US, worried that the Mayans had predicted all this and that it's all going to come true. I reckon that's all the proof you need to justify taking someone's kids away.

Here's what I'd like to see; a video mashup combining 2012 and The Road. Two sides of the same apocalypse. It shouldn't be too hard to find match cuts to counterpoint The Road's exploration of the father-son relationship with 2012's many 'I love you dad' moments. The Road's dour and sombre tone would add a much-needed gravitas to 2012, which in turn would liven up the Viggofest with some much-needed campervan stunts and exploding cities.

Then at the end, Mad Max shows up and saves the kid. Doesn't matter which kid.

Moderation in all things, say I.

Charlie Brooker Doesn't Like Hershey's

From his column on the Kraft takeover of Cadbury's in today's Guardian:

"As you may have noticed, the above suggestions work on the assumption that everything tastes nice when it's swaddled in Dairy Milk chocolate. Which it does. A bloated, over-ripe corpse dredged from a polluted canal would taste nice if it was ­encased in a Dairy Milk shell. If it was coated in Hershey's, you'd find yourself glumly picking the chocolate off to get at the sludgey grey flesh ­beneath. And that's a FACT."

Oh, Joy

Just as I finish catching up on the second season of the French cops'n'justice drama Engrenages (UK title: Spiral, screened on BBC4 with a credit for co-production), I see from the Canal Plus website that a third season has just wrapped filming in Paris.

Season Two was drug trafficking; in Season Three it's a serial killer, le boucher de la Villette. With any other crime show, mention of a serial killer plot would have me rolling my eyes. But Engrenages/Spiral isn't like any other crime show. No character panders for our favour; they're all genuinely complex, with genuine flaws. The people that we root for often do things we can't approve of and unlike, say, 24, the mishandling of suspects is without any suggested heroic quality.

Best of all, it's a show that doesn't feel like it's been pieced-together out of used-up TV.

Season Two was never going to be able to match the freshness and impact of the first, which I think I've watched three times now, but it still managed to build to a corker of a finale.

Dracula

In a post titled What I Learned in 2009 I promised I'd tell of my experience adapting Bram Stoker's classic novel for BBC Wales. Much as I'd like to say that I had a flood of emails urging me to go ahead, I haven't. But you're getting it anyway.

(Nope, that's not it in the picture - that's the milestone Gerald Savory-scripted version starring Louis Jourdain. This is not a Happy Ending story. Read on.)

I'd wanted to do a period macabre piece for some time. I had a project called Victorian Gothic which had been in development twice, once with Zenith and once with the BBC, and both times it had been polished up to production-readiness by the Drama department only to be passed-over by the Channel Controller.

The last time that happened, the word came back to me, No one will greenlight an original drama in a period setting. The writing was fine, they said. They loved the story, they said. But they'd only consider a period piece if it was an adaptation.

So I looked around for some seminal work in the genre that had never been adapted before, and that Christmas I spent the holiday period looking for the screen story in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.

I cracked it, too. Which to anyone who knows the book is the literary equivalent of unravelling the structure of DNA. But this time the word was, No adaptations that aren't already familiar to an audience.

The penny finally dropped. Our broadcasters were no longer in the adaptation business. They were in the remake business.

At which point Archie Tait (long-time friend and executive producer on Chimera, who knew of what I was trying to do) suggested I look at Dracula.

Dracula had been one of the texts underlying Victorian Gothic - Bram Stoker was a key character in that story, whose elements would eventually serve me in The Kingdom of Bones - so I'd absorbed it pretty well.

I took to the idea immediately. My argument was that nobody had 'done' the book properly since Gerald Savory's 1970s adaptation. Dracula is a work that's often plundered and rarely honoured. My proposal was to give the novel the full weight of a BBC classic adaptation, a reference-quality rendering of the book. All those great in-house BBC skills serving Stoker's vision, not just co-opting his work to serve a vision of one's own.

For some reason, Stoker never gets the respect that's automatically accorded to an Austen, an Eliot, or a Hardy, maybe because he wrote an instinctive classic rather than a cerebral one. Things would have to change in my proposal, as in adaptations they always do. But the guiding motivation would always be the question, What was Stoker getting at, here?

I won't insult you by explaining how the novel is a collage of second-hand perceptions, cast in the form of letters, journals, and dictated notes from the principal characters. This means that the character of Count Dracula is offstage for much of the novel, which adds to his mystery and enhances his credibility.

You don't get Count Dracula's version of the events. It's there in Stoker and you can work it out by a kind of literary triangulation, but I've never seen it done and still come out as Stoker. Dracula's role gets rewritten, as if his character somehow isn't integral, nor needs to be rendered with any fidelity to the author. What we mostly get is either a romantic rapist or, if the makers want to signal that they've seen Nosferatu, a hideous cockroach. Rarely has anyone made a serious attempt to show us Stoker's nasty-minded empty-hearted predator, who insists to his dissipated party-girl 'brides' that he's capable of love, and then goes on to prove at great length that he isn't.

I went straight to script and wrote the first hour. Didn't even make a plan, just saw the way and went for it. Archie took that to BBC Wales and we got a commission. I got stuck into the second hour, and somewhere along the way the contracts turned up and I signed them.

So far, so good. Then came the touchy stuff. I'm told that on the day I was set to deliver, a - now departed - drama exec in London heard of a proposed ITV version over lunch and cancelled our project that same afternoon. We had a completed script, we were way ahead. But the news took over a week to reach Archie and me, during which time the producers of the ITV project got out an announcement to the press, effectively 'bombing the BBC's boat'.

Archie had a call from BBC Business Affairs trying to get out of payment, on the basis that I'd signed my side of the contract but they hadn't signed theirs. My agent complained to the Drama department and the manoeuver was quickly scotched, but it left a nasty taste that remains with me to this day. It felt like the first sign of a form of 'attitude rot' that has surfaced in other ways since... that where writers are weak, that's to be taken advantage of. I was reminded of it when I heard that BBC Films are now inserting a non-union clause into some of their writer contracts.

It was a really unpleasant time in which a 'go' project got cut off at the knees. The script had to go through a complete resubmission process, at the end of which the Drama department felt that the competition had picked up too much of a lead.

ITV's version appeared to be a dead duck by the end of the summer - it had been conceived as a vehicle for one of their 'golden handcuffs' former soap stars, and I heard the actor in question pointedly distancing himself from it in a radio interview with Simon Mayo on BBC Five Live.

Schadenfreude, you may think. But there's a coda. About two years on, the BBC financed ITV's version and screened it as their own, with an all-new cast. I made a point of wishing it well (on my website, in those pre-blog days) and didn't watch.

I told you it wasn't a Happy Ending story. Unless you count the fact that I was asked my permission for the Dracula script to be used to teach structure on the BBC script editors' course. Which is more ironic than happy, I suppose.

My real disappointment didn't come from working hard and long for no reward, or from seeing yet another project shot down at such a late stage - both of those things have happened to me more often than I can count. It's par for the course.

But this was the BBC. You expect more.

UPDATE: You can now find the screenplay in a collection titled Dark Mirages, edited by Paul Kane, if you're so inclined. Details here.

Nuggets

Early last year I completed a questionnaire circulated by the editors of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. I was a member of the BSFA for a while, before I found that my changing tastes and inclinations meant that the British Fantasy Society was probably more for me; on moving over, I found myself consorting with most of the same crowd.

The BSFA was my big introduction to old-school fandom; global in reach, literary in its foundations, passionate in its concerns. For a solitary writer, it was a link to a welcoming subculture with a genuine identity and a sense of its own history. It was my way into friendships close and distant that have lasted to this day.

The questionnaire was a re-run of a survey first conducted twenty years ago for Mexicon III by Paul Kincaid. Can't remember how I responded back then but these are some of the answers I gave this time around:

On science fiction and fantasy
I think of myself as a mainstreamer with an sf/f background that tinges almost everything I do. Can't say it without sounding pretentious but I try for a sense of mythic resonance in the mundane.

Influences
When you start writing, you imitate what you love. I loved Wells, ERB, Bester, Clark, DC comics, the sf ballast mags of (to me) mysterious pedigree that somehow showed up at the local newsagents'. My major influences are probably everything I was blown away by between the ages of 12 and 25. Thereafter I began to separate my sense of what was mine from what I'd read.

On the use of British settings
My novels have tended to alternate between closely-observed British settings and closely-researched foreign landscapes, usually (but not always) with a British main character for point-of-view. Never planned it that way and it's not a very commercial way of thinking; the market likes you to find something that works and keep repeating it.

Do I detect a different response to my work from publishers in Britain and America?
Yeah. To UK publishers I'm a forgotten 90s horror writer. In the US I'm upmarket and literary.

The most significant developments in British science fiction and fantasy over the past twenty years?
Corporatisation of mainstream publishing houses has led to a massive loss of editorial know-how, and to the elimination of the specialised lines and imprints that were sustained by that know-how. The rot really set in when marketing people began directing editorial decisions, instead of serving them. It's great that the small and indie presses do so much to keep the flame alive but it's not the same.

And btw, 39 was Rob Hansen's convention membership number, not his age.

I believe.