The Longest Game

 Here's one of many tangents from a very enjoyable series of conversations I had with Katy Naylor, either side of Katy seeing Jonah Non Grata's Soho show, about that and other participatory projects:

Simon Kane:

Do you know the old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game?

 

Voidspace:

Yes, it’s impossible. Notoriously impossible.

Simon Kane:

Once I worked out what that was doing, I thought this is incredible, because it’s actually subverting what a game is. It’s not a role-playing game at all. I think it’s designed to be about creating a very visceral emotional relationship with the technology. The whole point of it is that it’s almost impossible to play.

 

Voidspace:

I had always thought of that as a bug rather than a feature, and just said it was early days, and they hadn’t actually got the hang of difficulty moderating it.

Simon Kane:

It’s about how you deal – it’s a Kobayashi Maru – it’s about how you deal with this unplayable game.

Voidspace:

In the modern Table Top Role-Playing Game world, in the art-game one-pager space, there are games that are deliberately unplayable. There are all sorts of things that are interrogating the form and just being fun and weird. It’s interesting if that was an idea back in the ’80s.

 

Simon Kane:

It has to be. There’s no reason to make it that unplayable. I think it’s signalled by the very first thing you do, where you have to work out how to turn on the light. That’s unnecessary. And you could die. It's horrible. This machine doesn’t understand how a person exists.

Voidspace:

It’s creating in you the sensation of being Arthur Dent, because Arthur Dent hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing. Everything is alien, nothing makes sense, everything is baffling. And so that ties into the idea of this work being able to create a sense of exchange, or a sense of communication that can put you into an emotional state of someone else who’s in the world of the piece. 

Tell me some more about Jonah.

... which, if you can bear it, I contine to do HERE.

 

 

 

 And you can try to play the old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure for yourself HERE.

 If you want to see me in a dressing gown in Islington, you can come and see Jonah Non Grata's other preview, at the Hen and Chickens this Saturday, by getting tickets for almost a tenner HERE.

 Meanwhile, the PR continues to work, keep taking the PR, with a lovely piece from, of all places, ATV HERE and another from Midlands TV HERE.

 (And here is the final scene of Jack Aldisert's The Manikins (A Work In Progress) – one of many other things Katy and I talked about – as passed to me in a manila envelope when I left the venue. Enlarge for spoilers...)

 

A Short, Fun History of Policing London from American Gaming Channel "Extra Credits"

... in five chapters. While the Government attempts to ban protests that make noise and historians who teach history, here's fifty minutes of stuff I wish I'd been taught:

 

 

 Episode 1 takes us to the beginning of the eighteenth century, a huge boom in personal property, new laws, no prisons, a subsequent boom in death sentences (proving no deterrent), citizen's arrests, bounty hunters, and teflon-coated gang-lord and "Thief-Taker General" Jonathan Wild.

 

 

 Episode 2 sees Wild and his growing Gangland Empire brought down by the popularity of renegade street rat and escape artist Jack "He went that-a-way" Sheppard, who plugged his own biography on the scaffold.
 

 

 Episode 3 sees novelist and banned-playwright-turned-lawyer Henry Fielding rustle up both the country's first state-funded court, open to the public, and the city's first police force, assembled surreptitiously from parish constables bearing batons stuffed with arrest warrants.

 

 

 Episode 4 sees Fielding's Bow Street model of law enforcement become acknowledged – if not adopted – nationwide, Henry's brother John starts to tackle the causes of crime, Elizabeth Fry attempts prison reform, and, facing an age of revolution, Home Secretary Robert Peele considers instituting a force trained to arrest people without killing them.

 

 Finally, despite a strong popular distaste for the very foreign idea of a salaried police force, Episode 5 sees Peele gets his wish in 1829... 

"Parliament was even ready to fund the police force directly through taxes, which was the single largest thing that had held the establishment of a force back. They were also starting to get an inkling that some things could simply not be outsourced or made to pay for themselves – an ethos that had ceated Jonathan Wild. It was that same ethos, by the way, that had led to the colonial taxes that lost Britain the American Colonies, allowed the East India Company to run amok in India, and would later hobble efforts to combat the 'Irish Potato Famine'. A lot of problems in this era arose from British Parliament just flat out not wanting to pay for stuff while still reaping whatever benefits it gave them."

 Imagine being taught that.

 And how is it that, despite an A Level in History, I only heard about the South Sea Bubble from Not The Nine O'Clock News, "The Great Hunger" from The Pogues and the East India Company from a joke in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, ?

 I mean, I know why.

One year on from "Frankenstein Wednesdays", and For One Week Only: ALL THE MONSTERS!!!

 

 Hats off, shoes off, and feet up to Matthew "Bishop" Woodcock for alerting me to this... The youtube channel Fear: The Home of Horror has been granted permission to share a generous clutch of beautifully restored Universal horror classics until January the 23rd! First up is the original, quite boring Dracula, which I wrote a little about HERE before I learnt to love Lugosi. I ecommmend it though, particularly for Dwight Frye's extraordinary Renfield, which I still like to think Tolkein might have seen before inventing Gollum.

 

 Next on Fear's playlist is, surprisingly, not Frankenstein, but The Mummy, a film I remember being quite sexy. Edward Van Sloane is back, as is "The Dying Swan". The plot – in which is an undead snack courts the spitting image of an old flame – is now a firmly established vampire trope, Karloff's never looked more gorgeous, and the opening five minutes are genuinely chilling. (Fun twitter fact: apparently there were once laods of mummies, but we ate them.)

 

 Next up is director James Whale's original, phenomenal Frankenstein, which I raved about almost exactly a year ago HERE, and stand by every single superlative.

 

 The first time I saw James Whale's The Invisible Man, in my late teens, I felt like I was watching a film from another dimension. I adored it. In my Bride of Frankenstein piece (see below), I write "The villain's anatagonists are hilarious. Their performances are shrill and dull... but enormous and precise and musically human. To Rains' mad scientist everyone else in the world is an expendable idiot, but thanks to the strengths of its comic relief The Invisible Man is a celebration of us expendable idiots."

 And those antagonists, Una O'Connor and E. E. Clive, return in The Bride of Frankenstein, thought by many to be one of the greatest horror films ever made. I think... well, I write about it HERE.

 

 Both Claude Rains and Bela Lugosi then return for The Wolf Man, Universal's second attempt at a werewolf picture. I break down the plot in my Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman piece thus (spoilers ahead): 'When Univeral returned to the idea in 1941, they chose for their hero... Lon Chaney Junior as a visiting American, and man of the people, "Larry Talbot", who sits on the wrong bit of the armchair in a fancy castle, or in the front with his chauffeur, like John McClane. Talbot tries it on with locally engaged Gwen Conliffe, whom he takes to a "gypsy carnival". There he is bitten by a dog he then beats to death, only to have it turn into Bela Lugosi. Bela's mother, the gypsy Maleva, is the only one who can explain this mystery, the keeper of the lore - a potentially problematic depiction, unless one considers how much the Catholic church would literally kill to be considered this powerful an authority on the supernatural. Talbot is finally despatched in his wolfman form (not that of a dog, like Bela –  never explained) when his skull is smashed in with a silver cane by his father, and Maleva repeats a beautiful elegy over his body, previously spoken for her own son: "The way you walk was thorny, through no fault of your own, but as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a predestined end." She is played by Maria Ouspenskaya, who studied under Stanislavsky, and every time she reaches "... to a predestined end" the mixture of grief and relief broadcast will leave you feeling naked.'

 

 Finally, fast-forwarding through all the bad times and the shoddier sequels, we come to the superb and hugely influential horror/adventure/comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstien, which I write about all over the place... 'Han Solo's screaming flight from the Stormtroopers, Bugs Bunny's toying with Elmer Fudd, The Goonies, Young Sherlock Holmes, nearly all of Spielberg's output, even Dangermouse and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. All shared that tone of "Horror Comedy" - so much so it seemed the only tone going - and all may have learnt a thing or two from A and C Meet F.'

They're up for a week. Get stuck in. Enjoy!

Frankenstein Wednesdays Friday: "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" (1948) – Baggage Handling

  Beginning to conclude my weekly "But What Do I Know!" through Universal's first 8 Frankensteins...

 How often is the last film in a series the one you'll have almost definitely seen first? 

 I saw "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" long before I ever sought out "Frankenstein" or "Dracula", and it's worth noting how smoothly the film went down with the rest of my childhood diet: "The Goonies", "Young Sherlock Holmes", Bugs Bunny's toying with Elmer Fudd, Han Solo's screaming flight from Stormtroopers, nearly all of Spielberg's output, even "Dangermouse" and "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" all shared this tone of Horror Comedy, so much so that it seemed the only tone going, and all of the above may have learnt a thing or two from "A and C Meet F".  Ignoring the duff bit with the chair, consider the clip below (which comes towards the end of the picture, so might be a little SPOILER-y): sitcom director Charles T. Barton doesn't just juggle the comedy and threat, he protracts the threat long enough for it to become comic – a relentless piling on of threats that seems at least as big an influence on "Indiana Jones" as the joke-free adventure serials normally credited.

 It's worth noting too how different this films's strengths are from the kind of routine which had made Bud and Lou famous stars of burlesque. The pair are best known nowadays for two entirely separate contributions to Culture: this film, and the sustained miscommunication of "Who's On First?" – still one of the most famous sketches ever written, over eighty years later. Their timing was atomic, but "AaCMF" has no classic spoken routines. Its laughs come almost exclusively from Lou Costello's obliviousness to, or acknowledgement of, danger. Few would put Abbott and Costello in the same comedy pantheon as Laurel and Hardy, but you always knew how the latter pair would react to a threat – they'd gulp, and go "Mimimi!" or "Whoahhh!" – whereas Costello innovated an entire language's worth of scare takes. With no spoken material he trusted enough to fall back upon, he was given little choice. Fortunately, his writers (credited here) had a far clearer idea of how funny this was going to be than Lou did, but still, with no live audience on set to gauge the laughs, this absence of patter clearly terrified him.

 The Casino Theatre, Broadway. Bud and Lou played here 

but really I just ike the picture.

 "No way I'm doing this crap!" he apparently complained of the script, "My five-year-old daughter could write something better!" It should be noted then what an improvement this film's plot is over previous Frankenstein Wednesdays. Five-year-old Paddy Costello may have been able to write better, but Curt Siodmak couldn't. Consider, if you can bare to, we who know, the screenwriter's three previous attempts to bring the monsters together: 

 In "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man" Larry Talbot seeks out the Scientist, hoping to be rid of his werewolf curse by learning the secret of eternal death. Finding Frankenstein's Monster frozen in ice, he frees it, then transforms into a werewolf in the midst of transferring his own "life force" into its body. They then fight. 

 In "House of Frankenstein" a deranged former associate of Frankenstein escapes from a dungeon, finds Dracula's skeleton in a travelling circus and briefly brings it back to life to wreak revenge. He then unrelatedly finds the bodies of Larry Talbot and Frankenstein’s Monster frozen in ice and thaws them out, hoping to put the Monster's brain into Talbot's body, but everyone dies before any of this is achieved. 

 In "House of Dracula" Larry Talbot and Dracula independently approach a doctor completely unconnected with Frankenstein, hoping to be cured of their respective spookinesses. The doctor agrees to treat Dracula, Talbot impatiently throws himself into the sea, and looking to retrieve his body the doctor finds Frankenstein's Monster buried in some mud. Talbot is then cured, Dracula turned into a skeleton, and the doctor goes mad and brings the Monster back to life for just over a minute before everything explodes. 

 By contrast, in "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" Dracula wants to revive Frankenstein's Monster, and Larry Talbot the Wolf Man is trying to stop them. That's it.

 It’s not just the simplicity of this story that comes as such a relief, it’s the dramatic improvements made upon delineating its main characters' whole deal: Dracula wants mastery, the Monster wants a master, and Talbot wants to do good rather than just kill himself – a mission tragically hampered by his own curse. As a result of this clarity, Lon Chaney Junior, Glenn Strange, and even Bela Lugosi all give arguably their greatest performances in the roles for which they are best known, and it's now three o'clock in the morning so this will have to be continued...

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LOOK HOW HAPPY HE IS!

Wow! I've really played a game of chicken plugging this. Okay: Time Spanner – the thing whose progress I've been charting on this blog for the past ten years – finally had a pilot episode recorded in June which was then broadcast on Radio 4 a month ago, which means you now have just one day left to listen to it, sorry.

And look who turned up to the recording! 

Ben Moor! Ned Mond! Julia, Joel, Jason, Katy Wix!

(Wedding photographer: Stephen Evans)

Has it really been ten years in the making? This interview from September 2007 suggests not. Back then, I appear to be contemplating a vehicle for myself about a homeless wedding planner, but what I realised soon afterwards was that if I wrote that, then I would have to research wedding-planning, and I wasn't very interested in researching wedding-planning so went instead for this sort of cosmic/science-fiction/fantasy... You know Doctor Who? That. 

Beautiful pic for the Radio Times by Thomas Flintham

Of course, it's not really Doctor Who. (Carrrie Quinlan's got that gig sewn up.) Hopefully, it rips off so many ideas from so many sources that I can't be fingered for any specific theft, but the real impetus is probably the comics I read in my teens, back when comics seemed to be doing something amazing – back when Alan Moore's Swamp Thing created a playground in which Peter Milligan's Shade the Changing Man could hang back on the benches, coolly composing existential thought experiments with painted covers by Brendan McCarthy, while the more popular kids like Gaiman's Sandman entered everything and won the gold – exactly the same impetus behind that strip I did about a slacker sent on a mission by an angel twenty years ago now that I think about it. Sorry. Obscure references. Bad. 

Also, I wanted to write the show to which "Peaches En Regalia" was the theme tune. 

 Team Spanner photo by Amanda Benson

l to r: Jeremy Limb, me, David Mitchell, John Finnemore, London Hughes, Belinda Stewart-Wilson

So, yes, I'm sorry I haven't given you blog-readers much notice of this culmination, and you'll probably want to listen to it three or four times. That's what all the cool dudes are doing. John suggests as much in this very nice piece, "John" as in John Finnemore who played Laika both in the finished thing and in that first read-through he let us perform in his flat six years ago (organising read-throughs was the only deadline I ever had for finishing a draft). Also present at that first draft was Gareth Edwards, who is now the producer of the show. I suspect Gareth experienced even more ups and downs trying to get this commissioned than I did; for me this was always a dream, and you're a fool to be disappointed if you don't get your dream, but Gareth managed it.

A lot of the "refining" John writes about on his blog was the result of conversations I had with Gareth both in emails and in person, not to mention the final audio edit, where a tenth of what was recorded had to be cut to meet the running time. I only know it was a tenth though by checking the original script. It doesn't feel like a tenth, because Gareth clearly cut the right tenth. It was also Gareth who suggested I call this other dimension "Heaven" rather than – as it stood in the 2010 draft – "Uberspace", sending the show off into a far richer direction than the original psychedelic kid's show pastiche I had in mind (although it's worth remembering how many of those shows... Ulysses 31, Space Sentinels, and in particular Monkey... felt no qualms about involving the ineffable). "Uber" didn't mean then what it does now by the way. Similarly, the choice of an unhinged, dictatorial, reality-television-starring property developer as the story's heavy seemed a lot more light-heartedly surreal back in 2010. 

And here's a problem. Among the many exciting things comics were doing back in the eighties was refashioning Superman's arch-enemy Lex Luthor into a satire on Donald Trump. And it wasn't just Lex: by the release of Batman Returns, you couldn't budge for superheroes pitting themselves against wealthy philanthropists secretly trying to take over the world, all of whom provided the seed for Kraken.

So I still hope Time Spanner gets a series. Of course I do. But what's funny has changed and so, just between you and me, I might have to rethink where it goes. That's the problem when you grow up reading surrealist apocalypic dystopia. But it's also exciting. Far worse for the fate of the show would have been if everything was now fine. And I'm still glad I didn't go with that wedding-planner idea. Shall we cheer ourselves up further by looking at more of Amanda Benson's lovely rehearsal photographs?

Here's our Kraken. I had asked for Jon Hamm, but what are you going to do? It's worth mentioning that if it wasn't for David Mitchell I wouldn't be writing comedy at all (see that interview), and I certainly wouldn't have written this. In terms of getting the right people to pay attention, he effectively joined Gareth as midwife for the last two years of this thing's birth.

Returning for a second to Jon Hamm, I love the motto of Mad Men creator Matt Weiner's: "Subtext is Pleasure". I was keen the dialogue in Time Spanner should also sound pretty natural, organic even, leaving as many jokes unsaid as possible, if that make sense, jokes that would appear more in the performing than in the reading. The problem with this, of course, is that commissioners don't perform scripts, they read them. They read them once, if that, and even if by some miracle they do correctly interpret every nuance and scripted fluff, the actors who end up having to perform the thing only get to spend an afternoon with it. There's no learning time, let alone rehearsal time – it's not bloody Shakespeare – and so the writer has to make it absolutely clear why people are saying what they're saying on that first read. It was David who suggested the blindingly obvious solution: stage directions. Here's a tiny example:

       

All David's ideas were good. Here I think he's suggesting John be given a stool...

And here he is holding a script in front of his face because the character he is playing is on the other side of a door. John, as Laika, is urging my character on. I, as Martin, am literally miming holding a cup of tea because I'm new to this...

Oh yes. That name. "Martin". 

I wanted – as we all want – something basically normal but a little unfortunate. The words "Martin Gay" came up in conversation eight years ago and I thought: Oo, bingo! It wasn't until two years into drafting that I realised I'd plumped for exactly the same name John had already chosen for his own feckless sitcom hero in Cabin Pressure. This is why nobody in the episode ever actually addresses my character as "Martin".

London! Secret weapon. Gareth always said Gabbie was the key... 

(Here's another indicator of how long ago I started writing this: I was writing for Laurence and Gus when I first thought of Gabbie, and Isy Suttie was in the cast and I thought she might make be a great fit, but by total coincidence she then went and got cast as the disarming new love interest in Peepshow, "Dobbie". That long ago)... 

Auditioning actors for Gabbie might be the most grown-up thing I've ever done. Everyone we saw gave beautiful, intelligent readings, but London Hughes was unique in actually reminding me who Gabbie was. I don't mean she reminded me of Gabbie. I mean she literally reminded me who the character was meant to be, and why Gareth was so right. She was the key. There has to be a surplus energy to Gabbie that, again, you can't really put into words, beyond the stage direction "enthusiatically" – an energy without which very little Martin does in this episode really makes sense. So we were very lucky with London. If you want more of her and of course you do, try here.

Far right: B-Stew gets into the zone... 

Belinda Stewart-Wilson took a porridge of archetypes and instantly made sense of it: Angel, yes, Muse, sure, but also Femme Fatale, Bell Dame Sans Merci, Cylon, Siri, White Witch... half of Tilda Swinton's CV actually... Philip K. Dick's VALIS, the Sorceress from He-Man, that female Buddha from Monkey, Bond's "M" and – if this is a rip-off Doctor Who – the Doctor. A character I was so nervous of pinning down she's referred to in the script throughout simply as "the Voice", Belinda took it all and simply made it sing.

And completing the team, second from left, the unweildily talented Jeremy Limb, from The Trap and music. You can hear his own science fiction comedy epic Event Horizon Crescent here. If Time Spanner is a baby, I always wanted Jeremy to be Godfather. In the Green Room before the recording, as final tweaks to my script were being made, it occurred to me how lucky I was to be in probably one of the best writers' rooms ever assembled, so thanks again to Gareth and to all the cast for keeping me company. And thanks to everyone who came to the read-throughs and played the roles and helped them exist a bit more. And thanks again to John Finnemore who always seemed to love this thing in all its forms. Which meant it was probably good. Which meant I stuck at it.

Have I missed anything? OH! THE LINK! Here. 
(And you can like it on here too.)
((And also broadcast that same belated epiphany was Now The Twelfth Night Show, which I loved appearing in, and which you also have a day left to listen to.))

 UPDATE: Someone has very usefully uploaded it to listen to whenever you like HERE.

Take Two Elements!

Any two elements... say, Electricity and Water.
On their own, perfectly harmless.
But mix them together
maybe in a bowl
DYNAMITE!

Roy Steel!
Second Best Big Game Hunter in the world!
Fighter! Lover! A man of action, with all the actions of a man!
The ancient Mayan word for "fist"!
His passport says "Beast Slapper"!

 

And Lorrimer Chesterfield.

Leading Professor of Occult Studies at London's London University!

A brain in the shape of a man!

Demon handler and Myth wrangler!

He reads books! He writes books! Sometimes he reads the books he writes!

His brain can fell an ox! 

 

My name is Sir Maxwell House. 

I took those two elements, and like some kind of scientific blacksmith I forged them, forged them into a team that would look Danger in the eye and bring it down with the Knowledge of a Man, and the Fist of a Man! They are... The Monster Hunters!

 

 And, oh, how I love them. Over the past two years the writing team of Peter Davis, Matthew Woodcock, and J. P. Chenet has produced – in addition to the above – two stage shows, two series of webcast adventures, and three specials, all available to listen to at the link above NOW, and I'm lucky enough to have been invited along for the lot. I like being in a series. I've never played a recurring character before, someone whose story I didn't know the end of, and the generous attention paid to Sir Maxwell with each new episode has made for a very happy inbox. 

 Happier still, my sister joined us for the last series, whose twisted arc the chaps played scrupulously close to their retro-fitted chests, in the happiest tradition of this mattering.  

 And it's surprisingly well researched. It turns out the Post Office Tower really was an official secret. And there really was an MI16. (There have actually been eighteen sections of military Intelligence in all, numbered 1 through to 19 – there was never an MI13.  In fact, I found out only very recently my uncle used to work for one: After an Oxford performance of Ring he casually mentioned over drinks above the Samuel Beckett Memorial Car Park, how much the experience of sitting in complete darkness wearing headphones had reminded him of his "anti-interrogation training in the foreign service". I suppose the thirty years are up then. Mum always suspected he had spent too much time in Egypt for a playwright. The Egyptians at the time must have agreed – "I stepped into a taxi, turned out it wasn't a taxi. I said, 'I have my daughters with me.' They said, 'Do they eat eggs?' I said, 'Yes.' So they boiled up some eggs and took me away. Of course, what saved me was that I didn't have a gun on me. Everyone always says carry a gun. But I was supposed to be out there teaching, if they'd found a gun on me that would be it. So they let me go."  

 Here if you're interested is a lecture he gave recently, about his childhood in Epsom growing up beneath the Battle of Britain. This is all true. But I digress.

 

The Beast Must Dies' notorious werewolf break

 Back to the silly voices, the final episode of Finnemore should still be available to listen to for a day or so, including four minutes of drunken American rambling (shaved down from eight) that I never thought would be John's kind of thing, and which I am very glad he decided was. 

 While writing this series, he actually scheduled a meeting in the "Douglas Adams Room" of the Beeb's new Grafton House digs, specifically to try out silly voices. Its decals, famously misquoting classic BBC comedy, did not disappoint. You may have thought it impossible to misquote "42".

  They managed it. 

  Ah, as I write this, Peter has just sent me this year's Monster Hunters Hallowe'en special. Dynamite.