He wants people to post, as a comment, on as many opinion-garnering web pages as possible, as often as they can be bothered, the phrase: "It just goes to show you can't be too careful!" It's perfect; it seems lighthearted without being a joke. It's vaguely pertinent to almost any subject without meaning a thing. It's the ideal oil for the internet's troubled waters.Jon's management of online traffic has always been exemplorary. He hardly ever blogs for example, but when he does, my God it's unmissable (there's a link on the right, under "where I get my ideas from"). And I think he's right, as well. This decade has gone to show you can't be too careful, which is something to carry into the new year, along with all the plans we'll make about how to cope with having everything we've always wanted.
"This is a brilliant interview. Kenny Everett is so funny and John clearly likes him. He asks why his first solo album was so sad when he has so much and John starts to play the Laughing Policeman on his guitar and sarcastically asks if he’d prefer his next album to sound like that. There is also a heartbreaking bit when he tells Kenny how he’d like to die..."
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.
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:
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.
