The Reviews Are In!

  Photo: Roswitha Chesher     

Yes, two reviews are in! 

 Enormous thanks to tried and trusted unatendees A sea lion in a hat and RedScharlach for generously attending the matinee of Love Goddess today. I don't want you to think from their kind words that we do a total hatchet job on Welles, but this is Rita Hayworth's story, and he was "a man of the world", and to quote London Hughes: "Play silly games, win silly prizes."

 Tech week continues into the actual Press Night tomorrow. We'll do two shows tomorrow, and we did two today, but with every show I feel less and less like John Daker, so COME!  (John Daker is the man in this clip. It is a hard clip to search for if you don't know that, so thanks to my sister Susy for knowing what I was talking about.)

  

London on Late Night

 Tottenham Court Road's east side is now completely unblocked. They've finished the outside of whatever that is. This was last Friday.

 My straight line's walk continued through Trafalgar Square, and past Parliament. There weren't many people around; there were possibly more police, but dotted around in twos and threes.

 What the outside's currently meant to look like feels unsettled. In a ground floor window in Pimlico, I noticed a naked couple enjoying their heating, I suppose, just pottering. Not these windows. Older windows. 

 

 I realised at this point I hadn't seen Vauxhall in over a year, so turned back and crossed the bridge. Vauxhall was looking a lot more finished now than it had in 2018, when I had the heroes of Time Spanner brought here at gunpoint.

 

 Of course it was. However, 2020's emptier streets, and clashes between police and the bone-stupid private militia of a reality TV star, might have made now an even better setting.

 

 Or whatever year this is. It's impossible to photograph the moon with a phone, isn't it? 

 

 I didn't take many pictures of the waterfront. The finished flats were almost entirely glass, and while it didn't seem impermissable to photograph their interiors, and nobody inside was naked, it still felt a bit like a mistake. Maybe I just wanted to photograph stillness.

 This flag was a nightmare. How has anyone ever photographed a flag?

 

 I'd known they were going to build an American Embassy in Vauxhall ever since David Byrne posted something about it in 2006 or so, on a blog that's now impossible to find. He'd expressed pertinent concern at the growing demand for castles, and queried its need for a moat.

 

 It's a post that's stayed with me, but this was actually my first visit. The embassy had quite a bubbly, Barbarella-ish approachability up close, for a fortress. In Los Angeles, it was now coming up to one o'clock in the afternoon. I was aware of this because one of my favourite people in the world would be preparing her first ever appearance on "The Tonight Show".

 

 I sent her wind-chapped salutations from the base of a building we'd pretended to escape three years ago – oh yeah, we still totally text – and returned home via the south bank. As two girls overtook me on roller blades, keeping warm somehow, and bearing music too mellow to blare, I thought how alright all this was, and how much it resembled a 2021 I might have looked forward to long ago. I wouldn't be wearing a parka though. I'd be in a long woolen coat or something. Maybe I should buy a long woolen coat. 

 Here's London Hughes in Los Angeles on Late Night.

HUGHESDAY, 22ND DECEMBER 2020

 

 I used to love the idea we only ever use ten per cent of our brain or whatever it was. Like Odd John, or the pill that makes Bradley Cooper get his shit together in Limitless, it threw up superb fantasies of human potential, suggesting if we could only get that percentage higher, maybe we could read all of "War and Peace" in a single minute by just flicking through it without blinking, or blinking very quickly, or we could move objects with our mind, or walk through walls, or turn invisible...

 

 

 But then I learnt it wasn't really true. It was like saying "you only ever use ten per cent of your home." We just never use a hundred per cent at once, and human potential is actually, sadly, a lot more knowable and mapped than I'd hoped. We aren't all secretly Captain Marvel (D.C.'s or Marvel's, take your pick) sitting on untapped panoplies of super powers. 

  But then... 

 

 Oh, then I saw London Hughes perform "To Catch A D*ck" at the Soho Theatre and, reader, I saw a human operating at a hunded per cent. That show has since been turned into a Netflix Special, which dropped today in something like a hundred and ninety countries worldwide, as one of the many fruits of London's move to Los Angeles back in February, and I watched it this morning, keen but also wary, because it couldn't possibly have been as good as I remember, but no it was, and that's the thing about London: she promises everything, and then makes good on it. She gives it all, and not a quantum of it is wasted, because her aim, like everything else about London Dionne Mischa Stacey Stephanie Estina Knibbs-Hughes, is true... 

 

 Respect to Hannah Gadsby, but not all comedy relies on self-deprecation. And respect, too, to W. B Yeats, but the best don't all lack all conviction. How is it possible for a comedian to have the energy levels of the oustanding and beautiful Robin Williams without projecting a quantum of that man's desperation? I've no idea, but London manages it. Also, her material's better. And she didn't nick it. Banging on about her positivity risks missing how funny she is, from which I'm guessing all the rest of it springs, but she is one of the bravest people I know, because none of it is fake, and her courage is contagious, and the fact I met her while casting a character who's energy has to fling the protagonist of Time Spanner through Heaven in a circuit round the Universe remains one of the nicest things I know about being me.

 

(London in LA)

 

Frankly, world, this was long overdue. Hey, welcome to London!

TIMESPANNER BONUS MATERIAL: 2020 Hindsight

  Time Spanner: "The Dan In The High Castle" is still available to listen to entirely legitimately for a month HERE (and less legitimately, archived alongside the pilot here.)

 I love this by robotqueenvictoria.

 There's not much sense performing a post mortem on a thing you yourself have written, especially if you're as sloppy as writer as me. Don't get me wrong, I like my writing, but I only seem to put the hours in on the bits I find fun – the big splurges and resultant problem-solving – rather than sorting out the structure beforehand, and playing within that. It's quite an actor-y, hand-to-mouth, gig-economy approach, and while this unstructuredness feels freeing at the time, in the long run it probably provides less actual freedom than working with all the resources available to someone with an actual plan (this is why I found it so rewarding to write for Shunt, whose shows already had a structure in place by the time I'd join the devising). Specifically, the fantastic exhileration felt when a last minute tweak helps me suddenly understand what I've written, is offset by the powerlessness felt re-encountering all the other bits that go nowhere written before this understanding dawned. But this isn't a post-mortem.

Rainbow over Vauxhall, February, 2020

 Today was a day for applause and thanks, so let me here assert that writing The Dan In the High Castle was a far from lonely experience. Seven months before the recording, a first draft was read out at John Finnemore's flat. This had Martin and Gabbie travel two years into the future to discover a dystopia they thought was the work of Kraken, just as in the episode that aired, but ended with them escaping into a mysteriously optimistic 2019, and also their relationship didn't develop beyond Martin finally getting to do something fun with his excellent new friend, all of which might have made good on the promises offered by the pilot. But what it didn't do, as my sister Susy pointed out, was provide any possible closure if this was to be not just a sequel, but the finale. It was London Hughes who suggested Gabbie should punch Martin in the face, so I put that in, and went off to redraft. I'd also had a new idea about octopuses, which didn't make it in, but anyway months passed and, as with the pilot, it was producer Gareth Edwards who paid for coffee after coffee while trying to convince me that, as much fun as I was having penning screwball wise-cracks, the threats should be real, and "Martin should care". It was then ancient friend and collaborator Tom Lyall who pointed out, over another coffee, that Gabbie should be also be returned to 2016, as missing two years of one's life is obviously huge, and when I suggested Martin should nevertheless still stay in 2018, it was again Tom who said, crucially, "Yes, and Gabbie should rescue him."
  Eschewing coffee for pints, David Mitchell simply said he loved it, which was highly encouraging, but otherwise useless, but really encouraging, but otherwise no use, but great. 

Maida Vale studios, November, 2018.

 These improvements made, I sent the possibly final draft to John Finnemore, because he's always lovely with notes, and he replied – as nicely as any intelligence could – that, actually, he prefered the version at the read-through. This is how his reply ended:

 "I loved the last draft, and the biggest problem with that one – Gabbie's passivity – is now fixed. So it's in great shape. I just miss Martin as my life-line of fundamentally understanding what the story is about, because it's someone who wants something simple and human. More even than Arthur Dent wanting a cup of tea. More like The Dude wanting his rug back. Maybe it's his shoes. It's almost his shoes now, but not quite, because he doesn't really try. And anyway, it's not his shoes, it's Gabbie. It's got to be Gabbie.

Does that help? I cannot imagine it does."

 Of course, it helped. So I threw out the pair travelling to 2018 in order to get Martin "future shoes", and instead made their motivation Martin's investigation of the future in which he gives up Gabbie and the Spanner. And I added Gabbie quitting. And, finally, one week before the script was recorded at Maida Vale in November 2018, I added Martin offering Gabbie the Spanner at the end. And I remain very happy with that ending, and as I say, wish I'd thought of it a little earlier, so I wouldn't have wasted all that time giving Bridget a load of exposition about "The Usual" which goes nowhere. 

 But if there ever is an episode three I am, of course, now stuffed.

I spent a lot of those months playing "Half-Life 2".

TIMESPANNER BONUS MATERIAL: "I have been given many names...."

 The second episode of Time Spanner: "The Dan In The High Castle" is now available to listen to for a month entirely legitimately HERE (and less legitimately, archived alongside episode one here.) More bonus material will follow but I'd like to open with something I learnt in the year since the show was first broadcast, which is that "Bridget" is acually the name of an already existing Irish goddess...

Some lovely soothing Irish facts.

 "Over the years, the goddess went by several names, including Brigid, Bridget, Bridge..." So, to be absolutely clear, I had no idea about Brigid when I chose the name that Gabbie would finally give to the Voice in Martin's head.

 "Meaning 'firey power', she was often depicted with rays of light or fire emitting from her hair and her head, showing us that she was the embodiment of the element of fire..." The fact that I depicted the owner of this Voice "wreathed in fire" (or as Bridget hereself put it in the pilot: "not on fire, just terribly bright") is therefore a complete coincidence.

 "Through her ties with fire and the sun she was considered to be the goddess of smithcraft..." Similarly, this was not why I made her the creator of the Time Spanner, nor why I gave her a robot - "She was perceived to be the patron of relatively high dimensions... and concepts and activities that elevated oneself..." And again, having the same figure interpreted by different cultures as both muse and angel just made sense, so this was also a coincidence.

When original angel Belinda Stewart-Wilson was suddenly unavailable, we were star-wobblingly lucky to have Sally Phillips agree to join us, but this recasting had absolutely nothing to with Bridgid's "triple aspect" (from London Hughes' Instagram.)

 "She was often seen as a motherly figure... Were some of you not aware the she existed?" Well no! Not remotely! That's my point, video! Gabbie's line was originally "You look like a Janet", because that was just the first name that came into my head, and that's basically how I write, but then I found out "Janet" was already the name of a Heavenly interface in The Good Place, so went for "Bridget" because, you know, she bridges things. Not mentioned in the video however, is the weirdest coincidence of all by far, which is that Brigid has her own cross, and it is THIS...

 An actual swastika. I am, as ever, indebted to the Time Spanner Tumblr for brilliantly bringing all of this to my attention, and to this Brigid blog blog for the images.

Four Garçons Dans Le Vent!

 Something else I said over pints last night was that I thought "A Hard Day's Night" might be my favourite British film comedy. The tone of post-war "British Comedy" is characterised as defeated, lonely, annoyed, and either manic or morose - the tone of Hancock and Fawlty and Bottom and Peepshow - but the Beatles seemed every bit as comic and British to me despite their youth, success, wise-cracks and untrappability. Theirs was the tone of the Marx Brothers and the Ghostbsuters and Bugs Bunny and Eddie Murphy, and I wish more British Comedy remembered this was also an option, that for all the former's brilliant legacy you don't just have to moan. It was this kind of galvanising voice I wanted to give Gabbie Hayes when I was writing "Timespanner", and that's why London Hughes' appearance at the casting seemed such a Godsend. London is all of this, and it's depressingly unsurprising that she had to go all the way to America to finally get a show made. But wait, now I'm moaning.

Just a nice picture of London from her Instagram.

 Anyway, there's a superb documentary about the making of "A Hard Day's Night" called  "You Can't Do That" hosted by Phil Collins - Oh, you think you could do a better job? - in which every single mind on the film seemed to be working as one, including of course that of its celebrated director Richard Lester, but also its far less celebrated writer Alun Owen, whose dialogue appears pretty much verbatim, and was a huge influence not only upon me but on the English language in general; it gave us the word "grotty" for starters. I also learnt from the documentary of the existence of this hastily improvised European trailer, filmed by Lester round the back of Twickenham Studios with whatever the boys could get their hands on, like something out of "Taskmaster":

 Aww, imagine The Beatles on "Taskmaster"! You can watch the documentary in full here. You can see London Hughes preparing for her astronomically glorious show "To Catch A Dick" while being interviewed by Richard Herring here. And I found the photo of the Beatles here.

What Do The Pills Do?

 Well, I didn't know they do this for a start:

 

 And now, apologies. The lights went out all over my old laptop a while back, but I have a new one now, so I can blog again woo! And I have something to plug which is ending very soon: "Coma" – a show ostensibly about lying down and taking a pill. The pill-taking is optional, but not the lying down, as space in the venue is limited (see below).

 Photo by Mihaela Bodlovic.    

As part of their ongoing Darkfield project, creator David "shunt" Rosenberg, writer Glen "Ring" Neath, musicians Max and Ben Ringham, et al have recorded me and others doing things in a box, and then taken that box up to Summerhall, so people can lie in it in total darkness for half an hour, and be an audience. Given the absence of any live performer (as far as I know) it's extraordinary how live an event these shows still manage to be – the simple presence of others counts for a lot, it turns out, even if you can't see them. And the twitter reviews I've read have been incredibly pleasing, although the most pleasing was probably: "Neither pleasant nor unpleasant it sits just the right side of creative to make you feel that things are not good until you leave", because it's so confusing. You can book TICKETS HERE and then I think the show's moving to Canary Wharf in September. But, as I say, most of my work was done a month ago, outside Television Centre (see below). You know, in that heat wave. Water was on hand... that's not much of an anedote is it – Okay: I was asked to provide a component of something unique built by friends. It was fun. And still is. I'm assuming.

So yes I'm doing Edinburgh this year, sort of - not physically (which is a shame as London "Gabbie" Hughes is obviously KILLING IT UP THERE), but I hear it's like I'm really there, right down to the smell (see below – not sure which vial's me):

 

And of course David's been doing stuff with binaural sound for over a decade now. And shipping containers. Things were easier back in 2007, before the crunch, back when we were doing "Contains Violence" and were still allowed in buildings. I can't believe I've never posted this shot of the microphones going into Nigel's head so we could record me stoving it in with an Apple Mac before:

And here's the card handed to audiences from that first binaural gig, intended to minimise technical hiccups. The system's been refined a bit since.

 

25/08/19: P.S.: I've just remembered, my favourite review is actually this one comparing the character I voice to "one of those vaguely disreputable Cronenbergian scientists", and noting "in fact Cronenbrg's two earliest movies, Stereo and Crimes of the Future could provide acceptable alternative titles for this..."  Lovely stuff.

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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, and 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 had for ever 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 the 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 ofwhat was recorded had to be cut to meet the running time – I only know this by checking the original script. It didn'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 in 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, one was the refashioning of 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 that 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. Isy Suttie was in the cast and I thought she might make be a great fit but then, by total coincidence, she 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 the character 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, let's face it... Philip K. Dick's VALIS, the Sorceress from He-Man, that female Buddha from Monkey, "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 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.