Having pooh-poohed Hélène Smith's Space Seances in the last post, this afternoon I learnt – completely coincidentally – that the overlap between Occultism and the American Space Programme is bigger than I'd realised: The name Jack Parsons popped up in the latest episode of Comedy Bang Bang, which I was listening to while out trying to catch the last of the sun – Oh, here...
... and from what little I could pick up, Parsons' esoteric approach to rocket science makes Nicola Tesla look like Clive Sinclair. I researched him a little further on my return, hence the links in this post, but I reckon the less you know about him, the more you'll enjoy the beautiful introductory video below – a perfect jarring of data and delivery that I've now watched five times. Samba music aside, Christian Sager seems a consummate host, a no-nonsense kind of guy. He doesn't even mention, for example, Parsons' attempt to gestate a "Moonchild" with L. Ron Hubbard – Sorry, I'll shut up.
That was July 2015. I'd just been enjoying Icke's terrible 2009 lecture to the Oxford Union on Netflix and wanted to share the highlights, but wasn't sure how much of an introduction he needed, so gave up. I didn't bother watching his speech yesterday to the anti-mask crowd in Trafalgar Square, but from what I've read it
was pretty similar to the Oxford one a decade earlier – except it didn't have slides, which is a shame because they were hilarious – so I'm finally posting it now.
If any reader still doesn't know who David Icke is, in my 2015 draft I recommended "this excellent wikipedia entry
charting Icke's progress from footballer turned
sports-presenter, turned Green-Party-figurehead, via an encounter with
Brighton psychic Betty Shine,
to the turquoise-favouring Way turned Truth turned Light immortalised in this tender interrogation on Wogan", then went on to explain that Icke was "big with
people who get bored by the news. Far better-constructed
alternate histories are becoming more and more
mainstream, but fortunately for Icke the news has also become more and
more boring, so his stock remains high..." which is not an observation that dated well. I've no idea why I didn't think his stock would be at least as high in Interesting Times.
I've no idea how much his consistent but blurry narrative of world conspiracy owes to Betty Shine, but for over three decades it's remained large enough to accomodate both genuine government cover-ups and the belief that former Prime Minster Ted Heath was a giant lizard. To quote Icke's Oxford lecture: "Pyramids within pyramids, like a series of Russian Dolls." Imagine
that... No, I can't either. Here's another quote of his to lillustrate the kind of level we're working at: "Jimmy Carter manipulated the Soviet Union into attacking Afghanistan which blew up leading to Al-Quiada and all that lot." The lecture's now on youtube, not Netflix, and honestly I can't remember if I'd still recommend it but here's what you missed...
"Then he started talking about depleted uranium," I wrote in 2015, "and if I'm honest it gets less funny, because – yes – what's important is not automatically common knowledge... Like David Brent playing Simply The Best, he closes with another Bill
Hicks routine, the closing speech from Hicks' swansong Revelations, a beautifully judged meditation that
reality is just a ride delivered by a man who knew he was dying. But
Icke's done nothing to earn this observation and robs its punchline
of any comic worth." That's what I wrote in 2015. My biggest revelation of the evening though was this: "Icke is as good a proof as any of the theory he
champions, believing is seeing. Or, less clumsily, it's the ideas we never
question that keep us stupid. He's not insane. He's just dumb." That's maybe not such a novel insight in 2020.
"Fucking magnets, how do they work?" Simpler times. Please wear a mask.
This is my last Andrew Lloyd Webber post, I promise, but I really buried the lede on Monday, because whilst enjoying Lyndsay Ellis' "Gethsemane" mashup, what I really should have been sharing was Ted Neeley's extraordinary 2006 Farewell Tour performance in its entirety, which it only occured to me to watch last night, and which is above. Neeley played Jesus in the film back in 1973, a Golden-Turkey-Award-nominated onscreen performance so shockingly uncommitted that I'd assumed someone else had provided the singing and Neeley was just a boss-eyed model hired to look confused and mouth along, no offense meant to boss-eyed models.
But my goodness, the sixty-three year-old Ted had me throwing my hand control across the room with excitement. I literally can't stay seated watching it. And if the reactions of his cast-mates in the wings when Neeley hits that high "WHY" seem a little over the top, the full documentary explains that this was actually the first time he'd sung "Gethsemane" since the memorial service of his original Judas, Carl Anderson, meaning he hadn't once sung it in rehearsals, not even in the technical rehearsals, and so this was the first time they were hearing it, and indeed the first time since the death of Anderson that Ted Neeley was hearing it. Here he is again, singing it again ten years later in Rotterdam, still raging against the dying of the light as a seventy-three-year-old Jesus. Importance may be empirical, but things mattering is subjective, and I find how much this matters to all involved incredibly inspiring, even in the face of Tim Rice's reliably shit lyrics... Look, that nobody would say "a new, exciting point of view" rather than "an exciting new point of view" is a hill I'm happy to die on. And speaking of dying on hills, here's today's Defoe:
Here's the Easter story retold in a scene from the Japanese animé Saint Young Men, a flat-share comedy starring possibly teen-age versions of the Buddha and the Christ which I first heard about as a "true or false" question on How Did This Get Played? I can't find that much else about it online, so I don't know which of the two avatars is the Oscar and which is the Felix. Maybe neither are slobs. Maybe it's more more like Alf? Or My Two Dads, and Jesus is... the noisy one? It's probably less reductive than that, but from what few clips I've seen it's clear he has issues with stigmata, and that both seem prone to anxiety, which is comforting. Here, I think, is its uplifting theme tune:
And here is today's far more downbeat Defoe, possibly for completists only. (If any reader does have more information about Saint Young Men, please feel free to share it in the comments below.)
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.)
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".
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.
... in other words: whatever the opposite of bonus material is... in other words: the shows! This is a post to provide links to both episodes of Time Spanner now that they're off the Radio 4 site, with sneaky thanks to whoever put them up - long may they hang around - and extrovert, obvious and unending thanks to producer Gareth Edwards, narrator John Finnemore, baddie David Mitchell, goodie London Hughes, angels Belinda Stewart-Wilson and Sally Phillips, and cast of thousands Jeremy Limb. Share and, as ever, enjoy.
Part 1 - "Welcome to Heaven, Mr. Sorry" (broadcast January 7th, 2017) - can be heard HERE.
Part 2 - "The Dan in the High Castle" (broadcast December 21st, 2018) - is HERE.
Happy Boxing Day! I hope everyone's been letting nothing them dismay. Heart-shaped thanks to all who've said nice things thus far about the new Spanner. "VonBlade" expresses hope that in "the next one" (if that ever happens) I might "spend less-time setting the scene for those who foolishly missed ep1." and while you may have a point, VB, I thought I'd put up the following exchange from the very first draft written back in March, to show just how much worse things could have been:
GABBIECool.
But get some shoes. And not dinner lady shoes like you had.
MARTINBrilliant!
Yes! See you at six.
GABBIE(Cautiously) Cool. (Departing) Happy Birthday! Aww, thanks for stopping…
MARTINThis
is a good idea.
ANGELThe
shoes?
MARTINWell
I need shoes ideally, but – I mean if it starts raining, say – No, buck up,
Martin! I need shoes.
ANGEL Whathappened to your shoes?
MARTINOkay,
retrace my steps: I definitely had them on when I brought my boss his tea, then
he forced me through a magic mirror at gunpoint to find out how to bring back
the dead and I was in Heaven – although I don’t really believe in Heaven – and I
met you and we stole the Time Spanner because you said I needed to bring stuff
back from the Future because my world was
dying and you gave me a robot helper which I didn’t really want, sorry, but
apparently Heaven’s full of robots, oh and there was something about how you once
gave the Spanner to Hitler –
ANGELYes!
Specifically that it wasn’t Hitler!
MARTINOr if it was, that it
was an accident –
ANGELNo! It was that it wasn’t Hitler.
MARTINSure, but that came a
bit out of nowhere. Anyway! Then you
stuck the spanner up my nose, into my brain, which is how you’re talking to me
now, sent me back to Earth –
ANGELThe physical plane.
MARTIN“Plane” yes, the plane, but
then I used the Spanner to go round the Universe back in time, just to check… not change anything, just check Gabbie
hadn’t heard me say… nice things about her, which she didn’t, so that all seems
fine, and everything seems great!
ANGELAnd the shoes?
Pause.
MARTINOh, I took them off to
go through the mirror! That's it.
I still like the joke. Ultimately though, it was decided that this first draft was a bit... well Gareth used the word "glib", but I prefer "easy to write".
While I'm posting bonus material, here from that same draft is a fuller description of the Cat-In-The-Bag, which I knew would almost definitely have to be cut down, but sometimes writing's just fun:
LAIKAThe
Cat in the Bag: Found furniture, peeling leather seating banks, fish-finger
sandwiches, Connect 4, Buckaroo, a single chandelier rescued from a Streatham
bordello, “Crash Test Dummies” on the jukebox by the Speak-Your-Weight machine,
actual crash test dummies propping up
the specials, a bowl of pens in the toilet, and – on the wall behind the stuffed
lynx – a seven foot high monochrome mural of Ariana Grande in a hazmat suit.
(While it's an obvious stand-in for the Dogstar on Coldharbour Lane, the real inspiration for the Cat was the short-lived "The Rest Is Noise" which is now a TK Maxx, and – more recently– "the Hob" in Forest Hill, which recently reopened as the crushingly inorganic "Signal" a couple of years ago without a thought for... Christ, listen to me.)
Well, this picture's nice and will brighten up the place. It's by Rhianna Evans – thanks, Rhianna – and bears an astonishing resemblance to the thing in my head. I love the oven gloves on Mr. Mergatroid (who I guess is the... matriarch?... which makes sense, as both Kraken and the Voice are patriarchs. And Mergatroid does move from one to the other. So, then I don't know, Gabbie's the craftsman, Martin's the clown? Does any of this work?) Sorry you've been out of the loop, blog, but there is to be a SECOND WHOLE EPISODE of "Time Spanner" to be recorded and broadcast later this year. Hazard a whoop! Not a whole series, mind, just another standalone, so if this story – very clearly begun on November the 3rd 2016 – is ever to be finished, it will have a pretty interesting shape (and will at least "span time"). John Finnemore hosted a read-through of a draft I wrote last week, and it turns out we won't be using that... Well, it could be better. And needs to be the best. Let's put it like that. Watch this – if you'll pardon the pun – space. Oh also, a Time Spanner fan blog has been set up which is absolutely full of tangential goodies, and is providing, for this writer at least, an incredibly useful resource/spur.
Also, the show was repeated on the actual radio waves! But I'm too late to post a link to that. Sorry. Speaking of continued evidence of my existence, however: Series 4 of "That Mitchell and Webb Sound" was also repeated, for which I wrote some sketches that I'm very fond of, none of which appear in episode 6, however, which is the only episode still up on iplayer. Also, Series 3 of "John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme" is still mostly up, and still incredible. I can see that now unambiguously, this far on. Lucky for me.
Finally, one more regurgitation: "Nightmare on Deskteeth Street", the surreal short about red boots that appears in my showreel, and whose filming I mentioned here, is now entirely visible on vimeo. Or below.
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.
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.
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 Crescenthere. 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.
What I really want to write about is Jon Ronson's "The Pychopath Test" -
which first alerted me to the current state of former MI5 whistleblower
Shayler's internal narrative let's call it - and Phillip K. Dick, and Brian
Aldiss' thoughts on ECG testing, and all sorts of research for "Time Spanner" and modern epiphanies. But that's going to take ages so here, I'll just drop you right in this... God it's funny if you can forget it's actually happening to someone:
"When I first woke up I was told by Jesus that we would be hit by
massive solar activity in 2012, and part of my mission was to gather
together 2,000,000 children to sing "Greensleeves" to calm down the
effects of this solar activity." And so on, and so on... Willy Mason said it so much better.
Here's the talk I gave at Science Showoff in September, in lieu of an interview, about a show that doesn't exist, recycling old blog posts. Pathetic. Since it looks like there may be as many as twenty acts performing on Thursday I'll probably go for something shorter than this now. I apologise that it starts with "so".
So as advertised I'm going to give a talk about how I managed to stave off a growing interest in science long enough to write a science fiction pilot.
The reason I wanted to write a sitcom about Space/Time Travel was...
Well, 1) I'd never tried to write a whole series before. I had written sketches, many of which took place in the past, and if I set a series in all of Time and Space then I might be able to recycle some.
But 2) I liked the idea that the best sitcoms take place in a form of prison, a trap from which the "hero" wishes to escape (trenches in Blackadder Goes Forth... in Father Ted it's Craggy Island... in Porridge it's a prison, it's a prison!) I'm not sure I actually agree with it but I thought, wouldn't it be great, just metaphysically, if the setting from which you longed to escape was All of Time and Space?
So I thought great, but now I'd chosen "The Universe" as my setting I had to work out what that actually looked like, the "sit" of my "com". So I started researching -
Actually, before I started researching I think I had already decided on two rules that this universe had to obey. First, in keeping with the idea of being trapped, it had to be finite. This is best explained by the image of someone looking through a powerful enough telescope long enough to see the back of their own head. Well that was how it was explained to me.
The second rule: There had to be just one universe, so no timelines - I was pretty strict about this, in spite of quantum theory. If you went back in time, you didn't get to change the past like in Back To The Future, you simply risked becoming more responsible for it. This cured any compulsion to go back and rescue Jesus or kill Hitler, or buy his paintings or - You could keep things light.
So, not this. Sorry, dude. (Update: this video has been removed. I can't now for the life of me remember what it was.)
In fact, according to this rule, if you did try to kill Hitler, then History and Dumb Luck dictated you would fail, so all you'd do is end up making him angry. Maybe it was all your fault. Aha.
Anyway, these rules decided (unscientifically), I began to research the Universe.
I watched Carl Sagan's Cosmos, which I'd bought on amazon, and I thought about nostalgia, because he's dead and I only found that out after, and because I'd originally seen the show when I was eight, with my Dad, and watching it again Space itself now seemed like quite an old idea, something I had grown up with but something, say, our hero's twenty-year-old sidekick might not have. And watching Cosmos I also started, really for the first time, learning Science... and the history of science, which is Science... and History. But when I was growing up I hadn't learnt either. "History" was battles and numbers, and "Science" was... also numbers I suppose - no one spoke about ideas the way I watched Carl Sagan doing now, not quite looking at the camera, poetically, and... simply the voice,
which was wonderful and I found myself trying to do it. I'd find myself
narrating my life, running a bath, say: "Thuh simpul ackt uv...
turningonna tah pp... thuh wwwwater falling, theb ath fffffilling." It was lovely. I was hooked.
Speaking of Hooke, I spent three years of school studying Science in something
called The Robert Hooke Building, yet in all those three years nobody told me who Robert Hooke actually was. That's what I mean.
So I was hooked on Science now, and History, and Reality. Which was a bit annoying, because I was getting further away from... well, Doctor Who and B-movies and umbrella-headed aliens and robots, and what I thought I'd wanted to write about: the flip-side to this research. The daffy conspiracy theories on youtube on which I'd hoped to base the mythology for this universe: Illuminati, aliens, the Philadelphia Project, Tesla conspiracies, Osiris, esoteric anti-science, Alchemy, John Dee, that kind of thing...
"Jim Carrey is an Osiris Resonator." Prometheus was basically made for this man.
Doctor Dee: very interesting historically, and pertinent. Queen Elizabeth the First's Court Mathematician. Prospero was based on him. An alchemist, he was called the Queen's Conjuror. What he actually was though was very good at reading maps. Map-reading was a technology in its infancy. When Dee brought one of the first globes back to England, it was like Project X, an invaluable technological advantage that ensured his country's position as a Global Super Power. Shakespeare named a theatre after it, of course. And yet. in spite of his learning, what Dee really wanted was to be able to scry, which means communicate with angels through use of a mirrored surface. Yes, they have a word for that, and it's "scry". And he couldn't scry - I think for pretty obvious reasons.
This never happened.
Angels don't exist. But... for the purposes of this sitcom I thought it might be useful to have an angel exist, if only to give my hero the ability to travel through Time and Space in the first place. After all Magic is simply Science that... can't be bothered. And Science is the study of reality. And Art is the study of everything else.
Except the "reality" component of this research was actually killing my interest in Time Travel now because I no longer believed in it... I was watching a home video of life in the year 2000, and there we were in our twenties pissing around in a garden that was still viewable from my window, but I live next door now, and a family have moved in with a staffy that barks, and a massive trampoline. The garden in the video is gone, and watching what was going on behind me ten years ago, it was suddenly clear to me that the past was gone. Just gone. It's there in our heads and in what we own, but there's no reaching it. And I know we talk about wormholes, and four dimensions, but Time's a dimension we can only move forward in and it takes no energy to do so and it requires no force, so it's really not the same. Which is fine. Everything's closed and cosy in this finite universe, fine... Except I didn't believe in the central concept of what I had to write any more. Not being able to visit the past seemed far more interesting than visiting it, because it was true. I didn't know what there was to explore in an idea I'd dismissed unless, unless I could find a way to stop dismissing that idea by somehow working out a practicable method for our hero to travel anywhere in Time without cheating. I... Basically I had to work out how to travel through time. Backwards. Because we're obviously traveling through it forwards already. Or perhaps more accurately, downwards. It's called Waiting. And then... hanging out the washing in the stairwell I remembered the telescope, and the back of the head, and it suddenly occurred to me how you might be able to visit the past without having to travel backwards. All it would require is for Time to be cyclical as Space is, patience, and a Big-Bounce-proof container. In other words, the longest journey anything could make was a second into the past, because you had to go the long way round.
So it's looped. Here's Space/Time:
Here's Now - Zero - here's the line of numbers meeting round the back, positive and negative, future and past. That's what the universe - reality - looks like, let's say. Every answer to "How?" lies on that axis. Now where do we put the angels?
Well I was reading too. It wasn't all box sets. And in Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh, I learnt that while Dr. Dee was furiously trying to scry, another mathematician over in Italy - Rafael Bombelli - was inventing the number "i"... in italics... which is the square root of minus one... which is imaginary... which doesn't exist, but crucially is "necessary for completeness". Bombelli literally brought a whole new dimension to Maths. One that went up and down.
It met reality at Zero, which by definition doesn't exist. And everything from that point crept into some definition of being.
So here then was the Universe.
Along the x-axis: Time and Space and everything else that exists, carbon, eggs, the shops - I could go on.
And along the "imaginary" axis, and Maths calls it that so... everything else: Angels, God, and numbers of course, and Love. Which is necessary for completeness. And which of course is why scientists sound religious when they talk about Science.
Not because Science is an Act of Faith, but because Love is. And scientists love science.
And so do I. Thank you.
Carl Sagan's Cosmos is the best, by the way, and here.
