Notebookery 8 (2014ish)

 This notebook might explain why the last one was so neglected. No page is blank, although none are so handsome as in the green book. Anything I worked on from 2014-ish onwards, I suppose, was worked on a little in this, including a theory I'd completely forgotten about, that Arthur Conan Doyle invented the language of cinema (I admit it's possible authors may have been pointing out what characters saw even before Sherlock Holmes.) There's also a little more Time Spanner material, a sketch for a Ulysses 31 knock-off comic that Martin Gay might have tried to sell in school (obviously based on Power Socket), and lines from later episodes that would never be said. All opinions are the characters' own. (Click to enlarge.)

Notebookery 7 (2012, 2017, etc.)

 I think I bought this when I decided that I was definitely going to try to write Time Spanner, preferably in this. Maybe it was too unweidly because as with yesterday's offering it turns out to be mainly empty and therefore still technically in use. The year 2012 appears on one page, along with a few sketches of characters from The Trap's Event Horizon Crescent, which I was listening to a lot at the time in New Zealand. The year 2017 appears on another page. I don't know why. I also don't know why it's this shape. (Click to enlarge.)

Today I'd Like to Remoan About Hostile Environments

 Hi. Twitter Simon here, beginning to wonder if the fall in (aways mild) abuse I receive when sticking my nose in might have anything to do with the new profile picture. I'd love it if people thought I was actually a lawyer from. Who wouldn't love being mistaken for a lawyer?

 NO FURTHER QUESTIONS etc. But why was this headlining my twitter side-bar last night? What even is "Nine News"? Ever since I read, a couple of months ago, that a Trump mega-donor had bought a "sizable stake" in the site, I've become very threat-level-whoah-now about what the site promotes. So, when I returned from last night's quiet walk to see #londonriots trending, I checked the hashtag, and indeed most tweets accompanying it were also wondering why it was trending, as there hadn't been any riots. I did also see footage of the anger in Whitehall. Sure. But I'd witnessed that before, any weekend over the last two years in which I'd been down to do a bus tour, and the Brexiters had had one of their "marches" – not marches so much, as a crowding into the Wetherspoons as early as possible to drink and drink and wander around with a flag and hurl abuse at buskers, looking for fun, or a fight, or a fun fight – and I would stand there, hoping that London might be a cure for this, and that these racists – I saw their banners and I saw their caps, these were racists – would see how alone they were. 

 But anyway, yes, I saw last night on twitter yesterday's outnumbering of the police outside Downing Street, and I saw some commentators express "boggled minds" that this "brutality" was in response to a shooting on another continent, and I tappity-tapped, in my little lawyer's wig, a reminder to those commentators just what Downing Street had been up to for the past four-years-plus: the Windrush scandal, the "Go Home" vans, "pickaninny smiles", "letterboxes", and the much discussed "hostile environment", and I hoped – again, hoped – that these protests might illuminate what that blithely bandied-about phrase "hostile environment" actually meant, and how instantly intolerable everyone should find it. Here's another hostility:

 

 "Ending freedom of movement". And a Union Jack.  

  As I wrote on Monday (okay, Tuesday morning) us pinky grey men never really have to think about "freedom of movement". I suspect this tweet knew exacty what it was doing though. Division aways benefits the Right, which might be why so much government messaging seems purposefully designed to ruffle liberal feathers, but while I still believe Fascism Thrives On Division, and while I still suspect the PM – and definitely POTUS – would rather see a civil war than their own resignation (for the same reason Hans Gruber blew up the Nakaomi Tower), I'm also very happy to see pressure applied, proper pressure, because no police officer was charged with anything relating to the killing of George Floyd until people marched. 

 Also, I'm not sure what we're seeing here is Division. I hope. After the December election, I decided to turn this blog into a Politics/Anxiety tag-free zone, because the increasing shittiess of all things seemed such a given, I wanted to spare anyone who came here any more of it. Also, I still had plans for a series of Time Spanner in which an avatar of the demiurge – President Guff Goofy – declared a zombie apocalypse, saying "you know who the zombies are", and I was saving up my politial anxiety for that. But that was six months ago, and now there feels something like a tugging at the monolith, slow work, but potentially effective, an awakening of care, which I find invigorating, and it needs to be kept up. So, I remain a remoaner. 

 I looked up what I'd been doing during the last #BlackLivesMatter protests in 2015. I'd voted for Corbyn. Again, I'd been hoping for an awakening of care, but we know how that turned out – care became discredited, and those who'd spent their entire political lives attempting to orchestrate a more just environment became associated with bullying and intolerance. So this probably does have to be led from the bottom. And, while I have Santa's knee, I'd also quite like a government intent on kerbing the manipulation of democracy through online misinformation, rather than one led by gamers seeking to become a world leaders in it. That seems another fair demand. 

 And finally, here is my favourite twitter interaction for a while. Elizabeth Jackson's not cowed by a wig. It's important to remember this is also an option.

TIMESPANNER BONUS MATERIAL: Trouser Bar Rabbit Hole

 The Dan In the High Castle was repeated today on Radio 4 Extra, so here's a fun game you can play that's vaguely related. I enjoyed playing it anyway. Above is the Radio Times review from when the show made Pick of the Day, and I'm fine with David McGillivray's reservations; it was only the second episode of anything I'd ever written, and there aren't that many ways to interpret the commissioning of a second pilot two years after the first. I'm very grateful though to those who stood up for it, including the fair Finnemore:

 But it was the following comment from David Cairns that set me on the path from which there could be no turning: "An indifferent review from the author of FRIGHTMARE. Praise from Caesar!" Now I hadn't heard of FRIGHTMARE but that wasn't too surprising; David C has a knowledge of film bordering on the Forbidden, having made it his mission to watch every single film illustrated in Denis Giffiord's Pictorial History of the Horror Movie. So here's the trailer...

 That's a hell of a font. I went and looked up McGillivray's wikipedia entry (which I'd like to think he had a hand in writing himself) and was instantly enamoured to find a stalwart who'd worked at the coalface of British smut. Living, breathing history: "House of Whipcord", "Satan's Slave", "I'm Not Feeling Myself Tonight", "The Hot Girls" (Not "Hot Girls", mind... "The Hot Girls".) These titles seemed almost specifically designed to wind up on a list. So I drew John's attention to the man's achievements, and John in turn drew my attention to this...

 It was not Kofi Annan. And I was not disappointed. But it was a surprisingly uneasy thing to google. So that's the game. Happy hunting!

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.

TIMESPANNER INITIAL MATERIAL

... 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.

TIMESPANNER BONUS MATERIAL: How not to recap.

 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:

GABBIE                           Cool. But get some shoes. And not dinner lady shoes like you had.

MARTIN                          Brilliant! Yes! See you at six.

GABBIE                            (Cautiously) Cool. (Departing) Happy Birthday! Aww, thanks for stopping…

MARTIN                          This is a good idea.

ANGEL                            The shoes?

MARTIN                          Well I need shoes ideally, but – I mean if it starts raining, say – No, buck up, Martin! I need shoes.

ANGEL                            What happened to your shoes?

MARTIN                           Okay, 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 –

ANGEL                             Yes! Specifically that it wasn’t Hitler!

MARTIN                           Or if it was, that it was an accident –

ANGEL                              No! It was that it wasn’t Hitler.

MARTIN                           Sure, 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 –

ANGEL                             The 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!

ANGEL                             And the shoes?

                                         Pause.

MARTIN                         Oh, 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:

 

LAIKA                              The 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.)

Wanna feel old? Today was two years ago!

That's just Vauxhall.

I won't keep you long, this is just to confirm that "The Dan In the High Castle" - THE SECOND TIME SPANNER - is finally available to listen to here! And the first one's still listenable to here! (Thanks Kate, whoever you are.) Why not fill your ears with both and feel lush?
A bigger write-up about the new one to follow, but in the meantime I hope you enjoy it, I hope it's the one you wanted, you know, I hope 2018 hasn't completely killed you, and I hope that everyone reading this has a merry, merry VERY CHRISTMAS!

Thanks this Kate too!

Post something, you idiot, it's nearly May!

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.

 

 

Anything else? Oh flip! Yes! WE'RE STILL GOING ON TOUR! As you were.

Share and Enjoy

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.