LOOK HOW HAPPY HE IS!
Wow! I've really played a game of chicken plugging this. Okay:
Time Spanner –
the thing whose progress I've been charting on this blog for the past ten years – finally had a pilot episode recorded in June which was then broadcast on Radio 4 a month ago, which means you now have just one day left to listen to it, sorry.
And look who turned up to the recording!
Ben Moor! Ned Mond! Julia, Joel, Jason, Katy Wix!
(Wedding photographer: Stephen Evans)
Has it really been ten years in the making?
This interview from September 2007 suggests not. Back then, I appear to be contemplating a vehicle for myself about a homeless wedding planner, but what I realised soon afterwards was that if I wrote that, then I would have to research wedding-planning, and I wasn't very interested in researching wedding-planning so went instead for this sort of cosmic/science-fiction/fantasy... You know
Doctor Who? That.
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 ever had for finishing a draft). Also present at that first draft was Gareth Edwards, who is now the producer of the show. I suspect Gareth experienced even more ups and downs trying to get this commissioned than I did; for me this was always a dream, and you're a fool to be disappointed if you don't get your dream, but Gareth managed it.
A lot of the "refining" John writes about on his blog was the result of conversations I had with Gareth both in emails and in person, not to mention the final audio edit, where a tenth of what was recorded had to be cut to meet the running time. I only know it was a tenth though by checking the original script. It doesn't feel like a tenth, because Gareth clearly cut the right tenth. It was also Gareth who suggested I call this other dimension "Heaven" rather than – as it stood in the 2010 draft – "Uberspace", sending the show off into a far richer direction than the original psychedelic kid's show pastiche I had in mind (although it's worth remembering how many of those shows... Ulysses 31, Space Sentinels, and in particular Monkey... felt no qualms about involving the ineffable). "Uber" didn't mean then what it does now by the way. Similarly, the choice of an unhinged, dictatorial, reality-television-starring property developer as the story's heavy seemed a lot more light-heartedly surreal back in 2010.
And here's a problem. Among the many exciting things comics were doing back in the eighties was refashioning Superman's arch-enemy Lex Luthor into a satire on Donald Trump. And it wasn't just Lex: by the release of Batman Returns, you couldn't budge for superheroes pitting themselves against wealthy philanthropists secretly trying to take over the world, all of whom provided the seed for Kraken.
So I still hope
Time Spanner gets a series. Of course I do. But what's funny has changed and so, just between you and me, I might have to rethink where it goes. That's the problem when you grow up reading surrealist apocalypic dystopia. But it's also exciting. Far worse for the fate of the show would have been if everything was now fine. And I'm still glad I didn't go with that wedding-planner idea. Shall we cheer ourselves up further by looking at more of Amanda Benson's lovely rehearsal photographs?
Here's our Kraken. I had asked for
Jon Hamm, but what are you going to do? It's worth mentioning that if it wasn't for David Mitchell I wouldn't be writing comedy at all (see that interview), and I certainly wouldn't have written this. In terms of getting the right people to pay attention, he effectively joined Gareth as midwife for the last two years of this thing's birth.
Returning for a second to Jon Hamm, I love the motto of
Mad Men creator Matt Weiner's: "Subtext is Pleasure". I was keen the dialogue in Time Spanner should also sound pretty natural, organic even, leaving as many jokes unsaid as possible, if that make sense, jokes that would appear more in the performing than in the reading. The problem with this, of course, is that commissioners don't perform scripts, they read them. They read them once, if that, and even if by some miracle they do correctly interpret every nuance and scripted fluff, the actors who end up having to perform the thing only get to spend an afternoon with it. There's no learning time, let alone rehearsal time – it's not bloody Shakespeare – and so the writer has to make it absolutely clear why people are saying what they're saying on that first read. It was David who suggested the blindingly obvious solution: stage directions. Here's a tiny example:
All David's ideas were good. Here I think he's suggesting John be given a stool...
And here he is holding a script in front of his face because the character he is playing is on the other side of a door. John, as Laika, is urging my character on. I, as Martin, am literally miming holding a cup of tea because I'm new to this...
Oh yes. That name. "Martin".
I wanted – as we all want – something basically normal but a little unfortunate. The words "Martin Gay" came up in conversation eight years ago and I thought: Oo, bingo! It wasn't until two years into drafting that I realised I'd plumped for exactly the same name John had already chosen for his own feckless sitcom hero in Cabin Pressure. This is why nobody in the episode ever actually addresses my character as "Martin".
London! Secret weapon. Gareth always said Gabbie was the key...
(Here's another indicator of how long ago I started writing this: I was writing for Laurence and Gus when I first thought of Gabbie, and Isy Suttie was in the cast and I thought she might make be a great fit, but by total coincidence she then went and got cast as the disarming new love interest in Peepshow, "Dobbie". That long ago)...
Auditioning actors for Gabbie might be the most grown-up thing I've ever done. Everyone we saw gave beautiful, intelligent readings, but London Hughes was unique in actually reminding me who Gabbie was. I don't mean she reminded me
of Gabbie. I mean she literally reminded me who the character was meant to be, and why Gareth was so right. She was the key. There has to be a surplus energy to Gabbie that, again, you can't really put into words, beyond the stage direction "enthusiatically" – an energy without which very little Martin does in this episode really makes sense. So we were very lucky with London. If you want more of her and of course you do, try
here.
Far right: B-Stew gets into the zone...
Belinda Stewart-Wilson took a porridge of archetypes and instantly made sense of it: Angel, yes, Muse, sure, but also Femme Fatale, Bell Dame Sans Merci, Cylon, Siri, White Witch... half of Tilda Swinton's CV actually... Philip K. Dick's VALIS, the Sorceress from He-Man, that female Buddha from Monkey, Bond's "M" and – if this is a rip-off Doctor Who – the Doctor. A character I was so nervous of pinning down she's referred to in the script throughout simply as "the Voice", Belinda took it all and simply made it sing.
And completing the team, second from left, the unweildily talented Jeremy Limb, from The Trap and music. You can hear his own science fiction comedy epic Event Horizon Crescent here. If Time Spanner is a baby, I always wanted Jeremy to be Godfather. In the Green Room before the recording, as final tweaks to my script were being made, it occurred to me how lucky I was to be in probably one of the best writers' rooms ever assembled, so thanks again to Gareth and to all the cast for keeping me company. And thanks to everyone who came to the read-throughs and played the roles and helped them exist a bit more. And thanks again to John Finnemore who always seemed to love this thing in all its forms. Which meant it was probably good. Which meant I stuck at it.
Have I missed anything? OH! THE LINK! Here.
(And you can like it on here too.)
((And also broadcast that same belated epiphany was Now The Twelfth Night Show, which I loved appearing in, and which you also have a day left to listen to.))
UPDATE: Someone has very usefully uploaded it to listen to whenever you like HERE.
