Head First Into Shallow Waters

‘You said that you only read the first ten pages of a script,’ said the woman whose head I could only see from the rear. ‘So, would it be okay if I made the font smaller?’

This was one of the better questions asked at the BBC’s Writersroom event but even this hammered me deeper into my seat and caused my right eyebrow to begin The Dance of Brutal Honesty.

I could feel it rising: the urge to say something monumentally arrogant. I could see myself standing up and launching into my best Peter Finch impression, shouting: ‘I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!’

But, thankfully, I wasn’t the one answering the questions. I was in the audience at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. Another prospective writer, or, as I increasingly saw it, another sick fantasy wrapped in a fragile ego wondering why the hell he’d travelled at that way.

Yet, too that point, the day had been going so well. I’d reacquainted myself with the best book shop in the North West: Blue Coat Books, which in my student days was housed in the Bluecoat Galleries but has now been relocated to Hanover Street. I had enjoyed the frothed ice of ‘summer berries’ in Waterstones, where I’d also bought Graham McCann’s book on four of the finest comedy writers of the twentieth century: Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, and Galton & Simpson. I’d then made the tiring slog up a hill I hadn’t trod in about four years and felt strangely nostalgic about the exhaustion.

I’d made that walk, from Lime Street to the University, for about a decade, only to find at the end of it that a doctorate in English Literature made me well qualified to despise criticism and critics. Wanting only to write, I’d quit the offered life of academic papers, lectures, tutorials, and marking, for the uncertainty of poverty, low self-esteem, and creative obscurity. I’d not been back to the University since.

Only, now I was back, I found I was being nothing but critical.

The truth is that I despise being around writers. Or, should I say, ‘would-be’ writers. I’ve worked with academics who have published dozens of books and, on the whole, they are flawed, troubled, and occasionally crazy. Yet they are also people that labour under no pretensions as to what they can or cannot do. They go about writing in a professional manner. It’s normal folk who take up the pen that worry me.

Aspiring writers tend to have a crazed look in their eyes, like dogs that spent their formative years with abusive owners and are damn sure that they’ll never be locked in another shed for another long hot Summer. The stench of desperation hangs on them like some primal musk. Everything is easy to them. Writing is not a struggle. They say things like: ‘I’ve got a script here, and one at home, and I finished one this morning, will write another this afternoon... Or do you want me to write something new?’

I felt ashamed to be among them. I could feel the eyes of the theatre staff on me, as though marking me out for special pity. ‘He thinks he’s a writer! Bless!’ And how could they think any different? Like every writer’s group I’ve ever attended, I end up surrounded by people driven by the post-Romantic urge to ‘express themselves’. These are those writers that gather in the local library on a Thursday morning and get their pictures in the free newspapers posted through our door.

‘Me and my friend are going to write a comedy’ asked some young girl at the back. ‘Do you want us to write the whole series first?’

‘Have you written the first episode?’ asked the professional script reader.

‘No, we’re just about to start.’

My other eyebrow began to dance. The opening act to a ballet was being performed above my nose and I knew it was going to end with a tragedy.

Then the guy sitting in front of me raised his hand to ask a question. On his lap: his script. The laminated cover had been reflecting the stage lights into my eyes for the whole presentation. His raised arm allowed me to see the title: ‘A Sample Script For “Doctors”’. He’d written his own version of an established show. But he wasn’t the only one.

A few moments later a hand goes up on the far side of the theatre: ‘Could I send you my script to “Eastenders”?’

Another person asked a question I didn’t hear but the reply suggested they’d asked about a show on Channel 4.

But by that time, I was all out of eyebrows. So my heart just sank. My heart sank and sank and sank.

Yet now I’m home, preparing for two days in my own private Manchester hell, I find that a quite different feeling is enduring about the event. In a perverse way, it has changed me.

I’ve always been hesitant about the purpose of the Writersroom. I’ve suspected it enabled the BBC to appear to be listening whilst going on doing their usual tricks of commissioning work from friends and those already inside the industry. The standard of BBC comedy is such that I’ve believed that no other explanation is likely. My recent attempts to write for ‘NewsJack’ has only increased my cynicism. I would have been happy if my sketches and one liners had been less funny than those broadcast but when I’m sure that my material is strong and still gets ignored, then I have to look for explanations. Perhaps I’m not funny. Perhaps my funny is not a mainstream funny. Did my work even get there?

Yet listening to head of the Writersroom North and the script reader, I did start to have faith in the system I had come to doubt. I believe they believed in the project and that belief now convinces me to believe a little bit more than I did before. I found that I wanted to ask questions, to beg for mercy before them, to say that I’m not like these people with their musicals set around the world of soft cheeses, the reheated episodes of Dr. Who, their questions already answered a hundred times on the Writersroom website. Yet I wouldn’t know what to ask. Not when others have more pressing issues to raise:

‘Can I include real music in my script?’

‘Does it have to look like a script?’

Somebody wise once said: writers write. To which I would add: would-be writers ask stupid questions about fonts.