What we can learn from The Good Doctor

I know writers who will not watch 'reality' television under any circumstances believing it to be the bastard that steals food from their children's mouths. However, I would like to put another point of view.

I think writers should watch - and learn.

The most obvious case in point is ITV's "I'm A Celebrity..." and the incredible performances by "Dr" Gillian McKeith (she was told to stop using the title when it was discovered that she had bought her doctorate from a man called Dave who flogs them four for a vegan cracker down the pub). So far she has screamed every time anything has come within twelve feet of her; creepies, crawlies, bugs, people, water, the sky, rope bridges, food, smoke, boxes, a sense of irony... She has declared herself phobic of everything. The title of her own show is, You Are What You Eat - if that is true she must have eaten a shed-full of phobes.

The non-doctor has whined and fainted (though medics suggest we may have discovered a new kind of fainting here, the kind where you can pass out and still adjust your shirt whilst laying prostrate on the ground). She has irritated her colleagues in camp and worse; she has mangled the lyrics to James Brown songs. Let's face it, she is a quack, a nut job, a pathetic whining woman - and the kind of evil character that keeps viewers coming back for more.

Oh that we writers could create such monsters.

We may detest what the loathsome woman is doing but it keeps people engaged and isn't that what our characters should do? Schedulers love this stuff.

It shows we must be bold with our baddies. They can be the most irritating, whining, appalling, scheming individuals just as long as they get under our skin. Nothing new here you may say, I've given my baddie lots of layers of evilness. Ok, but is he/she a cliche? They don't all have to be gun-totting vampires with a taste for virgins and a plan for world domination.

Of course producers would wail if we all handed in scripts that contained blatant copies of the sniveling, red-nosed, Scottish phobic. They might even argue that creatures like this don't really exist. But they do and we have the evidence.

I'm not arguing for copies. What I am saying is if you want to create rich, multi-layered characters, learn from her.

What underpins her thinking?
What is her game plan?
How do the rest of us fit into her bizarre reality?

These kinds of questions reach out into our scripts and make the whole that much more interesting.

She might be TV's most deliciously conniving character since J.R. Ewing.

Of Fish and Hedges.

I've never met a writer who didn't obsess about some part of the 'how to' of our craft. It's in our nature. We worry about margins (every form of writing comes with its own set; radio is different from television, television is different from film and no-one quite knows what the industry standard is for plays because there isn't one - which is something else to worry about).

What the work looks like on the page is important and don't let anyone tell you different. A reader can pick up a script, flick through it and immediately tell if the writer knows how to format. I've heard execs say, it doesn't matter, I'll read anything - send it in on the back of a fag packet if it's good, it's good. I don't believe those stories.

You wouldn't buy a car if it looked like a bicycle, you wouldn't buy a fish if it looked like a hedge. Readers like to know what they're reading and, to be fair, there are so many How To books out there and so much formatting advice on the t'internet that you have no excuse to turn in a piece of work that doesn't look right.

A few months back someone asked me to read his script. I'm ten pages in and I'm thinking, this is wrong, this would make a much better radio piece when it suddenly struck me like the 9.05 to Paddington. How dim can you be; this IS a radio script. But when I'd opened it it was formatted like a TV sit-com, so that's what my eye told my brain to expect, and that's what I was reading it as.

If you've never seen a professionally written script and you want to be a writer - that's you and ten million others, so brace yourself for the rejection letters - search out one of the many script sites on the net and read, read, read. The more you read the more you'll understand what makes a good script, what makes a bad one. You'll also pick up how to format.

Make your fishes look like fishes.

Exaggeration atop hype atop a table

The X Factor, the annual search for a new pop star, piggybacked a show called Pop Idol onto TV and ever since the received wisdom has been, it's great entertainment for the masses and a terrific opportunity for young talented singers to become stars almost overnight. Except, for the most part, they don't. Go on, name all the winners since 2005, in order, along with their top ten hits. No, I couldn't either.

It's a juggernaut show for ITV and one that will run at least another three years - the length of Simon Cowell's new contract. Its supporters claim it's harmless entertainment, it's detractors point to the plastification of music. I wholly agree with the latter but having produced a fair few hours of mindless TV entertainment myself, I'm not averse to a little mindless pap.

I'll sit and happily pass judgment, 'that was flat', 'that was brilliant' (the latter after everything Rebecca has sung - what a great voice). I rage that the judges never manage to couch anything they say in musical terms, no-one is every behind the beat or flat in their comments. The closest they get is the occasional mention of 'tuning issues'. But this isn't the kind of show where anything real ever happens.

If I was producing the show, I'd be worried.

From the baying crowd to the judges power of continued participation, tears, tantrums, in-fights, extraordinary costumes and a PR machine that leaks (makes up) stories all week only to have Dermot O'Leary commiserate with the victims on Saturday, the whole thing is starting to seriously wobble under the weight of its own internal hype.

Hype is not dissimilar to excessive swearing in comedy routines. If your first joke contains half a dozen f-words you've not got anywhere else much to go for the rest of the set. If every element of the X Factor lays hype upon hype where is there left to go? The Set is bigger and better than every before, the lighting more dazzling, the entrance of the Gods, sorry, Judges is now a religious moment, the VT introductions cut faster with more and more clips and costume changes piled higher and higher and Voice Over Man is running out of hyperbole - "Five million this...." "Twenty billion trillion that". Christ. Where will it end?

This last week we saw the introduction of extra staging. The studio stage is now not high enough. Now the set designers need to place performers on higher and higher platforms. I lost count of the number of people standing on perspex rostrums. Soon no-one in the studio will be able to see the contestants and guest because they'll be hovering two hundred feet above the studio floor.

But I'll keep watching until somebody's head explodes.

Oh, and can someone please tell Louis Walsh that being a Diva isn't a good thing.

And the Dead Shall Inherit the Earth

In the movie 'Ed Wood' (the man voted worst director of all time) Bela Lugosi bemoans latter day monster pics ( the film is set in the 1950's). He says people don't want classic horror films anymore, now all they crave is "giant bugs, giant spiders, giant grasshoppers - who would believe such nonsense". I love the grasshoppers line.
In his view the old Gothic horror pics were much more potent because they were spookier fare, "They had castles, full of moons...and the women prefer the traditional monsters" Ed wonders why and is told, "The pure horror, it both repels and attracts them. Because in their collective unconsciousness, they have the agony of childbirth. The blood. The blood is horror".
The words of Bela Lugosi as imagined in the screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. It's a screenplay that reads beautifully and if you haven't seen the movie go find the DVD - but before you watch it hunt down a copy of Plan 9 from Outer Space, Wood's .45 magnum opus. It puts everything into context and underlines the truth in the Tim Burton film. Plan 9, being an Ed Wood movie, makes no sense - really, you may think you've seen films that made non sense, but believe me this is of a different order. The acting is beyond terrible, the script stinks, and the effects are laughable but what it does have is a kind of ridiculous amateur charm. What's more it got made. Wood had a passion for the movies and tricked and scammed backers to find the money to make them.

I'm not sure he ever realised he was so bad but this was a strange complicated man who, in the mid-fifties, was happy to put his transvestism up there on the screen in another of his pictures, Glen or Glenda. This movie contains two stories, one is of a man struggling to come to terms with his need to dress in women's clothing. The other is a story that swept the nation at the time - a man who had undergone a surgical sex change, Christina Jorgenson.
But woven between these not too disparate tales is an all-seeing puppet master played by Lugosi, pulling the strings of the struggling mortals. Lugosi is barely in the movie but got top billing whilst Ed Wood plays Glen/Glenda.



Lugosi's traditional monsters have come back into fashion, they are now not only on the big screen but the bread and butter of big budget television series. 'True Blood' has humans and vampires ( and various other creatures) living side by side. In the BBC's 'Being Human' vampires, werewolves and ghosts flat share. In The Walking Dead that nice bloke who was Egg in 'This Life' stars as a Deputy Sheriff battling Zombies. In the first two there is definitely a scary/funny dynamic on offer, in the latter Frank Darabont splashes plenty of blood and guts around and goes for all out shock. We're only two episodes into The Walking Dead as I write this so we'll have to see where it goes but the scary/funny route is one that keeps me - and many others - coming back for more. If the blood does it for the ladies, I think the blood and the wisecracks does it for the men.

Remind me...

A few years back I was presenting a mid-evening radio show when the station manager decided it was time to stay late and watch the thing go out. Now, mid-evening and successful are no words that go together well in radioland - but we'd tapped into a rich vein. No-one else on the station - in the region - was doing our kind of show; getting real people to tell extraordinary stories. I don't mean, "phone up and tell us something funny", funny was often what we got but our regular diet became tales that were gobsmackinly extraordinary. The emails came in the text machine went barmy, people wrote letters to the show. It was a joy. Said manager had always said she was a fan of the show but I soon discovered that all this was going on under the management radar. She asked what I' be doing that night and I said, the usual blank piece of paper and see what we got - plus our little competition. Oh, she said, remind me how that works. It was at that point I realised that she'd never heard the show. I'd done the same competition every night since we'd started.

Last week I had a similar experience only this time I was the one with egg on my face. A voice appeared on the telephone, it was a guy I'd met quite a few times but someone I didn't much care for - and I had no idea of his name. He wanted me to send him something. In my bid to get rid of him I agreed and asked for him to remind me how he spelt his surname. there was a pause and then he said: S_M_I_T_H.

Health and Safety

Where would the content of our drama series be if it had to adhere to British Health and Safety Laws? At dinner last night my good friend Marcus told us how Blu Tac has been banned from his university on 'health and safety grounds'. Apparently the act of putting up a poster with said blue sticky stuff could result in...paper cuts! I cannot tell you how loud I scream inside my head when I hear these nonsensical utterances from on high. The response, always measured, never loud or emotional, is to assure us that they are far from nonsensical and quite necessary as we seek to remove every possibility of accident from our lives.You might think them necessary, lads, but most of us out here on the rock-face think otherwise.
Obviously Health and safety regs abound on the shoot of a drama but imagine how those dramas might look if they were applied to the script:

• All fangs on True Blood shall be rounded off

• Zombies on Waking the Dead shall wear marshmallow teeth when gnawing other characters

• House may not carry that stick - or as we prefer to call it, the offensive weapon - as it could be used to accidentally trip, or cause to fall to the floor, other actors who may be in the general vicinity.
  
• Spikes on top of railings in Albert Square shall be sawn-off
• Beer in the Rovers Return shall be served in plastic tumblers
• Blood used in Casualty shall not be red in case someone on the show develops a real bleed, in future we suggest aquamarine or umber.

I listen to the spokespeople from the Health & Safety Executive pleading that it's all in the way their rules are interpreted - and I have some sympathy. I understand how the H&S laws save hundreds of lives every year, particularly on building sites, but why has the practical nature of these laws oozed out and infected everyone from window cleaners (sorry, you can't go up a ladder, use this long-handled brush) to University management who ban Blu Tac? What is even more frustrating is that we seem powerless to stop it.

Perhaps someone should write a series centered around the heroic figure of an H and S Official: "Reitman HS" He didn't need a Magnum .45 to clean up the city, a clipboard was enough.

And so we wave bye bye to Downton Abbey, ITV's blockbuster Sunday night costume drama. I have to admit, I was one of the eleven million (at its peak). As a reboot of the old LWT hit Upstairs Downstairs, it recreated a time when life was 'them and us', toffs and the servants, the upper and lower class. A hundred years ago you knew where your place was, none of this social climbing, I'm gonna be a celebrity nonsense. If the boot was on the back of your neck that's where it stayed.
My Grandmother was in service, a cook, though not at quite such a grand house as Downton. Her employer once admonished her for using too much fuel on the range. She replied, "Man nor fool can heat without fuel and I can't cook without coal" - I bet Julian Fellowes wishes he could come up with something as poetic as that. Fellowes script for Gosforth Park won him an Oscar, well done says I, but I've often wondered how much of Gosforth Park was there in the script and how much was created by Robert Altman. For me Gosforth Park shows a more realistic relationship between servants and toffs than Downtown Abbey.
Much has been made of the 'gaffes'; everything from a servant walking up to a Lady at a fair and asking 'how's your mother?' to landed gentry walking their dog across the estate on a leash - it would never happen. During a hunting scene a rider was on a coloured cob, which would only have been ridden by gipsies at that time. Last night the chauffeur ran up to Lady Sybil and patted her shoulder to get her attention. So often I found myself muttering, "that would never have happened" and yet enough of us have stayed tuned in to ensure the commission of the second series half way through the first.
I've heard it said that the simplicity of the storylines is the secret to it's success and you'd have to agree that the stories are pretty undemanding. Sometimes it's been like a connect the dots picture with four dots. But that can also be said of the 'comedy' drama The Darling Buds of May which occupied a similar place in the schedule in 1991. The UK was then going through hard times and Downing Street was so intrigued to know why the nation was so enamoured with The DBOM they asked Yorkshire TV for a set of tapes. Perhaps in times of austerity we need our stories to be black and white, goodies and baddies, the evil doers get their just deserts and the good guys come out on top.

Plus Sunshine.

If memory serves it never rained on Pop Larkin and I can't recall it ever raining on Downton Abbey. The time for stark realism is over - for now - what we need is more escapism, in posh frocks, under glorious blue skies.
That and zombies taking over America but more of The Walking Dead another time.

It's a fine line

I was flicking around, trying to find something to watch during a commercial break when I settled on an age-old episode of Steptoe and Son. Now, Galton and Simpson were two of the reasons why I wanted to write and Steptoe is absolutely their peak so I did what I always do when I find an old episode playing - I stayed with it and never went back to what I was originally watching. All that depth with just two men in a room. It does fly close to tragedy but always stays the comedy side of the line and still makes me laugh at loud. It's interesting to compare it to something that's just finished it's first series run - Whites, the Chef comedy starring Alan Davis.
Here is a comedy that spends most of its time working really well as a quirky drama. In fact, for me, it works best when it's a quirky drama, with AD's executive chef being dark and brooding, and less well when he has to do something 'comedic'. I like the characters, I like the situation, the writing is well observed and really nicely put together. I like it's production values - in fact I like the show - but I don't laugh out loud. I don't really smile much.
So, what do I like about it? I like it for its darkness - particularly the antagonistic relationship between chefs Scoose and Bib. But that's not what got it commissioned. I'll bet my house that no-one went in saying "We've got this dark vehicle for Alan Davis that concentrates its best efforts on two supporting actors..."

Why is British comedy working so hard at not making people laugh? I know the audience sitcom is out of favour but there is a place for it. I watch a lot of American TV, always have, grew up with it. My current favourite is the glorious Mad Men but I haven't missed an episode of Dexter or True Blood since they began and House is a regular treat. Before that I was a huge, huge fan of what David Chase did with The Sopranos and what Alan Ball did with Six Feet Under and before that ER - during the glory years - was unmissable. My breakfast viewing - controlled by the kids - is Everybody Loves Raymond and Frasier - which just might be the best sitcom ever but we can start a poll on that if you like. My point is, all these make me laugh out loud. Yes the sitcoms but also the dramas. They have moments that just make that uncontrollable sound burst from my body. So why can't a polished show like Whites do the same? I look forward to a second series - even darker if I had my way - but with more laughs. Let's start by not calling it a comedy, that might take the pressure off.

Some explaining to do

I guess I can't call my blog "Goat walking a tightrope" without some explanation. But before we cut to the chase let me just say that I am a working writer and sometime broadcaster and sometime TV producer who descends the stairs to my office each day to face the blank screen and flashing cursor that dares me to write something. I've written sketch comedy and sit-com and drama and for movies but every time I face that blank screen that little flashing cursor is a constant taunt. Go on, it's saying get started. You're a writer, write something. These days I desist. Not because writers hate to actually write anything, though I have spent hours putting off the moment, no, I wait because I've learned that the best stuff takes a while to ferment. So, now I research and get my story more or less straight before I start writing pages. That's the easy part - or at least it is for me. Once I start, once I know where I'm going I just put her in gear and off she goes. I don't analyze it, I don't understand where it comes from or how it works but it does. Just luck I guess, like the golfer Gary Player said, the harder you work, the luckier you get. That's certainly true as far as writing stuff goes - finding a home for it these days is becoming increasingly difficult.
Once upon a time you could sidle up to a producer in the bar, slip him a script and if he liked it you'd find yourself with a commission, maybe not for a series but certainly another script and possibly even a pilot. Not now. Now even getting read is a major coup, even for battle-hardened pros.
But what does this have to do with my blog title? About six months ago a buddy sent me a link to a youtube video of a Chinese Circus goat walking a tightrope. Immediately I typed out the words "A Goat Walking a Tightrope Isn't Enough..." and pasted them to the bottom of my monitor. They are there to remind me that however good I think my story is, however great I think my third or four draft is coming along it will NEVER be enough. So I keep polishing, keep twisting, keep thinking 'how can I make this better" in the hope that the next script that finds its way from my agent to a producer will be followed by a phone call.

But it still doesn't solve the problem of getting them to read it in the first place.