Originality Is Non-Existent...

The great film-maker Jim Jarmusch said: ‘Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Authenticity is invaluable, originality is non-existent’.

And for those of us digging at the creative chalk face that's true. Each vein we hit seems to be one that someone has plundered before. We can barely work any idea without getting that feeling that 'I'm sure I've seen this somewhere...'. Which is of course the moment when we have to stop, down pen, cease clicking the keys and reassess our stories.

However much we attempt to wallpaper over the cliches once you hit Cliche Town in a script the streets start clearing, the viewers click away.

And yet to see some drama  and comedy on TV these days you'd almost imagine it was the writer's job to deliver a succession of tropes and lines so worn down they are smooth from the pounding. Why is that? I refuse to believe any writer goes in with a notebook full of hackneyed ideas. Heads of This and That tell us - demand - that it is the new and fresh stories that get bought. My arse. If one channel has something the other channel wants one just like it - and then they tell us their product is nothing like the other. Denial. Don't believe them. Remember, people who run television don't watch it. Oh, they get across a landmark series by watching bits, but they don't watch like a viewer watches. Too many spread sheets and number crunchers.

But original programmes do get through, escape the searchlight beam of Stalag Mediocre, climb the fence and break out into the world. Once there they are cheered and applauded for being different - until someone then decides they want one just like it, and so it goes.

The Danish political drama Borgen may not be original - you can argue The West Wing got there first - it may have taken some inspiration from other political dramas but it has a kind of authenticity that I love. I have no experience whatsoever of Danish coalition politics yet this show grabbed me in the first half hour of episode one. I believe the country is run by four people and Danish television news is staffed by six. Doesn't matter, it was real. By the end of episode ten I was completely hooked.I can't wait for series 2.

How can a tiny country like Denmark with a small population, a tiny pool of actors, writers and producers suddenly be showing the sharks in the infested waters of UK and American television how to do it?

That is what I - and I'm sure many others are unpicking at the moment. But if we unpick it and use it it won't be original.

In the meantime for those who hark to the hackneyed, the unbelievable and the resolutely cliched there is a drama, in it's third series on British TV, that shows, for some, originality is non-existent: Whitechappel. It began with a good idea and is now so far down the road of implausibility it is hilarious to watch - if you can bare to watch at all.

Happy Birthday Mr Dick

Charles John Huffam Dickens is two hundred years old today. Well he isn't, patently, no-one is meeting him down the pub for a few pints before going out clubbing. He may have shuffled off his mortal coil in 1870 but today anyone who remains in the consciousness the way Dickens does after two hundred years has to be special. He remains the most revered novelist of his time.

But do we read him?

Over Christmas the BBC presented us with another version of Great Expectations to go with the many other versions of Great Expectations that have gone before. A Christmas Carol remains an all time favourite for many people but have they read it or have they seen one of the many film versions or the the stage musical, or the updated Bill Murray comedy 'Scrooged'?

Everyone knows the story of Oliver Twist but does our knowledge of the story come from watching the film or TV adaptations (the last one was so politically correct I could barely watch). Then there was Bleak House, have you read it or did you seen the brilliant Andrew Davies adaptation of a few years back.

Just a couple of weeks ago the last unfinished novel, The Mystery Of Edwin Drood,  found its way onto TV with a very plausible ending - though I doubt it was the one Charles Dickens had in mind. Very good it was too. But have you read it?

What I'm saying is the majority of those of us who say they love Dickens do so because of the films and television adaptations not because we've all been busy reading the books.

I was given A Christmas Carol and David Copperfield as an eleven year-old boy. I devoured the former and struggled through the latter. Not because Copperfield is particularly impenetrable but because my Dickens novels came printed on flimsy paper in a font so small it was almost impossible to read more than half a page at a time before going blind. I struggled on, through Great Expectations, later Middlemarch and Bleak House - but that it's. I saw Harry Secombe in 'Pickwick'. I saw Ron Moody as Fagin in Oliver. I've seen loads of Dickens but I've only read a few.

My son found him almost impossible to read - and he reads a LOT. Yet his stories survive and work so well when dramatised. I've a notion he'll be around - and relevant - for another two hundred years but I'm not so sure it'll be because people are reading him.

Call The Nostalgia

With politicians from all sides sniping at him Conservative Prime Minister John Major didn't exactly have an easy time in the top job. His cabinet was split on Europe - and other things - he referred to those on his side of the house who were ganging up against him as 'bastards' (I'm sure many a Prime Minister has uttered the same words, but with Major we got to know about them). ITV's satirical masterpiece 'Spitting Image' depicted him as a grey man who wore his underpants on the outside. It was a time when Politicians were thought of as the scum of the earth - not unlike now. It was a time of gloom, crashing financial markets, soaring interest rates.
Against this background a television show captured the public imagination. Simple stories simply told. The darling Buds of May offered weekly tales about Pop and Ma Larkin and their numerous offspring, nothing too demanding, nothing too funny, nothing overly dramatic and yet this confection appealed to viewers in their millions. Huge audiences sat down to watch The Darling Buds of May each week. But why?
Downing Street, never very up on what's on the telly, sent for the tapes. Surely there could be something in this show they could tap into.

But Darling Buds was froth. There was nothing the spinmeisters and statisticians could get a grip on.

Yes, it had 'Del Boy', David Jason fresh off the success of Only Fools, yes it had a very pretty Welsh actress, Catherine Zeta Jones, in her first major role but what was at the heart of the formula. How could the politicians tap into this mix?

My theory about Darling Buds has always been nostalgia and sunshine. It tapped into an England that barely ever existed but one that we all love the notion of. And the sun shone, 99% of the time.

Skip forwards to 2012. A coalition government, headed by a Conservative Prime Minister, beset by Euro sceptics and unloved by the great unwashed. Austerity abounds, times is tough, we live under the shadow of a world going to hell in a handcart.

What are people watching in the millions? A Sunday night drama about bicycle-riding Midwives working in the East End of London in the 1950's - who live with Nuns. 'Call the Midwife' doesn't depict anything too dramatic, nothing too demanding, yes, there's a sprinkling of humour - but not too much and not much in the way of sunshine. But the nostalgia card is a powerful thing. Instead of sunshine we have babies.

In times of trouble we like to look back not naval gaze. Downing street won't need to send for the tapes this time. They can watch on the BBC iPlayer - and wonder how they can tap into the shows success.

Bad Boss III - They're Taking Over The Asylum!

My thanks to David Kursey, the well known radio broadcaster and pseudonym for this tale, which he will tell in his own words. His boss, on hearing that they'd booked actor John Challis for his show, came up with some ways to make the interview 'non-standard’:

"Now I’m a great admirer of Only Fools and Horses, and my views on it are strong. I rate the early ones best because they’re gritty and real. The storylines are funny in the middle years, and some of the incidental characters really come into their own. But I have a firm belief that John Sullivan should have said “no” the minute popular culture reduced his Peckham to just another Christmas tradition. Trigger became too thick to be real or funny; Mickey Pierce surely wouldn’t still be wearing that hat?... John Challis was there throughout, so this was a good opportunity for me.

My co-host had never seen an episode. (That’s a story for another day.) So the boss decided to motivate…

“You must know it – you know, Del Boy… in the market… wears a hat.”

No.

“Anyway, I think you should split this interview into two parts. For the first five minutes you should interview him as Boycie.”

Oh God.

“Then, after five minutes, reveal that he’s actually John Challis and ask him about what it’s been like to play Boycie: does he get recognised, that sort of thing.”

Oh GOD.

I tried to use the situation to my advantage and asked how, if only one of us knew the series, we could both probe John Challis in character.

“Ask him about the bar… You know… when he fell through the bar. Everyone’s seen that.”

Me: “But he didn’t fall through the bar.”

Bad Boss: "Yes he did – someone opened the bar and he went to lean on it and…”

Me: “That was Del. That was David Jason.”

Silence.
 
“But wasn’t he with him when he fell?”

“No – that was Trigger. That was Roger Lloyd-Pack…”

Silence.

“How about asking about the beard?”

“Uncle Albert – played by Buster Merrifield. Now dead.”

Silence.

“Well, you have to remember you know the series better than most of the audience. I’m sure you can make it work.”

We did. I did. We spoke to John Challis, the actor who’d taken the most insignificant of roles and turned him into an essential part of one of the nation’s best loved sit-coms – probably one of the most instantly recognisable figures in British comedy.

At least to some".



The door is still open for any more Bad Boss stories. 

Birdsong Strictly For The Birds

Over the past two Sundays I invested three hours of my life watching a camera move in ever so slowly on the face of a man who didn't have a lot of luck. By my reckoning he died at least three times during this show. It felt like I'd died many more times.

The BBC's attempt to bring Sebastian Faulk's Great War novel 'Birdsong' to life left me wishing the idea had been tossed into a muddied trench of its own. Abi Morgan (The Hour arrrrggggghhhhhh) adapted the book and decided on a structure that ran two time streams in parallel; Stephen Wraysford's affair with the married Isabelle and his subsequent time spent in the trenches. She elected to discard the other time-line from the book - wisely - that brought the story into the 1970's.

Two time lines were enough, in fact often too much. Just as you were getting your teeth into one story it skipped back - or forward - to the other. We never spent enough time with either to properly get to know the people or what was at stake.What is the one thing we all know? Structure is everything, get that wrong and everything is thrown out of kilter.

Money had been thrown at this. Mucho grande moolah. Crowd scenes of hundreds featured hundreds of real people, no cgi here. The battle scenes were impressive, as were the trenches, this was a production that screamed attention to detail.

But the pace!

If I never see another slow zoom I will die a happy man.

I enjoyed Eddie Redmayne's performance in My Week With Marilyn and when I saw he was heading this cast I was interested to see what he did with the character of Wraysford. What he did was stand very still - a lot - and show no visible emotion at all - a lot. This shot was repeated over and over again whilst a piano theme evolved very slowly beneath.

Yes, the summer sunlight captured in the pre-war scenes was very pretty, as was Clemence Poesy as Isabelle, the fine lady who gives up everything for a clerk. But even this story wasn't properly developed. One minute they are touching ankles in a punt and the next they're bonking while her old man is in Paris. When they run away together they have a brief moment in in the sun but then she breaks the handle on their last cup and their relationship is doomed. We discover later why she really leaves him. But a bit of nicely lit bonking doesn't really convey the emotions of the pair. Wraysford may say she was the the only women he had ever loved but all he does is gazed in to the middle distance with a stupid look on his face.

Pace is a tricky beggar. But this made that other slowly paced show 'Mad Men' seem like it is cut by The Editor Supreme at MTV. There has to be a reason to take things ultra slow. This just made me frustrated and uncomfortable.

If you hadn't read the book chances are you wouldn't have picked up on many of the themes. The characters aren't really people but representations of a changing world. Hence Isabelle, who represent all things beautiful, is literally scarred by the war and is never the same again. 

I know how she feels.

I need to watch something that rip-roars along at a mighty pace, just to rid myself of the feeling of torpor I was left with .

Great 'Bad Boss' Story II

Having written about the Bad Boss who told his producer to "Stop bringing me ideas!" I have been passed a number of other such tales.

Such as:
The Radio station boss who told one of his presenters that time checks were more important than anything else he did...

...the TV producer who told a director lighting was the least important thing to worry about...

...the manager so up his boss's ass that when said boss told him budgets had to be cut and he needed to lose staff he kept his tame monkeys and fired the writer and director - and had no show...

And this little beauty, which concerns an experienced producer of a radio phone in show:

Having spent years putting together sparkling radio shows a new boss arrived. The producer was no longer left to their own devices, each day the topic had to be checked with the boss-man to make sure the subject was to his liking.

Each day the producer would come up with good lively suggestion only to have those topics squashed and replaced by something more aligned to the day's news - but so stale that few listeners were prompted to phone in. After weeks of this the phone-in had all but dried up. The producer complained, only to be told that if they did it the producers way they'd have too many calls.

Any more bad boss stories gratefully received.

A Great 'Bad Boss' Story

Last week I was working with a friend on some TV shorts. She told me a great story that had me open mouthed, speechless and angry all at the same time. Just thinking about it makes me want to  kick ass.

This concerned a boss she worked for at the BBC. Now the hallowed halls of the dear old Beeb are not quite as hallowed as once they were. Neither are all the positions of power staffed by the keenest minds. Cascading down from on high you eventually hit a seam of people who never got beyond 'a little bit of power'. However, some of these people wield it like they're Louis B Mayer but without the insight or sensitivity.

Being a creative force my friend kept taking him ideas until one day, unable to cope with her creative flow, he said these words:

"Will you please stop bringing me ideas. With you it's one after another. We have an ideas meeting on a Wednesday, you know the rules, everyone is allowed ONE IDEA. And I don't want to hear any more from you until you've seen the last idea all the way through".

If she didn't know before that she had to move on - she did - this was the moment that cemented it.

"Will you please stop bringing me ideas!"

In the parlance of the young OMG, WTF. In a creative industry those words should be a sackable offence.


Apparently he is still in the same job. Dear God.