Talk To Rex

Anyone watching our latest offering is probably sitting there wondering: are sitcom writing rooms really like that? Do people sit around all day and fling insults at each other while the producer gradually goes out of her mind? Can interns really not open jars of coffee? Is photocopying quite such a dangerous activity?

To be honest, we were never entirely sure while writing it. Sure, we had plenty of experience of uncomfortable writing rooms for stage shows; we’d heard tales from deep within the bowels of the BBC, incidents that were spoken of in hushed tones, with furtive glances to see who was looking. And I once injured myself on a Xerox machine back in 1993.

But that’s the UK. Thanks to the wonder of the Internet, people as far away as Australia have been watching. People in Canada. People in America. And that got us thinking: America has sitcoms too, and they have sitcom writing rooms as well – they’re famous for it, in fact, as the principal way that TV comedy gets written in Hollywood. Surely their rooms aren’t nearly as dysfunctional as we’d made ours to be. But how could we ever know?

Enter Ken Levine, blogger, Talkradio 790 KABC host, oh and Emmy-winning sitcom writer. Some time last year, he got together with Day O’Day, blogger and expert on Personality Radio (seriously: check his website), and between them they run this thing called The Sitcom Room.

Now I’m not suggesting I flew all the way to Los Angeles, camped out in a hotel for nearly 36 hours, ate reasonable Chinese food (it was advertised as bad Chinese food, but frankly I was disappointed), met some great writers, and stayed up afterwards talking American politics until gone midnight – I’m not suggesting I did all that just to find out whether Hollywood writing rooms involve protracted discussions of pheasants. But since we had to do that research, I sure as hell wasn’t going to put the other James through all that crap. I mean, come on: he’s got delicate skin. It’s entirely possible that California would kill him.

The format was pretty simple. At the start, we spent half an hour chatting and vaguely getting to know people. During this time, Ken and Dan were watching carefully to ensure that we’d later be paired up with precisely the people we talked to the least; to facilitate this piece of admin, Ken talked for two or three hours ahead of lunch, giving us some useful background and tips, punctuated by anecdotes and his hatred of a certain scumbag talent agency. Up till then it was pretty much like any other writing seminar you might imagine, only without air conditioning. Then some actors came in and did a fairly bad scene, with the 20 of us trying to keep up putting crosses through the jokes that didn’t work in the script.

Then off we went in our teams to rewrite the scene in twelve hours, with a list of studio and network notes (some of which contradicted each other, and some of which made no sense and bore no obvious relation to the scene at all; Ken made a point of being very polite about studio and network execs, but if these notes were at all representative I suspect that’s down to tact more than anything).

In the room: I was clearly being passionate about something, although I can’t remember what. Actually, one of the most interesting things that happened, which a lot of people commented on, was that you quickly lost sight of who came up with different jokes, different ideas. Despite this, people would get incredibly worked up over particular things: this joke, that story beat, whether we were going to like a character if it appeared he might be fleeing the country to avoid being implicated in the death of an innocent dance teacher. (I was guilty of worrying about the last… and I was wrong.)

The following day, our four totally different takes on the scene were performed for us, letting us see real actors tackle what we’d come up with. I guess for many people, particularly people starting out writing, this would be incredibly helpful; I’ve at least had that experience before, but it’s still the only way to test whether something works. And they did work, all four of them, much to everyone’s relief.

You can read Ken’s own write-up. We had the mirror. We also had the Hitler joke.

Was it worth it? Absolutely. Besides the fun of meeting new people, writing, and seeing your work performed (because let’s face it: I can get all that without travelling five thousand miles), it gave me conviction that I want to keep doing this, and do it more; and the confidence that I’m good enough to. Getting started in writing involves a fair amount of sitting on your own waiting for the words to come, and it’s not always clear during those YouTube breaks if you’re heading in quite the right direction, or if there’s going to be anything there when you arrive.

If I could have got more out of it in any way, I think it would have been that during the writing my group could have asked Ken more questions, and maybe got his input on what we were doing. As it was, whenever he turned up we just acted a bit like naughty school children. “Everything going okay?” “Yes, it’s all fine.” “Nothing you want to tell me about? No petty larceny, or dead bodies, or lengthy discussions about the relative merits of the sexual organs of different animals?” Admittedly part of that was because of an early visit where a small bombshell was dropped on us (the details of which are sealed under a vow of secrecy) and we had to throw away some of the work we’d done – so every time either Ken or Dan came in after that we were worried they’d announce that the network wanted to replace the entire thing with a musical.

Right at the end, after the read-throughs, and after we’d all had a chance to have another go over our scripts, a few other show-runners came in and talked about their experiences over the years. Despite the impression given by Ken’s post, and one or two of the comments from people who weren’t actually there, this wasn’t a big part of the weekend, but it was useful in its own way (although, I suspect, the sort of thing you could get in some form or another at other seminars and industry courses), and of course contained a load more stories about the sorts of things that go on in a Hollywood writing room.

Although I’m still not sure how much they talk about pheasants.

…it is clear from the “before” and “after” images here that Scotch Beef is actually HUMAN FLESH!!!

So he had a great quality of life and from the looks of things modelled for the Edinburgh Woollen Mill – but that doesn’t make it right!

Paul McCartney wonders why the other Beatles wouldn’t let him release a tape of them dicking around.

That’s because it sounds shit, Paul. The other Beatles were right.

Mind you, it would probably hold its own against Standing Stone. Certainly it would be more bearable than Mull of Kintyre. But I doubt it would have the finesse of the frog song.

What is it about the new “pasta hut” advert that just makes me think of starving orphans…?

After the embarrassing farrago which was the BBC’s adaptation of Oliver Twist last year, it is a relief and a delight to see that the Beeb can still do Dickens properly. Though not quite as perfectly crafted as Christine Edzard’s Little Dorrit, the BBC’s current offering is a masterclass in TV adaptation, and has the Dickensian balance between comedy and tragedy just right. Plus some really good performances, not just from reliable stalwarts like Tom Courtenay (who is mesmirising), but also from surprising areas – who knew Russell Tovey could act? That absurd Welsh one off Torchwood is really rather good! As is token ethnic Doctor Who girl Freema Catalogue!

But a gripe (and you knew I’d have one): what is it with TV serials having so little confidence in the actual content of the episode that they have to show you what’s going to happen in the next one to entice you back? The now-obligatory “coming soon” segment, which used to be more the kind of thing you got on Richard and Judy, now sits as a huge great spoiler at the end of every episode of everything.

Okay, I understand that series using the 45-minute single episode format can no longer rely on a juicy cliffhanger to woo viewers back for the next instalment, which is why the likes of Merlin and Doctor Who give you a taster as a matter of course. The downside to this is that they tend to show you the best bits to make the next week’s episode look much better than it really is, so every episode is invariably a big disappointment (invariably a great big mammoth disappointment in the case of Merlin).

But that’s not what I’m complaining about. I’m complaining about being shown the content of the next episode when you have been given a juicy cliffhanger, when you are sitting on the edge of your seat waiting to see what happens next. It’s a bit rubbish when a little teaser gives it all to you before you’ve had a chance to enjoy the anticipation.

When the revived Doctor Who first gave us a two-parter it fell right into this trap: Aliens of London gave us a suitably thrilling climax in which we saw the Doctor being killed – yes, killed! – then on rolled the caption “coming up” and we saw the Doctor running around chasing aliens in the next episode. So, oh, he wasn’t dead after all.

Since then the production team have got wise to that problem and started showing what’s coming up after the credits – and I believe in the last series they removed that bit altogether from some two-parters, which at least shows some confidence in the strength of their cliffhangers (even if, typically, the resolution was often a great big mammoth disappointment).

So why on earth can’t Little Dorrit do the same? It’s a grand adaptation which sets up huge Dickensian cliffhangers and there have been no disappointments so far – so I wish they’d stop telling me what’s coming up and let me watch the credits. As it is I feel the need to hastily switch off to avoid spoilers, which means that I don’t know what the theme music sounds like. These things bother me.

Coming up in the next blog entry: a rant about something and the word “mansuetude”!

Thomas Friedman writes an op-ed column in the New York Times yesterday asking how could these companies be so bad for so long? Although I think he’s hugely mistaken if he thinks Steve Jobs could turn around GM in a single year (the iPhone took around five years from what I’ve heard), the rest of it’s well worth reading if you’re not already bored by this.

The ongoing collapse of the US automotive industry – or rather, their automotive royalty, the Detroit-based Big Three – is an incredible opportunity to move the US forward, which President-Elect Barack Obama won’t take. He should take the opportunity to shore up massive adult education programs, retraining the people who will, without question, lose their jobs at some point over this issue; and he should let the companies live or die on their own merits, cushioning the impact for their employees rather than injecting money – be it loans or direct investment – into an industry which has problems that started long before the current financial crisis, and while exacerbated by it are not rooted in the same issues facing the rest of the economy. By doing nothing for the companies, Obama might be letting the most obvious US car manufacturers perish, although that is unlikely (Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code was created to provide a way out for companies without short-term viability but with longer-term prospects). However he would not be killing the US automotive industry, and the companies that survive – including Aptera and Tesla – would come out stronger and more able to compete in the long term.

The problem he has is that it doesn’t play well at home to let giants of industry, and mainstays of national culture, go under during the current climate. If the economy weren’t in the state it was, it wouldn’t be imperative to consider bailing out three companies that are losing to their foreign competition. But right now, Americans will clamor for their government to help domestic industries other than those on Wall Street, and Obama will not want to risk going into his Inauguration with a significantly lower approval rating than he has on the back of his election victory. Although at the moment his transition team (in the voice of Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel) seems to be recommending loans rather than a bailout, with the rhetoric coming out of the companies themselves and the automotive workers unions, it is difficult to see how the President-Elect will be able to stick this course as the situation continues to worsen for an industry which directly or indirectly employs up to 3% of America’s workforce.

The thing is, most industries are completely unlike the financial sector. If America’s banks had started folding up like used napkins then everyone would have felt it, in a major way: businesses and people depend on banks for capital, particularly in difficult times. And if savings and deposits had started disappearing, this would have further accelerated loan foreclosures, business foreclosures, personal bankruptcies: you name it. Other industries would have fallen, and so the US government (like others around the world) really had no choice but to step in and do something; the issue was always what, and what the taxpayer would get in return.

However if GM, Ford and Chrysler fold then the knock-on effects, while not small, won’t take down untold other industries; companies and individuals that buy or loan their products could switch to other manufacturers. In any case they won’t fold: they may enter Chapter 11, allowing them to restructure, prune and refocus; or they may be bought out by other auto manufacturers, which is what happened to the UK car industry, as Don Pittis points out in his argument against automotive bailout measures. Conceivably they could be bought by an investment group and broken up, although that would almost certainly be the worst outcome.

This isn’t to say that a major domestic manufacturer in severe financial troubles isn’t going to cause a lot of problems. People will lose their jobs; not just those directly employed, but people working for the supply chain companies. An estimated 3-5 million people depend on the Big Three both directly and indirectly, and government has a responsibility to them to help them continue to work, no matter what happens to their employers. That does not mean that there’s a responsibility to keep companies alive that cannot compete; it is saddening to let go a former giant, but sometimes it is the right thing to do. Providing the individuals currently dependent on those companies can be given other options, letting the market run its course would likely be the best option.

Put simply, bailing out the automotive industry in America is protectionism. This isn’t a failure of regulators causing a market crash; blame cannot believably be lain at the feet of government. This is a simple matter of companies being beaten by others with a competitive edge. Keeping them alive at this point with taxpayers’ money is possibly the worst way of spending that money to help those individuals, because it has to be funneled through companies that are – demonstrably, by their inability to continue competing – inefficient. (The reasons for those inefficiencies are complex, and not entirely of their own construction, but this doesn’t change the argument.)

Say there is no bailout. The Big Three downsize up to 30% of their workforce, and use the existing $25bn low-cost loans from the federal government to retool and focus on producing cars that are more fuel-efficient; this might require some weakening of the requirements for eligibility for those loans. Instead of the $10bn to $50bn bailout manufacturers were asking for on Friday (depending who you believe and how you count it), the government spends half that on retraining programs for up to 2 million employees who lose their jobs in the near term; that’s $5,000 – $25,000 per person, which should cover costs even at the low end. Five years down the line, one or more of GM, Ford and Chrysler may well still end up radically restructuring, out of business, or in the hands of other companies. However the focus will have been on taking care of the people who can no longer find work in the automotive industry, and so in the individual, pain will be much less.

Unions will point out, and are certainly correct, that retraining is stressful and difficult; but this is the world we now live in, and we have to accept that there will always be someone else prepared to do our jobs for less. While it was still impractical due to distance or economic effects for them to compete, this didn’t matter; but this is no longer the case, certainly in car manufacture. To continue to compete you either have to be cheaper or better, and right now it seems that the US auto industry is neither. (The workforce, however, may be better than elsewhere; if so by enough margin, or if the other economic effects are right, foreign auto manufacturers will re-employ them. Toyota already has more than ten engineering and manufacturing plants in the US, for instance, and it wouldn’t be crazy for the new administration to consider an incentive package to encourage further growth for this and other companies.)

Say, however, that Obama caves, and out of the gate in the new administration (in fact earlier, since the companies may not last that long) we see a bailout of Detroit. Based on what happened with the banking industry, the manufacturers will likely get a better deal out of this than the taxpayer: the government is unlikely to force real change on the corporate beneficiaries by restructuring out existing shareholders and current board members, and although a surprise here would be a welcome dose of reality in how taxpayers’ money should be used, putting voting rights in the US government is unlikely to result in the enormous changes required to get the country’s major car manufacturers back on their feet; it would likely prove too contentious for the government to invest in a company and then push it through a restructuring that would result in significant job losses.

Barack Obama has said that he wants “to help the auto industry adjust, weather the financial crisis and succeed in producing fuel-efficient cars in the United States”. Without incentive or requirement to change, it is difficult to see how they would achieve that; sure, it’s possible, but let’s not forget that they’ve been optimistic before, and that the current problem goes back much further. In two or three years time, Detroit will be back in the same position, and we’ll have to go through all this again.

That’s not real change.

Let’s be clear: I didn’t laugh at the joke. But I also didn’t laugh when Jonathan Ross was suspended; when the BBC Trust decided it was at the beck and call of the Daily Mail and waded in to lay down the law; and by the time Leslie Douglas resigned I was into negative laughs: I was making other people miserable to deny the world of their laughter also.

I did laugh when Russell Brand issued his resignation with a photo of Joseph Stalin in the background.

This entire incident has reached levels of craziness that would never have happened were we not in the middle of a series of important ongoing stories that have become boring before they end. Without something new, the media jumped on a story, any story, that was different. If only the election had happened a week earlier; if only the financial system had collapsed slightly quicker and we’d been getting on with our lives by now; if only there’d been a major humanitarian disaster to divert our attention from two people paid by the BBC to be professional children.

Sure, some of the media, rather than jumping on the bandwagon of hate, calling for resignations and firing and the pulling down of the BBC while desperately digging through the archives for topless photos of Georgina Baillie, instead made their new front page story all about how everyone else was doing this. No matter: it’s still a media storm even if you’re merely talking about people talking about something.

But really this isn’t about the media. It’s about how the BBC is governed. And what we’ve had confirmed is that in the 21st Century the BBC is allowed to run according to its internal procedures – including investigating when they might have been broken – right up until the point where a newspaper with a large enough readership decide that they’re upset.

The current complaints tally is around 37000, some 0.6% of the population of the country, or one in 1600 or so. A few thousand complaints always sounds like a lot, but it’s really not. While not quite in the position of the famous Brass Eye Paedophilia Special, where 2000 complaints had to be weighed against 3000 calls of support, a Facebook supporting Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross has racked up over 29000 members (via The Guardian), and it is likely that more of those supporting actually listened to the show in the first place than those in opposition. Add in that it’s much rarer for people to officially register support of something contentious than to complain about it, and it’s clear that although passions are riding high on this issue, it’s complex enough that it should have been resolved calmly, rather than with pitchforks and torches.

Decency is not democratic: what you think is funny I think is horrific, and vice versa. We have rules and regulators which provide for professionals to determine what the current suitable limits are for broadcasters, and to enforce and sanction around the fringes. This is necessary because, no matter how much a passionate individual believes that something is a black and white issue, there will always be an opposing voice from somewhere. This country has produced Oswald Mosley, Richard Dawkins and Mary Whitehouse, and we should be proud of that, even if we agree with none of their positions.

The biggest risk, which as the outraged opinion pieces are dying down is starting to be discussed more seriously, is that the new, neutered BBC, will take significantly fewer risks in comedy. And you have to take risks with comedy: otherwise you’re just chasing the tails of anyone with more balls than you. There are very few things I’ve laughed out loud at that won’t upset someone, which is simply the nature of humour. Jim Davidson was once the funniest man on television, Graham Norton once raised eyebrows with his Mother Teresa drag act – and although opinion is divided over Brand and Ross’s actions in October, even the most stupid, ignorant and insular idiot who doesn’t read the Mail on Sunday can accept this means that some people find them incredibly funny.

So no, I didn’t laugh at the joke. But let’s be reasonable: they killed that night.

A while back I blogged about how I noticed one of my ideas on a bookshelf in Waterstones and a little part of me died. Last week I was in Foyles and I noticed another book on a shelf with the title I gave my own novel some years ago: Mere Anarchy, a collection of witty writings by Woody Allen. Needless to say, another little part of me died.

Mere Anarchy is a phrase lifted from Keats’ poem “The Second Coming”, though I doubt that Allen’s use of it is nearly as appropriate or clever as mine was. Because not only did it describe what happened in the novel pretty well (a very laid-back parochial approach to apocalyptic goings-on), but my book actually featured the second coming. Clever, see? In a wanky sort of way.

Although when The Friday Project got their hands on my book, the title was the subject of much debate; they didn’t see quite how clever Mere Anarchy was, they just thought it was a weird title for a comic novel (I guess you have to be Woody Allen to overrule your editor). After much lengthy and anguished discussion, it was ultimately decided that More Tea, Jesus? was more commercial, a title I learned to love in the end. It’s just as well, as somebody’s nicked my old one.

What happened then was that The Friday Project went into liquidation a couple of months before my book was due to hit the shelves and it was unceremoniously returned to the bottom of the long, long ladder that is Getting A Thing Published. My agent tells me that the credit crisis is taking its toll in the world of publishing and nobody is buying anything right now (unless you’re Woody Allen), and amidst the generally enthusiastic responses to my manuscript is the repeated complaint that it may be “a bit too quirky”. Maybe comic novels involving Jesus just don’t have a clear target audience, or maybe the Second Coming just aint commercial (unless you’re Keats). If anybody knows what IS commercial, please do tell, as that’s what I’ve been instructed to write.

In the meantime, More Tea, Jesus? can at least be seen online thanks to HarperCollins’ Authonomy website. This seems to have the slightly unwanted side effect of inviting criticism from people who may not be qualified to give it, and since my book has been rewritten, edited, rewritten some more, re-edited, rewritten and proofread, I’m sure as hell not rewriting it again for anybody except an actual publisher. But if you promise to be nice about it, you can start reading here.

Enemy of rational thought Richard Dawkins has been at it again, spouting off about how “religion is accustomed to getting a free ride – automatic tax breaks, unearned respect and the right not to be offended, the right to brainwash children”. And don’t get me wrong – he has a point about entrenchment of religion in society. However when he pledges money to a humanist group that wants to plaster buses with the slogan:

“There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life”

he’s just using the same unsophisticated brainwashing he’s accusing organised religion of sneaking upon us. It’s like one of those terrible Wikipedia jokes: needs references. Dawkins is supposed to be a scientist (I personally think he should have to hand his gown and fluffy hood back), and scientists are automatically suspicious of blanket statements like that. Probably no God? So you’ve run the figures on that, I take it? You’re not just foisting your beliefs on people who don’t know better? To use his own word, isn’t that brainwashing?

He manages to make it worse by rounding off, “this campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think – and thinking is anathema to religion”. Really, Richard? Anathema, you say? Anathema is generally taken to mean someone or something detested. But religions have for millennia welcomed thinking people; is Dawkins arrogant enough to seriously think that (say) Thomas More, humanist (that word cuts both ways) scholar, statesman, and actual bloody saint was detested by the Catholic Church? Or perhaps that he wasn’t a thinker – that the word ‘utopia’ was stolen by him from a heretic boy in Southwark? One of the premises of Utopia is that a man without religion cannot be trusted by society, so I can understand why Dawkins might like to ignore More; I just can’t see how he can claim he wasn’t one of the most important thinkers of his day.

Honestly, it makes me embarrassed to be an atheist.