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After Friday’s successes it was only right that the Universe, as usual, brought me down to earth. I was heading to Wrexham, where due to general indifference I had been moved from the main auditorium to the small studio space and still hadn’t sold enough tickets to fill it. Not that that was unexpected, just a sharp juxtaposition with the way last week ended. To be honest I was a little surprised that 100 people in Wrexham wanted to see me. It takes more than me to impress the people of Wrexham. Between 2001 and 2005 Wrexham Council’s website was named “Best Local Government Portal in Wales" on four occasions. And this century they have applied three times for city status. They haven’t achieved it and they never will, but you have to admire their Robert the Bruce like persistence.
I started work on my sitcom script in the car on the way up. There’s a long way to before I will get this together and I have to work out what it’s going to be, what the rules of the sci-fi in it are and who the main characters are, but it was good to be starting to ask these questions. Will this be the first script of mine since 2007 to make it to the screen? I find it utterly terrifying that it’s eight years since “You Can Choose Your Friends” was screened and it must be over a decade since I started writing it. Since then I’ve written Relativity, Absolutely Scrabulous, Gorgeous (TV and radio versions), Chedwood, two versions of Ra Ra Rasputin, an episode of Man Down and attempted other scripts like my Ukip based sitcom Little Hitler. And I’ve written a play, “I Killed Rasputin”, but none of them have come to anything (and I expect I’ve forgotten something). Other never produced scripts include “Sex Amongst the Stalagmites” (though that was the first version of Gorgeous really), “Hostages”, “Warming Up” and “Double Act”. Plus the first script I wrote back in 1990 “Coathanger Tim”.
This is not unusual for a writer. There are people in America who are millionaires from film scripts they’ve written and had optioned but which have never been made. I was lucky enough to get paid for most of the pilot scripts I’ve written. I quite like the idea of seeing if I can write a script every year for the rest of my life, get paid for it, but never see it made. It would be awfully depressing, but bizarrely quite cool too. To walk the tightrope between success and failure. Not good enough to get stuff made, but still good enough that they keep paying you to try.
If I manage to get something on and it is a success I have a bottom drawer full of old scripts that will no doubt be snapped up in those changed circumstances. Though as time passes I feel it’s less likely that they will ever be more than words on a page (they’re mostly not even that any more).
It’s hard to pick yourself up after a script you’ve put your heart and soul into gets rejected and in the old days I found it hard to commit to writing a script, hoping that that would make the pain less intense (but of course it just meant the scripts weren’t good enough and so were bound to be rejected). It’s easy to get paralysed into inactivity by the fear of failure and I blew some good chances in the early 2000s when I was relatively hot by procrastinating and failing to hit deadlines, only to find that when I finally got my act together the person who had commissioned me had moved on. It’s actually quite remarkable that “You Can Choose Your Friends” ever made it to air. It took me a long time to pull myself together on that one.
So will this new script join the pile in my virtual bottom drawer? I think it’s going to be quite a tough write and an even tougher sell and I would be very surprised if it makes it to air. But that frees me up to write exactly what I want rather than what I think might please people and you never know, if it lands on the right desk and the person who reads it is in a good mood or has recently gone insane, but no one else has realised then it might make it.
And no, kickstarter is not really an option for something like this. Not only would the costs of making even a simple sitcom be huge, it would take me at least a year of solid work to write 6 scripts. I need someone else to pay for it and to pay me to get this kind of thing going (though if all 150,000 RHLSTP listeners gave me a pound a month then I reckon we could do one of them).
Like Wrexham and its attempt to get city status, being a writer is mainly about never giving up, even in the face of seeming certainty of failure.
And the 100 Wrexhamians who came to see me were rather lovely. It was a good show. Once again a great game of Addams Family Pinball was interrupted by me having to go back on stage for the second half. Back in my hotel room I completed the game, getting a new high score, 936,702,220, tantalisingly close to the billion (just starting my second mansion tour with an extra ball waiting for me).
