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Somehow managed to get through my personal training session this morning after minimal sleep, but aside from recording a read for the podcast and a couple of other video things, the day was a write-off.
So script 6 remains totally unwritten. Thank God the record has been put back two days. I have a feeling those two days will be critical.
I went back to bed at 3pm, which is the kind of thing I did when the kids were tiny. It’s weakness like this that probably means that my script writing days are coming to an end. If I’d managed to make more of a success of it then I could have teams of other people working on my ideas, but the dice didn’t roll my way, even though I think writing scripts is probably what I’m best at. It’s a young person’s game (tell that to Roy Clarke) and it’s sad that I didn’t get the commissions that I possibly deserved in my thirties and forties and that all those pilots are left unmade. But I blame myself for 60% of it. I didn’t always grasp the opportunities when I had them.
The truth is that (for me at least) most of the hard work comes at the last minute and most of the inspiration has to come in the white hot furnace of fear. A pilot script was never going to have that extra spark.
When I worked on a sitcom writing team two or three years back I was sacked because they felt a first draft was too far away to be completed in time. They may have been right - I didn’t completely feel what was going on in that show - but I had just given them the bare bones to check it was going in the right direction. The rest would have come together quickly. The set back and humiliation of being dumped from that project would have been enough to stop me writing there and then if I hadn’t been committed to series 3 of Relativity. The sacking was badly handled, but possibly deserved.
Ultimately if I am going through this Hell then it probably has to be for something that I’ve created and that I love enough to make the pain worthwhile. I like Relativity and it’s always fun to do, but even this project is probably not worth the pain. I don’t think there’s a fifth series in me. Which does at least mean that I can make the final episode be an end. I think it might mirror episode one a little bit.
I do appreciate how lucky I have been to get a series commissioned and four series and twenty episodes made. But it’s hard not to feel sad about the series that never made it. And particularly the three or so different ideas that I had that would be set in Cheddar Gorge. It would have been awesome to do something that might have helped publicise and revive my home town. There’s an outside possibility that my RHLSTP with Deborah Meaden might provide some light at the end of the cavern for the Gorge, but a TV series would have been amazing for the town. And more importantly for me.
I am not too sad about it all though. Writing is by far the toughest job in comedy and doing stand up and podcasts is much, much cushier and more fun and more lucrative (unless you get a really big writing hit) and I think I’ve ended up in the happy timeline (at least for my career, sorry about all the other shit in the world that had to happen to make me relatively content).
I doubt that next week will be the last time I ever write a sitcom script - and never try and second guess the future- but it might be and I don’t think I’d mind too much if it was.
It’s great that the podcast has been going long enough to include interviews with people who have subsequently become world famous. He's ace and you can tell what a great guy he is by how happy comedians are about his success.
