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I made good progress with my Relativity scripts today, finishing off episode 2 (first draft) and then wondering if the TV pilot episode I wrote 8 or 9 years ago might be the basis of a good final episode of the series, discovering that with minimal editing it would work pretty well and managing to polish that off in the afternoon (whilst, at the same time, watching the second day of rehearsals of EH(FNR)). I was meant to deliver first drafts of all four scripts by yesterday, but it’s been an almost unbelievable effort to get three in only one day late. I love it when work I did many years ago bears fruit like this. It feels like stealing. But you’re stealing from yourself, albeit from a younger version of yourself, who deserves to be robbed due to his relative youth and stupidity. But it’s also comforting to know that his hard effort (the script was a lot better and tighter than I had remembered, with lots of funny and a few quite moving twists and turns).
I have a good idea of what I am going to do in episode 3 - I just need to find the time to write it. But I thrive on this level of busyness. I am already a bit exhausted, but in a month’s time I should have done all the writing and filming for AIOTM, have an almost edited taster tape of EH(FNR) and have all the scripts ready for Relativity. And I am not complaining, because, the dread that accompanies each new script aside, I am massively enjoying this. A decade of unproduced scripts makes it very special to have two different ideas being made (even if one of them just ends up being a taster tape) this year.
Although feeling knackered and battling off a bit of a sore throat, ear ache and minor cold, my wife and I braved another night out, heading to Waterloo and the cool and slightly creepy Vaults theatre (more than a little reminiscent of Edinburgh with a bit of Diagon Alley thrown in (see, I know loads of Harry Potter Trivia). Feeling every one of my 49 years I felt a bit out of place amongst this hip, young crowd, but also was pleased that we’d made the effort (and when you’re a parent sometimes going out can feel as irksome as doing actual work). We were there to see
Fran and Leni, a play about punk, love and death - three of my favourite subjects.
I enjoyed it a lot. It was funny and emotional (weirdly Debussy’s Clair de Lune featured quite heavily and I’d been thinking about that a lot today as I am planning on basing episode 3 of Relativity around that scene from What is Love Anyway? where my mum played the music to my grandmother. It fizzes along with great performances from writer Sadie Hasler and director Sarah Mayhew and they packed an awful lot into the hour. Like my own punk-based play “Punk’s Not Dead” it was about the shifting dynamics of friendship and how we change as we get older, but this play is much bolder in scope and the theatre, a vault under the railway, with trains rumbling past, was ideal for the subject matter. Highly recommend it and if you’re young and not scared of picking up lurgy from the dripping water, I suspect hanging around in the bar afterwards would be a lot of fun too. We are old and tired and just rushed home to bed. What has become of us.
Bizarrely as we queued a man introduced himself and said he was sorry to annoy us, but he lived in the same street as us. I asked him what number and he’s four doors down (I did vaguely recognise him). Strangely and unusually we’d taken in a package for his house two days ago and told him it was waiting in our hall. It was an odd coincidence, just as the social convention that it feels weird to greet me in my street, but not at a random location across town. He asked for my number and I thought that was a bit inappropriate, but he actually meant what number house I lived in so that he could come and get the parcel.
