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I realised today that by the end of the year I will have recorded 106 RHLSTPs (plus all those snooker and stone clearing podcasts on top). Given two are not going out that’s a nice round 104 podcasts, or two a week. Which is why we are going to start putting out two podcasts a week for the next couple of months so we have some chance of catching up (though I like the idea of having enough in the bank so these can continue long after my death and the death of the human race, beamed out into space for alien audiences to enjoy).
Another one of the 106 went up today and the first of the somewhat arbitrary 18th series (made up of the podcasts recorded post Edinburgh, up to the end of 2019) with Max and Ivan
If you haven’t head of Max and Ivan, don’t worry. You’re just old and out of touch, OK Boomer? Just pretend you know so you don’t look uncool. They are really funny and a couple of bits in this had me crying with laughter, which is always a good sign.
Hope you’ve got your bets in for how many of the first drafts for the six part third series of Relativity I will have done by next Wednesday (factor in that I am doing a RHLSTP on Sunday in Sheffield). I would have thought four maximum, but I had some good ideas for episode 4 today and made OK progress. I might have it done by Friday. I don’t think I can write two more on Monday and Tuesday, but might push things up to five. Which would leave me a good month and a bit to do second drafts and write the final episode. Two months ago I genuinely thought this series had broken me and that I was going to come up with nothing. And whilst there’s still a long way to go and no guarantee that what I’ve done is any good, it does seem manageable now. Why does writing work constantly surprise me in this way?
My confidence has taken a bit of a bashing with the way I was treated over the scripts I wrote for that TV project in the first part of 2019, but having finally got my arse to stick in the chair at my desk for half an hour at a time, I am actually looking forward to the possibility of getting a bit more focused in 2020 and writing books/sitcom scripts without commissions. As I have undoubtedly said, my plan is to use the money we have raised from the podcast ads to make an audio series of Everything Happens For No Reason (and I might simultaneously try and write that as a book as well). I had an incredible work ethic in the first 13 or 14 years of my career (not that much time wasn’t wasted in procrastination, but we’d sit down most days and so something and I’d work into the night when required). I was burned out by Time Gentlemen Please, where the workload was insane, but mainly became disenchanted that my hard work was going unnoticed and also for the first time I had some money and thus less incentive to put myself through the mill.
To be a good writer in a competitive market you really have to be prepared to put the work in and that hasn’t always been the case for me over the last 15 years, partly because I’ve been trying to protect myself from the terrible pain of rejection (which is harder when you’ve put your heart and soul into something). Yet I always wanted to get to the point where I could write what I wanted, without interference and without having to worry about whether it made money. I am at that point now and yet I am still finding it hard to shake off the fears and insecurities and to apply myself.
So my new decade’s resolution is to get back into my writing work and to try and enjoy it, even though a lot of it is painful and makes you want to do anything but write.
And episode four of Relativity is a bottle episode, which isn’t really ever necessary in radio as you can do anything and be anywhere with no real additional cost. But it’s proven to be a good way to get a script written more quickly. Basically just four characters in one room in one unbroken scene. It’s almost that thing that I always wanted to do in a sitcom (and which subsequently turned up in Community and sort of Rick and Morty) in which you do a clips episode, but all the clips are things that haven’t happened in the series before.
In Time Gentlemen Please I had the notion of having Steve watching a show called “My Dodecha- Dads†(like My Two Dads, but with Twelve Dads) and the Twelve Dads got stuck in a lift with their daughter and remembered some stuff from earlier in the series - prompting my characters to remember loads of stuff that had never actually happened. Ironically this would be way more expensive than doing a regular episode, whereas a clip show is a way to make cheap telly, just like a bottle episode (where the characters are forced to stay in one room which is cheap).
In this Relativity episode there are no flashbacks, but it’s all about memory and nostalgia and reverting to our teenage selves. It’s quite a nice idea, I think. But most importantly QUICK TO WRITE.
2020 is when everything changes. I can’t see any reason why I will not break the habit of half a lifetime.
