Show 3 of Objective passed from the sick-making, overwhelmed with too much to do phase, to the slightly calmer still miles to go, but it now seems achievable in the time available phase at around about 4 o clock this afternoon. I hadn't got all that much actual writing done, but an argument and an order was developing in my head and I was hopeful that somehow in the next day or so this would turn itself into a completed script. So I can go through the whole unpleasant cycle again for the final one (not to mention the next AIOTM). It doesn't get any easier or less terrifying. The moping around and playing fruit ninja on my iPhone are all part of the process. I also think it is natural to spend some time feeling like you can't do anything because nothing you think of is perfect and then reach a tipping point where you realise that you have to get on with something so your best will have to do. It's very liberating getting to that place and funnily enough giving yourself license to be rubbish usually means you think of something anyway. But researching, constructing a theory, writing and performing a show like this in a week is a pretty touch ordeal. Especially when I am aware that there is another one right over the horizon (though thanks to that strike not as close as it could have been). I will be very happy when the next week and a half is over. As I know will a lot of you - these work based blogs seem to be exhausting some of you more than the work is exhausting me. But alas when I haven't done anything but work it is hard to think of anything to write about!
I was slightly helped by a new programme I downloaded last week (on the Twitter recommendation of Graham Linehan) called
supernotecard. I have used things like this before, but found this one very clear and useful for ordering the material and getting an idea of what I had in mind. It was worth the £15 I spent on it (especially as I bought it with money I didn't know I had in a palpal account I didn't really remember setting up) even if, as I suspect will be the case, I only use it once or twice. It's only like having some index cards that you can move around on screen (or so far that is all I have used it for) but unlike actual index cards I didn't end up losing them in the mess on my desk and could edit them without making a mess. By the evening I had a plan for the show, if not very much material, though I have a couple of nice chunks from the Hitler Moustache show that will fit in nicely and even something that I did for AIOTM. It is helpful to have a few familiar bit and tried and tested jokes when you've working on a brand new script. It's a bit daunting to be creating half an hour a week if none of it has ever even been said in front of an audience.
The topic for this one is the St George flag, though I want to concentrate on my nation's general shame and embarrassment rather than dwell too long on the right wing associations. I have been trawling the internet for stories and much as the internet is distracting when you're trying to work, it's also an amazing resource for research. When we wrote Lionel Nimrod, we spent days looking for books in the BBC library. Now I just google "St George" and find out all I need to do about England's Palestinian/Turkish/Roman patron saint and his flag. With the benefit of hindsight
this was a great story to chance upon. It's probably not something that I will use in the show, but it's funny now that we know what would become of England in the World Cup that Darren Luxton went to all the trouble of buying this massive roof-sized flag and then paying scaffolders to put it up, only to have his team crash out with such little success. "We should celebrate out team. This is our country and I don't see why I should fly the England flag. England are going to win the World Cup," predicted Darren. It must have been humiliating enough to remove the flags from your car's wing mirrors, but when you have a roof-sized flag you must be a little red in the face as you come to take it down. Did he try and front it out and leave it up there once England had exited? Or did he get the scaffolders out in the dead of night to take it away and try and pretend it never happened? Is it still there? Anyone in Plymouth able to let me know? There's nothing on the internet about its removal. And now having written this I think I might have to include it in the show after all!
But the point is that I would never have known about Darren Luxton's hubris without the internet or several months of looking through newspapers on one of those old machines they had in libraries, oh you know, what are they called? Just looked it up on google, but for once that didn't help. With all the newspapers on bits of microfilm. Microfiche? Yes. Sometimes it's helpful to have a brain as well as the internet.
I ended the night watching a very bad film on the telly called "French Film" which despite having a great cast and a not altogether terrible premise didn't really gel. And it had Eric Cantona in it. How could it all go so wrong? I found it quite fascinating to watch it and work out why. Which turned relaxation into work once again. But I think it was probably down to the script. The dialogue was clunky and the situations unbelievable and more pertinently, not true. You couldn't buy into it as a viewer, but also I think the actors (who have all been good in other stuff) struggled to bring it to life or to make you care about their characters. Or possibly they were miscast. It reminded me of Sliding Doors, because the characters spoke in a way that people don't speak and because it was hard to feel sympathetic to anyone. And whilst Hugh Bonneville and Anne-Marie Duff were clearly destined to be together, there was no actual chemistry between them or any reason why they should like each other. Hugh's hackneyed analysis of why it was frustrating calling Call Centres in India made Anne-Marie say that he was amazing and that he should write about that sort of thing and become a novelist, which seemed a little unlikely and as realistic as Gwyneth Paltrow falling for a guy who recites the Spanish Inquisition sketch. It was strange to watch, because I wanted to like the film and could see how it might almost of worked - and there were some interesting things to think about. But ultimately none of the relationships were believable (surely everyone could see they weren't meant to be with each other - even the people who ended up with each other in the end) and because there was little truth to their actions. But it struck me that in these romantic comedies they have to work to the premise that when people break up to be with their true love, the person they leave either has something else lined up or is so rubbish as not to deserve anyone. I thought it would be interesting to see a film where the slighted lover didn't meet someone knew and didn't deserve their fate. Because that's basically what happens in real life. The ends don't get tied up. That was the film for me. But then I probably won't be writing romantic comedy any time soon. Or it's because of this outlook that my romantic comedies will be anti-romance.
Still oddly fascinating to watch something that I didn't like whilst trying to get to grips with why I didn't like it. It wasn't a film I had heard of so my guess is that I wasn't the only person to react to it in this way. But whose fault was it all? That's the question.
I will have to plump for the script writer I think, though maybe different actors might have made it fly, so possibly the casting director. Or maybe the producer insisted on getting names, regardless of whether they had a spark or not.... so.... No. Even perfect actors could not have made this one fly. It was the writer. Writing is hard and sometimes we don't get it right. Try again, fail again, fail better.
