The post Edinburgh brain mist is slightly clearing now and I made a small amount of progress on my script. I have a very strong idea of the character of Rasputin, but much sketchier notions of the other characters at the moment. It's a fun project to work on because whilst I want to give it a basis in historical fact, I am also going to take massive liberties with the truth (not least Rasputin's claims to have invented Europop) and invent all kinds of nonsense (I want to set an episode on the Titanic). And yet perversely this fits in with the myth of Rasputin, which is full of exaggeration and contradictions and downright lies. Rasputin somehow managed to weave a path where he could claim to be a Holy man and yet seemingly live a dissolute life, where he could be a saviour to the Royals, yet a devil to the people who killed him. So bizarrely it's maybe in keeping with the legend around him that his own account of what really happened (or what reeeaaalllly happened) would be a mixture of bullshit and angel piss (angel piss is the purest truth). On top of that I am attempting to satirise 21st century politics, have at least one big song and dance number a week and put in loads of knob gags, so it's a big ask for a 30 minute sit-com. But I have a strange feeling that I can pull it off. I like the idea of a comedy that different people can enjoy on different levels (I guess the Simpsons is a fine example of that) and of colliding subtle political and historical jokes with broad, slapstick and simple anachronism. It sounds amazing in this paragraph. I wish the script I've got so far was an eighth as good as what I've just written here.
It's important I get it right. It feels a bit like I am in the Last Chance Saloon with this one. I've written a lot of scripts in the last ten years but only one of them has been made. The competition out there from hungry and ambitious young writers and from established ones who will get their stuff on no matter how shit it might be (not to say that all of them are shit - if only they were) means that if I don't have something that hits soon it will get even harder to get my stuff on. But I won't stop. The good thing about rejection (if it doesn't stop you in your tracks) is it means you get better at what you're doing. I can't believe my career possibly hangs on a thread supporting this ridiculous idea.
But anyway, I've gone off on a Ronnie Corbett style digression. Although the first episode begins with Rasputin's death, it will then go back to his first meeting with the Royal family, so I more or less want the thing to start (with a slight liberty taken with the actual time-line) with Tsar Nicholas II playing tennis and getting the news that the entire Russian fleet has been sunk at Tsushima, then putting the telegram in his pocket and carrying on with his match. Sounds like ridiculous comic situation set up to demonstrate out-of-touch and useless monarchy, doesn't it?
But it's what happened
From the distance of a hundred years most of what was going on in pre-revolutionary Russia seems darkly insane and often funny, yet Nicholas was in power for another decade after that. I do feel sorry for the Russian Royal family. They were largely well-meaning idiots who believed in their divine right to rule, but had no actual clue how to do it. This man ended up being shot in a cellar along with his entire family and yet if he'd made a few basic changes instead of carrying on playing tennis who knows what would have become of the world?
It's easy to spot the mistakes and the horrific comedy a hundred years on. The trick is to spot it now, before it all goes tits up for us all. But in 2112 some poor writer of 4 dimensional holographic Com-blips is creating a telling space-satire of our similarly ridiculous times. But the commissioning alien-robot overlords are going to tell him that it won't be made because everyone's doing the pastiche of contemporary ideas using historical source material and 1970s music.
Thanks to Simon Bramwell who sent me an email pointing out that See Tickets are promoting my upcoming tour as something slightly different than I intended. But as you can see it does make a lot more sense of the expression I am pulling in the photo. But it's one way to sell tickets I suppose.
