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After dropping the kids at school I drove into London to have a meeting with Chris Evans (not that one) and then do the read through of the scripts I’ve managed to write.
I got to Ladbroke Grove at about 10.30am and went to Caffe Nero to put another hour of work into the script for episode 4. It’s not quite finished, but it’s nearly there and, it turned out, it has the funniest conversation of the series in it. It’s one of the only bits that is actually completely made up, so that proves that real life isn’t funnier than imagined stuff.
Good to be taking things right up to the wire, but it would be much better if I was capable of not doing that.
It was lovely to see the Relativity cast again - well most of them, a couple couldn’t make the read through so we had some excellent stand ins to help us. One or two of them had read the scripts without realising the testicular cancer storyline was based on actual events (as if I am a good enough writer to imagine something like that).
I was pretty pleased with the way things went - it’s certainly better than the other read throughs we have done at this stage. It doesn’t feel like any of these five scripts are too far off (though episode 6 is as far off as it could be) and there weren’t too many bits where I was embarrassed by the writing. There were hardly any ice thin bits which crumbled under the weight of a tentative foot. There were a few, but not as many as usual. There needs to be a bit more balance so that a couple of the characters are better represented and I need to take out some slightly repetitious bits and work on making sure everyone’s stories are moving forwards. But given the struggle it’s been to get this far, it was remarkably OK.
I don’t want to relax, because there’s still a lot to do in the two weeks til we start recording this (though the final day of studio has been moved back another two weeks, which I wish I didn’t know, as it will be tempting to utilise all that time to work on the remaining script. The producer is pretending that we won’t be doing the final script in that last record, so I will have to have everything ready pretty much by the end of next week. There’s always time for precision edits and additional jokes on the day of the record.
But the good news is that it’s hanging together and things are looking good. Thank God I had cancer this year though or this would have been a lot harder.
Remind me to make this this final series of this show though. I don’t think I can go through all this again. I know I say that every time. But no one reminds me.
