So that's it. I have completely finished my comedy drama script and sent it off to be judged. Now the anxious wait to find if it will be accepted or rejected or kept in some kind of limbo of delayed decisions and rewrites. It's either going to live, die or be kept on a life support machine as doctors tinker around inside it, trying to save it, even though it's probably brain dead. The exhilaration of completion is tempered by the fear and dread tinged with hope.
Whatever happens the decision about this script will have a big impact on my life. If they like it and commission it, it will lead to at least a year's work of worth, temporary financial security as well as my work being introduced to a much wider audience. If they don't like it then I will have to consider my future as a script writer. I can't take too many more knock-backs and I think this is the best and most promising TV writing I have ever done, so if they don't want it I have to either psyche myself up to put myself through this process again, or just decide to concentrate on other aspects of my job. It's not quite make or break, but the reaction this piece gets will undoubtedly have a huge impact on my career one way or the other.
Since writing 37 episodes of Time Gentlemen Please ten years ago I have had a few punts at TV writing. I wrote a sitcom pilot for Frank Skinner called "Jammy Bugger" which very nearly got made, though he decided he wanted to write his own series instead. Then I got two commissions for comedy dramas, "Double Act" for Channel 4 and "You Can Choose Your Friends" for the BBC (initially). I wrote a pilot script for Double Act which the channel liked and they asked me to write a second one. I dragged my feet a bit and by the time I had done it the executive that liked me had moved on and the project was dead in the water. You Can Choose Your Friends also went through several rewrites, went from being an hour long comedy drama to a sit-com, it was read in two different versions by actors in front of executives before the BBC rejected it. Paul Jackson at ITV heard about the project and commissioned it as a 90 minute comedy drama which actually got made. But then there were protracted discussions about whether it should be a series and then I was asked to write a pilot episode of a sitcom using the same characters (called "Relativity"), which, with another change of executives never got made. Most recently I was commissioned by the BBC to write a sit-com about Scrabble players called "Absolutely Scrabulous", which got as far as being read in a room of executives, but was also rejected.
So it's been a frustrating decade and whilst I think the right decision was reached on a couple of those projects, there are a couple there that I think were very strong. Certainly stronger than some of the things that got commissioned at the same time. That's the luck of the draw. But it doesn't make me overflow with confidence about the new script. Will that also get consigned to the dustbin (or the bottom drawer? - "Gorgeous", this latest project is itself a substantial reworking of a sitcom I wrote in the mid-90s called "Sex Amongst the Stalagmites".
I have an unusually positive feeling about Gorgeous. My luck might be about to turn and the persistence might be about to pay off. It is a very exciting turning point for me whatever happens. It's 68 pages that might change my whole life.
And today, on the last day of a four month process (though most of the actual work has been done in the last five weeks) I made quite a significant change. My girlfriend had read the script over the weekend and suggested that she thought the head guide should be a woman, not a man (as he has been ever since the early script in the 1990s). I told her that that was a ridiculous idea and she was totally wrong and how dare she question my genius. But on the drive to Leicester I thought about it more rationally and realised that she was totally correct about it. And so after over 15 years of being a fictional man, a character overnight becomes a fictional woman. I hope he/she doesn't mind the abrupt sex change, but suspect that secretly he was always uncomfortable living a lie and always secretly wanted to be a woman.
It's interesting how such a last minute decision might affect the lives of others. Because if this project now does get made, because of an off-hand remark by my girlfriend a female actor will now get a job that would not have been hers and a male actor, totally unbeknownst to him of course, will fail to get the role that would have been his. Potentially that script note could have massive consequences for those two people, altering their whole careers and their lives. And yet one of them will never know anything about it - won't even be aware that had that change not been made it would have been them in the show.
Of course that itself might all be in an alternative universe where the script gets the green light. It shows how all our fates are shaped by chance and whim. We have to roll with the punches and I've done that enough in the past. It would be cool if this time things go my way, but thinking about it I don't think I will allow myself to be discouraged if they don't. It's all about channelling the failure and the frustration and coming back and getting better. And I should be encouraged that in my own opinion my last three scripts have been the best I've done. So the next one should be even better.
I have pushed myself very hard this year, but it definitely feels like progress has been made. And in a three month period I'll have written As It Occurs To Me, Gorgeous and What Is Love, Anyway and all these things feel like the best thing I have done in each of those three media. Will I look back on May-July 2011 as a creatively fertile period where my life changed or will this just be another step in the slow march forwards? Or am I about to fall on my arse?
It feels like my time might be about to arrive at last, but I've had that feeling before.
If all else fails I might just try and find the crack in the fabric of time which allows me enter the alternate universe where my scripts have all been made and are massively popular, kill the alternate me and live his charmed life. Or maybe I should just push him back into this universe so he gets the taste of what rejection can be. It'll be good for him. Only by experiencing failure can we truly appreciate success.
