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Phoebe went in for her first full afternoon at the nursery and I popped round the corner to a cafe to try and do some work and got more done on my new sitcom idea in two hours than I have managed in the last six months. That’s not even exaggeration. The pram in the hall is supposedly the enemy of creativity, but it turns out that it’s actually the baby. And it doesn’t matter what room of the house it’s in. The pram is the patsy in this situation and is entirely blameless. I don’t know why people have allowed the pram to take the blame for so long. I have nicked almost all of this joke off of my much funnier wife - having a funny wife is the friend of creativity, as long as you don’t have any moral objection to just letting her come up with ideas and then nicking them and passing them off as your own.
And if you put the baby in the pram in the hall then to be honest, you can get quite a lot of work done if you go to a part of the house where you can’t hear it crying.
I bet it was Jerry Hall that came up with that. She loved saying stuff based on room-based stereotypes. To be a successful wife you must act like a cook in the kitchen, a maid in the parlour and a whore in the bedroom and a pram in the hall. So good luck to Rupert Murdoch who now has a Hall in every room of house, which is very nearly the punchline to my joke on that subject. And when I say my joke, I actually nicked that one off Stewart Lee. I don’t think I have written any of my jokes. It’s amazing I have managed to keep going this long.
Suddenly with the baby out of the way and under someone else’s supervision the ideas (and more importantly the words) started flowing and an idea that I thought might have died a natural death in utero, actually started feeling like it might work. As always the days where inspiration strikes makes the horrible days of blockedness and sludge-brain fade away as if they have never happened. I only did a few pages, but I felt like I had characters and a relationship that might work. And it might be a coincidence: I’ve been thinking about this idea on and off for months and trying to work out how the opening scene works (and that’s all I have) and all that wasn’t happening was me sitting at a computer and writing it. Or feeling excited by it. And perhaps thinking that my writing days had ended with my Rasputin play.
Perhaps it’s the fact that if I am going to be able to pay people to look after my daughter I am going to have to earn some money to pay them with that pushed me onwards. But it felt good. I hadn’t slept all that much but I think two weeks of healthy living has helped get my mind in better shape even if my body has some way to go. Try again, fail again, fail better. It’s easy to get disheartened with life not going your way, but all you can do is pick yourself up and try again. Or failing that, look at the other bits of your life where things have worked out OK.
Basically, as always, with writing (and keeping fit), it’s all about picking yourself up and giving it another go and hoping against hope that the next leap will be the leap home. Or that someone will give my script a whirl, it will do well and I can finally get all the ones I’ve written over the last decade out and sell them to someone else.
But count my blessings, the podcasts and the stand up are doing well enough to keep me afloat. The Happy Now? tour seems to be selling well, given it doesn’t start for another month and we haven’t done much to push it yet. The Leicester Square Theatre dates in February are filling up nicely and Reading and Sutton Coldfield have sold out. Leeds, Salford, Liverpool, Norwich, Aldershot and Swindon all look like they might sell out in advance, so book early for these gigs, but even dates further down the line are looking (mainly) pretty good. All details are at http://www.richardherring.com/happy_now/tour.
