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Tour facts - Norwich 16th Feb (1 ticket left) Norwich is the home of the world's second best podcaster Adam Buxton. He is also secretly Norwichman, a superhero who turns up whenever anyone in Norwich is in trouble. He has used his powers twice.
He is also called Norwich-man because he contstantly has his knickers off ready when you come home.
Into London today for two quite important meetings. If they both came off then that would be an incredible start to 2018. The second one was the more important one, but the first has the potential to be a big step too. I mean this is not my first day at the rodeo. It is my second day at the rodeo. And consequently I know it's pretty rare to have one successful meeting a year, so the chances of getting two big results in a day….. But I don't know. I felt weirdly confident.
And I don't think meeting one could have gone any better. It's incredibly rare that you walk out of a meeting room thinking that you've more or less got a done deal, but all parties could see that the proposed idea was a strong one and one likely to do well and we seemed to agree on how we should progress. Not counting my chickens, but I'd say this meeting was worth about 2546 chickens.
Meeting two was just up the road about half an hour after the first one finished. I cabbed over to it, feeling quite the business men in his jeans and jumper. Could I get two for two?
I don't think I could. In fact I don't think I've had a worse meeting in all the time I've been doing this. We were chatting about a script that they'd previously seemed quite luke warm on, but I'd heard the cold bit of the luke warmness might be warming up to luke warm and the hot bit getting a bit hotter…. but as it turned out the temperature was the same.
It started out OK and I thought I explained the high concept of the sitcom much better than the last time I'd met them, but after about 15 minutes of being quite critical of my writing I suggested they didn't really get what I was trying to do and the meeting was brought abruptly to an end leaving a very weird atmosphere. I don't know how much of this was my own fault. Perhaps most writers are keener to bend to the will (or at least pay lip service) to the opinions of the executives who decide their fate. I think I probably am usually. But I am struggling to think of many jobs where you pay someone with a specialist skill to do something and then tell them that you know how to do their job better.
There were some attempts to build bridges, amongst me being told that my characters weren't likeable (which I don't think is true, but would hardly be unusual in a comedy) or that I needed to give more hints of what was going on (when the idea is all about the mystery of what is going on) and maybe it isn't totally dead in the water. But I had to laugh when it was over because I don't think it could have gone worse if I had loudly and stinkingly farted all the way through the discussion.
I get some of their concerns, because this is still in the early days as a project, but I am also utterly confident that I (plus the team I will have around me) will get the balance correct. Perhaps I hanker for the days (that I just caught the arse-end of at the start of my career) where commissioners let people get on with stuff and just hope they've picked the right project. Have I earned the right to be trusted? Maybe I haven't. I don't know. It's just a shame that the only two people I've encountered who've seen the work and then haven't been bowled over by it, are the two people making the decision. And fair enough. It's a big decision.
Maybe I've just got too used to not having to deal with the gatekeepers. Is it better to get something made, even if it becomes a different thing than you intended than to stay true to your vision and it never see the light of day? Should I just have done the well-worn trick (that surely executives are aware of) where you make out like every suggestion is something potentially brilliant or definitely worth thinking about… flatter them into being on side and then just basically ignore them….
I wish I lived in the Universe where this show was going to be made. But then again, would I want to be the successful prick that I am in that reality? Probably not.
It was unsettling and of course upsetting and this is the kind of thing I would never usually blog about, certainly as things were going on (though I think in this case it can't actually make anything any worse and I am not convinced they'd reread the script, so I doubt that they'll have the time to read this either). But it was such a contrast with the first meeting of they yearmand my balloon of happiness was so rapidly and comically deflated.
The project isn't even dead. They want to meet up again, supposedly and they're not the only show in town. But those high hopes were 50% dashed. And I might accidentally have had a meeting with a mentally ill janitor at the first place.
But I am lucky. I have enough going on to keep me in business even with the 0% success rate that experience predicted. And how nice that after all this time I still have hope in my heart that this might be my year. In the end though, it's better to not have one fabulous year, but a continuous run of OK ones.
I wonder when that will start.
