The ninth birthday of Warming Up is rapidly approaching (after finishing this blog I will be one entry away from nine years of uninterrupted blogging) and I am reminded that last year on the 25th November
I set myself the goal of getting a sit-com or comedy drama into production by November 25th 2012 (I also set out to win the coveted COBNOB and in just 12 short months have attained the C of the COBNOB, so just an OBNOB to go).
I guess my only realistic shot at achieving the 10 year anniversary ambition is Gorgeous, the script I am working on right now. It's just about realistic that if all goes well we might have started making this by next year (though with the pace that TV works at that might be a bit of a stretch). It's still a long shot, but I hope all your own ambitions (and they're all listed back in last November's Warming Up entries) are progressing in the right direction. It might be helpful for me to make November 25th 2011 the deadline for getting the second draft finished. It's a tight deadline, but you know how I am with deadlines.
My brain blurriness continued for much of today, but at 5.30pm I finally found myself at my desk with my fingers moving across the keyboard, creating a conversation about Tictacs between three of the characters in the show, whilst a fourth one (who only came into being last week and was not in the first draft at all) lay possibly dying beside them. There's certainly more drama in this second draft and infinity per cent more Tictacs too, but ideas were flowing well and I managed to write (with interruptions) until 11pm, which counts as a productive day, even if it took me til most of you had finished work to even properly begin.
It's a strange feeling to create a character only to almost immediately (probably) kill him, but I think he might provide the key to making this script work. He's called Leslie Garrett in a tiny joke that is never alluded to in the script (in which he is always referred to by his first or last name, but never both at once) and which many of you will still not get even now. But by (possibly) killing him, I am perhaps giving all the other characters a chance to "live" or at least be realised. For the moment they only exist in the limbo of my imagination, versions of some of them have lived there since the mid-90s when I wrote "Sex Amongst the Stalagmites", so they're under no illusions about how likely they are to exist (unfortunately for them they don't even realise they are characters or that the shoddy world I have created for them is not real - they feel, I imagine, a bit like I felt with my hangover yesterday).
But I love how these people who exist merely as uncatchable thought and pixels on a computer screen and ink on paper may one day be made flesh and blood and affect the lives of the actors who play them, the crew who make the show and the people who watch it. And if creating a fat man with the name of a classical singer only to (probably) kill him (I am actually not 100% certain he is going to die) makes the others get to exist, then does that make me a (possible) murderer or a saviour? Such is the conundrum of the writer.
The script is definitely a lot more exciting as a result of this new character and provides some jeopardy. When Stew and me wrote a pilot script for (I think) Fox TV in America, the executive came back with some good notes (which is unusual in itself), one of which was "Where's the jeopardy?" We laughed at this at the time and turned that into a private catchphrase that we would say to each other in an American accent.
But it's a good note whatever accent you choose to say it in and in the first draft of this script there was no jeopardy, but Leslie Garrett, by possibly dying and maybe not dying provides the jeopardy, both for himself, but more importantly for the other characters. And for me a bit. I don't know what's going to happen, but his death or life will impact considerably on the people at the centre of the piece. I am actually anxious to see what happens next. Which is a good sign.
And the jeopardy for you reading this blog is, is the jeopardy I have created in the script enough jeopardy for this show to be made. We even have a deadline of 12 months and 2 days (though to be fair, a simple "no" can take away all the drama in a second). And the comic relief is wondering if the TV show "Jeopardy" was created in response to the question "Where's the jeopardy?" taken a little literally.
Anyway, if I keep sitting here writing this, then I won't get to sit here writing that, so I had better go and work on my shoddy Universe. Knowing out there somewhere is a TV executive with the Darth Vader like ability to destroy it in an instant.
