I'm Giving A Talk

The very thought makes me smile with stinging pangs of self-mockery.

Basically Joe Oppenheimer, our contact point and supporter from BBC Films asked me if I'd give a bit of a talk to some TV and Radio writers about my experiences on the rocky road to FAQATT. The phrase "teaching your granny to suck eggs" comes to mind.

And also, if I flipped the situation and found myself facing some upstart who'd come straight out of stand-up into feature film writing and I'd been bashing away doing radio and TV for years, I'd want to slap his impertinent little testes.

Anyhoo, I'm committed to doing it on Tuesday at some conference stylee stately home. I'll try not to be too much of a nob.

Having self-deprecated sufficiently, I've got to confess I am looking forward to talking to some other writers about the journey that got me here. I'm sure we'll all have had similar experiences with rejection, failure, juggling day jobs, stupid gutless commissioning bods, stupid producers, over-enthusiastic but talentless script editors and piles of things we've written that nobody wanted. Or is that just me?

(For anyone that's wondering, all of the above was before FAQATT got optioned. Relax.)

Joe was a bit concerned about how I'd feel about talking to a room full of strangers. I reminded him that I'd earned a living as a stand-up for six years regularly playing to 300+. This would be much less people and I wouldn't even have to make them laugh.

All I've got to do is make them not want to kill me.
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