Douglas Adams Rewired My Brain

If you were to remove the top of my head and look inside, I'd probably die from shock and blood loss. So don't do that. But if you were to do it metaphorically, and chose to picture my formative creative influences as a series of geographical features, then you would find a pretty big mountain range named 'Douglas Adams'. Probably with a dead whale lying next to it.

I was ten years old when I saw the Hitchhiker's television series. On a family holiday in the same year, I found the first two Hitchhiker's books sitting on a spinner in the caravan site shop. Their influence on my tiny forming mush-like brain was seismic. Ideas that were funny. Jokes that made you think. Concepts pursued to their illogical conclusion. Dry British stoicism in the face of interplanetary insanity. Arthur. Ford. Zaphod. Trillian. Marvin. Slartibartfast.

Much of where I am now, who I am now, what I do for a living now, I owe to the worlds he created.

And now I find myself, thirty one years later, writing an episode of Dirk Gently for the BBC. My seasoned forty one year old self is calmly typing the words, building the episode, structuring the jokes. This is what I do for a living. It's just another gig.

But somewhere deep inside my ten year old self just did a little wee and passed out.

However tangentially, I am adding to the legacy of Douglas Adams. I am putting words in the mouths of characters he helped create. But more than that, the reason I am able to, the reason I got the gig in the first place, the reason that working in this world feels so damn natural to me, is that Douglas Adams rewired my brain as a child. I am simply putting into practice what he taught me.

Thanks for everything, Douglas. I hope you enjoy the episode.

.

Becoming Human Coming to the Tellybox

And lo! A child to Being Human was born! And the people saw that it was good, even though it doth have both fangs and fur. And they watched it online quite a bit.

And the Gods looked down from on high, well, BBC Television Centre, and they too saw that it was good. And they decided, this is good enough for the tellybox. Let's put it on. And so they did.

Well, they will. On Sunday 20th March.

And lo, I wrote a third of it, the bit in the middle.

Amen.

Being Human - Type 4

The second episode of Being Human wot I wrote airs this week. Spoilers beyond this point, so go away and watch it then come back. Titled “Type 4” it was a blast to write and I hope everyone found it a blast to watch. I got to introduce zombies to the Being Human universe! Quite a responsibility. And I got Mitchell and Annie to make out. And I set George and Nina on the road to having a little hairy baby. All fairly big Being Human milestones.

Sasha the zombie's character came from a few places, not least of which was my past life as a stand up comic. I used to spend my weekends on stage attempting to talk over gaggles of drunken Hens, a fair few times in Cardiff. Little did I realise that my onstage fantasising about killing gobby women then digging them up would later prove creatively useful.