Reddit AMA

I am doing an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit Covering; Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel, Being Human and Dirk Gently which starts tonight at 9PM on BBC4. No really, the timing is a total coincidence...

Being Human Online

I had the good fortune to be asked to contribute to this years Being Human online experience. They're going to be rolling out more bits and bobs as the series progresses, but here are a couple of the video pieces. Great fun to do and well done to the actors and crew involved.





The official blog is here.
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Being Human – The Graveyard Shift

The new series of Being Human is almost upon us. I wrote episode three, 'The Graveyard Shift'. I am inordinately proud of the fact that I also came up with the title for my episode, which wasn't the case last year (damn you Laura Cotton). Obviously I wouldn't dream of spoiling any of the plot points other than to say that it is funny and shocking in a roughly 70/30 percent split. I am very proud of it and would like to publicly thank all involved.

This was my third year in a row writing for Being Human and boy has the time flown. It seems like only yesterday that Lord Toby was urging me to drink the virgin blood from the Hollow Skull of The Fettered Man and swear fealty to the Horned Onesy. Since then I've written 'That One with Tourettes George and the Cage', and 'That One with the Zombie and Mitchell's Cornish Stalker' as well as pitching quite a few lousy ideas that Toby has wisely vetoed. (Evil Morris Dancers? Anyone?)

Hope you enjoy it.

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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.

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Hotwire

I am adapting the comic Hotwire into a film script.

Hotwire began life as a Warren Ellis outline, which Steve Pugh wrestled into life, doing pretty much everything else. I've met Steve and he's a lovely bloke. His site can be found here, with some pix of Hotwire.

The premise in a nutshell is a world where spirits can no longer cross over and hang around, like ectoplasmic pollution. The titular Hotwire is a police exorcist with an ass kicking attitude and a spiked blonde crop.

It's so far up my alley I'll need a doctor to get it out again. And odd – I have a shelf full of Warren Ellis stuff, have a bit of Steve Pugh, and hope one day to branch into comics, yet here I am, interpreting one of their nuggets into another form. Odd the way the business works. And very, very cool.

Being Human

BEING HUMAN
Originally uploaded by BBCTHREE

I am writing an episode of Being Human.

For those of you who don't know what this is, it's basically the current jewel in the crown of BBC 3 and you can read all about it here. In a nutshell, it's a flatshare drama with a difference, namely that the flatmates are a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost. And laughable though the premise sounds, it works. Very well indeed.

It was an honour to be asked. I'd auditioned for season one, failed, forgotten all about it, then got offered an episode of season two. This was partly, I understand, in response to another fantasy spec script that I wrote that was floating around the various production companies of London. It didn't get commissioned, but it's more than paid for the time it took me to write it in getting me this gig.

I've had a few meetings with the creator Toby Whithouse and the producers and was stoked when I discovered the plotlines they were entrusting me to execute. Big juicy stuff that I could really get my teeth into. And I was also stoked by the gaps in the storylines that they were entrusting me to invent.

Obviously, it's nothing that I can divulge here. But in the wake of my episode I'm expecting nothing less than a BAFTA. I also expect to be given Toby's job when he passes on the Being Human torch, in the manner of Russell T Davies passing on Dr Who to Steven Moffat. My episode will be that good.

And if it isn't, I will blame everyone else, from the actors to the tea lady on set. For I am a writer and that's what we do.

Pinewood Studios Diary 3

Once your fame cherry has been popped, you can never go back.

For me, it was the first time I stood back stage in the dressing room of a comedy club, waiting to go on, only to find the headliner standing in his pants, ironing his trousers on a brown stained creaking ironing board.

The fact that he was bounding onto the stage an hour or so later with a spring in his step to rapturous applause didn't have quite the same glamour anymore. The bubble was popped, for I had seen behind the curtain to a world not of magic and wonder but of mundane and every day concerns.

Performers were not gods. Comedians had the same worries and problems as everyone else. Dressing rooms could be dirty, smelly crowded places, no different in many ways to factory locker rooms. This was just another section of the real world, with a glamorous public face, true, but a disappointingly common place underbelly.

The same was true of the first time I saw my words being performed by others: initial excitement, then irritation that the lines weren't being delivered exactly as I imagined them in my mind, then finally boredom as I saw the same lines being said ten times in a row for the benefit of coverage. The dream had lost it's sheen as it entered the world of work.

But now. To my film.

We are filming at Pinewood and we have been rehearsing at Shepperton. Pop goes that potential glamour bubble. It feels just like two factories, with all the attendant security guards, hanger like spaces and whistling caretakers with walkie talkies.

In offices on the lot, there is a growing team of artisans designing and building sets, scouting locations and planning the shoot. All based around things I made up.

I think it will be a while before that bubble pops.

And rehearsals? Ah, rehearsals. Here I did the opposite of imagining glamour. I imagined frustration, assuming that the director would direct (it is his job description after all) and that I would watch, inert and powerless on the margins, fearful of breaking the bond of trust between him and the actors, fearful of overstepping my own job description.

Instead I have been welcomed in to a wonderland of collaboration, as we all work to make the script and performance of that script as good as it can possibly be. All credit to the director, Gareth Carrivick. Only someone who is supremely confident of their own position and ability could give the actors and myself the liberty which we have enjoyed.

I mentioned to my wife that these days had probably been my best working experience as a writer so far. "Well." she said "Then what you mean is that this has been the best working experience you've ever had."

She's right.

I believe in weird

Oh yes I do.

Consider this – I am about to go to London for the day on a train. I bump into a director I’ve not seen for five years. We chat on the train on the way down, exchange e-mail addresses and head our separate ways. Four hours later I am walking down a street in London town when I look through a window and see the same director drinking a coffee in a café. He points at me. I point at him. I enter the café and say.

“This is just wrong.”

We make predictable jokes about stalking and say goodbye again. Do you want to know what he’s currently producing? “Most Haunted” for living TV.

Three days later, I’m in London again at a friend’s party. Also at the party is a guitar playing stand up who I’ve worked with a few times. We chat a little and he leaves the party.

The next day, having stayed at the friend’s house, I hop on a train that will take me into the centre of London. I walk perhaps fifty yards along the train and pick an empty seat at random in a train full of empty seats. I look to one side to discover the guitar playing stand up from the night before sitting across the aisle.

Needless to say, I leapt upon him and staked him through the heart, cut off his head and buried it at a crossroads. It seemed the prudent thing to do.