It’s all over. I’m writing this in Manchester Piccadilly, after seeing Potted Potter start its week’s run in the Lowry last night. Already the Fringe seems as if it was months ago. The last few days went by in a hazy fatigue, teetering on the edge of futility. There would be no more reviews, audiences would remain at similar levels as previously – for better or worse – and there would be few new insights into character or script.
A friend who was visiting at the weekend tried to engage me in a conversation the other night that was nothing to do with the Fringe, and I found myself incapable of talking to her about anything normal. People putting on the shows seemed locked into the same three conversations; how had it gone, what was next, and how tired and ill you felt and looked. It felt like the final stages of the siege of Paris: if you weren’t exchanging recipes for cooking rats, then forget it.
I saw forty-nine shows – apart from my own – and would have made the half-century had the fantastic Maeve Higgins not cancelled her final show. Here are my personal highlights… The charming Terry Saunders’ Missed Connections, the loopy Bridget Christie – The Court Of Charles II, and the unexpectedly moving Hippo World Guest Book. I’m also looking forward to the next show by Tommy and the Weeks. Their excellent show this year, which blithely subverted expectations, sketch comedy, and taste, promises great things for the future. Paul Foot and Josie Long each created a truly distinctive, beautifully written, and very funny hour of stand-up; Tim Key and Tom Basden each wrote impressive debut solo shows, which for me were even stronger than their work in sketch act Cowards.
Now to start planning what we’re going to do at the 2008 Festival Fringe…
Tony Jordan came and gave a talk recently about creating a TV show. Here, thanks to our transcrib-o-matic linguistymachine, are his thoughts on creating Holby Blue, Hustle, and Life on Mars.
Things at Silver Street trundle on...perhaps trundle is the wrong word...before I know it I'm working on the next set of story outlines with the team...it doesn't seem that long since we last did it... but as with continuing drama everything's always on the go. It's a hectic week, ideas have been thrown about, some taken on others not and before you know it the wall is ablaze with multicoloured post it notes ready to be typed up. The word frantic springs to mind.
I'd finished my scripts by this point, had to make a few minor changes ...all of which had to be done in a space of a few hours. Suddenley was looking forward to the next few days in Edinburgh watching other peoples work. (How great is the city and the festival?!)
So now have a day of recording to sit in which I'm excited about ...one of the self contained storylines that I'd made up for an episode turned out well - I can see there being some laughs!
The Edinburgh Fringe continues apace: the pace in question being that of an emphysemic snail. Lots of performers are talking about having ‘hit the wall’: the combination of fatigue, drink and low-level viral infection have taken their toll. But there’s nothing to be done other than necking vitamin C, quaffing Lemsip, strapping a costume to your wheezing chest and bloody getting on stage and doing it, darling.
In the middle of the week, I saw two shows within a fourteen-hour period which seemed to encapsulate the polarity of Fringe experience. The first was Seriously. Pet Shop Boys. Reinterpreted. Billed as musical theatre, this is a sort of revue show that takes bits of various PSB numbers and sticks them together with the intention of forming dramatic scenes – closer to Closer Than Ever than, say, Mamma Mia. However, there’s often little apparent logic to the juxtaposition of material, and the fragmentary approach to the original lyrical structure often robs it of any real meaning: chucking a verse of I Want A Dog into the middle of To Speak Is A Sin adds nothing to either piece. However, the cast stride nobly forward into this void of meaningfulness, imbuing every phrase with great, wet, steaming gobbets of meaning. All of the wit, irony, subtlety and charm of the original songs is bulldozed by the smug, precious, overblown delivery. The Pet Shop Boys are sometimes accused that all their songs sound the same: this show, which commits every vacuous cliché of musical theatre, seems intent on proving that myth. I’d have been more willing to forgive the almost wilful misunderstanding of the band’s work, had they not had such extensive professional experience, but their impressive CVs and high production values instead led me to ask what the Pet Shop Boys had done to deserve this.
At the other end of the budgetary scale, The Lost Tapes Of Tom Bell is a charming, funny discussion of childhood and adulthood being presented as part of Peter Buckley Hill’s Free Fringe. Tickets are by (emphatically non-compulsory) donation, and the show takes place in the grotty, windowless back room of a pub on the Canongate. Audience participation has never been less threatening, as Tom gets one punter to toast crumpets, and lets another do some painting. To describe the humour as ‘gentle’ doesn’t do justice to how funny it is, but this is a genuinely feel-good show with more than enough humanity and wit to make up for the lack of it the previous day.
Thing is, you can be funny electronically these days. It's a lot cheaper.
Rob Manuel - your ginger overlord - has written a big long page all about being funny on the internets. It's got lots of good advice if you're thinking of making your own funny rather than just writing it and hoping that someone else will make it.
Read it. It's good.
And Rob runs b3ta, so he knows what he's talking about.
Four up-and-coming playwrights supported in part by the BBC writersroom are having their plays performed in Newcastle and Hexham during the lunch hour.
Find out more about how to get a bit of culture with your scran on the New Writing North website.
It’s the end of the first week of the Edinburgh Fringe. It’s been overcast, with sunny intervals and rain in places. I’m writing this in a drizzly Pitlochry, having sneaked away from the capital for a couple of days to get on with some writing for a deadline at the end of the month. Last night we watched bats flying around over the river Tummel, and reflected on how inconsequential most of our concerns about our shows felt once we’d escaped the febrile atmosphere of the performers’ bar at the Pleasance.
I have yet to see a really excellent piece of theatre at this year’s Fringe. The plays that I have seen often suffered from being based on received ideas of what might make good theatre, rather than being based on something in the real world that got under the writer’s skin. Frequently, too, the naturalistic staging and performance style chosen made the fundamental lack of reality all the more apparent.
I’ve had a better time in the best of the comedy shows, although as ever there’s no shortage of patchy sketch acts making lazy jokes about hackneyed targets. But there’s also Johnson and Boswell: Late But Live at the Traverse, which brings the relationship between the eighteenth century diarist and his biographer right into the present day, using it to satirise today’s Scotland in what feels like a genuinely risky way.
Having co-written and directed Bill Hicks: Slight Return, which plays one final Edinburgh show next week, I’ve often been asked which current comedians are keeping Hicks’ legacy alive. There’s never a shortage of reviews which compare his work to that of new acts: it’s usually a shorthand for angry nihilism. But watching the brilliant Josie Long the other day I was struck by how her show – neither angry nor nihilistic – has the same purity and drive for truth that informed Hicks’ later work. Unusually for a comic, she celebrates things she likes rather than derides what she hates. And like Hicks, it somehow becomes more than just stand-up: there’s a genuine attempt to answer the question, how should we live our lives? It’s a mile away from the easy cliché and tired stereotype of much of the rest of the comedy on the Fringe.
We've just put a script from the second series of Kay-Mellor-produced drama The Chase in the script archive. This is episode 8, transmitted on the 29th July and written by Pat Smart. So, hot off the tellybox then.
Several episodes of The Chase, including this one, were directed by Sue Tully, who used to play Michelle Fowler in EastEnders.
All part of the service.
You may need to download Acrobat Reader to read the script if you don't have it already.
Hi I'm Aisha....and I'm currently working on atttachment on BBC Asian Networks radio drama series called Silver Street. I've ben here for some weeks and have sat in a day of recording, worked with the lovely researcher and had a laugh with the production team discussing story possibles ....and had a week of working with the editor and script editor on storylining. All good! The last three weeks I've been writing for them...the quick turnaround on scripts from scene breakdowns to 1st and final drafts demanding and mind blowing... but have got to the end. Phew!
That's who write British films, according to the latest research conducted by the UK Film Council
They took a random sample of 40 films certified as British in 2004 and 2005 and theatrically released in the UK, and talked to the 63 credited screenwriters to find out a bit about who they were.
So, sure, I was kind of expecting that the majority of them would be older white men. It's unfortunately a fact that people who aren't white men are under-represented in a lot of places.
But, come on: 98% of these writers were white? 82.5% male? That's more than a little bit rubbish.
I mean, these figures would be all right if 98 out of every hundred people in the UK were white. And only 2 in 5 of us were female. But I'm pretty sure that isn't the case.
No-one can tell from a script what colour your skin is or whether you happen to wear your genitals on the inside.
So, please: Write. Rewrite. Make sure it's as good as it can be. And then send us your script.
The only thing we care about is the quality of your writing.
