Balancing
It feels like I have many fingers in many pies at the moment and the work/work balance is just about holding up. The work/life balance is not, balanced. This is due in part to having a life partner who is out on the road touring in a show (with a company on which the Arts Council have just practiced euthanasia). I am insisting my daughter reconsider her GCSE options - don’t do drama, please drop dance, if you want a home life of sorts when you’re reaching middle age, a nice 9 to 5 in a reputable firm with your own desk and no threats of funding withdrawal, would be the best option.
I’m still finding time to craft and make muffins - how? I bought a dishwasher. A perk of having a regular BBC wage as a writer and not freelance dribs and drabs. My carbon footprint may have nudged up a size, however I don’t drive - so there’s a semblance of balance there.
I sit down to my dog-eared Holby script with that Groundhog Day feeling. It’s not right yet and time is running out.
When I sent off the last draft, for the executive producer's eyes, I had that niggling feeling - the type that says ‘hey, did you leave the gas on this morning’ as you get on the tube. I then had a few days of relative calm whilst it was scrutinised (exec producer was abroad, probably reading it on plane somewhere, all very romantic). I pottered about in a haze of ignorant anticipation and read a shed load of Eastenders documents that had come through.
Soap overload. I cannot explain the size of the hangover that an afternoon of sheer cliff-hanger gluttony can give you. Half a year of Eastenders trauma condensed into a couple of days is tantamount to some sort serious drug overdose. The only antidote was reading the dishwasher instruction manual.
Finally My Holby notes came through with a warning from my script editor - ‘this may look like a lot, but don’t fret…’ the printer spat out another page, then another, the low ink light was flashing..
Reading notes from Mr McHale is akin to having a conversation with him - he writes notes like he speaks - passionately - his voice was clear as a bell in my head as I reached page 10 and beyond. Expletives and all. It made me smile. I wondered if like Mission Impossible, the notes would self destruct after I read them - I was being given a mission to knock my episode into shape. Failure was not an option.
I looked at my wall chart. I had just had a commissioning meeting for my next Eastenders ep and was about to start writing, I was due at a Casualty storylining Conference in Bristol in a couple of days. Feast or famine, my work life has always been like this. But unlike some 9 to 5 jobs I’ve had, what I love about writing episodes for TV (or previously designing shows for theatre), is that there is always an end point, always closure. The episode has to be aired, the show must go on. At some point all this will stop! …. Then start again if you’re lucky.
My Holby script is not home and dry yet and I’ll have to work on it this weekend. There’s a lot of ‘honing’ to do, taking out superfluous bits that are repetitive or woolly and stand in the way of telling the story succinctly. The art is to leave enough of my original storytelling voice to make it recognisable as an Abi script and get the serial across.
Talking of which - Saturday 16th Feb is my Casualty debut!
We’ve had the dramatic suicide bid, the retrospective diary special (tonight - and do read Mark Catley’s Writersroom interview) - the Radio Times is bristling with praise for these edgy episodes of everybody’s favourite Medical drama. Casualty is a corker once more!
Yeah Abi, like … follow that.
I haven’t seen a DVD copy of my episode yet, but I have to say it was one of my favourite scripts to write. My next blog entry can be a compare and contrast exercise, how I felt the script translated to the screen.
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