'Tis in ourselves that we are thus, or thus

Time for another in my very occasional round-up of reviews. I don't review everything I read and my star ratings should not be taken as absolute - I have been known to change my opinion over time!

The Man Who Forgot His Wife by John O'Farrell

The problem with novels by people who are known for being funny is that you tend to expect punchline-driven humour all the time. You're reading each paragraph waiting for the payoff. This was perhaps the problem with O'Farrell's first few novels, and probably why I enjoyed his non-fiction slightly more. There's a bit more seriousness in The Man Who Forgot His Wife. The plot doesn't advance a lot beyond the initial amnesia premise, and there's a highly contrived and unlikely scene where our hero does the business with the French assistant on the gym mats, while being viewed on security CCTV. Otherwise, though, it's quite an enjoyable and involving book which has you reading to the end. ***


Infinite Sky by C.J. Flood

One of those raved-over Young Adult novels which I had been meaning to read for ages - perhaps it was inevitable that it would not live up to the hype over on Goodreads, but I found it something of a disappointment. The author is very good at evoking an unsettling atmosphere, but I didn't feel completely engaged with it and wondered at times where it was going. It's also irritating that it refuses to pin itself down to a particular time - it feels contemporary in places, but then we have the jarring detail of teenagers looking for a phone-box. There are some poignant moments, though. **




Doctor Who: City of Death by Douglas Adams and James Goss

One of the best-remembered Who stories from the Tom Baker era, and one of the last to be novelised thanks to various ongoing rights issues. As James himself says in his note, it's the 'most authored and least authoritative' Who adventure, the product of an insanely frenzied weekend of writing by Adams and producer Graham Williams so that the director would have something to work with on Monday. Could the novel possibly live up to the TV story? It does, and it also adds a wealth of Adams-style humour, character moments and asides without ever deviating from the spirit of the screened episodes. The novelisation almost becomes the definitive version of the story, so much so that you are convinced you actually saw the 'extra bits' on TV. An expanded backstory for John Cleese and Eleanor Bron's art critics, a first name for the Countess, the whole history of the various splinters of the alien Scaroth scattered in time and some great jokes about Parisian manners are just a few of the wonderful highlights. Things to forgive - some dodgy French and a few winceworthy typos. ****½


Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O'Farrell

Another which I came to with high hopes, having enjoyed a couple of the author's early novels. Set in the heatwave of 1976, which the author does a great job of portraying, it's the story of an absence - the missing father of the Riordan family and how his disappearance affects the strained relationships in the rest of the clan. Some of the family feuding is tedious at times and veers close to parody. There is a sense of a heat-exhausted novel staggering towards its conclusion rather than steaming ahead, but there is still much to enjoy here. ***

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

A novelist I was not familiar with. I came to this book with no expectations other than the vague notion that it had been garnering a lot of rave reviews, but I was determined to read it without prejudice. All I knew was that it was the story of human society twenty years after a catastrophe, in which the heroine and her band of fellow actors travel the devastated landscape of Canada, performing Shakespeare. Emily St. John Mandel's fourth novel turns out to be very much more than this. A haunting story of loss, memory and of what actually matters in the world, Station Eleven is a stunningly clever, compelling collage of various intersecting characters' stories from before, during and after 'the collapse'. A subtle gear-change halfway through catches you by surprise, and yet is still entirely 'right'. One of the best novels I have read in the 21st century, it's full of moments and images which will make you look at the world anew and wonder how it - and you - will be remembered. It will be hard to beat this as my book of the year. Recommended without hesitation. *****

A Teenager Named Maureen

By this autumn, I will have been writing professionally for 23 years - I start counting from the first time I was paid for something I wrote, in 1992. I like to think I've picked up a few things in that time - and, to be fair, I've probably forgotten a fair few as well.

In recent years I've been concentrating on writing for younger readers. As I'm now in my mid-40s, this is of course strewn with pitfalls. But then a lot of children's and Young Adult writers have the same problem, and we get over it in a number of ways.

Not likely to be called Maureen, Susan and Roger. Trust me on this. 

The other thing recently which has made me aware of a lot of pitfalls of writing is the work I've done - in various contexts - looking over unpublished manuscripts at various stages. As a tutor, editor and mentor I would say I've probably seen a couple of hundred unfinished books (and I include those where the writer believed them to be finished). About half of these were aimed at the teen/YA market.

Although everyone's manuscript requires individual attention, there are problems which recur all the time and which people could very easily eliminate if they knew about them. So, I've decided to present - from my experience - the Top Ten Things People Get Wrong When Writing A Teen Novel.

1. That's Not My Name.
If the writer is of a certain age and fondly recalls the children's literature of their youth, the chances are that they will be harking back to a time when you really could have books where someone called Dick woke up stiff after a night in the barn, and someone called Julian could announce that he was feeling a little queer. You may have happy memories of a wonderful story in which Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy venture into a world beyond a wardrobe, or John, Susan (her again), Roger and Titty mess about on lakes. And while you may realise that you can't call a child 'Titty' in a novel today, you should also know that none of those other names cut the mustard any more either. (Except Lucy. You're allowed to have teenagers called Lucy. Along with other names which have survived the test of time, such as Ben, Alice, George, Emma, Oliver, etc.) So please - no 13-year-olds called Maureen, Margaret, Alison, Steve, David, Darren... Don't choose your characters' names by mentally going through the register from when you were at school. It may seem obvious, but so many writers genuinely don't seem to realise that those names have dated. There are plenty of lists of baby names from the 90s and 00s out there, so even if you don't know any teenagers personally, there's no excuse.

2. Are We There Yet?
So many unpublished novels begin with a meandering, waffly opening chapter, usually a relic from the very earliest draft where the writer was trying to find his or her way into the voice of the book. Often, this will involve the main character arriving at a new school and getting to know a lot of new names and faces, many of whom have disappeared by the time the plot actually gets under way. You've probably only got 50,000 words or so, and you should make them count. So don't waste a chapter or two on irrelevant stuff. Your reader will be wondering when on earth you are going to get the story going.

3. A Kind of Magic.
In the last 15-20 years, novels featuring spells, magic, the supernatural, fantasy, fairies, dark demonic forces and pink sparkly custard with the ability to transform into eagles have all swept to prominence, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. But magic is not a plot short-cut. This is something I've seen again and again - writers bringing in a magic spell, a supernatural happening or a hitherto unsuspected ability, in order to move the story on. If you have to do that, the chances are that your book already suffers from deeper structural problems. Look at how published writers use magic. It's almost never thrown in just as a 'with one bound, they were free' way of getting the characters out of difficulty. There's a trade-off for using magic: emotionally, economically or in terms of expended force or energy. Use your magic sensibly.

Hocus pocus, narrative focus. 

4. What's It All About?

In a desperate attempt to make sure there is enough going on in their novel, a new writer will often throw in everything including a magical, talking kitchen sink. Maybe you need to do this in a first draft, to work out what is effective and what isn't. But don't leave it all in. The result will not be a neatly-dovetailing denouement in which all the threads come together, intertwined with narrative genius. It will be a mess, in which all the disparate elements look as if they've wandered in from different novels. That robot clown on page 56, that Minotaur on page 98, that aquatic chariot race on page 134? They may have all seemed like a good idea at the time, and for perfectly valid reasons. But now that you've got through to the end, and you're redrafting and re-editing (you are doing that, right?), ask yourself how valid these elements are for advancing the plot or the characters. Or are they just there because you like them and can't bear to let go of them? Plonk them in a folder called Bits and Bobs. You'll find somewhere to use them, even if it takes five years. 

5. As You Know, Captain...

If you have to have pages and pages of characters sitting down and explaining vast chunks of the plot to one another - as if they're either in the kind of meeting you get before a school trip, or the kind of tedious post-project debriefing session you may have had to endure at work - then you've done something wrong. This goes double if you have characters telling one another things which they already know. 

6. I Quit.
There's a well-known critics' favourite called 'quitting before you're fired', and people often feel the need to include it in children's novels - perhaps fearing the young reader will be so disgusted by the scientific implausibility of what they have just read that they will fling the book aside, unless the author gets there first. Basically, 'quitting before you're fired' is a seemingly-clever (but actually not that clever) technique where the author, having spotted something which doesn't make sense, decides to have one of the characters point this out to another in the hope that drawing attention to it will make it look deliberate. You also sometimes see this called 'lampshading' (i.e. hanging a lampshade on anything which challenges the audience's suspension of disbelief). What the author should be expending energy doing, of course, is going back to the Thing Which Does Not Make Sense and either removing it, or making it more likely, believable or comprehensible.

7. 'I say, Julian, what a jolly wheeze.'
Part of the problem with being any age older than a teenager and trying to write teenage dialogue is that, unless you have children of that age, or are a teacher or social worker or someone else who works with young people, you won't hear much of it on a day-to-day basis. So you should make it your business to go and listen to some, in any way that won't get you arrested. Go and earwig in Subway and Nando's, or on train station platforms or in bus queues. Write down anything especially witty or interesting - because, of course, you will have your Writer's Notebook with you at all times. At all costs, try to avoid going either of two ways - having your young people speak in the voices of middle-aged people, or having them speak in a kind of forced, pseudo-contemporary way, peppered with slang which will quickly date. The best children's writers are very adept at capturing the rhythms of young people's speech, without actually using expressions that pin them down to a particular year in the 21st century.

8. The Machine Stops.
If you are writing about contemporary young people between the ages of 12 and 17, then at some point you're going to have to address the fact that, at this age, the vast majority of them will be conducting a lot of their lives on social media, either using laptops or iPads or phones. In ten years, all of that will have dated too and I'll have to come back and update this blog, always assuming anyone is still blogging in 2025. But for now, have a think about the challenges this sets us as writers. It’s rare to see anyone under the age of 30 walking around without some kind of portable communications device, often multi-tasking on a number of virtual platforms while walking, talking, eating or working. And while we can’t yet teleport ourselves out of difficult situations, the existence of a cloud of data, accessible at a thumb-nudge, changes the whole way we think and act. The prevalence of technology and social media means that much of the emotional dimension of our characters’ lives could well take place in these virtual spaces. Ignore it at your peril. (All right, so you can’t allow for every eventuality - there is always the possibility that a young reader in 2035 will download a book from the SchoolLibrarySpace, flick through it and  declare in horror that it’s ‘so 2010s – the characters are called Ryan and Jade and they use Snapchat…’)

9. Tonight We're Going To Plot It Like It's 1989.
Following on from the above - there's a good reason the Sarah Jane Adventures team were always having their phones impounded, because mobile technology is a surefire way of short-circuiting a plot. ('Hi, Mum? The alien kidnappers have taken us to a hangar just outside Basildon. I think it's somewhere off the A132. Can you come and get us?') The ease and speed of sending data will affect the structure of our plots. In the 1980s, if Gary wanted to blackmail his ex, Trish, with an ill-judged photograph of them in flagrante, he would probably have had to wait a few days for it to be developed – and even then, Trish would have the chance to destroy the negatives. In 2015, if Connor wants to do the same thing to Chloe, all he needs is the evidence on his phone and, in milliseconds, it can be up there for all the world to see. Spy stories involving the recovery of files – either on paper, on CD or on memory-stick – will fall by the wayside now that data zips through the wireless networks and is backed up in the Cloud, and so writers of hi-tech thrillers will need to find new, 21st-century MacGuffins to drive their plots.

10. Teenage Kicks.
You know what teenagers are like, right, because you were one? Chances are you'll get it terribly wrong, though. So may first-time writers produce what they think is a teen book but, because they haven't read enough of what's out there, and what they produce is, as far as tone and storyline and emotional content go, a book for age 9-12 with slightly-too-advanced vocabulary and syntax for that age group. It goes without saying that, if you want to write for teenagers, you should be reading and enjoying what's already out there - and if you are, that will make doubly sure we don't get any adolescent Rogers and Maureens listening to the latest happening sounds on their Compact Disc Players.

'What's your problem?'

Remembering our own childhood is not good enough - yes, today's teens live through the same emotions and experiences as we did in the 1980s. But on the other hand, the context is very different. I grew up in that 12-year gap between the arrival of computers in the home and the day when some bright spark first had the nous to plug one into the telephone socket. If you travelled back in time and told me about social media, revenge porn, Instagram, people filming rock-stars' unfortunate hair-burning accidents and putting them on YouTube, vloggers getting book deals, apps, Snapchat, Clash of Clans and the entire raison d'être of something called a Kardashian, my head would probably have exploded. I was still having trouble with the idea that the Hobbit game could talk to me. THORIN SITS DOWN AND STARTS SINGING ABOUT GOLD. If you'll excuse me, I'm off to feel middle-aged.

Just saying it could even make it happen

So, Tuesday 30th September arrived, the day I would finally manage something I had wanted to do since 1985 - to see Kate Bush in concert. As a spotty teenager I had become enraptured with Kate, listening to her albums over and over on my Walkman, covering my wall in her posters and scouring the media for the smallest mention of her in a way which would put a modern-day teenage Directioner to shame. My love had perhaps lapsed a little in the last 20 years and I had not given the later albums the attention they deserved, and so I had tried to rectify this in the weeks leading up to the concert.

We had been lucky enough to get much-sought-after tickets by going for the penultimate show in the run, which I thought would be a less popular night than the opening few. I was terrified in the few days running up to the event that one of my usual minor ailments (broken tooth, blocked ears) was going to prevent me from getting there - and would have prevented my friend and fellow Kate fan Steve from going in too, as I had our tickets! But all was well in the end.

It was really one of the most extraordinary things I have seen on a stage. Anyone expecting a valedictory 'greatest hits' performance would have been disappointed - she didn't even do three of her half-dozen Top 10 songs. (Well, she didn't do 'Don't Give Up', either, but I wasn't expecting that.) But it wasn't about that, and so there was no disappointment in the Hammersmith Apollo - just a lot of love, awe and admiration. The focus of the evening was to be a dramatic, musical presentation of the two Kate albums which could be said to be almost narrative poems, two pieces of work twenty years apart: The Ninth Wave from the flipside of 1985's Hounds of Love, and A Sky of Honey, the second CD of 2005's double album Aerial. The first is an intense 7-song cycle depicting the hallucinatory experiences of a woman almost drowning in icy water after a shipwreck, while the second is a modern-day symphony expressing the changing moods of a single day in the countryside from dawn through to night-time and the next morning, and a reflection on the challenge of capturing this in any form of art.

The concert was divided into four distinct parts, opening with Kate coming on stage with band and singers for what looked like a conventional rock gig, drenched in blue light and with the guitars turned up, if not quite to 11, then certainly to a rockier level than one might have expected. Crowd-pleasing moments included a storming 'Hounds of Love' and 'Running Up That Hill', at which point a young man six rows in front of us leapt up and danced as if at a rave. We didn't begrudge him his fun, really, although he was almost exactly in front of us and we had to crane to either side to see Kate! (At various points throughout the night, the audience got to its feet and gave spontaneous ovations, but then respectfully sat down again and listened to - and, just as importantly bearing in mind what was to come, watched - what was going on. This was rather as I imagined it might be.)

'King of The Mountain' finished this opening section - a song which always rather underwhelmed on the radio, but which sounded awesome live - and then three-quarters of the way through, it just exploded. The band vanished from the stage, a mime artist came on twirling some odd device, and confetti (adorned with the Tennyson quote from The Ninth Wave) was blasted into the audience. With a combination of sound and lighting, the effects guys managed to create the impression of a storm in the theatre, and at that point a screen came down and we had an amusing filmed insert (scripted by Kate and the novelist David Mitchell) with an astronomer calling the coastguard. From there it was full-on theatre - with scenery, lighting effects, back-projection, dramatised inserts, etc. The Ninth Wave was brought to life with visual imagery which I will always associate with it from now on when listening to it - including the one part which leaked out before the performance, the 'flotation tank' sequence where she performs in the water in a life-jacket! (The accompanying concert programme goes into the problems they had recording with live microphones in water, complete with some fruity language from an increasingly-frustrated Kate.) There was also a brilliant evocation of a helicopter sequence, achieved only with a massive lighting-rig swooping over the audience and stabbing out a stark, white spotlight. Also memorable was a dramatic interlude as a lead in to the spooky 'Watching You Without Me', where some clever direction managed to sneak Kate on stage behind a door without anyone noticing. An upbeat, light-drenched rendition of 'The Morning Fog' finished this section, with the musicians coming to the front of the stage and giving a beautifully joyous, loose-feeling, folky rendition of this piece, in which - spoilers! - the drowning woman is rescued and returns to her family.

The third part was mainly based on the second disc of Aerial, which I have always found difficult - but I appreciate it a lot more now! Digital images (birds, sunsets etc.) combined with conventional stage scenery, puppetry and moody lighting to create the feel of passing time, recreating and re-interpreting the album's 24-hour timescale. The climax of the 'Aerial' song itself, where she sings about going up on the roof and, um, turns into a rather scary blackbird (or was it a crow?) was very powerful and unsettling and weird! Then she finished with an encore, which involved her sitting down at the piano and performing not an obvious song but the lesser-known 'Among Angels' from the 50 Words For Snow album, and ending with a crowd-pleasing 'Cloudbusting' with the full band.

So, well worth it and very memorable - more like theatre than a traditional music concert. I loved it, and if I had any mild disappointments at all it would be the self-indulgence of the Aerial section in places (but if you go and see Kate Bush and don't allow her to be self indulgent, you're in the wrong place!). One might question the wisdom of giving her son Bertie, lovely chap that he appears to be, a full 4-minute solo, but there you are... nobody seemed to mind that much. Altogether it was well worth it, with a very contented audience vanishing into the night, and I hope the rumours of more Kate concerts in the future turn out to be true. The word 'genius' is over-used in the rock world, having been applied to everyone from McCartney to Eminem, but surely in Kate's case it is not hyperbole. There can rarely have been a live concert which was such a complete expression of an artist's creative concept, combining music, theatre, lighting, sound, staging, choreography and set design in perfect holistic vision.

Although, next time, 'The Man With The Child In His Eyes' would be lovely, please, Kate...

Footnote - I also managed while in London to go and take a peek at the new Foyles - a thing of glass and light and beauty with books arranged very creatively. I hope it starts a high street bookselling renaissance. (I had to navigate my way through the mess that Tottenham Court Road/Oxford St/Soho has become, though - when will that vast redevelopment ever be finished?)

Anything You Can Do

Do you know what the ten things never to say to a writer are? If you don't, here's Chuck Wendig to brief you. A lot of that resonates with me. I wrote an article for The Author a few years ago about the ten most annoying questions writers get, and it touched on a lot of similar ground (and resulted in a very nice handwritten reply from J.K. Rowling!).

Like most other writers, I probably get asked the one about where ideas 'come from' more often than anything else, and I give a similar answer to Chuck's - you just can't stop them coming. I currently have 63 'blurbs', or attempts at blurbs, on my computer. Each of these represents a potential new novel. Maybe 10 of them are actually good enough to be made into novels at some point. It's my continual fear that I won't live long enough to write all the books I have 'ideas' for.

Ideas are not the problem - it's what you do with them.

And yes, I always write a blurb because it forces you to think:

Who is this story about? 
What situation are they in at the beginning? 
What happens to change that? 
What questions does this make us ask? 

Those are the questions I use for children's workshops about story outlines too.

This is also why I am extremely sceptical when readers write scathing reviews which say 'I could have done better than that', or 'I could have written a much better novel/script about the same idea'. I may have become hard-hearted after 20 years as a published writer, but I'm afraid my first reaction is, 'no, you probably couldn't.' They think they can just pop through a magic fireplace to, say, BBC Media Centre, slap a script down on the desk and say 'read this'. It's the same mentality which draws people into being amateur football managers, and declaring - usually every 4 years after England is knocked out of a major competition in the early stages - 'My Sunday league team could have put up a better showing against Costa Rica/Portugal/ Italy/delete as applicable.'  Our national team is not the force it once was and is, sadly, distinctly average on the world stage, but even so, the idea that amateurs could make a better fist of it is, come on, a little far-fetched. Yes, even with England.

Doctor Who fans are more guilty of this than anyone. There is a tendency - especially since the show came back, first under Russell T Davies and then under Steven Moffat - for fans to fulminate that they could be writing scripts which are better than what has ended up on screen, and indeed in some cases that they could even be running the show more efficiently.

What is rather telling is that they always choose the worst example of Who they can find, and say things like 'I could wee Fear Her in my sleep', or 'I've had dreams that have been better-plotted than The Rings of Akhaten'. I make no comment as to the merits of those stories - they are the favourite of someone, somewhere, as the Doctor Who Magazine 50th Anniversary Poll reminded us - but just observe that they're generally rated lower than their bedfellows. So why set your sights so low? Surely any aspiring TV writer should choose the best example of Who (or Buffy, or Casualty, or Midsomer Murders, or whatever their bag is) and say, 'One day, I want to write a story as good as Pyramids of Mars/The Caves of Androzani/ Blink/Asylum of the Daleks'?

This excellent piece by Lee Zachariah says everything I want to say about the reasons the current incarnation of the show upsets a certain kind of fan a bit too often. A dimension which Lee doesn't mention so much in his - perfectly valid - comparisons with other programmes is the sense of ownership which Who fans feel over the show, one which really came into its own during the two big gaps when Who was off the air (sob!) in the early 90s and late 90s/early 00s. That was the point at which fandom took over the controlling narrative, and after which any 'official' version of the programme was going to have to compete with the fan text rather than automatically trumping it. It's very different from the way fans interact with, say, JJ Abrams, Josh Whedon and J Michael Straczynski about their shows. Yes, some fans are annoyed by Steven Moffat for a very simple reason -  he isn't making the version of the show which exists in their head. And so his ideas must automatically be inferior to theirs - even though he is the one with 25 years' experience of writing for TV.

Some people take it even further and argue for a return to the halcyon days of the New Adventures' open door policy (from which I and others did benefit). They say the BBC should no longer insist that people writing for Who come from established TV backgrounds, and that it should open script submissions up to the general public.

I'll tell you what I think about this.

I think that is the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard, and is a recipe for disaster.

Let's imagine for a second a lunatic parallel universe in which this actually happens. None of these script submissions would even be seen by Steven Moffat. They would be sifted through by some lowly BBC employee who would, slowly, lose the will to live as he/she reads the hundredth barely-literate, action-packed effects-fest in which multiple incarnations of the Valeyard take on the Daleks as they battle the Ice Warriors for control of Mars, or in which the Rani teams up with Sabalom Glitz on Peladon. Even those which were not continuity-laden, unfilmable nightmares would need bashing into shape through about seventeen different drafts before they produced anything remotely resembling a TV script. And it's likely that the best idea - the best story - which could slot into a new season of Who would come from someone who had ten years' experience of writing scripts for TV anyway, thus invalidating the entire process. Opening up Doctor Who script submissions to Joe Public would be to deny that Who is in fact a very difficult programme to write for. It would be like turning auditions for the London Symphony Orchestra into The X-Factor and allowing people to have a a shot when they haven't even done Grade 1 violin.

All right, it's the way publishing still works - most of the houses allow submissions (although increasingly they have to come through an agent), even those with no previous novel experience. Genius novels are found on the 'slush pile'. But TV is a very different beast, and even competent writers with lots of experience in other media, e.g. books or audios (I feel able to count myself among that number) do not necessarily have enough of a grasp of the basics of TV scriptwriting to produce a workable new Who. (When I do talks, I find myself comparing different kinds of writing to different kinds of running - it's rare, almost impossible, to excel in both sprinting and distance running, for example, as your training is totally different.)

And the people who say 'I could do better' think they can simply send their 'finished' (i.e. probably utterly unworkable) Who script off to the production office, rather than going through the more realistic, more tedious process of building a reputation: getting stuff published in small magazines, building up a CV through short films and soaps, having a script 'calling card', going through processes like BBC Writers' Room, script workshops and networking and so on. There's no one way to do it, but the ways in which people do it usually cover two or three of those bases.

It can take ten years or more of that kind of thing before you're ready to tackle a 50-minute episode of a highly-regarded show. But some people don't want that. They want their genius to be discovered now.

When I was first published, I knew nobody in publishing and knew nothing about it. The people I now know, and the knowledge I have picked up, is the result of 20 years' experience. I am a much better writer now than I used to be, because I have listened to people, and I have read more, and watched more, and thought more. That was never going to happen overnight. And I'm not published because I 'know' (actually not very well) some people in publishing. It's the other way round.

So, if you're angry enough to be watching a professional at work and think, 'I could do better', then by all means have a go. Anger is an energy, as a prophet said once. But I'm afraid, it's a case of - depending on what you want to get into - practising your scales, learning your dribbling and passing skills, or writing for non-paying, non-glamorous markets for a bit.

And there's no magic fireplace to let you jump through time to the required spot. You've just got to clink glasses with Madame de Pompadour and celebrate doing it on the 'slow path'.

Good luck. It's what the rest of us had to do.

The One About A TV Show That Is Not Doctor Who

At the risk of sounding like someone who writes in to the local newspaper to rant about whatever is on their mind, you know that song, 'it's 5 o'clock somewhere?' Well, it's always the 20th anniversary of something somewhere, these days. These anniversaries sneak up on unwary 45-year-olds who are still getting accustomed to not being 30: the first Iraq war, Britpop, Nirvana's Nevermind, Tony Blair becoming Labour leader, Jarvis Cocker showing his bottom to Michael Jackson at the BRIT Awards... (Wait, we haven't had that one yet, have we? That's next year. I hope.)

And now, apparently, this month it's the 20th anniversary of Friends. I find this a bit odd, as I thought we'd already had the 20th anniversary of Friends a while back, but that might have been the 20th anniversary of the pilot episode... or maybe it was the 10th anniversary of it ending. And if it's 5 o'clock somewhere, it's also the time for a Friends repeat somewhere. There was a time when it seemed to be on E4 about fifteen times a day, although that's calmed down a bit now, and they now fill the gaps with The Big Bang Theory and Who Cares How the Hell You Met Their Mother, Seriously? (not a fan of the latter).

The early series of Friends actually have a haunting, nostalgic, almost elegiac quality in places. There is the sense of regret beneath the comedy that these people will never get their childhood and high school years back, and the freedom and fear of being unleashed into the adult world - especially when viewed on the rather washed-out, grainy prints E4 seemed to use. (Or did it always look like that?) Later series sometimes descended into farce, and it was tricky to ignore the fact that the regulars increasingly looked like highly-paid, airbrushed supermodels, but it was usually very funny. It's not hard to see why it did so well here in the UK, as it has all the staples of a great British sitcom: a small group of characters (which doesn't change at all in 10 years - even Dad's Army and It Ain't Half Hot Mum lost a couple of regulars) and comedy which is often based around misunderstandings, social embarrassment, irony, characters behaving in predictable ways, and people trying and failing to pass on important messages until it's too late.

It's interesting to think about the few things which a UK version might have made more of, but which are more-or-less ignored. The Geller family's Jewishness is just there, it's hardly ever really made a big thing of (which is fine), and yet it's hard to imagine a UK sitcom with a Jewish family which would not make their religion a central issue - and sadly, it would probably lapse into comic stereotype. Also almost totally glossed-over are the obvious income differences there would be between a head chef, a very-occasionally-employed actor, a singer/masseuse, a data input thingy whatsit (what does Chandler do, anyway?), a university lecturer and a waitress. (I say almost, because there are odd references to it, and one episode where it is, rather jarringly, pointed out that three of them earn less than the others.) The awkwardness would be made more of in a British sitcom - and it would probably also be a class-based issue, with the comedy arising from the ensuing social gaffes (think of Rodney and Cassandra in Only Fools and Horses).

A few elements proved odd for the British viewer, though (I'm hoping it wasn't just me) so I thought I'd round up a few of the cultural oddities which sometimes proved a barrier to enjoying the show properly. I don't mean stuff like the importance of High School proms or (mostly) issues of vocabulary, or how darned odd it sounds the first time you hear Phoebe say 'I'm a mass-oose' to rhyme with 'caboose', and not the much sexier and more Fruunnnch 'mass-euse' to rhyme with 'Chartreuse'. I'm not talking about high-fiving, belief-suspending riffs of plot ludicrousness like Rachel's meteoric rise from waitress to Ralph Lauren buyer (is nobody in US sitcoms allowed to stay unsuccessful, or be poor or have unfulfilled dreams?). Or Joey's apparent ability to work on a Los Angeles-based TV production while living in New York all the time, or the increasing unlikelihood of all six of them being together for casual breakfasts before work and cosy gatherings on the Central Perk sofa in the evenings (Monica being the only chef in the world who never works evenings, weekends or public holidays).

I'm thinking of things which probably won't have been commented on by the US viewer because they are so normal, and yet which will have made most UK viewers go 'huh'? At least, until the time we saw 'The One With The Holiday Armadillo' for the seventeenth time on E4. (Seriously, it was always 'The One With The Holiday Armadillo'.)

1. Ross is a Professor. 
His students call him Professor Geller. He's only just got his PhD, he's only just left the museum and started teaching. Yes, 'Professor' means something very different in the US education system, and it jars a bit when you're used to the UK one, where being a Professor entails the responsibility for an entire department - and where you're a prodigy indeed if you manage it before you're 40, let alone 30.

2. The Hallowe'en episode.
There always has to be one. And everyone dresses up in random, weird costumes whose extravagance is in inverse proportion to the humour quotient of the script. Can they not just ignore Hallowe'en one year?

3. The Thanksgiving episode.
Equally baffling. Again, there always has to be one, and there is usually an 'amusing' incident with a turkey and a crisis over a family misunderstanding.

4. 'Doodies'.
Over and over again, in the episode where Chandler starts his new job, it is apparently hilariously funny that his colleagues pronounce 'duties' in this way. It isn't even funny the first time, seeing as we don't have the same slang term (it's a toilet reference, right?), and having it repeated throughout the episode doesn't make it any funnier.

5. Pottery Barn.
We don't have it. So the whole social significance of Phoebe's antipathy to the place (despite eventually decking out her flat in its fake-antique stuff) is rather lost on us.

6. The crying Indian.
The basis of a famous Chandler one-liner, in 'The One Where They Run Out Of Petrol' (look, I know it's not probably called that, but people call Doctor Who episodes 'the one with the maggots' and 'the one with the statues' so often that I thought I could get away with it). Chandler says that if he throws some rubbish down, a 'crying Indian' would come by and save them. It's all about this environmental awareness short from the 1970s, which most UK viewers will only have discovered since we got YouTube. They probably wouldn't say 'Indian' these days... right?

7. Whooping at celebrity cameos. 
Seriously, why do audiences do this? Every time a guest or minor character walks into the room for the first time and, big deal, they happen to be played by Christina Applegate or Tom Selleck or someone (yes, they play roles, they are actors) the entire studio audience explodes with a rapturous 'WAAAAOOOGGHH--HOOO!' and a deafening round of applause. Quite apart from drowning out the character's first line of dialogue, it also breaks the fourth wall (and not in a clever way) and means that, on some level, the audience are not fully buying into the fictional universe presented.


That's it.

Well, not quite. I can't let this go. For the last time:

Doctor Who and the Deep Breath

In the olden days, when some people still had black-and-white telly, and Wagon Wheels were bigger (they were) and your mum and dad used to ask people, 'Are you on the phone?' and people still believed in TV detector vans, and you could pop down to the Post Office for a quarter of aniseed balls (insert nostalgic music here), there was a magical range of Doctor Who novelisations from Target Books.

A 'novelisation' was a necessary thing in the pre-video age - it was the only way of catching up on episodes you had missed, or of experiencing again those which you had. Because Doctor Who was so rarely repeated. It must be one of the BBC's few hit programmes of the 1970s and 1980s which never got a full series repeated on terrestrial TV. I'm pausing to think about that 'never', but... no. I'm prepared to be corrected here, but I'm pretty sure of this: not once has a full series of Doctor Who been repeated on 'normal' television - that kind of thing only started happening with the 2005 relaunch, when the BBC3 repeats became the norm. Only individual stories were repeated, often 'stripped' across the week on consecutive days.

The Target novelisations were a wonderful way of 'owning' the programme before one could ever do so on video or DVD. Terrance Dicks did a sterling job, novelising the bulk of them in the 1970s, but later on - largely thanks to the efforts of editor Nigel Robinson - some of the original scriptwriters came in to adapt their stories into prose.

The covers ranged in quality, from the wonderful to the puzzlingly bad. Many fans have a great affection for the work of Chris Achilleos, but I want to put in a word for the very talented Jeff Cummins too - perhaps I am biased, as he produced the stunning cover for my first novel The Dimension Riders in 1993, for which I am eternally grateful. The back cover blurbs were an odd mixture too. I don't mind a bit of melodrama, or a teasing blurb which deliberately avoids giving away a lot of the plot, but we did get the odd blurb which didn't do justice to the story at all. (Take this one for Mawdryn Undead, for instance, or this for The Awakening.)

I've started using the idea as the basis for school workshops, in which I get children and teenagers to 'mini-novelise' the openings of recent Who like 'The Impossible Astronaut' and 'The Day of the Doctor' - and even, if I am feeling brave, 1970s classic 'Horror of Fang Rock'. It provokes a lot of interesting discussion about the different ways in which stories are told in various media.

Sadly, the new stories broadcast since 2005 have not been novelised - the medium is seen as redundant in the post-DVD age. BBC Books don't think - rightly, I'm sure - that they'd sell enough to make them worthwhile. That doesn't stop people having a bit of fun with the idea, though.

So I wonder how that master of crisp and sturdy prose, Terrance Dicks, would have described the appearance of the new Doctor, played by Peter Capaldi, in a novelisation of his first story? Based on his previous work, would it perhaps be something like this?...

Inside the Police Box which was not a Police Box, but in fact a Time and Space vessel known as the TARDIS, was an impossibly huge, dimly-lit room full of books and scientific apparatus, with a many-sided console at its centre. At the controls stood that mysterious traveller in Time and Space known only as the Doctor. Now in his twelfth incarnation - although, in truth, the Doctor himself did not bother counting - he was tall and lean, with a hawkishly imperious, high-cheekboned face and elegantly swept-back grey hair. Authoritative blue-grey eyes were framed by dark, imposing eyebrows, while his mouth was set in what could have been determination, or perhaps grim amusement. He was elegantly attired in a high-buttoned white shirt and a dark blue Crombie coat with a blood-red lining, matching blue trousers and sturdy, polished black shoes...

Apologies to Sir Terrance if that's nothing like the way he'd do it nowadays...

The stars are my fault

Some books I have read recently, with the star ratings I gave them on Goodreads. Oh, how I do enjoy a good star rating. I'm sad enough to be excited by star ratings, having been raised on 1980s copies of the controversial Doctor Who Bulletin.

Disclaimer: Two of the writers below are friends on Facebook and one in real life as well, but as ever, my policy with friends' books is to review them if I liked them and to tell them honestly in private if I didn't!

The Fault In Our Stars by John Green.

Never would have read this if my daughter hadn't told me to... Lots of very sassy, unconvincingly smart teenage dialogue gets in the way of a genuinely touching romance, humour and some interesting writing. Ultimately, I'm not the target audience - I read it at some emotional distance and resisted the shameless tear-wringing. Everyone who likes this book says the bit in the Anne Frank House is awesome - I'm afraid I cringed at it more than a little. ***



The Set-Up by Sophie McKenzie.

First in a highly successful series, so it must be doing something right - who am I to judge? But I found it emotionally flat, with the main character's continual obsession over the lead girl to be puzzling. The writing was flat and 'Year 6 SATs' in style, with lots of cheap phrases like 'my heart was pounding', the exceedingly dull narrator's body apparently being contorted in various uncomfortable ways by his unnecessary emoting. His whiny emo-mooning is totally at odds with the action-thriller the story wants to be, and totally gets in the way of his being likeable. There was a vestige of a good spy/action plot at the heart of it, totally wasted by the plodding way in which it was told. And please, YA writers, stop making your characters nod, smile and bite their lips all the time! It must hurt their necks and mouths so much. *

Flood Child/Flood and Fire by Emily Diamand.

This book and its sequel are charming. They're full of jokes, fun and quirkiness alongside the darkness and exciting adventure, and compellingly told. There's some quite visceral violence too. In a future Britain, drowned in post-apocalyptic floods and at the mercy of rampaging raiders, a girl called Lily is in possession of a unique treasure - one of the last remaining computers in the world. Action-packed but with a sense of fun and an underlying intelligence - rather like a clever Doctor Who two-parter, in fact. ****

Floodland by Marcus Sedgwick.

Coincidentally, another 'flooded future England' book with a young female protagonist, but this time set in Norwich, much shorter than Emily Diamand's books and much darker, at least until the redemptive ending. Didn't totally feel it. A novella which felt a little like an expanded short story at times - a glimpse of a world whose other stories it would have been interesting to know. I gather his later stuff is very good, so I may seek out more of it. ***

The Quarry by Iain Banks.

Sadly, not a great final novel. I so wish Banks had gone out in a roar of brilliance, but this is the book of his where I've cared least about the protagonists since A Song of Stone. After the very enjoyable Stonemouth I had high hopes, but sadly it wasn't to be. Flashes of his old self can't redeem it. There's a MacGuffin of a lost videotape which turns out to be not very interesting after all, and would you believe it, some drugs and sex, long-buried secrets and a few rants against injustice and established authority. Enjoyable in parts, but ultimately unsatisfying - The Crow Road it is not. **

Dark Matter by Michelle Paver.

Haunting, unsettling tale of an Arctic expedition in the 1930s plagued by dark forces, this could so easily have lapsed into stereotype or laughable parody. Instead, it is thoroughly intriguing and pulls off the very difficult trick of narrating an intelligent ghost story for the cynical modern reader. Astonishingly detailed sense of place - you totally believe you are there in the long, cold Arctic night - and a compelling, psychologically-disturbing narrative. *****


The Unpierced Heart by Katy Darby.


In some ways a clever pastiche of the Victorian Gothic novel, with flashes of Conan Doyle - an engaging approach to the storytelling and a mystery which intrigues. The story unfolds through the perspectives of multiple narrators, cleverly intertwined, and there is rich, superbly-researched period detail. Not sure it totally holds the reader's attention in the end as it veers off into over-the-top melodrama with its moustache-twirling villain and the seemingly obligatory pox-riddled prostitutes, but it was entertaining enough. ***

The Liberators by Philip Womack.

More YA fantasy, this time with rather complacent, wealthy children. Superbly dynamic and intriguing opening which makes one think the Alan Garner comparisons are going to be justified, but soon lapses into smugness and tedious runaround. I found myself unengaged by the end. **

The Secrets We Left Behind by Susan Elliot Wright.

Compelling story set in two time-zones, with a disastrous decision in a squat in Hastings during the drought of 1976 having shocking ramifications in 21st-century Sheffield. Lots of research has gone into the 1976 bits, and you feel you are really there with the characters in very real settings. They have jobs/situations you can believe in, as well. The ending requires you to buy into something I can't reveal without spoiling the plot, but the author carries you along with her crisp, strong narrative, teasing you when you think you've worked it out. *****





Love Falls by Esther Freud.

Languid, Italian-set holiday romance with pretensions to literary fiction, populated with the kind of people I would go out of my way to avoid. Complacent, pretentious protagonists laze in the sun in between magically-appearing meals ('supper'), and having giggly romances. There is no plot. Seemingly random 1981 setting, in order to shoehorn in some irrelevant references to the Royal Wedding. Rape is presented as a casual irritation. I remember quite enjoying her early novels Hideous Kinky and Peerless Flats, but this is one of the worst books I have read in two years, and I'd have quite happily drowned most of the awful characters in the swimming-pool. *