BATMAN
Busy week – for me. If I kept a diary, most days might read: ‘Got up, got down to a bit of work…’ Or, a touch more interestingly, as this morning, ‘Two young foxes asleep on the lawn..’ (and who continue to snooze as I knock this out). ’Busy’ because we began recording the new radio play on Monday, so it’s piling in with the commuters and wondering, yet again, how folk stand crowded trains, strap hanging, day after day? I need to travel at busy times only a few times a year - and didn’t need to as it transpires on Monday, by arriving far too early for our ten o’clock start - ‘pathologically early’ as a friend put it recently. She’d rung to say she was running late with lunch so would I not arrive till one, rather than the half-twelve first suggested? When I did ring the bell - on the dot of one - the other eight or so guests were already drinking outside, presumably not having been similarly warned off. I like to think my punctuality-plus is because I’m working class and still feel the need to behave: ‘Don’t show us up’ as my mother used to hiss at me in seaside boarding houses. A couple of other guests arrive spectacularly late – and then leave early, with no such inhibitions, media types (of which I’m one, of course). The wife of this insouciant couple has just been interviewing Prince Harry. I say his relationship must be quite serious for him to leave a wedding and drive to London to bring his girlfriend back - only to be told that the squeeze had, in fact, been parked at some address close by. I’m finding it hard to distinguish Harry from the actor in the Channel 4 series ‘The Windsors’ who recently, after communicating with his beloved on Skype, then buttoned up and adjusted his trousers as he got up from the screen.
It’s Maida Vale for the recording and one of the advantages of arriving early is a chat with an actress who’s also in way before time. She’s brought in her nine month old son who is finding the green room a terrific play pen. He moves round unsteadily, propping himself up against the coffee tables and sofas. Sadly, his minder – another actress – arrives to whisk him away. He’s called Raleigh, like the bikes, and his mother tells me she does a lot of audio books, including ‘Girl on a Train.’ Other actors now arrive, including our 21 year old female lead, gutsy, noisy. She’s playing a 17 year old, having been a teenager in ‘Broadchurch’ (which didn’t see, so know little about her). It’s her first radio. At the end of the recording I’ll tell her that she really grabbed hold of the part and made it her own. This is because she’s not at all the way I imagined her character, but it works (I think). In the play she’s an A level student and part time receptionist in a middle range Folkestone Hotel, who realises that an Irish visitor who’s registered under the name of Barclay is – spoiler alert – the writer Samuel Beckett. I’ve taken pleasure with the play in making sure that the small incidents it portrays are exactly what happened to Beckett back in March 1961. Her character is fictional, however, and I had a lot of fun with her world of Adam Faith, Amami hair wash, John Wayne at the movies. To a great extent (though not Amami Hair wash or Bear Brand nylons) it was my world. I got the feminine touches from my old friend, the journalist Valerie Grove who sent me details from her teenage diaries. After the commission came in I’d e-mailed her, inquiring if she knew of anyone who kept a diary from those years and who ‘might be willing’ etc, knowing full well that V. Grove (V. Smith then) was an inveterate diary keeper. Some of her entries went straight into the play, including a detail about a newly opened Wimpy Bar. As we seldom meet, I suggest to Valerie that she might come to listen to the recording and I’d take her to lunch, having in mind – suitably - ‘Byrons,’ the burger place on Regent Street, close to Broadcasting House. But, as it turns out, we’re to record in the BBC’s Maida Vale studios where the nearby tennis club (tucked away behind the area’s many mansion blocks) welcomes a few star actors and BBC personnel wandering in. Valerie used to play tennis with Harold Pinter (not much of a serve, apparently) so we opt for the tennis club rather than the BBC canteen and sit out in the sun with chicken satays and a glass of wine, and pick up on bits and bobs from our last fifty years. She’s from South Shields, via the outer London suburbs, and has a sharp ear for language usage. I’d turned to Valerie at one point after her arrival in the control room to ask what she thought of a scene we’ve just recorded. ‘Fine,’ she said, ‘but a girl from Kent wouldn’t say that line: “You’ve not got one, have you?” That’s a Wakelam Northernism.’ Indeed it is and the Northerner hasn’t noticed. The line is de-contorted; the young actress, faithfully reading what was on the page (good for her), informed of the change, and her delivery improved as a result.
Our lead, playing Sam Beckett, is Adrian Dunbar, whom I remember from my early days in London when he was a promising young actor at the Royal Court (‘Those whom the Gods destroy they first call “promising”’). Adrian, happily, is now very well known for ‘Line of Duty’ (See ‘Impure Drama’ - which I don’t mention). He organises the Sam Beckett festival in Enniskillen, and knows his stuff about the great man. Along the corridor, in one of the breaks, we pass the actor Rory Kinnear, whom Adrian doesn’t notice. I say, charming as ever, ‘We’ve just passed an actor even more famous than you.’ There’s a moment and Adrian says, more in sorrow than anger, ‘People, I’ve found, think they can say anything to actors - the kind of things they wouldn’t say to other professions.’ But the same applies to writers, of course, and I say that when I’m asked what I do (generally a conversation stopper: I tend go for ‘self-employed’ or ‘work at home’) the next question is ‘Are you famous?’ Adrian was in Danny Boyle’s production of Edward Bond’s ‘Saved’ at the Court. I ran a group of Royal Court Young Writers at the time and Bond came in to talk about platform performances of a couple of their plays. He had a reputation for irascibility but was kindly critical of the two plays we showed him, making a little speech. The young writers were thrilled (one of them, John Cooper, rightly deciding on the Law as a better bet, is now a QC and well known Human Rights Lawyer). There were intruders at this little occasion thirty years ago. Max Stafford-Clark, who ran the theatre, and Danny Boyle, in charge of the Theatre Upstairs (where we were) had been hiding in the wings while Bond was on his feet, talking. I only later learned that they’d been listening, not showing their faces, in anticipation – perhaps – of some outburst from the usually uncompromising Edward. This odd behaviour wasn’t unusual at the Court. Danny, I remember, had a relationship with the casting director, whom he later married. He felt, all his time at the theatre, he needed to keep his affair secret, in case Max, a womaniser, made a competitive land grab. Danny, since, has acknowledged his great debt to Max as a director - and I may never have seen anything so good on stage as the last scene of Caryl Churchill’s ‘Top Girls’ which Max directed. I was always a bit nervous in Max’s presence. I once quietly slipped out of a preview of a play to bump into him where he was prowling just outside in the Circle bar. He tore me off a strip, like a teacher. Later, he gave me useful and encouraging advice on the couple of plays I had performed at the Court, coming up to Sheffield to see a preview of one of them at the Crucible. While impressed with the facilities of the (then) newly built Crucible, he balked at running the place: ‘Imagine, Stephen, having to do the Panto.’ His – austere - methodology was to go through plays line by line, asking, ‘What’s the intention of this line? What does the character want from it?’ It’s an approach that pays dividends but I think takes you so only far. I quite like characters to wander off-piste (one of my favourite scenes in the latest radio play has a couple talking of teapots, costume jewellery, and the grand Duchess Anastasia). Whatever the drift of his private life, Royal Court productions under Max were puritanical: clear, sparse, serious, left wing, I sometimes felt I had joined a theatrical sect. Simon Curtis, who got going as assistant to Max on ‘Top Girls’ and later directed the brilliant platform production of ‘Road,’ mentioned to me, school boy grinningly, that Tracey Ullman was the only actor he’d ever seen daring to read Daily Mail during breaks in rehearsals on the big stage. I once watched a rehearsal of the play she was in where Ullman, not well known then, only needed to walk across the stage to have people in hysterics. But the place wasn’t a fun palace: I generally always felt a bit of a flibbertigibbet there. I once burbled the praises of a visiting production ‘Bent’ (Ian McKellen the lead) to Danny. His response was the dismissively one word ‘Meretricious.’ I needed to look it up later: ‘showily, falsely attractive.’ The word came into my mind thirty years later, seeing extracts from his Olympics Opening Ceremony. I avoid ‘colourful’ opening ceremonies, even (well, particularly) eighty million pound ones, never saw the whole thing but didn’t take to what I did see. But maybe it’s me, over the years, that’s gone po-faced.
I remember standing as part of the audience at Simon’s platform production of ‘Road’, looking down at a little chap next to me and realising it was Paul Simon. The Court pulled in the stars. ‘Meryl Streep’s in tonight,’ the guy in the box office once told me. So it’s not that surprising that I came across Sam Beckett along one of the dimly lit back corridors of the (then) unreconstructed theatre. I mentioned this to Adrian, playing Beckett. He said that he didn’t think Beckett had had a play there in Max’s time but I knew it wasn’t a ghost I’d seen. Beckett had come from a chat with Max. I still retain a fondness for the old – poky - Royal Court, much the same during my time as it was in George Devine and John Osborne’s day. A couple of years ago I wrote a radio drama - almost a one-scene play about a visit Devine made to the unknown, impecunious young writer at the time of ‘Look Back in Anger,’ The new Royal Court is much glossier, more spacious, ‘purpose built’. Space was very limited in the old place. I liked nipping up the little flight of stairs from the Circle Bar into the top General Office, to get a few sheets of a play run off and gossip. Relegated to a roof space, folk were glad to see you. We used empty dressing rooms for discussions. Simon Curtis excitedly was once showing me some ideas for the set of a play we were working on when Gary Oldman walked in, young, blond - and not very pleased we were occupying his dressing room. I think he was getting into his part as the near silent young copper in Ron Hutchinson’s ‘Rat in the Skull’, another Max production. A tight four hander, this had all the hallmarks of a Theatre Upstairs play. Max wanted it shown in the big theatre downstairs, Brian Cox, indelibly, in the lead.
I have similar feelings of nostalgia working (generally the case with me these days) in the BBC’s glossy New Broadcasting House as opposed to Bush House, Lime Grove and Kensington House where I’ve worked in the past. At Maida Vale you head along a long gloomy corridor before finding the door that takes you downstairs into a cavernous area (grey, grey, grey) where the studios are and (astonishingly) a central concert hall. Arriving one morning at Maida Vale a few years ago, I found a crowd outside the entrance. ‘Who are you waiting for?’ I asked one guy, who didn’t know but was happy to join the throng. It turned out to be ‘Take That’ - in their successful re-incarnation, without Robbie. They recorded in the concert hall next to our studio and we were a bit worried that some sound would seep though. It didn’t and (I’m getting older and like to preserve some dignity) I didn’t sneak out to hear them play, though having fond feelings for the lads. During my glum period back in the early Nineties. I was in some huge Regents Park drawing room. It was evening, quite shady. Three of us, gay men, were eating. Across the room, big as a tennis court, the television was on. There was something about the music video that was playing and I got up to have a closer look. It was Take That, whom I didn’t know, break-dancing – is that what it’s called? throwing themselves around - to ‘Could This Be Magic?’ It was an image of happiness, joy. Some other friends I house sit for (gay: pretty young men always acceptable viewing) have ‘Take That’s Greatest Hits’ on now ancient VHS and I still sometimes slot the tape in and watch that particular dance routine (how do they do it?), and how it reminded me during a long period of (a long Maida Vale corridor of grey, grey, grey) depression what happiness felt like. I gather that over the last quarter of century, after their break up, Gary retreated miserable, depressed, to his Cheshire pile to smoke endless joints, and Robbie hit the usual ‘substance abuse’ pop star problems. Then things picked up again followed by a run in with the tax authorities and so on. All this soap opera stuff cheers me with own my less spectacular (or spectacularly rewarded) ‘career’ progression and regression. Life, eh?
One of our actors says about the latest play – the Beckett play, as I like to call it – that it would make a good film. And though it does have a (quiet) detective element, ‘I don’t think it would bring in many punters,’ I say. But at the end of the Maida Vale full cast recording (we had a further half day at Broadcasting House on the Friday for Voice Overs) I realise how sorry I am to leave Beckett behind. Like a lot of my stuff it comes out of my general reading. I’m not that fond of Beckett’s plays and have only ever seen one – ‘Footfalls’ (Billie Whitelaw in a wheelchair - and what I remember is not the play but that it was the evening after the Westland debate in the Commons when Kinnock had gone on too long in his attack on Thatcher and let her off the hook. It was his best chance of finishing her. We know now how vulnerable she was that afternoon. He knew he’d failed, had ‘lost the House’ and wasn’t reassured by my brand of cheerfulness that night. I think we did have a laugh later at our choice of play, and enjoyed meeting Billie, Beckett’s great interpreter. Beckett – at his least attractive – once reduced Billie, his favourite actress, to tears and a near nervous breakdown. I find the plays, which I’ve read rather than seen, too resolutely dour and pessimistic for my taste but love what I read of the man: his foibles, oddness, his quiet heroism in Occupied France, his long ‘unsuccessful’ years as a writer, his distrust of fame. There’s another feeling, too. I say it to my more usual radio director, David Hunter, whom I come across, later in the week of our recording in the Radio Drama Office at New Broadcasting House and who takes me out for a Byron burger lunch. We sit outside in the sun at the end of what feels like a successful week’s recording. ‘I think this play is my swan song,’ I say. It’s my nineteenth this century (I totted them up at a quiet moment in the studio when I had these finite feelings). This is the week John Humphreys and others have needed to come clean on their salaries and I’ve also totted up it would take me about a hundred plays to get anywhere near Humphreys’ and Huw Edwards’ annual trousering of license payers’ money. But it’s felt a privilege. Radio 4 Drama – my main outlet (there were three plays for R3) – is on the change: more ‘Box Set’ drama, story, story, story. I took some amusement, catching up with folk in the Radio Drama office, by saying about the latest, ‘Well, it’s a play in which nothing happens’ ( a bit like ‘Waiting for Godot,’ of which it was famously remarked ‘A play in which nothing happens, Twice.) I like the slight look of concern on one (earnest) producer’s face as I trot out my (not quite true) line about the play. For the last fifteen years or so I’ve been allowed to write more or less what I want to: single plays, character based. It was a freedom I first enjoyed (got away with) in television in the late Seventies and Eighties before management asserted its stranglehold and drama producers got (ratings related) nerves. I look round that new BBC building - huge open plan offices, intelligent, sensitive, creative souls in row after row of screens, and realise why I value Maida Vale and the old Radio Drama headquarters at Bush House. You need a map to find the toilets from the studio in Maida Vale and in Bush House your producer escorted you (you’d get lost otherwise) from the drama offices to the wonderfully un-necessarily gorgeous entrance hall. Cramped little offices – broom cupboards - where producers and writers could conspire. Big Brother wasn’t watching you. And I’m grateful for having been for the best part of my working life what feels like a protected species - a butterfly, maybe (the flibbertigibbet) - or, better, I think, (uglier/less delicate/survives longer) – a bat. I once rescued a bat, lying wings outstretched, puzzlingly, on a lawn in France. It was summer, hot. With gardening gloves, I moved it in to the shade, put a little saucer of water nearby and collected some dead flies for it to eat. I sometimes wonder if it’s the most well- meaning thing I’ve ever done (as my mother used to say about somebody who was useless: ‘He means well’). A few hours later the bat was still there but folded up into its wings. Still alive, I thought, so I got a ladder and lifted it carefully up into the gutter under the eaves, made little dam to retain some water in case it needed it and left it to shuffle up into the roof space. It had gone the following morning. Don’t know if it survived. Hope so.
July 2017
Busy week – for me. If I kept a diary, most days might read: ‘Got up, got down to a bit of work…’ Or, a touch more interestingly, as this morning, ‘Two young foxes asleep on the lawn..’ (and who continue to snooze as I knock this out). ’Busy’ because we began recording the new radio play on Monday, so it’s piling in with the commuters and wondering, yet again, how folk stand crowded trains, strap hanging, day after day? I need to travel at busy times only a few times a year - and didn’t need to as it transpires on Monday, by arriving far too early for our ten o’clock start - ‘pathologically early’ as a friend put it recently. She’d rung to say she was running late with lunch so would I not arrive till one, rather than the half-twelve first suggested? When I did ring the bell - on the dot of one - the other eight or so guests were already drinking outside, presumably not having been similarly warned off. I like to think my punctuality-plus is because I’m working class and still feel the need to behave: ‘Don’t show us up’ as my mother used to hiss at me in seaside boarding houses. A couple of other guests arrive spectacularly late – and then leave early, with no such inhibitions, media types (of which I’m one, of course). The wife of this insouciant couple has just been interviewing Prince Harry. I say his relationship must be quite serious for him to leave a wedding and drive to London to bring his girlfriend back - only to be told that the squeeze had, in fact, been parked at some address close by. I’m finding it hard to distinguish Harry from the actor in the Channel 4 series ‘The Windsors’ who recently, after communicating with his beloved on Skype, then buttoned up and adjusted his trousers as he got up from the screen.
It’s Maida Vale for the recording and one of the advantages of arriving early is a chat with an actress who’s also in way before time. She’s brought in her nine month old son who is finding the green room a terrific play pen. He moves round unsteadily, propping himself up against the coffee tables and sofas. Sadly, his minder – another actress – arrives to whisk him away. He’s called Raleigh, like the bikes, and his mother tells me she does a lot of audio books, including ‘Girl on a Train.’ Other actors now arrive, including our 21 year old female lead, gutsy, noisy. She’s playing a 17 year old, having been a teenager in ‘Broadchurch’ (which didn’t see, so know little about her). It’s her first radio. At the end of the recording I’ll tell her that she really grabbed hold of the part and made it her own. This is because she’s not at all the way I imagined her character, but it works (I think). In the play she’s an A level student and part time receptionist in a middle range Folkestone Hotel, who realises that an Irish visitor who’s registered under the name of Barclay is – spoiler alert – the writer Samuel Beckett. I’ve taken pleasure with the play in making sure that the small incidents it portrays are exactly what happened to Beckett back in March 1961. Her character is fictional, however, and I had a lot of fun with her world of Adam Faith, Amami hair wash, John Wayne at the movies. To a great extent (though not Amami Hair wash or Bear Brand nylons) it was my world. I got the feminine touches from my old friend, the journalist Valerie Grove who sent me details from her teenage diaries. After the commission came in I’d e-mailed her, inquiring if she knew of anyone who kept a diary from those years and who ‘might be willing’ etc, knowing full well that V. Grove (V. Smith then) was an inveterate diary keeper. Some of her entries went straight into the play, including a detail about a newly opened Wimpy Bar. As we seldom meet, I suggest to Valerie that she might come to listen to the recording and I’d take her to lunch, having in mind – suitably - ‘Byrons,’ the burger place on Regent Street, close to Broadcasting House. But, as it turns out, we’re to record in the BBC’s Maida Vale studios where the nearby tennis club (tucked away behind the area’s many mansion blocks) welcomes a few star actors and BBC personnel wandering in. Valerie used to play tennis with Harold Pinter (not much of a serve, apparently) so we opt for the tennis club rather than the BBC canteen and sit out in the sun with chicken satays and a glass of wine, and pick up on bits and bobs from our last fifty years. She’s from South Shields, via the outer London suburbs, and has a sharp ear for language usage. I’d turned to Valerie at one point after her arrival in the control room to ask what she thought of a scene we’ve just recorded. ‘Fine,’ she said, ‘but a girl from Kent wouldn’t say that line: “You’ve not got one, have you?” That’s a Wakelam Northernism.’ Indeed it is and the Northerner hasn’t noticed. The line is de-contorted; the young actress, faithfully reading what was on the page (good for her), informed of the change, and her delivery improved as a result.
Our lead, playing Sam Beckett, is Adrian Dunbar, whom I remember from my early days in London when he was a promising young actor at the Royal Court (‘Those whom the Gods destroy they first call “promising”’). Adrian, happily, is now very well known for ‘Line of Duty’ (See ‘Impure Drama’ - which I don’t mention). He organises the Sam Beckett festival in Enniskillen, and knows his stuff about the great man. Along the corridor, in one of the breaks, we pass the actor Rory Kinnear, whom Adrian doesn’t notice. I say, charming as ever, ‘We’ve just passed an actor even more famous than you.’ There’s a moment and Adrian says, more in sorrow than anger, ‘People, I’ve found, think they can say anything to actors - the kind of things they wouldn’t say to other professions.’ But the same applies to writers, of course, and I say that when I’m asked what I do (generally a conversation stopper: I tend go for ‘self-employed’ or ‘work at home’) the next question is ‘Are you famous?’ Adrian was in Danny Boyle’s production of Edward Bond’s ‘Saved’ at the Court. I ran a group of Royal Court Young Writers at the time and Bond came in to talk about platform performances of a couple of their plays. He had a reputation for irascibility but was kindly critical of the two plays we showed him, making a little speech. The young writers were thrilled (one of them, John Cooper, rightly deciding on the Law as a better bet, is now a QC and well known Human Rights Lawyer). There were intruders at this little occasion thirty years ago. Max Stafford-Clark, who ran the theatre, and Danny Boyle, in charge of the Theatre Upstairs (where we were) had been hiding in the wings while Bond was on his feet, talking. I only later learned that they’d been listening, not showing their faces, in anticipation – perhaps – of some outburst from the usually uncompromising Edward. This odd behaviour wasn’t unusual at the Court. Danny, I remember, had a relationship with the casting director, whom he later married. He felt, all his time at the theatre, he needed to keep his affair secret, in case Max, a womaniser, made a competitive land grab. Danny, since, has acknowledged his great debt to Max as a director - and I may never have seen anything so good on stage as the last scene of Caryl Churchill’s ‘Top Girls’ which Max directed. I was always a bit nervous in Max’s presence. I once quietly slipped out of a preview of a play to bump into him where he was prowling just outside in the Circle bar. He tore me off a strip, like a teacher. Later, he gave me useful and encouraging advice on the couple of plays I had performed at the Court, coming up to Sheffield to see a preview of one of them at the Crucible. While impressed with the facilities of the (then) newly built Crucible, he balked at running the place: ‘Imagine, Stephen, having to do the Panto.’ His – austere - methodology was to go through plays line by line, asking, ‘What’s the intention of this line? What does the character want from it?’ It’s an approach that pays dividends but I think takes you so only far. I quite like characters to wander off-piste (one of my favourite scenes in the latest radio play has a couple talking of teapots, costume jewellery, and the grand Duchess Anastasia). Whatever the drift of his private life, Royal Court productions under Max were puritanical: clear, sparse, serious, left wing, I sometimes felt I had joined a theatrical sect. Simon Curtis, who got going as assistant to Max on ‘Top Girls’ and later directed the brilliant platform production of ‘Road,’ mentioned to me, school boy grinningly, that Tracey Ullman was the only actor he’d ever seen daring to read Daily Mail during breaks in rehearsals on the big stage. I once watched a rehearsal of the play she was in where Ullman, not well known then, only needed to walk across the stage to have people in hysterics. But the place wasn’t a fun palace: I generally always felt a bit of a flibbertigibbet there. I once burbled the praises of a visiting production ‘Bent’ (Ian McKellen the lead) to Danny. His response was the dismissively one word ‘Meretricious.’ I needed to look it up later: ‘showily, falsely attractive.’ The word came into my mind thirty years later, seeing extracts from his Olympics Opening Ceremony. I avoid ‘colourful’ opening ceremonies, even (well, particularly) eighty million pound ones, never saw the whole thing but didn’t take to what I did see. But maybe it’s me, over the years, that’s gone po-faced.
I remember standing as part of the audience at Simon’s platform production of ‘Road’, looking down at a little chap next to me and realising it was Paul Simon. The Court pulled in the stars. ‘Meryl Streep’s in tonight,’ the guy in the box office once told me. So it’s not that surprising that I came across Sam Beckett along one of the dimly lit back corridors of the (then) unreconstructed theatre. I mentioned this to Adrian, playing Beckett. He said that he didn’t think Beckett had had a play there in Max’s time but I knew it wasn’t a ghost I’d seen. Beckett had come from a chat with Max. I still retain a fondness for the old – poky - Royal Court, much the same during my time as it was in George Devine and John Osborne’s day. A couple of years ago I wrote a radio drama - almost a one-scene play about a visit Devine made to the unknown, impecunious young writer at the time of ‘Look Back in Anger,’ The new Royal Court is much glossier, more spacious, ‘purpose built’. Space was very limited in the old place. I liked nipping up the little flight of stairs from the Circle Bar into the top General Office, to get a few sheets of a play run off and gossip. Relegated to a roof space, folk were glad to see you. We used empty dressing rooms for discussions. Simon Curtis excitedly was once showing me some ideas for the set of a play we were working on when Gary Oldman walked in, young, blond - and not very pleased we were occupying his dressing room. I think he was getting into his part as the near silent young copper in Ron Hutchinson’s ‘Rat in the Skull’, another Max production. A tight four hander, this had all the hallmarks of a Theatre Upstairs play. Max wanted it shown in the big theatre downstairs, Brian Cox, indelibly, in the lead.
I have similar feelings of nostalgia working (generally the case with me these days) in the BBC’s glossy New Broadcasting House as opposed to Bush House, Lime Grove and Kensington House where I’ve worked in the past. At Maida Vale you head along a long gloomy corridor before finding the door that takes you downstairs into a cavernous area (grey, grey, grey) where the studios are and (astonishingly) a central concert hall. Arriving one morning at Maida Vale a few years ago, I found a crowd outside the entrance. ‘Who are you waiting for?’ I asked one guy, who didn’t know but was happy to join the throng. It turned out to be ‘Take That’ - in their successful re-incarnation, without Robbie. They recorded in the concert hall next to our studio and we were a bit worried that some sound would seep though. It didn’t and (I’m getting older and like to preserve some dignity) I didn’t sneak out to hear them play, though having fond feelings for the lads. During my glum period back in the early Nineties. I was in some huge Regents Park drawing room. It was evening, quite shady. Three of us, gay men, were eating. Across the room, big as a tennis court, the television was on. There was something about the music video that was playing and I got up to have a closer look. It was Take That, whom I didn’t know, break-dancing – is that what it’s called? throwing themselves around - to ‘Could This Be Magic?’ It was an image of happiness, joy. Some other friends I house sit for (gay: pretty young men always acceptable viewing) have ‘Take That’s Greatest Hits’ on now ancient VHS and I still sometimes slot the tape in and watch that particular dance routine (how do they do it?), and how it reminded me during a long period of (a long Maida Vale corridor of grey, grey, grey) depression what happiness felt like. I gather that over the last quarter of century, after their break up, Gary retreated miserable, depressed, to his Cheshire pile to smoke endless joints, and Robbie hit the usual ‘substance abuse’ pop star problems. Then things picked up again followed by a run in with the tax authorities and so on. All this soap opera stuff cheers me with own my less spectacular (or spectacularly rewarded) ‘career’ progression and regression. Life, eh?
One of our actors says about the latest play – the Beckett play, as I like to call it – that it would make a good film. And though it does have a (quiet) detective element, ‘I don’t think it would bring in many punters,’ I say. But at the end of the Maida Vale full cast recording (we had a further half day at Broadcasting House on the Friday for Voice Overs) I realise how sorry I am to leave Beckett behind. Like a lot of my stuff it comes out of my general reading. I’m not that fond of Beckett’s plays and have only ever seen one – ‘Footfalls’ (Billie Whitelaw in a wheelchair - and what I remember is not the play but that it was the evening after the Westland debate in the Commons when Kinnock had gone on too long in his attack on Thatcher and let her off the hook. It was his best chance of finishing her. We know now how vulnerable she was that afternoon. He knew he’d failed, had ‘lost the House’ and wasn’t reassured by my brand of cheerfulness that night. I think we did have a laugh later at our choice of play, and enjoyed meeting Billie, Beckett’s great interpreter. Beckett – at his least attractive – once reduced Billie, his favourite actress, to tears and a near nervous breakdown. I find the plays, which I’ve read rather than seen, too resolutely dour and pessimistic for my taste but love what I read of the man: his foibles, oddness, his quiet heroism in Occupied France, his long ‘unsuccessful’ years as a writer, his distrust of fame. There’s another feeling, too. I say it to my more usual radio director, David Hunter, whom I come across, later in the week of our recording in the Radio Drama Office at New Broadcasting House and who takes me out for a Byron burger lunch. We sit outside in the sun at the end of what feels like a successful week’s recording. ‘I think this play is my swan song,’ I say. It’s my nineteenth this century (I totted them up at a quiet moment in the studio when I had these finite feelings). This is the week John Humphreys and others have needed to come clean on their salaries and I’ve also totted up it would take me about a hundred plays to get anywhere near Humphreys’ and Huw Edwards’ annual trousering of license payers’ money. But it’s felt a privilege. Radio 4 Drama – my main outlet (there were three plays for R3) – is on the change: more ‘Box Set’ drama, story, story, story. I took some amusement, catching up with folk in the Radio Drama office, by saying about the latest, ‘Well, it’s a play in which nothing happens’ ( a bit like ‘Waiting for Godot,’ of which it was famously remarked ‘A play in which nothing happens, Twice.) I like the slight look of concern on one (earnest) producer’s face as I trot out my (not quite true) line about the play. For the last fifteen years or so I’ve been allowed to write more or less what I want to: single plays, character based. It was a freedom I first enjoyed (got away with) in television in the late Seventies and Eighties before management asserted its stranglehold and drama producers got (ratings related) nerves. I look round that new BBC building - huge open plan offices, intelligent, sensitive, creative souls in row after row of screens, and realise why I value Maida Vale and the old Radio Drama headquarters at Bush House. You need a map to find the toilets from the studio in Maida Vale and in Bush House your producer escorted you (you’d get lost otherwise) from the drama offices to the wonderfully un-necessarily gorgeous entrance hall. Cramped little offices – broom cupboards - where producers and writers could conspire. Big Brother wasn’t watching you. And I’m grateful for having been for the best part of my working life what feels like a protected species - a butterfly, maybe (the flibbertigibbet) - or, better, I think, (uglier/less delicate/survives longer) – a bat. I once rescued a bat, lying wings outstretched, puzzlingly, on a lawn in France. It was summer, hot. With gardening gloves, I moved it in to the shade, put a little saucer of water nearby and collected some dead flies for it to eat. I sometimes wonder if it’s the most well- meaning thing I’ve ever done (as my mother used to say about somebody who was useless: ‘He means well’). A few hours later the bat was still there but folded up into its wings. Still alive, I thought, so I got a ladder and lifted it carefully up into the gutter under the eaves, made little dam to retain some water in case it needed it and left it to shuffle up into the roof space. It had gone the following morning. Don’t know if it survived. Hope so.
July 2017