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I am becoming cool as fuck about deadlines and my coolness seems to be paying off. I had to finish the final script of Relativity today and try and prepare some extra stuff to of for AIOTM tomorrow afternoon. I had hoped to get some of this done on the train ride down from Selby, but I wasn’t quite in the right frame of mind. Firstly I was tired and the last dregs of this stupid month long bug were still lingering. Secondly, I was very hungry. I had turned down the hotel breakfast, thinking I could pick something up at Selby station. But Selby station didn’t even have a man in a van selling coffee, so I thought I could get something on the train. But the train was full of sports fans heading down for the rugby or the football and I didn’t fancy fighting my way through them for a horrible bacon butty (but the woman sitting next to me had got the last one in any case).
The people around me were chatting and my Word formatting had gone weird and though I added a couple of lines to the script, I hadn’t solved the problem of how I fitted all the stuff I needed into the last third.
I wasn’t going to be able to do any work once I got home as we were having friends round for lunch and then it was only reasonable that I look after my daughter and put her to bed. In the past I might have moaned about my work and refused to have a glass of wine and been a bit of a party pooper. But although I did moan a bit about my work commitments, I decided to drink some wine with my friends. I have had so little time off lately and not been at all sociable and this was my little window of fun. And I figured that if I got mildly drunk in the mid-afternoon, I would be sober by seven when I might be able to get some work done. Admittedly this meant doing some mildly tipsy childcare. But if we break the child we can always get another one, if I miss my deadline, then think of all the people who would be affected by that.
And somehow this tactic worked. I don’t understand how, beyond the knowledge that I had promised to get the script in today. I sat down for a couple of hours and all the inertia and the script problems lifted away and I was rather pleased with how this script (it’s actually episode 3 of the 4 we’re doing) turned out. A nice mixture of mundanity, sadness, funniness and sentiment. Although the characters in this sitcom aren’t exactly the same as the people in my family (though the grandfather figure is not far off being my dad), I have used some real life incidents from our family life and this one, with some artistic licence, conflated the last two visits I made to see my grandmother in her home. I had totally forgotten about my dad’s mild road rage incident in the car park until I checked my blog, but it’s the perfect start to the episode and it was nice to include the odd and unlikely detail of us getting off the lift on the wrong floor and being greeted with a Twilight Zone version of the corridor above. Those of you who have seen “What is Love, Anyway?†will be familiar with some of the events, but although I have to cram it all into 30 minutes, I think this makes a rather neat little play about family, love and loss.
We’ve got an outstanding cast for this and I am really looking forward to recording them all next month. They should be out in June.
Although I didn’t really think too much about AIOTM (but decided to see if we could wing the filming of one of my more recent routines) I once again felt disbelief at what I am managing to achieve at the moment.
But it’s a big weight off my shoulders to know that I’ve just got some minor Relativity rewrites and a tiny bit of AIOTM to sort out… for the moment. Oh Frig, I’m 50 isn’t too far away and we should hear about Everything Happens in a week or so….
I was pleased that I had managed to have fun with my friends and my daughter before I did this last bit of writing though. The relief of finishing a script that comes after the despair of thinking you’re never going to do it, is a singular pleasure.
Seeing my wife and child again was OK too.
