I've had a nice couple of weeks, tinkering away mainly at home in Harpenden, not getting up to too much, trying to exercise, dieting, watching TV and doing the odd bit of work on the Rasputin film or "The Box Lady and Other Pesticles" as I am now calling it (though "Just on the Border" might be a good alternative title,
as suggested in this entry, but also quite apt given my mental state at the time). Bye Bye Balham's 278 pages took in practially all the entries from late November 2002 to early June 2003 (over six months), but this second volume is over 300 pages and has only got us as far as late September (a little over three months). If we keep doing these then there are going to be an awful lot of volumes. Chris Evans (not that one) wants to do a limited hard copy print run, for those of you who prefer physical book (get with it grandads), which will be limited to maybe 500 copies. So there will still be a chance to have a book shelf groaning with rows of Warming Up books - there could be 30+ volumes at this rate and that's only if I stop writing it at some point. Given it's taken me four years to put out the second volume, realistically we might not get to the end of this Sisyphean task, but it will be interesting to try.
Things will be getting hectic again pretty soon though. On Sunday I am off to deepest Wales for the Machynlleth Comedy Festival (may be some ticket left, but you have to buy them from the box office now) and then I will be haring back on Monday to get to London for my first Leicester Square Theatre podcast with Tim Minchin! I tried to do a bit of preparatory work for that today and had vague hopes of scripting the stand up I would do at the beginning, but we're hours away yet and there's plenty of time - never mind that I am spending most of the next two days in my car. I still haven't secured a guest for the second podcast on 14th May, but there is a very interesting possibility, but I won't find out for sure until Tuesday. I will let you know as soon as I know. If the worst comes to the worst I can always interview Me2.
But still immersed back in 2003 looking back at the blog, wondering about missed opportunities and who is to blame for them. I think largely it was myself, though I can understand why I was tired and depressed and not keen to get working. But I was being offered work and people were interested in me writing scripts, but for at least a couple of years I seemed to totally lose the ability to get stuff like that done. I had a film script that had been commissioned, but I never got past the first few pages. It was about a promiscuous man who picked up a mystery sexually transmitted disease and promising titled, "I Don't Know Who I Did Last Summer". The opening scene was good, but I just couldn't muster the enthusiasm to get the rest of it down on paper. I was sabotaging myself and I can't help wondering how things might have gone if I had been able to buckle down then - I really wasn't filling my days with much more than getting drunk and sitting around in my pants feeling sorry for myself.
On the whole I think these wilderness years were important for me and helped to (eventually) make me much better at what I am doing, but my main regret from my career is that I have had less success with my sitcom and drama scripts than I would have liked.
I found a script that I had managed to write (though I think a little later on in maybe 2004) based on Warming Up called "Blog", in which I dramatised some of the stuff that I'd been writing about on here. I think it's a really neat and strong script - a little bit different than usual sitcom fayre as it wilfully avoids the kind of structure that leads to a satisfying denouement and tying up of threads. It's just some stuff that happens to me, which, I believe, over the course of a series would have started to have a more amorphous feeling of story and plot. Like life (because it was based on life) it was a load of unconnected things happening to someone, but like life that builds into something that has a connection, even if it is just the protagonist. I am putting the script as an appendix to the volume, so you can judge for yourself whether it might have worked. It was progressing quite well and it looked like we were going to do a pilot, but then the BBC commissioned Lead Balloon, a sitcom about a comedian/writer's day to day life and they felt the projects were too similar. In subject perhaps, but not in execution. I think Lead Balloon was more similar to Curb Your Enthusiasm, but there was room for both those shows - so I was little bit unlucky.
I might try and pitch it again though. Or maybe find a new way to look at it. Actually just had quite a good idea of how to do that. Hmmmm, interesting.
Surrounded as I am by more successful friends and contemporaries it's easy at times to feel like a failure - perversely a failure with a comfortable life style and a big house - and in 2003 I think I was finding that a problem. But there's a point where I went to Norway to see the premier of the first European production of Talking Cock where I suddenly feel proud of this achievement.
This is the entry I am talking about. I was glad in the midst of this difficult time I was still able to spot this, because it's something I struggle with still. But that is pretty cool.
What a ridiculous and charmed life I have. We have to be thankful for the failures, as they are the only thing that give our successes meaning.
