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We're down to fumes with 2017 so it was time to write up my year for
the History section of my website. I have been writing these yearly reports since 2003 (at which point I obviously wrote what I remembered about the earlier years of my career too) and it's always strange to leave each entry with questions about what the future will bring and then to be able to return years later to seemingly empirically answer them (but then Relativity is first mentioned in 2007 and only came to fruition in 2017, so you never can tell). It's weird to look back and see all those unmade sitcoms and the projects that rose and then fell away and the ones that are still going on. The sense of building momentum, followed by nothing really too major happening, but still being here, still going on, the years slipping away. But the important thing to note is that I am still here and still stupidly busy (even if I am making most of my work for myself) and still somehow solvent after 30 years of Fringing. Increasingly (possibly because I have to due to the way things have gone) I view success as managing to carry on and remain viable and relevant (enough).
But the brutal passage of time and the realisation that there are less years of work to go than I have done already (though maybe Nicholas Parsons would have made the same prediction at 50.
And what is going to happen next?
Will Everything Happens (For No Reason) make an appearance in the 2018 or 2019 round-up or will it join the ranks of Chedwood and Absolutely Scrabulous and all those other scripts I poured my soul into, only to be told by people who generally know less about comedy than me (because I have been doing it loner than they have been alive) that they are not good enough to be made?
Does it matter? I think for a long time I was sitting waiting for my break (or for my first 21st Century break), without realising that the break had already happened.
I am 50 and I still love comedy and I still want to work hard at it. But my real challenges now are being as good a father and a husband as I can be (and thank God I don't keep a fastidious record of my failings in those concerns to look back upon each December) and make myself and my family as happy as is possible, in the face of the unfavourable parameters set by life.
But talking of alternate Universes… I didn't watch it, but there was a documentary about Alan Partridge on TV and many Twitterers commented either with their tongue in their cheek or with genuine surprise that Stewart and I were not mentioned at all. I don't lay any serious claim to inventing the character, but we did write a lot of his early lines. And had history turned out differently perhaps we might have been involved in his further development. We weren't because our manager felt we shouldn't write for the Day Today without securing ownership of the characters we helped create. Was he right? I mean imagine if he had secured me just a half a per cent of the ownership of Alan Partridge…. And how different would my career have been (and Alan Partridge have been) if I'd gone from the Day Today writing team to I'm Alan Partridge? We can at least have a stab at what might have been by looking at the career trajectory of my friend Peter Baynham who did exactly that (though I honestly don't think I would have done a good a job as he did). But ultimately my desire to perform might have stopped me riding the train that would have be solely a writer.
It'd be nice to be in a position to know that you're likely to get your scripts produced and to be still getting big cheques through the door for the shrewd contract you signed in 1993. But rewriting my history would mean everything post 1993 in my history section would be erased. And would I have felt the compunction to work and create if I had made millions and hadn't experienced the bitter sting of rejection after rejection? Would I have a website that I updated daily and would I even have a history section? Who wants to read about successes, when they can read about a man playing snooker against himself and failing to win on any TV quiz show, in spite of an obvious and genuine desire to do so?
And it's nice to know that I wouldn't give up what I have for that possible future. Every decision we make and action we take has enormous consequences on what happens next and unlike the protagonist in my sitcom I am not tempted to change. I might be interested to have a look though.
I am more interested in seeing what happens next in this universe though. And to looking back in another 15 years to see what quiz failures have befallen me.
