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It’s taken almost a decade but one of my sitcom scripts has managed to get past the stage of just being some words on paper and some of it is actually going to get filmed. It’s still some distance from actually being on TV, but a broadcaster has asked us to shoot 10 mins of the pilot episode so they can better judge if they want to do it. It’s a positive step forwards, although there are, of course, many more hurdles to get over before I have something actually on the telly. But I feel optimistic. I think this is a good script and an interesting idea with lots of potential. I would certainly be in my 50s before it would be seen by the public (if that happens at all) which would seem incredibly depressing to the thirty-something me who last got a script produced for TV, but maybe in my 50s is where stuff is going to start happening for me. We’ve been through some stuff in the last 14 years (it’s Warming Up’s birthday tomorrow) and anyway who has endured every day of that (as I have) will know how potentially exciting news can lead nowhere.
Anyway today we had our first production meeting to discuss the script we’re going to shoot, who might direct it and who might play the parts. Fittingly perhaps one of the people there had worked on my last full TV series Time Gentlemen Please back in 2001 and we chatted about the madness and drunkenness of that cast. Though she’d only been on the much more civilised second series so had missed quite a lot of the fights and the cast members being run over by taxis (only one actor and one taxi) and most importantly had never seen the Bean-Faced Postman in action. I can’t imagine such a raucous ensemble managing to get employed in the modern world. Those were crazy times. And as they happened just a few months before this blog started then fortunately they go unrecorded (not that I would havre written about them at the time).
It would obviously be a momentous thing if I finally got a sitcom into production and got to do a whole series of it. It feels like it’s my turn again. I have been very patient (between the petulant hissy fits about my writing genius going unrecognised) and a bit unlucky. But we are all mere puppets dancing for the whim of the executives and there’s no way of knowing what will happen next.
I have been in this business long enough to detect the whiff of bullshit when people falsely praise something and I think the feeling in the room was that we had something pretty exciting here. But you know, it’s 2016, so I am expecting the rake in the face that inevitably follows any tiny moment of allowing myself to dream. I’ve had enough disappointments to know that it’s foolish to get excited.
And yet, I am slightly excited.
On the way back home I walked down Ladbroke Grove where someone had been writing on the pavement in chalk, “Be Vegan”, the ephemeral, low budget and specifically targeted advertisement said. Obviously I do whatever pavements tell me and I was vegan for the next five minutes. Until I got to a cafe and had my lunch and had a cheese and tuna sandwich. They really need to write “Be Vegan” nearer to where the food is. I can only retain so much information in my head. Nevertheless I admired the hope of the person writing on the floor (though people on Twitter claimed chalk is made of long dead animals, but I guess as long as you don’t eat it, that’s fine). It’s not too different from what I’ve been doing. Writing in chalk on a pavement ahead of a rain storm and hoping that someone would spot the worth of what I was doing. Knowing that probably the TV executives would go for a tuna sandwich instead. All right the metaphor breaks down if you push it too far.
Our hopes and dreams are what makes us. If we lose those we lose nearly everything.
I know the past. And for the last fourteen years can actually get a pretty strong idea of what I was doing on any given day (thank goodness I have the blog because I don’t really remember too much of it). I wonder what the next 14 years will bring. I hope I can keep doing this til then, if only to be able to do the 28 years old joke.
That’s fourteen years of Warming Up now completed. Get ready for the birthday celebrations tomorrow. Fourteen fucking years. What the fucking fuck?
