The Week That Was

An interesting week that began with Monday's QI production meeting being filmed by The South Bank Show. They're doing a special all about our boss - the estimable Mr John Lloyd CBE - and his extraordinary career in TV. And, let's be honest, it's well-deserved. He's given us The News Quiz, Not The Nine O'clock News, Spitting Image, The Museum of Curiosity, Have I Got News For You, QI, Blackadder and had a hand in Mr Bean and several other well-known shows. He also co-wrote two episodes of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and The Meaning Of Liff with Douglas Adams. The man's a genius and deserves every accolade lobbed at him.

Tuesday was a working at home day, hunkering down on finding great material for the new series of QI and Wednesday was much the same. Thursday saw me having a couple of quite exciting meetings, one about my possible involvement in working for another popular TV series and one with a publisher about a new book. Then, in the evening, it was off to the famous Foyles bookshop in Charing Cross Road for the Transmission Prize award ceremony.

I was one of the judges this year - no mean feat when every candidate was an amazing person - and my role at the awards was to do a 15 minute presentation explaining who the eight finalists were, what their big idea was, and why we'd selected them for our shortlist. The prize was awarded this year to Dr David Nutt, a brave and brilliant chemist who is challenging politicians over their attitudes to classifications of drugs. As he points out, some of the most damaging drugs are perfectly legal and there are things that can be done to reduce their negative effects on society ... but there is a lack of political will to do so. Meanwhile, other drugs remain illegal making research into their possible uses in medicine fraught with difficulty and bound up with red tape.The Transmission Prize is all about taking big ideas and communicating them effectively and, in his books, interviews, talks, blogs and other media, David speaks with passion, authority and clarity. He was a worthy winner, but picking him out of such a brilliant shortlist was really difficult.

Okay, I admit it. I did enjoy a little ripple of thrills in seeing my name in Foyles' window. It may not have been any of my books on display, but I was judging the winner from the books that were on display ... so that's nearly as cool, isn't it?

Friday saw me back at work on QI and also taking part in an 'Ask the Author' live Twitter chat organised by my publishers at Unbound. Some of the questions were bizarre to say the least! But my latest book - Constable Colgan's Connectoscope - does contain some pretty weird facts too.

When I got home I was both flattered and amused to see that a student called 'Jack J' from the University of Chester had animated one of my appearances on Radio 4 last year. I appeared on Josie Long's Short Stories, speaking for a minute on the subject of the police playing hide and seek on night duty in the early 80s as a way of learning beats. Here's his excellent effort:



This week was a good week. And now the weekend is approaching and I'll be doing some extra QI work to make up for the hours I lost on Thursday. But, to be honest, it's a joy to do so it doesn't really feel like work. :)

What's that? Lunch break is over?

Ow! Mr Fry!

That whip stings!

Words we should adopt

In a month or so, my good friend and boss John Lloyd, and co-author Jon Canter, will see their new book published. It's called Afterliff  and it's a 30th anniversary follow up to John's and Douglas Adams' magnificent 1983 volume The Meaning of Liff. The 'liff' books are based upon a simple premise, explained here by the authors:

'In Life (and indeed in Liff), there are many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognise, but for which no words exist. On the other hand, the world is littered with thousands of spare words which spend their time doing nothing but loafing about on signposts pointing at places. Our job, as wee see it, is to get these words down off the signposts and into the mouths of babes and sucklings and so on, where they can start earning their keep in everyday conversation and make a more positive contribution to society.'

The result was that John and Douglas gave us words like:

Brumby (n.) The fake antique plastic seal on a pretentious whisky bottle.

Detchant (n.) That part of a hymn (usually a few notes at the end of a verse) where the tune goes so high or low that you suddenly have to change octaves to accommodate it.

Lusby (n.) The fold of flesh pushing forward over the top of a bra which is too small for the lady inside it.

Sidcup (n.) One of those hats made from tying knots in the corners of a handkerchief.

...and so many more. Do seek both books out immediately.

But there have always been situations for which English has no single word and so we've sensibly borrowed them from other languages. Here are a few more that I believe we should add to our lexicon:

Age-otori (Japan): To look worse after a haircut

Arigata-meiwaku (Japan): An act someone does for you that you didn’t want to have them do and tried to avoid having them do, but they went ahead anyway, determined to do you a favour, and then things went wrong and caused you a lot of trouble, yet in the end social conventions required you to express gratitude

Backpfeifengesicht (Germany): A face badly in need of a fist

Gigil (Phillipines): The urge to pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute

Ilunga (Congo): A person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time

L’esprit de l’escalier (France): usually translated as “staircase wit,” is the act of thinking of a clever comeback when it is too late to deliver it

Pena ajena (Mexico): The embarrassment you feel watching someone else’s humiliation

Tatemae and Honne (Japan): What you pretend to believe and what you actually believe, respectively

Tingo (Easter Island): to borrow objects one by one from a neighbour’s house until there is nothing left

Waldeinsamkeit (Germany): The feeling of being alone in the woods

Yoko meshi (Japan): literally ‘a meal eaten sideways,’ referring to the peculiar stress induced by speaking a foreign language.

You can find many more in Adam Jacot de Boinod's excellent book The Meaning of Tingo.

Sign Post (See what I did there?)

I'm very lucky. Over the course of my (nearly) 52 years on this fabulous planet I've got to meet hundreds of extraordinary people; not just celebrities but scientists, authors, philosophers, artists and many so-called 'ordinary people' who do extraordinary work in the medical, military, business and charity sectors. I like meeting people. And I like books. And when I meet people who've written books, I often get a copy signed by them as a reminder of that meeting.

I've been collecting signed books for some 30 years now and, sadly, many of the people who's scribbles I've collected are no longer with us. On my shelves here I have signed tomes from Douglas Adams, Eric Sykes, Willie Rushton, Kenneth Williams, Ray Harryhausen, Ronnie Barker, Norman Wisdom, Patrick Moore, Tom Sharpe and many others. They're all pretty worthless to a collector as most of them are personally dedicated to me but I didn't get them as an investment; they're little moments from my live forever preserved in paper and ink and they're much more personal than a photograph.

I have some personal favourites of course. When I was invited to the 30th birthday party of Viz magazine, I took along my copy of Co-creator Chris Donald's biography, Rude Kids, and asked the contributors for their signatures. They all went one step further and did cartoons of some of their creations:

Cleo Rocos planted a kiss alongside her signature in my copy of Bananas Forever: Kenny Everett and Me:

 

Stephen Fry had some comments to make on spelling:

 

 

Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth and soon-to-be-released Pacific Rim director Guillermo del Toro did a self-portrait in my copy of Joel Meadows' and Gary Marshall's Studio Space:

 

 

I'm a big fan of graphic novels and have many signed copies. Among the stars are a copy of Watchmen signed by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, a copy of Batman: The Scottish Connection by Pat Mills and Frank Quitely (who also drew me an amazing picture of Batman doing something we wouldn't normally see ...), Simon Bisley's Slaine and Mike Mignola's Hellboy. But the star is Alan Moore's and Brian Bolland's Batman: The Killing Joke, signed by both and featuring this sketch. Fantastic!

 

 

If you enjoyed seeing these I'll post some more at a later date.

 

 



Sharpe to the end

This week we say goodbye to Tom Sharpe, one of my heroes.

When I was just starting out as a writer, three authors dominated my bookcase: Douglas Adams, P G Wodehouse and Tom Sharpe. Douglas was the man with the glorious leftfield ideas. 'Plum' was the chap with the brilliantly imagined characters and delicious similes. And Tom provided the biting satire and the explosive slapstick. But what they all had in common was the language; the brilliant metaphors, the incisive wit, the staggering put-downs. It's probably why none of them have ever really seen a properly good TV or film adaptation; you lose so much by no longer hearing the author's voice. How do you translate Wodehouse gems like 'The puzzled frown that had begun to gather on Lord Emsworth’s forehead vanished like breath off a razor blade' to a TV screen? You can't. How do turn an Adams line like 'He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it' into scripted dialogue? Well, you can but it loses some of its impact by being vocalised. And it's the same with Tom Sharpe. His characters have such perfect inner monologues; they capture the essence of the character and tell us so much more about them than we could glean from their physical appearance and what they do and say (there's a great little Telegraph feature here with 10 great Sharpe quotes). His greatest creation, hen-pecked lecturer Henry Wilt is a case in point. So much of the humour comes from hearing Wilt's thoughts. You can't easily do that on film (watch David Lynch's Dune as a case in point). Which is why you end up with a film like Wilt (1989) that, frankly, time has forgotten and probably for the best. The BBC did a better job by bringing Blott on the Landscape to life in 1985. But best of the bunch was Channel 4's 1987 adaptation of Porterhouse Blue. Both it and Blott enjoyed excellent screenplays by Malcolm Bradbury but they still couldn't match the original prose. Some things simply don't translate between media.

Tom Sharpe lifted my spirits when I was a young police officer. Between outbreaks of violence, I read his books as I sat on a 'Green Goddess' riot coach waiting for the call to grab a shield and deploy. My first introduction was his South African books Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure. But it was The Throwback that really hooked me and reeled me in. The book tells the tale of Lockhart Flawse; raised by his grandfather in a crumbling, remote, Northumberland manor house, and unleashed on a world he doesn't understand on a quest to find his father and 'whip him to within an inch of his life' for abandoning his mother. It's a search that involves, among other things, faking an IRA bombing, a bull terrier going mad after a dose of LSD, and a man being stuffed by a taxidermist. It's hilarious and brilliantly written.

I never got to meet him but I did have the same agent and, as the result, I'm privileged to own a couple of signed first editions. I've read and re-read and re-re-read everything Tom Sharpe every wrote and I'm sad to think that there will be no more.

A holistic supernatural review

I don't often write reviews because I generally don't read reviews. I like to watch/read/hear something and make up my own mind. It's always seemed to me that professional reviewers - and I know a few as friends - are just people with informed opinions and, therefore, their view is no more valid than my own. Admittedly, some of them have made films and TV and written books themselves and, certainly, they've built up a large mental storehouse for comparison purposes. But, when it comes down to it, films, TV, books, art etc. are 'good' or 'bad' depending on the individual viewer's perception. Almost every review I've seen of the John Carter movie has been negative and yet everyone I know who's seen it thoroughly enjoyed it. So who to believe? In just the same way that I can't say that a Gaugin is better than a Manet, I can't say that Coronation Street is better than Eastenders. Both have merits and demerits; all that I am entitled to say is which ones I like and which I don't.

Which brings me to two shows that have just finished their runs: Being Human series 4 and Dirk Gently series 1. This is not a review per se - more a flurry of observations about why both shows didn't quite work for me this year. In essence, the problem I had with both is that they seemed to have lost their essential qualities. Let me explain ...

When Being Human began, I thought it was one of the most interesting and original ideas for a comedy drama that I'd seen in years. A group of supernaturals - a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost - find each other and end up sharing a house while attempting to fit into human society. It's an inspired set up for a TV series. I met the show's creator, the very affable and talented Toby Whithouse (see my interview here), during the filming of series 2 and we talked about where the show could go. Obviously, he couldn't reveal too much but he said that he was looking forward to exploring as many facets of human behaviour as possible; to use his characters to challenge the concept of what it is to be human. There would be temptation, envy, lust, joy. He would write about the angst that parents suffer about bringing a child into a world where that child will always be under threat; whether to fall in love with someone who is immortal and who will watch you grow old and die; how to live alongside people who fear and hate what you are; how to be human. That is, after all, the name of the series and what distinguishes it from all of the other supernatural series on TV. Which is why, with series 4, I was disappointed by the sudden change to 'end-of-the-world vampire armageddon' story arc.

I will state categorically here that the change of cast was not an issue - the new people have slotted in beautifully and are every bit as entertaining and likeable as Annie, Mitchell and George were. It's the plot that I had trouble with. The War Child. The over-exposed Mark Gatiss 'Old One' character Mr Snow. Time travelling ghosts. In just eight short episodes it's stopped being about 'being human' and has turned into every other supernatural TV show/film from True Blood to Daybreak to Blade to Ultraviolet (the excellent TV series and the unrelated Mila Jovovich film). There were hints of this plot-line in the show's pilot back in 2008 where the original Mitchell (played by Guy Flanagan) was told by the original Herrick (Adrian Lester) that the vampire takeover is coming and to choose sides. That whole plot device was dropped for the revamped (sorry) pilot and series 1 and the show was all the better for it. Now, it seems, the vampire takeover plot has returned, for me, it's a big step backwards. I really don't want to see it drown in the sea of predictable supernatural cliches, especially when there is so much that can yet be done with the characters. Incidentally, the US Being Human is very good. It's taken a different path to the UK show but I love the ideas they are exploring there, such as their 'Annie' - Sally Malik - becoming addicted to possessing human bodies so that she can have a physical relationship. That's closer to what I think Being Human should be about than the UK show currently is. It was Being Human's originality that made it so wonderful and made me love it. I hope it gets back to that with series 5.

And then there's Dirk Gently ... which seems to have done exactly the opposite to Being Human. While Being Human has got too fantastic, Dirk Gently isn't fantastic enough. This is a show that demands big world-changing themes ... but it falls flat. Stephen Mangan is perfect in the role; he is Dirk. He's exactly how I always imagined the character to be and the always excellent Darren Boyd is great as sidekick Richard MacDuff. Yes, I know MacDuff's character is fundamentally different from the book but changes always have to be made when converting a book to a film or TV. They are different media and what works in one doesn't necessarily work in another. However, that isn't my beef.

Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently books are a showcase for the author's extraordinary gift for invention. The first book, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, featured a time-travelling Cambridge Don (who, as many of you know I'm sure, was a recycled character from Douglas's aborted Doctor Who story Shada), an electric monk that believes things for you, a ghost desperately trying to get a message to his sister, an alien spaceship at the dawn of time that is responsible for kick-starting life on Earth, an impossible sofa and a very funny horse. We also get to see the effects on the history of poetry when Dirk becomes Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Man from Porlock'. It's a work of genius. The second book, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, had Norse gods destroying airports, jet fighters turning into eagles and giant green-eyed, scythe weilding monsters rampaging about killing music executives. Even Adams's unfinished The Salmon of Doubt - which may or may not have been a new Dirk Gently novel - has the main character(s) travelling (in Douglas's words) '... through the nasal membranes of a rhinoceros, to a distant future dominated by estate agents and heavily armed kangaroos.'

So why, then, is the TV series so damned mundane?

The essence of Dirk is there with his unorthodox methods of working and his obsession with the interconnectedness of things. But where is the vision, the inventiveness, the fantasy, the sheer lunacy of Douglas Adams? Dirk should be saving the world by accident while looking for a lost cat, not solving everyday murders. Now, I do realise that budget comes into the picture. I also realise that the show will draw inevitable comparisons with Doctor Who and Sherlock. But, if that's the case, why bother making it? I know that seems a little harsh but if something won't work properly on TV then why do it? I would personally draw a parallel here to two recent radio series that have transferred to TV - Bleak Expectations and Dave Gorman's Genius. Both worked brilliantly on radio as 'radio has all the best pictures'; a lot was left to the imagination of the listener. In Bleak Expectations, writer Mark Evans could do whatever he liked. Anthony Head's character -Mr Gently Benevolent - was killed, came back as a ghost and possessed a pigeon, was then killed again and resurrected as a Frankenstein's monster-type creature and then later orchestrated an abortive Martian invasion. However, when the show moved to TV, Evans created a new, albeit very similar, show called The Bleak Little Shop of Stuff and it lacked all of the sparkling originality and madness of the radio show. It was just a Dickens spoof. And Dave Gorman's excellent radio series Genius, in which the British public come up with fantastic ideas and inventions, it was easy to simulate the Isle of Wight being made more symmetrical or a giant spike on a steering wheel instead of seatbelts to ensure people drove more carefully. The move to TV wasn't unsuccessful but a lack of budget - radio shows cost a fraction of the cost of TV shows - and a rubbish time slot meant that the BBC killed it after just two series.

That's how I feel about Dirk Gently. If you can't afford to do it properly then why bother doing it? Writing in the Metro newspaper, Keith Watson said, 'There was no disguising the fact that Dirk Gently was a five-star script being filmed on a one-star budget, making it look like a designer label knockoff when set against the production values lavished on Sherlock.' As I said at the start, I don't always agree with critics and rarely read them, but Watson has hit the nail on the head as far as I'm concerned. Howard Overman - the chap who gave us the excellent Misfits - is the chap behind the TV version of Dirk. He's a very, very good writer and what he's given us is very, very good TV writing ... but it just isn't Dirk Gently. It's Dirk Gently Lite. I want full fat, outrageously fattening, over-the-top Dirk Gently because that's what Dirk Gently is all about. Instead we have something that looks like a slightly bizarre crop of episodes of Morse or Midsomer Murders.

Despite everything I've written here, I watched all of the series I've mentioned and enjoyed them. There were some great performances, brilliant writing and many classic TV moments. I will be tuning in to the new series when they happen. But I hope, in the meantime, that Being Human and Dirk Gently return to the roots that made them such phenomena in the first place. I fear that if they don't, they'll lose that originality and spark that made us all go 'Wow!' I also hope that Bleak Expectations and Genius return to the radio where they both belong and are both quite brilliant.

But then again, this is just my opinion and, therefore, it carries no more weight than yours. You may disagree with everything I've said.

Which is how it should be.

Words you didn't know you didn't know

Back in 1983, my good friend John Lloyd and the late great Douglas Adams wrote a book called The Meaning of Liff in which they catalogued all of the things, feelings and situations that didn't have a word to describe them. The words they used were all UK placenames. Thus a BALDOCK (n.)became 'The sharp prong on the top of a tree stump where the tree has snapped off before being completely sawn through', and a PIMLICO (n.) became the 'Small odd-shaped piece of plastic or curious metal component found in the bottom of kitchen rummage drawer when spring-cleaning or looking for Sellotape.'

Well, the truth can sometimes be as strange as fiction. Here are some names of things that you may not have realised actually had names. Enjoy sharing them with bemused friends and colleagues.

Aglet - The plastic coating on the ends of shoelaces.
Akimbo – hands on hips or knees apart with feet together.
Armscye - the armhole in most clothing. 
Brannock Device - the machine that's used to measure your feet at the shoe shop.
Crepuscular Rays - rays of sunlight coming from a certain point in the sky.
Dysania - the state of finding it hard to get out of the bed in the morning.
Feat - a dangling piece of curly hair.
Ferrule - the metal part on a pencil that holds the eraser.
Gynecomastia - having man-boobs.
Lunule - the white, crescent shaped part at the top of a nail.
Morton's Toe - when your second toe is bigger than your big toe.
Muntin - the strip of wood/metal/PVC separating window panes.
Paresthesia - the pins and needles feeling you get when part of your body falls asleep. This is also known as obdormition.
Peen - the ball-shaped lump opposite the hammer's striking side. If it has a claw for pulling nails it's a Cow Hammer rather than a Ball Peen Hammer.
Petrichor - the smells outside after it has rained.
Purlicue - the space between the thumb and the forefingers.
Phosphenes - the lights you see when you close your eyes and press your hands to them.
Rectal Tenesmus - the feeling of incomplete defecation.
Semantic Satiation - what happens when you say a word for so long that it loses its meaning or sounds nonsensical. 
Skeuomorph - a design feature copied from a similar artifact in another material, even when not functionally necessary. For example, rivets on jeans, copper colour on pennies, the shutter sound on a digital camera, and the pointless handle on a tiny jug.
Tittle – the dot above a lower case letter i or j.
Wamble - stomach rumble.

Sadly, I can't remember where I found these. If you know please tell me. Meanwhile, any good new ones you'd care to add to the list?

The Meaning of Liff is still on sale. And there's this cheeky online version here.