Author: strokeofbadluck

The 80s soul playlist KEEPS playing Shannon: Let The Music Play! Reminds me of…

There was a boy called George Shannon in my English class at 13. He came from Ipswich (now I wonder where he lived? Christchurch Park, I reckon. His father was – I think – a doctor, doing very nicely to have afforded a ‘Westminster education‘…)

Well, in O Level English (we were so old-fashioned) we did a novel ‘continuous assessment’ thing that was worked out ESPECIALLY FOR THE SCHOOL (because it was ‘a good thing’ at Parents’ Evenings…). Shannon was clever. He had BRIGHT RED hair and a face which made him look like a lieutenant in wartime – basically young but grizzled (sort of, in my fevered imagination…) He got (capitals lock) A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A, A… in his homework. He clearly had enough As for an A in O Level (before the days of A1s, themselves made redundant last year…). And for the last item of homework, he just said: Enough… and (quite understandably) handed in a sentence of rubbish. Just to be funny…

He got an F…

How we laughed (corporately, though we didn’t know the word then…)

And then blow me down if it didn’t – SOMEHOW – count against him in the O Level. So he got a B in the final grade! As Donald Trump would say: True Story! (Probably/possibly…)

I haven’t thought of George Shannon for ages (and no, I don’t basically want to ‘get in touch!’… Not with ANYBODY from THAT SCHOOL… They’re all FOOLS who do GREAT JOBS, till they drop down dead…)

I think the ‘masters’ (no mere teachers at Westminster!) just wanted to PUNISH him for hubris. They didn’t LIKE him…

They were ALL gay, the English masters. Two of them came on to me (not seriously. It was ONLY the 70s…). One – Mr J – LOVED Evelyn Waugh (which – a bit – I inherited. A Handful Of Dust – that’s one of the Top Five or Six…) AND Samuel Beckett (not inherited AT ALL! Though he was quite cool with his brush cut… AND I once sat next to – on the Paris/Heathrow flight, c1985 – his house guest, an academic woman from America who was just SO GLAD I had actually heard of him, and proceeded to tell me all… zzzzz. It was barely an hour in the plane and – being 21 – I just thought ‘it’ll be a good story’ and slept with my eyes open…)

So, Mr J invited all his FAVOURITE PUPILS back to his flat… And I – using basic ‘flight’ mechanism – DIDN’T GO… And (unlike Shannon) it didn’t lose me an A grade. It was just never. Spoken. Of. Again…

As for Mr F (the other transparently gay English teacher) he was VERY GOOD LOOKING – and used to give ‘free lessons’ (I think they were called), in which some pupils SMOKED (it was 1977…). One such lesson, I remember, Nick Croft said to me: Cool For Cats.

Nick Croft was SO COOL! And ‘Cool For Cats’ was a reference to Squeeze (who were New Wave, and therefore GOOD) AND meant – or at least I took it to mean – a statement along the lines of: J Wrathall IS Cool (for Cats)…

I was insanely HAPPY!

As for Nick Croft, he had come to Westminster a WHOLE TERM before me, and was the SUBSTANCE to my SHADOW (oh, that WESTMINSTER SLANG that we had to be tested on in Grant’s). He became a doctor (natch) and was NOT COOL AT ALL when I met him at the funeral of Amanda in 2011 (ex-City Limits, breast cancer), which he came to as ‘moral support’ for Marc (with a ‘c’! He’s ALMOST French – except he’s Jewish/Iranian…). Marc being Amanda’s brother, also a doctor at the Royal Free where (you remember?) he was TOO BUSY to see me post-stroke for even one second out of six hours I waited in A&E (it had been rebranded as just plain ‘Accident’, but everyone still called it A&E, the same amount of syllables…). With an oedema that nobody had noticed – and that lost A STONE in weight when (eventually) I was prescribed water pills… Blah blah blah…

As for Mr F, he was famous for having had an affair with Adam Mars-Jones, who was just getting fame on the back of his ‘zany’ collection of short stories Lantern Lecture… As a schoolboy, natch! We all laughed (corporately) – and headed straight for the exit after the lesson was over.

Mr F once complimented me – ‘You look rosy-cheeked. And your lips are such a dark red…’ – in a way that was supposed to be enticing but was actually DEEPLY CREEPY… His whole smile was creepy…

Us sophisticated schoolboys just rolled our eyes and said: Ah, Mr F! Say no more about IT…

And we looked on knowingly – not actually having a clue what ‘it’ involved…

And my housemaster – an old Etonian called Mr Hepburne-Scott, who had a model-railway fetish AND the railway sign from Adlestrop IN HIS STUDY – was murdered by a rent boy ON SCHOOL PROPERTY. It happened in the early 90s, just before the Internet became standard. Otherwise it would have been all over it… instead of just a ‘diverse item’ in the Daily Telegraph…

I used almost to stay awake ALL THE TIME in the office. Except at the middle section that was edited by a man called K (VERY serious Liverpudlian. Used to be a teacher but was – I suppose – too dull… I once found a comedy flier for a comic who had almost the same name as him. I showed it to him. Reckoned it might get a chuckle (even a CORPORATE chuckle…)… Not REMOTELY interested! He was married to (or, come to think of it, in a PARTNERSHIP with) a Spanish woman, nice, also part-time at the magazine, who probably knew he was also EXTREMELY GOOD AT SEX. In a THOROUGH way. So everything else didn’t really matter…)

I can’t remember what the ‘K pages’ were called. ‘In Sequence’ (not that…) or something… They were so boring! Only he AND THE SUB used to read them. (And the sub used to skip…) They were about things like the vaults at Tate Modern and what ‘cinematic’ delights lurked there, waiting to be discovered, if only an individual – just ONE – ever happened to be passing… (But there was only K…)

C – designer, also freelance – used to LOVE working at home, especially now his sons were off at school. He used to have a glass of Chardonnay for lunch – only AT HOME, of course. And then a brief nap… And then he’d be up-and-at-’em for the whole afternoon… C used (and still probably does) have a headpiece in his ear and listen to Robert Elms on LBC. He liked his soul/jazz cocktail, did C. Post-stroke he gave me a Gregory Porter CD (which was sweet…But not really ME. So I resold it on Amazon…)… C used to give K’s pages the most minimal possible layout: a b&w pic, 3 columns, a word over… I can do that easily, said John the sub. Another down… Next?

It was a COMPLETE labour of love, you see…

C was good. We had an unspoken thing: we didn’t care AT ALL about the magazine or the editor’s fads. (C was a Star Wars guy…) But we ‘agreed’ (silently) to just make it as quick and as good as we could in the time. It might have been about cardboard production… It was worse when, inevitably, it started on ‘Geoff Andrew on Michael Han… zzzzz’ AGAIN!

But still we TRIED. For no one’s sake but our own…

And NOBODY ELSE EVEN NOTICED – except for the other sub. Subs subbing for other sub’s sake… Wheels within wheels…

We could have just gone to the pub instead. But we all WANTED TO GET HOME…

So our partner could say: AT LAST, here he is, been gallivanting off to London! *sneer implicit* (C lived in Surbiton, like The Good Life…)

She: Just in time for bath time…

Me: Could I take my overcoat off first?

She: Do you have to? I’ve got my novel to write…

And she would be off to her shed in the garden…

It’s like doing therapy.
You just talk and talk…
And at the end they don’t charge you!
I said, to keep them on their toes, that I’d rather be painted in silence (not true)…

But I’d noticed that, when people did faces, they did them better if I talked, which meant I smiled, or at least grimaced…
So, alas, I *had* to speak… 😏


Writer/director Robert Rossen made one masterpiece (The Hustler) and two pretty good movies (Body and Soul, All The King’s Men). But other good credits are hard to find. (I’ve seen Lilith and Alexander the Great, and neither is good.)
This adaptation of Alec (brother of Evelyn) Waugh’s ‘controversial’ novel was racy at the time, owing to its portrait on an interracial ‘romance’ between Joan Fontaine and Harry Belafonte on a West Indian island. But it’s so lukewarm as to be virtually invisible.
There are (typically for an adaptation) SO MANY characters to keep track of – which means it at least has an interesting cast: not just Fontaine and Belafonte but James Mason (going through the neurotic playbook), Dorothy Dandridge, Joan Collins, Michael Rennie, John Williams and Stephen Boyd – who later won fame as Messala in Ben Hur, but here is utterly hopeless as an English aristo…
The main reason to watch this (free on YouTube) is Freddie Young’s gorgeous cinematography, each delicately coloured, immaculately composed frame being as good as a painting…

Directed by Michael Anderson and starring Richard Todd, it followed The Dam Busters (1955, and surely the most BORING ‘great’ film EVER. Except maybe Jeanne Dielman… Even the title does for you in that one…) in the ‘straightforwardly told imperial derring-do’ tradition. Except. There. Wasn’t. An. Empire. Any. MORE!!!
Eric Ambler ‘wrote the script’, presumably in the two-week gap between his novels State of Siege (1956) and Passage of Arms (1959)…
The ‘incident’ happened in 1949 when HMS Amethyst sailed up the Yangtse and… (oh, it’s too dull to even write about…).
What the AMETHYST was doing there was, of course, never discussed…

If the Yangtse looks suspiciously like England, it’s because it was actually the Orwell, Suffolk. B&W covers a multitude of sins – at least that was the theory…
Herbert Wilcox – aka Mr Anna Neagle, the great uncle of Nicholas Hoult and the MOST SUCCESSFUL BRITISH FILM PRODUCER EVER! (thanks to Ryan for research…) – must have considered this with a sinking feeling. Even Spring In Park Lane (1948, with A Neagle and M Wilding) was preferable…
Among the b-list cast – in which ‘foreigners’ like Akim Tamiroff play Chinese! – Bernard Cribbins and Ian Bannen can be spotted…

(In those days I was a Pointless ‘addict’ – for want of anything else. I used to say to people: Please come on Pointless with me. They’d say: That’s a TEERIBLE idea. And I’d say: Yes, I know it’s a terrible idea. I’m not completely daft… But it’s the only one I’ve got!)

16/2/18

Dear Jimmy McGovern,

You don’t know me. But amazingly enough we have the same agent! I wanted to write to you about Broken.

I had a stroke in 2013, and found I couldn’t write any more. I only wrote one line ‘creatively’ in 2014. A few sentences in 2015. And so on. Combined with brain damage, this (I saw at the time) made my life impossible, and I tried to kill myself. But of course I didn’t succeed.

When Broken was screened last July, I stayed up to watch it after my parents had gone to bed. It isn’t their thing. (By this stage I was living with them. My marriage had gone the way of my career.) In July I still thought about killing myself all the time. About 100 times a day. Only first I’d just watch this…

Well, I’m sure you’ve been told this before – but on the other hand you’re a writer, so you don’t get told it enough. Broken was FANTASTIC! It was all great, but episode 4 did it for me. I’d never seen Paula Malcolmson before. Everything about it. Sean Bean just saying ‘Please don’t do it’ over and over again. Her instructions about how to make dinner for her boys. Her giving away her clothes.

I’m ‘labile’ these days. Just thinking about it makes tears run down my face. Maybe it’s just professional jealousy, because I can’t believe you could just make it up. But it makes me wonder: what is the terrible thing that you’ve come back from? I know you started writing quite late. I think you went through something terrible, and survived, and now you cope with it. I don’t know if that’s right. Maybe you’re just brilliant! But just thinking of that as a possibility makes me able to go on.

Also, I saw you on Celebrity Pointless! I’m an addict. Every day at 5.15, it comes around. And by 6 it’s time for a drink… That you could write Broken and be on Pointless… Somehow that said it all.

Best wishes (I really mean it this time),

John Wrathall

12/3/18

Thanks for that fascinating letter, John. I notice it’s dated 16/2 but I got it only a day or so ago.

First of all, I’m sorry you’ve been through such a bloody awful time!

But I’m delighted you liked the Paula Malcolmson episode. She’s tremendous – as a woman and as an actor. So down to earth and full of humanity.

You start AFTER Pointless, I see. We start immediately THAT starts. 5-15. Large gin and tonics. Bliss.

Thanks, once again, for such a lovely, generous letter.

Jimmy

Di and Di were a mother and daughter team. They were ‘cleaners’. We got them recommended by Marina, an organic grower. That was good enough for us, in the authenticity stakes.

Di the daughter – ‘Young’ Di – was about 40 and was grotesquely overweight. You couldn’t look at her and not feel sorry for her. They were both great talkers – a double-act. When we got them we congratulated ourselves on having such authentic cleaners. It’s the same with Bea and Dana now – except B and D are also actually GOOD CLEANERS.

Di and Di weren’t. They’d just want to sit down and perform – in front of an audience of two. They both had a good, bitter sense of humour – and were both more or less illiterate. Old Di had been a military wife in Germany, back when she was still married to ‘him’.

That was the whole reason we lived in Essex, we told ourselves. At £10 an hour, they were cheap entertainment.

For a month or two young Di was ill (diabetes) and so her daughter came instead. Heidi! She could actually clean. She was about 20 and she seemed ‘good value’.

I suppose the kids were 7, 5 and 1, more or less. J had about £40 in his money box – approximately. He’d just been given a fiver here and there ever since he was born (including from our neighbours on the Green, in an immaculately copperplated envelope…). He didn’t really know or care about money (still doesn’t, at 17 and three quarters). Some time during the weeks that followed, I happened to check his money-box (maybe it had been moved and I thought: hmmmm…). It was empty.

We thought – rightly or wrongly – that it was Heidi. We hadn’t even employed her – we’d just been foisted with her. And she had that too-ready smile. We didn’t trust her, so we said ‘no thanks’ to Heidi, pretending we were skint. We’d just make do with one Di…

But she STILL couldn’t clean! So basically – after much agonising on my part – we pleaded being skint and said our farewells. (But Di – and later Di again – STILL cleaned for Marina. She pulled her hair out over them, but she just WOULDN’T sack them. They went on working for her for AGES… Perhaps even till she moved to Totnes…)

I thought it was a hardship having to work at Sight & Sound in the wake of the stockmarket crash in 2008. It was clear that – barring miracles – screenwriting would never again constitute ‘a living’. A friend in Manningtree said if you take this job, a little piece of you will die. But really it was a godsend. I used to meet you every month for lunch, at the Foyles Cafe, and that was a lifeline. (I’ve always appreciated stuff that I do regularly, every week or month, just because it doesn’t need setting up each time…)

From 1999 (when Premiere closed) to 2009, I basically just worked from home and did childcare etc. But jobs can be a good thing – if the people there actually ‘get’ you. At S&S, no-one really did. But you ‘got’ me! So for one lunchtime each month, I felt human.

It was during the Liability time. The entire staff of S&S NEVER EVEN SPOKE ABOUT IT – except for the editor. Ignoring the fact he’d known me 25 years, during which time we’d written songs together, he dutifully ‘had’ to see it to gauge whether it deserved a place in ‘his’ magazine. And a freelance sub was glad to borrow a dvd of it and (generously) gave it a 7 (when the received opinion was that it just scraped a 6…).

That screening that you came to – and Norman – I basically stopped asking people to. It was so depressing that NO-ONE wanted to come. It clashed with the latest Tarantino (the Django one), so…? Even a production exec at the BFI – who I’d known for 25 years too and was IN THE BUSINESS – didn’t come because she had ‘a work thing’. (And she still hasn’t – to my knowledge – seen it…)

So I thought: I’ll just take you and Norman (and D, who came to the screening but ran off without a word. Ah… He always wanted me to be ARTIER…)

I’ve always felt the fear of being abandoned. I remember the desolation I felt every time my parents went off to Italy and I was dumped with a grandmother or the neighbours. (I suppose it was just what my parents were used to, both having been born abroad and sent off to boarding school in England, my mum at 7 and my dad at 9.) My mum was just ‘unavailable’ – and knew no better. And being sent away to school at 13 just added insult to injury…

So I always feel – though I know as well that it’s CRAZY to feel – like I’m going to be abandoned. And with my marriage, of course, it happened, through (I thought) no fault of my own. I had a stroke, got depressed, killed myself (almost…), was abandoned…

Just to be working, in 1990, and notice something (that the computer made a noise like the Snap! record) and to say it OUT LOUD… And for someone actually to ‘get’ what I was talking about! That was (virtually) unique. It was trivial, sure. But on the other hand, to actually say what was on my mind – and have it confirmed by someone else… that was IMMENSE! And so rare.

My dad ‘got’ me, about 40s and 50s movies. At school, Marc ‘got’ me – until I realised that he ‘got’ EVERYONE. At the LRB, Michael, Nicky and Hugh all ‘got’ parts of me. Dermot ‘got’ me at The Good Times, from time to time. At Premiere John Poile ‘got’ me (I got him the job…) and Ryan came occasionally (ah, the floppy-disc years…). And then I pretty much stopped working in offices…

K – for all her virtues – didn’t really ‘get’ me of late. I’d occasionally say something about me… and she wouldn’t get it or – later – even HEAR it. She’d just carry on looking at her iPad or iPhone, and occasionally tell me about the problems she was having with her novel – which I’d try to solve…

Then Alex, in 2011 or 12, started listening to The Beatles and pop music, and in the car on the way to school we could ‘get’ it together. Going to Sigur Ros at Latitude in 2008 was significant because I put him on my shoulders (aged 5) and went up the front. It was so great! And K and James just stayed at the back and got bored. (Luke was at my parents nearby – the whole reason we went.)

Kraftwerk in 2013 was similar: I went up the front with Alex. I got chatting with a guy who was AMAZED I had seen them in 1981 at the Lyceum (he probably wasn’t born by then…). He was also, I remember, pleased because I gave him a set of 3D glasses (I’d taken a spare in case Alex lost his – a good father…).

5 days later I had the stroke…

In 20 years, 1993-2013, I wrote 17 screenplays start to finish (some of them rewrites **); I got paid SOMETHING for almost all of them. I wrote a short in 1997 (my first money!), signed with an agent and had my best year (3 screenplays commissioned) in 98. (Which is also when I bought the cottage in Mistley that I now live in…) The 90s were great, with so much money slopping around.

For Good I was SUPPOSED to get £100,000, the final part paid on the first day of principal photography. But I blinked at the wrong moment when the budget – always under what they wanted – was being finalised, and took ‘profits’ and £57,000, in the end, in ‘cash’. Needless to say, the ‘profits‘ never materialised. And bearing in mind it had taken 4.5 years of rewriting Good (terrible title! I drew up a list of about 100 alternatives…), it worked out about £12,000 a year. *

After the 2008 recession I had to take a part time subbing job. People were still interested in my scripts, but the deal now was: write it, and then we’ll see. For Liability, they wanted to give me nothing, only ‘profits’, but I’d been there before – and so had my agent, who got me £15,000. Plus ‘profits’ – which, of course, never materialised either. (Weird, considering the budget was only £500k… But then movie business accounting…)

After I had the stroke, I (finally) got paid in full for my work on United Kingdom (formerly Colour Bar), which I’d written a script for in 2010 and heard nothing about. (It was, bizarrely for such a British period movie, produced out of L.A. at the time, so suing them would – I found – not have been a serious option. Though I did look into it…) Eventually another project about the same thing got lucky – and signed up MY producers (just to avoid THEM suing…). I eventually got around £25k in total.

And I also get less than a grand each year from ALCS, mostly from Spain, the only country where Good was a hit. (They LOVE Viggo, because he speaks Spanish ‘like a native’, having been brought up in Argentina…)

I thought ‘this will be the one‘ 17 times. I was right twice – or right-ish, because both my films were flops...

* In R’s ‘novel’ I get a cameo, saying of Good: ‘The title was a hostage to fortune.’

** And one short, Magic Moments (1997), for which I got paid my first screenplay cheque, £300!