Hello, friends! It is I, Fabrizio Giullare, your favourite author. Since I last spoke to you there has been a major development in my career: I've gone into writing movie scripts. Yes, you read that right, and I'm so pleased about it. Though, I'm not surprised; it was only a matter of time before someone recognised the genius of pieces such as Little Plants and Fluff and Corkscrew Bandana Dancers. It did take them longer than I'd anticipated, mind you.
What did take me by surprise was the direction that the production company wanted me to go in: horror. Now, I've never shied away from any genre, but I've never found myself dipping my toes in the same waters as Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft or anyone else with three names. The man from Broad Tedium Films is a very persuasive person and convinced both myself and my agent that my personal style fits and this would be a fantastic idea.
So this left me with something of a dilemma. I've never watched any horror films either. So I got down to my local rental place and picked up a few movies that sounded good. I didn't go for anything that had been given a theatrical release, as I thought that would just be vulgar, instead going for offerings that had gone straight to DVD. I watched several of them over the course of a most educational week and gleaned what I could from them.
I had the tools required to create a fantastic horror tale. Granted, some of the tools were already in my possession.
For example I'm a firm believer in 'Why have drama when you can have turgid sequences of nothing happening?' and it looks like most of these horror film makers have that same wonderful philosophy – Dread and The Broken being fine examples of this. My own fifteen hundred page novel Clogged Pores in Pall Mall is about one man staring at a drop of water going down a wall. It's something of a masterpiece and a personal triumph for me. Seeing that I could bring that kind of unrelenting lack of event to the screen filled me with a giant, quivering sense of excitement.
Then there's the greatly overrated trait of internal story logic. Why have a character do something that makes any kind of sense in favour of having them jump in random directions? I love to set up characters who, for example, clearly hate and fear cows to then have them go and purchase one as a pet, without one word of explanation. That jarring sense of confusion is just what the reader or, in this case, the watcher needs to make sure they stick around. It's one of my favourite writer's tools.
Of course I have had to wade out into the deep waters of brevity for this project, but then you can't have everything. I've just had to make sure the film seems like it's twelve hours long.
All in all I think I've done a damned fine job on it. I can't wait for Windmilling Arms to appear on the shelves of rental shops and music store chains.
Happy writing!
Showing posts with label silly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label silly. Show all posts
Friday, 17 August 2012
Monday, 16 April 2012
Got Any Spare Paragraphs, Mate?
Hello, I'm Fabrizio Giullare, and this is another of my long-running series on writing dos and don'ts.
Just for those who need a little bit of a catch-up, and can't be arsed looking back over the rest of my posts. I'm the writer of a number of novels and comics. My biggest novel has been Shepherd With Some Straw, that's currently in the process of being turned into a movie. While my most recent novel is Claiming Benefits from the Wrong Window. Both of which are available on Amazon.
My highly acclaimed comic work includes Little Dots, my collaboration with famed Japanese artist Yuudi Maeda and my work at Marvel on the Drooling Slugs crossover event.
Now that we've got the re-introductions out of the way, lets get down to what you're here for. In the past I've talked about the importance of having too many paragraphs on the page, it's an annoying habit that lots of writers have that puts readers off. I know my editor gets quite ratty when I hand her a manuscript with more than four paragraphs on a page.
"Fab," she says to me. "Why do you need to clutter up the page with so many different paragraphs. I've come to terms with your overuse of sentences, but this is almost too much for me."
And I have to agree with her and I find myself putting the offending clumps of words together into that glorious pattern of monolithic blocks of text that I know people love so much. Bear in mind, this only happens three or four times in a nine hundred page manuscript – my editor is an exacting woman, and she hates to see a page with too much white space. That's free space in which you can be telling the reader about the character's favourite hat. It all adds up to that wonderful power of narrative that you're building.
"But, Fab, surely it doesn't entirely matter! Surely you need to let the work flow as freely it obviously needs to!" I hear you cry. And I answer by saying, "Watch the adverbs, buddy, there are ladies present."
I know it may seem like it's a completely arbitrary thing to fixate on, but you need to wake up and smell the bergamot, my friend, this matters. It's on a par with naming characters Beryl or Angela – who the fuck does that any more? It brings people out of the story that you're creating and makes them think about old ladies who smell of lavender and pee. The same goes for too many paragraphs, except without the lavender and pee, it makes your reader start to wonder if you know what you're talking about. A good, confident writer knows that a strong block of text on the page tells the reader this guy knows what he's talking about and makes them more eager to read what you give them. Heavy slabs of text give your reader something to hold onto and strengthens your narrative.
I've come to terms with my editor's hatred of the full stop and she's come to terms with the fact that I'm not going to stop using it. We both agree that plants should never be involved in a story, for any reason whatever. This is just lazy writing and your readers will forget what their names are and probably start selling their bodies for Victoria sponge. That's how serious getting the writing correct is, you'll ruin human civilisation. I know you don't want to do that, you're a nice guy, so behave.
Until next time, I'm Fab Giullare, saying write well!
Just for those who need a little bit of a catch-up, and can't be arsed looking back over the rest of my posts. I'm the writer of a number of novels and comics. My biggest novel has been Shepherd With Some Straw, that's currently in the process of being turned into a movie. While my most recent novel is Claiming Benefits from the Wrong Window. Both of which are available on Amazon.
My highly acclaimed comic work includes Little Dots, my collaboration with famed Japanese artist Yuudi Maeda and my work at Marvel on the Drooling Slugs crossover event.
Now that we've got the re-introductions out of the way, lets get down to what you're here for. In the past I've talked about the importance of having too many paragraphs on the page, it's an annoying habit that lots of writers have that puts readers off. I know my editor gets quite ratty when I hand her a manuscript with more than four paragraphs on a page.
"Fab," she says to me. "Why do you need to clutter up the page with so many different paragraphs. I've come to terms with your overuse of sentences, but this is almost too much for me."
And I have to agree with her and I find myself putting the offending clumps of words together into that glorious pattern of monolithic blocks of text that I know people love so much. Bear in mind, this only happens three or four times in a nine hundred page manuscript – my editor is an exacting woman, and she hates to see a page with too much white space. That's free space in which you can be telling the reader about the character's favourite hat. It all adds up to that wonderful power of narrative that you're building.
"But, Fab, surely it doesn't entirely matter! Surely you need to let the work flow as freely it obviously needs to!" I hear you cry. And I answer by saying, "Watch the adverbs, buddy, there are ladies present."
I know it may seem like it's a completely arbitrary thing to fixate on, but you need to wake up and smell the bergamot, my friend, this matters. It's on a par with naming characters Beryl or Angela – who the fuck does that any more? It brings people out of the story that you're creating and makes them think about old ladies who smell of lavender and pee. The same goes for too many paragraphs, except without the lavender and pee, it makes your reader start to wonder if you know what you're talking about. A good, confident writer knows that a strong block of text on the page tells the reader this guy knows what he's talking about and makes them more eager to read what you give them. Heavy slabs of text give your reader something to hold onto and strengthens your narrative.
I've come to terms with my editor's hatred of the full stop and she's come to terms with the fact that I'm not going to stop using it. We both agree that plants should never be involved in a story, for any reason whatever. This is just lazy writing and your readers will forget what their names are and probably start selling their bodies for Victoria sponge. That's how serious getting the writing correct is, you'll ruin human civilisation. I know you don't want to do that, you're a nice guy, so behave.
Until next time, I'm Fab Giullare, saying write well!
Friday, 6 April 2012
My god, it's full of words!
Hey, how are you doing? I wasn't expecting you. Really I wasn't expecting to be here myself, just popped my head in to do a few things and then go back to the ole novel.
But since we're both here, pull up a pew and I'll sputter more nonsense at you. No, really, it's the least I can do after you went to the trouble of looking in on me.
I've always been in awe of writey-type folks who have a way with word count. There I've said it and it feels so good to get it out there. Yes, I am that shallow to see word count as a major part of writing, I can't help it, it's just the way my mind works. People like Gary Gibson, Dean Koontz (sorry, I'm not going to send you to his website, it's too much selling and quite frankly his output in the last decade has been appalling), China Mieville and yes, even though I'm not a fan at all, Stephen King, among others. Folk who can throw out four, five, six, seven, eight or more hundred page books with distressing regularity and, often quality (with the noted exceptions, of course).
It's not something I'm proud of and I hide the fact like a chronic masturbater who's hoping not be noticed cranking one out in a public toilet stall for the seventh time that day.
Word count isn't anything like a mark of quality in a work, yet from the time I started using a word processor and was given a way of tracking my word count, it became a compulsion to get higher and higher. You can't believe the sense of accomplishment the first time I broke the 100,000 word mark. What I'd written was a colossal piece of shit, but I'd made it. Then I saw that other authors regularly managed 160,000 words and more (and Stephen King has the crazy notion that 180,000 is 'goodish', like more is better...hang on a sec...DAMN YOU, KING , YOU BROKE ME!) and I looked at my paltry sum of words and I despaired.
There's no basis for this to be the case (except for that formative experience from On Writing, the best thing King has written, bar none and a recommended read despite what it's done to me) as some very good, classic books just squeak into novel-hood; the one that springs to mind is A Clockwork Orange, a great book that still has a pertinent message to this day. That couldn't be more than 60,000 words, it puts my desperation to stack up them thar words as high as I can into perspective.
For a while there I didn't worry about it, since the books I was writing were hovering around that 100,000 word mark, and I was happy with that, I thought it was the best that I could do. I still watched the word counts go up, but I didn't sweat it – if I got to it, great; if I didn't that was good too. I'd hit a little bit of Zen in my writing.
Now I'm up to my hips in a new novel-writing project. And going by what I've written so far and the detailed synopsis I've made (this is thanks to Gary Gibson, and I recommend doing this, it's a great way of seeing problems and mining new aspects of a story) it's going to be a fucking monster. My estimates suggest it's going to be at least 180,000 words and probably more - if it ever sees print it will be a six hundred plus page doorstop.
And you'd think I'd be pleased with this, not a damn bit of it. It's not huge just for the hell of it; the length is dictated by the story I want to tell. Instead I'm intimidated in a way I haven't been by writing for a very long time. There's the fear that I'll fall short and make an arse of myself (to who? I dunno, that weird wee guy who's always looking over my shoulder when I'm writing...the one that's only in my head) or that I'll get to the heady heights of 200,000 words and discover I've written an unreadable slab of compressed shit. Normal, understandable fears, right? Right?
Still the procession of words continues and the other fear I have rears its head. It's another fear that I've had from even before I started writing novels when I was fifteen - the terror that I'll run out of words, that the well of things to say will offer nothing more to me than a proverbial word bucket full of watery rat poo and kidney beans. It's something that hasn't happened to me so far, but it's there in my mind like a blank-faced imp, saying, "This is what you've got to look forward to, Couper! Ha ha ha! Look at my impish wang and snivel!"
Or worse, it will cause me t snap one day and I'll spend the next few months adding 'u's to the giant 'duh' I've decided to put onto page after page in my brain-crippled state.
And that's where I am right now, fighting the ball-retracting fears that I'm going to tumble into dementia or that I'm continuing an exercise in self-deceptive incompetence.
Welcome to my happy writery world! Aren't you glad you stopped by? Why not have a custard cream?
Will
But since we're both here, pull up a pew and I'll sputter more nonsense at you. No, really, it's the least I can do after you went to the trouble of looking in on me.
I've always been in awe of writey-type folks who have a way with word count. There I've said it and it feels so good to get it out there. Yes, I am that shallow to see word count as a major part of writing, I can't help it, it's just the way my mind works. People like Gary Gibson, Dean Koontz (sorry, I'm not going to send you to his website, it's too much selling and quite frankly his output in the last decade has been appalling), China Mieville and yes, even though I'm not a fan at all, Stephen King, among others. Folk who can throw out four, five, six, seven, eight or more hundred page books with distressing regularity and, often quality (with the noted exceptions, of course).
It's not something I'm proud of and I hide the fact like a chronic masturbater who's hoping not be noticed cranking one out in a public toilet stall for the seventh time that day.
Word count isn't anything like a mark of quality in a work, yet from the time I started using a word processor and was given a way of tracking my word count, it became a compulsion to get higher and higher. You can't believe the sense of accomplishment the first time I broke the 100,000 word mark. What I'd written was a colossal piece of shit, but I'd made it. Then I saw that other authors regularly managed 160,000 words and more (and Stephen King has the crazy notion that 180,000 is 'goodish', like more is better...hang on a sec...DAMN YOU, KING , YOU BROKE ME!) and I looked at my paltry sum of words and I despaired.
There's no basis for this to be the case (except for that formative experience from On Writing, the best thing King has written, bar none and a recommended read despite what it's done to me) as some very good, classic books just squeak into novel-hood; the one that springs to mind is A Clockwork Orange, a great book that still has a pertinent message to this day. That couldn't be more than 60,000 words, it puts my desperation to stack up them thar words as high as I can into perspective.
For a while there I didn't worry about it, since the books I was writing were hovering around that 100,000 word mark, and I was happy with that, I thought it was the best that I could do. I still watched the word counts go up, but I didn't sweat it – if I got to it, great; if I didn't that was good too. I'd hit a little bit of Zen in my writing.
Now I'm up to my hips in a new novel-writing project. And going by what I've written so far and the detailed synopsis I've made (this is thanks to Gary Gibson, and I recommend doing this, it's a great way of seeing problems and mining new aspects of a story) it's going to be a fucking monster. My estimates suggest it's going to be at least 180,000 words and probably more - if it ever sees print it will be a six hundred plus page doorstop.
And you'd think I'd be pleased with this, not a damn bit of it. It's not huge just for the hell of it; the length is dictated by the story I want to tell. Instead I'm intimidated in a way I haven't been by writing for a very long time. There's the fear that I'll fall short and make an arse of myself (to who? I dunno, that weird wee guy who's always looking over my shoulder when I'm writing...the one that's only in my head) or that I'll get to the heady heights of 200,000 words and discover I've written an unreadable slab of compressed shit. Normal, understandable fears, right? Right?
Still the procession of words continues and the other fear I have rears its head. It's another fear that I've had from even before I started writing novels when I was fifteen - the terror that I'll run out of words, that the well of things to say will offer nothing more to me than a proverbial word bucket full of watery rat poo and kidney beans. It's something that hasn't happened to me so far, but it's there in my mind like a blank-faced imp, saying, "This is what you've got to look forward to, Couper! Ha ha ha! Look at my impish wang and snivel!"
Or worse, it will cause me t snap one day and I'll spend the next few months adding 'u's to the giant 'duh' I've decided to put onto page after page in my brain-crippled state.
And that's where I am right now, fighting the ball-retracting fears that I'm going to tumble into dementia or that I'm continuing an exercise in self-deceptive incompetence.
Welcome to my happy writery world! Aren't you glad you stopped by? Why not have a custard cream?
Will
Wednesday, 10 February 2010
A Hinter Tale.
Come, take a walk with me.
I don’t do a great deal of wandering around the internet, I’ve got a few places that I frequent a lot – a forum here, a Twitter there, some news sites, social networking stuff, a very few blogs that I don’t read often enough and a clutch of amusing webcomics. I’ve been doing the same thing pretty much for the past four years or so with a few modifications. If my habits were equivalent to walking through snow, my foot prints would be deep enough to do open cast mining.
Not to say that I delve that deeply (I’ve yet to tunnel down into the Deep Web, a term that I was only introduced to recently) nor am I limited to what I view by my habitual site visits; I’ll follow links to places that may grab my interest.
I know there is a lot of odd stuff out there. People seem to often use the internet as a place to offload their madness. The reasoning being that, as far as I’m aware, they can dump the simmering sludge of barmy into the electronic byways to allow them to function in a better way with other human beings. I don’t know how well this works as I’ve had some experience with crazies who just seem to dig further and further into their demented worlds.
Or there’s the even less pleasant side where people get to be utterly shit to one another in a way that would get them punched in the face if they did it in a pub. People see it as carte blanche to be unremittingly horrible to one another because they are doing it to a computer screen and not using their real name. That’s the nature of free speech, but I’m surprised that there haven’t been more cases of someone being tracked down and getting the snot kicked out of them for saying someone’s spouse looks like a donkey with Down’s Syndrome.
There’s definitely a lot of entertaining stuff out there that celebrates the best humanity has to offer, but it’s never going outweigh the inane, depressing and boring or simply unsettling content that you lock your peepers and your poor beleaguered web browser on. In times past I’ve bemoaned my lack of web exploration, feeling that there’s a lot to see out there, but I’m not putting the effort into finding it. I’d like to be one of those people who clicks away stumbling across curious bits of the internet, but I’ve never found myself having the time or inclination. Where would I start? I have a hard enough time working out what I’m going to have for dinner each day and my mind doesn’t work like a random subject generator.
Hmm, maybe that’s why I’m such a shit conversationalist. Something worth thinking about in the future, that.
I, like a lot of people out there have had mixed fortunes when it comes to the phenomenon of the forum. These are the venues in which the free flow of ideas and the art of conversation can be practiced. More often than not, though they are playground in which people shout, “You’re wrong and you’re a dick!” and, “No! You’re wrong and you’re a dick!”
There are a lot of things that bemuse and frustrate me on such forums, like the habit on some where people say something quite insightful and clever only to be ignored, and then have someone down the thread say the same thing and be called a genius. Something of a pet hate that one. And of course there’s what I mentioned earlier about people using it as their abuse shield – “I get to call you a fuckwit with suppurating genital warts all around your anus and you can’t do shit! Ha ha!”
Of course this all depends on how well the board is monitored for this kind of thing. Some forums are rigorous about having people act as though they have a higher emotional age than three and they prosper because of it. Although I’ve seen a fair few that prosper because (I’d love to say in spite of, but I’d be lying) of this kind of school yard behaviour. Those aren’t the kind of places I’m going to hang around in for very long, I stopped finding playground banter entertaining when I was fourteen or fifteen and seeing it perpetuated by people my age and older is sad and boring. There would be some people less robust than I who might find this kind of thing intimidating.
I’ve been on some forums, small and large, that have been friendly and well-run where there’s a limited amount of animosity and quite a bit of interesting conversation. Those are ones that I tend to orbit a lot and they enrich my internet experience no end.
I’m not going to list them all because you might turn and fucking spoil them but this place, White Chapel is a pretty good place to hang around if you want adults to be adults. Mostly it’s because they are under constant threat of being crushed by the admins if they act like idiots, but mostly it’s because they are a decent bunch of people.
There’s no way I could talk about forums and message boards without mentioning the very odd and specialised breed that are the news site message boards.
News corporations, particularly the papers, have had a tough time of it since the internet grew into the all-encompassing tentacle monster that it has. They have all had to up their game and adapt to a medium that they can pin down and control about as well as they could an ocean. The internet comes from so many different directions and sources that to control it would take an insane amount of work – not that that stops anyone from trying.
In their wild efforts to add more content and interest to their sites many papers have a comments section below articles and stories. And just like any other forum they have their moments of inanity and times of brilliance.
Weirdly though, both of these things are generally blotted out by insane extremists. People who seem to scour the internet to look for these very comments pages to fill up with their hate-filled and often uninformed views.
The most obvious example of this is the BBC News website’s Have Your Say section.
Because, for the BBC, being able to comment on every story would be tantamount to heresy, they pick a few stories, seemingly at random or picked by an autistic rhesus monkey, and throw them out to the public like bread crumbs to pigeons.
And no matter what the story - doesn’t matter if it’s the most inoffensive fluff piece in the world - you’re always guaranteed to have someone going and saying that those on unemployment benefits are to blame. Even if there’s a picture of fluffy ginger kitten, you’ll get one comment in capitals thus (spelling and grammatical errors for effect): “ITS A DISGRASE! THESE DOLE SCROUNGERS LIVING OF MY TAXES SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF THEMSELFS FOR THIS.”
It’s amazing that so many people are so offended by people out of work getting money to help them out that they feel the need to tell the world at every opportunity they get. It must be awful to feel so aggrieved at having to help people in between jobs, do they get annoyed about millions sunk into bad government investments or given to hospital administrators when the medical staff are so low paid?
But then, this is the internet after all and trying to apply rational thought just falls down in the face of all the concentrated insanity that free floats from one place to another. Maybe I should just start wearing wooden clothes and call myself Beverage Carrier Bag XVII, I might just start to look normal…
Will
I don’t do a great deal of wandering around the internet, I’ve got a few places that I frequent a lot – a forum here, a Twitter there, some news sites, social networking stuff, a very few blogs that I don’t read often enough and a clutch of amusing webcomics. I’ve been doing the same thing pretty much for the past four years or so with a few modifications. If my habits were equivalent to walking through snow, my foot prints would be deep enough to do open cast mining.
Not to say that I delve that deeply (I’ve yet to tunnel down into the Deep Web, a term that I was only introduced to recently) nor am I limited to what I view by my habitual site visits; I’ll follow links to places that may grab my interest.
I know there is a lot of odd stuff out there. People seem to often use the internet as a place to offload their madness. The reasoning being that, as far as I’m aware, they can dump the simmering sludge of barmy into the electronic byways to allow them to function in a better way with other human beings. I don’t know how well this works as I’ve had some experience with crazies who just seem to dig further and further into their demented worlds.
Or there’s the even less pleasant side where people get to be utterly shit to one another in a way that would get them punched in the face if they did it in a pub. People see it as carte blanche to be unremittingly horrible to one another because they are doing it to a computer screen and not using their real name. That’s the nature of free speech, but I’m surprised that there haven’t been more cases of someone being tracked down and getting the snot kicked out of them for saying someone’s spouse looks like a donkey with Down’s Syndrome.
There’s definitely a lot of entertaining stuff out there that celebrates the best humanity has to offer, but it’s never going outweigh the inane, depressing and boring or simply unsettling content that you lock your peepers and your poor beleaguered web browser on. In times past I’ve bemoaned my lack of web exploration, feeling that there’s a lot to see out there, but I’m not putting the effort into finding it. I’d like to be one of those people who clicks away stumbling across curious bits of the internet, but I’ve never found myself having the time or inclination. Where would I start? I have a hard enough time working out what I’m going to have for dinner each day and my mind doesn’t work like a random subject generator.
Hmm, maybe that’s why I’m such a shit conversationalist. Something worth thinking about in the future, that.
I, like a lot of people out there have had mixed fortunes when it comes to the phenomenon of the forum. These are the venues in which the free flow of ideas and the art of conversation can be practiced. More often than not, though they are playground in which people shout, “You’re wrong and you’re a dick!” and, “No! You’re wrong and you’re a dick!”
There are a lot of things that bemuse and frustrate me on such forums, like the habit on some where people say something quite insightful and clever only to be ignored, and then have someone down the thread say the same thing and be called a genius. Something of a pet hate that one. And of course there’s what I mentioned earlier about people using it as their abuse shield – “I get to call you a fuckwit with suppurating genital warts all around your anus and you can’t do shit! Ha ha!”
Of course this all depends on how well the board is monitored for this kind of thing. Some forums are rigorous about having people act as though they have a higher emotional age than three and they prosper because of it. Although I’ve seen a fair few that prosper because (I’d love to say in spite of, but I’d be lying) of this kind of school yard behaviour. Those aren’t the kind of places I’m going to hang around in for very long, I stopped finding playground banter entertaining when I was fourteen or fifteen and seeing it perpetuated by people my age and older is sad and boring. There would be some people less robust than I who might find this kind of thing intimidating.
I’ve been on some forums, small and large, that have been friendly and well-run where there’s a limited amount of animosity and quite a bit of interesting conversation. Those are ones that I tend to orbit a lot and they enrich my internet experience no end.
I’m not going to list them all because you might turn and fucking spoil them but this place, White Chapel is a pretty good place to hang around if you want adults to be adults. Mostly it’s because they are under constant threat of being crushed by the admins if they act like idiots, but mostly it’s because they are a decent bunch of people.
There’s no way I could talk about forums and message boards without mentioning the very odd and specialised breed that are the news site message boards.
News corporations, particularly the papers, have had a tough time of it since the internet grew into the all-encompassing tentacle monster that it has. They have all had to up their game and adapt to a medium that they can pin down and control about as well as they could an ocean. The internet comes from so many different directions and sources that to control it would take an insane amount of work – not that that stops anyone from trying.
In their wild efforts to add more content and interest to their sites many papers have a comments section below articles and stories. And just like any other forum they have their moments of inanity and times of brilliance.
Weirdly though, both of these things are generally blotted out by insane extremists. People who seem to scour the internet to look for these very comments pages to fill up with their hate-filled and often uninformed views.
The most obvious example of this is the BBC News website’s Have Your Say section.
Because, for the BBC, being able to comment on every story would be tantamount to heresy, they pick a few stories, seemingly at random or picked by an autistic rhesus monkey, and throw them out to the public like bread crumbs to pigeons.
And no matter what the story - doesn’t matter if it’s the most inoffensive fluff piece in the world - you’re always guaranteed to have someone going and saying that those on unemployment benefits are to blame. Even if there’s a picture of fluffy ginger kitten, you’ll get one comment in capitals thus (spelling and grammatical errors for effect): “ITS A DISGRASE! THESE DOLE SCROUNGERS LIVING OF MY TAXES SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF THEMSELFS FOR THIS.”
It’s amazing that so many people are so offended by people out of work getting money to help them out that they feel the need to tell the world at every opportunity they get. It must be awful to feel so aggrieved at having to help people in between jobs, do they get annoyed about millions sunk into bad government investments or given to hospital administrators when the medical staff are so low paid?
But then, this is the internet after all and trying to apply rational thought just falls down in the face of all the concentrated insanity that free floats from one place to another. Maybe I should just start wearing wooden clothes and call myself Beverage Carrier Bag XVII, I might just start to look normal…
Will
Thursday, 24 December 2009
Oh, I can't be bothered changing the channel...
“On the first day of Christmas TV gave to me,
Hours of depressing soap operas!”
It’s the season to be merry, have fun, relax (kind of…well not really, but it’s a nice thought, isn’t it?), overeat, over drink and sit down to watch some bad television. Y’know, the stuff that the channels have been hooting and hollering about since the end of October.
Every year, for those of us who watch any television, we switch on the goggle box whenever we manage to roll out of bed and after we’ve unwrapped our presents and we hope beyond reasonable hope that this year it will be different. This year our expectations will be, if not met, at least given something to chew on.
We will look out on the Arctic nightmare the outside world has become, this year we’re looking at heavy snowfalls and sub zero temperatures, and feel cosy as we curl up in front of the television.
(The bookies must be shitting themselves this year. Hoping that we’ve had all the snow we’re going to get in 2009. Y’see, snow lying on the ground doesn’t make it an official White Christmas, snow falling does.)
We want to be enthralled, entertained, made happy that its Christmas and that we don’t need to interact with our relatives, alternatively grinning at us like they want eat some vital part of our anatomy or scowling at us like they want to eat some vital part of our anatomy. Yes, you’ve given us some lovely gifts and I’m most grateful, honestly, but right now could you stop staring at me like you’re one of the cast from ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and let me inure myself to the season with something mindlessly amusing flickered into my brainstem.
Yes, we get the odd gem of good telly. Things like ‘Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death’ and a good film from four years ago will be highlights, but they tend to be few and far between, stuck amongst things like the Queen’s Christmas Speech and any number of rank smelling dramas and television shows that wouldn’t be allowed on air at any other time.
I mean Noel Edmonds is a master of bringing us foetid television, the worst being (and I’m not the only person to note this and I may even have been pointed in the direction by Charlie Brooker, so what? This is the internet, I don’t no stinking original ideas!) ‘Noel’s HQ’ and ‘Noel’s Christmas Presents’. Horrific examples of celebrity guilt schmaltz that would make Frank Capra break out into hives.
Then you have the catering to the soap opera junkies. These poor, zombified souls have been steadily hooked more and more by these insidious dramas, going from being shown two or three nights a week to encroaching on every night. Now the vicarious living that’s offered by these programmes is ingrained in quite a portion of the UK population.
It probably wouldn’t be so bad if the portrayals of life in these fictional places was, y’know something akin to real life with ups and downs, but the wisdom of dramatic imperative for programmes like ‘Coronation Street’, ‘Emerdale’, ‘River City’ (which is only in Scotland, the rest of the UK can heave a sigh of relief about that) and the grand master of them all ‘Eastenders’ is that life for working class people is a never-ending slog from one kind of deep misery to another. The characters listlessly go through their joyless existences until they are swept off the mortal coil in some way so tragic that it stops you from wanting to get up in the morning. Unless a character comes into the show when they are older, they are unlikely to reach anything approaching old age – most of them are lucky if they make it out of their teens. And don’t even get me started on the miraculous metamorphoses that take place.
The grand high wizard of this crushing misery is ‘Eastenders’, a programme so morose that you’d be lucky to see an actor smile in a month, let alone an episode. These people live such uncertain, tragic and short lives that you wonder why anyone would want to live in Albert Square. Murder, rape, insanity, disease and disaster are staples of soap opera life, but only ‘Eastenders’ is innovative enough to pile it all onto the one character. Yes. Yes! They are visionaries in their desperation to keep the viewers coming to the show.
And the Christmas episodes are the jewel in the miserable crown of the ‘Eastenders’ year. A day when they have to double the depression. We are treated to an hour long episode filled with less Christmas cheer than in the city centre of Tehran.
Which brings the thought of what the writers would do if they could get away with it. I mean, they seem to be so keen to portray life with such grey joylessness, and bleak desolation, why not step it up, take it to the next level? I’ve been thinking about this and it wouldn’t be that hard. It would actually be cheaper than their normal offerings, whether they used special effects…or not.
It start like this: you open with the ‘Eastenders’ theme tune as normal, then you would have the characters all sitting in the Queen Vic. All of the tables and chairs have been removed so that everyone has to sit down. As you have come to expect, no one is smiling, but this time there is quite a concrete reason for this – they are all holding shotguns in their mouths.
Slowly the camera pans across their faces, the deadness created by their grinding lives shining there, perhaps a hint of pleading in the younger characters’ eyes. No one says a word, they just stare long and deep into the camera.
Then the person at the end of the line fires. And so it goes, they blow their brains, making a tune: ‘Jingle Bells’ in 12-gauge minor.
Once this spectacle ends the camera drifts across the bleeding, twitching corpses, showing us the growing pools and rivers of blood as they form on the wooden floor. In the background a baby cries and over the sound track plays Adagio for Strings. This continues for the rest of the hour-long running time, going into silence once the music stops, the only sound now the crying baby.
And now ‘My Family’.
Now, I know that this is what people want, but sometimes perhaps the channels might want to consider thinking a bit differently and have something fun, even funny for us to watch after gorging on our Christmas meal.
A nice dream.
And on that note I say Merry Christmas and, if I don’t feel another rant coming on beforehand, a very happy New Year!
Will
Hours of depressing soap operas!”
It’s the season to be merry, have fun, relax (kind of…well not really, but it’s a nice thought, isn’t it?), overeat, over drink and sit down to watch some bad television. Y’know, the stuff that the channels have been hooting and hollering about since the end of October.
Every year, for those of us who watch any television, we switch on the goggle box whenever we manage to roll out of bed and after we’ve unwrapped our presents and we hope beyond reasonable hope that this year it will be different. This year our expectations will be, if not met, at least given something to chew on.
We will look out on the Arctic nightmare the outside world has become, this year we’re looking at heavy snowfalls and sub zero temperatures, and feel cosy as we curl up in front of the television.
(The bookies must be shitting themselves this year. Hoping that we’ve had all the snow we’re going to get in 2009. Y’see, snow lying on the ground doesn’t make it an official White Christmas, snow falling does.)
We want to be enthralled, entertained, made happy that its Christmas and that we don’t need to interact with our relatives, alternatively grinning at us like they want eat some vital part of our anatomy or scowling at us like they want to eat some vital part of our anatomy. Yes, you’ve given us some lovely gifts and I’m most grateful, honestly, but right now could you stop staring at me like you’re one of the cast from ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and let me inure myself to the season with something mindlessly amusing flickered into my brainstem.
Yes, we get the odd gem of good telly. Things like ‘Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death’ and a good film from four years ago will be highlights, but they tend to be few and far between, stuck amongst things like the Queen’s Christmas Speech and any number of rank smelling dramas and television shows that wouldn’t be allowed on air at any other time.
I mean Noel Edmonds is a master of bringing us foetid television, the worst being (and I’m not the only person to note this and I may even have been pointed in the direction by Charlie Brooker, so what? This is the internet, I don’t no stinking original ideas!) ‘Noel’s HQ’ and ‘Noel’s Christmas Presents’. Horrific examples of celebrity guilt schmaltz that would make Frank Capra break out into hives.
Then you have the catering to the soap opera junkies. These poor, zombified souls have been steadily hooked more and more by these insidious dramas, going from being shown two or three nights a week to encroaching on every night. Now the vicarious living that’s offered by these programmes is ingrained in quite a portion of the UK population.
It probably wouldn’t be so bad if the portrayals of life in these fictional places was, y’know something akin to real life with ups and downs, but the wisdom of dramatic imperative for programmes like ‘Coronation Street’, ‘Emerdale’, ‘River City’ (which is only in Scotland, the rest of the UK can heave a sigh of relief about that) and the grand master of them all ‘Eastenders’ is that life for working class people is a never-ending slog from one kind of deep misery to another. The characters listlessly go through their joyless existences until they are swept off the mortal coil in some way so tragic that it stops you from wanting to get up in the morning. Unless a character comes into the show when they are older, they are unlikely to reach anything approaching old age – most of them are lucky if they make it out of their teens. And don’t even get me started on the miraculous metamorphoses that take place.
The grand high wizard of this crushing misery is ‘Eastenders’, a programme so morose that you’d be lucky to see an actor smile in a month, let alone an episode. These people live such uncertain, tragic and short lives that you wonder why anyone would want to live in Albert Square. Murder, rape, insanity, disease and disaster are staples of soap opera life, but only ‘Eastenders’ is innovative enough to pile it all onto the one character. Yes. Yes! They are visionaries in their desperation to keep the viewers coming to the show.
And the Christmas episodes are the jewel in the miserable crown of the ‘Eastenders’ year. A day when they have to double the depression. We are treated to an hour long episode filled with less Christmas cheer than in the city centre of Tehran.
Which brings the thought of what the writers would do if they could get away with it. I mean, they seem to be so keen to portray life with such grey joylessness, and bleak desolation, why not step it up, take it to the next level? I’ve been thinking about this and it wouldn’t be that hard. It would actually be cheaper than their normal offerings, whether they used special effects…or not.
It start like this: you open with the ‘Eastenders’ theme tune as normal, then you would have the characters all sitting in the Queen Vic. All of the tables and chairs have been removed so that everyone has to sit down. As you have come to expect, no one is smiling, but this time there is quite a concrete reason for this – they are all holding shotguns in their mouths.
Slowly the camera pans across their faces, the deadness created by their grinding lives shining there, perhaps a hint of pleading in the younger characters’ eyes. No one says a word, they just stare long and deep into the camera.
Then the person at the end of the line fires. And so it goes, they blow their brains, making a tune: ‘Jingle Bells’ in 12-gauge minor.
Once this spectacle ends the camera drifts across the bleeding, twitching corpses, showing us the growing pools and rivers of blood as they form on the wooden floor. In the background a baby cries and over the sound track plays Adagio for Strings. This continues for the rest of the hour-long running time, going into silence once the music stops, the only sound now the crying baby.
And now ‘My Family’.
Now, I know that this is what people want, but sometimes perhaps the channels might want to consider thinking a bit differently and have something fun, even funny for us to watch after gorging on our Christmas meal.
A nice dream.
And on that note I say Merry Christmas and, if I don’t feel another rant coming on beforehand, a very happy New Year!
Will
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