Ch-ch-ch-changes...

Well, with the summer solstice passing this weekend, it was a good time for a bit of a celebration of death and rebirth... that's right, dedicated readers: my laptop has died. Booooooooo. But now I have a nice new shiny laptop. Hurrah! It's all ups and downs on the solstice.

But shiny and nail-polish stain free as my lovely new Acer is, let us spend a minute to mourn the passing of my bizarrely over-specced (is that how you spell that?) but still slightly rubbish Dell, The Script Machine. Yes, I named my laptop. Nothing weird about that. It's been dying a slow and torturous death of massive crashes and complete file corruptions for three months or so, and I spent quite a lot of the past month shouting at it furiously and threatening to hit it with sticks, but t'was on those fair keys that I wrote my very first half decent scripts, and a few bad ones.

The Script Machine: 2004 - 2009. Rest in the spare bedroom.

My new laptop is very shiny, and in a super sexy midnight blue, not, not, I assure you, pink. I would include a picture, but it's so beautiful that you would all travel to my house and kidnap it, travelling with it to a cave to be your illicit-tech bride. You know you would. You're filthy.

It's crunch week for That's How I Roll - commissioning decisions from BBC3 are due this week, so I should know one way or t'other soon enough. Whichever way the decision falls, I suspect beer will follow.

And finally, in my occasional series of musical recommendations that mostly revolve around Ladytron, can I suggest you purchase their very first iTunes exclusive live album here. I should have been part of the crowd noise, but I was at the previous Astoria show, that got cancelled 40 minutes in when an amp blew up unimpressivley but fatally (for the amp, nobody actually died). Therefore, this recommendation is tinged with a little bit of resentment, which at least suits the mood of the music.

I bid you adieu.

Drag me to rationality...

I went to see Drag Me To Hell recently, and it's a lot of fun, silly, scary (in a boo! way as opposed to a Session 9 could sleep for days way) and a throw-back to the sort of movies that made me fall in love with horror in the first place; not suprising, as it was written by Sam and Ivan Raimi, who are also responsible for Army of Darkness, the very first horror film I saw.

But... here's my problem. Girl gets cursed by Gypsy. Fine, story wise, if a teensy bit racist. She has two people supporting her - her boyfriend, who tells her that everything's fine, all the spooky goings on are just post-traumatic stress, there's no such thing as demons, or hell etcetera etcetra - and the weird psychic dude with the bitchin' 'fro.

Of course, rational boy's wrong, and weird-ass mystic if right. Which is a problem for me. Because those movies make me a schmuck. They make Richard Dawkins a schmuck... well, he kind of is a schmuck, but he's also right. There are no demons. There is no hell. The only curse a Gypsy is likely to utter is "Fuck off".

And have you ever met anyone who believes, ernestly belives, in psychic powers, or angels or fairies - oh, god, those people with "I brake for fairies" stickers on the back of their car. They smell like joss-sticks. They think the world's going to end in 2012, and that horroscopes have some bearing on our weekly lives.

Those people are fucking nuts. And they drive me fucking nuts. But in supernatural movie land, they're heroes.

And then, bless him, George Romero came along and calmed me down. Because of the professor on the chat show in Dawn of the Dead. Utterly rational. Utterly right. Utterly believes in zombies.

Hurrah.

Writersroom Roadshow in Plymouth tomorrow...

At the risk of yet more marvelous redundancy, let me say as many others have that the BBC Writersroom Roadshow is in sunny old Plymouth tomorrow evening. You can read more about it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/insight/roadshows.shtml.

It's at the very decent Theatre Royal (where one of the first things I ever co-wrote was staged, hoooh, yes) and you can hand in your script in person then ask the very friendly and helpful Writersroom peeps what is they do, what they're looking for and all that good gubbins.

Crazy people bringing powerdrills and chainsaws because their scripts came back with no notes are notified that their Writersroom roadshow has been moved to Jester's Nightclub on Union Street, where the bouncers will bid them a cheery hello.

Doctor Who Costume Exclusive...

Oh, dear me. This blog’s just turning into a long list of apologies, isn’t it? I might as well be Catholic. Oooh, a Catholic confession blog: That’d be good. I’d read that.

So, I went to the Red Planet workshop over a week ago now, and yet I still haven’t written anything about it. It’s an experiment. I’m trying to simulate print media in a digital age. That, or I’m lazy. Actually, not even that: busy.

Jason wrote up his experience of the whole thing here, and he summed it up very well, rendering this post not only late but redundant. Tony Jordan is a palpably friendly person who sums up the noun ‘bloke’ so well he could be a dictionary definition. He also swears more than I do, which makes me just a little bit jealous. And it’s hard to bring together any sort of summary of points as it’s all just a big inspiring blur, mixed in with a lot of unrepeatable language and scurrilous accusations, and I’m not really all that blokey, so I doubt I’d have it come across very well.

Nevertheless, in short: know why it is you write; don’t bother trying to follow the crowd, as this will leave you both behind the crowd who have inevitably moved on and will also leave you artistically bankrupt*, and... um... oh, don’t worry about budgets, that’s producer’s job; fight your corner but know when to back down. I’m sure there was more.

Oh, and at one point he read my mind.

I also met someone who used to script-edit Doctor Who, which I didn’t realise until someone pointed out later; this was best for all involved as I didn’t have an embarrassing fanboy meltdown, and said person didn’t have to endure an embarrassing fanboy meltdown.

And on the subject of Doctor Who... I know what the 11th Doctor’s going to wear. Nobody’s told me, it’s just one of my very mild superpowers. Because, and prepare to gasp – gasp – in excitement, I accidentally dress like the Doctor. Not in a fanboyish way, despite such insulations in the previous paragraph, hoh no. Just, about a year before a new Doctor takes the reins, I start dressing like he will. This has started recently, by the way. I didn’t run around school with a leek attached to my jumper. But, when the new Who came on the telly, I noticed the Doctor was wearing my clothes. Not hard, back then, of course, it was just jeans and a leather jacket and a t-shirt. But nonetheless, that’s how I dressed.

I decided to smarten up a bit, somewhere towards the end of that series, and got myself a nice brown suit, which I wore with an overcoat, and because I’m not really fond of proper shoes, basket-ball shoes. A pattern was forming.

Then, with no real impetus, I changed to a blue suit. And low and bloody behold, so did the Doctor.

So, what will Matt Smith be rocking up in following his jaunt around the Tardis' mammoth wardrobe? Well, I’ve just started wearing a brimmed cloth hat. My money’s on the Doctor bringing the hat back. Also, if the current state of my hair’s anything to go by (somewhere between Yahoo Serious and Ollie Barbieri from Skins), he’ll also be sporting a white-boy ‘fro.

Although, now I come to think of it... I do seem to be describing Tom Baker. See, that’s the problem with accidentally dressing like Timelords: Nonlinearity.

And, now, ladies and gentlemen, Mitch Benn:



Oh, also That’s How I Roll has made it through all the various stages of execs and is going to Danny Cohen for next Thursday, blah blah blah.

* He didn’t actually say “artistically bankrupt”, that’s where my blokiness falls down.