I’m Away For A Walk

I came across this by accident, and thought it might be of interest to my fellow Peter Capaldi fans.  It’s an Iain Banks fanzine from 2006 that includes an interview with Peter about Crow Road and Wasp factory. There are some interesting details there that I had not heard before, including the fact that apparently he wore hair extensions in Crow Road :D

I came across this by accident, and thought it might be of interest to my fellow Peter Capaldi fans.  It’s an Iain Banks fanzine from 2006 that includes an interview with Peter about Crow Road and Wasp factory. There are some interesting details there that I had not heard before, including the fact that apparently he wore hair extensions in Crow Road :D

The season for giving is upon us and to once again say thank you to Peter Capaldi, we’re raising money for It’s Good 2 Give, a charity he supports. They do incredible work for children and young people with cancer. There’s a raffle and prizes to be won!

The money raised will support The Ripple Retreat, a restful and safe place which offers respite for children and young people with cancer, and their families.

Peter Capaldi is a patron of the charity and this is a cause he is passionate about.

“I was introduced to It’s Good 2 Give after the charity had helped a family I know. I was hugely impressed by their approach and ambition. By spreading the word I hope to help them raise the funds they need. It really is Good 2 Give; please help them by giving what you can.” - Peter Capaldi

Each £1 donation will buy you one entry ticket for the raffle.

Donate £10 and you’ll receive ten entries, £20 for twenty entries, and so on.

Earlier today I tweeted about how watching some piece of creative endeavour that thrills you is energising; how it sends you away restless and wanting to create something of your own. I had a reply from someone saying that they felt the opposite; that seeing something great by someone else made them realise they would never reach those standards and thus they found it demoralising.

I know exactly how he feels. So I thought I might blog this. This is my theory about that feeling and what we need to recognise when we feel it. I hope that some of you might find it helpful:

Much of the unhappiness we feel in the creative process stems from the fact that we started as fanboys and fangirls of the thing we’re now involved in. You go into novel-writing, because you’ve always loved novels. Your whole life nothing made you happier than sitting in a corner with a book, absorbing the stories, living with the characters, luxuriating in the beautifully-turned words, the well-phrased observations about life and how it is lived, the worlds created before your very brain and now you, too, want to create those worlds, turn those words. You want to become a playwright because you’ve loved the theatre since you discovered it. You’ve seen everything there is to see, you’ve read plays, spent your money and spare time standing at the back with the cheap tickets so you could see everything you possibly can and now you, too, want to create those scenes that beguile and provoke. You go into comedy because you’ve never been happier than sitting in those rooms, watching those women and men with the audience in the palm of their hands, pouring out these brilliant and hilarious thoughts. You’ve got a point of view, you know what’s funny and now you too want to make strangers rock forwards in unison and delight as your ideas hit them. Every single person starts as a fan of the thing they end up doing.  And it makes us very unhappy when we come to do it ourselves. Because we end up judging our work by impossible standards.  I don’t mean judging it against that of people whose work is superior to ours, I mean judging our own work in a way we can never be equipped to judge it.  You can never truly judge your own work. Not really.

Here’s a really good thing to remember. There are two ways into a theatre:

You can either walk with the excited crowds along the street, warm with the glass of wine you just had in the bar down the road. You walk in past the polished glass and the polished brass, past the liveried doorpeople tearing your tickets, up the marble staircase with the sculpted handrail. You walk into the plush, red auditorium with the sprung velvet seats and the gilded alabaster cherubs staring at you from the proscenium, shining in the light of the chandelier hanging from the ceiling rose. You get yourself seated, open your bag of Maltesers, look at the program you bought. The whole room is rich with anticipation. The hairs on the back of your neck go up as the lights dim and the curtain is raised and there before you is a set designed by a genius, wrought by craftsmen and then through a door in the back of that set comes the person you’ve come there to see: that figure from film, from television that you’ve always wanted to be in the same room as, and they begin to speak finely wrought words, teased out of the language by a genius… 

That’s one way in.  The other way is, you schlep round the back to a side-street, go through the entrance opposite a strip joint where a woman with a sour expression who smells of stale cigarettes and tea grumpily shoves some keys in your hand. You make your way down the thin, rat-run corridors with their peeling paint to your musty dressing room. You put on the your costume, still damp with the sweat of last-night’s performance and you make your way back along the corridors to the stage. You go through the sprung doors that always smack back at your head as you pass through, into the backstage area, covered in struts and weights holding up the flats of that set, plastered with arrows and instructions and lists. And there in front of you is a table with all the props everyone is going to need over the next two hours, each in its own space, delineated by masking tape, and you take the prop you need for your first entrance, you wait by a door for the exact moment, the exact word and then you go through it. You’re met by a haze of light and beyond and in it a vague, organic mass whose mood and intention you can’t divine and then you say the words that you’ve been paid to come there and say…

There are two ways into a theatre.  When you’re reading someone else’s work, or standing in front of it, or listening to it, or watching it, you get to come in the front of the theatre. You get to see it as the finished product. That’s how you meet it and that’s how you judge it. When you’re looking at your own work, you can’t get in the front. You don’t have a ticket. You have to go round the back. The only way you can look at your work is from the side that shows how it’s put together, because that’s all you can think of when you see your own stuff – how you put it together. What the process was, what you added, what you cut, what you always intended, what arrived in the moment as you were creating it that feels like it’s not even yours to claim, it was the subject of such a bolt of inspiration. It can look ugly – the struts, the spars, the sandbags holding it all up, the gaffer tape sticking it together in an ungainly way. And because you can only see your work that way, it’s not really reasonable to judge it against stuff you’ve only seen by coming in the front. In fact, not only is it not reasonable, it’s simply not possible. They are two entirely different experiences making you miserable by pretending to be the same thing.

And by the same token, you should always remember when you come in the front of a theatre and look at what is happening on the stage that behind the set there are stage weights and pulleys and people dressed in black with headsets, wandering around looking hassled. Even if you can’t see exactly what those things are it’s good to remind yourself they’re there. It’s good to remind yourself that no matter how brilliant someone else’s piece of work that you’re marveling at might be, they’ve gone through the same process as you do: They’ve rewritten and restructured and redrafted. They’ve stood back from what they’ve just done and thrown the whole thing across the room in disgust and self-loathing. They’ve had to lose bits they’ve loved, they’ve added bits they weren’t meaning to that you think were genius bits of craft and that just plonked themselves down on the page or the canvas or the score.

We all always imagine it’s easier for other people. My image of other writers is that they sit down at their old school typewriters, with a box of cigarettes, a visor, those weird armband things and just go brrrrrrrrrrrrrr ping brrrrrrrrrrrrr ping brrrrrrrrrrrr ping! Done. “Now to spend my advance on sweets and prostitutes.” Of course they don’t do that.  I mean obviously we all spend that money on sweets and prostitutes in the end, but not straightaway. There’s a lot more work to be done first.

For a long time I would write a new stand-up show every year and take it up to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. And it took months and it was painful. I can remember sitting in other comedians’ shows and thinking, “You bastards. You’ve just turned up and done this.” Of course I ought to have been able to have seen that was untrue with a second’s thought – I’d seen them out and about doing work-in-progress gigs, same as me, after all – but the image of someone else’s work just coming easily, fully-formed and God-given is irresistible and every creative person beats themselves up with it. 

But it’s not true. Stop it. Remember which way into the theatre you’re going.

Peter Capaldi and An Lanntair director Roddy Murray, Stornoway. © John MacLean Photography. 

So recently I had the unique pleasure of spending two days on set of the new David Copperfield movie that’s being shot right now, directed by Armando Iannucci. 

I can’t say too much because it’s early production, but I met Peter Capaldi - he was very well mannered and shook my hand. We spoke a bit about his costume and his role in the film, and I showed him to one of the rooms in the house because he got lost. Later on, he even checked up on my friend and I to see if we were enjoying the shoot - such a considerate and sweet actor. 

Between takes, he was snapping shots of his friends with a DSLR camera he had round his neck. Among these people were Hugh Laurie, Tilda Swinton, Dev Patel, Paul Whitehouse, Benedict Wong, and of course Armando. 

There was a super relaxed atmosphere on set. Everyone was calm, happy, and knew exactly what they were doing. The crew were friendly and it was a pleasure to watch them work. The overwhelming presence of British talent that day was surreal; my friend and I had to keep excusing ourselves so we could laugh it off. I recall the second day of shooting, I was making a cup of tea, and as I turned to look into the garden, Tilda Swinton was standing there in a beautiful blue gown. I was caught in her gaze like a rabbit in headlights. For an aspiring film maker and movie fanatic, it was heaven.

Poor Julius, when will he ever learn? Because for the fifth SIXTH(!!!) year in a row I must correct him:  

Darling Julius, I’m very sorry to have to tell you this, but Malcolm WAS right the first time. It really IS the Twelfth of June.

Happy Happy Twelfth of June, everyone!

Today in TTOI history: It’s– It’s– What is today, Ollie?

Which I always like to commemorate by remembering:

1. How days after it first came up Malcolm will still NEVER let Ben be wrong about a pony vs. a baby horse

2. The Specs of STONED Sleepy Sunday Morning Sexiness

(my oh my)

and also

I decided to scan the chapter of the book so it’s all in one post. I apologise for the rubbish quality (and also a very long post) ,but I didn’t know another way of doing it. I also didn’t want to break the spine of the book

This is a diary that Peter has written  of his experience  with dealing with Hollywood agents and Miramax, over a period of 10 months .It details the problems entailed with trying to get his film Moon Man, made.

It is very, frank, honest, and personal account. (Maybe too honest for his own good really), but it only makes me love him more.

We do not know how lucky we are.

When asked to consider Steven’s finest moments, I was overwhelmed by images. Heores and villains. Battles and beauty. Monsters and children. Then I realised that I’d only got as far as 20 minutes into The Empty Child -round about the joke about Marxism and West End musicals - and had to sit down for a cup of tea.

I think, as fans, we can focus on the detail - Mondasian Cybermen! - at the risk of missing the bigger picture. That picture being, in Steven’s case, that we’ve just seen one of the greatest sci-fi body-horror thriller action-adventure romances (plus comedy) of our entire lives, beamed on to our TVs for less than 10p, written by a world-class master of his craft who’s now so in command of his talent, he’s riffing on ephemera from 1966 and turning it into gold, whisky, sex, whatever turns you on best. We truly do not know how lucky we are to have a man of this calibre writing our favourite show.

Since leaving Doctor Who, I’m approached, now and then, by strangers who remember my withered husk from Doctor Who Confidential. There’s a glint in their eye as they say, “What d’you think of it now?” An awful lot of those people are dying for me to trash it. I think, genuinely, they’re trying to achieve an intimacy. I think, nastily, they want me to say something bad so they can take it online and have some strange sort of fun. And when I say , “I love it!” they often think I’m lying.

I love it. I love every episode the man’s written. I love the other episodes he’s rewritten and I think few people know how many that is. I love the detail, I love the scale, I love the people, I love the jokes. I love the fact that Steven himself is quite down on The Beast Below. The whole of the UK on a spaceship? The whole of the UK is a spaceship? I’d retire there and then, complete. Nope, for him, it just wasn’t good enough.

I love the man, in truth, I love his mind, I love his standards, I love his rigour, his darkness, his kindness, his ambition, his love of TV. I love the man who wrote the very last line of Coupling, which shows what a lovely human being he is.

I love his women. Consider, in bad fiction, which is most fiction, how women’s roles, which have suffered so many years of neglect that they can be summarised as ‘women’s roles’, fall into the same old categories. They are reduced to the Mother, the Wife, the Daughter, the Bride. Agents of sex and childbirth, nothing more.

But then look at what Steven does with those categories. The Bride stands tall at her reception - literally in her wedding dress - and summons the Doctor back itno existence with an Old Maid’s rhyme. When the Bride has a Daughter, it’s a vital part of a galaxy-spanning revenge. The Daughter then becomes the Wife, a woman of such swagger and joy and tenderness, the Time Lord finally falls in love. We’re not done yet. A lesser category pops up, the Dominatrix, complete with eye-patch, but don’t worry, the Bride who’s the Mother of the Daughter who’s the Wife kills her stone dead! Then a lesbian travels the universe and everyone adores her. And nestling at the heart of the show is Doctor Who’s very own problem category, the Companion, a title inherently subordinate to the Man. Until Clara comes along! Companion to every single moment in the Doctor’s life. A woman so strong that in her first appearance, and her last, Death itself cannot stop her. A decade before Wonder Woman, Steven started weaving his own vast female mythology across the stars, in a funny old children’s show on Saturday teatimes.

I could mansplain all day, but the other thing I love in Steven’s writing is the complexity. I’ve heard some tiny, distant rumours that some people might have a problem with that. But I think it’s the very thing that will ensure Doctor Who’s logevity. You see, in the old days, us older fans fell in love with this show because it was porous. It had gps. It was cheap, it was rushed, it was lovely and brave and unapologetic, using three walls in Lime Grove to create an entire Dalek invasion of Earth. All those gaps allowed us in. We imagined the offstage armies. We embraced the wobbles and bumps. If Sutekh had a secret hand on his cushion, we hooted, or invented a reason why (Clara!). But we either imagined it better, or saw how good it was underneath. Which is exactly like falling in love.

Now, the modern show has a lot more money. You can see those armies centre-stage. Gallifrey is so gorgeous, it has a spare city. Cyber-fleets can explode behind Rory’s head as a throwaway joke. And sometimes, a lossy show allows the mind the slide off. But Steven has created a brand-new porous surface. He invites us into the plots. He gives us stories which vault and somersault and double-back and trick and trap and treat. It’s not so much porous, it’s more like a great big spinning double helix and we’re clinging on, spinning for our lives, and yelling with joy. Yes, it’s complicated, but that’s wonderful. It will keep people thinking about the show forever.

Okay, my favourite moment? It’s my favourite joke. A Good Man Goes to War. Rory approaches River Song in the Storm Cage, and she says she’s been on a date with the Doctor, to the frost fair in 1814. “He got Stevie Wonder to sing for me underneath London Bridge.” And for a second, there’s that lovely shiver as you anticipae the punchline. “Don’t tell him.”

That’s a small momnt from a man who’s created empires. But a favourite joke is a beautiful thing. I just looked up the line and it turns out, I’ve long since paraphrased it, but that’s even better - like I said, Steven makes us part of the text, and now I own it! The point is, I think of that line every few days. Literally, a couple of times a week, every week. Every now and then, when I’m washing up or watching TV, or walking into town, or whatever, it pops into my head. “Don’t tell him.” And I laugh. I laugh, every single time. It’s been making me laugh for six years and it will make me laugh for the rest of my life. Very few people can write a line capable of that.