A Hogswatch quickie featuring Russell T Davies
Some present plugging and an interview with an utter legend
Hi friends,
This isn’t a full Glom of Knit newsletter (I’m going to do one of those after Christmas I think, with some rounduppy stuff and all that). BUT as it’s the last postal day before Christmas coming up I thought I should do one of those memory-jogging marketing emails that professional authors do. As if anyone is fooled. As a sweetener, after the ‘PLEASE BUY MY THINGS PLEASE’ bit, is the full transcript of an interview I did earlier this year with my absolute writing hero, Russell T Davies over zoom earlier this year, which was – as he would say – a hoot.
As always feel free to drop me a line via reply or on Twitter and say hi!
Marc
Christmas Capitalist Stuff (Pratchett fans take note)
The Magic of Terry Pratchett – with FREE Christmas Card and badge with every order
I found a bunch of the ‘Hog-Based Festive Cards’ I had printed for last Christmas, so I’m throwing them in for free with every sale, along with an ‘Ask Me About Terry Pratchett’ badge. This is the updated ‘trade paperback’ edition of the book, which makes some minor updates and corrections to the hardback version. It’s a floppy paperback, but the ‘trade’* bit means it’s the same size as the hardback**. It’s a wonderful Christmas present. It even looks a bit Christmassy.
You can buy directly from me here (which helps me buy Christmas presents for my many children, spread across the globe).***
The Magic of Terry Pratchett – signed copy w/ badge and Christmas card | ★ MARC BURROWS ★
Manic Street Preachers: Album by Album
Need a last-minute gift for the indie kid/pretentious music obsessive/ F*cking Manics Fan in your life (this could just be you)? You can still buy the edition that comes with the free fanzine collecting my writing about the band over the years OR buy the fanzine separately. GO HERE!
Be Pure! Be Vigilante! Behave!
A lunch date with Russell T Davies
So a couple of months ago I was commisioned to write a piece for The Guardian about TV endings, based on a viral Tweet I’d done about the mad, mad ending of Byker Grove. For various complicated reasons The Guardian ended up not using the piece, and I expanded it and sold it to Den of Geek instead. It was finally published this week to coincide with the anniversary of the show. You can read it here. (i’m very proud of it).
Anyway, the original piece for The Guardian was meant to be about the art of the TV ending, and since the most knowledgable person I can think of to talk about telly is Russell T Davies, I contacted his agent to ask if he’d fancy chatting. And he did! I spent a happy 20 minutes on my lunch break talking to one of my absolute heroes. In the end I didn’t use a great deal of it in the article, so I thought I’d replicate it here, as a lil Christmas treat. He is as onform as always.
A lunchtime Zoom with RTD
So I’m here to describe the meta ending of Byker Grove, where they all become self-aware, realise they’re in a TV show and write their own endings….
Byker Grove ended like that? How did I miss that? I’d have started a letter-writing campaign. They were all fictional! I’m appalled! The Brittas Empire ended like that. It was all a dream. I can’t forgive them to this day. What a terrible thing to do to us. David Lidderment said that about Albion Market when it came to an end, it ended on a normal episode – he said that “Albion Market will continue, but the cameras will face the other way”. People thought he was mad, but actually, I agree with him. I’d much rather that. I believe they carry on, they do!
They did that with the third iteration of Crossroads. That ending didn’t only make that episode of Crossroads fiction, it makes the WHOLE of Crossroads fiction. Going back to 1964, the whole thing is fictional! It’s all Jane Asher’s dream. I’m still angry about that.
You wrote your fair share of mad endings though
Someone found the very final episode of Springhill the other day, which was a soap founded by Paul Abbott and Frank Cottrell-Boyce, who delivered episode one and then ran away to become empire builders, so it was taken over by me and Phil Marquis, the man who invented Footballer’s Wives, and the last episode, of a daily soap opera set on a Liverpool council estate, the last episode has the antichrist triumphing, as a baby. An angel has been sent to murder the antichrist, but the baby, in the ultimate locked door mystery, the baby grows into an adult and strangles her so the fingerprints will never be recognised, reverts to a baby again and the angel is found dead, which presumably leads to the reign of Satan on Earth. That was the actual proper ending! The Antichrist murders an angel! On a budget of approximately £14,000 per half hour! I had to go to my bosses and explain myself on that storyline, I literally sat there and defended it, “it was the antichrist, this is what it’s about”, I wouldn’t move. I hoped it would continue. Our script editor was Phil Collinson, who went on to produce Doctor Who with me, it was his very first job in television and he was the one that was saying “I think we might be going too far”. At the time we really believed in it, we were ready to go to a third series. The Antichrist was only a baby, it could have gone on for years. I loved it. What an ending! The murder of an angel, which we signified because she wore a white mac.
Have you ever been cancelled mid-series?
It’s never happened to me mid-series. It’s a much more American thing. Imagine them on Holby now. It’s always afterwards, you make your series and then go through this waiting period. If it goes well you assume you’re probably fine, if it does badly you know you’re probably axed, but most shows will sit in the middle ground, and that’s very very difficult. The normal service is in the middle. Being cancelled mid run just doesn’t happen.
My stuff never does come back, I write definite endings rather than ones that you can come back to – I did it with a series called Mine Or Mine back in 2003 and 2004, which no-one watched, and that came to a big climax when we didn’t know if it was coming back, everyone had been poisoned around a kitchen table. There were four forms of poisons. I worked so hard to get so much poison into a Welsh family buffet. It came to this great big climax, but I knew how they all escaped, it was just a very good cliffhanger where it looked like they’d all die, and I absolutely knew what happened in the second series. But that never happened. You have to give things a great big ending.
I used to always know what happened next. I just write one-offs now. Second Coming, Bob & Rose, Casanova – an American producer wanted us to make some more of that one. He died! Did they miss that bit?! I like that. I love the freedom of writing a proper ending. But I have done that [written a cliffhanger not knowing if the show is coming back]. On The Grand and on soaps.
With Doctor Who a second series was almost guaranteed, the investment was so massive, and because we knew we were regenerating … they couldn’t have done that to a lead actor, have him appear for one scene. Getting past two years, that was the trick.
What about with the soaps you worked on? How did you bring them to a finish? Do you remember?
Revelations! Families! Of course I remember! A lot of those cheap soaps we’d quite carefully engineer an ending that could be a cliff-hanger or could be a real ending. Families ended brilliantly with the mother in law murdering her daughter in law, who had slept with the father in law, so the wife let her die. At the same time we had a character, Jackie, inherit $10,000,000, so we were all ready for Jackie the millionaire. Revelations ran for two years and both years came to an ending with a murder that the murderor gets away with, which gave us something for a third series. We made sure they came to a climax. The murderers, the Bishop’s wife sits there supreme, and anyone who tries to stop her has been murdered. You’d build in enough to come back.
I was full of ideas – Jackie the millionaire in Families could have run and run. The one I think is sad is with The Grand, in the very last episode Esme Harkness, who is the hotel prostitute, buys the hotel. She’s been given a faberge egg by the last of the Romanovs – not my storyline, I might add, that was maybe a bit too far – and in the last episode I had her sell the faberge egg and buy the hotel, and that would have been a glorious series. That was a series that found itself in the final episode. I remember thinking that I should have done that in episode one, having Susan Hampshire as a former madame running the place. I had great stories ready for that, but they just kind of snuff out. It’s very sad.
Meanwhile, in another hotel, Crossroads, it was all a dream.
Saying it was all a dream is obviously a really popular way to end a show. It’s like a writer masturbating I think. It’s a writer stuck at a desk thinking “this is fiction, so I’ll make it fiction, I’ll make my fiction their fiction.” I think it’s wrong. I can’t bear the ending of the Wizard of Oz, I think that’s the worst ending in history. Seven years old, I was appalled by that ending. You wait for it to continue. Literally, as a child, you watch Dorothy wake up in the black and white world and there are all the avatars of the people from Oz, you wait for her to reach under the bed and pull out that pair of ruby slippers, that would be the ending now: It was true all along. It’s lacking a final moment. It’s shocking.
How do you approach finales when you don’t need to worry about picking up, either because you know your safe or you don’t actually want to come back?
Just blood and thunder. You throw everything at it. I love a finale. It’s for the faithful viewers who have stuck with it, and you can’t go fast enough or hard enough as far as I’m concerned. I love them. I save money for them in the budget and plot very far ahead.
I loved the ending of Dark Season back in the early 90s
I loved that! One the first whole shows I’d written, and I turned up at Elstree and flooded the basement! I wrote a flood in my very first thing I ever wrote, where the flood’s essential and saves the day, my god I was lucky with that. It’s why I’m one of those very few people for whom Return of the Jedi is my favourite Star Wars film, it throws everything at it, a bigger Death Star, teddy bears! Duels! Everything. I’ve never been so happy in the cinema as watching that. Size. It’s all about size. People love the ending of Empire Strikes Back because it’s so adult and dark. Oh fuck off! People like that go on and make Rogue One. Have you tried watching Rogue One twice? Once I quite enjoyed it, the second time you realise it’s a Star Wars film where they all die. What a load of rubbish. That’s not what Star Wars is. It’s a fundamental breaking of the promise.
That’s another thing you have to do. You have to keep your promise intact to an audience. What you promise them they’re going to watch. It’s why those fictional endings really disappoint me. It’s not what I came to watch in the first place. To do that to The Brittas Empire, one of the finest sitcoms ever, which was genius, and those characters were genius, and they all turn out to be passengers on a bus? It undermines everything you felt and thought about them. I’m angry about all of these fictional endings now. It absolutely undermines it.
Right, I think I got enough from that – thanks so much for this.
Oh it’s been fun! Always fun to talk about Telly. “Do you remember?” The cheek of it. I always remember!
* Not, as I originally thought, something to do with handsome gay men.
** Let’s be honest, this is 100% so the publisher doesn’t have to reformat the pages or re-do the index. I bloody love my publishers, of course.
*** A small cat called Princess and two tropical fish, Joderowsky and Argento, whom I suspect are psychopaths.