The Deadline Song

It’s not easy writing your novels to deadlines.
Keeping up those plot positions
Watching out that they all transition
Plot and rewrite both at the same time.
Smells like subplots I’ve forgotten
Curled up died and now their rotten

I’m not an editor tonight
Don’t want to lose that word count
’m getting careless, baby
And you’re not in the last third

CHORUS
I can’t decide
Whether this scene lives or dies
Oh, it’ll prob’ly be in the sequel
Or a short story on the side
No wonder why
My brain feels dead inside
My thoughts are all emulsified
Lock the doors and close the blinds
We’re running out of time.

It’s a bitch convincing people to read you
If I stop now call me a quitter
If I wrote less I’d be much fitter
Pleasing everyone isn’t likely
Banging keyboards till I’m crippled.
Read reviews until I’m fickle

I’ve got to hand it to you
You’re in all the outlines
But my characters surprised me
And you’re no longer necessary

CHORUS

Oh I could throw you in the bin
Or just simply do you in
But the readers might miss you when you’re gone
I could spin you off a series
But the publisher might query
Whether anyone would buy them…
That's why….

CHORUS

Alpha Papa's Cuddly Toy

Went to see ALPHA PAPA at the cinema with the Evil Monster Boy(1) and while I don't really like the comedy of embarressment I was happy to make an exception. As we were on our way home the EMB pointed out that the filmakers had avoided the main pitfall when turning TV into cinema - that of trying to big everything up. Instead Alan Partridge continues to be, in his own imagining, a big man in a small world. Recomended.

(1) And he's sodding enourmous these days so probably I'm going to have to stop calling him that - in  public at least.

ALPHA PAPA
UK (2013)
Writing credits
Peter Baynham, Armando Iannucci, Steve Coogan, Neil Gibbons and Rob Gibbons

Directed by
Declan Lowney

One sequence that had me in hysterics was Alan lip syncing to Roachford's Cuddly Toy while driving into work. The EMB couldn't understand why I was laughing so hard and singing along to the chorus but you really have to be sad white boy in your late forties/early fifties to understand why it was both joyous and heartbreaking.

So to prolong the moment here is Roachford's Cuddly Toy which I also declare to be Peter Grant's official theme tune...

The Nostalgic Smell of Tube Trains

I went to the London Transport Museum, for research purposes, and after stepping around drifts of off season tourists I stepped inside an old red 1960s era tube train. I was instantly caught in the undertow of nostalgia and dragged back to the thousands of hours I spent riding that exact type of train in my youth. Back when the silver Jubilee Line trains were the height of modernity.

It wasn't the look of the carriage as the smell and this is where I find the limitations of my prose. Dust certainly, something that might have been electricity (except the carriage had been sitting in a museum for twenty years) and a musty smell that could have been the seat covers. Really, just as honey smells of honey and shit smells of shit what the carriage smelt of was 1960s era tube train(1).

(1) I think it might have been either 1959 or 1962 Stock but I can't tell.