Elevator Pitch

As mentioned in the previous post, I’ve been fortunate enough to have another of my short stories selected as a winner by the Liars’ League . Titled Elevator Pitch, it featured in the May event, themed Beginnings and Ends.

Elevator Pitch was the final story to be performed on the night. This will have been due in no small part to the actor, Sarah Feathers’s, tremendously energetic and humorous performance, which I’m sure will have sent the audience homewards with a real buzz.

The video is now available on the Liars’ League website along with the manuscript of the story. I’ve embedded a link to Sarah’s reading below. It lasts just under fifteen minutes. (A podcast is also now available of the whole night’s readings.)

As in March, I went to the rehearsals the weekend before the show, met Sarah and sat in on the read-through. The story involves three characters in a confined space and Sarah did a brilliant job of bringing each character to life, using body language, gestures and facial expressions to complement the dialogue.

It’s an incredible privilege to watch a professional lift your words off the page and voice plausible characters that hold an audience’s attention. It feels like alchemy – and, as mentioned in the post after March’s Liars’ League, it’s an invaluable insight into how writing is interpreted by a reader.

It’s fascinating to discover details that an actor has added into the story on their own initiative before the rehearsal – in this story Sarah had some great views on how to deliver the male character’s voice.

Some of the Liars’ League stories tend to focus on narratorial exposition or one character’s internal voice and this can make them extremely compelling (Birth Plan by Uschi Gatward in the latest event was a good example). However, my story is quite dialogue heavy, with three very different characters and this can be quite challenging for an actor performing a reading – how many different voices (accents, variations of delivery) can be juggled simultaneously in such a short time?

As did Alex Woodhall with his reading of my previous story, Sarah met the challenge brilliantly — each character has an unmistakable and convincing identity. This shouldn’t be surprising as Sarah is one of Liars’ League’s most regular actors and she’s also narrated many popular audiobooks, including the recent, bestselling Philippa Gregory novel, The White Princess.

Katy and Liam, who run the Liars’ League are also very insightful editors and directors: with their help the story also evolved considerably during the rehearsal – and afterwards. Its many contemporary references – mainly movie actors’ names – were batted around with alternative suggestions offered, even by email on the day of the performance itself.

We found it most difficult to settle on the heroine in Isabel’s pitch: a kick-ass, British submarine commander – you’ll need to watch or read the story before this makes much sense)

After going through countless others, we settled on Kate Winslet. There was something a little surreal — and metafictional — about how we ended up casting an imaginary lead role for a piece of fiction within a piece of fiction that itself was concerned with casting movie stars. Weird – but it didn’t raise any Sunset Boulevard mogul ambitions in me (although I wouldn’t mind living out in Santa Barbara again – the place where I was trained in screenwriting by a genuine Hollywood old-timer).

The story appeared to go down well with the audience – Sarah promptedlots of laughs (in the right places) from the audience, which included my friend Fay again plus ex-City University coursemates, Guy and Sue and Alison Burns, who ran the City University Certificate in Novel Writing (now the Novel Studio) at the time Sue, Guy and myself took the course.

The night went far too quickly and it was fantastic to see everyone – and to meet Jim Cogan – whose excellent and poignant story The Memory Man preceded Elevator Pitch. In fact, all the stories were entertaining and captivating and would repay anyone’s time watching, listening or reading them on the website or podcast.

I feel very lucky to have had two stories chosen recently (the selection is done anonymously, by the way) and the quality of the writing on the evening shows how difficult is the Liars task every month — picking from what obviously seems to be a sea of excellent submissions. It’s no wonder the event was recently voted one of the UK’s Top Ten Storytelling Nights by The Guardian.

The Foolish Joys of Spring

Here’s a photo of a sheep…

Newborn 166
Newborn 166

…and a lamb which must have been a day or two old. I took this about three minutes into a run earlier in the week. The land use around here is a varied mixture of livestock, lots of horses, sheep, cattle and a few goats and pigs and arable, mainly wheat but there’s an absolutely massive field — about 3/4 mile by 1/4 mile — very close which has been sown with oilseed rape this year and will soon be a block of bright yellow that I imagine will also waft a pungent smell for a couple of weeks.

It’s fascinating to observe the rhythm of the seasons in events like lambing and it’s something I want to do in the novel — both literally and metaphorically in terms of the plot — decay and rebirth and so on. It’s been re-assuring, after the persistent snow and extremely low temperatures in December — I calculated about -15C at least in my garden — that hibernating wildlife seems not to have been affected. I’ve seen plenty of bumblebees and loads of ladybirds.

I get BBC Countryfile magazine and the new issue comes with a ‘free CD of British birdsong’. I guess there’s a trainspotter aspect involved — learning the individual songs of each bird if you can really be that diligent — but I imagine that the people who will play it most are those who don’t get the benefit of natural birdsong. (Before Classic FM was launched the engineering test transmissions played birdsong, which proved very popular with listeners.)

Fortunately I haven’t dashed to play my CD as the birdsong in the garden is at its seasonal peak — with the birds busy pairing off and making nests. We’ve got a few resident blackbirds who sing most beautifully perched on the tops of trees, especially at dawn and dusk. It makes me realise one of the best investments I’ve made in a long time was a 16kg bag of bird seed which saw us through most of the winter and has meant the residency of countless sparrows, finches, blackbirds, robins, starlings has continued. But I’m not sure it’s delivered on the promise of the first species on the sack, I’ve not had the pleasure of seeing those in the garden in the winter, more’s the pity.

Great Tits
Did It Do Exactly What It Said On The Tin?

Another joy of spring in the non-natural world is the April Fool. I was a bit remiss myself as I’ve enjoyed doing a few spoofs myself in the past — all I could do is post a very unconvincing status update on Facebook at 11.55am. Maybe it’s because of the recession but there were a lot of amusing hoaxes this year — there’s a round up here.

Legoland Vandalism
Legoland Vandalism

The Guardian has done some good April Fools in the past and this year it tried to convince its readers that it had changed position to wholeheartedly support the royal wedding. If you accepted this unlikely reversal of its stance then there were some very amusing stories on a supposed live wedding blog. My favourite was the desecration of the Legoland model of Buckingham Palace — a suspected trial run in miniature for the big day (see photo below linked to Guardian website).

Best of all — and my favourite for a long time — was the spoof Ken Bruce show on Radio Two. Like all the best hoaxes, and the sort of humour I like in general, this was done with such a light touch that it might just possibly have been serious.

I turned on in the car mid-way through the show and thought ‘this isn’t Ken Bruce, I wonder who’s sitting in’. But the lightly-accented Scottish voice claimed he was Ken Bruce. I twigged fairly quickly, especially after ‘Ken’ completed a whole link by burbling gibberish, that this was an April Fool and tried to identify who was the impersonator. Many other people took it literally and complained that it was Ken Bruce himself having his own joke — or that he was even drunk (which isn’t too far fetched given the rumours about another recently departed Radio Two presenter).

I nailed it as Rob Brydon fairly quickly — although the fact he’s on just about everything anyway helped narrow down the odds. His impression of a lecherous, incoherent egotist was so spot on that I felt a bit sorry at the end when the real Ken came on as he’d been so thoroughly skewered. (From a personal note I used to work for someone with a very similar drawl to this ‘Ken Bruce’ and he was also an occasionally lecherous, alternate monstrous egomaniac and paranoid neurotic so I did particularly enjoy Rob Brydon’s creation).

I’ve listened to the first half hour on the iPlayer — and I’ll try and listen to the whole thing again as it’s so funny.  There was perhaps a bit too much smutty innuendo for my liking — not because I’m prudish about these things (as some blog postings will attest) but because remarks about knobs are a bit lazy, like shock swearing, for a comedian to resort to — thankfully I didn’t hear any puns about garden birds and female anatomy.

But there were some inspired moments — particularly when the other presenters were trying to be serious. Hearing ‘Ken’ saying that Jeremy Vine had come in to ‘bore us all to death’ was priceless but I think my James might have been shaking the radio in rage.