Episode 8 - The Nuts and the Bolts

An apprenticeship in drama

Previously on This Writer’s Journey…

After a bruising encounter the previous year with a BBC radio script editor, I stopped writing and started looking for work as an actor. I’m now working in South Wales with Spectacle Theatre, a community theatre company. Tentatively and very secretly, in the privacy of my garret bedsit, I’ve started writing again.

For a baby dramatist, Spectacle Theatre - especially in the early days when there were only five of us - was an amazing apprenticeship.

Spending my days on the rehearsal room floor, creating plays with the company, collaborating, agreeing, disagreeing, discovering what worked and what didn’t. And then taking the work on the road, finding out first hand what worked with our audiences, and what didn’t. The time at Spectacle laid the foundations for everything that came after, in writing scripts for theatre, TV and radio.

I learned so much about drama in that job. If this were a writing class I’d tease out some of the strands and share them with you. But I’m not giving you a lecture, I’m telling you a story, so I’ll limit myself to just one important thing that I learned.

• I learned that I wasn’t the greatest actor in the world. That I was, in fact - to be extremely generous to myself - extremely average.

So, when the offer came to move to the Vale of Glamorgan to set up a new community arts team at St Donat’s Arts Centre, I accepted the job, and moved to the little cottage that came with it, in a village by the sea.

In the early days in the bedsit I’d splurged a week’s wages on a litte black and white portable TV. It came along with me and settled into an alcove beside the solid fuel stove in my tiny new living room, that had a fine, unimpeded view of the local graveyard.

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Ah. That little telly. It brought me so much joy.

No streaming back then, no catch-up TV, no record button to watch something later. If you didn’t catch a show when it went out, you missed it.

When I could, I caught Play for Today, a strand of individual plays by different writers. It went out at prime time on a Thursday evening. Impossible now to believe that the BBC would allocate so many hours to the transmission of one-off plays, many of them tackling difficult issues and themes. In truth, each week was a bit of a lucky dip. But even when the plays disappointed, they were often an exhilarating watch.

There was a sci-fi drama series I liked a lot, Blakes 7. And I enjoyed Angels, an gritty twice-weekly drama about a group of nurses working at a fictional hospital.

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Angels was produced at this time by Julia Smith and script edited by Tony Holland, the people who were to become the creative brains behind a certain drama series set in the east of London. Perhaps they were, even then, gestating the idea of EastEnders.

After the Vale of Glamorgan, I moved to the Orchard Theatre in Devon, and then back to London to work with Free Form Arts Trust. In the gaps between arts jobs, I picked up work as a primary school teacher on daily supply in the East London borough of Hackney. Hackney, at the time, was one of the most deprived places in the UK, and my teaching days could be - well, interesting.

Somewhere in all this, having danced around each other for five years, David and I finally became a couple (sorry people - that’s all the detail you’re getting) and I began work on a new play.

I’d just got home after a day working in a particularly tough school in Hackney when the phone rang. A red beast, plumbed into my bedroom wall, it had a chunky handpiece, a dial you had to turn with your index finger and a loud and jarring ringtone you couldn’t change.

The London Bubble Theatre Company was on the line, asking if I’d be interested in coming in to chat about their summer season.

The company had for some summers now been travelling around the outer boroughs of London performing their shows in a small circus tent. They operated from a base in Hampstead, north London, and it was there that I went to meet the management.

We had the usual friendly chat, talking about this and that, trying to read each other. I talked about the play I was writing. They talked about me running daytime drama workshops over the summer in their roaming big top . With my background in community theatre and teaching, they thought I’d be perfect.

I thought about their offer. How much did I want to spend my summer running hit and run theatre sessions?

Into the silence they added a fancy title: Workshop Director. 

I let that sink in. Thought about it some more. Gave a regretful smile and got to my feet.

Okay, they said, if you’ll do the workshops, we’ll commission you to write this summer’s late-night musical.  How does that sound? 

My first professional commission.  I could have kissed them.

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They told me they were thinking about something with a WW2 theme. We made a date to meet the following week for me to pitch my idea.

I did some reading. I did some thinking. More reading. More thinking. This was the idea I pitched.

The main character, a Jamaican airman, Cliff, who’d answered the Mother Country’s call to help at her hour of need, has spent the war as a gunner at the back of a plane, the most vulnerable and dangerous job in the aircraft. With the war now over and his services no longer required, he is being shipped back to the West Indies. But he’s met an English girl, Anne. They are planning their wedding. It’s a story of love and loss, commitment and betrayal: the struggle of two little people against the world.

The Bubble management liked it.

They asked me to go off and write it.

If you’re enjoying my story, maybe you could show appreciation via the tip jar.

Until the new year I will be donating all tips to Crisis - a UK charity for homeless people.

Huge thanks to all the people who’ve tipped so far. I have forwarded on your donations.