Tag: writing

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Laughs and Larks in London

Every Sunday, the Comedy Store in London hosts an improv evening, and it has done since 1985. I’ve occasionally considered going, but a few weeks ago, I was finally given a good reason to take the trip.

The actor Neil Mullarkey has been part of the Comedy Store Players since its inception. A few weeks ago, he announced his retirement, with his last show set to take place on 4 January 2026. I’ve been casually following his career since discovering him at the Edinburgh Fringe in the early 2000s.

So I made the visit on Sunday, taking a train to London, then the Caledonian Sleeper back to Scotland on the same night. The plan contained a number of variables, any one of which could have ruined the whole intererary, but it all fell nicely into place.

Aside from the aforementioned Mullarkey, the cast of players that night comprised Josie Lawrence, Richard Vranch, Lee Simpson, Rufus Hound, and Steve Edis on piano. The first two also were part of the regular cast for Whose Line is it Anyway?

The first half is all about short sketches, many of which are based on predefined setups. In Freeze Frame, a cast member could freeze the action and take the place of another actor. In Three-Headed Expert, three of them have to answer with just one word each, form a sentence with the others.

The second half follows a more play-like structure. In this case, it was a murder mystery set in the 1920s, with the action taking place in an organ loft. An honourable mention goes to Rufus Hound, who played it as a silent film actor, despite the musical element.

Almost every one of the scenes originates as an suggestion from the audience, who took up most of the 400 seats. It’s clear the players have been honing their skills over many years, drawing on a toolbox of voices, phrases and moves, however ridiculous the premise.

Although Neil Mullarkey’s retirement marks the end of an era, the Comedy Store Players are bigger than any one performer.

In 2024, Ruth Bratt became the first new member to join the core group in three decades, a sign that the troupe continues to evolve and that the Sunday night show will be with us for a long time to come.

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Too Long a Title

In 2002, the rock group Cornershop released two singles from their album Handcream for a Generation. In March, we saw Lessons Learned from Rocky I to Rocky III, while August bought Staging the Plaguing of the Raised Platform.

Before writing this entry, I listened to both tracks. They’re both solid guitar-driven and riff-heavy pieces that should have been hits, yet neither song gained traction. Only the first of these even reached the Top 40.

I think two factors were in play here. Firstly, and most obviously, they found it difficult to escape their massive track Brimful of Asha five years earlier. Secondly, in my experience, the public finds it difficult to overlook a long or unwieldy title.

I was reminded of these songs when I heard about the upcoming science-fiction series The War Between the Land and the Sea. It’s produced by Russell T Davies and is part of the Doctor Who universe, so the BBC is unlikely to encounter much resistance to the nine-syllable title. If they had attempted this title for a new show, by contrast, that hurdle might have been much higher.

There are other instances of media where a long title has been used. Right now, I can think of:

  • The novel Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg (1987).
  • The film The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain (1995).
  • The Channel 4 comedy The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret (2009).

Like them or not, titles of this length tend to slow the reader or viewer a little. When the first on the list was adapted into a screenplay, it was given the truncated title Fried Green Tomatoes. This reminds me of a point made in the George Orwell novel 1984:

COMINTERN is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily.

Sometimes the gamble does pay off, and the audience successfully beyend behind the title:

  • The film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) is known by its fans as simply Lock, Stock.
  • The police procedural show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000) goes so far as to nudge its viewers into abbreviating it.
  • Mark Haddon didn’t lose any readers by calling his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003).

The final two examples, both from the world of music, are each making a definite statement.

For her second studio album in 1999, Fiona Apple chose the following title, with the capitalisation as it appears on the Genius website:

When the pawn hits the conflicts he thinks like a king
What he knows throws the blows when he goes to the fight
And he’ll win the whole thing ‘fore he enters the ring
There’s no body to batter when your mind is your might
So when you go solo, you hold your own hand
And remember that depth is the greatest of heights
And if you know where you stand, then you know where to land
And if you fall it won’t matter, cuz you’ll know that you’re right

It’s a rather twee sentiment, but it’s nonetheless out to make a statement. The cover art makes the first three words legible from a distance, while the rest require a closer look, giving the listener an easy abbreviation.

Apple held the Guinness World Record for the longest album title until Chumbawamba beat it nine years later with the following. The capitalisation has been converted to sentence case:

The boy bands have won, and all the copyists and the tribute bands and the TV talent show producers have won, if we allow our culture to be shaped by mimicry, whether from lack of ideas or from exaggerated respect. You should never try to freeze culture. What you can do is recycle that culture. Take your older brother’s hand-me-down jacket and re-style it, re-fashion it to the point where it becomes your own. But don’t just regurgitate creative history, or hold art and music and literature as fixed, untouchable and kept under glass. The people who try to ‘guard’ any particular form of music are, like the copyists and manufactured bands, doing it the worst disservice, because the only thing that you can do to music that will damage it is not change it, not make it your own. Because then it dies, then it’s over, then it’s done, and the boy bands have won.

In this instance, the last five words are emphasised on the album cover, which echo the first five words and again make an unignorable statement.

In short, a long title certainly makes a statement, but consider carefully whether your audience will look beyond it or not.

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Understanding Ephemerality

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been catching up on the When It Hits the Fan podcast on BBC Sounds. It’s advertised as an insider’s view of how critical stories are managed from a public relations point of view. David Yelland, a former editor of The Sun, presents alongside former Royal communications advisor Simon Lewis.

Considering their backgrounds, the two sometimes bring differing or even opposite perspectives, yet there is a surprising crossover of agreement. Where is a debate, these are always respectful. Many other podcasts could learn from this.

Episodes tend to centre around how a communications lead will shape a message to influence the perception of its subject while staying within legal and ethical boundaries. There are also mini-episodes in how to manage what they describe as your ‘own personal PR’, from negotiating a salary to dealing with mismanagement from bosses.

Having heard so many episodes spread over the last years, I’ve found it interesting how language, timing and framing determine whether a story escalates or fizzles out in the short-term. In the long-term, almost every story becomes forgettable to a greater or lesser extent.

One example discussed was an incident from Normandy in June 2024 when Rishi Sunak, who left a D-Day commemoration early This was a hot topic at the time, especially as it happened during an election campaign, but has not become a defining moment in his political career.

Then there was the rebranding of Jaguar in November 2024. This attracted a lot of discussion on release, possibly in the hope of generating buzz and therefore free advertising. In the last 12 months, however, this has generally been met by public indifference.

As I write this, I’m reminded of this what a senior manager told my team a few years back: “Look back through your old emails. What was the meaning of life a month ago is probably irrelevant today.’ It’s the same with going through old blog entries. Who remembers when I talked about the Sheree Mack plagiarism scandal or the list of forgotten Booker Prize winners?

In short, When It Hits the Fan is a offers an insight into the power of persuasive language when it matters, yet it’s a useful reminder that many stories burn brightly before quickly becoming ephemera. A new episode is currently being posted every week.

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A Glimpse Into Prison Life

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy revealed last week that he intends to write a memoir of his 20-day incarceration. Right now, legal action is still ongoing and a fresh trial is scheduled for early 2026, but it promises to offer some insight into how someone who once held such high office navigated his sudden loss of freedom.

Sarkozy will also join a long line of political and literary figures who have turned prison life into prose. Jeffrey Archer, the former Conservative MP, produced his Prison Diary trilogy in the early 2000s. In these, he chronicled his time as Prisoner FF8282 in high- and lower-security institutions. The books are part reportage, part literary exercise, and – let’s be frank – part self‑vindication.

Prison has often served as a crucible for writing. Archer was already an established novelist, so it was only natural that his time behind bars would lead to publication. his 1979 novel Kane & Abel is one of the bestselling books of all-time.

Going back earlier in the 20th century, we have Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom from 1994. Strictly speaking, this is an autobiography rather than a prison diary, but he spent more than a third of his life locked up.

The final example that comes to mind is De Profundis, a letter from Oscar Wilde to his friend and lover Lord Alfred Bosie. Although taking up 80 sheets of handwritten notepaper, it’s a far shorter read than any of the above. The overall tone here is one of suffering and despair, with the latter part infused with theological musings.

You can almost guarantee Nicolas Sarkozy and his team are in discussions with publishers as we speak, ready to roll after the final outcome of the case. It’ll be interesting in due course to gauge how his story will fit into the long tradition of prison memoir, and whether it changes how he’s perceived by the public.

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Bond in a Bind

NB: This entry explores plot points from the end of the James Bond film No Time to Die. If you'd rather not know, it's best to skip this entry.

As authors, I’m sure we’ve all written ourselves into a corner at some point.

I faced this problem a few years ago after I published what was intended be a one-part story on a writers’ website. There was an enthusiastic reaction from readers, so I felt compelled to write more chapters, but the characters were all scheduled to leave school and I couldn’t realistically take them all to the same college.

Fortunately, it was an ensemble cast, allowing me to pick a few main characters and introduce others, and the story went on to comprise 25 chapters altogether.

But what if you know millions of people are waiting for you to solve a plot problem? It’s been reported over the last few weeks that the writers of the James Bond franchise have a hit just such a stumbling block.

In all the stories from Dr. No to Spectre, our hero has been forced into some difficult corners, then has ultimately escaped in one piece. But at the end of No Time to Die from 2021, Bond is killed in a missile strike, so the question is how to bring his character into a new screenplay.

If there had been any ambiguity surrounding his death, this problem might already be solved, fudged, or even circumvented altogether. Fans, by contrast, clearly saw what happened in that film and won’t accept being told otherwise.

It’s worth noting here that most of the Bond films from the last 60 years were made by Eon Productions Limited before creative control passed to Amazon MGM Studios in February 2025. I’m conjecturing, but perhaps the former owners knew a sale was in the pipeline and deliberately deployed the fatal storyline with the intention of delaying or stopping future development. This would effectively end the James Bond series on a natural break.

And yet there’s a definite thirst from filmgoers to keep the franchise alive. While it might be difficult to see a way forward at the moment, there are a few options the new writers might consider. Here are a few, starting with the one I believe is least likely.

Write off the previous film as a dream

Because it’s been discussed and parodied so much, it’s not a spoiler to mention that in 1986, the 10th season of Dallas effectively wrote off the ninth season as a dream. While that show was a little over-the-top, as is the Bond franchise in its own way, I’m confident the new writers won’t lower themselves to this ridiculous premise.

Ignore the plot point

Many sitcoms and dramas reset the story each episode, knowing that TV channels sometimes air them out of order. There may be plot points that develop over the season, but these are unlikely to be necessary for understanding the plot of individual episodes.

The key here is that each new conflict tends to be resolved by the time the final credits roll, leaving the characters are in much the same position as where they started.

As such, the death of a main character may be too large of an issue to ignore, so I find it unlikely this will be the approach taken.

Reboot the series

Over the last two to three decades, there has been a trend to give series a reboot, borrowing a term from computing jargon.

We know another actor – yet to be announced – will take over from Daniel Craig. Also, rebooting isn’t unknown to the Bond franchise, with GoldenEye (1995) and Casino Royale (2006) forming fresh starts.

Perhaps this is the perfect time for a third such reboot, ushering in a much younger main character and having him go through the process of learning the ropes.

Show the succession of the identity

Since Bond works for MI6, audiences expect secrets to surface. To my mind, writers can use that to their advantage.

Supposing the code ‘007’ and the name ‘James Bond’ aren’t personal identities at all, but titles passed to each new agent. When one agent is lost, another steps into the role. The concept could easily conveyed through dialogue in an early scene. Besides, fans are already used to actors changing over time, so this wouldn’t feel too jarring.

In my view, the final resolution will be along these lines, while keeping within the established universe and canon.

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The Abridged Pecha Kucha

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned I was invited to give a talk in Pecha Kucha format at the Dundee Rep theatre. I chose the topic of my Millennium Bridges tours from 2023 and 2025. It’s worth looking back at that previous entry to find out about my preparations.

A few days beforehand, I was told the running order. I didn’t mind where I would be placed on the bill, but going second allowed me to relax for the rest of the event. The theatre was set up like a cinema, with a large screen at the back of the stage, plus two TV screens at the back of the auditorium for

I was initially sceptical about being able to commit the entire speech to memory in such a short space of time. Assuming an average of 50 words per slide for 20 slides, that multiplies to 1,000 words. Instead of learning the script word for word, I found the pictures became an aide memoire, giving me a general idea about the next part of the speech.

There are legitimate times to learn by rote – such as acting roles – but I felt this wasn’t one of those occasions. As such, the script was slightly different each time and that gave it a more natural flow. There was no rule against reading from a page, and some of my fellow speakers did just that.

I also warned the organisers in advance that I would be performing while wearing my jacket and bag, as if I’d just come in from the cold, and I wasn’t about to run away.

The event was filmed, but the footage isn’t yet available. In previous years, the organisers would usually stream it online, but that didn’t happen this time. For now, all I can offer is a still image of the audience:

Credit: Aylish Kelly

Topics covered by other speakers included: gardening, pub quizzes, an assortment of community and social engagement projects, and even an interpretative dance to cap off the evening.

Afterwards, a few members of the audience congratulated me on the talk. One man noted that I’d managed to time the end of my speech for exactly when the last slide left the screen. I thanked him but emphasised that it was a coincidence and I could easily have overshot the mark.

A long-term ambition is to help people find the confidence to speak in public, whether it’s for a social event like Pecha Kucha or convincing a boardroom of directors to fund a business project. Heck, maybe that could be my next talk. For the moment, I’ll drip-feed you one piece of advice for free:

Going on stage produces a rush of adrenaline, especially if you’re not used to it. Since it can take up to 30 minutes for this to deplete, and up to an hour for the effects to wear off, it’s best not to go straight to bed. Instead, I recommend spending that time winding down: take a walk, read a book, or listen to the radio.

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Who Reads This Stuff Anyway?

The first entry to this blog was posted on 10 October 2013, making it 12 years old last month.

The intent was to create a deadline each week so I would keep writing regularly. That’s going well so far because when this entry is published, it’ll be number 641, or an average of at least one entry a week. But how many people are likely to read it?

Well, that depends what measure you use.

If you look at each entry, you can usually find at least one or two Likes, although some have in the region of eight or nine. The same names tend to pop up week after week. Altertatively, we can look at stats provided by WordPress from December 2024 onwards. The number of monthly visitors ranges from 113 throughout May to 548 in October – with one outlier.

For some reason, August attracted a total of 1,163 unique visitors, most of whom came back two or more times:

Data visualization of site traffic from July to November, showing a sharp rise in both views and visitors during August 2025. Tooltip reveals 2,742 views and 1,163 visitors for that month.

The timescales match up with two entries from that period. The first talked about an Edinburgh Fringe show by Ross McCleary and Stefan Mohamed, while the second addressed the thorny topic of Creative Scotland curbing its funding. I can only expect one or both topics were on the minds of my audience.

All of which is interesting to me, but I haven’t even touched upon the reason I started writing this entry.

Every time I hit Publish, an email is sent to anyone who opts into receiving notifications. I was advised yesterday by a long-term aquaintance that her email provider had suddenly started placing my WordPress notifications into a folder, starting with an entry from June about audio dramas. Before then, the last email in the folder was from a reply I’d made on LiveJournal in December 2016.

Unless something unpredictable happens, I know this blog is never going to reach a wide audience. It helps me to stick to a regular deadline. If it finds an audience, then marvellous, and if not, nothing is lost.

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Accepting One Invitation and Declining Another

I’m pleased to report I’ve been invited to take part in a Pecha Kucha event on Friday 7 November at the Dundee Rep Theatre.

These talks follow a rigid format. Speakers need to prepare 20 slides, which will be projected for exactly 20 seconds apiece, so the accompanying speech must match the time available. Less rigid is the choice of topic, which can be almost anything, provided it’s suitable for a family audience.

I’ll be talking about my trips around the Millennium Bridges in 2023 and 2025.

My challenge here was to take the complex story of the two trips and weave them into a story that the audience could easily follow. This meant indentifying suitably strong start and end points, while needing to eliminate a lot of detail along the way. If unconstrained, I could easily make the story into a half-hour speech.

I thought the accompanying pictures would be the easy part, since many of the were already taken. However, they all needed to be JPEG files converted to a specific resolution and dots-per-inch value. I’m not arty at all, so I relied on online tools with hit-and-miss results; one in particular kept converting pictures at random from JPEG to PNG.

The hard work won’t be over until the night of the presentation. While I have a good idea what my script says for each slide, I need to rehearse and make sure I hit all the relevant points.

But I can’t take every opportunity.

At the end of last week, an event organiser offered me a ten-minute slot to read poetry at his regular spoken-word event near the end of November.

I’ve wanted to go to this event for a long while, but it always clashes with my weekly writing group on a Tuesday. I was even inclined to write a new piece to fill the ten minutes.

Realistically, our own event has to take priority because our members expect us to be there. If my co-host or I know we can’t make a session, we try our best to cover or to make it an online-only event, depending on the type of interruption.

This time, it wasn’t possible to clear the day because of our other commitments. I reluctantly had to turn down his generous offer, with the caveat that I’d be happy to consider other days of the week.

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A Look Back to Ten Years Ago

I have a couple of upcoming projects that I’m not ready to talk about just yet. To fill the gap, I’ve instead looked backwards in time to the entry closest to today: 26 October 2015.

With the title Relentlessness, the entry described a hectic week. The open-mic night Hotchpotch held an event aboard the vintage HMS Unicorn, the Dundee Literary Festival had just been and gone, and the artist studios WASPS held an open weekend. I’d also been to see Hamlet at the cinema, presented by National Theatre Live, while our writing group was gearing up for National Novel Writing month.

As I read back this snapshot of events, they somehow don’t feel like they happened ten years ago, even though I rationally know they did.

For instance, WASPS studios is very much still open for business and Jen Robson is still around, albeit working from a home-based studio. Hotchpotch is still going, although we’ve never been invited back onto the Unicorn. Then we have National Novel Writing Group, which only ceased operations this year.

On the other hand, although none of us realised it at the time, the last Dundee Literary Festival would be held in 2016. It took until March this year for a replacement event, the Dundee Book Festival, to start up.

There’s something both appealing and lamentable about that ephemeriality. No doubt I’ll feel the same when I look back upon this year’s projects from 2035.

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Gttng Strtd Wth SMS

Last week’s entry was all about postcards. In writing about these, however, it was necessary to touch upon its replacement technology: SMS. I realised I had more to write on the matter. so today’s entry effectively serves as a part 2.

When the first SMS-capable handsets became available, they wouldn’t contain a full keyboard. Instead, each letter was mapped to the number pad in the following semi-standardised formation:

I say ‘semi-standardised’. The 0 key usually acted as spacebar, while 1 often produced symbols, but some layouts deviated from this. Ditto the toggling of capital letters, which we’ll disregard for the following demonstration.

To type the word BOOK, the following steps were necessary:

  • B required two presses of 2.
  • O – three presses of 6.
  • Pause for a second or press the right arrow, depending on phone, to allow the letter to register. O would otherwise loop back around to M.
  • O – three further presses of 6.
  • K – two presses of 5.

Overall, quite the frustrating process. It quickly became accepted practice to omit letters from words or use soundalikes. This might morph the word thanks into thx, or tomorrow into 2moro, which are still reasonably legible.

There were further innovations to come. One was the T9 system, which guessed each letter in context based on its neighbouring presses. To type the aforementioned BOOK, you would press the buttons 2-6-6-5 once each. The display might suggest BOOK first, but COOL or CONK could be selected from the menu, cutting down on overall presses.

Many phones would remember which words were used most commonly, but my Nokia 3330 never did. If I wanted to mention my pal Amy, I always had to scroll through BOX and COW.

Despite T9, the abbreviated style still persisted in popular culture for some time, with Fall Out Boy releasing a single as late as 2007 titled Thnks fr th Mmrs. It only died out when touchscreen input became more common.

Cards on the table, I was never sorry to see SMS speak disappear. Although it took longer, I liked to write my sentences out properly, and it could be challenging to decode some abbreviations. I much prefer what we have these days. No doubt the style will make a resurgence at some point, but I won’t be participating in that.