Storytime and an Update
Recently I was asked the following question:
What would you tell your younger self, and at what age?
I have two correct answers to this question.
Age 16 - Don't do sciences for A-Level. You'll find it boring and you won't use it
Age 14 - You can't act. Get into writing. That's something you're actually good at!
The story of my doing A-Level science is a good story (but wasn't good at the time), but that's not what this post is about. We're currently on my inability to act. First, a little backstory...
I was part of a drama club for 11 years, and in that time we performed many plays and musicals. However, towards the latter end of that time, we stopped being able to afford the rights to proper musicals, so we had to write our own. We'd already experimented with doing variety shows (a selection of songs, dances, monologues and sketches).
Some of these were very good and they were all loads of fun to perform. My personal favourite bit was when I was wearing shorts, a t-shirt and a cowboy hat for Is This The Way to Amarillo; coming off and immediately having to change into a dark hoodie, a leather jacket and a binbag to play Vincent Price in Thriller (we didn't really understand the source material).
There's another great story about one of our variety shows, but that's best saved for another time.
A cast member went AWOL on the day of the show. That's where the fun bit begins
We were alternating between proper musicals and variety shows for a while. Eventually one of us had a bright idea (it might have been me; I can't remember so I won't take credit):
We're already breaking up the musical numbers with sketches. What if we had one cohesive story linking up the sketches?
Then someone else said (again, might have been me, might not have; I don't want to take credit):
What if the musical numbers matched the sketches?
So essentially we invented the jukebox musical. We had already included a couple of sketches based on a play concept I had come up with about a bank heist (I had recently seen Ocean's Eleven and had again misunderstood the source material). We altered it again so that it could take place on a ship (most of the dance numbers were already nautical-themed and it was easier to change the setting than the dance numbers).
In case you were wondering, changing the setting to a boat and all the dialogue used was a team effort, but the original bank heist concept was entirely my idea (although I stole all the characters from a TV show called Lab Rats. I would later rip off all the same characters when I wrote Tangents)
As the now-jewel-heist (pretty sure one of those hyphens is unnecessary but I have no idea which) was not enough to fill the runtime, we added several parallel storylines. Unfortunately, our group only contained two boys and, as I already established, this one couldn't act; so the other guy was forced to play three characters (fortunately one of them was kidnapped early in the play and replaced by another one as part of the heist).
I played a German tourist, a role I had filled before, but about seven years prior. This was because I could do a convincing German accent. However after about three minutes, I would start to slip into Scottish (most of my impressions/accents eventually go that way), so I was only ever in one scene at a time.
It was at this point that I completely forgot why I was telling this story in the first place.
I mentioned to someone:
This will either be the worst show we've ever done or the best show we've ever done. There are no other possibilities.
The person I said this to wholeheartedly agreed. So we performed that show and we were right; it was the best show we'd ever done. Encouraged by this, we regrouped two weeks later and started work on another show, this time, based in two schools, one of which was closing, causing the two schools to move in together.
The misunderstood source material in this one was St Trinian's 2 and Waterloo Road. (I'm 90% sure the grammar in that sentence is incorrect, but I'm 100% sure I'm not changing it). Long story short, that show went down a lot in quality and ended up at the other end of the scale.
After this show, it was summer, so we didn't meet for several weeks. For some reason, after we regrouped, more than half of the group had disappeared. To this day, I have no idea what caused this mass exodus. I know the show was bad, but that's no reason to abandon ship!
For the rest of that year, we rehearsed a few things, but never with a particular show in mind. Then, that summer, we had some time off, so I spent some time coming up with an idea for a show with our cast restraints (four members, all female - I had bit the bullet and retired from acting by that point). This was what became Tangents. Thanks to the small cast, I had had to design the show in a way that allowed for double-, triple- and quadruple-casting (there were 12 main characters, each with their own convoluted and interlocking storylines).
This is turning into a post about Tangents, which isn't what this post is supposed to be about - Ed.
I know, but I'm no closer to figuring out why I was telling this story in the first place - Phil
So, having come up with an almost plausible (don't even get me started on the legal implications of children carrying bins full of paper that are actually on fire)
↑ I genuinely wrote this into the show because I thought it worked. I have no filter.
idea for us to perform, I received a letter from the person who ran the group:
Dear Phil
As you know, the Drama company is no longer viable and so I have decided to shut it down.
Susie [Not her real name]
She was more articulate and less blunt than that, but that was the gist of the letter. This meant I was left alone with a now orphaned play.
FAST FORWARD FOUR YEARS!
So it's four years later.
Redundant. - Ed.
Don't care. - Phil
I'm talking with someone and Tangents comes up. I explain some of the plot and she's now interested. She says I should write the full story outline scene by scene so she can have a look.
One week later, I showed it to her. Maybe one day I'll show it to you too. She liked it and said I should write some of the actual script. I proceeded to do this in the worst way possible. Because I had the scene-by-scene outline, I wanted to write certain scenes first because it seemed more fun.
That's all well and good in theory but in practice, it just means the character development happens in the wrong order. As a simple example, in scene 13 COLIN writes a poem, then several scenes later he announces he's taking up writing poetry.
So how does a lazy writer get around this? Break the 6th wall (writer criticism) and give COLIN a vendetta and a murderous streak towards the writer. The writer turns up near the end of the play having previously played a different character in every scene who COLIN was originally very sympathetic of.
Turning into a Tangents post again! - Ed.
Have you remembered what we were talking about then? - Phil
The advantage of taking 1 1/2 months to write a post
is that if you forget what you were talking about you can just wait until you remember, then write it in afterwards. I started telling the story because it's a good story which explained why I got into writing in the first place which would then lead to me explaining why I started the blog, which would be a good segue into the update. However, I've completely forgotten why I started the blog when I did, except that various people have been asking me to start a blog for about 15 years.
Anyway, I can't come up with a good segue or finish the story properly, so I'll just get to the announcement:
I have a new name
- Himself - James
- His wife - Lola
- His kids (in reverse age order)
- Betsy
- Mae
- Lucy
- Waffle (This was the result of letting people vote)
- His siblings
- Harry
- Sasha
- 7 others
- His bear-hiding friend (long story - probably in this book) - Seth
- Me - Phil Botham
- My brother - Josh Botham
- My old drama teacher/boss - Susie
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