SCHOOL OF 1980 WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS?

This next blog will, of course, be film related. This is in no way influenced by the crowd funding campaign School of 1980 Indiegogo Sedentary Gentleman is currently running with Mark Tew and the Makelight Productions team Andromeda Godfrey and Diana Juhr deBenedetti.

WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS?

Like all writers Sedentary Gentleman is always being asked where he gets his ideas. Well this time you find out. I’m going to give you the background to why I decided to write School of 1980. (I should point out I’m co-writing the short with Mark Tew, so he probably has an entirely different perspective…)

WHAT ACTUALLY IS SCHOOL OF 1980?

School of 1980 is to be a ten minute short film inspired by certain movies of the early 1980s. It’s about a young teacher who has to fight to survive in a crazy out of control school run by Hollywood dandy punks who are way too old to convince.

The short has a late 1970’s sensibility. It’s from an age when it seemed, in movies at least, society was crumbling into anarchy. As a young suburban teenager at the time, I was both terrified and very attracted to these images of violence and lawlessness, as long they didn’t personally impinge on my life, obviously.

These films have sort of been forgotten now and watching them back, what once seemed so contemporary and horrifying looks as alien as a film about Medieval times.

HOW DID THE PROJECT COME ABOUT?

Mark Tew and I had been working on a project all year that we realised wasn’t going to happen; so we came up with something new. We were getting very frustrated and didn’t want to allow 2013 (and that year still sounds so futuristic to me!) to ebb away with little to show for it. We didn’t realise it but we were on the lookout for a subject and an aesthetic that might provide our next House Trafalgar.

So one night we were watching a little Canadian movie called ‘Class of 1984’ (you see what we did there), and realised we could do much much better.

WHY CLASS OF 1984

I first saw Class of 1984 at the cinema when it came out, as a callow sixth former and even then I understood that as I braced myself for something grim and horrific, what I got was nowhere near satisfying enough.

It’s hard for people to realise now but a child of the seventies grew up in a very strange culture. Everything, from kids TV programmes to comics to music was realistic and extreme. The world was a stark, existential place and there were no heroes. In Britain.

The Reanimated Spinball ace Rico, now an unstoppable monster reprogrammed to kill Joe Taggart because he's getting too popular as captain of Carson City. You remember: Death Game 1999. Action comic. Right? 

In America, they seemed to get it slightly wrong. They couldn’t seem to shake off that new wave arty vibe. Despite murderous drugs, gun culture and no wave music, they were too colourful and just about still too glamorous to be ‘real’. They appeared to live in a world where Alice Cooper was frightening. I liked that much more than our tedious Mohican and tippexed black leather uniform punk.

DIRTY RED SEATS

This was the era of the fleapit cinema, with stained red seats, cigarette smoke and sticky carpets. Cinemas were in decline and our local was a right toilet. 

My childhood cinema. The glamour of Hollywood in your suburban town

However, unknowingly, Sedentary Gentleman was discovering his lifelong love affair with the movies. He didn’t treat the fleapit as somewhere to snog, mainly because he had no chance of getting a girlfried, but also because unlike most cinema-goers who seemingly turn up to have a chat and a meal, he was into the films.

Star Wars had got people into the cinemas a couple of years before – and glorious that was too – but that thirteen year old had grown now and wanted something meatier. He got it too, in a double bill of Mad Max and Mad Max 2, which were the best and scariest films ever.

Some fans honour the greatest film ever made

The shy, socially awkward and rather ugly Sedentary Gentleman still remembers his dismay when the projector light failed just as Max slammed his lorry into the Humungous’s car – pulping evil gay mohicaned warrior Wez. It then started up again having missed the climactic crash. You took film like a punk gig in those days. 

Mad Max had a touch of panto but it was a genuinely scary, full-on movie. People got hurt, including Max. I still can’t decide which I like better: 1 or 2.

THE VIBE

The vibe in those days was colourless and grungy and sleazy. No heroes, just desperate vengeful ordinary people who quite often paid with their lives after meting out their violence. In these pre-PC times, nothing was taboo.

This all happened just before the dawn of home video; before the Italians replaced The Exterminator, Class of 1984, The Warriors, Death Wish, with their overblown, talentless Xerox versions of those very movies. Don’t get me wrong, I have a small place in my heart for Metalstorm, Gladiators of the Year 3000 and Bronx Warriors, but I can only glorify crap for so long. For me, cinema started again on video with The Evil Dead; a movie which utterly blew me away although I was not a horror film fan. A different story.

My mate Paul had a tee-shirt with this on it. I seriously considered killing him to get it.

 THE CLASS OF 1984 EXPERIENCE

Back to Class of 1984. I went to the cinema ready for some full-on, nasty punks versus teacher violence. What I got was a rather static TV movie where young actors too old for school swore at an impossibly earnest Perry King and a decade of clunky sixth form dialogue, before he took them down far too quick and bloodlessly.

MY STRANGE FRIEND

Class of 1984 failed to live up to expectations. The reason? I had a better movie in my head already. Because of my strange friend.

There was this kid at my comp school – a genuine nut – who wrote his own ‘novels’. I say novels; they were handwritten epics of sex and violence about an invincible him and his girlfriend, blowing his many real life bullies away, armed only with his secret arsenal of Magnums and combat knives. The novels were the crassest kind of wish-fulfilment. Mash-ups of Stephen King’s The Stand and Clint Eastwood.

The rest of us were in there too, often as victims for him to avenge. I loved these epic tales, especially when he cut out pictures from his older brothers porn mags and pasted them onto the pages.

That's a good tag line. If only it was, say, half the length, then I think you'd really have something

Yeah my strange friend would now be posting selfies of himself in Kevlar and shades, posing with his replica handguns.

Never knowingly original, I was inspired enough to write one of my own, I think it was called ‘Fight for Survival’. Although I couldn’t keep it up (stop sniggering) and it quickly became a series of stupid jokes.

So in my head, Class of 1984 was a celluloid version of my mate’s books. But it wasn’t. I wanted to be terrified; I really did but this movie just didn’t do the job.

REWATCHING – IT’S STILL CRAP

Fast forward to watching this again for the first time since, with Mark. Class of 1984 is still appallingly paced, violence free, unconvincing and ridiculously scripted but this time I could see the funny side. I loved the American version of punks, who look as threatening now as Adam and the Ants. Hollywood punks reached their height with Return of the Living Dead and their low with Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. (I’m gonna write a whole blog about different types of movie punks one day – be warned).

See, English punks were hardcore. And this is a picture of Bow Wow Wow.

As we talked, we realised we could do better. We could make a House Trafalgar version of this movie. And that was the spark.

We got stuck for a while. I wrote a script but it didn’t quite work. We kept at it though and eventually understood that Class of 1984 was just too clumsy and talentless to create real sparks. An audience would think we weren’t doing this deliberately and neither of us want to make ‘so-bad-it’s-good’.

COME OUT TO PLAY

So we widened our perspective. We took in movies we did like. We watched Assault on Precinct 13 again – a film that I genuinely almost found too terrifying to watch back in my room in 1981 on a black and white TV. We watched The Warriors, we watched Mad Max 2 on blu-ray. This was what we wanted to do. Mark wrote a version of the script; I re-wrote that one. We met up with Andromeda and Diana and went into a co-production. We started the Indiegogo campaign.

It’s a comedy, yes. But School of 1980 is an awful lot more. I hope you get to see it!

You know: for kids

Ten Short Films You Don't Need To Make

PLEASE DON’T

Here’s my top ten list of short films people never need to make again:

1. Twenty something trauma in your rented flat. Drama and conflict free essays in narcissism. Sorry your girlfriend/boyfriend left you but you know what? When you get older it won’t matter. And if you put your twenty minutes of sitting in a kitchen smoking and staring into space to an indie soundtrack you deserve executing.

What a great idea for a film

2. Zombies. It used to be vampires but then it was zombies. It’s probably demons now.

3. Street musicians are wise. Or interesting. Same with fire jugglers or anyone who may attend a festival. See: devised theatre.

4. Middle class boys wearing suits in underground car parks pointing guns, swearing and shouting into each other’s faces. Arguing over a suitcase full of something mysterious is equally dull.

Hey, no one's done this before!

5. Drugs. Films about drugs are as boring as the people who take them. It’s not about cool. It’s about interesting.

6. Raising your head and looking into a mirror to see how haunted you are. Not necessarily a film per se, but a cliché we never need to see again. See also any film where the protagonist sits on a beach looking at the waves. With an indie soundtrack.

Get a job

7. Films about young people. You may be a young person and think whatever you’re currently going through is important. It isn’t.

8. Love I.T.? Know how to do CG? Brilliant! Just don’t do an I Am Legend/Monsters knock-off about you alone in a deserted, abandoned city.

Hey, this already exists. So you don't need to do it less well!  

9. Work in an office? Don’t like it? Poor you. Funnily enough though – all bosses aren’t shits, and you’re actually a twat. Jobs are crap but ordinary people seem to manage them without casting themselves as Joseph K.

10. What is the nature of love? Are relationships possible in an existential universe? I don’t care and nor does anyone else. You don’t actually feel any more nor wound more deeply than anyone else. The difference is, they go and do dramatic and interesting things worth making films about.

You win. No one in the history of the world has ever understood suffering the way you understand suffering. At seventeen years old. I need to know about that via the medium of short film.

There you go. Totally unfair and biased. So what. I could have mentioned super heroes, martial arts and manga but I don't want to upset people. 

LAUGH ABOUT IT NOW PART THREE

THE RING MAIN CIRCUIT

Assessment One was basic: on a wall of plasterboard, construct a ring main circuit adhering to the 17^th Edition of the Electrical Regulations.

Your basic ring main circuit

Now, you may think from past experience, I would panic. Ha ha! You’re wrong! Because the panicking about building a ring main circuit according to the 17^th Edition had already happened and been overcome on the pre-course. I had already built one! 

And now I even had the invaluable electrician’s on-site guide manual to help me (once I realised the red book was the on-site guide, not the green one I'd been using). 

Your on-site guide

What I did not have was any facility with tools. Sedentary Gentleman had barely ever used a power drill and the one time he did (at the Hampshire Youth Theatre in 1982 when as a painfully unlikeable youth he had offered to help out a bit) – the pointy bit at the end had fired out like a bullet and embedded itself in a wall. Since then, Sedentary Gentleman has stayed away from power tools. 

This is more my experience

Saws, knives, hammers, the metal things you bang to make objects stick to walls, spirit levels, screwdrivers – there’s probably a word for the phobia I have towards such items.

During my time with my colleagues the electricians, and previous experience with practical men, I had heard a lot about ‘making good’. This, I understand, means making a wall or whatever look nice again with plaster and paint or something. once the complex electricianing stuff is over. 

Now, I had a deep unease about my ability to ‘make good’ but I figured if I vaguely sorted the wiring/circuit thing, the ‘making good’ would somehow get resolved.

In front of me was a bare plasterboard wall, like an unpainted theatrical flat or a vertical table. There was no ‘making good’ required here. Assessment One was just me and the electrical task; mano a mano.

Before I could build a ring main circuit, I had to work out how to stick the CU – or Consumer’s Unit – or Fuse Box to you – to the plasterboard wall without it falling off. Then I had to work out how to stick the wires in. Then wire an electric socket in at the other end. The difficult, incomprehensible job of testing the circuit with probe machines I would panic about later.

Trying to control my breathing, I looked at the tools. I was acutely aware the South African boy next to me had actually completed the whole assessment and was moving on to the next one. Ignore him, I told myself. Just get this done a bit at a time. I reached for the drill.

Men watched me as I worked

KEEP ON KEEPING ON

By lunchtime that Monday, the rest of the group had finished. By finished, I mean they had finished all eight practical assessments. All of them had finished all of the tasks. No exaggeration. I only realised this at about four o’clock that afternoon when I finally emerged, sweating, angry and tearful, with a basic cobbled together never stand up to any form of scrutiny ring main circuit. Just to be clear: I was still on Assessment One. The most basic kind of circuit there is.

Our friend the Cockney ‘tutor’ had remained hidden for the bulk of the day. In fact, I hadn’t seen him at all. I had occasionally heard him in my aural periphery telling people they had done a good job, but I was so absorbed in not fannying up this ring main circuit I hadn’t looked up. I’d skipped lunch to get this damn thing on the wall.

Suddenly, he was on my shoulder. I gave him a really stupid smile. A weak smile that appeared to enrage him. ‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘That’s no fucking good.’ He proceeded to tug the wires out of the CU. ‘What the fuck have you done here? These are the wrong width. How have you trimmed these?’

I didn’t know. I don’t know how to trim wires. I don’t even know what that means. And that’s what I told him.

With a deep sigh, our friend picked up a Stanley knife and a piece of twin and earth and neatly carved the plastic sheaths away, exposing the bare wire. I had seen him do it but as to how, I knew I had no idea. ‘Tear that down,’ he said angrily. ‘Fucking start again. Jesus!’

He stomped off, knowing he wasn’t getting away early tonight.

COMPLETING ASSESSMENT ONE

Just after Tuesday lunchtime I completed Assessment One to his satisfaction. Luckily, a couple of the other electricians – bored of hanging around – had suggested how I put a ring main circuit on a plasterboard wall. They were nice. This was my seventh attempt.

‘Thank fuck,’ said the tutor, until he realised the second assessment was much more difficult and involved cutting Steel Wire Armour cable.

I had to cut and connect this bad boy

I should point out at this point, I was suffering from an absolutely brain annihilating hangover. I was staying at a friend’s flat nearby and gone out round Exmouth Market with my oldest mate Grant with the express intent of obliterating the memory of that terrible Monday from my mind. I succeeded. Already I was planning to drink as much as I possibly could every single night of this hellish week.

A very lovely part of London

So for Assessment Two, I was hardly in a fit state to tackle walking to the workshop, let alone actually pass any assessments. But for once, luck and preparation were with me. The Steel Wire Armour cable thing. I  had had such a nightmare with it on the prep course, I had focused what energy I had on getting that right.

Okay, by the time I’d manked it up over and over and kept cutting and cutting it down to start again, the cable was about twelve inches long (and this is the cable you use to electrify your garden lights) so was of no use to anyone, but it DID connect the two electrical things it was supposed to connect. You switched it on and a light came on. It didn’t kill you when you used it. The tutor was relieved.

The rest of that Tuesday afternoon was easy. It was easy because the tutor threw the assessment book onto a table and instructed me to go through it and fill it in myself. I no longer had to build anything. Just test and write down results. A couple of the electrician chaps told me the answers and I wrote them down. Funnily enough, I passed all eight assessments.

I was surprised to discover that Tuesday night that the practical part of the ‘becoming an electrician’ was over and I had passed everything. All that had to happen for the next three days were written exams. Thirteen written open book multiple choice exams. As my colleagues groaned, I inwardly cheered. The right kind of tears came to my eyes. I could pass these exams. Of course I could. The pain was over.

I got drunk a lot happier that night.

The pain – the real humiliation was done. The rest was standard frustration, and coming to terms with the realisation that I would never, ever be an electrician. The pain and humiliation was scarring; I couldn’t see past it yet but at last, it was over.

AFTERMATH

I only failed two out of thirteen written exams. I finished the course second highest in my group.  I passed one of the two some weeks later but I never finished the final exam. It was only twelve multiple choice questions but I had no idea of any kind what the answers were. I even memorized the questions and four possible answers and after each re-take (at 10 quid and a train to London a time) wrote them down. I then showed them to an electrician I had got to know. 

Even after that, I still never passed that final exam. After five attempts, I gave up for ever.

I think the company went out of business. I never checked.

LAUGH ABOUT IT NOW more

PART TWO

THE LOW POINT

I believed at the age of forty two, a grown man in UK society would be beyond being so humiliated he could cry. I didn’t actually cry – I really didn’t. Neither did I walk out and ask for my money back. I couldn’t. I couldn’t because that would mean I would have to face the fact I been stupid enough to give thousands of pounds of someone else’s money away for nothing.

The is the most painful part of the ‘becoming an electrician’ story. This part is about the week long ‘practical’; in Clerkenwell in London.

Now, I’ve had some low points. We all have. Becoming a teacher. Countless professional rejections; mundane jobs that stretch days into weeks, all the while knowing contemporaries are that precise moment are filming TV or getting writing commissions. Leaving London.

Everyone has lows. However, I have always remained firmly committed to the idea that eventually, one will get through; get to a point one can look back and say – it was tough but we made it. We got there in the end.

I’m still waiting.

I often remember a second hand quote from Nabokov when someone congratulated him on becoming a success. His reply (roughly): ‘yes, but it should have happened twenty years ago.’

So. The week long practical training course to become a qualified electrician.

I had been forewarned. The ‘course’ requested I attend a voluntary weekend pre-practical. I had gone a few months before and although scary, these two days had been possible. It was designed to help those poor souls who had limited practical experience. Or so I believe. I cannot remember anything I experienced but I can definitely state that whatever it was comprises the sum of everything I presently know about being an electrician.

The old 'twin and earth' cable. Lots of this in electricianery

THE WORKSHOP AND THE OVERALLS

Alarm bells began to ring when I turned up. The building was more like a Clerkenwell literary agent’s arty Georgian house.

As ever, I presumed from the off I would not be able to find the front door or any reasonable method of entry, which would involve the beginning of a familiar humiliation involving phone calls to bewildered and hostile call centres imploring me to ‘press buttons’ and so on which I would be unable to fathom until some flustered, angry receptionist would eventually open it for me. At which point I would understand how simple the whole process of getting into the building would have been with an ounce of thought.

But none of that happened.

I went in and immediately the terrifying aura of practical men was palpable. The reception area was un-carpeted and scuffed. There were stained plastic chairs and a coffee machine I knew I would never dare attempt.

A coffee machine roughly like this but much more battered

Tough looking young men in hard hats and boots and leaned against walls. Nobody spoke. Many were rolling cigarettes. They looked like they worked on building sites already. Everyone was waiting, more or less patiently. A few were tough looking Eastern Europeans.

The unease I had experienced when I purchased an alarmingly tight brand new pair of overalls and shiny bright steel work boots on my first ever visit to a Wicks, was entirely justified and now blossoming into proper sick-inducing fear. I had only ever worn them once to try them and realised they were way too small. I didn’t take them back because I don’t take things back. I didn't want to face Wicks again.

The course notes said I had to wear overalls, so I bought overalls. I generally unfailingly do what a course asks me to. 

No one else had. Not one other person waiting here had bought new overalls. 

A South African boy of about twenty was talking to me. I couldn’t really hear. He was saying how he had just rewired his house in Hammersmith and wanted the paperwork from the course so he could sell it on. Apart from that, he repaired motorbikes. What did I do?

I couldn’t tell him I had written some Doctor Who books. I just couldn't. That was it. That was what I did. And what about these overalls?

These overalls from Wicks

I was going to spend a week in the company of young, aggressive practical males. Dressed as an old gay actor.

I could not wear the overalls. To wear the overalls would be suicide.

The waiting was terminated by a squat Cockney, apparently cursed with both narcolepsy (such was his indifference towards us) and Tourette’s. In between the swearing he invited us to follow him to the ‘workshops’. The group nonchalantly stood up and wandered down a drab corridor. Posters of smiling, multi-racial men in yellow helmets smiled at me from a line of posters. They didn’t look like anyone in this building.

The posters had photos very much like these

ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE

I walked through a corridor of heavy duty plumbing equipment into a room the like of which I had not seen since the few craft lessons at school I'd endured until being selected for  a Latin O level class got me out.

My fellow trainee electricians quickly set themselves up in their booths. They nodded knowingly at the tools, cable and hardware that lay in wait for us. 

At last I realised: the other men here were all actually already electricians. They already worked as a job at being electricians. They needed a certificate in the Seventeenth Edition of the Electrical Regulations to help them sign off work on site. This was the course. They already did this stuff every day. For a living.

An electrician tests something

I was carrying the overalls. I couldn’t put them on.

‘Put them on,’ said Tourette’s man, pointing at me. Already he knew; already he understood. And he didn’t like it. He knew I was going to be inconvenient.

I put the overalls on. The garment stuck to me as I struggled; both the sweat of fear and the wrong size conspiring against dressing. My arms and legs stuck out like oversized clown’s limbs. I looked like an old, gay actor.

Roughly what I looked like to the others

It was literally true that if I passed this course, I would be a qualified electrician. The salesman had not actually lied to me. However, they weren’t here to teach me anything.

Tourette’s man made it very clear in a little speech: get a few practical exercises out of the way and piss off early for a drink. Get everyone home early. 

This was not a week-long practical training course. This was a week-long practical exam.

Sedentary Gentleman's Fictional Heroes

WE CAN’T BE HEROES

Sedentary Gentleman has often been criticised for making his fictional protagonists too ‘unsympathetic’.

The subject of this blog

So Sedentary Gentleman, having read a blog is best optimised for marketing purposes when containing lists of top tens to engage potential customers, thought he would let you in on some of his ‘heroes’. 

We can't be this

FLASHMAN

Undoubtedly the finest literary creation in all, um, literature. In one story he gets one over on ‘The Master Detective himself’.

I don’t know what made Sedentary Gentleman laugh more: the fact Flashman gets yet another undeserved victory, or the spluttering response of a Holmes worshipping friend when I told her. For my friend, Holmes could never be beaten. It simply couldn’t happen. But Flashman does it.

A coward and a bully

Flashman-ophiles always relish the moments when our man threatens to become too heroic and manages some hideous feat of craven cowardice resulting in the misfortune and often death of a much more noble colleague. The genius of Flashman is, of course, his humanity in the face of horror, stupidity and ridiculous Victorian morality. 

Sedentary Gentleman recalls clearly, back in the late 1970s, reading the blurb in the back of a paperback about the adventures of the school bully from Tom Brown’s Schooldays. He thought it the most brilliant idea ever. That a coward, a bully and a knave could ‘star’ in a book was almost beyond belief – after a short lifetime of ‘good’ heroes, this was such a daring conceit.

Although obviously Sedentary Gentleman hasn’t read Tom Brown’s Schooldays, there is an odd childhood memory of a BBC version – of a young boy being ‘roasted’ over a flame by this character ‘Flashman’ and his bully boy chums. Those blurry early TV flames, the knots tying the boy (presumably Tom Brown) to a metal fire guard, the bullies laughing and taunting; feeling the horror and despair of the victim... Let’s leave it there, eh.

Flashman definitely got me away from the whitebread heroes and pulp plots of James Herbert and King and that. I realised a character could hold a book; that you could have unreliable narrators. You didn’t have to like them; you didn’t want to be them but you could only empathise with them. And more importantly, one didn’t have to ‘resort to the supernatural’. The real world was sufficient from then on; more than enough. And that includes JG Ballard himself – the eponymous ‘hero’ of that comically perverse novel ‘Crash’.

ASH

Out of the Evil Dead. Check out Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness commentary. How he believes the film drops dead (no pun intended) when Ash turns out to be a straight up hero after all. The final shot of Evil Dead 2 is up there with ‘Waiting for Godot’ as a master class in ennui, empathy and existentialism. Yes, Sedentary Gentleman did write that last sentence.

Ennui, empathy and existentialism. With monsters.

Selfish note: as a student, Sedentary Gentleman seriously considered getting himself a tattoo of Ash in the final image of Evil Dead 2. What a wanker. Even worse, he also considered as a teenager a tattoo of Wile E. Coyote – so deeply did he identify with this unlovely creature whose every attempt to succeed was met with spectacular and painful failure. This was in the 1980s, before it was understood tattoos became de rigeur for so many people. So getting old has its benefits.

Sedentary Gentleman, not a fan of this classy art form. His loss

Although Ash is actually a real hero, he is only interesting when he is unheroic; when he is you or I. Army of Darkness was strangely more but less. You gets me?

DUNBAR

The small number of people in the world who can still read would usually cite Yossarian as the hero of Catch 22 but for me it was always Dunbar. An American officer who spends his time practising archery; not because he loves this hobby but because he hates it. Time drags when Dunbar so he feels like he lives longer.

Dunbar’s eventual fate is wonderful; so unbelievably fantastic it will come as a huge disappointment when you read it.

SOMETHING HAPPENED

Our un-named narrator is the greatest, most honest fictional character in all literature. Oh, I said that before. I’ll stick to this being Sedentary Gentleman’s favourite, most psyche-damaging book.

CLAUDIUS

Finally, we have I, Claudius. A book of pure pleasure. Never copied; never bettered. Even the magnificent TV series does not capture the full glory of Caligula and his unfortunately too brief reign. Sedentary Gentleman’s colleague – the same as before – felt bad reading it. The reader is greedy for plot, wants more atrocities, more madness, more callousness. It brings out the worst in us...

What else do you need? Except the 2000AD Judge Dredd story ‘Judge Cal’ which brilliantly and comically reset the Caligula story in Mega-City 1.

TONY COCKSURE AND KTEL BREVELL

Oh, and a brief plug on behalf of the Sedentary Gentleman: his film DISCO – currently in development with Future Sun Films, has many parallels with the decadent Roman Empire. Set in a fictional London of 1978. You could say it’s a pulp rehash of the Anthony and Cleopatra story. Itself a delightful study of two utterly loathsome human beings.

The Theatre proves once again nothing can compare with the live experience

Anyway, Sedentary Gentleman needs his cocoa. There is no real aim for this blog but a few pleasant moments reliving fine books. He doesn’t ask you to like him; empathy is more than enough.

The lesser film version

Laugh About it Now

ELECTRIC DREAMS - NOTES FROM A SURVIVOR

A surprisingly non-ironic blog. Something personal and painful. Enjoy!

PART ONE

We were that desperate.

This surely is the only possible explanation as to why I would even consider the possibility that I might train to become an electrician. Or, as the outcome was more specifically sold to me: a Domestic Installer.

I should have known it wouldn’t work out. Plenty of other people were telling me. I just didn’t listen; I couldn’t. There was no other option.

2009 was just beginning. 2008 was washed up and gone. Somehow I found myself, and my wife and our twin boys not even at their second birthday, living in Worthing in West Sussex. There were no jobs. No jobs that paid any money, at least. And seemingly no jobs that didn’t.

I will confess now that I’ve always been pretty bad at jobs. I had already retrained twice and both of those ideas had fallen to pieces due to my lack of enthusiasm and any form of entrepreneurial flair. Every evening the television was filled with highly motivated individuals elbowing each other through the market place to make their name as property developers or chocolate factory owners or SEO consultants.

This was clearly what one had to do now; in lieu of an actual job, you invented one. With my ability to be drained of confidence and enthusiasm even in tasks I do like, having to dredge up these qualities for non-existent jobs I didn’t was always going to be an uphill struggle.

Add to this a complete lack of confidence and ability in any physical task; you can see why electricianing had never been a career choice.

And talking of enough. Enough was enough. I was a year into being a father. I hadn’t slept properly in all that time. I had moved out of the capital to this backwater retirement town I’d never even visited until I moved to it. My ‘career’ had ended when both my agents – neither of whom had ever made any money out of me – dumped me in the same week. My life consisted of taking babies to playgroups and being glowered at by tattooed teenage mums. I didn’t know anyone, never went out; had no money and no social life.

I was done with embarrassment and humiliation and poverty. Enough was enough.

Everyone said that the people in short supply were plumbers and electricians. Now, I don’t mind theoretical science but plumbing appeared to involve difficult physical work involving pipes and water systems. A lot of manual labour. Electricity on the other hand was about wires and maths. Surely, I could master that stuff. Also, I was often told the manual stuff would come. One just had to practice enough.

I suppose there was a vision of a future in which I made a couple of hundred a day moving sockets and sorting out fuse boxes in the houses of friends and old people. Not proper electricianing and that: I mean, even I couldn’t dream up the notion I would be repairing hospital generators or pylons, but a little bit of domestic installing between auditions and Doctor Who book writing seemed not impossible.

THE SALESMAN

‘Do you have any manual skills?’ asked the grinning salesman in my front room. He was too clichéd – pressed suit, armful of laptops and folders, silver bracelet and watch combination. ‘Are you practical at home; get on with the little jobs?’

My wife looked at me. Was this time for honesty? I couldn’t tell.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t have any skills like that.’

‘Perfect,’ said the Salesman. ‘That’s exactly the type of people this new Domestic Installer qualification is designed for. You won’t be bogged down with the old fashioned regulations and ways of working. We’ll teach you how to do those things. Now, do you want the course in Southampton or London?’

‘London.’

‘Great. How would you pay?’

How would we pay? What, the small matter of two and a half thousand pounds to become a Domestic Installer? Don’t ask. But it didn’t matter because after a few old people’s houses and jobs at mate’s rates, I’d quickly pay that off. I’d be working within a year.

We shook hands, the salesman and I. He actually had the nerve to shake my hand.

WHAT IS ELECTRICITY?

The first thing about electricity: I didn’t know what it actually is. A force? A power? How does it make lights work? Ovens? Why does it shock you?

A friend of mine, a practical friend, told me to think of electricity as water and the wires as pipes. This helped. But not really. How do real electricians define this raw thing they work with every day?

However, for the purposes of this course did it actually matter what electricity was? I mean, I have a degree. Surely I could get my head round the theoretical grounding behind this all-powerful force in our lives.

Except I couldn’t. Maybe I was tired but I just could not grasp the concept of electricity. You look it up. Even Wikipedia uses the old Star Wars getout (as in the infamous Return of the Jedi Obi-Wan lie to Luke). Wikipedia states what electricity is depends on what kind of ‘electricity’ you’re talking about.

Thanks. I don’t know what kind of electricity I’m talking about. That’s why I’m – oh never mind.

I didn’t know any electricians at that point so I couldn’t ask them. I kept at bay the advice of the pre-course literature that suggested knowing electricians would be helpful. Truth is: I’m scared of electricians. As I’m scared of any reasonable practical male able to do proper things with their hands.

Call me foolish, but I presumed when the course literature arrived that Part One Section One would consist of a definition of electricity and the general method by which humanity had discovered and mastered this mighty power.

This did not seem to be the case. In fact, Part One of the three inscrutable ring binders was dedicated to something called Part P. This is a certificate about the health and safety aspect of working with electricity in domestic situations like, you know, when you install a boiler.

Littered with jargon, this folder appeared to imply quite a great deal of familiarity with actually already being an electrician. Even more confusing, the rest of the folder seemed to talk a lot about the Electrical Regulations 17^th Edition. What?

None of the ring binders provided any information on what an electrician did.

The student – me – was expected to complete written courses in all three folders, on my own, and send them off for marking. Once I had passed, I was expected to book a date for the week long practical course in London which would be sufficient for me to begin work in my new profession.

I passed the written course. I had to. Two and a half thousand pounds of other people’s money had been invested.  I passed by rote learning every single piece of information in the Electrician’s Handbook. This was one of the hardest, most boring thing I have ever done in my life.

Because I had merely memorized paragraphs I did not understand, as soon as I passed I forgot everything. 

Didn’t matter: I was through to the next stage.

IN PART TWO: 

LEARN HOW A FORTY YEAR OLD MAN CAN BE SO HUMILIATED HE CAN CRY.

THE THESIS

THE QUESTION

Right, I’m determined to do it. I’m going to write a blog entry not about films. I swear there must be other things in my life. There must be.

Soo...football? Music? Family? God no.

Okay. Yes, indeed. For all my fine talk I do have a day job. It’s not great, it’s not awful and it roughly covers the bills. But that’s not what the blog’s about.

THE ANSWER

I’m going to write about cycling to work. Okay. Go with me! Excitement.

Yes, I attempt to cycle to work as often as possible. Given the current state of the weather, this is a lot of fun in its unpredictability. Yesterday, I closed the front door and down came the wet snow. Arrived ten miles later utterly soaked. I spent half the day walking around the office barefoot because I’d forgotten my socks. That’s how I roll.

I forgot these on Monday

Why do I cycle ten miles to work and ten miles back when I could just go in the car? Well, maybe you’re not like me but I have this annoying disability that never allows me to put my life into perspective. I have this perpetual virtual timeline in my brain that says you started in 1966 and, the randomness of existence willing, will probably stop somewhere around 2030. This never goes away. 

So any time I spend doing things I don’t like or feel are important is scary. Those minutes are burning off for no discernible reason. We can agree to disagree on what you and I consider ‘important’ but sitting in a car at a roundabout is pretty low on that list.

Okay, no one wants to go to work – unless you work in film obviously – and my job is particularly pointless. But when it’s burning calories on a bike at least I’m doing something positive during these eight hours of waiting for it to be over. Narcisstic? Self-obsessed? Hubristic? Check my job description: I’m a writer. What do you expect?

NO INTEREST IN BIKES

No interest in this

Got to tell you, I’ve no interest in bikes. I quite like exercise: played a bit of footie in my time. One of the reasons for my indifferent career success is that I like and am reasonably proficient at lots of things. 

And in this world, success comes to those who only do one thing and do it all the time. My SF Doctor Who type colleagues deplore sport in all forms and probably think they’re only played by bullies. Likewise, my sport friends think I’m weird for doing Doctor Who and films and that. I’m sort of okay at most things; not brilliant at anything. Hardly excited by anything. Except films and writing and acting.

I would very much like to do sailing and snorkelling and diving but I can’t afford it. I do go running because it’s cheap. But bikes? No. I hate anything physical involving gear. I am the world’s worst DIYer, or maintainer of anything mechanical. (One day I’ll write a blog about the time I paid loads of money to nearly become an electrician – but the scars haven’t healed). 

I am often passed on the A259 by lycra clad men in their forties riding two hundred gear feather-weight kinetic machines. Good luck to them. They obviously see this as important, in the way it’s important for car people to get stuck in that next roundabout queue as quickly as possible. Same with enthusiasts of television, dogs, cats, drum ‘n’ bass music, Apple products, anything to do with houses, car insurance and general male banter. I am not part of that human race.

This makes these men feel cool

My bike sat in an alley for four years until I got this contract. It’s a hybrid, apparently, which means it’s okay on road and grass. In moderation.

I quite enjoy the contempt and aggression directed at me by drivers – especially those women in their 4x4 containing one child who spot me at roundabouts – and pull out anyway. I’m a driver, and I hate cyclists and their stupid clothes and how they get in my way when I’m on the road.

LIFE

I mainly enjoy the cycle to work because it does remind me I live in a real world more than my own little closed circle. The awareness that you could be killed any minute by some half-asleep bad-tempered provincial who does this journey every day in a metal death machine they barely understand concentrates the mind wonderfully.

What I see when riding to work

There is the thrill of actually navigating the UK’s badly maintained and cycle-hating roads. The begrudged miniscule cycle lanes between Goring and the railway bridge are particularly exciting, with the illegally parked delivery vans, self-important mums who ‘don’t give a damn’ and car door opening pensioners. It’s not London so there’s some actual countryside and stuff to look at if you like that sort of thing.

ROUTE FUN

You can skip this bit if you like.

Basically, I start with my immediate area, down a few local streets. The first great bit is the underpass that cuts out the death trap of roundabouts in the centre of town. Bye bye jammed drivers!

Feeling smug, I then get some speed up and weave around to the first crucial right hand turn at the mini-roundabout at the side of Victoria Park. This is where I first annoy drivers who believe wrongly I’m slowing them down in their dash to the next set of red lights. Once we’re round we’re on the proper road and don’t have any more scary right turns (UK rides on the left, obviously).

The A259 here from here to Goring is a bit unpleasant, as the road is narrow and there are lots of builders, electricians and plumbers on their way to jobs. The smell of dope is very strong as the vans pass. Along Goring High Street where Mark works. Never seen him in his shop and he’s never seen me. Surprising as I’m wearing a bright orange coat, helmet and black tights. Running tights, okay.

Over the railway bridge, onto the A259 cycle path and past the new Asda, then the new Sainsbury’s...I’m stopping there. You gets me.

 The new ASDA at Ferring when it was being built

MY BIKE

There’s a whole lot of stuff to do with biking to work. A ritual of bags, locks, spare clothes, lights and keys I find bewilderingly rewarding. I like these small but vital pieces of equipment you can’t do without. I definitely feel fitter and better for my little 40 minutes forays into the real world. It plugs me in to the raw stuff of life. I see the patterns of civilisation swirling and there is a feeling of achievement in labour. And there’s a great downhill bit near Littlehampton.

No distractions: just me and the road (I think what one is supposed to write when one is banging on about bike stuff). And because of where I live there are no hills.

Best of all, cycling to work is nothing to do with films. It’s cathartic. You’d probably hate it.

I will probably go back to writing about films next time. That’s the day job and I can work from home.