I was considering starting this short post with a rallying cry. These two shows, both available on iplayer at the time of writing, are so good I wanted to start with a celebratory 'Hell yeah! This is what we pay our licence fee for!'
But they're both US imports the Beeb have shelled out for so I guess that might not strike quite the right note. Dave and Shrill are, and I cannot overstate this, superb. I've decided to throw them together here because they're both super-intelligent shows about millennial creatives - a rapper and a writer - trying to get their freelance careers up-and-running in a cut-throat world. The're both about self-expression and doubt, about the change that success brings and the pressure it puts on relationships; the dislocation it creates. They're about the emptiness of social media and the hunt for authenticity. They both have crucial turning-points at weddings and parties, poignant and funny scenes featuring boomer-parents, and moments of razor-sharp creative performance. Go get 'em! I've just re-read yesterday's post - my first stab at 'One Cool Thing' - and found it crass and childish so here we go again.
As part of this year's September Shorts I've asked writer friends to contribute posts inspired by the title One Cool Thing. They'll be telling you about one cool thing they're looking forward to as Autumn approaches. It might be a book or movie, a tabletop or computer game, an event or visit to a special place, a chance to achieve something... or perhaps even an exciting new project. But I couldn't ask everyone else to help out without doing the graft myself, could I? So I'll go first... and second, it seems... that way there'll be a marked improvement once the guest writers turn up. Martin Griffin: Replaying Black Flag The final months of a games console's life is an opportunity to take stock; to revisit some of the wonders it dished-up and relive some of those timeless adventuring moments that might be forgotten in our perpetual clamour for the new. So it is with the PS4's end-of-days. Yeah I'm excited about the new machine - awesome processing power, unreal engine blah blah - but I'm also really looking forward to replaying some of my favourite PS4 games as the nights draw in. I'll be revisiting The Last of Us, I'll be finishing A Thief's End once and for all, I'll be hiking the woods in Firewatch one last time. But chief among my planned destinations this Autumn will be the Caribbean. Why? Because Black Flag, for my money at least, was the most successful stab at a pirate game made by any PS4 developer. The landscapes are lushly sundrenched. The sea is salty and raw. The smugglers' towns are densely populated, morally dubious and grubbily lit. And the music! I love incidental music in video games; to pass by a drunkard braying a shanty in some seafront bar and to hear the crowded pub join in on the choruses? That's the stuff of world-building wonder that sets my pulse racing. So swab the decks, people. Cast off. And splice the hell out of that mainbrace - whatever that means - we're going to sea! As part of this year's September Shorts I've asked writer friends to contribute posts inspired by the title One Cool Thing. They'll be telling you about one cool thing they're looking forward to as Autumn approaches. It might be a book or movie, a tabletop or computer game, an event or visit to a special place, a chance to achieve something... or perhaps even an exciting new project. But I couldn't ask everyone else to help out without doing the graft myself, could I? So I'll go first, that way there'll be a marked improvement once the guest writers turn up... Martin Griffin: A Quiet Place Part Two A Quiet Place has featured prominently in a recent slew of sensory-deprivation horror stories. There was home-invasion thriller Hush featuring a deaf heroine, there was that thing Don't Breathe which I never saw, then Eleven's flotation tank visions in Stranger Things... and then in 2019, Bird Box was very good and The Silence very wasn't. In short, there've been plenty to choose from.
Now, I've never been one to miss a chance to vault onto a swiftly-disappearing bandwagon, so I've been working on a screenplay for my own sensory-deprivation project. It features a protagonist who can't smell anything but that turns out to be an advantage because they have to battle an alien monster who stinks real bad. I'm calling it Sniff Movie. Aa-anyway, A Quiet Place was taut, spare and thrilling, and featured one of cinema's best ever barefoot-woman-steps-on-a-sharp-nail scenes. It was killer. However I have to face the fact that Part Two is starting from a tricky position. It's already played its big cards. We're not going into theatres wondering what a silent post-apocalyptic world will be like because we've already spent ninety minutes there. We know the characters well, and we've seen the baddies too. However, though the cast remains largely the same (with the addition of the wonderful Cillian Murphy,) it is a damn fine cast, and Kransinski writes and directs so the signs are good. All I need now is a cinema that's actually open by the time the movie arrives later this month... I took this photo on Ringstead beach outside Dorchester. A couple of mates had taken us there for a swim. There were seven or eight of these big cruise ships - iphones really struggle to capture landscapes so you'll have to take my word for it when I say they looked spectacular - all moored out in the calmer waters of the bay. I asked my pal about what was going on. He'd read about them in the local paper and had all the answers.
These huge ships, some the size of cities, were rendered useless by the epidemic and had been temporarily decommissioned, a decision that was costing the cruise companies huge amounts of money every day as their assets floated idle. To avoid the additional mooring fees at Southampton, the decision had been taken to drop anchor out at sea and leave them there. Sometimes, my pal told me, the ships swapped places, or moved up and down the coast from safe harbour to safe harbour, but they were basically parked. Not empty, though. Even doing nothing, these floating cities needed a skeleton crew to keep them clean, maintained and operable. So there are people living out there on these echoing vessels for weeks at a time. Apparently you can see little orange ribs, their outboard motors buzzing, travelling from ship to ship as staff take time out and catch up with each other, a few hours of company to stave off the emptiness. There's your next novel, folks. It's a bobby-dazzler. Later, I told a pal about it and he uttered that oft-used phrase of the non-writer; "That's a great idea" he said, eyes gleaming. "The thing will write itself!" 1993. I was working at Sainsbury's on the Beers Wines and Spirits aisle; full-time and back-breaking, loading up boxes of bottles, submitting orders, stacking shelves, staffing the aisle. I was paid weekly in cash - I think about £120. I hated the work and knew I had to get out of there. My plan was to live and work abroad; the south of France or Catalonia... but I only had £300, the remains of an insurance claim after my house was burgled in the last year of university.
Cut to today. I found the graph above on a recent clear-out; my save-to-escape plan from over 25 years ago. I have a friend who often refers to me as disciplined and I'd always taken it in good spirits then dismissed it. Looking back at my save-to-escape project however, I might have to concede he has a point. The amounts look trifling now but they represented close to 40% of everything I earned. It's interesting to note I stuck to the weekly target for a grand total of *checks notes* um one week before slipping. I didn't stop though. Put in an emergency catch up plan - the shaded area - over Christmas and the line rose pretty steeply for a while there, until a significant setback (I recall nothing about it) in January. By March I'd tripled my stash to £900. I got a job driving a van for a holiday company and moved out to Perpignan with my girlfriend. We ended up moving around, courier-ing a small campsite in the Pyrenees. My French got considerably better. So did my driving. So there you go. Slowly, £40 at-a-time, I managed it. Nowadays I manage to finish things slowly too. A thousand words here, a couple of hundred there. Finishing things is what counts and September Shorts will be the same way this year - we'll get there, one blog post at a time. See you tomorrow for the next one! |
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