Comedy and column inches out of misery...

Wrote some comedy sketches. Myself and M had promised to write some for someone we know for performance by some young people. I was cold, tired, had the remnants of Swine Flu gnawing away at me, was bereft of ideas, couldn't think of any funny lines. Naturally, they turned out great.

I was in a pub the other day and, laid on a table, with nothing and nobody else in sight, was a newspaper. I realised, too late, when I'd taken it back to my table, that it was a copy of the Daily Mail. It was the edition, I'd find out much later in the day, containing Jan Moir's nasty assault on the memory of Stephen Gately. I picked up the paper and went and sat down with it. Ten minutes passed by and I'd read the back pages when a man tapped me on the shoulder. "Did you take that paper? The one from that table over there?" We looked. The table was still empty, with no obvious sign that anyone was or had been sitting there. I explained that I thought the paper in question had been abandoned. "It's my paper. Why did you take it?" I explained again and made some quip about the horror of the Daily Mail and the poor state of its page layout. "I'll have it back now." I'd already given it back to him before he'd said this. He was a rather odious man. A typical Daily Mail reader (I felt tainted having been near the paper for those ten minutes) - that paper was in his every movement and utterance. He shuffled off but didn't sit down and read but went over to another couple sitting across the way to tell them what had happened. "He," said the man, in fully earshot of me, "just took the paper. Can you believe it?" If I'd realised it was a copy of the Daily Mail I wouldn't actually have bothered touching it. And if only he'd known (although he reads the DM every day, so probably did know) what he'd relished fighting to have back in his possession - Jan Moir's nasty ramblings. Yuk.

How much???

Positive(ish) story about regeneration in the town of Beverley in today's HDM. Unfortunately, the figure highlighted in the overline doesn't quite excite. £120's not going to regenerate or transform much, is it?
Read the full story here.

Biting backs...

Bless the Hull Advertiser, the weekly newspaper circulated around the city and its surrounds by my former employer. The Advertiser is a free sheet which has, at various points in its time, had its own editorial staff but is now a compilation of the HDM's daily content in the form of '60 second' glorified nibs. Which is no bad thing, although it doesn't always inspire a reader to read on. One headline did do the job this week though - BBC bites backs in 'ageism' row. For me, it brought to mind images of Paxman, Clarkson and Anne Robinson sinking their teeth into old folk. Turns out it's nothing more than a simple typo (the kind of literal I used to introduce into newspapers during my relatively short tenure - sometimes for fun, sometimes because my attention to detail was somewhat distracted by holding play readings somewhere else in the building). If anyone's going to take a lump out of anyone's back, it will, I read, be Government ageism tsar Dame Joan Bakewell (no gags about tarts, please, although a couple of extra consonants and a sub with a sense of humour could have seen to that), who ain't happy about the way the Beeb banishes female presenters over-50. And rightly so. Of course, I'd already seen/heard the story elsewhere but it wasn't presented so well - a two deck headline atop three paragraphs. One of those paragraphs - the first - was a bit shoddy too: The BBC hittting back at accusations "of that it is"... The poor subs over at the HDM are somewhat under the kosh at the mo' due to whole Centre of Excellence reshuffle that's ripped through Northcliffe. My thoughts are with them.

Mr Paul Harris, a blind man...

Stories abound in the world of print media of dummy headlines and picture captions that subs never got round to changing before the newspaper went to print. 'Insert headline here' and Caption: Caption are the least worrying of these. I seem to remember, although I might be making it up, that 'Insert picture of fat cow here' snuck through in my day.

The story of Mr Blind Man, which is Hull's latest national media appearance, comes from a similar place. Council tenant Paul Harris, who was registered blind last year, go the reports, was sent a letter from some maintenance contractors. The letter addressed him as Mr Blindman. Apparently this was a 'database error' on the contractors' part. Yes, of course it was. I've just heard Mr Harris on the radio. He sounded, quite understandably, a bit upset. I do like this quote from him, which, in summing up his dismay at how this could have all happened, made me laugh like a little schoolboy:

"You wouldn't send a letter to a person who's got Down's Syndrome saying Dear Mr Down's Syndrome would you?"

Well, these contractors might do that. And who knows what dummy picture caption a sub might come up with.

tinyurl.com/dfbwmf

Single mouse...

This bill for the Manchester Evening News is, quite possibly, my favourite sighting during two days in Manchester (although the large gathering of female Celtic fans battering the permed hair out of each other comes a close second. But I didn't get a pic of that, d'oh!). Single mouse causes havoc at baby unit? Huh? Had the mouse just separated from its rodent partner and gone on a vandalism spree? Are these single mice more prone to causing havoc at baby units than their married counterparts?

A case of the DTs...

Tomorrow the Daily Telegraph promises a guide to photographing 'absolutely everything'. Now, I don't have an enormous amount of free time, 7 month old son and all that, so I won't get round to it myself but I would imagine that even the most dedicated of photographers would be hard pushed to take on this mammoth task. Taking photographs of absolutely everything? Cripes. If you are following the DT's guide, good luck! And apologies in advance if I don't have the time to view the results.

Welcome to the blank charade...

I had the misfortune to read a comp copy of the Daily Mail today, and found, within its tightly packed, appallingly designed and scaremongeringly sensationalist pages a warning headed: Why no child is safe from the sinister cult of emo that built a case against teenagers wearing dark clothes, wrist bands from Claire's Accessories and long fringes and listening to Blink 182 (!!!) on the grounds that they may commit suicide like Hannah Bond, who, the Mail suggests, would have been alive now if she hadn't discovered emo and become addicted to the internet's evil Bebo. A tragic case indeed but the Mail does Hannah's memory no favours. The only thing they get right is the sentence: "No doubt many adults would ask: 'So what?'" I must remember to have a chat with my skinny jean fixated teenage son, if I can get to him through his lengthy fringe, in order to demonstrate my new Mail-inlfuenced knowledge, without which I would never have known that "Emos like guitar-based rock with emotional lyrics". Dear oh dear.

A thousand trees...

More press clippings sort of sorted, cut out, transferred to plastic transparent wallets and snapped inside ring binders, in no particular order, original publications sliced to smithereens and hurled into a box for later disposal. Obscure, defunct publications, far-flung newspapers, dodgy trade magazine, print outs of long-since collapsed websites, even bizarre pitches to magazine editors sneaking in here and there (one to Total Football: "Let me write a feature for you about what it is to follow a perennial loser - Hull City - instead of you wasting more print on those top flight bastards that fill your pages." I don't recall ever having read Total Football, don't really feel strongly about Premiership sides getting coverage in what is, after all, a wholly appropriate publication, and hadn't followed City closely since 1982). Some memories revived and stirred along the way and a lot of newsprint on the hands. Catherine Cooper from The Stage welcomed me to the fold by telling me that the said publication rarely published a review that dared to damn a show. I got in there because my predecessor in the region, Barbara Theakston, had gone deaf but also, bizarrely, was increasingly complaining that the productions she was watching were too 'loud'.

I realised, as I got busy with my craft knife, that I miss writing for newspapers and magazines, although I'm happy to no longer be a critic and reviewer. I enjoyed working for Artscene and its editor, Vic Allen, who had, maybe even still has, the finest head of hair in journalism. Vic's briefs (no, I don't mean his pants) were truly great - if they had been written down they would have been several thousand words over the required word count. I didn't do that much for Artscene over the course of eight-ish years - little bits here, little bits there - but I always felt that the mag was important and I was honoured to be a part of it right up to its untimely demise, a victim of some brave new electronic, interactive world perceived by Arts Council England that hasn't really materialised. The Big Issue In The North, first place that paid me for the privilege of publishing my words. I remember buying a copy and running around town, bumping into people I knew and showing them the piece I'd written, with a great big grin on my face, as if I'd won the Booker prize or something. But I had always remained so excited about seeing my name between front and back covers and hadn't got so cynical and weary. The HDM, bless it. I haven't salvaged a lot from five years of hack work. But there were three columns that I'm proud of and several little bits of me that sneaked through that should have been stopped in their tracks. I loved the Mail when I turned up there, all excited to have bagged a job that meant I'd get paid for writing full-time. Then I spent all my time shunning and running from responsibility. I could have done a lot more for them if they'd let me but, well, sometimes it doesn't work out like that, does it? And the end might, when it came, not have been for such exciting reasons.

Interpup v The Mighty Windass

The playwright David Eldridge has, for the second time, christened me The Mighty Windass. Which, coming from such an esteemed theatrical gent, is very nice indeed (and marketing will, I'm sure, be keen to use it on the posters come January). In the spirit of Lewis Carroll, of course, if he says it a third time I will indeed become The Mighty Windass and I shall rule, if not the Universe, the World or the country, then at least a couple of the dirtier streets in east Hull. I am assuming that David is, perhaps, a fan of the Christopher Guest film A Mighty Wind, a piece of work that I wish had existed during my school days as The Mighty Windass is certainly preferable to a lot of the utterly uncreative names I was called as a trembling, spotty member of Woggy (!) Hall's form with an oh-so-funny surname at the boys only Riley High - an establishment designed and run with the encouragement and training (but very rarely education) of thugs in mind. All of which, in a rather contrived way, brings me round to a conversation I overheard at the bus stop this afternoon. Someone was talking about being bullied. A bigger, older chap who should have known better offered the bullied some advice: "Yeah, bullies, they don't give a shit about you. So if you're gonna be punched you may as well give them a slap. Tell you what you need to do. Put some pool balls in a sock and whack the bastards across the head."

Actually, steering my thoughts back to the playwright David Eldridge, I've not given up on Big Brother. I'm there every night - even forcing M to endure the show on the nights when she feels indifferent to tuning in - and will be until the end. There's nowt so life-affirming as meaningless trash on telly, is there? But I've gotta say that I'm missing Russell Brand on Big Mouth enormously, and have yet to find a guest presenter that doesn't leave me wanting to throw one of the cats at the television or, say, whack Pete Burns across the head with some pool balls in a sock.

So, we we're in town - I had to drop a hard copy of the aformentioned half a script in at the theatre - and I walked past a newspaper bill board, announcing the staggering news Hull shops to open late. Which illustrates, I suppose, that we're in the middle of the silly season when nothing much happens but is hardly the earth-shattering stuff of your above-average front page. Keen, as ever, not to buy a copy of the paper I read the story online when I got home, amazed that mother-of-two Lynn Smith, 32, of Belvoir Street, west Hull, reckoned that "Late-night shopping will make life easier." Which makes it sound like shops being open until 7pm is on a par with the invention of the wheel, the availability of food and peace in all corners of the globe. But never mind late night shopping, you want stuff that makes life easier, you read what the clever Newsround kids have to say. I especially like 10-year-old Lauren's: "I would invent a robot dog called Interpup. On his belly would be a screen and you could play games or surf the web. You could teach him to speak and sing by telling him through the speaker!" The Mighty Windass would certainly buy one of those.

Half a job...

Submitted a revised first half of the play. Always a relief to get these things off my hands, a few minutes of calm before the next life-trauma needs unravelling. At almost the same time I got an email from someone informing me that an entire coach load of people are attending the play on the same night. I'm amazed at and impressed by the way some folk can be so incredibly organised five months ahead of an event, if I can call my own play an event - I'll probably only start thinking about my own tix for the play a couple of hours before the curtain (what curtain? Have you ever been to Hull Truck? - reality check ed.) goes up. Quite obviously, having revised the first half of the play now means that I have to turn my attention to the second half for it is, indeed, a play of two halves.

Like the other 60 million writers in the country, I'm also knocking an idea into shape for the Red Planet competition. Now, I'm not big on writing competitions (it's no way to develop anyone's talent, is it?) but it seemed like a nice diversion at the time. And, at last, I'm writing about the wacky world of regional newspapers. I wondered when that would happen and suddenly, it has. It won't stand a chance of winning, I'm certain of that, but what I have doodled thus far may well form the basis of something that could be performed a bit further down the line. Although, maybe not, as that would mean finishing it. In case you're wondering, my regional newspaper drama is not about me, as that would mean that it revolved around a main protagonist who spent much of the time he was being paid to write content for various publications actually writing plays and being in rehearsals instead, rather than around a main protagonist who spent much of the time he was being paid to write content for various publications getting pissed instead. I jest, of course - they all work incredibly hard and very long hours.