Hey, screenwriters: more of this, please!

An occasional essay

Photo by Gordon Cowie on Unsplash

I blame covid for our addiction to box sets. My wife and I started with Elementary, (see here) which is probably our favourite of all – lots of episodes, clever and intriguing, and only occasionally getting lost in whatever it is that screenwriters think we need in order to keep watching.

With all our bingeing, we're running out of options, so I’m hoping there's a takeout service run by friendly screenwriters for the sort of fare I'm after. If there is, all I want is something to enjoy.

If you make a shed load of money out of it, that's fine by me. If you derail your career in writing a script and raising the money and it all flops, I'm really sorry. This post is an attempt to short circuit the process of enjoying myself by seeing if anybody else wants to write it so we can watch it. I'm happy to review it afterwards.

I’ll come to a couple of plotlines in second, but I guess what I'm after is more cosy and less crime. I don't mind a gun that goes bang in the dark, but I don't like all that violence, or indeed suspense or anything that the rating agencies would assess above mild peril. I'm not quite as bad as my grandson, who grabs Nana's hands and puts them over his eyes if Andy (see here) is running for his life, or an unexpected dinosaur jumps out of the ferns. But I'm right with him in wanting to be spared the gruesome stretches.

So less, please, of the dark plot lines with a hidden adversary who’s often at the next desk trying to mastermind the destruction of our hero over a series or two. We're just getting to the end of NCIS New Orleans series 3 (see here), which we have very much enjoyed but I keep putting off the last couple of episodes and an expected showdown between our hero and the mayor. (I don’t think this is a spoiler alert, but I’m not sure).

I think the long dark plotline is a subset of the even longer getting lost in the plotline scenario. Having decided that there is only so much a hero can do with a pile of bones or an identic memory, a penchant for pathology or counterintuitive diagnosis, a blender, a procedures manual, a campervan, or a quirky outlook, the screenwriters create a super-narrative that slurps us into a vortex of amazingly important things that don’t really matter to us or our hero but might reward a screenwriter. The vortex often kicks in around series 2 or 3 and usually wrecks series 4 to 35 (although I have to watch them all, just to be sure).

I appreciate that in watching TV at all, I’m admitting to enjoying the concatenation of the unlikely and the ephemeral by way of meaningless graphics, but I’m just trying to help the odd passing screenwriter out by indicating where I lose the will to live before I lose the will to hit the off button.

Maybe we could have less stupidity, too. You know, fewer people wandering alone into buildings stuffed with baddies, or law enforcers who take the afternoon off to rescue their third cousin – a crime boss intent on destroying the city – from a rival gang.

And finally, more loos, please! Heroes and villains handcuffed to old girders in deserted warehouses, dropped into empty wells, or locked in concrete dereliction to a soundtrack of dripping water – how to they manage? I have to pause my viewing a couple of times an evening to nip to the loo myself and I feel quite anxious about all these people trapped in box-set-land, sometimes for days, without access to amenities. I’m not asking for graphic imagery – water closets or ruinous wrecks relieving themselves in one corner of a room while improbably tethered to a coat hook in the other – I just want a helpful pointer, maybe a reassuring subtitle.

Plotlines

First, some stories not suggested or written by me that I’ve read and thought, ‘That would be fun to watch.’ This section absolutely hits my aim of doing as little as possible to maximise my viewing pleasure, since everything has already been done. All our friendly screenwriter has to do is plunder the text and deliver a script. (It's possible that I have badly misunderstood what a screenwriters and the like actually do, but I hope I've hinted at this lack of commitment to the cause already.)

I really enjoy Tim Sullivan’s (see here) creation, DS George Cross and would quite like to watch him in action. I recommended him to my 95 year-old Mom, and she’s up to book 5 on her Kindle (other e-readers are available). I see that Tim has already prepped for screenwriting before he turned to novels so he might take it on, himself. I like the creative and sympathetic way in which a character in danger of becoming a bit of a crime writer’s trope is fleshed out and pursues gainful employment while exploring the altogether more hazardous pursuit of developing friendships.

I appreciate that these tales have some striking scenes, and to spare me you might have to introduce a sanitised summary. I know it doesn't feature in the text, but perhaps we could listen in on a primary school teacher providing a sort of news round for the class, from time to time.

I’ve also been reading Otto Penzler’s edited Big Book of Christmas Mysteries (see here), which I appreciate is out of season. In my defence, it’s a very thick book (or would be if I weren’t reading it on Kindle, other e-books…) and I’ve been reading theology and other stuff in between, just to calm my nerves.

I hadn’t heard of Otto, or several of the short-story writers he has introduced me to, but I though Peter Lovesey’s The haunted crescent would be fun to watch, and if Wallace and Gromit are looking for a plot, The burglar and the whatsit, by Donald E Westlake might be adaptable for next Christmas. It’s even possible that Ed McBain’s And all through the housecould be morph into a DIP Christmas special.

Two free plots

Following this connection, these ideas won’t threaten Robert Thorogood (see here), but may have some mileage for the right mage with a sufficiently powerful wand.

The armchair sleuths

This isn't a very original idea but there is a neat twist to it, as I say, if the right magician happens to be writing the screenplay. It's sort of gogglebox (see here) meets cosy crime as a couple in their 60s (I said it wasn't very original) binge watch crime box sets. The trick is not to worry about who is most likely to have committed a particular crime but to work out who a screen writer would have picked for the sin of commission – which is always the answer in box-set-land. This couple’s genius lies in an unerring ability to home in on which of the 25 random strangers they meet in the first 5 minutes will be revealed as the villain in the last five. There are another dozen themes that could be developed in the series, all of which will strike a wonderful resonance with cosy crime aficionados who are finding the genre predicable while finding themselves hooked.

There are, of course, several major problems in developing this plot line, not least in connecting it to the real world. In my defence, I would say that connecting to the real world has not always been a high priority in the cosy crime I've most enjoyed.

If the writer is particularly adept, there may be a pun around armchair sleuths and amateur sleuths, but I haven’t found (or I would have used it, instead of offering it to you).

The Wednesday afternoon mainly not murder club

I think Chesterton may have been the first to nab Thursday for mysterious goings on (see here), although Richard Osman’s weekday quartet of crime solvers (see here) have reappropriated it to similar ends. So, let’s go for Wednesday, and a younger generation.

In the good old bad old ‘70s schooldays, when most, if not all, of Wednesday afternoons were free for sport, there were always a few undesirables, including me, who wanted to do other things. For obvious reasons football or road running were out in my case and so when I was in the sixth-form I started to spend Wednesday afternoons in the chemistry lab playing chess with a few other loiterers (the most laid back of whom turned out to be a fairly serious fast bowler, but I only discovered that later).

My tutor was unimpressed with this and somehow persuaded the Principal to shell out for a year’s subscription at the local snooker hall, where, with a few props (and a Chemistry teacher who tagged along), I played a devastatingly haphazard form of billiards and snooker. Hats off to you, Mick Lawson!

Anyhow, this scenario would involve a group of sixth formers in the mid-70s who secrete themselves away on Wednesday afternoons because they don’t want to be goalie at hockey or last pick for the footie. They decide to write a book together and a friendly teacher looks in on them from time to time, ensuring they aren’t outed to the pitch, and offering helpful suggestions.

It might be a gruesome book (some of what my colleagues were reading at the time would not pass my mild jeopardy test), but I hope not, and that it would have a clever plot around something topical at the time. I’m trying to think what was happening in the Midlands back then. British Leyland and much of the industrial heartlands were dying. Local factories were employing immigrant labour and Dad was teaching English to Yemenis on shift work, living 15 to a house and sending cash home to their families. A chap up the road, who worked on a production line was printing his own payslips so his wife wouldn’t realise he was squirrelling enough away to co-own a steam organ with a local factory owner. It got noisy they day she found out… Maybe something in there – the curious in the everyday.

Anyhow, the series could be about the developing plot as the chapters come together, but also about the writing process. And nobody need know how it was all going to end until, well, the end!

Over to you…

I know I’m a bit like Morris McGurk in Dr Suess’ If I ran the circus (watch here) or the con man Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man (see here) in selling something I haven’t the skill or courage to do myself.

But I’d really appreciate it if you did.