Shoulda left it to the robots

You might find this review of Interstellar a bit spoilery. But at least it's over faster than the movie...

So, the Earth is dying because they can't figure out to use hydroponics. And Cowboy Farmer finds mysterious symbols in his ramshackle old house (= Signs, Close Encounters). And he says, "It's not a ghost. It's gravity." Though why shouldn't a ghost use symbols? Maybe it's the ghost of a mathematician. And he looks at a bunch of numbers in binary and he doesn't say, "WTF are these numbers?" Oh no. Instead he goes, "They're coordinates!" And they are the coordinates for a secret base within driving distance of his house. And he gets there and they say, "Oh yes, those are mysterious gravity things sent by these aliens who put this wormhole near Saturn" (2001). And nobody says, "Hang on, you're our best pilot and the gravity fairies told you the coordinates of NASA? So let's think about that for five seconds."

But you soon realize why nobody tries to have conversations like that, because one guy would say, "Could the arrival of the wormhole have anything to do with Earth's climate getting messed up?" but then another guy would say, "Faith is about reaching your hand up and knowing there will be something there to hold onto." And then they'll all nod and the first guy will be secretly thinking, "I'm locked in here with the crazy people." So they get into the ship and even though the robots seem to be the only intelligent ones, nobody pays any attention to them, probably because whenever you go, "I have a cold, maybe homeopathy and love and peace will cure it," they would say, "Are you absolutely sure you're the species that created us?"

OK, so off into space and more running about like a bunch of teenagers forced to go on a survival weekend (this crew could get a job on Prometheus, no trouble) and when they come back after 23 years in a gravity well, and Lady Scientist says, "Let's go to planet A" and Cowboy Pilot says, "Hang on, planet B is better but your boyfriend is on planet A, right?" she doesn't say, "Ya got me," she starts coming out with asinine twaddle about maybe that's the best criterion for judging stuff, and love is energy, like, innit, and it's the only thing that transcends time. (And also hate, lust, fart jokes, etc, in that case.) And the others don't say, "Oh, stop wriggling. We caught you out and you know it." No, they listen to her whole critically-failed Fast Talk roll as if it was a valid point. And then Dr Man (geddit?) turns out to be yet another famous actor, and he is mad and evil and tries to kill them, saying that nobody would go on risking their necks to save the whole human species, they'd only do it to specifically save their own family - even though history is full of examples of people putting the group first, and that is kind of the whole USP of homo sapiens. Obviously not a regular churchgoer, Man tries to kill everybody and take over the mission for HAL-like reasons, but everyone is saved thanks to the robots (what did I say about them?). This doesn't stop Cowboy Pilot from telling the robots they have to be sacrificed in a black hole. Lady Scientist doesn't come out with one of her love-is-energy speeches there, but she does at least query whether you should tell an intelligent, loyal being to sacrifice itself for your sake. Luckily Cowboy Pilot has an answer: "They have to do anything we tell them." (Hah, you fool, Aristotle, why did you waste all that time on that Ethics book, ya booby?) Anyway, Cowpoke sacrifices himself too, and he falls through the event horizon into Inception, where he gets a view of his daughter's bedroom as she's growing up and he can send her messages by pushing books and making the dust spell out binary messages. This would all be very confusing, but luckily one of the robots is on hand to explain absolutely everything to us (ya see? ya see?) and it turns out not to be God doing all this, but the gravity fairies are are, like, 5-dimensional people from the future. And they have just enough vestigial interest in the fate of the entire species (from which they evolved, let's not forget that) to give Cowboy Pilot limited access to one room on his farm over a 30-year peiod. Contacting humanity and giving us the answer to climate control, terraforming, wheat blight and wormhole tech would have been just too easy. And you can see the discussion (imagine this in 5 dimensions): "Shall we explain what they need to do to survive?" "Explanations are a bit too sciencey. Love is energy, dude." "Oh yeah. Just give this one guy a mystic experience, then. After all, we already know he must succeed or we wouldn't be here." "Point. Also, without the woo there's no movie. And we're shooting for M Night Shyamalan to direct."

No good points? Oh sure. I liked the explanation of why wormholes are spherical, the black hole FX, and the robots.

Nurse Twicely

The character of Nurse Twicely was unveiled to young readers – in fact, literally unwrapped – in A Little Lint and the Holy Spirit, a short novel by Mabel Barltrop, founder of the Panacea Society. The Hallivancy children find what they think is an Egyptian mummy: a figure swaddled in bandages in the lost luggage office at their local station. Their little dog Binky (later renamed Bad Dog by Nurse Twicely) gets hold of the end of the bandages and runs off, unwinding them to reveal a dozing Nurse Twicely.

“You naughty children,” she says. “I was having a nap after my journey and I suppose you put me in here like somebody’s lost steamer trunk?” When the children protest, she tells them never to talk back to an adult. Thus the Nurse Twicely books start as they go on, hammering home the suffocating manners of middle-class Edwardian England. But if that’s all the stories amounted to, they would not have been likely to seize the imagination of a generation of children. Mrs Barltrop was canny enough to include a hint of something fantastic as well:

“Why were you wrapped up in bandages?” said Annabel. “If you don’t mind me asking, miss.”
     “It’s not miss, it’s nurse,” said Nurse Twicely. “And they aren’t bandages like those horrid Gyptians who hounded Moses used to use. This is holy lint, and wrapping myself in it has given me as much get-up-and-go as a dozen tonics and fifty spoons of castor oil.”
     With that, she gathered up all the strips of fabric and smartly wrapped them into rolls, just as fast as cook could whip an egg. Binky gave a little growl as she tugged the last piece out of his mouth, but she wagged a short thick finger at him and he went as quiet as a wound-down clock, just like that. Then she packed roll after roll of bandages into her battered black bag. And there had been miles and miles of them, enough to stretch between every tree on the village green and still have enough to string the maypole, but she packed them all away in there like a conjurer doing a trick backwards.
     “Now then,” she said, snapping shut the big brass clasp and taking up her bag. “I can see four growing children, and somebody mentioned castor oil.” 

The first book was published in 1924 and was followed by Nurse Twicely Returns and A Third Spoonful of Nurse Twicely. Her return in the second book (she arrives wrapped in brown paper having been posted from Timbuktu where she had gone to help the missionaries) gives a reason for her name: “Because I will give naughty children a second chance, you see, but only Our Lord can give you three chances, and after that you can whistle all you like about your hot toes but there’ll be no help for it.”

At the end of the second book she climbs into her Prophecy Box and announces that she will only visit again when Shiloh (the Panacea Society’s female saviour) has come for watercress sandwiches on the lawn. This presented problems when the success of the series meant that Mrs Barltrop’s publishers demanded the third book for which she had contracted, so the stories in the new volume were explained away as some adventures from Nurse Twicely’s other two visits to the Hallivancy household that she had forgotten to mention earlier. (It is surprising that Mrs Barltrop was confounded by the need for consistency given that, in the course of the books, the Hallivancy children go from being orphans to having a mother whose eye colour changes twice and a father who is either dead, in India on business, or the local clergyman.)

Some elements are established in these three books that are present in Nurse Twicely’s later incarnations. She wears a white linen hat “shaped like a scone”, she is best friends with twenty-four bishops, she has an even lower opinion of little boys than she does of little girls, she likes cats but not dogs, and she takes her charges on whirlwind adventures around the world. In the books her adventures are rather pedestrian, despite the exotic locations and fanciful (or ignorant) depictions of native characters. Her motivation for these trips seems to be only to take the healing lint to sick children who have sent her postcards. Her relationship with the Hallivancy children remains that of an admonishing martinet enforcing “nice” manners. But all that was to change…

By 1930, in order to retain its charitable status, the Panacea Society was obliged to shed some of its assets. Mrs Barltrop sold the rights in the Nurse Twicely books to the West End impresario Norton Dudley. He apparently never read the books, buying the rights on the advice of his eight-year-old nephew, and promptly decided they were ripe for theatrical adaptation. For this purpose he engaged twin writers Jonas and Ruta Dauksa, Lithuanian Jews whose experimental plays had been strongly influenced by Artaud’s surrealistic Theatre of Cruelty. To Nurse Twicely’s adventures the Dauksas brought an element of uncontrolled fabulosity, much of it probably deriving from their poor command of English. A flavour of this may be detected in the different ways they have Nurse Twicely convey the children on adventures:

• Setting sail in the boat at the bottom of the garden
• Taking off in a flying lawnmower piloted by the gardener
• Being carried along in the “plodding shed”
• Sitting on deckchairs in the mist
• Following the Rubric Footpath
• Taking a “quirkular” route through a cornfield (“Why, it’s a maize.”)
• Going out along the Dizza Pier, which sinks beneath the waves 

As the Dauksas’ style of humour proved disturbing, to say the least, older children were not infrequently removed from early performances in tears. Their younger brothers and sisters, however, having a less fixed idea of what reality ought to be, seem to have embraced what Jonas Dauksa called “the surrealiness” with enthusiasm. Nonetheless, with an eye to the box office, Norton Dudley decided that adding songs would make the play more accessible, to which end he hired Jonathan “Snapper” McFeely, a choreographer and street musician who had been a well-known figure in Soho pubs until his arrest in 1923 on indecency charges involving a tortoise.

McFeely composed a number of songs including “Jar-daft and Wobbly Wise”, “Poor Mr Butterhead”, “Black Magic and Fairycakes”, “Cardboardilly Boxadally”, “Socks for Tea”, “The Trouble with Tuesdays”, “Penguin Pie”, and “Riffraff and Sundry”. It should be no surprise to the reader to learn that McFeely had acquired a drug habit while in prison and fuelled his creative sessions with a cocktail of brandy, gin, betel leaf juice, and various narcotics.

The stage play enjoyed only moderate success and, as the generation that grew up with her turned to face the exigencies of the day, Nurse Twicely might have been forgotten. But in 1940 Norton Dudley, in an excess of patriotic zeal brought on by a health scare, donated the film rights to the Ministry of Information. “It shows the pride and ingenuity of the Semitic peoples in the face of adversity,” he declared, having forgotten the books ever existed or that Nurse Twicely, even in the Dauksas’ version, rarely allowed a scene to pass by without a dose of Biblical sanctimony.

That was swept away for the 1943 movie starring Arthur Askey. The script as rewritten by Marriott Edgar dispensed with Nurse Twicely’s smothering piety and made the whole story funnier and faster-paced, though at the expense of losing some of the fanciful charm the Dauksas had brought to it. Naturally Askey could not be repressed from improvising his trademark style of broad comedy patter with lines like, “Have you got the lint?” “Steady on, it’s just a touch of gout,” and the catchphrase, “That’ll do nicely, Twicely.” Some of the dialogue was deemed too risqué for wartime audiences, and ministry officials imposed a sound of crashing waves over the soundtrack as the Dizza Pier submerged:

NURSE: My old friend Dizzy? We called her Dizzy Peer on account of her bins. Like bottles, they were. Only you wouldn’t get a ha’pence if you took those back.
BISHOP: I didn’t say Dizzy. I said this is the Dizza Pier. It goes down, you see.
NURSE: So did Dizzy for two bob and a jam sandwich. 

The Rubric Footpath, which in the books was signposted with tendentious homilies and in the Dauksa play with koan-like riddles, here becomes the Rubberbrick Footpath, which Askey is able to bounce along with the help of some early wire work.

The episode in which Dolly Hallavancy is taken to the dentist illustrates the evolution of the concept. In Mrs Barltrop’s novel, Dolly is told to pull herself together, that the power of prayer is much more effective than any anaesthetic, and that Jesus endured much worse than toothache without complaint. In the play, the dentist has run out of laughing gas so he gives Dolly sneezing gas instead. It was left to Marriott Edgar to turn this into a full-blown comedy set-piece. In place of laughing gas, Dolly is offered a range of substitutes: “Sneezing gas, burping gas, hiccup gas. This one… oh, that just gives you gas.” Opting for blurting gas, Dolly then finds she cannot keep a secret or tell a lie, causing mayhem in the Hallavancy household until Nurse Twicely counteracts the outbreak of honesty with a gobstopper. Yet it’s possible that Mr Edgar may have drawn inspiration for this scene from the novel, where the character is known as the Gossiping Dentist and reveals all sorts of indiscretions. In the play this has become the Gossipy Dentures, an amusing puppet character who lives in a glass of water and generates chaos with his acerbic Loki-like pronouncements. (In the movie, the Gossipy Dentures appear only briefly and are voiced by Will Hay.)

Other characters that appear in various incarnations in either book, play, movie, or all three include the Garden Metro-gnome, Bad Dog and Wise Cat, and Dr Hugh, the twenty-fourth bishop who helps rescue the other twenty-three after they have fallen through the Prophecy Box into another world (an obvious lift from E Nesbit’s short story, “The Aunt and Amabel”).

After the war, with the books out of print and cinemas eager to replace British pictures with imported Hollywood features, the character of Nurse Twicely lapsed into obscurity. It’s possible that a young Spike Milligan may have come across the play while entertaining the troops in his artillery unit as part of the First Army in North Africa. Could Mabel Barltrop’s hectoring creation have influenced the anarchic comedy of the Goons? The truth, as ever, is unknowable.

The Buried Giant: some treasure here, but more spadework required

There’s a tendency among many writers of literary fiction to opt for emotional coolness and ironic detachment, as though fearing that any hint of excitement in their storytelling would undermine the serious intent of the work. I don’t know where this notion came from. You can’t see Maugham or Greene or Forster having any truck with it. But the question is not where it started but whether that is the kind of literary writer that Kazuo Ishiguro is.

Adam Mars-Jones seems to think so. In his LRB review of The Buried Giant, he particularly takes Ishiguro to task for throwing away what ought to be a Fairbanks-style set-piece in a burning tower by allowing “nothing as vulgar as direct narration to give it the vitality of something that might be happening in front of our eyes”.

I’m not so sure about that particular scene. It could be that Ishiguro is reaching, not for the drama of the events, but the drama of the telling of the events. In the way he deploys the scene, we’re left in the dark for a while as to the fate that has befallen a major character. It’s how Conrad, say, might have chosen to tell it. The point is, though those events are not told in a way that plays up the excitement of the action itself, they nonetheless have dramatic effect. It works – just not as Mars-Jones or I might have preferred.

But there are other bits of the story that do not work at all, and make me think that Ishiguro either scorns, or is not craftsman enough to manage, the control of the reader’s expectations that is needed for a novelist to hold and enthral.

An example – and from here on beware of spoilers: Wistan and Sir Gawain are both supposedly charged with killing a dragon whose breath is causing people’s memories to slip away. Finally, approaching the dragon’s lair, Sir Gawain reveals that he has actually been protecting it for all these years. The two warriors walk up to the lair, chatting away, and we have plenty of time to see how this has to play out. Wistan and Gawain must fight, and because the book has a good way to go yet and there’d be no story if the dragon isn’t killed, we can see that Wistan will beat Gawain, and then he’ll slay the dragon. Almost sheepishly, Ishiguro then goes through those exact motions, apparently sensing that something he has done has defanged what ought to be a thrilling peripety, but not knowing how to fix it.

Unlike the burning tower, this isn’t a case of a scene that Ishiguro has made to work differently. As he tells it, the scene simply does not work. No story can grip if it fails to make the reader wonder what’s going to happen next. Here’s how he could have fixed it. Wistan and Gawain walk up to the lair. Wistan is still injured from the fight in the tower, Gawain is an old man. We wonder if even together they’ll be able to overcome the dragon. Then, just as they’re about to descend into the crater where the dragon waits, Gawain steps in front of Wistan and admits that he is sworn to protect it. Now that would be a moment of pure anagnorisis to make Aristotle cheer – and the reader would be left reeling. What? Sir Gawain’s on the dragon’s side? He’s about to fight Wistan? What is going to happen now?

See? Told like that we wouldn’t have time to predict the consequences. We’d be in the moment, struggling to draw breath. It would be – gosh – exciting. And it would work.

There are other places where Ishiguro struggles with the storyteller’s craft like it’s a broken deckchair. Fleeing from enemy soldiers through an underground labyrinth, Gawain and his companions come to a portcullis, which they lower – barring their own escape route – simply so that they can discuss (ie tell us about) the hell-hound that is said to dwell in the tunnels. In a movie the hound would at least turn out to be on the same side of the portcullis, though the shock would be soured by knowing the characters had done something dumb just for the sake of getting the plot into its next mooring. As it is, the hound turns up on the other side and we have to go through a lot of tedious mechanics about how they will raise the portcullis while ensuring that the hound doesn’t attack the two old people who are tasked with doing that. Everything plays out exactly as Ishiguro has just had his characters describe it, and then to top it all off we have to go through yet more nuts-n-bolts prose about getting the portcullis up having cut the rope earlier.

This verges on “he crossed the room, putting one foot in front of the other, until he reached the other side,” and it’s surely the job of the editor to point out to the poor dumb author that he has befuddled himself with foolish details and really ought to take a stab at getting the story firing on all cylinders rather than wandering around the side alleys of his narrative in an obsessive-compulsive daze.

Talking of obsessive-compulsive, I feel compelled to dwell on some quibbles. Ishiguro has a curiously imprecise control of authorial viewpoint that may possibly be deliberate, but in light of some of the fumbled set-pieces I’m inclined to think it’s just a failure of craft. For instance, lapsing into a personal narrative voice as he is inclined to do every hundred pages or so, he says, “Many were roundhouses not so far removed from the kind in which some of you, or perhaps your parents, were brought up.” Ah, so I am supposed to be a reader familiar with this world; these are events that occurred just a generation or two back. But not so fast – just a few lines further on he describes “a tall fence of tethered timber poles, their points sharpened like giant pencils” and we’re back in a modern mindset. Why not, “and a duckpond the shape of an iPad,” while you’re at it, Kazuo?

Maybe that skittering viewpoint is deliberate, but how about the sinews from a hacked-off arm being described as “entrails”? A “hollowed-out trunk” – when he means just a hollow trunk. “Comprised of” occurs a couple of times; didn’t this book have an editor? And there are several instances of constructions like, “with my wife and I hanging together on the rope” – these from characters whose grammar is otherwise solid enough.

And then this: the narrator tells us, “This door – it would have been a ‘proper’ door on wooden hinges – ” What? That voice, that “it would have been”, is how I might relate an anecdote. Pyrrhus being hit by the roof tile, for instance; something I know about but have no first-hand knowledge of, so I have to intuit details like, “it would have been a flowerpot-shaped cylindrical tile.” But everything else in The Buried Giant is related as if the narrator is there to see breath steaming on a cold morning, clothing flapping in a high wind. So why that one lapse into a removed viewpoint? If it’s technique rather than carelessness, it’s a technique that fails to have any useful effect.

Tom Holland in The Guardian gives Ishiguro the benefit of the doubt. "The gaps and seams," he says, "[...] are designed to show." But I say, goddamn it, an author should do the bloody work. Nabokov wanted Laura burned, and it was in not greatly more ramshackle a state than The Buried Giant. 

And yet – the book has something. A world in which memory is unreliable, a fantasy told without the pomp-rock bombast that’s typical of the genre, events recombining in oddly shifted permutations as in a dream, a quasi-allegorical exploration of love and loss – those are all interesting ideas. And Ishiguro has moments of great inventiveness that are well-served by his flatly unadorned style, as he talks of the ogres that emerge out of the mist or describes an attack by pixies on a boat caught in reeds. It often reads (and this probably is deliberate) like a translation of a classic saga, in that its brilliantly arresting images are recounted in the voice of an academic whose striving for accuracy sacrifices any of the original’s lyrical power. Fine, that's what Ishiguro set out to do and that, at least, he achieved. But me, I like to luxuriate in the poetry of beautiful language, and I kept thinking that if my accountant rewrote Malory or Beowulf she might end up with something a lot like this.

Look, here's the thing. All this carping is because I can see the outline of something great here. I just wish Ishiguro had chipped away the stone until he found it. Written by somebody like Alan Garner, The Buried Giant would be fabulous. As it is, throughout the book we continually run smack into quagmires of clumsy prose and expository specifics , with the result that it all reads like the extensive notes an author prepares before he or she gets stuck into writing the novel itself. It really is half brilliant and half incompetent – both "fascinating and moving" and yet "aimless and atomized", as Laura Miller described it in Salon - and that alone makes it almost unique among modern novels. Well, I say that, but I have yet to read the rest of Mr Ishiguro’s oeuvre.

If I haven't put you off reading the book (and I hope I haven't) then you might be interested in hearing Kazuo Ishiguro talk about it on this Guardian podcast.

 

Writers, have the courage of your convictions

It strikes me that the problem with a lot of television drama shows is that they seem to be created with the expectation that audiences will only keep half an eye on them while doing other things. Often the scripts are almost tongue-in-cheek, crowbarring in arbitrary plot developments and dei ex machina like sellotape slapped on to a badly wrapped present. It's as though the writers don't expect anybody to believe in their story, so they carry it all off with a big pantomime wink.

It's what I hate about a lot of British TV shows these days. They don't have the confidence to act like they even deserve your full attention. They treat drama like it's light entertainment, with sniggering nods (sorry, intertextual references) to quiz shows and guest-starring comedians or newsreaders instead of actors. And so, naturally, the audience doesn't ever fully engage. They watch it all with the cynical smile that insincerity invites, like a bully smirking at a victim who is resorting to pratfalls and forced jokes to try and ingratiate their way out of a beating.

Yet in the States, where network TV is subjected to the ongoing indignity of countless commercial breaks and messages running in the lower third, the actual craft of drama continues to be treated with proper reverence by the people making the show. You can watch a network drama like Elementary, Monk, Life, Eureka, ER... and it's clear that, despite the medium's contemptuous presentation of their work, everyone involved is willing to do their jobs as though you are giving the show your full attention. Even if three-quarters of the audience are actually tweeting, reading, talking on the phone while the show is on, the creators earn respect like an entertainer at a club who soldiers on professionally through constant heckling. They are doing the work. No faking, no ironic distance. It's obvious that they genuinely care.

If you're a writer or an artist or a musician, whether working in television or novels or comics, integrity is the single most important thing you have. It can be hard to hold onto that integrity if you don't feel like anybody is paying attention, but lash yourself to the mast and see it through - because unaffected love for the work you are doing is the only way to engender love in an audience.

Showrunner of your story, captain of your soul

"Think anybody these days would disregard George RR Martin or JK Rowling on the subject of typeface or cover design? That’s even if they could. Jonny Geller wrote for The Bookseller recently about how Susanna Clarke’s deal for the miniseries of Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell gives her more control than the original film deal twelve years ago. That’s not a concession, not a sop to the author’s preening ego. It’s a win-win. An author like Ms Clarke, as demiurge of their story universe, sits at the heart of its sun. From there, everything is illuminated. By comparison, anybody else can only know half as much – and most of that will be wrong."

This week I began a regular column in The Bookseller. My first piece (excerpt above) is about the role of the writer as creative champion of a project - whether book, comic, videogame, TV show or movie. (Or radio play, I guess - gimme a break, you know how hard it is being a Renaissance Man these days?) Pop over and take a look. Leave a comment. Debate is good, and remember there are no right answers.

Publishing contracts: three key things to watch for

Some years ago, Jamie Thomson and I were setting up a development company using investment and personnel from the games publisher where we worked. There were three contracts to negotiate (for two games and the start-up itself) each the size and complexity of a government white paper. So every evening after work, Jamie and I would sit with the publisher’s lawyers hammering out the deal point by point. Days of this. Did I curse my lot? Oh yes. ‘I’m a game designer, not a contracts lawyer,’ was the habitual grumble.

Why not use our own lawyers? That’s an expensive way to begin a start-up, since each clause had to be parsed as if it were a safety instruction for the ISS. The main reason, though, is that lawyers can’t do your negotiating for you. It’s like an author with an agent. Don’t you and the agent have congruent goals? Not quite. He or she gets a percentage, but you’re the one who has to live by the contract’s terms. Make sure, therefore, that you’ve scrutinized and agreed every point.

These days you don’t have to be involved in a start-up to need to know your way around a contract. Authors have become savvier now that they have the option to self-publish. About time, too. When I started out in the business, it was common for authors to sign publishing deals that gave no guarantee of print runs or marketing spend. It still is, actually. Quite recently a friend of mine had a novel published by one of the Big Five that I have yet to see in any bookstore or reviewed in any magazine or paper. They might as well have put concrete overshoes on his manuscript and tossed it in the East River.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There are three things that an author should look out for when negotiating with a publisher. Attend to those and the contract can be, as an idealist once said, ‘an agreement between friends to make sure they stay friends.’

First, a publishing deal is a joint venture. In any joint venture, you can only agree an equitable division of spoils when you know what each party is putting in. Now, there’s no way to know the value of a novel before it’s published – if there were, we’d all self-publish. But you do know how much money (in terms of time and risk) you invested in it. Say it’s nine months. What is nine months of your time worth? Once you’ve settled on that, find out what the publisher is going to be investing. They have no reason not to be specific; this is a partnership after all. Say that their editing, design, printing, distribution and advertising tots up to the same as your nine man-months. That’s a fifty-fifty JV, and don’t let anybody tell you any different. The advance has to be factored in, of course, but remember that you’re the early investor here. You plunged on in the wild surmise that nine months at the keyboard would result in something that others would deem worth reading. Publishing your book isn’t a personal favour.

By the way, authors can be delicate flowers so maybe you don’t like the idea of demanding to know the publisher’s business plan for the book? Spin it around. Do you think they would sign a contract that specified all their obligations but left blank the details of what you were going to write? The reason they wouldn’t is they can always do a deal with someone else. And so can you. You have a finished manuscript. You can walk across the road and publish with someone else. They want your book, remember. Any glint of magisterial disdain you may detect is really the shiny sweat of desperation.

For the second tip, skip to the stuff at the back: what does the contract say about its own termination? In the old days termination might be triggered by a book going out of print, but with print on demand that’s meaningless. Instead you’ll need to agree a minimum level of sales. Consider that and other termination conditions. Your aim is to make sure that the rights don’t remain tied up in perpetuity. The day may well come when the publisher has no great interest in promoting your book. Fair enough, it’s not their baby, but you won't feel the same way. The partnership then no longer makes any sense, so make sure you aren't going to be chained together after that point is reached.

Thirdly, be aware that it’s all very well to make statements of intent, but the contract has to back those statements up. Short of a default that triggers actual termination, what happens if one of the parties fails to do what they said they would? In the bigger world, a company might undertake not to dump dangerous chemicals in the sea. If they do, they are fined a million dollars, say. Right there you have a clause that, if the cost of processing those chemicals to make them safe is more than a million, stands as a guarantee that they will get dumped in the sea. A contract is a set of game rules, you see. You sign and then you start playing the game and each side will see what they can do to win.

This isn’t cynicism, just reasonable caution. You’ll hear of the ‘Chinese Contract’ – supposedly an agreement so wisely constructed for the win-win that neither side has any reason to game it. But there are zero-sum elements in the most harmonious partnership. My wife and I can’t both have the whole of the last Rolo. You may notice grey areas in a proposed deal, and it is your job to identify them and seal up the gap. Nobody who intends to play fair would want to leave anything undefined and if they say, ‘We can decide that later,’ then leave at once. But when you do see and fix those loopholes, keep a smile on your face. ‘An agreement between friends,’ remember. Or to put it another way, ‘It’s not personal, it’s business.’

Gotta kiss a lot of frogs

‘We need a writer for an animated TV show. It’s from a concept by Viv Stanshall – ’

I was off like a shot. Viv Stanshall? The Bonzos. Do Not Adjust Your Set. Sir Henry Rawlinson and Cumberpatch the gardener – not to mention Old Scrotum the wrinkled retainer. Work on something cooked up in that great rambling, fecund greenhouse of a mind? You bet.

Well, even the best of us fires a blank from time to time. Viv’s “concept” was of a bunch of kid tadpoles living in a canal. The leader’s name was Walthamstow. That was the first red flag. It was where Viv grew up, but dammit, I don’t call any of my characters Stoke Poges, do I? The first gag in the script was a pun on Henry Ford’s comment that “history is bunk”. In a show for 7-10 year olds. A writer, they said they needed? I had to explain I’m not qualified to administer the Last Rites.

Other characters in the original pitch were Taddy Boy, complete with frock coat and Chris Isaak quiff, and a frog called the Wise Old One. Along with the name of Walthamstow’s gang (the Telstars) that rather stamped an expiry date on the whole package. There was also a Scottish tadpole who wore a Tam O’Shanter and always carried tartan bagpipes. Let’s not even, as they say. To help sell all this there was an animatic for which the production company had somehow managed to rope in Stephen Fry and Neil Innes. (Innes isn’t too big a surprise, admittedly, being Viv’s old mucker and therefore bound to do it for Old Times’ Sake, but what Fry was thinking I don’t know.)

The guys at the production company were excited because they had shown the animatic to a BBC exec and he had expressed a flicker of amusement. I wasn’t there, but I’m familiar with those Matrix-like halls and I’m willing to hazard that it was really just a hiccup after a long lunch. Encouraged as they were by this apparent evidence of approval, the production company nonetheless realized that the whole thing needed to be torn down, sown with salt, and rebuilt in pristine materials.

‘That name Walthamstow…’

‘Yeah. No. That’s shit, obviously. You can get rid of that.’

‘So what do we have to keep?’

‘Well, it’s got to be called Tadpoles.’

That’s what you want in a brief – ie, it actually was. I had just finished working at Elixir Studios, so I was familiar with the canals of Camden Town and liked the idea of dropping an edgy feeling of urban clamour and detritus into the canal – a development that I don’t believe Viv would have objected to.

As it often helps to have a writing partner when you want to spin up the levels of energy needed for comedy and/or animation, I roped in a friend of mine. (She is quite well-known these days, though wasn’t back then, and as I haven’t sought her permission to talk about this, I’ll be a gentleman and leave her name out of it.) We knocked out a script (this is one of several versions) after first changing all the characters:

TADPOLES Aquatis Personae

Finzer – aka (only to himself) "The Finz". Desperately wants to be cool, so the fact he's a tadpole AND a kid really gets him down.

Bino – Finzer's cousin. An albino tad; big and tough (for a tadpole).

Izzy – a wannabe tad. Don't call him a newt to his face.

K8 – pronounced "Kate". She’s sweet on Finzer, although she's in heavy duty denial about that.

Sprat – brainier than the rest and boy does he like them to know it. Sprat is a fish and, brainy as he is, he still can't figure out how come he and Finzer are half-brothers...

Dad Pole – dumb as ditchwater, but doesn't realize it.

Massy – Dad Pole’s girlfriend; the mother-figure of Finzer's household.

Mrs Todpuddle – the gang’s teacher. The longest suffering tadpole in the canal.

Spikey – the local bully/menace. He’s a mean-eyed fish and he’d like to eat you, but not before he’s sold you a dodgy timeshare in the Norfolk Broads. Think Arthur Daley at 78 rpm.

The Frogs – three grand old figures who are only glimpsed at the water’s edge, turned half away in profile like brooding Easter Island statues. Everyone thinks the Frogs are enormously wise and the source of all good fortune, but they never speak to tadpoles and might very well not even know they exist.

What came of Tadpoles? I’m not sure. I was busy with Leo Hartas preparing our comic strip Mirabilis: Year of Wonders to appear in The DFC, as well as developing book concepts with Jamie Thomson such as the Dark Lord series. Meanwhile, my Tadpoles writing partner had projects of her own. And the production company that hired us went out of business with the new animatic only half-finished. So, shrug. You get a lot of things like this to work on if you’re a freelance writer, usually for no money up front, and most of them deserve to be deep sixed. It’s not like it was a project very dear to my heart. The only regret is that it would have been nice to do something in memory of Viv Stanshall. Maybe this show, though, would have done him no favours.