GLEE SHOUT IT OUT LOUD MOVIE
I was delighted to have become a movie guy. I wrote six movies all of which I thought were remarkable. An up-and-coming film production company asked me if I would be kind enough to write them screenplays to add to their portfolio. Mothers requested private tuition for their obnoxious children.
GLEE SHOUT IT OUT LOUD DRIVERS
Two miserable years later, we had air time on the two most popular TV channels and EBA had picked up a cult following, not of maids and tuk tuk drivers as had been planned, but from the ranks of the middle-class. The place was bereft of English speakers and sadly lacking in creativity so I was persuaded to stay on to direct my dubious masterpiece. I’d planned to collect my salary and leave.īut that was not to be so. It was exactly what they wanted to brighten up their dull programming. So when I fronted up at the rector’s office with the script for a forty-programme situation comedy called English By Accident, the administration was delighted. They mistakenly assumed I knew what I was doing. My task was to teach English via the television. At one point, mainly to escape human contact, I took up a position with the open university in Thailand. For twenty odd years I stood bemused at the front of an assortment of classrooms wondering when fate would return me to my home dimension. I had passed through some peculiar portal that turned me into a teacher. So how did it happen that I should wake up one morning as a writer? I’ll keep this brief. Who needed books? My visual cortex was rampant. There was a whole new world of motion pictures packaged in plastic cassettes on tape that unfurled like wayward spaghetti at crucial plot moments. And soon you didn’t need to go to the cinema at all. If you didn’t have a special lady, you could charcoal on a moustache and sneak into stinky airless adult cinemas and fill in the gaps of what they didn’t tell you at school. Then there was cinema as a form of education. One eye always trained on the screen in case you missed something. You could save up for a month, buy a packet of chocolate raisins, and canoodle with your girlfriend in the back row of the stalls. You learned to appreciate cinema as a venue. I grew up, as boys must, and found new outlets to shout aloud with glee…about. Me and Johnny Dukes would stage sword fights on the way home and practice unhelpful dialogue like, “Avast ye scallywags.” Who needed Steinbeck when you had Errol Flynn? I was a proud minor of the ABC cinema on Wimbledon High Street where I would go… “To see the films we love and shout aloud with glee.” (Song.) We idolized Flash Gordon in black and white, Tom and Jerry, the Three Stooges. Then there were the affordable Saturday morning picture shows. For the modest cost of a television license, you could enjoy the dramatic marvels of the BBC and watch hours of sport. Those were the days when the TV had to warm up before you got a picture. I relied on television and cinema to stoke my cultural development. There were too many distractions girls to chase, balls to kick, cigarettes to choke on. As a lad I was too impatient to nuzzle down with a good book. As a published writer I suppose I should be embarrassed to confess such a thing.
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