Ben Paddon

Category: Rants

  • Dinner Worry About It

    I’m stuck. I’ve hit a wall with this latest script. I’ve written my characters into a sitcom scenario that should be a tremendously funny moment – a sitcom dinner filled with hilarious misunderstandings – and yet I can’t seem to get any of the words to form on the page.

    I don’t know what it is. Maybe I’ve been staring at it too long. Maybe I need a second pair of eyes to offer some advice. Maybe… I don’t know, maybe I just need to sit down and hammer the scene out no matter how it turns out. That’s what first drafts are for, isn’t it? Get this shit out of your head and onto the page, and you can make it work later. But I obsess over making it work now. The rest of this script is stupendous, containing one of my favourite moments from anything I’ve ever written, but the rest of it just isn’t coming together. Everything was going so well…

    I’ve spent the last few days just watching sitcoms and trying to absorb as much via osmosis as I can. I’m currently watching “Joking Apart” for the first time. It’s funny, but it hasn’t aged well. There’s a distinct veneer of the 90s about it that is a little difficult to get past. The saxophone in the opening titles and incidental music, the fashion, the slightly off-kilter acting, it’s all a little overwhelming at times. I can usually shotgun a six-episode series of a show in one day, but I find myself digesting “Joking Apart” in bits. An episode here, an episode there.

    Maybe I should get Adam to have a look at it. But then his schedule hasn’t been ideal as of late. He hasn’t even had the time to give me notes on the first script I sent him…

  • A Funny Turn – on the subject of Russell T Davies and clunky writing

    I’ve been watching and rewatching a lot of Doctor Who lately, partially because I’m hard at work on three separate Doctor Who related projects (nothing official, o’ course – just some fun fan stuff) but mostly because… well, I love the show. I grew up with it, with Tom Baker and Peter Davison. My earliest Doctor Who memory is of “The Mind Robber”, seeing Jamie McCrimmon’s face being jumbled up. It horrified me as a child. It still sends tingles down my spine, even today.

    The fourth series of the revived show is probably the second-most uneven series of the show to date, right behind the second series, and yet both series contain some of my favourite episodes of the show. One such episode is “Turn Left”, an alternate-history episode that retells some of the events of the third and fourth series in a universe where the Doctor died. It’s a wonderful episode, brilliantly grim, if a bit over-the-top at times. However there’s one moment in the episode that I cannot take seriously:

    Torchwood fans try to pretend Ianto Jones never died. Some Doctor Who fans deem the ’96 TV Movie to be non-canonical. Me? I would happily remove this single shot from the show’s 48-year history without a moment’s hesitation.

    It’s a moment that is simply too over-the-top. It’s too silly, too ridiculous, too much after seeing London get nuked off of the planet. It’s not just the pointing, either. It’s the shaking of the head, the glare, the malice. It doesn’t work. It comes across as ridiculously cheesy, and in an episode as bleak as this it becomes unintentionally hilarious.

    I wanted to know how the scene read on the page, on Russell T Davies’ original shooting script, and fortunately enough it’s one of the many Doctor Who scripts available to download from the promotional site for “The Writer’s Tale”. So I downloaded it and had a look:

    It’s a nice piece of action text, but… well, it still doesn’t work. It tries to hammer home a point from an earlier scene – the Spanish maid can see the space beetle on Donna’s back – it’s too much. Too clunky. Too forced. If it were up to me, I’d remove the Spanish maid from this shot entirely. She’s superfluous, telling the audience something that they already know. No, it’s worse – she’s repeating it, so soon after having already reminded them of it.

    Or, alternatively, can her presence in the scene be amended? Can her contribution to this moment be fixed? I at least thought it was worth having a stab at:

    [CeltX added a line break into the second paragraph during the export process. No idea why.]

    Is this any better? Well, no. I’ve tried to tone down the maid’s reaction, to make it seem more real, more human. But she still feels unnecessary. Her presence muddies the tone of the scene. What is supposed to be a tragedy, a disaster, is then punctuated by something awkward, shoehorned into the scene in an attempt to serve the overall narrative, and backfiring.

    But then, that’s something of a calling card of Russell T Davies’, isn’t it?

  • On death, television, and Ianto Jones

    SPOILER ALERT! This post contains spoilers for Buffy the Vampire Slayer season six, and spoilers throughout the entirety of Torchwood. (more…)

  • IM-MI-GRATE!!

    There are two types of immigrants. There’s

    • the Culture Vulture, who absolutely loves the culture of the country they’re living in and takes every opportunity to show off their expertise about said culture, and there’s
    • the Perpetually Dissatisfied Homelander, who for some reason is able to find at least one thing that’s inferior about everything in the country they’ve chosen to move to in comparison to the stuff they left behind, begging the question of why they left in the first place.

    Kotaku’s Brian Ashcraft is a prime example of a Culture Vulture; a Texan who moved to Japan some years ago and has made a career out of talking about how great Japan is.

    By contrast, most Perpetually Dissatisfied Homelanders are usually elderly British men, traditionally actors or comedians such as John Cleese. It’s worrying, then, that I appear to be fulfilling this role as of late. I can’t walk into a supermarket without having a little moan to my girlfriend about how American Kit-Kats just don’t seem to be up to par, or how import stores seem reluctant to bring in British Rolos which are immeasurably superior in every possible way to their American counterparts.

    Perhaps even more baffling is that since I arrived in the US I’ve actually watched British television almost exclusively, with the exception of 30 Rock and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (which I used to watch in the UK anyway, so it almost doesn’t count). I’ve kept up-to-date with Doctor Who and Torchwood, I’ve enjoyed new shows like The Inbetweeners, and I’m even revisiting old shows I haven’t seen in years like Goodnight Sweetheart.

    It’s an absurdly negative way to look at a country that I chose to live in, to dismiss its culture and positive elements from almost the day I arrived. America has lots of fantastic things that Britain doesn’t have, such as Burger Kings that sell edible food. And Cheap buses. And more than seven theme parks boasting more than four types of roller coaster.

    So I’ve decided that as of tomorrow (which is actually today, what with it being 1:15am as I type this) I shall endeavor to find more of the Good Things about being in America. Ideally I’d like to do this by driving across the country, America Unchained style, and exploring more of it, but sadly I haven’t got two dimes to rub together at the moment. Or rather two dimes to rub together is more or less all I have. The point is I don’t have a lot of money, and as there aren’t any pubs nearby in which to make a drunken bet in, it doesn’t seem likely to happen.

    Nevertheless, positivity here I come and all that.

  • The Tooth Hurts, Doesn’t It?

    If God is real (and I maintain that he isn’t) then maybe someone out there can explain to me how he can design something as wondrously complex as the human nervous system, but totally fuck up something as simple as teeth.

  • Maybe it’s time to Forget

    We all know what today is. For some Americans it’s going to be a day of reverence and reflection. For others it’s going to be a day of rage. For a handful of ignorant bigots it’s going to be a day of burning the holy texts of people of a different faith based solely on the acts of a terrorist organization who just happened to consider themselves part of that same faith.

    Despite the battle cry of “…or the terrorists win” that we’ve heard used in both sincere and ironic manners over the last nine years, America has allowed itself to be so fundamentally changed by the acts of a few men and some hijacked planes, by the loss of lives. The US has cast off a number of the freedoms that people take for granted. The Bush administration enacted illegal telephone wires and unconstitutional arresting of people without cause, without their usual rights, simply because they might possibly have done something involved in some loose manner with terrorism. America has invaded foreign countries and killed countless civilians in the search for the leader of the terrorist organization responsible for the events of that day.

    America has let terrorism win because it has let that unfortunate day impact its thought process, its decision-making process, from the guy in the Oval Office right the way down to the guy on the street driving his car with anti-Islamic bumper stickers plastered on the side. Frankly, America is not the country I thought it was when I first moved here from the UK. It isn’t the land of the free when people can be taken from their homes without just cause. It isn’t the land of opportunity when the Republican Party, who want so much to remind us of the events of 9/11 insofar as it will get them back in office, are working to stamp out any potential “opportunity” the average person might have. America has been falsely advertised, and I respectfully request a refund.

    America was told, “Never forget”. Clearly that’s not working out in America’s favour.

  • Recipe for Homeopathic Chocolate Milk

    Ingredients:

    • 2-3 tblsp. Chocolate milk mix (e.g. Nesquik)
    • 1 large glass’ worth of milk
    • Access to running water

    Instructions

    1. Add 2 tblsp. chocolate milk mix to drinking glass (3 if you’re using a larger glass).
    2. Add milk and stir.
    3. Place glass underneath tap faucet.
    4. Turn on tap. Leave for an hour.
    5. Return to find crystal-clear glass full of rich, delicious chocolate milk made the homeopathic way.

    As well as being deliciously chocolaty, Homeopathic Chocolate Milk will also cure Diabetes types 1 and 2.

    Enjoy!

  • Stop telling me what I can and can’t use Twitter for

    There have been a number of articles over the last year or so telling us what we shouldn’t be tweeting about. Pretty much everyone I know has seen this “article” on The Oatmeal, and there are a number of other articles on the subject. You don’t want to know what I had for breakfast? You’re not interested in my day-to-day ramblings, or what’s going on in my life?

    Well then here’s a question for you: Why the fuck are you following me on Twitter?

    By choosing to follow someone on Twitter you’re effectively saying, “I want to know what is going through this person’s head at any given moment.” If you’re following me, I can only assume you have some kind of interest in me, or my work, or what I get up to in my free time. Is that an excuse for me to post any old random shit, or an invitation to push said shit onto your phone? No, of course it bloody isn’t. But if you’re following me to find out when Jump Leads updates and instead find yourself having to endure tweets about the latest episode of Doctor Who or my musings on the future, why continue following me? Why continue to follow anyone on Twitter who is actively tweeting things you have no interest in?

    And yet people with this sort of attitude instead find themselves tweeting complaints about the person they’re following. Why don’t you just save yourself the effort and just unfollow the person? Depending on whether you’re using a Twitter client, it can take anywhere between one and four clicks to stop following someone. Surely that’s much less effort than typing some passive-aggressive tweet about your disinterest in my socks.

    So fuck you, “Don’t Tweet About This” article writers. I’m going to tweet about my lunch. I’m going to tweet about my vacations. I’m going to tweet about writing, and hanging out, and the events I go to, and emotional breakthroughs. Is it self-indulgent? Yes. But self-indulgence is the very core of what Twitter is.

    If you don’t like it, you know where to find the unfollow button.