Let them die

I'm trying to remember the last time a character died in a drama and didn't come back to life. This isn't a new thing – nuts, nuts, nuts, I've got the name of the first time it happened. It's on the tip of my tongue but, Jesus Christ, I can't recall.

But anyway, I think it's happening in dramas more now. Certainly I'm loathing it more.


It's not as if I like a good bloodbath. If something is more violent than my regular benchmark movie, The Muppets Take Manhattan, then I'm not automatically drawn to it. I'm not automatically against it, I'm not recoiling in fear the way I am with even the mildest horror story, but I don't think cor, I must see that.

It's not even as if I'm against a happy ending necessarily or that there isn't a part of my head that knows Captain Kirk will always survive whatever the latest life-or-death crisis is.

But now I don't just know in my heart of hearts that Kirk will survive, I know in my fact of facts that he can't die. Cannot. Nobody can ever be killed again in Star Trek because that was all fixed in the latest film. No more dying.

Therefore no jeopardy.

The only interesting thing now for me is seeing how they cope when one of the cast doesn't want to come back for another sequel.

Writers tell other writers that they must kill their darlings: you must be willing to delete your absolute favourite bits of the book or the script if that will be better for the whole. But we don't listen any more. Or maybe it's producers who think that's a stupid idea: you've got this character who everyone loves, everyone is riveted to, why wouldn't you bring him or her back to life so we can keep on enjoying them?

Because sooner or later, we stop enjoying them and it's over. Forever. We stop enjoying them and we stop watching the show.

Example. A bit of an odd example, but here goes. One of the few times I've watched Coronation Street was when there was a big court case legal story and the kick was that we knew the person on trial was innocent. The nation watched. I watched.

And today I can't tell you which character or what the story was because I switched off and have never gone back.

Because in the week of the big reveal, the big climax to the story, the producers were quoted in newspapers as saying that they would never let an injustice happen in the show. They would never allow an innocent to be convicted.

I do think it was the absolutely most stupid time to tell us that. But, more, it erased Corrie for me. Not just this particular story that I'd been enjoying, but all stories. Ever. I want to say that phrase from Down the Line: "What is point Corrie?"

There is now no story in Corrie that won't work out happily. True, it was never very likely but now it's official. I get very tense in romcoms even though they always end well because there is always a pixel of a possibility that they won't. I give you Lost in Translation. Er. That's about it.

So it's not much of a pixel of a chance of a sad ending. Oh! One Day. There you go.

I will watch and enjoy a series where I know everyone will at least scrape by to next week. I've written Doctor Who and there's not a moment's doubt that's the Doctor will prevail. But I don't kill him and bring him back.

Actually, I did one where a character survives. Originally I had planned for her to die but it was honestly too upsetting. Not for me. But it wasn't going to get made if it were that bleak. And I like the compromise we made, I like where we went instead of her dying. I liked very much what new possibilities it have us in the characters if she didn't die.

But if she had died, she'd have stayed dead. I promise.

I'm fine with: have they died or haven't they? I'm not fine with dying and then coming back. Not even when I'm glad about it. Not even when I loved the character and it is bliss to see them sitting up, coming through the door or stepping out of a shower.

Because all they had and all they were died with them. A reborn character is a new character and we're starting again. We're starting again with a character who has had the most almightily improbable beginning. When you care enough about a character, it's as if they are real. If they come back from the dead, there is now zero reality to them.

I didn't want them to go yet now they have to prove their worth to me anew and they have to get me back to seeing them as real. And it doesn't happen.

It's not like you have to kill characters off. But if you want us engaged, if you want us caring at all, let them die.

Truth hurts

I wrote a script once called Wasps. It did very well for me: opened lots of doors, got me some of the attention you need and it was also very validating. I wrote that, it was received so well, I thought yes, maybe I can do this.

But one thing that kept being said of it was that it showed so clearly that I had done my research. On a Doctor Who once I was told I shouldn't be afraid of showing my library card. You've learnt all this stuff, use it and show us. Wasps was a police drama in a new setting (yes, there really is one) and was quite apparent that I had spent months with this unit.

In truth, I hadn't gone farther than my kitchen. It was a spec script, I'm always more interested in characters than anything else, I wrote real people in a setting that I'd research if we ever went to series.

But it did read as if it were true and I'm not saying this to boast to you. Well, I suppose I am, but it's a pretty feeble boast and if I came in thinking I was great for fooling producers then I'm now uncomfortably embarrassed that I didn't put the work in and even pick up the phone to the police.

What I think I got right was authenticity. The characters were people. There was also a lot of jargon and I don't mind jargon, I think having a short techy word for something long and complex is essential in certain conversations and really handy in drama. It's rare that as a viewer or reader you actually need to know what a spindizzy is and how it physically works. It is the opposite of rare, it is mandatory that you know the character knows. And that it means something, both literally in the sense of the definition of the jargon term and more importantly in that it matters to them.

I'm good with dialogue and I've been around enough jargon that I can hear it both as the rhythms of someone's speech and as the technical words. So for a placeholder, I made up some terms for these police characters. It was a helicopter unit and I've flown helicopters – now, doesn't that sound like a boast? It wouldn't if you knew how little I'd done. Man, the cost. Rotor time is the easiest way to burn cash outside of an Apple Store.

But did you see what I did there? I admitted an interest, an effort, a failing and gave you a glimpse into my financial state – and I used the term 'rotor time'. Odds to onions, you hadn't heard that before. Doubtlessly you can work out what it means but you didn't bother, you read it and accepted it. It sounded real, it sounded authentic.

It was. It is. I knew all the helicopter stuff so all my characters knew it too. Whereas I have not one possible clue where the phrase 'odds to onions' just came from but I accepted it, didn't you?

(Quick aside? Jargon's jargon, fine, but sometimes it is gorgeous. The rotors on a helicopter spin 600 times per minute and they are attached to what's called a mast. You can imagine the forces going on there as that machinery spins. It's as likely to wrench the whole helicopter around one way as it is to spin the blades the other. That's why you have tail rotors: they fight the machine being spun. And two-rotor choppers like Chinooks don't need tail rotors because their two main rotors are spun in opposite directions.

Still, imagine that torture on the helicopter. Pounding, pounding stresses.

And there is a nut and bolt that keep the rotors attached to the mast. Pilots and engineers call it the Jesus Nut – because if it ever fails on you, the next person you'll see is Jesus Christ in heaven.

Isn't that wonderful? That's what you get from real research. So I'm not knocking real research at all and therefore I really am not boasting that I fooled a few people by making up onions.)

What I am saying is that Wasps was authentic.

Authenticity: if you can fake that, you've got it made.

This is all on my mind and I wanted to talk it through with you because I was in a conversation last night with a friend who had a play on at the Rep Foundry, a night organised by the Birmingham Rep theatre. His piece is a true story and, wow, you can tell. It really takes you somewhere new – new to me anyway – and into a slice of recent history that is teeming with drama. But in chatting afterwards, he was arguing that writers have to be true.

I completely agree.

What I couldn't quite articulate with him last night, because I don't think I realised I thought it, was that there's no reason you can't lie about being true.

There's truth and there's reality. A key reason I prefer drama to journalism is that in journalism you try to make things simple: this person did that for this reason at that time. In drama, you embrace the fact that there are no facts. That this person or that person may or may not have done this or that. And if they did it, they may not know why. The world is an utterly delicious mess and drama gets that.

I was watching an episode of the US legal drama Suits this week and something bad happens to a key character. I don't know if Suits is technically and legally accurate, I do know that it feels authentic, but this bad thing – I don't want to spoil it, sorry to be vague – cut into me. Lawyers in New York, it cut me even though it could not be a more alien world if it were Star Trek.

Though, that's a thought. There was a gimmicky Star Trek once where Scotty came back and guest-starred in The Next Generation. Fine, whatever. Gimmick. Only, here was this starship engineer recalled to life through transporter technobabble and facing intergalactic peril yet it was moving. Nuts to all the Starfleet uniforms, all everything did in that setting was get us to where the story really was. This Scotty had been the ace engineer – "the engines canna take it, Captain!" – and here he was decades in the future where his skills have been superseded. Where he is a curiosity at best and a danger at worst.

He wants to help save the day in whatever the story of the week science fiction threat was against the USS Enterprise. That was the plot but the drama was that he couldn't. This science fiction trope of a character was suddenly an old man burning to recapture glory days that had ended so soon and before he'd noticed. He was worker who could no longer work. Everything this character was and needed now wasn't.

It was desperately moving. I think it had a Starfleet-happy ending and naturally the Enterprise survived whatever it was. Can't remember. Don't care. But twenty years since I've seen it, I remember the feeling.

Because it wasn't real, but it was true.

Sex

This was only meant to be a joke. I write the blog to talk to you but a couple of weeks ago the Birmingham Rep reprinted one entry, then the Writers' Guild did another one and I could see numbers going up. It was nice. As ever, my mind wandered to getting us all biscuits. But then last week I dissed Star Trek Into Darkness and within the day had doubled the number of people who'd read the blog in the whole week before.

Well, I said. Next time I'll write about sex and see what happens.

And that was about as far as the thought got. I did ponder being serious and giving you advice or maybe even reaching deep down inside myself to reveal some of those desires we all have. Possibly even admit a fantasy to you. I'm not ashamed of this: there is a sexual position I'd like to try. It's nothing very kinky, it's just that maybe one day during sex, I think I'd like to be present.

But then writing that line made me think about how you'd have to search really hard to find any sex in anything I write. This could well be because I write Doctor Who audio dramas and, please, it's a family show. And there's not a huge amount of sex in Radio Times magazine.

Only, even thinking back through my script pile, sex doesn't feature much at all. I do remember a friend complaining that nothing happens in a particular script of mine – ooh, it was called Other Women: I like that title, I must use that again somewhere; oh, look, I just have – and he moaned that it was just people talking or having sex. We'd swapped scripts at that point and his had nothing happening either: just the end of the world, or the universe, or something. I remember alien tentacles. And he was right about Other Women: unless you were interested in the people, they weren't interesting and nothing happened. Similarly, I wasn't interested in his characters so let the world end, or the universe, or something.

Sex isn't interesting. Not in TV or film.

I mean it. Will they/won't they tension is remarkably powerful but once they do/did, it's all over. Certainly the tension, often the series, always the movie.

Equally, if someone takes their clothes off in a film, I don't think you're watching a character any more, I think you're noticing the actor's body. Even if only for a moment. I don't know. It could be a male thing, it could be a me thing.

But Dar Williams said something especially smart once. I haven't been able to find the quote for you so I'll have to paraphrase – and I'll also have to set it up less eloquently. She wrote a tremendously moving and deceptively simple song called When I Was a Boy. I'd quote you the whole thing because it's as intricate and powerful as a poem but the key lines for today are:

I was a kid that you would like, just a small boy on her bike
Riding topless, yeah, I never cared who saw.
My neighbor come outside to say, "Get your shirt,"
I said "No way, it's the last time I'm not breaking any law."

Notice the 'small boy on her bike'. It's not a mistake. It's another case of a writer using the wrong word and thereby making a far more powerful point. But you need to hear the whole song for that. For now, the story continues.

Some years after writing this song, Williams was performing it at a festival. I want to say Lilith Fair but I'm not sure. I want to say that it was an all- or a mostly-women event. The Lilith Fair concerts didn't exclude men from the audience, did they? I adore the music from those concerts. Anyway, whatever the festival, this particular gig was at least very much mostly women in the audience and Williams says she thought about taking her top off during that song.

But she didn't.

Because there were cameras.

And here's the thing I think was so smart, so perceptive: she said that cameras are male.

It could be ten years since she said that and I still think about it.

I can't let you out of a story. If I've actually managed to get you into a tale or even into this blog's nattering, the idea of deliberately chucking you out is abhorrent. And I think sex, shown on screen, does exactly that. I suspect that if I looked, I might – might – just possibly be able to find you a dodgy photo on the internet. I know, it's unlikely. But if I ever did manage to do it, you know that posting it here as some kind of an example would change the blog totally. You would see that image before you read a word and this would no longer be about drama or even sex, it would be about Page 3 porn and the like.

Sex increases the ratings but it changes the content and it decreases the drama.

For me, anyway.

But this fascinates me because one reason I write about people instead of the universe ending in tentacle-based peril is sex. Let me pin it down more precisely: I find immense, seismic drama in the instant before sex.

We are all this cauldron of desires and fears and for most of the day we go around hiding both from everyone. We cover ourselves in clothes and an awful lot of pretence. I hesitated over telling you that gag about my favourite sexual position being "present" because for it to work at all, I needed you to believe I could be telling you the truth right up to that word. That was difficult. But then it's supposed to be. Drama is difficult, drama is telling the truth. Not necessarily telling you something real, but telling each of us something true even as we are lying.

And so there we are, wrapped in our clothes and our culture and our neuroses and we are so practiced at it all that it would surely take dynamite to break through to the real us.

Yet there is dynamite. Thank god there's dynamite.

There's a reason I think we use the word naked. It does mean nude but it also, to me, means more than clothes being opened or shed, it means us being opened. Revealing our skin is revealing what's under that skin, what's inside us. It means revealing our desire. Our hope. Fear.

Desire is the dynamite. Wanting someone in a way that's more like your very body and soul yearning than it is your mind thinking or being at all rational. The complete need for this person. The need that makes you blush, makes you incoherent.

And if it's dynamite for opening us up, it is primacord explosive wrapped around your waist because of the risk. Admitting your desire to yourself is one thing, but admitting it to this other person is geometrically, exponentially, infinitely harder. You're laying yourself bare and all of the power of your cauldron is irrevocably put in their hands. In every physical and emotional way, you are giving yourself to them and in that instant they may reject you.

There's no going back from that: you can try saying you were kidding, but nobody's ever kidded.

It is do or die inside.

So I find romances and romcoms deliciously tense. That's silly, even preposterous of me because there surely has never been a modern romance tale that didn't end happily. But as the couple tentatively lean in for that first kiss, I feel like they're playing with live ammunition.

These are terribly male types of analogies and metaphors, aren't they? I'm not trying to be masculine writing about romcoms, I just don't know another way to convey the totality of the damage done by rejected love and desire.

Also, I've just realised why I wrote the qualifying word 'modern' back there. Wuthering Heights. Oh, my lights, the power in that novel. Emily Bronte knew all this stuff, even if she did write weird narrative structures and never thought to include tentacles.

When I watch a romance, a romcom, a drama, I am truly edge-of-seat until the first kiss. After that, I'm not fussed. Sex, nudity, cor, phroaw, whatever, do what you like. Have an orgy on screen for all I care. I'm not saying I'm either prudish or even trying to claim that I am somehow immune to body parts, but sex on film isn't explosive, it isn't story, it just isn't drama.

I started writing this to you as a gag and yet I've actually learnt something about myself: I've learnt that although I have mocked films before for cutting to rippling waves on the ocean or whatever, it turns out that I am actually quite fine with a kiss and –

FADE TO BLACK.

Star Trek: Don't Give Away the Goods Too Soon

There's a contrived, gratuitous underwear scene in Star Trek Into Darkness and I didn't notice. I saw the film on a giant screen and in 3D and I am male but I did not register a scene with Alice Eve as Dr Carol Marcus wearing considerably less than a Starfleet-issue uniform. I keep hearing references to it now but it was only when some review included a still from it that I remembered it was there at all.

I obviously saw it, I have zero doubt that I shook my head at the whole thing when it happened. And you can bet that one reason it all left my head instantly was that we see so many women characters wearing so little in so many films. It's just because full costumes are expensive. That's the reason. Austerity.

But the other reason that it left my head a frame later is that Carol Marcus is just not a character. There's nothing there. She ultimately provides a plot point but what's then meant to be deeply emotional is just a bit of a shrug because after most of the film is done, I still have no interest in her. I do remember having that brief kind of half squint, half blink you get when you're trying to work something out: I remember thinking 'why are they doing this?' during her introduction scene. I'll accept anything in a film, anything at all, unless it throws me out of the story and I was a little thrown.

Part of me doesn't want to tell you why because I'm reluctant to spoil a film, but that's silly of me as I'm about to wreck it. And I'm wrecking it because by the end, I wasn't thrown, I was drop-kicked out of the movie. Star Trek Into Darkness has myriad problems and they are all well reported online, but there is one writing issue that I think is a knife and I'm not seeing that mentioned anywhere.

So I'm mentioning it. Alongside mixed metaphors about drop-kicked knives.

Here's an amusing list of the film's head-scratching moments: you'll laugh more if you read it after seeing the movie, but you'll save money if you read it before.

And here's Star Trek writer David Mack exploding about the failed science in the movie. For all that I think science should always be correct in a story, I'm really against the science in this one because it makes so little sense that it damages the tale. You know that Star Trek is all about these spaceships flying around where nobody's yet got to and you know it's all about whether Captain Kirk can save the day against impossible odds and whether he can even live to fight another day though you suspect he just might. By the end of Star Trek Into Darkness, there is no need for any spaceship ever again and nobody can ever die ever again. Ever. And you will swear that the filmmakers didn't notice they'd done that.

I noticed it. I also noticed the time a lot. The 3D process makes films considerably darker and that was a problem because it made checking my watch really difficult.

I didn't initially see this writing issue that now so bothers me but that was because it came at the end. Up until then I was just getting progressively more irritated in general. I really enjoyed 2009's Star Trek and hadn't expected to: it made me a Trek convert and I came to this one very enthusiastically. But there's a bit early on that's a nice little nod to something in the old Star Trek movies and TV shows.

And then there's another nod.

And another.

Then there's a contorted speech that I could hear went down really well with the fans sitting behind me because it referenced a popular episode I do remember seeing some time. Okay.

Only, then there was another.

And if there is one reason that next time I'll wait for the reviews before seeing a Star Trek movie, it's because these references and homages built and built until whole scenes, whole sequences of scenes were remakes of famous moments from old ones. It gets so bad I was thinking "And… cue Spock…" just as he did precisely what you expect him to do. With the very dialogue you expect him to have.

It's a giant emotional scene toward the climax and it is stunningly irritating and empty because all you can think of is that you've seen this before somewhere and it was alright then. The sequence revolves around the death of a major character and death has no impact in Star Trek anyway: I'm sure a real fan could tell me when a character has died and not come back to life next week but I don't know of one. This time it is especially empty because of this pastiche sequence but also because it comes after a risible scene where Kirk abruptly and insanely interrupts an interrogation to ask Dr McCoy "What are you working on that will save my life later?"

He doesn't quite say that but it's only a pixel more subtle. I laughed and the wall of fans behind me growled. I like to think they were growling with me, not at me.

So anyway, we're into the final parts of the film and I am no longer in the story, I am also completely out of Maltesers and having a rotten time, and then they do this. They have a very exciting end sequence and it is completely destroyed because of what happened in the film's very exciting opening sequence.

Follow. When the film begins and we're on some planet or other, the USS Enterprise has been hiding under the ocean. You know in your heart that this doesn't make sense somehow but it's still very exciting as the ship rises up from the sea and flies off across the sky before heading out into space. It's very well done, it looks real, you could clap.

Only, then the end sequence is all about the USS Enterprise starting off in space and, damaged, now falling toward Earth. It's going to hit atmosphere, this spaceship is going to be flying through the sky.

Yes? And? So?

We've seen that, we know the ship can fly really realistically across the sky, it's great. But now we have to buy that this is suddenly a Calamitous Bad Thing when it was Perfectly Fine Before.

Writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman try to turn this into a devastatingly, heart-stoppingly thrilling moment by having some character or other actually say: "This bit's exciting, I know we did this earlier but now it's completely different and we're in such danger, I can't tell you, man, we could even die and everything".

There's a writing maxim that you should show rather than tell and I don't agree 100% – there's a fantastic example in Battlestar Galactica where the telling of a tale is riveting and the later showing of it it is a bit boring – but I think I agree 98%. Star Trek Into Darkness has what should have been and really could have been, actually was, a huge finish with little emotion but buckets of spectacle. Telling us that it's exciting is like trying to put a bandaid on when you really know you should've thrown away that opening sequence.

In television, if the start doesn't grab or seduce you into the story enough, you've changed channels. In films, you're there to the end and it's the end that's in your mind and heart when you leave the cinema. I don't know, maybe I would've walked out of there thinking the film had problems but was exciting. But instead I just walked out of there irritated.

The opening sequence unquestionably cost more millions of dollars than I can imagine, and I can imagine quite a bit, but the film was hurt by it. And if they'd cut it at the script stage, the cost would've been no more than wear and tear on the delete key.

I don't go to films to get writing lessons, I go to be in the story but when you're not, you take what you can. And I've taken away a writing lesson: don't give the goods away too soon.