Categories
science writing

Lab Rats – I so wanted it to be good

They finally set a sitcom in a research lab.

The idea is hardly original – I myself submitted a script for a lab sitcom (WHITECOATS) to the BBC and Channel 4 in 2004 only to have it a) rejected and b) ignored, respectively. A German TV producer got excited about it and pitched it to some German TV channel. I never heard from her again…

Well, if the brilliant Richard Herring gets his sitcom ideas rejected by the BBC then a total unknown writer who hasn’t even done the requisite ten years on the comedy circuit is NOT going to get taken seriously. I get that, I even agree. (And of course my script was the work of a screenwriting and comedy novice…)

I wrote WHITECOATS because I wanted to see a sitcom set in a lab. There wasn’t one, so I took a DIY attitude. Luckily for me it didn’t get taken up; I moved on to writing thrillers for children and wound up being paid what I’m guessing is more than a novice TV writer.

So LAB RATS – should have worked for me. I love Chris Addison in “The Thick of It”. He’s sweet and he’s a Manc, like me. I loved Geoffrey Perkins as Ford Prefect in the radio version of “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”. I watched both the clips released prior to the show’s airing and laughed out loud.

But I’m afraid I watched with dismay yesterday. I’m not going to tear it apart – too many TV reviewers are doing that. I AM going to keep watching, but from such a beginning I don’t see that it ever reach any decent height. Unless they rejig the formula radically as was done with “Men Behaving Badly”.

The best thing I can say is that it’s sort of Goodies humour, but the Goodies has dated too. And the other thing I can say is that some of their conversations, sad and geeky though they were, are not far from the stupid kinds of things I remember we did talk about when I worked in a lab. The two clips of LAB RATS that made me laugh are here.

Okay, I’ve criticised another writer. Now I’ll offer myself up for the same treatment. Here is a snifter of my pilot script for WHITECOATS – the four-scene sample I entered in the BBC New Talent contest. Obviously I didn’t get anywhere or else I would never have written The Joshua Files.

Categories
cuba salsa

Dancing at Carnival de Cuba 2008

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I finished editing the clips I filmed of the son band playing and people dancing at Carnival de Cuba last Saturday in sunny London. Featuring my friends Becs (in white with turquoise top), Deborah (red cardy, dancing with me), Nicola (white top and trousers, flowing blue-and-white overshirt) and Mel (halter-neck, brown-and white polka-dot dress), all of whom I’ve previously blogged.

Seems implausibly cold now…an artic breeze in blowing through my window at exactly the right angle to torment my wrist, which already throbs with strain from typing and the computer mouse.

I dreamt such a great idea for a story last night. I really should have written it down but as usual I thought it so vivid on waking that I wouldn’t need to. But as ever, an hour or so later and all I remember are fragments. In the dream I was shown a photo of a bunch of people who were known to have been behind the funding of a particular scientific project – a project that later had was found to have sinister connotations. The photo was an unexpected capture of all the suspicious parties together. And those faces were indeed surprising. I could identify some of them from my scientist days. One in particular was someone I hadn’t liked at all. In the dream, I had that delicious thrill of Aha!….followed by hmmmmm…

I’ve forgotten all the details, except the faces of the scientists that I recognised.

That’s right guys. I know who you are. I’ve seen ya!

Ah well, back to the manuscript.

Categories
cuba salsa

Charanga Habanera in London

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Charanga Habanera in London

Ah, the lovely boys of Charanga’s front line. Cuba’s finest, playing for free in Southwark Park.

We missed them by two days in Havana…and also in Cancun. Well worth the wait…rumour has it they’ll be at the afterparty later tonight at the Colosseum in Vauxhall. This is where it really would be an advantage to be JK Rowling. People in their 20s adore her…they grew up on her books. Bet she’d get to dance with anyone from Charanga she likes.
Well I’ll still try my luck…
Emailed from my BlackBerry®

Categories
ice shock nostalgia raves writing

One of those rambling posts about the vagaries of life

I am doing blogging all wrong.

I’ve been reading other people’s blogs and I can see that mine is Not Quite Right.

Well I’m going to do a post that’s more typische. Part rant, part rave, part diary, part confessional.

Rant: Where to start? I’m not much of a ranter over things that don’t directly concern me and over which I have zero control. Not saying there’s anything wrong with ranting, in fact I seem to have voluntarily surrounded myself with people who love a rant; my daughter, my husband, my agent to name only three. Maybe that’s why no ranting. Ranters need to be listened to. And that, it seems, is increasingly my role.

However, I did recently get slightly involved in the age-ranging debate about putting labels like 5+, 7+, 11+ on children’s books, although only in the private e-space of a members-only online writers’ club. But actually, meh. The businesswoman in me dislikes the attempt to stop a perfectly legitimate marketing initiative. Last time I looked publishers sell the books and do the deals. Ifnwhen the sales director at my publishers phones me up and asks me to make sales calls to sell my books to the major chains, then maybe I’ll start to feel I have any place telling her how to run the business.

Rave: Now what I AM is a raver. So many things to enthuse over, so little time. Let’s just divide the things that have recently amused or fascinated me into categories.

TV: All the usual suspects for me: Battlestar Galactica continues to swoop, Lost continues to be gloriously daft-yet-compelling, still laughing over Peep Show’s use of a highly literary reference as a euphemism for erm…well I can’t better it so let’s just say ‘doing a Chesil beach’; reruns of Sex And The City. How I love Samantha. She somehow reminds me of Jessica from Pokemon’s Team Rocket.  And a surprise new addition to my highly selective TV viewing is BBC4’s US import Mad Men – set in 1960’s Madison Avenue and the cutting edge world of advertising. The men are urbane, sexist and wear natty suits; the woman are gorgeous, ambitious, under-appreciated, professionally limited and don’t complain when their bottoms get slapped in the office. Everybody smokes and all these macho men wilt the minute one of these supposedly suborbinate women turns her ravenous gaze upon one of them. You can sense the powerplay just waiting to happen. Ah the good-old-days when a pretty secretary could take a powerful man down. Mostly I enjoy the offices though. They remind me so much of my father’s set up at Mexicana de Cobre. Just good ol’ plain nostalgia.

Reading: I’m very busy writing so haven’t read much lately. I bought some books by Cornelia Funke; Inkheart and Inkspell and some books for younger readers that I’ll read to the little ‘un. I have, however, been enjoying reading The Spectator and New Scientist, which I can manage in bite-size chunks. Two Speccie articles made me laugh out loud today, one by Rod Liddle about the Eurovision Song Contest (it wasn’t political; Eastern Europeans just don’t ‘get’ decent 12-bar blues based pop music), one by Deborah Ross, but then she always makes me laugh. Right-wing intellectuals are so much funnier than left-wing ones. And therefore sexier. I’d have PJ O’Rourke over George Monbiot, any day. But then the left does have Naomi Klein. So maybe it’s gender specific?

Geekchic: Loving my Sony Vegas video editing software. Hey I never said I didn’t have some special interests.

Podcasts: The usual trio of Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s Radio5 movie review show, Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time and the Litopia After Dark podcasts continue to equip me with the knowledge and ideas to do my job.

Music: Performance Channel is screening a Beethoven piano sonata every evening. I caught one while half asleep yesterday. It wasn’t one I knew and being on the verge of sleep was struggling to place it – Brahms? Schubert? Beethoven? It sounded very German and very wonderful. I lay there thinking about Wilhelm Meister and Marienbad and Werther and other ghosts from the past, conversations with my mother.

Diary: Well not much to report here. I have been editing book 2 of Joshua; ICE SHOCK. It’s been hard work but I finally made it through the whole script, having addressed all Editor’s notes. Now I need to write two short new sections and then do a continuity check. But I’ll do a separate post about this. And liasing closely with the publicity department at Scholastic to put things in place for a book tour starting next week. Yay!

Confessional: Well wouldn’t you like to know. I don’t dare to be open about such stuff. Would cause a rare old scandal, no doubt.

Categories
nostalgia science

The immune system kicks a**

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Antigen presentation – the central tenet of immunology. Didn’t make any sense to me until I saw the crystal structures of MHC I, and the T-Cell receptor.

I emerged into the outside world today full the kind of renewed energy that only a post-viral recovery gives you.

The immune system is an amazing thing. Even moreso when you have some knowledge of how it works. I remember when they published the crystal structure of the Major Histocompatibility Complex I protein bound to a peptide antigen. Luckily for me this was the year that I took biochemistry finals at Oxford. I’d never understood the scientific evidence for molecular immunology properly until I actually saw those molecules interacting.

I’m just not good enough of an abstract thinker. The cellular evidence just befuddled me. I had to see something in 3D before I could catch on.

Immune system, amazing, hence I have made a whole load of antibodies and cytotoxic T-cells and other cell and molecular weapons and totally kicked that viruses ass and cleared it out of my system. And if anything like that comes round again, my B-cells will give it what for…

Oxford was warm and filled with shoppers, students and tourists. I heard some Brazilians speaking Portuguese and it cheered the part of me that still wants to be in Sao Miguel do Gostoso. I dropped into Waterstones and was relieved to see that ‘Invisible City’ survived the recent cull of children’s books on display in the window. Still on display and in the 3-for-2! Lots of books for older readers have been put aside to make way for picture books and other things for younger kiddies. Finally I share a window display with the wonderful Axel Scheffler!