St Valentine brought me something more important than love today. He helped me to finish the second draft of my family sit-com. Literally. The ghost of St Valentine rose from the grave, came round to mine and helped me knock out some of the dinks in the story-line. If it gets made, it was St Valentine's idea not to have the drunk sister-in-law throw puddings at the sister. Good call St V! Now get back to your job of humiliating the lonely.
It is a really good feeling finishing a script - not to say there isn't more work to do on this baby, but personally I prefer to do the real polishing once the thing has been cast and you've heard it read out a few times. I learnt from Time Gentlemen Please that you can spend months writing a script, but you don't know what's going to work until you find out what the performers can do and which lines can be made redundant by a raised eye-brow or a subtle glance. I actually love actors. I think the good ones can do amazing things for a writer. And I don't just mean sleep with them. Though many of them seem to do that as well, God bless them for that. I remember when I first shared a flat with Chris Addison in Edinburgh I asked him to keep me away from biscuits and actresses. If only he could be with me 24 hours a day I would be a slimmer, saner person.
But it's particularly good getting this script to the point where I am happy for it to be shown to the bigwigs. I had to squeeze the first draft out of my constipated mind before Christmas and actually got to a point where I just wrote pretty much rubbish for the entire second half because I was so sick of having the project hanging over me. Which made the re-write harder because there was a lot of crap to get rid of and condense. No doubt if I get a chance to do another draft I will think that much of the current one is poor, but seriously draft 1 is some of the poorest writing of my adult life. So given that the BBC liked that draft they should be drowning in their own bodily fluids when they read this one. Unless the secret of getting on to TV is to really rubbish. Which thinking about it, it almost certainly is.
Finishing a script is better than sex - and also has the additional benefit that you're closer to meeting some actresses now it's done, one of whom will definitely sleep with you, so you get sex as well. If you're lucky they'll give you a biscuit as well.
So all is good. Now I move on to the next script. Months of agony followed by an afternoon of delight. Ironically like a relationship with an actress in reverse.
