Being a Non-Linear Account of the Life and Opinions of the Author, Cross-Referenced and Illustrated, with occasional Hesitations, Repetitions and Deviations
I had another idea for a TV programme a few weeks ago, following the phenomenal success of my karaoke and shots idea in the Philippines and Vietnam. (See Calling the Shots.) I always knew it was too extreme for Western wimps, but the Asian markets would lap it up. I'm still waiting to sign the contract with NHK in Japan, and when North Korea gets wind of it … Well, you can guess the rest.
This is also a reality show adapted from a successful existing format. (As a wise man once sang: 'There's nothing new under the sun, everything you think of has been done.') It's a simple enough idea, although it would be quite expensive to implement at first. That's where the advertisers and sponsors come in, to help fund the development stages and keep the programme on the air. As always, the public get to vote via email and phone, and the direction of each series will be determined by this democratic process.
The first step is to locate the agents or management companies for every so-called 'celebrity' photographed in the current edition of Heat magazine.* Then we write to them, inviting their clients to take part in a new prime-time TV show to be syndicated to networks right across the English-speaking world. Depending on how many of these Z-listers agree to come on board, we charter a suitable aircraft and fly them to an uninhabited island in the South Pacific. We tell them that hundreds of hidden cameras will be transmitting live feeds 24/7, and that the course of the show will depend on the public reaction to these people left to fend for themselves.
And I mean literally fend for themselves. We won't be sending a ship to replenish their supplies; there'll be no airlift of essential gear; Ant and Dec won't be sitting in a comfortable studio a short walk away from the 'jungle' in which our volunteers have found themselves. This shit will get very real very quickly. The guests will be left to their own devices. After a few days it will begin to dawn on them that they have no hope of rescue. It's sink or swim.
Thus the public themselves will decide whether this latest bunch of WAGS, soap actors, pop singers, amateur cooks and professional clothes horses are worth watching or not. If the viewers vote to discontinue the experiment, we respect their wishes. We switch off the live feed and bring the series to a close. No winners: just an essential service to improve the quality of the public discourse in the UK. In a couple of years' time everyone will have forgotten about the castaways anyway. By then we'll have found a new set of participants, a new island, and a whole publicity machine will be in place to drive market share for Season 2.
On the other hand, the personality clashes and conflicts which keep mass audiences focused on low-budget televisual garbage might be worth monitoring. In that case, the cameras will keep rolling. The world can watch and salivate as the latest overpaid wastes of DNA descend into Lord of the Flies-style savagery.
I still don't have a working title, but I'm sure I can come up with something in due course. If you'd like to help crowdfund the pilot show in the meantime, drop me a line.
* Other pointless gossip-filled shite publications are available
A few months ago, two friends of mine named Simon and Kylie took over a big old pub in Phonicstown Cwmaman called the Boncyff. It's a place I've been to a few times over the years, but it's too far from home to have become a regular watering hole.
It was originally called the Fforchneol Arms. First recorded in 1872, according to Richard Arnold's definitive essay 'The Pubs, Clubs and Breweries of Aberdare' (in Old Aberdare Vol. 2), it's more commonly known as 'the Bonki'. The origin of its peculiar name is – as with so many aspects of Valleys life – a topic for debate, mythology and downright bollocks in pubs and elsewhere. I once read (somewhere) that the boncyff was a large tree stump on Gooseberry Hill, more or less opposite, used as a counting table for the miners' wages. By association the word transferred itself to the pub, and gradually mutated to its current form.
The name 'Fforchneol Arms' seems to have fallen into disuse over the past two decades or so. The side of the building currently reads Boncyff. (I can't tell you what it says on the front. We just dive straight in after getting off the bus, without stopping to look. I took the photo a few years ago, but I doubt if it's changed since.)
[A digression: My friend Florence grew up in Uganda, and occasionally falls into the language gap when she's among fluent Wenglish speakers. A few years ago, she had to go to the old Aman School for a dance class one evening. Being new to the area, she asked her work colleagues how to get there by public transport.
Having been advised to catch the bus and 'get off by the Bonki', Florence boarded the Glynhafod service and asked the driver for 'a return to the Bonkers.' When she told me about it a few days later, we roared with laughter, and I said, 'You're bloody bonkers!'
Anyway, Simon and Kylie introduced Friday night karaoke a couple of months ago. You won't be surprised to learn that Phillip, Clare and I have been up to check it out a few times. In fact, it was – partly – the reason why Clare started going there in the first place.
But it's not just karaoke. It's Karaoke and Shots. Every time you sing, you get a free drink. It's never a free pint, unfortunately, but one of those 'blink and you'll miss it' drinks in a little plastic cup that looks like something a nurse might hand you when you're standing behind a curtain. Still, a free drink is a free drink. They have the same offer at the Golden Cross in Cardiff on Wednesday evenings. As Jade Justine the host/ess always says, 'The more you sing, the more pissed you get for free.'
Clare got royally pissed the first time she did Karaoke and Shots. In fact, she spent most of the Saturday feeling very sorry for herself, drinking soft drinks, occasionally moaning and mopping her fevered brow, and eventually baling out before Lindsay had even set up her gear in the Glandover. Shot to death, one might say.
Later that night, I had an unfortunate incident myself. I'd stayed in the Welsh Harp until closing time, with a nice gang of friends I hadn't seen for a while. When I got home and put my key in the Yale lock, the bloody thing snapped in two. Luckily for me, the mortise lock opened without any problems, and I was able to shoulder charge the door open. (Yeah, I know – is there any more damage I can do to my shoulders?)
On the next Manic Monday, I showed the remaining portion to Phillip and Clare, and suggested that the Broken Key would be the perfect emblem for our karaoke get-togethers. Every time someone makes a hash of a song, we could display the Broken Key on the table in front of us.
Goddess knows I earned it myself on Wednesday night, when I struggled through a very high arrangement of 'Waterloo Sunset' in the Golden Cross. 'Lola' would have been better suited to my voice, but since Jade is a drag queen I didn't think it would go down too well.
However, the very words 'karaoke and shots' gave me an idea. Let me explain …
It seems that half the country spends Saturday nights glued to Reality TV 'talent' shows like The Voice and The X Factor. At least three of my friends have tried out for one of these shows, and failed to qualify. It wasn't because they weren't up to the mark – it was just that there were other people on the day who offered better entertainment value. Take this young lad from Aberdare, who appeared on The X Factor a few years ago, for example. He looks the part; he talks the talk; he certainly thinks he's the best thing since sliced bread. But look at Louis Walsh's face as soon as he starts singing. Cheryl Cole's reaction is priceless, too.
After seeing Clare's pitiful attempt to get through the Saturday after the Friday before, I realised that Karaoke and Shots is actually a brilliant idea for a talent show. I'll pitch it to you so you can see what you think.
Hopeful wannabes with a half-decent voice get to do their party pieces in front of a panel of judges. The successful ones go through to the next stage. So far, so predictable.
But here's the twist.
Instead of just sitting there saying, 'It's a "no" from me,' or refusing to turn their chairs around, each judge is provided with a 9mm revolver loaded with live rounds. If any contestant fails to reach a decent standard, he or she gets blown away live on prime-time television.
See – Karaoke and Shots just got real.
I first outlined this idea on Facebook a couple of months ago. A few of my friends thought it had legs. I also sketched it out in the Golden Cross last week. Jade was horrified, but the barman seemed to like it.
Jade said, 'You can't go killing people live on TV.'
'Not in this country, no,' I agreed. 'But I bet the Japanese networks would bite my hand off for the rights.'
After all, I'm old enough to remember the insane clips from Endurance that Clive James used to feature on his TV show. I'm just taking things to the next level.
I was in the Golden Cross on Wednesday night, drinking with a good crowd of performing arts students from St Paul, Minnesota, for some bizarre reason. Suddenly, a young girl sitting beside me literally launched herself off her stool and into the middle of the crowd. I started laughing and told her, 'It's only the lighting system – that bright red dot on your chest isn't really a laser guide for a sniper rifle.'
But the plot thickens. Phillip and I were sitting in the Lighthouse last night when I noticed that Spanish Steve had a bright red dot in the middle of his back. We looked around and Martin had a bright red dot on the nape of his neck. I told Phillip what had happened in Cardiff the night before. Maybe there really were snipers positioned around the building, ready to take down anyone who murdered 'Delilah' for the thousandth time. Was Karaoke and Shots about to come to life?
Anyway, having kept the proposal to my Facebook friends and my fellow members of the Broken Key Club until now, I'm putting it out there for anyone to buy. It's even got a working title, courtesy of the barman in the Golden Cross, who mentioned that it sounded like a plan for a snuff movie.
I recently landed the biggest proofreading job so far. Gollancz are reissuing William Gibson's 'Sprawl' novels – Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive – together with his collection of short stories Burning Chrome. Guess who got the gig to do all four?
It's been exciting for me, because they want these to be the definitive editions, and so I've been entrusted to bash a degree of consistency into the books. It's understandable, I suppose, because they came out at different times, and were presumably copy-edited by different people. I've been making long lists of charactes, product manufacturers (real and fictional), locations (real and fictional), and futuristic slang words, technical terms and foreign words, in order to apply the changes across the board.
It's been a fairly long time since I read Neuromancer, and I've never tackled the sequels before. As a result, I hadn't noticed just what a heavy influence Mr Gibson has been on the mainstream of science fiction over the past twenty years or so. I suppose the most obvious nod to his books was one of my favourite films of all times, The Matrix.
While the idea of plugging into a 'virtual reality' system anticipates Neuromancer by a few years – I've traced it back as far as Christopher Priest's novel A Dream of Wessex – it was the Wachowski Brothers who really brought the idea to a mass audience. While Mr Gibson uses the term 'the matrix' (with a lower case m) to describe the cyberspace world his characters explore, I think his vision of the internet owes more to the embarrassing graphics of Lawnmower Man than to our everyday experiences of surfing the Net. However, the character of the Finn, an AI construct who acts as an intermediary between the human protagonists and the sentient programs inhabiting the matrix, was a direct steal as the Oracle. (In Mona Lisa Overdrive the Finn even refers to himself as 'an oracle.') While the films owe a conceptual debt to Mr Gibson's books, the two media are worlds apart.
No, what I've got in mind is the subtle way in which Mr Gibson's ideas have spread into popular SF films and TV programmes over the years. Take Minority Report, for example. That's another great film based on a very short story by one of the Grand Masters of the genre, Philip K. Dick. You might not have noticed it unless you were looking, but the rundown areas of Washington DC are referred to at one point as 'the sprawl'. That's straight out of Neuromancer – as are the little mechanical spiders which the police use to search the building in which John Anderton is hiding.
Those same little spiders turned up again in the second episode of the revived Doctor Who, of all places. And it's though Doctor Who, perhaps surprisingly, that many of Mr Gibson's ideas have made it onto the small screen. In the two-parter 'Silence in the Library'/Forests of the Dead', Steven Moffat introduced the idea of an electronic interface which could record a person's consciousness for a short time. At the end of the second episode, all the characters who've been killed by the Vashta Nerada, and River Song, who sacrifices herself to save the Doctor, are reunited in a virtual world. That's a nod to Neuromancer, where the stored consciousness of a dead hacker known as the Dixie Flatline helps our hero crack the biggest encryption job of all time. In 'Time Heist', in the most recent series, one of the characters is an augmented human, who can plug hardware into a socket behind his ear. That's straight out of the Sprawl books as well.
Although they're some three decades old, and Mr Gibson has left the Sprawl behind to write more complex but less technologically biased books, his legacy in modern SF is huge and widespread. Read the books for yourself when they're reissued, and see how many winks to his ideas you can spot next time you're watching a film or enjoying the Doctor's latest adventures.
Several years ago, I became famous in the pub for remembering huge amounts of trivia which I could recall at a moment's notice. I used to tease my pals that I was going to start charging them for storing facts in my brain. That, of course, is the basic plot of 'Johnny Mnemonic' – later made into a rather disappointing but very stylish film with Keanu Reeves. And that's the reason I'm writing this today. The first story in Burning Chrome is, of course, 'Johnny Mnemonic'. Even though I had the book in front of me when I was working on the proof, the Voyager edition isn't without its production errors.
So, like Neo in The Matrix: Reloaded, I had to go back to the Source. If you've read my blog 'OmniScience' from a few years ago, you'll know that I was regularly reading this cutting-edge magazine of science fact, fiction and fantasy around the time that I was studying for my O levels, back in the very early 1980s.
So, ladies and gentlemen, I can now reveal the Source, as it was was revealed to me when I was about fifteen, and didn't have a fucking clue what was going on in the story at the time. Thirty-five years on, I still can't quite believe that I'm working on the reissue. When I wrote to Gollancz and told them I'd been a SF fan for most of my life, I don't think they believed me. Well, here's the proof (no pun intended!)
