Hello and welcome to sitcom keeps I'm James Kerry. No Dave this week but I'm joined down the line by screenwriter and author Jonathan Ames. He wrote to the HBO show Bored to Death which starred Ted Danson and co-created a show called Blunt Talk with Seth MacFarlane which starred Patrick Stewart and Adrian Scarborough and ran on stars for two seasons. Unfortunately we didn't get that one in the UK sadly.
He's also the writer of four novels one of which the Extra Man is being released in paperback by in the UK by Pushkin Press and that's what we start talking about but don't worry we quickly get on to talking about are you being served. Hope you enjoy. First thing I wanted to say was how much I've been enjoying the book. It's great fun but it's only recently that I realized that you wrote it some time ago and this is a UK version of the book as it were.
Yes the novel first came out in 1998 and I wrote it from 1992 into 1997. Almost five years. Okay so that's a long time in coming. One thing that leaped off the page of me that I'd be keen to talk a little bit more about is you mentioned are you being served as something that are something that our odd couple end up watching together and I'm wondering how the hell that ended up in your book because this is a slightly forgotten show in the UK exactly but it's very much a visit time.
Is that a show that you had brought up watching or was it just something that you just thought? I was not brought up watching it but during the I lived with an eccentric gentleman upon whom Henry Harrison is somewhat based and this was the early 90s and on an obscure channel and back then the cable wasn't quite there weren't quite as many channels yet but I guess it was beginning to happen where there were more and more channels and on one of the channels I'm not sure what and it was an old TV with an antenna. Are you being served with play every night? Maybe at 11 o'clock at night or something like that and this eccentric gentleman loved watching it and I would watch it with him and I loved the show too.
I must have seen dozens of episodes and I just enjoyed it so much. I can't quote it the way I once did or the names of the characters but it was all I don't know it was so dry and so and the characters were so great though the faces and Mrs. Slocum you know I can't remember all their names but they had great Captain Keacock and Mrs. Slocum of course you know one lived for every episode for her to say my pussy was out all night in the rain it was just very funny I mean again maybe nowadays it wouldn't be so funny but she was hilarious.
Well they did a new episode of it last year in the UK where they recast it and they sort of gave yeah and actually because it's so of its time as it were I think it just kind of it kind of worked and I thought it might go to series again because department stores are a thing so I thought perhaps it might be rebooted but it didn't quite take it. And the sets were so minimal like you know what I mean it was I mean the whole thing was so in a way I guess camp is an overused word but just kind of cheap but the actors were so dedicated and strange and I don't know. Yeah and there was a number of other shows from that stable which I don't know if you also ever got to sample because those two writers were prolific and they had like three shows on one time which in the UK at least is quite an achievement but they were three so in a way they weren't doing 24 episodes per series like you guys often do over there but they were running you know they were running you know highly high and all over you know there were just loads of different shows that they were doing. Were you sort of drawn to that I mean it's obviously our predominant interest in the show is situation comedy and also people who want to write sitcoms.
Were sitcoms part of your upbringing in terms of you know we did you find yourself drawn to that format or were you your books certainly show that you're kind of more of a book guy but obviously there's a huge overlap. Yeah well in general I mean my entry into the world of arts and writing was through books and I think books remain my first love and the thing that is the medium from which I still derive the most pleasure but as a child I mean looking back on it now every night all I did was watch TV and I knew that the schedule by heart now that there were you know only three or four channels there was ABC, NBC, CBS and then two local New York channels and I remember the numbers CBS was two, NBC was four, ABC was seven and then there were two New York channels channel nine and channel 11 and they seem to have their different loyalties and different reruns and when I say loyalties channel nine this would make too much sense for an English audience but channel nine was the New York Mets and channel 11 was the New York Yankees and then you also had different local news stations anyway but I would watch every night probably starting around six o'clock probably reruns Gilligan's Island, you know the Green Batman and then it would become you know the sitcoms on the family, Maud, Sanford and Sun and most of these produced by Norman Lear were the ones that I watched and then they mashed so all through the 70s I watched TV by the 80s once I was in college I went to college in 1982 I stopped really watching television I didn't really you know I didn't watch television again until sometime in the early 90s when when Peek came out yeah when you're at college you stand out of time for it you're just too busy doing stuff and you know it's there are shows that I'm aware were actually very significant and I'm thinking why didn't I see that I was at college I just I was doing sketch comedy and trying to get people to think I was funny and I didn't have a TV you didn't have TVs and obviously you know now people watch so much stuff on their laptops or but yeah so I really didn't watch TV after probably like 1981 or 82 and so and so for you was the natural way into writing is there something that you want to do that would have been books as well so that was always part of the plan yeah but my goal and dream was to be a novelist and my first novel came out in 1989 when I was 25 and then I struggled for many years to write a second book but then the second book was the Extra Man nine years later and then after that I began to produce books fairly somewhat rapidly because I had a column in an alternative paper sort of a column of my adventures which actually did lead if you want to talk to my first TV show my first venture into TV yeah that'd be great well so yeah 1997 in New York I began writing for a newspaper called New York Press and it was a free paper that came out once a week and I wasn't paid very much but I got a column in it every two weeks and I would write up my adventures and I turned myself into a character and by 2000 and by 2000 I stopped writing the column but for a few years kept writing those sort of pieces and I'll try to do this quickly and then somewhere in that mix David Letterman took an interest in me probably two three okay yeah because someone had given in my novel the Extra Man the book that you began this conversation with yeah and he was a big meter and he really liked it and the person who gave it to him was the talent booker and she had seen me perform like a decade before I used to put on these shows where I would do monologues not unlike the essays that I would later write and and so when Letterman told her I mean I really liked that book you gave me she said well you know he's really funny because like I said back then I used to perform a lot you should have a month so he had me on three times 2003 to 2004 and around this time a young producer in LA saw me give a reading and he got it in his mind that I should come up with a TV show based on my essays so my first essay collection was called What's Not To Love so I came out to LA I had never written a script this would have been around 2003 and pitched this TV show idea with me as the star and I pitched and I pitched it at the poor man's curbing enthusiasm and I said but literally we're not using that exactly right but literally I'm poor so the show won't be poor in quality but I'm but I'll be like Larry David figure quite neurotic and confused at the center of things and curbing enthusiasm at the time is all the rage and anyway show time took a chance on me I never written a script and they commissioned me to write a pilot I got final draft I read a few scripts I wrote a pilot we actually shot it and I played myself not very well unfortunately which would be a requirement psycho analysis now and but it didn't go to series but that's what I got my foot in the door in Hollywood though for the next three years it seemed like well I'm never gonna get a shot again and I sort of gave up on it and I to be honest and I know this is a television podcast I was more somewhat drawn to TV because it was almost impossible to survive writing books and also I was a performer and I guess I wanted to I don't know reach a wider audience and make more money or whatever motivation yeah I you know the underneath motivation perhaps one hopes is to bring joy to other people to bring laughter and make them feel less alone but anyway for the next three years from 2004 to 2007 I didn't seem like Hollywood was gonna give me a chance again but then I wrote a short story called Bored to Death and where I again I was playing with fiction and nonfiction I wrote it as one of like in the style of one of my essays you know Jonathan Ames and narrator but I came up with this notion that I put an ad on Craigslist as an unlicensed private detective and got a case and so that then became that then opened up Hollywood again for me went a producer read that short story and and she and I were talking and she was like I think there's a TV show in this and I said the same and so that's how I then got back into TV I don't know if that's convoluted or boring for you but no no that's no that's really interesting because I mean because you know this is it was obviously a big deal and a big break and it was it was a successful show that ran through series and you got to work with Ted Danson I mean by me that's what's not to like and so what did you what were you learning about writing through through that and I guess once it goes to I mean it must be terrifying in a way it's the thing that you're aiming for is you write a pilot's script and you rewrite it rewrite it and then you get the green light so okay let's do it let's make more and you're like oh well this one took me a year what I do now and obviously you guys have got a bit of a machinery in but it's still a frightening thing I'd imagine to get that break and to sort of repeat this formula every week did you find that or was it not as hard well there was certainly a lot of terror and anxiety and fear of failure the thing is the pilot came very easily I wrote it in about five days maybe seven days and and I was happy to do so because I was getting paid more for this one little 30 page pilot than I'd ever been paid for like 400 days novel like the extra man so I thought well but in here I'm happy this is enough money you know I this will keep me in the game for another few years of the it was quite enough money to live on for you know a year or more I lived very frugally back then and and then they're like okay well if we get the right cast we'll shoot this and I had met Jason Schwartzman because he had read my novel Wake Upser and I was trying to turn that into a movie at the time and then so I met with him which was thrilling and then I told him I was working on this show about you know a writer who becomes a private detective and he was a big fan of the true film film Stolen Kisses which was very much about a young man who briefly becomes a private detective and so then I was like I thought he'd be perfect for it anyway it all came together miraculously HBO suggested Ted Danson I had also met luckily Zach Alphanakis socially and he was also interested in my movie Wake Upser and I was able to convince Zach who at the time said he would never do TV again to at least read the pilot board to death and he did and then he decided to do it and so it came together we shot the pilot and then they were like yes let's do seven you know write seven more and it was very daunting but I I did it I did get a writing stuff but on both my shows I board to death and blunt talk you know the writers were very hopeful but I tended to write like 98 percent of the scripts I just I was compelled to rewrite most of the dialogue because dialogue is so idiosyncratic the writers were so helpful with plotting and you know improving what I had written or coming up with funny things to you know yeah and poking holes and saying hey this bit doesn't quite track and you know it's just it's extra yeah and then also coming up with funny lines that I would use you know but I did the bulk of the writing on all my shows which was a lot you know for blunt talks we did two seasons in two years and so I wrote 600 pages in two years the equivalent of six feature films man I'm beginning to talk about features in a second but we as you describe the the genesis of board to death I mean what the the lesson there I guess which again people listening to the show who are sort of aspiring to be writers quite or at least starting out it shows you that it's sort of you know this was a development of an idea of a pilot of a character of a persona that came from a place and then and even then sort of five kind of stars had to align at same time with with HBO Ted Danson you know and the rest of the cast just just to be in with a shot you know it's it's it's really it's I think that's one of the people don't quite get is just quite is that failure is so incredibly yes writing for television or getting something on I mean the you know it's they say you know something like 90 percent of all restaurants fail you know and that's kind of like I'm saying 99 percent of all ideas for TV shows fail or it's not necessarily because they're bad ideas but just you need so many things to line up I mean if you say I often I once came up with a phrase I call the Swiss clock of luck because a Swiss clock I show precise moves so perfectly and at the same time to have a TV show happen it's got to be like both precise and lucky you know that you find the right cast that it all somehow happens at the same moment that Ted Danson is at this point in his career where he wants to try something different you know Zach Albinakis at that point in his career it's like I never want to do TV he had done a couple bad shows but then he decides to do TV and then right before we shot the pilot of board to death he had just shot this movie and he came from the set of the movie goes yeah I just did this movie called the hangover I don't think it's gonna be very good you know and then at the end of our season you know after as we were finishing shooting the movie came out and Jason Ted and I joined Zach and we went to like a midnight showing of the film and you know it's just you know luck and timing and you know and then also of course you can't just snap your fingers and make things happen and for me it was years in the making to get that opportunity in a way it began with me performing I began performing in 1992 at this you know kind of literally underground basement nightclub called the Fez and because that woman saw me perform there in the early 90s 10 11 years later she was working for Letterman and you know hadn't forgotten me gave him a copy of my book and then he had me on which I think then gave the people that green lit which was shrimp time my first pilot they green lit you know the writers script probably gave them confidence in me because Letterman was like this guy's funny but I only was on Letterman because I you know was doing my own shows like you were talking about doing sketch comedy 10 years before and 10 years before I'd been hoping to be discovered and wasn't you know like I would be like yeah and even even when you were discovered you kind of weren't because it took from from that from that fairs club to being seen to board to death being on television that was something I first performed you're right I first performed at the nightclub in 1992 and then and then board to death debuted in 2009 so yeah 17 years my first novel came out in 89 you know and actually the person who booked me at the nightclub had seen me perform in a cafe in 1991 and somehow found me it wasn't so easy because you know was the internet back then she you know then we didn't even have email so I mean yeah I got to explain that I got a kid who had and trying to explain to them a world without email and without the fact that you you had only sort of four or five TV channels and you had to kind of watch it when it was just they can't really get their head around that. Also in that interim process didn't your didn't the extra man also be on the movie? Well that took a while too that book and that book took me years to write and I really struggled between my first book and my second book 89 to 98 during which time I began to perform in part because I was struggling with my writing but I thought that when I got on stage so you know you keep trying for the young writers and performers out there the whole the life of the arts like any producer is perseverance just putting stuff out there and putting it out there with you know with kind of an open mind and an open heart and a joy and you know you sort of hope to get to the next level but you just there's no guarantee of force.
But also finding out what kind of writer you are as well because it may be that you assume you're going to work in the movies and actually the ideas you come up with are just a little television or thinking that you're going to be a TV writer and actually everything you write is probably more seen into a novel and it takes you quite a long time to find out the opportunities there but also what you're good at what you're passionate about. But so how did the extra man because that turned into a movie that's Kevin Klein which was amazing. Oh yeah he's so good I've really been lucky in my career I've had such great actors involved in my projects I mean I mean Kevin Klein and Paul Dano in that movie many you know some of the smaller roles were also collectors. That came about let's see that that book came out in 1998 The Extra Man and then became a film in 2010 so that was kind of 12 years in the making.
Were you involved in the description of that at all or were you kind of thrown clear from that project? I was involved I wrote a draft on spec for The Extra Man and then and then I've also written a draft on spec you know adapting my novel Wake Up Sir and we were looking for a director for Wake Up Sir and by mistake the people that I was working with at the time sent my script for The Extra Man to the directors Berman and Fauciini but they were supposed to get Wake Up Sir because at the time I did have a director attached to the Extra Man of a nice actually British director Richard Longcane but we weren't doing the film made and then they read the script and really wanted it and so they took my script and I hadn't written a lot of scripts at that time and they took that script and then they kind of rewrote it and did their own thing with it but I am credited as one of the screenwriters. Right okay were you kind of happy with what they did in the end or were you? Yes I mean it's you know that book was very personal to me because it was the novel that you know I many people had a case of what's called Second Novelitis where you just it's very hard to produce a second book because you have a greater level of self-consciousness of oh my god this when you put something out in the world and and you just more you can't follow through I mean I think we all face that in life whatever our careers we and so I really faltered but then I came through and I you know nine years later published it and meant the world to me so I think the movie it was going to be hard for the movie to live up to the importance of that book in my life because that book by being able to write that book I sort of said to myself and to the world not that the world cared at all I am right I can I can write a second book you know and but the movie nevertheless is very strong and and funny and and you know and captured a lot of the spirit of the novel and Kevin Klein is brilliant and so is Paul Dayno and so the actors you know they did a very good job but but that but it was a little bit hard for me to totally accept its transformation only because the novel the novel was so personal to me yeah yeah given that we've we've got are you being served in your life and in the book it's sort of I can see how that but also as I'm reading it's interesting to know how personal the novel is because I can I can see in in the hero how there is a so much introspection and so much worry and so much of you know he's he's sort of trying to copy this sort of this gentleman image that he's reading about in loads of these great books and you know Fitzgerald and Woodhouse and stuff and I'm wondering if you know that speaks of a of a younger version of you who was really who was really unconfident as a writer in terms of what they were worried about and I wonder if now you look back on that guy as it were and have a device for them it's just like oh man you got talking about this or you tell me what you should be more worried about this other thing or you know who what do you say?
Good question I mean I mean you know what the book was in many ways autobiographical but at the same time I wasn't that character for example I was not a cross dresser but I took very introspective my own character exaggerated them because I had questions along those lines or now my own gender or sexuality confusions that I had to work through so for the novel I made all these things I sort of either made them more extreme or made it one direction you know because by the end of the book in a sense he sort of overcomes this need to cross dress you know he sort of has found himself that he maybe has come to realize I am a man and this is my destiny and I can't this is who I am in in some ways the desire to cross dress was he so loved women that felt so incapable of getting them that it was almost like if I become a woman then maybe I can have a relationship with one but I what I would tell the young writer who was writing it because it's this something I've been thinking about a lot like I don't remember that young man I don't remember his concerns and my god the hours he I talked about he was me must have put in to write that book over years and sitting down and I have memories kind of like postcards or like a movie montage like there I am at that desk and you know and my funky old computers that I had are laptops and just but yeah so I don't know what I would tell him because you know I we all have to struggle and I'm still struggling yes I would tell him to be kinder to himself that's more to the young writer I mean I think compassion for yourself is very important so that we can then have compassion for others I was always very cruel and I still am in my mind to myself hello again hope you're enjoying this interview with Jonathan Ames we'll get back to it in a moment I just wanted to mention that if you like this sort of thing and you want more access faster to more interviews you might consider joining us on Patreon if you join now you'll get access to interviews we've already done with Stephen Moffitt and Al Murray and also some Patreon only podcast as well and we'll also read the first 10 pages of your script if you send it to us and you're a Patreon member and we'll do a little podcast about it too plus you get copies of Dave's book and my book and also the warm feeling of helping out your fellow man so do consider that but meanwhile let's return to the interview with Jonathan Ames. One of the questions we often end up talking about with writers is in our experience there are two kinds of writer there are ones who love writing and then there are ones who love having written actually hate writing and I'm wondering which of those two you would say? Well that's interesting I mean you know oftentimes these desires to you know divide like this you know make it very black and white but you know like some people like spicy food and they're like spicy food they don't um I would say for me I don't know that I fall easily into either category but but the reason why I mean I think Thomas Mann had a great quote he said uh writing is difficult for writers so if you care about writing it's very difficult because the sentence how do you convey with truth or honesty or humor what you want to say I mean grammar itself is perplexing and so so writing is difficult and I avoid it like the plague I procrastinate but then sometimes when I am sitting down and writing and I'm not one of these people that can write for eight hours and you know be tossing flowers into the air you know certainly of late my focus and concentration seems weakened I think our modern culture with the phones and internet it's you know this is part of the problem in the 21st century is that we're so distracted we're distracted from ourselves from each other from the world constantly looking at phones anyway um so I think it's a mix of pleasure and and struggle and then but then I definitely like once having written you do have a sense of accomplishment it's a little bit like having exercise that day like I did it yes like five I'm also there especially as sitcom writing those there are various sort of schools of thought I mean I'm by nature a planner so I tend to plan stuff in fairly great detail before I start writing but others just like ah you just start writing and then you'll kind of figure it out as you go are you a planner or you are you know well with TV writing everything had to be very planned because you had to get everything approved every step of the way so like HBO you know I would first I guess submit caps but they called capsules for every story almost like every episode so there'd be like a two-page summary almost you know written like a little narrative which was to my play to my strength because I was a pro-writer but you know and then so HBO would approve that and say okay now you can outline or they would give some feedback on that and then you would you know that's when I would work with the writers and really come up with an outline and I would work with them for the capsule as well and then the outline would be approved and then we would follow the outline very closely for the script but you know sometimes deviating and so in the case of TV writing very planned yeah there's no there's no real option about doing that is there because of the format but in terms of novels and essays that is much more having an idea just sitting down and trying to start climbing the mountain and then one or like it's like rock climbing okay I've got a a foothold and a handhold here oh I think I'll go there now but oftentimes you have I usually had at least when I was writing essays and maybe novels there's this point or place or moment you want to get to and Ian Foster sort of I once read a great quote from him talking about a passage to India where he knew somehow maybe this is what he's writing the right the book that something happened in these caves the Malabar caves it's been a long time since I read the book or it's all the movie and but then he wanted to get there no he didn't begin there but that's where he wanted to get to yeah so a lot of times it's very good to get to the moment you know I have him for ed Moby debt but I imagine you know he wanted to get to the moment where Ahab is finally battling the white whale yeah I've read the great American novel I know I have it I haven't don't don't tell it that's a scoop that's an exclusive okay yeah nobody nobody I don't know our secret and so looking ahead to the future what do you find yourself most excited about writing writing next you've drawn back towards TV I know you've done since sport of death you did a blunt talk which ran for two years which and again probably involved you writing more you know more per year than at the point in your life but what are you excited about next or is it just you know well I heard a novella come out in the States in this past year you were never really here which was my first thriller the 10th at genre writing and that and that became a movie you were never really here directed by Lynne Ramsey with Joaquin Phoenix and the same people that are putting out the extra man Pushkin Press in England published you know you were never really here so I've been working on a sequel to that to the novella but I've been struggling and I can't say I mean I'm not sure that I'm excited about anything at the moment I'm a bit confused a little bit stuck and and I don't know it's one of those times of well I think all times are struggle but I'm struggling to write at the moment and most of it is starts with me and some of it is the world is in such a disturbed state of affairs I've always been so very concerned about the environment and I always try to put in messages about the environment but you know we're just just increasingly in the time of cataclysmic weather and we didn't you know we've known this was coming for decades I was very upset about more upset as a young person you know I was against cars I only wanted to ride my bicycle I I was reading articles in the late 80s after the NASA report when they went up in space and looked out at the planet and they're like um things are happening but you know the will to change was not great enough yeah but it's hard to um if there's something like that you care about a lot it is hard to fictionalize that without it sounding appreciate isn't it it's hard to turn ideas into characters because stories tend to be much more ambiguous than they well I you know I would just try to at least have characters acknowledge what was going on yeah to show up to show awareness so that I don't know so that at least is we're not committing at least there's no total denial you know so I guess I would try to put these work these things in and go on talk which was you know about you know cable news broadcast I couldn't be ahead of the news but the one issue that was always going on was the environment so both seasons kind of focused on that yeah yeah that's a show that people over here and not aware of and I'm very excited about it because I'm looking because it didn't make it to the UK in a way that I saw at least and the cast of Patrick Stewart and Adrian Skalbrah um sounds sounds great Adrian Skalbrah was in episodes of a show that I wrote was involved in writer Miranda and he's got a ton of you know of more or less credits than that but it just looks great um how did that show come about and what you know yeah well and also Dolly Wells who's also English and Jackie Weaver who's Australian but to Americans she might sound English and Patrick Stewart and Adrian Skalbrah were just brilliant together I sort of did a PG-Woodhouse relationship with them and that Patrick Stewart plays a cable news host here in the States but he's English kind of like oh god I'm a Pierce Morgan in a way I mean yeah sorry about sorry about people well a different sort of character but at least the idea that you know an English news actor could get a prominent spot in the US so that kind of gave me that you know sort of uh career in a sense that this wasn't far-fetched but um anyway and then Adrian Skalbrah played uh Patrick Stewart's valet you know uh his sort of man and so it was a very Worcester-Geeves kind of relationship uh yeah and they were really funny together um and how that came about was that Seth McFarland uh wanted to do a TV show with Patrick Stewart and because I had worked together on you know uh Seth's animated so um I forget which one but Patrick voiced you know some CIA operative or something um and anyway Seth McFarland needed a writer to come up with an idea for Patrick Stewart and I was to get on the phone with Seth McFarland which was a great opportunity but I needed to come up with an idea and so the night before I was uh to speak with him I was a channel surfing and I saw Pierce Morgan on CNN and I thought this could be a great vehicle for Patrick Stewart and kind of a Larry Sanders mode um you know to sort of live behind the scenes of this cable news host and I'd been told in a somewhat convoluted way that Seth McFarland was looking to do Patrick Stewart that's what my agent had written because I he said you want to get on the phone with Seth McFarland I said yes of course what's it about and he said uh Patrick Stewart uh doing Larry Sanders and I thought okay well they've already done Larry Sanders and you know uh that could be odd it was such a great show but then I'm channel surfing I thought well an adjacent world could be this so when we got on the phone with Seth McFarland he says do you know what I'm looking for and I said well uh Patrick Stewart doing Larry Sanders said no no no no I don't want to you know do something like that you know that exact process he said I just want that tone I want a kind of funny cable comedy and I said well that said you know an adjacent world but a very good setup for a comedy you know it could be a cable news host and living behind the scenes you know it's a formula that's certainly been done and uh and and a cable news staff is not unlike the staff of are you being served you've got a whole world you know somebody said something like to be shows or about families but so anyway I proposed this on the phone to Seth McFarland and he really liked it and um and so I must have fleshed it out some more and he decided to go with me and then and Patrick Stewart I had to meet Patrick and Patrick had to approve me and he he read my novel Wake Up Sir and then we met uh I was living in Brooklyn at the time where I had lived for many years and Patrick spent his part of his life in Brooklyn and so we met in Brooklyn and hit it off and um I began to flush out the character and I ended up naming him Walter Blunt because that was the first role in Shakespeare that Patrick Stewart had played in Henry the Four and Walter Blunt is a character who brings some news but the king says something like it's it's news is old as an old fish or something which was kind of and so then once I had that name Walter Blunt then I thought well then his show could be Blunt Talk you know because these new shows always like you know used to be the O'Reilly factor or Anderson Cooper 360 so you know so that's how that came about and unfortunately I don't know if one can see it in the UK the only way to see it but probably in the UK you can't is to rent it on Amazon okay well I shall look hard for it but I don't know if you can in the UK you know for various reasons and so what did you what did you learn doing that show so I let's see what did I learn I don't I it was very hard of course you know being a showrunner is tremendous responsibility you have this it's like three jobs it's insane you know I think the in right in Britain in England the writers crave more power but then when you tell them what a showrunner does it's like well I don't want that much power that I mean that's a three-man job isn't it yeah well it's you know certainly when you're shooting which are you know 12 to 14 hour days you know you're on set the whole time because especially with comedy if it's not working you've got to fix it in the moment it's not like drama where like okay we got that information across there was a dagger was found under the bed just needs someone to say that you know how can you say that's what drama is but yeah sure you're pushing against an open door here but I mean to a certain degree but yeah like the writer being on set if you know hopefully the scene will work more or less or you could cut it if you've cut around it but you know it's a lot of information being conveyed but in comedy if the laugh isn't landing you've got to change it up by the moment because you also don't have really any rehearsal time you get you get one table read so you get pretty good at knowing if a scene will work and what makes a scene work and so there's just the being on set but then while you're shooting you're still in my case I never had all the episodes written so then I would have be writing on the weekends and then during the week while we're shooting I also needed to be editing the episodes that we were finishing up and then and then casting the episodes that to come and approving the wardrobe and the locations that were found so it's a million decisions and of course you have a lot of people around you but ultimately you know and if and I think for a show to at least the way I did maybe coming from the world of novels I I exerted a lot of control because the whole thing I needed to please me whether it be the wardrobes they were wearing or you know the props that were you know visible in the set I kind of cast my eye over everything yeah yeah and but it's you know a great it's a great child be true right right yeah and you make you know you make a good living and you work with people and there's a lot of joy but there's you know we're all drive ourselves and so you know one worries about failing and not being able to do it or and then there's so many people to please you know you've got to please the network you've got to please the actors you know so anyway I don't know what I learned yeah it's hard to know given that you barely had time to think for the whole for two whole years you know when you're making the show it's just and I guess there's always that difficulty of you know I said this to a fellow writer the other day because I'm scripting a show a show and he was sort of complaining a little bit about this and I just said hey just bear in mind you're complaining about a show that is actually on TV and it's very easy the moment it stops to wish you got it back but it's you know those planets don't align that often yeah and I would often I was very close to one of my writers who had been a script supervisor on board to death and then I made her a writer on Bluntop and I was very aware especially because board to death had been canceled that to appreciate this you know to appreciate every moment like oh my god look they're feeding us or wow Patrick Stewart is like saying this funny line I really you know what I mean really try to step back yeah appreciate the moment which we have to do everything in life like right now like I'm going to talk to you and you know I've got coffee and like this and then you know this is a good moment yeah yeah well I'm glad it's but I'm glad it's good moment it's been a good moment for me too yeah we should just probably round these things often thanks so much for being on the show it sounds like you've I mean it sounds like you're in a bit of a creative kind of impasse at the moment do you have any do you have any things that you do to get you out of that do you have any kind of ways of kind of shaking things up or is it just like it's just a bit of a waiting game well yeah I mean I think taxes if you're something you're receiving a tax is that really makes you creative but that's sort of what kills me is seeing all these papers pile up around my gas and things that I need to attend to I mean these are you know nice problems to have but yeah but I'm also trying to help some other people get some TV shows going more like in a supervisor kind of capacity so I'm doing a bit of that but um so it is but it is a little bit of a creative law I think the only way to get out of it is to sit down and to be disciplined and to try and you know have a reasonable goal I'm going to write one page a day or I'm going to sit up I desk and put a you know yellow pad and jot down ideas I often I think you know and I should take my own advice you know for most of us the next generation will be different we sort of learn to be creative with a pencil in our hand or a crayon and so I think there's a connection from the brain to the hand and yeah and so if it might be helpful just to scribble down ideas and then move into typing which is maybe the next level of making things a little bit more solid yeah yeah no it's good I mean I've got myself recently an apple pencil so I can go back to writing manually as it were especially with notes and stuff on an iPad and it does make a difference because you're you're yeah the way your hand moves and your brain especially if you're my age or older I don't know what these kids are doing now maybe they can write a novel on a phone or something I don't know I know I can but hey it's been so great to talk to you I'm I'm as I say I'm really enjoying your your book and I'm really looking forward to reading it sounds like um your other book sorry that comes after I've just lost it on the phone um wake up sir sounds like it really is up my street so I'm very much looking forward to following up by reading that yeah well that one is very much a thematic sequel to the Extra Man and in fact the character in that book's also a writer and he's working on a book that bears with a strong resemblance to the Extra Man so yeah it sounds like I'm reading them the right order at least yes I think so that's great um thanks so much for talking to us and for for showing your insights and wisdom I'm really grateful and thanks very much indeed but thank you for having me