Authors Electric

Montacute House aka Wolf Hall  The media love to feed off each other. Over the winter the Daily Telegraph ran a news item every Monday (yes news, not features!) relating to Downton Abbey,  and in the last few weeks I've notices something similar with the BBC's Wolf Hall , except for a small snag: viewing figures weren’t as brilliant as expected.  Still, even that became news of the non-news kind ( Wolf Hall fails to grip the nation ) and they hedged their bets by finding a photo of Mark Rylance for the front page. The Beeb of course cashes in with spin-off programmes and Rylance (surprise!) popped up right on cue on Desert Island Discs . Do I mind?  Not in the least, because fickle creature that I am, I’d rather watch or listen to Mark Rylance than the sadly overexposed High Bonneville any day. Oh what a circus. The media have me down to a T. But it’s still worth thinking about Wolf Hall on TV and its impact or lack of. For me the books do require pa...

I’m afraid I’m not talking turkey gravy here, just another writerly conundrum. Do you ‘flatter your reader’ by letting them work out what’s going on, or just lay it on the line, loud and clear? This balancing act came to mind during the recently concluded TV drama The Missing ,  a gut-wrenching tale about the abduction of a five-year-old child and his father’s insistence on following up new clues eight years later when everyone thinks he should move on.  I’m not questioning the characterisation, the acting or even the labyrinthine plot, only the problem of keeping track of what was going on in a narrative that jumped backwards and forwards in time right up until the final denouement. At first we were told this with useful captions ‘present day’ or ‘eight years earlier’ but after a couple of episodes we were left to work it out.  Well that was fine up to a point, but because the locations and characters were the same in each time frame, some close observation was r...