Authors Electric

What does BBC Radio 4’s long-running, much-loved soap opera about Everyday Farming Folk have against Hallowe’en? BBC Radio 4's The Archers The Archers began on 1st January 1951, as a 15-minute daily serial intended to spread the word about new developments in farming. It centred on 3 or 4 farming families, most of whom were called Archer, with the addition of the Aldridges at the posh end of the scale, balanced by the Grundys and Horrobins at the other. The characters took off, and a wealth of other storylines got woven in, some for comic effect, some for their gripping dramatic pull, but most as vehicles for messages about Good Social Behaviour. No one is ever racist, for instance, except in a clumsy way, because unless one of the villagers says something objectionable (and, needless to say, quite out of character), how are we, the listeners, to grasp that a newcomer to the Ambridge village is from an ethnic minority? Halloween pumpkins... at least they're not plastic. Photo ...

Another distraction - view from my window as I type When I’m not writing my own books or not-very-successfully trying to promote them, my chief occupation is being an editor, proofreader and appraiser of other people’s work, and I must admit I love these things almost as much as I love doing my own writing. The processes are very different, however, and seem to use entirely different bits of my brain. It would be lovely to be able to do my own work in the mornings, for example, and work on other people’s books in the afternoons. I know some editors who do this, but for me it simply doesn’t work. It was the same with lecturing and research, in the days when I did those things. In UK universities, lecturers are expected to fit their original research into the gaps between all their various teaching commitments and administrative functions. There are exceptions in a few places, I believe, and perhaps for some who’ve achieved the dizzy heights of academic stardom, but on the who...

I've blogged a couple of times about Littlewich Ways - our village community radio play project. Littlewich is a small fictional village set in Cheshire; the wich refers to the salt industry around which much of mid-Cheshire's industry has grown over the years. My own house was built in the mid 19th century for the manager of the local salt-mine, and the Winsford mine (a mile or two away across the valley) is Britain's oldest mine. So our little script-writing team - there are four of us at present - meets up every week and we storyboard future scenes and read-through stuff we've written for group feedback. We get strange looks in the pub occasionally (but they're used to us by now) and we even recruited our latest writer when I apologised for disturbing her quiet drink with her partner ... But nothing was actually getting recorded. Nearly 40 episodes in and we still only had two up on YouTube . The problem is trying to get groups of volunteers in the same p...

Thoughts from a visit north of the border. The house party consisted of Cally Phillips, George, Hector, Dude, Jan and Viv. Call it an authorial thinktank, or brainstormer. There were three guitars and a tin whistle in the croft (!), and we didn’t play a note. One of the subjects me and Cally talked about a lot was the continuing problem of self-division. So keen was I to meet and pick the brains of a genuinely computer literate writer that I paid half a million quid for a single rail fair from Manchester to somewhere north of Aberdeen. I won’t tell you where exactly, because Hector and Dude would die of excitement if they had any more visitors to run around and slobber over, and I won’t mention that the cost was well offset (as my kids might say) by the gift of a magnificent Subaru to drive back to civilization in. Cally and George, near the Spotty Bag shop.  Cold Two points before I continue. One, I’ve never agreed with the bizarre rule that you must never...