Authors Electric

1980s me! I was born in 1964, so most of my supposedly formative years were in the 1970s and 1980s. I remember our family having the first colour television on the street – hired from Radio Rentals as were they all back then. I remember having just three TV channels and the excitement of the launch of Channel 4 in 1982. I also remember the launch of Brookside , the new hard-hitting Channel 4 soap set in Liverpool. I’d just started at Liverpool university and if you got up early enough at university, you could watch them filming in the city.  Brookside was supposedly targeting ‘gritty social issues’ – did it? I honestly don’t know. I didn’t watch any other soaps, so I had nothing to compare it with. I had vague memories of the local charming-but-deadly gangster Tommy McArdle, and then of course there was the infamous body under the patio and the first televised lesbian kiss, both of which catapulted actress Anna Friel to fame.  But compared to modern soap, Brookside  is ...

 One advantage of not having watched a lot of television during the busier spells of my life is that when things became a lot less frantic there were some really good programmes I had never seen at the time when they were first aired. That's my excuse for having viewed all three series of 'Detectorists' several times over the past year. In case anyone reading this hasn't heard of 'Detectorists', I should mention that it's a (very) British comedy series. So it came about that, whereas I had sometimes been tempted to see my writing process as like that of a sculptor working on a huge lump of marble or some appropriate geological formation, whittling or carving or hammering away until the original source material had become the chosen shape, I realised that it was actually more similar to the way metal detectorists worked. Bear with me while I try to explain my reasoning. First there is the faint signal from the depths of the earth - or my mind, as the case may...

Ah ... Game of Thrones. It's an excitement that has passed me by. Why? Well, it's not on Freeview, and that's the only television I watch. And even that is only turned on before nine in the evening if it's something special. 'Think what you're missing,' I hear you cry. 'It costs next to nothing to pay for Sky, or Virgin, or Netflix ... all gateways to a world of wonderfulness.' 'But,' I reply, 'I spend enough time with screens. I write on a screen. I do a lot of my research on a screen. I catch up with the News on a screen. I drop by social media occasionally. And when that is done I want to look up from the screen and read a book, or go for a walk, or simply sit on my balcony and listen to the birds sing.' Does this exclude me from the mainstream? Possibly. It reminds me of my schooldays. Unlike almost everyone else in my class, we didn't have a television until I was 16. This meant I felt shut out of vital discu...

Cross-channel confusion Last autumn I had a disturbing experience. Well it wasn’t too bad because I was only sitting in front of the telly and no blood was spilled, and you know how it is when a character appears and your immediate reaction is ‘oh that’s so-and-so from what’s it’s name,’ because with any actor worth their salt you’re bound to think of them as their most recent persona.  But this time it got out of hand.  I was watching the dramatisation of Capital by John Lanchester  and couldn’t miss the fact that city financier Roger Yount was actor Toby Jones aka Lance from cult BBC4 comedy The Detectorists . But then Roger’s wife Arabella turned out to be Rachel Stirling who happens to be the wife of the other guy in The Detectorists , Lance’s mate Andy. Confused? No, not exactly, but it didn’t help with my suspension of disbelief. Then there was Nicola Walker (great actress, loved her feisty farmer in Last Tango in Halifax ) playing two different d...

I should have known my fate was sealed when the bloke on the bus beside me commenced to cough all the way into town. Those microbes then took a few days to work their evil magic on me, until it was time for the helter skelter ride through tunnel darknesses which can sometimes accompany germ infestation.   Sometimes a flu/cold is like enforced meditation in a cell; Christmas cold/flu has that added frisson of feeling you are in the cell while others are enjoying unusual freedoms. Each night these new inner demons had the upper hand, but I knew if I could get through to 6am, a bright spot would emerge to start the day – The Waltons, on Freeview Channel 61, the “True Entertainment” channel. I hadn’t seen The Waltons on tv since the 1980s, but by then I would have become jaded by seeing too much of them, so it would have been the 1970s when the programme had initially held me transfixed in some odd sway. So, last flu-filled Christmas I watched again, to see if the ...

Last year, at about this time, I took the exciting Strictly Come Dancing Bowl Of Nibbles Game out from under the bed and blew the dust off its box. So now, in the interests of balance, I've had a rummage in the wardrobe, and now we can all play X-Factor Clock Golf (TM) . Hours of fun for the whole family. The rules are very simple: Play proceeds right to left, except when there's an odd number of players, when the first player to have a go missed is the last player who started. Take a card from the pile and throw the dice twice to determine the order of rounds. Popstar Cards are wild. Watch X-Factor carefully. Score 2 points each time Gary Barlow wears a V-neck pullover without a shirt. Score 5 points each time someone on your sofa says "Nicole who?" Score 5 points each time someone on your sofa says "That Tulisa's really tall, isn't she!" Score a bonus 10 points every time you look at Tulisa and can't rid yourself of an image she w...

When I was just starting to write an older, more experienced, author told me that you needed any two out of three particular things in order to succeed as an author; Talent, Hard Work, and Luck. It puzzled me then that talent was optional (I now know better!) and I quickly discovered how important Luck is - like a lottery win, the right review, the right person just happening on your book, an international event at the right moment and you’re projected into the stratosphere. I’d been planning for quite a while to E-publish my biography of Christina Rossetti - a book I’m frequently asked for and which can cost quite a lot on the second hand market. Unfortunately E-publishing the biography of a poet isn’t easy - all those illustrations, all those poems requiring individual formatting for Kindle. A nightmare. But I’m lucky to have a partner who’s not only an artist (he’s designed several of my book covers for major publishers), but also a cyber-wizard. With the help of Mobi-poc...