Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Film and Television

As I began to write and publish my novels I always hoped that this would encourage a door to open to the world of cinema. And it did, relatively quickly, thanks to the arrival of Channel 4 and their decision in their first season of “Film on Four” to ask non-film writers to write a film for their new channel. I was duly commissioned and the first film to be made from one of my scripts was Good and Bad at Games in 1982. Since then twelve of my scripts have made it to the screen, one of which— The Trench—I also directed. I suppose I must have written some three dozen scripts in total over the years since Good and Bad at Games. A success ratio of one-in-three is actually not bad going for a screenwriter. The debilitating aspect of the job is that so much of the work you do goes both unseen and unpublished, therefore the key thing, from my point of view, is that films must be made from time to time: otherwise all the effort and frustration that inevitably comes with the job begins to take its toll. Luckily enough — and a lot of luck is involved — I seem to have been able to keep that sporadic momentum going. An added bonus for a moonlighting novelist is that the film world provides a refreshing sense of collegiate mutual endeavour. After the long solitary work required on a novel it is a pleasure to collaborate. Equally, after collaboration, it is a pleasure to return to the closed study.

No such collaboration, however, is involved in the job of TV critic, yet I was very pleased indeed, in 1981, to be offered the job of writing the television column of the New Statesman, taking over from Julian Barnes, who was moving on to be the Observer’s TV critic. Not only was I joining the staff of a magazine I revered but I was also to be paid a sum of £80 per week and provided with a free television and video recorder. I started on 1 May 1981 and lasted until 25 February 1983. It is the only regular column I have ever written and the most sustained work of journalism I have ever attempted. I found the unfamiliar discipline both a challenge and rewarding and discovered that, amongst the consumption of ephemera that two-years’ television-watching inevitably encourages, there were films and programmes that were not only stimulating but proved enduring. But because I wasn’t a professional journalist I grew increasingly conscious of the sheer amount of writing I was doing. This, more than anything, made me call a halt: when I left I calculated I had written some 80,000 words of television criticism — a reasonably sized novel’s-worth.