Ratings and Offices

Big fabulous dominating and entirely unconnected to screenwriting news is that our house purchase has finally gone through.

Finally.

Took a minor nervous breakdown over the weekend along with a couple of - how shall I put it? - forceful phone calls to our hesitant buyers to get it through, but it's done.

And I've now realised there is a connection with my professional life, in that I can finally escape from my rabbit hutch and work from home again.

I always loved the idea of having an office when I was working from home - having space for pin boards, shelves, a reading chair, desk with a view, pleasant chats and idle banter over regular coffee breaks with the chummy souls who populate the other offices in the building, then shrugging off the stress of a hard day at the wordface with a gentle stroll home through warm sunshine.

Ha.

Took me about a week to cover the place with the detritus of the creative life, which involves storms of bescribbled paper, endless drifts of biscuit crumbs, a scattering of redundant stationery, and several intriguing stains. And also to realise that I would only ever encounter my fellow hutchees once or twice a year, and when I did, I'd wish I hadn't (especially the heavily set men with sovved up hands who ran some sort of phone betting operation at weekends for a couple of months - I don't know exactly what they were doing, but none of the horses they were recommending ever came in and they didn't respond well to friendly enquiries...).*

Instead of helping me separate work and home life, it feels like it separates me from life entirely, and I'm sure that can't be a good thing.

Great response to the Afterlife episode. Okay ratings; best of the series so far (oh yes!**), but still well down on the first series. Planning's underway for series 3, but ITV are still holding off on a final decision until... until...it's almost... almost... too late. If past history tells us anything.

AAAAND the Producer on my current project, who I've worked with before, like, and think is good, is leaving for an impossible to miss opportunity at an indie.

Great. Which is when I receive my first direct contact from the Exec producer, who reassures me that "we'll appoint someone equally good ASAP, this won't effect you, don't worry, all's well" (subtext; please don't walk please don't walk please don't walk). I won't walk because the script ed's good, I don't want her to sink, and because I've got hooked into the story (smuggling a thriller into the whodunnit genre), but ooh - am I tempted.



*Except for James P, who has the hutch opposite mine, who is on the EastEnders rabbit wheel, and is lovely. Who'd have thunk, two screenwriters in the cheapest and smallest offices available in the area?

** It's great getting ratings - they're like football scores, except that I care about them. At least I do now; I had no idea when I first started. I remember getting an excited phone call from my agent after the first bit of TV I did (a Taggart; red indians rob a security van, and a man gets thrown off a bridge into the path of an express train. Nice.), hearing him bellow "Brilliant! Seven point nine and 31! Isn't that great?" and having to pretend to share his enthusiasm because I was afraid to show ignorance in case he dropped me. I now know that with 7.9 million and 31% he was as likely to drop me as he was his trousers in Oxford Circus.