Nurture your friends, and yes i am a geek

Off up TAAAHN (or the Big Filth, depending on mood) yesterday for the latest in my series of what and who is out there missions, where I dodged Christmas crowds, surreptitiously tugged down tinsel wherever I felt I could get away with it, and muttered ‘bah’ and ‘humbug’ a lot.

Having blithely swanned from meeting to meeting over the years without pausing to wonder how exactly I came to be invited*, in the cause of research on behalf of you, dear reader, the last two meetings I did I asked why they’d invited me.

First one was through a script editor I worked with on a long-form crime show who now has a project at the company in question. They were looking for someone with a proven track record over 90 minutes who could do dark, with maybe a dash of gothic. That’ll be me, then.

Second came from two different directions – one of the two people in the meeting had come across me on The Bill and remembered me from that**, while the other had been pointed in my direction by one of his mates, a script editor on Life on Mars. They were looking for crime/action/personal/long-form/maybe a few laughs (aka. “A fresh approach”).

Spot the common denominator?

I can’t stress this highly enough; the script editor is your friend.

yes i am a geek

I’ll mention here one ace bit of geekery that amazed me during the office to home office transfer, simply because, uniqely in my experience, It Just Worked.

I wanted to network a couple of PCS, looked at wireless ADSL and soon realised that over a couple of floors and rooms, it wasn’t going to be particularly speedy or reliable. I read in some mag about these miraculous Homeplug gadgets that turn your mains electricity circuits into an ethernet network, thought I’d give it a shot, and you know what?

It only bloody works! And first time, too! Straight out the box! With Windows!

Help ma boab.

So I now have 2 desktops, one in the kitchen, one the office, and a laptop (via a portable plug-in wireless extender) all networked and all sharing the same super speedy ADSL link.

I was so chuffed, I had to tell someone…

*Well, see, what it is, is the editors/producers send little cards to all the agents saying they want a writer, and all the agents send little cards describing their clients to the editors/producers, and the editors/producers flick through the cards till they find someone whose name they like and then they invite them. Or they throw all the cards into a wastepaper bin especially emptied for the purpose and pick a few out at random. Or they pick the fourth and seventeenth cards that arrive on alternating days, put them in a pile till it looks an impressive lot and invite them.

**Fortunately I remembered her too. This is not always the case, because I have been forced to acknowledge that I have an appalling memory for faces. This works both against and for me. While it has led to me blanking the cheery greeting of a then head of drama series and serials who I’d apparently met a few times before, it has also led to the development of a handy defence mechanism – a broad smile and acting as if I know everyone in the room, which means I come over at best as a warm, friendly and decent bloke, or at the very least an unthreatening simpleton.