I'd Like To Thank Everybody For Everything

This is insane, I'm too busy to visit my own website.

I will soon post a full account of what happened in London on Monday, from BAFTA to Groucho (from croissant to kebab). Right now, can I just thank everyone who has congratulated me by text, email, blog comment, phone, forum posting, telex and pigeon. I'll try to answer everyone individually over the next while. My Irish mobile has died of love, and I can't get at any voice messages or texts. It will, however, return from the dead on the third day, and speak in many tongues, when I get a new charger for it here in Berlin (I left the old one plugged into London...)

 WWhhhhhhhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

 Fortuna's wheel is going UP. Fun while it lasts, and it won't last forever. Foolish not to enjoy it.

How To Push Art Down A Pipe

What an interesting week. Elizabeth Baines has been writing very well about the National Short Story Prize, and the controversy over the postponed broadcast of Hanif Kureishi's shortlisted story, in her fine blog, The Tart of Fiction / Fictionbitch.

As she was talking about me in one of her posts, I felt moved to respond. I'll copy my rather lengthy comment to her in here, as it follows on fairly directly from my last post...

 

Hi Elizabeth,

I'm glad you liked my comments on the problems of pushing highly individual works of art down distribution channels designed to handle a standard product.

I have very recent experience of the process, having had my shortlisted story ("The Orphan and the Mob") cut to fit the BBC's thirty minute slot.

Not having read the small-print, I hadn't realised the BBC were going to cut my story until they'd already abridged it and recorded it. The deed was done with no input from me whatsoever. And as you say, when you take out bits of a short story, it isn't the same story any more. A story is about the arrangement of parts, about particular rhythms and resonances, and all of that is totally altered when bits are cut out.

In my case, they removed all the swearing and a lot of the biological detail. Jokes were shortened. (Three variations on a comic riff would be cut back to one, so there was no sense of a riff at all).

So what they broadcast wasn't my story. It was something else.

But... but... but... having been through the process... and having been furious at first... I have come round to another way of looking at it.

Because the finished broadcast was superb. It wasn't my story, but it was great radio. At my suggestion they had cast Conor Lovett, the finest Beckett actor of his generation, as the 18-year old Jude. The BBC had started by auditioning 18 and 20 year olds straight out of drama school. When I reacted with horror, and suggested Conor Lovett, they auditioned him and loved him and cast him. Trust me, the lack of ego required to do that, and the sensitivity to the writer's suggestions, would never occur in, say, the film industry.

And the abridgement was, in its way, terrific. It was sensitive to the rhythms of the piece, and when it changed them, as it did, it managed to find new rhythms that worked. Usually slightly faster, more staccato ones, because of the cuts, but that gave it an energy which a linear medium like radio needs.

They took out some of my favorite Irish swearing ("Ardcrony ballocks!") and all mentions of urethral sphincters (and the original had a lot of them), but I can understand that, at three thirty in the afternoon, if the BBC broadcast my story intact, it would probably not get its charter renewed. Do you really want the playgrounds of England to resound to cries of "Ardcrony ballocks!" I think not.

And much of the cutting made it work better for radio. You can't pretend a short story is best transferred intact to radio. It isn't. My story ended with a purely visual sequence, where Jude, as he leaves the burning orphanage, hears the scratched orphanage single clearly for the first time. We read his uncomprehending and phonetic version of the lyrics,

"Some...
Where...
Oh...
Werther...
Aon...
Bo..."

and we realise (but he does not) that it's "Somewhere over the rainbow..."

Well all that just cannot be done on the radio. The bilingual puns ("Aon bo" is the Irish for "One cow") and all the rest only exist as words on paper. They've got to go.

But this is radio: And what they replaced all the description with was simply this: the song itself, rising over Jude's final words (which are, unknown to Jude, from the Wizard of Oz, and from Yeats' "Leda and the Swan", and which work fine on the radio.)

And with Conor Lovett's truly extraordinary delivery, and Judy Garland's actual voice, I think the BBC created a moment that was better, more emotionally powerful, than my original. I really did feel the hairs rise on the back of my neck, and along my legs, no kidding.

And that is why, even though the BBC cut off my ballocks and removed my urethral sphincter, I think they should have their charter renewed. They can't win, trying to broadcast tough art in daytime slots. But they do as good a job as anyone could, and the alternative isn't a Nirvana of great art broadcast uncut to millions at lunchtime. It's no art broadcast at all.

A bit of me would like everyone, everywhere, to hear all of it, at all hours. But that's a child's wish. Everyone everywhere doesn't want to hear it, urethral sphincters and all.

And the original story still exists on the page for all of those who do.

And my mum rang me after the broadcast to tell me how much she'd enjoyed it. Which was a result.

I think it's still up on the Radio 4 website, at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/afternoon_reading.shtml

Press the button for Tuesday. It'll be up till Tuesday 24th of April, after that I don't know.

Anyway, great blog Elizabeth. Keep it up, and best of luck,

-Julian Gough

www.juliangough.com
www.myspace.com/juliangough

A Vision of Ireland came out of Dev's Hole!

I was definitely too hard on the BBC in my last post. I've only just listened to their version of "The Orphan and the Mob" (as opposed to reading the text of their version), and it works incredibly well as radio. I do mourn some of the stuff they cut out, but they  jam-packed an entire half hour, which is twice their usual length for short stories, and if I were to put anything back I'd just have to take something else out. So, damn good job done by the abridger. Conor Lovett is so good I nearly cried with happiness. Perfect deadpan comic delivery throughout, and then a stunning, restrained, emotional finish that really thumps you in the heart and changes the way you feel about all the previous laughter. So subtle, and so powerful.

Given that it had to go out at 3.30 in the afternoon, they left it as strong as they probably could get away with. I wish they hadn't cut so many Tipperary placenames, but I will die a happy man having heard the line "A Vision of Ireland came out of Dev's Hole!" broadcast on the BBC in daylight.

 Meanwhile, the fact that the BBC have postponed Hanif Kureishi's story is becoming news. I have tremendous sympathy for both sides there. They're both right, given their different situations. Like a fox trying to eat a rabbit, and a rabbit trying to escape a fox, you can understand both, but they can't afford to understand each other.