A Year in Reviews

OK so this is not what I promised I’d write. Not exactly.

What I had promised was an article about how to cope with reviews. The idea was that it was the article I wish I had when I started out. Now I have written that (it’s bloody long) and if you want to skip straight to it, click here. I won’t judge. But if you want a bit of preamble about what this year has meant for me, I promise it’ll enrich the reflections in the review piece and morever I’ll keep it brief.

Still reading? Ok so, here’s what happened.

Trying to writing this blog post in the context of having had three pieces of work out within the space of three months made me naturally reflect on the year that’s gone by. I started 2018 needing to take a month out. I find myself ending it in the same place, just with less ability to do it. (Do you ever really get to take proper time off? The answer to that is probably yes and that’s top of my list of things to figure out for 2019).

I’m very, very, very tired. I feel like I’ve been very, very, very tired for a very, very, very long time. At least though, with An Adventure at the Bush and Doctor Who finally meeting their audiences, I’ve put to bed projects that took up many years of my life. They both require a giant amount of research. In fact, it’s only in the last few months that I’ve been able to read a book again for pleasure instead of work. They both pushed me as an artist who wants to be responsible in the stories that he tells. They put massive strains on my personal life in ways that I regret.

When I ask myself why I let that happen, what was it that made them so important, once I ducked past the “this story is very important to tell because of x” (all of which is true), what sits at the bottom of it all is that for me both those pieces of work and Sticks and Stones, a play I wrote for the wonderful Paines Plough were all about proving that my earlier projects weren’t a fluke.

I reckon I’ve done that – all three were fairly favourably received, and I’d gladly work with everyone I made those pieces with again. There is the impulse to make art that proves something to others, whether you’re conscious of it or not. And then there is another impulse to make art that is solely for your own comfort and consumption. It’s the equivalent of cooking potato faces and spaghetti hoops for dinner. If others like it – great! – but that concern doesn’t sit at the very top of your thinking. More often than not, there’s some cross over at least.

An Adventure was 95% potato faces and spaghetti hoops. I thought of the audience in terms of how I was taking them through it and how they might approach the play, but the way it was made and the way it was presented – it’s the most “me” thing I’ve ever made. In its style and concerns yes, but also it was the play I needed right then, more than anyone. I knew on the final preview that no matter what happened after that, this play had already given me what I needed. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, my paternal grandfather died whilst I was writing the play. He did, in fact, die a week after my telling him I was doing so for the first time. Making that play allowed me to grieve him in a way that I couldn’t have managed without it. I felt like it was a gravestone for him that the act of cremation naturally robs one of. Here lies Jayanathibhai Patel and his story – or a version of it – was told.

It won’t surprise anyone that knows me even a little bit to know that I think about my place in this country a lot. I think about the fact that once all my grandparents are gone, I have no real connection to anywhere else. Both culturally and legally. In a world that’s increasingly pulling up the drawbridges, this is where I am, whether I like it or not, with this face, in this country. My grandparents did a wonderful job of trying to make Britain a place that might work for me, but I never quite felt that connection I was aching for. I asked myself: How can I, in turn, make this a less lonely island? An Adventure was also that for me.

In that and Who, I worked with two predominantly South Asian casts this year and whilst I kind of wish I could say it didn’t mean much to me, it really did. I had conversations I’ve been wanting to have since I was fifteen. I felt both lighter and more driven. Sitting on a lunch table in the South of Spain, with an actor who’s been in the game for decades, a couple who were around my age, and one that had just graduated from drama school, I finally felt like this was an industry where I not only belonged but could make work that was important to me and enjoyable for others for a long, long time to come. To be, alongside the great Malorie Blackman, the first writers of colour on Doctor Who is a horrible honour, but I’m sure glad it was for the sake of that story.

Doctor Who also marked the occasion of my moving from being a local storyteller (theatre and domestic dramas which feels manageable) to being a global storyteller which is one hell of an eye-opener, particular if it’s a beloved show that you’ve made that move on. Your Who ep could be someone’s favourite ever and it could be the one that destroys someone else’s love of the show. It could go down horribly here and be a triumph in the States. There is absolutely no real emotional logic you can arm yourself with to make that less weird or easier to take. It is ridiculous but I’ve learned a lot and (mostly) loved it.

All in all then, it’s a banner year?

Sort of. Because if 2018 marks anything else, it’s also – being absolutely honest – the closest I’ve come to wanting to end my life in four years. I don’t say that to try and elicit a shock or sympathy and I don’t want to linger on it for too long. I took the steps I needed and I’m in an alright place now, but I want to drive home the point that there isn’t necessarily a correlation between success and a sustained peace. I’m sure a part of me thought that was the case when I was a younger man, but the final thing 2018 has taught me is that this is categorically not true.

So I look forward to a 2019 where I can embrace my limitations in some parts of my life, take the limiters off in others, keep pushing for excellence but to also find a joy in being a beginner again. Maybe I’ll learn to bake. 

You guys are all so into baking right now. Is it cause of the show? Are the baking and the judging inexorably linked? Oh! Speaking of…

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APPROACHING CRITIQUE: A BRIEF GUIDE FOR THE PANICKED AND SOON TO BE PUBLICLY JUDGED

Getting critically evaluated, be it by Lyn Gardner or your twelve-year old cousin is fucking nauseating. Even if the review is good, you’ll probably feel more relieved than joyous. Happy that you didn’t throw up on your shoes rather than suddenly assuming you’re a God. And every time I think “I’m used to it. I won’t care.” Every time I’m wrong. I suppose it’s good in the sense that if you find yourself not caring at all then that’s probably a bad sign. I want to care til the end of my days because to me it means that I’ve invested in it and that I’ve left a bit of myself behind in the work.  But how is that possible? In a world where even the most addictive substances create a tolerance, how is there no inoculation to this horrible effect?

My theory as to why you keep caring (which, to repeat, I think is healthy) and why it always stings a bit is that there is so little time to steel yourself for it even if you want to. Most new productions are being worked on right until press night and you’ve probably spent months before that trying to be open to changes and improvements and being a good collaborator. In order to do that, you need to be quite vulnerable and open as an artist, willing to accept critique and work on it which is tough but made easier by knowing you’re making the play with people who want it to be good and who (hopefully!) like you as a person. The gap between final preview and press night is not enough time to disengage that mode of being and close yourself up. By the time people come to review the work – people who don’t have that investment in you or the play – you’re still in quite a vulnerable place.

By the by, if you don’t know anything about me and are wondering what’s informing what I’m writing here: I’ve had four or so full-length theatre pieces reviewed and the same again for telly, so whilst I’m not deep into my career, I’ve had enough experience to throw out some pieces of advice that I wish I’d known before I got started. I’ve not had anything out and out panned and I’ve not had a runaway critical smash either so I hope that most of what I’m writing speaks to the middle range of responses which will be most artists’ experience.

We’ll do this in three parts. The first will be about approaching reviews when the play (or other public piece of art) is out in the world. The second will be how to consider the response after the fact. The third will be about actions and techniques to try when you’re a few months post show and in that blissful in-between stage of making work that won’t be out in the world for a while. My focus will mainly be on dealing with critics but will encompass some aspects of audience response too.

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WHAT TO DO WHEN IT’S ON

These are the main approaches that I’ve seen other people try and those that I’ve tried myself. You won’t find what’s best for you until you give a few of them a go. Also, some techniques work better for different projects.

It’s also worth noting that each carries a different load of stress. Nothing you do will make the experience *entirely* stress free or less nauseating I’m afraid, that’s just part of the deal of putting your stuff out there to be publicly judged, but you have some say in the *type* of stress you have which I suppose is some comfort. 

Anyway, here’s what you can do:

1) Don’t Read The Reviews

2) Read Them, Don’t Engage

3) Read Them, Engage

Let’s dig a little into each of these…

DON’T READ THE REVIEWS

This is something I see writers do once they’re a few plays into their career (using the term ‘career’ loosely here). They might look at them after the fact, but the aim is to not go anywhere near them whilst the play is running. For a writer just starting out, I think it’s pretty impossible to bring yourself to not look at reviews, hoping as you are for critical validation (who doesn’t want to read a good review? And they’ll be good because you are, obviously, a genius. Or at least so you think. Sometimes.)

When I started out, I found this approach a bit high-minded. It felt so dismissive – “I don’t care what they say. I know it’s great.” By the time An Adventure came around *totally* got it. I was so sick with worry, felt so fragile and that play was so close to my heart that I couldn’t bear to sit and take what might be a mauling. So I tried very hard to not read the reviews. And you know what? I managed it and felt great. For a bit. 

Because the big problem with trying not to read the reviews is that they will probably, in some way, leak out to you. With An Adventure, this happened in what feels like now quite a hilarious fashion. I had actively told everyone that I wasn’t reading the reviews to pre-empt them showing them to me. So I was sitting on the wall of the terrace outside the Bush, blissfully unaware, feeling pretty good about life. The press night the evening before had gone well – for me it wasn’t quite as good as the preview before it, but well enough despite some Prominent Director’s phone going off in the quietest scene. Just then my phone went off and it was Madani. We had a friendly opening exchange, just shooting the breeze and then he says “so listen, here’s the rundown” and I realised I had told everyone I wasn’t reading reviews *except* for the director. Whoops. Before I could stop him, he’d given me the summary: “They’re all good. But there’s an outlier.” For fucks sake. No bliss for me, ever again, just the gnawing question: “Which one, which one was it?”

Social media is another way you’re going to hear about reviews. You might post telling people not to tell you, but there’ll be a proud/combative relative or old school friend tagging you in a post saying how the reviewer really gets it/should burn in hell. Sometimes the actors will leak opinions from reviews to you. There might be a summary floating around the office of the theatre the play is in.

Basically, this approach is probably the best thing for your mind, but it’s also really, really hard to maintain, especially if you’ve got a long run and still have some plugging to do for the show. If that’s you – there’s an app called Buffer that lets you set up social media content ahead of time and not see the replies or have to go on the platform itself. Invaluable. Otherwise, get off social media and make sure you tell absolutely everyone and their mum that you don’t want to hear anything about the show. Get the hell away for a bit if you can. This isn’t an approach that I think works for me long-term because I find it hard to cut myself off from the world. I like to stay involved in the show, I like to be able to talk to the actors as much as I can, I like to hang around the theatre, I like to talk to audiences after, I like to suffer and celebrate communually so I’ll never be able to dodge the feedback. But if you can do it, you’re an absolute hero and have my respect.

READ THEM, DON’T ENGAGE

This is my default (and mostly where I ended up with An Adventure after my attempt to dodge reviews failed). Partly it’s out of curio-vanity, partly it’s because I don’t want to hear it from anyone else and partly because I want to be able to respond to questions or concerns within the company with the full knowledge of what they might have seen. It’s hard to be an effective cheerleader for the team when you don’t know where they are in the league.

A way to do this that’s kind to yourself is to not try and seek them out as they come in. Instead, go do something completely non-work related the day after press and then set aside an hour or two by yourself in a quiet place and Google away.

If the thought of that makes you queasy, find a partner or a good friend, and ask if they’ll look at the reviews and give you a summary. At least that way you get to maintain some distance.

Try to resist the urge to dismiss responses out of hand, even if you think they’re unfair. The horrible thing about an unfair critical opinion is that the critic won’t be the only one to have it. That review will speak for at least one other person. So if you’re interested in understanding the range of responses, you’ve got to face it.

The benefits of this approach is that you get to know and move on. It provides some degree of that looked-for inoculation. Once you know that someone has had that opinion, it makes the next time you encounter it easier. Let me tell you, this is particularly useful with something like Doctor Who. The consolidated viewing figure for my episode was eight million people in the UK. That, like the vastness of the universe, is a fucking terrifying thing to consider when lying in your bed late at night. However, that’s not eight million opinions, that’s probably about four or five generalised responses. Knowing “Ok so broadly people love it because of X though some folks really hate Y” made it easier for me to just get on with my life.

With plays, once you’ve taken in the reactions, more often than not things get brighter because there’s so much to enjoy about your work being on; the way the actors’ performances deepen, the way the scenes get tighter, the morbid thrill of seeing how different audiences respond, the utter weirdness that sets into a cast’s inter-personal relations when they hit the four week mark.

READ THEM, ENGAGE

Red Alert. This is the most fraught approach. It takes time, it takes energy, it takes tonnes emotional fuel. I’ve only really done this once with a theatre critic who’d reviewed my first play and given away a massive plot point and I wanted them to adjust the review to not do that. Unless they’re massively misrepresenting your play to a potentially broad audience, I think there’s little to be gained from engaging with critics, especially if it’s in response to a negative review.

Having said that, audiences can be different, and I don’t think engaging with them is bad per se. I liked doing a tweet-a-long for Doctor Who that exposed my process and I made a point of doing it with Murdered By My Father because it felt important to talk to the young demographic that we were targeting with researched-backed knowledge and clarity about the quite harrowing piece they’d put themselves through and how it manifests in the real world. Talking to people about An Adventure and what it had meant to them made all the work I put into it worthwhile. Even playing whack-a-mole with trolls on social media has its charms (as long as you don’t let them burrow too deep into your head).

If you’re going to respond to/engage with either critics or audience members, be sure to ask yourself what master it is in yourself that you’re serving. If it’s ego, be wary, if it’s curiosity careful to not mine too deep or you might end up in self-loathing, if it’s anger or hurt, take a step back and breath before you dive in. The world of the creative industries is small. If you have to piss someone off, make sure you’re super clear about why you’re doing it. People can be arseholes. Categorising the arsehole helps diminish their power and it useful when explaining their arseholery to others (ok, this image needs work.)

Some other tips: Learn to take a compliment. Even if it’s just “thank you, that’s very kind.” Resist the urge to tell the person who’s told you they like what you’ve made a list of the things that are wrong with it. They probably don’t care and it’s only really you who needs to reflect on that. If you’re a leading creative on the project, get in the habit of spreading praise amongst the team (Please remember your goddamn designers, lads) and reasonably absorbing blame rather than reflecting it. Even if it doesn’t seem fair, it’ll do you well in the long run.

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THE REVIEWS ARE OUT. HOW TO COPE WHEN…

THEY LOVED IT

Wonderful! Thank Santa for that. Enjoy the crown of daisies. Be pleased for yourself and your collaborators. Let a bit of yourself feel vindicated. Put it on your website. File it away for a rainy day/an Arts Council application. Line up your most audacious project that you’ve squirrelled away. Ring your Dad and tell them you were right to ignore them.

But don’t believe the hype. I know you want to. But you can’t. Even when it’s earned, you can’t get hooked on validation because it’s dangerous for your sense of self but also your ability to just do your job. It’s the same when actors get laughs in a play – it’s such a clear and immediate response, that to find you don’t get that response another day is devastating and can really throw you off course. You grasp for it to the detriment of the rest of what you’re doing and you can’t let it do that. Eyes forward, focus on the work and moments to come.

THEY HATED IT 

Fuck those guys! What do they know? Well…they know they didn’t like what you’ve spent years slaving over and I’m here to tell you friends that it sucks and not only that but it will always suck.

Worst of all, your friends probably know. And you know they know. And they know you know that they know. But nobody wants to talk about it. If you feel they’re itching to be supportive, maybe bring up – vaguely – the spectre of a couple of bad reviews and watch as the floodgates open and they tell you how it doesn’t matter, and you’ve made what you wanted to make etc etc. Some of it will be true. A lot of it won’t. But it’ll still be nice and you’ve earned a bit of nice.

The aforementioned “outlier” than Madani told me about turned out to be probably the worst review I’ve ever had. That it was from The Guardian and written by someone with a not dissimilar background to me made it doubly hard to take. Never mind that it was otherwise across the board positively well received, humans have a strong negativity bias and it magnetises your attention on responses that push firmly against your hopes. 

You’ll feel miserable. You’ll draft witty, cutting responses to the reviewer. You’ll dig into their biography. You’ll look at their other reviews and that’ll either validate you or horrify you (“They gave four stars to what?”). You will basically be looking for a way to dismiss the opinion. Sometimes that’ll be valid. Often it won’t. That’s why it’s hard.

Especially since a bad review can be an absolute body blow. That Guardian review basically put me to bed for three days. A friend of mine who otherwise had a wildly successful and much loved show had exactly the same feeling and response to their one bad review. They’re a smart and rational and wonderful person. Doesn’t matter. You can’t really push the feeling away in the first instance, you just have to sort of go through it. Let yourself feel really shitty. You’re allowed to feel shitty. You worked hard and it mattered to you.

When you pick yourself up, remind yourself how you felt about the show before it got reviewed. Outside of all the framing you tell yourself of certain things not being right or needing time to settle did you, fundamentally, create the piece you set out to make. If the answer is no, you can self-evaluate and consider why that happened and how to avoid it next time. If the answer is yes then for the love of God, embrace that. I’m so bad at this but trying to get better and An Adventure was one of the first things that let me do that. I adored that play. I adored that company. I had made pretty much exactly what I wanted to put out into the world and I felt so lucky to have had that opportunity. Wallowing for a bit is fine but I would be an idiot to dismiss the joy a project like that gave me because of some dissenting voices. If it’s still running, keep your focus on finding the audience who need that play, for whom it means more than anything. If you’ve made your work with care, they will be out there.

Eventually, with time, you make your peace with naysayers objections and when you do it helps to learn this phrase by heart: “I guess it just wasn’t for them.”

THEY SHRUGGED AT IT

Honestly, I think this is the trickiest one to deal with and it’s hard to give advice for. We hope for our work to elicit a passionate response, one way or another, and someone going “yeah, it was fine” can be incredibly disheartening in a way that is disproportionate to what is a fairly positive reaction. You can’t get fired up from the thrill nor can you galvanise each other to fight back against a mauling.

The careers of even the greatest writers you adore will be pocked with Shruggy work. It might be the audience wasn’t up for that kind of work in the time it was made, it might just be it’s a fair effort that didn’t quite find its fullest expression, it might have suffered in contrast to another similar show. For whatever reason, there’s no shame in this, even if it feels disappointing in the moment.

I find the best way to at this kind of response is as a bit of an emotional score-draw. “Thank God I don’t have to get too wrapped up in a response!” Both bad and good reviews can be addictive (and I screenshot segments from both). Take the calm that only comes from “They liked it! They mildly liked it!!”

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IT’S OVER. NOW WHAT?

Finally, beyond press night and the run of the play, here are a few things to consider trying in order to make myself feel more zen about reviews and life as an artist.

UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU’VE MADE 

With a bit of time and space away from the project, I think it’s useful to sit down and try and grapple with what you’ve done. That might be, finally, looking at reviews if you haven’t.

Consider the basis of the critiques you’ve received. Turn them over in your mind, ask yourself whether you honestly agree with it or not. If so, what might you keep an eye on next time? Ask if the project did what you hoped it might do. Did it surprise you in ways you didn’t see coming? When my first play, True Brits, finished its run at the Edinburgh Fringe, I discovered an unexpected feeling in that one of my proudest achievements with that play was for it to have a brown man on a theatre poster at the Edinburgh Fringe, a fringe where the only other brown man on a theatre poster was a browned-up Italian man, starring in a musical about Buddha. In that context, that poster felt mighty to me and I’ve been obsessed with my show posters ever since.

Otherwise, this part usually involves trying to get a grasp of how the work was received by the people in the industry (I’m so sorry for using this word) whose opinions matter to me, considering my next steps and if I need to change my process or my priorities.

For example, if the show was a success, I think about what projects I might like to work with that team again on if I can. What might be the stories that could fire us up? Can I put it to the front of the queue so it can in the works before that actor disappears into the stratosphere?

If you’ve made something absolutely heinous which you think was a disaster in every way and you hate everyone involved, perhaps you need to dig back into short pieces, applying for scratch nights, search for art that you think will reenergise you, seek out new collaborators. On that note…

CONSIDER WHAT YOU’LL MAKE NEXT

If you’re anything like me, you’ll get a bit of a creative wanderlust in the aftermath of a project. “I should make a musical next!” “I should make an epic!” “I should make an easily tourable intimate two-hander that in some tangential but beautifully metaphorical way refers to Something Big In Science.” Some of this energy comes from other things you’ve seen but often some of that energy can also come from the reviews and responses and that can easily lead you astray. A touch of “I’ll show ‘em!” is useful for an artist, if not just to get you going in the morning, but you can’t let it dominate the big artistic choices you make. Be clear about what’s driving you.

In that respect, the single most useful question I’ve found to ask myself when looking to start a new project is “what compels me?”. What’s that conversation you find yourself coming back to again and again when you’re five hours deep into a session at the pub or thinking on at three in the morning. You might, honestly, find it’s nothing. In that case, maybe don’t write for a bit. Definitely not for theatre. I find it’s a medium where it’s easy to sniff out the lack of compulsion in a writer. Try something else for a bit. For example TV – though it definitely can and should tell soulful stories driven by people invested in the tale they’re telling – sustains itself more heavily on narratively driven, episodic, high concept pieces than theatre does. This means you can be part of a wider writing team (something theatre has no real equivalent of) and it can be a place to tell stories that don’t necessarily come from the deepest place within you but still allow you to be playful, exercise your craft with flair and learn a lot.

TALK TO SOME CRITICS

You may not be in the frame of mind to do this immediately after the show is done, but I’ve found it invaluable to talk to people who review about what they look for, what the pressures are on them, what their process is, why they do it. If not just out of curiosity, it makes me consider what a tough job it is and how I’m really glad I don’t do it. Of course, you don’t have to become best mates (it’s probably quite difficult if you’re both still active and a conflict of interest to some extent) but you might find it enlightening. And hey, if you add them on Facebook you might get some decent pictures for your dartboard.

SOW THE SEEDS OF YOUR OWN DESTRUCTION

This sounds a bit counter-intuitive but what I mean is that it’s incredibly healthy both for your mind and the industry for you to put a bit of time and thought into how you can support those coming after you. Depending on your situation, it will take different focuses. For me, as A Visible Minority In The Arts (TM) I’m obsessed with thinking about how I can bring through more People Like Me, if not just to take the burden of representation off my own shoulders. I don’t want to do this job forever. I’m excited by what other people are making. I want to help if I can. Any experience you have will be gratefully received by someone with none, even if it doesn’t feel like it. So make yourself useful.

The one caveat here is that this should be on your own terms. People might be eager to hear from you but you can’t give and give all the time. Be clear about that from the start – you’re not mugging anyone off, you’re just protecting yourself in what can be an emotionally demanding job. They’ll come to understand when they get to your position.

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CONCLUSION (AKA THE TLDR)

Critiques are emotionally tumultous. The bad ones drag you to the floor, the middling ones make you wonder why you bother and the effusive ones run the risk of turning you into a right dickhead. There’s lots of different ways to navigate them, but they will always be a part of your life. Finding some way of embracing/negating that early will make your journey easier and if you’re really lucky, one or two will tell you something about your work you never expected and when that happens it’s luminous.

Wear none of them too heavily, hold the friends who absolutely understand what you’re doing close (what a heart-filling pleasure it was to have peers I’ve known for years see An Adventure and tell me “that felt like everything you’ve been working towards since I first met you”) and always remember that the only critic you truly need to please, to care about, the one who will be there judging your work before and after, forever and ever is you.

You made a show. It’s hard. Harder than people whipping off a casual thought can know. So be nice to yourself, yeah?

 

A Eulogy for Jayantibhai Patel

I’ve been asked by a few people to provide this, so here’s the eulogy from my grandfather’s funeral:

I’d first of all like to reiterate what Foi said and thank all the people who have supported us over the past week and for taking the time to be here today.

When I was a kid, I used to spend a lot of hours being babysat in Dada’s office, impatiently flicking through television channels, waiting for him to finish work and take me home. In that office he had a little sign that I thought about as I sat down to write this. It was a picture of a bird and began with the words: “If you love something let it go…”

When you love someone like I and the rest of his grandchildren loved Dada, how do begin to let them go? Especially since without them, the world feels a little colder, a little crueller and it’s jarring to just push on with your life when you know there’s one less person in it who’d help you unconditionally, who’d treat you as a child in the good and bad ways.

I think one way to do it is through understanding, to consider the ways in which they shaped you and the world you live in, and Dada certainly did a lot of shaping. In fact, it is impossible to consider his life outside the context of history because, throughout that life, it was history he was making.

As Foi mentioned, Dada came to England in 1964. He would’ve been 31 that year, the same age I am now. The difference being of course that I am already here and happy with my place, whereas he arrived in this country, along with thousands of Kenyan and Ugandan Asians, as part of an migration wave that was not always particularly welcome.

But to be an immigrant is to be a person of ferocious hope. Of relentless care. It’s knowing that the singular ambition that drove you across oceans must not destroy community but seek to provide for it. It is to not let the hatred of others define your life. It is to know that taking a step into the dark, the unknown, is necessary in search of the light.

What I found remarkable about Dada was how he excelled at doing all of this. Firmly both a family and a community man, he was never intimidated and always compassionate. I think the fact that old school friends of mine, people I hadn’t heard from in years, got in touch to send their regards speaks to the memorable effect, through that compassion, that he had on all of those that he met on his various journeys – in England, in India, in Kenya, in America.

And for us, the children and grandchildren of immigrants, those journeys undertaken by those responsible for our being in this country are our site of understanding, our foundational myths. They keep you honest, warn you of dangers that are best avoided, remind you of values.

So what dangers did he warn me of? What values did I learn from my Dada’s life? A fair bit. The big and the small.

I learned that knowing people is nice. Helping them is better.

I learned that 3/4s of being good at your job is putting in the effort.

I learned that Johnny Walker Black Label is the finest blend whisky known to man.

I learned that a can of Fosters is an entirely appropriate drink to give a five year old.

I learned that the best thing to spend money on is other people.

I learned that when you shave, always shave with the grain and not against.

I learned that, because of my Dada’s diligence, hard work and adventurous spirit, I could be whatever I wanted to be…as long as it’s a doctor, engineer or lawyer.

I’m kidding about that last part but I know that whilst Dada wasn’t initially thrilled about my choice of career, he took my ambitions seriously if I took them seriously myself. One of my lasting memories of him is from when I went to ask to borrow the money to do my Masters. He looked at me, skeptically, as you would do if your grandchild had just told you he wanted to go to drama school at age twenty four and asked me : “What do you hope to achieve?”

I told him I was proud of the economic legacy he had left in this country and I wanted to do much the same and leave a cultural one. And when I put it in those terms, he folded his arms, nodded and told me he understood, something I never expected to happen. That was the mark of the man – often stubborn, but always just wanting the best both for and from you and I have spent the last decade desperately trying to make him as proud of me as I was of him, and I know that’s the same for all of us grandchildren.

To be honest with you, I had no idea how I was going to finish this speech. I thought maybe it should be with what Dada would’ve wanted for us. His last text message to me, sent when I was at a wedding, said simply: “Enjoy yourself”. That felt about right.

But coincidence can be a funny thing. The other night my friend Meghna was telling me, quite casually about the origin of her father’s name. A name he shares with Dada. She told me that it’s derived from a Sanskrit word meaning: “Victorious” or “the winner in the end” and when I heard that, I knew that the way to finish was to go back to Dada’s beginning.

Because although he may now have left us, we that loved him can let him go knowing he lived a life that honoured the name he was born with and seeing all of you sitting here, reflecting on the legacy he has left behind – friends, children, grandchildren, businesses, incredible stories, a way of life, a country changed – there is no doubt in my mind, no doubt at all, that Jayantibhai Shanabhai Patel is the winner in the end.

ROGUE ONE OR: THE WAR DOESN’T CARE ABOUT YOUR GODDAMN HERO NARRATIVE CHARACTER ARC, SOLDIER

CAVEATS

#1 – What Rogue One attempts to do is almost certainly more interesting if you’re a Star Wars fan and there’s no denying that there is a huge amount of fan service going on in this movie.

Having said that…

#2 – I am a massive Star Wars fan so whatever.

But!

#3 – There are a lot of people I’ve spoken to now who are marginal Star Wars fans who loved Rogue One.

Finally:

#4- I wanted to keep this spoiler-free but I figure enough people have seen the movie now but, either way, here is your warning of SPOILERS.

“So happy I avoided spoilers tbh”

Right. So.

Rogue One is both non-essential viewing and a necessary corrective to the Star Wars movie canon. How is that possible? Well, it speaks a little to what I discussed in an earlier blog about alternate narratives. The Star Wars story universe is so large that everyone’s understanding of what it is can be totally different. If you’re just here for the Skywalker & Co monomyth, which is after all what most people understand Star Wars to be, Rogue One won’t do anything for you and that’s A-OK.

But if you want to explore a little deeper, if you want to have a new lens to examine not just these films but the nature of history-making and heroic narratives, especially in times of war, look no further.

To begin, here’s a hot take for you:

The protagonist of Rogue One isn’t Felicity Jones’ Jyn Erso.

Jyn is the hydroscopic nuclei around which the misfits of Rogue One form and tumble down, down, down into the core of a nascent war, a mission trajectory that’s shared and unstoppable. It couldn’t happen without her. But the mission isn’t really about her.

The real protagonist is the most consistently underserved ‘character’ in the Star Wars universe.

The real protagonist is the Rebellion itself.

There are a few reviews and indeed comments from friends whose opinions I rate that suggest that the characterisation of the Rogue One team is thin. I agree with that.

It also didn’t bother me at all. Not only that, but I think it’s fine. Not only that but I think that this works in a positive way towards what this spin-off film is trying to achieve that the main movies often suggest but never quite land: Being a Rebel fucking sucks.

I realise this might read a lot like a rabid fan’s lengthy defense of undercooked characters but go with me on this because if nothing else I think Rogue One pulls off one hell of a trick in expanding the Star Wars universe in every direction whilst telling a very contained story.

On a practical level for Disney/Lucasarts, Rogue One had to work within a narrow, well defined channel: Tell a satisfying tale in the same story universe without overwhelming the narratives of the Saga movies (as I have learned the Episodes 1-7 are called). This film is built to be entirely subservient to the grander ones around it. Subsequently Rogue One, whizzbangs aside, exists on a smaller level than the main films. The heroes are minor characters in the world, they’re not Jedi and even the main villain – Director Krennick – saunters around with the fury/frustration mix of an insecure middle manager.

Even the emotional space of Rogue One is smaller. The Saga films operate under the sweeping emotional logic of a grand space opera. The music is more soaring, the language heightened, the jokes broader, the characters more vivid, the colours brighter, the contrast between sides sharper. Black. White. The Dark Side and the Light.

Rogue One, on the other hand, operates in the emotional logic of a war movie. It’s still got jokes, its characters are still occasionally fun and whilst some of the morals veer into the grey, the visuals do so less than you’d think – it’s beautiful film to watch. But there’s little romance to all this. There’s no time for it.

That’s because whilst our characters here are a lot less equipped to deal with them, the stakes are still huge, the enemy just as daunting as in the Saga movies. It’s this disparity that gives Rogue One its weight. It’s why a Death Star targeting a city here feels more daunting and terrifying than Starkiller Base wiping out the entire New Republic in The Force Awakens. This movie is all about the scale of the challenge that director Gareth Edwards twins well with his eye for the awesome (in the original sense of the word). In the Saga movies, the main characters observe people getting fucked by super weapons. In Rogue One, the main characters are the ones that get fucked by super weapons. The Death Star here is an absolute titan, in a way that it’s never felt before, and dealing with it feels like the most urgent thing in the whole damn universe, ahead of absolutely anything else. It’s this imperative that makes Rogue One move at the speed of plot, not the speed of character, something which is anti-thetical to wisdom on good writing. The film, without question, suffers a little for this.

Yet, for me, the aforementioned weight-through-scale is why I still found Rogue One satisfying and why I didn’t miss any greater characterisation. I suppose it’s not too dissimilar to my love of Apocalypse Now (a movie, trivia fans, in which Han Solo’s got a cameo and none other than George Lucas was once slated to direct.) Willard not having much about him as a protagonist didn’t bother me and still doesn’t bother me in the slightest. He was a man on a crazy mission with crazy events happening all around him that were out of his control, all in service of taking down a Big Bad. Now of course Apocalypse Now is a totally different style of movie and has a whole different take on warfare. But both movies are about the mission above all else (well, at least, the non-Redux version of Apocalypse Now is and if you’re not a monster that’s what we’re talking about). The relentless drive. It’s in opposition to, say, a Saving Private Ryan, which desperately wants you to care about its characters. The movie isn’t about Private Ryan at all really, it’s an excuse to showcase the valour and humanity of these incredible people. You can tell how important it is to Spielberg. Apocalypse Now and Rogue One have a completely different approach and rarely reach that same level of characterisation.

Having said that, Rogue One’s characters were still clear enough to me to get me through the story. I was never at a loss as to what everyone’s ‘deal’ was. Yes, none of them were particularly special, none of them got a huge amount of space to get to know the others. But each of them had an anchoring point, each of them had a part to play. Rogue One needs more characters to create similar potency to a few in the Saga films. Its wholeness comes from greater numbers, wider skills and greater diversity in a world you already know at least a little about.

This last point matters.

Some have commentated that Rogue One wouldn’t work anywhere near as well if you removed it from its Star Wars context. I believe that’s likely true, but this is to miss the point. The whole raison d’etre of this movie is to reframe that context, and this moves me on to how Rogue One isn’t just fan service but genuinely makes the Star Wars universe richer both in tone and in complexity in a way that the Saga movies cannot without derailing themselves.

There are certainly nods to those in the know. Some made to amuse (too many of these), some made to be a nostalgia nurse, but most fill in tiny gaps of story and lore in a way that is immensely rewarding. There’s the Death Star’s weakness now being a deliberate choice, not a simple flaw. There’s the Jedi being seen in the context of being part of a larger religion. There’s young Jyn having a Stormtrooper doll. I loved this! It’s a little of what I’d hoped for from The Force Awakens. There’s a moment in that movie when Rey talks about Luke Skywalker and the Jedi as a myth. No longer there, but indelible in cultural memory. Yet there’s nothing really in that film that hints at this powerful myth’s place in that world. I remarked at the time “wouldn’t it have been great to have seen something like kids playing as Jedi and getting told off or something so we know what the deal with the wider world is?”. With that one half a second shot of a Stormtrooper doll, you get how deeply rooted the Empire is. It’s not some vague menacing military presence. You feel the Empire’s supposed pervasiveness through this better than almost anything else I’ve seen in the Star Wars movies. It’s beyond great ol’ fleets of Star Destroyers, it’s down to the very toys children play with in that world. As someone who was more delighted than one should be to see a brown human Star Wars figure in a shop (thanks, Riz) there was something in that which seemed to highlight the grip of a dominant force, not just militarily but culturally too.

My favourite nod was a very subtle one, subtle enough to have passed by my co-watcher who is also big on Star Wars. In a section of the fight above Scarif, a hapless Red Squadron X-wing pilot gets it in the neck. They spent a little longer focusing on his demise than others. Why? Because he’s Red Five, the callsign Luke gets given during the Death Star assault in A New Hope. 

That’s a funny moment to look back on after watching Rogue One. When Luke Skywalker blows up the Death Star, the beat is ultimately less about saving the Rebels (with whom he really doesn’t have any real investment), and more about him trusting in the Force and thus preparing him for his journey to become a Jedi in the films to follow. His sigh of relief when the torpedo enters the exhaust port feels like it’s saying “oh thank fuck the Force worked after all and I don’t look like a total dickhead for turning off my targetting computer.” He even gets a medal for this demonstration of Boy-Wonder-greatness.

In contrast, you suspect that the history within the Star Wars universe may not remember Jyn and co so well – indeed, it’s impossible for the future films to do so without some sort of unwelcome Late-Stage Lucas Special Edition kind of insertion. To paraphrase the Hamilton mixtape, the Rogue One crew are Luke Skywalker’s ghost writers. Which is a necessary and sobering thing to see, really. Nearly everyone who dies on Scarif won’t get remembered individually. Such is the fate of most people who do important things for the sake of any war, cause or movement. And you don’t actually have to be that interesting a person to do your part, either, even if movies demand it, entertainment demands it, dramatic writing demands it. Reality doesn’t. Not one bit.

Do I think that’s all by design? No, I’m not quite that generous, and there are plenty of bumpy moments and choices in Rogue One, but perhaps it’s because of the moment we’re living in that I feel more able to give a pass to a film that flags how our mythologies, societies and ideology are ultimately collective even if Great Individuals seem to dominate our narratives. There’s such hope in that if you’re in deep despair at what feels like a lack of agency. Thus the events of Rogue One are the sort of mythical moment that can power the relentless emotion behind a whole resistance. You can imagine soldiers on Hoth with tattoos saying “Remember Scarif”.

I’m finishing this post not long after hearing of Carrie Fisher’s death at sixty, which is no age. It’s a stark reminder that all our heroes must die, most of them earlier than we or they would wish. That’s the message of Rogue One – life is routinely devastating, our ends will likely be unsatisfying to us and unresolved to others but on we plough in the hope that through our actions it will be a little less so for those who come after that. The movie literally continues after you’ve gone because you yourself don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

Rogue One’s final dream-haunting Vader sequence demonstrates this. Having slammed Luke a little earlier, let me give him his due – it’s this horrifying sequence that drills home the need for young Skywalker to appear into this universe. Vader is unstoppable, a merciless, murderous machine gun in an a field of quivering, tightly-gripped bayonets. Yet, perhaps because of what we’ve seen up to this point, those soldiers who get ripped apart by Vader don’t feel like grunts anymore like they do at the start of A New Hope. Their deaths sting. They feel like the most important aspect of the resistance, ones who will die without people knowing much about them but knowing themselves that someone else will carry on the fight once they go. There’s no doubt the comrade behind the blast door will take the crucial message on and on and on. There’s no doubt another fighter will take up a downed pilot’s callsign. There’s no doubt the narrative of the cause is greater than the narrative of the individual.

Of course it is. That’s how it should be.

They’re all Rebels aren’t they?

Observations On Commitment (from the Perennially Single)

Lovers, do you want to know if your loving works?

Are you turtle doves or just a pair of –

Well-intentioned dopes with no long-term hopes

Then check how you do with the single folks.

See, commitment’s not selfish, that’s rotten, that’s rancid,

the love from a couple yes, is romantic but it’s also

effusive, seductive, substantive and when at its best

that seduction’s expansive.

So ask…

Are you a steady source of fun

for those sans plus ones?

Do you find a third wheel stable

Or tap teetering toes beneath the table?

When you feast with lonely friends

Do they laugh and laugh again?

But when they’re in the loo,

They pray the world to end?

If that last feels familiar, you fear it might be the case?

Well, here’s some advice that’ll help you save face:

We “Unwanteds” prefer pairs that can handle their liquor,

Who don’t snicker or bicker or titter or

lick each others

Earlobes.

In front of us.

In public.

Don’t do that.

It’s gross, honestly.

Enough to kill off a rhyme.

Please, if you’ve done it.

Don’t do it next time.

When your solo buddies stick, it means you’re not a…

…lone together and, sure you are two but when

it works it’s a singular view for jaded old hacks to

stare at your backs as you walk down the aisle and feel

warmth not denial ‘cause as a two you’re no trial or vulgar nor vile

merely twin beacons that mark the edge of a smile.

And some day should you find our presence unbuoying

Perhaps our poems too cloying?

Or that we’re just plain annoying

Don’t blow your lids.

It’s all just good practice

For when you deal with your kids.

—————

Written for Lauren & Mark, The Mighty Mighty Foxcrofts.

Hitched 24th September 2016

Some Words on Writing, Depression and Not Enjoying Barcelona Very Much

I’m going to preface this by saying I realise a lot of what I’m talking about below comes under the heading of “small violin problems”. All I can say in defence is that since starting this blog five or so years ago I’ve always wanted to document my writing journey (ugh) as honestly as I can. I hope there’s enough about the topic that’s clear and possibly familiar, despite the lens through which it’s looked at. I’ve been wanting to write it for a while, but held off until I was feeling a bit better and now here we are.

So. I really wanted to write one of those beautiful pieces about working through depression – you know, the ones with a lot of wanky water metaphors, illustrated with a cute little picture of a stick figure staring at a black dog (who’s in the water?) or similar – but I don’t know how to do it since the main problem seems to be that I don’t think or feel as keenly as I used to. For me, when I write, I sit at the computer and the images form like on a little TV in my head. For the last half a year or so that TV has mostly been screening static.

It’s an insidious process watching the person you understand yourself to be slip away in increments. Eating a bit more. Running a little less. Cracks from your housemate about how you’re sleeping late. Flagging instead of answering emails. Seeing your pile of work build up and up – work you solicited to get – and having no desire to touch it. Wondering when you last had a thought, an actual thought. Not answering party invites. Until one day you realise your clothes, the ones you’ve bothered to wash, don’t fit and you could be quite accurately be described as a lazy person who doesn’t care about anything very much. Wait. What? I love parties. I love people. I love my job. I’ve worked so hard to get here. This is not me. Or is it? Does this goes back or is this me now?

I don’t quite know what sent me in this direction, and I’m not sure if looking for trigger-cause links is particularly useful. It’s post-rationalising, isn’t it? There are things that seem likely, but how can you ever really know? Nevertheless, here are some things I suspect:

1) Getting to thirty. This was a psychological barrier for me as my mum didn’t make it to that age (29 years, 3 months) and I’ve always had a thing about doing as much as I could before I got there. Now I am, I guess the future feels a lot harder to formulate since, in a way, I figured thirty would be the end of it. I hear athletes can get a bit fazed after tournaments, even if they win a medal, because their whole life has been geared to make sense of that one moment. When it goes, it can be hard to replace it. Maybe it’s a bit like that.

2) The process of making Murdered By My Father. I’m less sure about this one, but the intensity definitely did a real number on me and I’d like to use this space to reflect on that whole experience so bear with me. It feels pathetic to talk about it in these terms considering the subject matter – especially since the incredible people we worked with at the charities deal with it every day – but I guess I wasn’t really prepared for what it would entail. MBMF was my first piece of television and I knew it was going to be quite a visible one. Plus the turn around on it was, from the perspective of someone coming from theatre, ridiculously short. PLUS I already had two theatre commissions to work on that I also needed and wanted to throw myself into.

So there were a lot of balls to juggle, but MBMF by necessity of its looming shoot date became my main concern. I had two maxims floating in my head at all times whilst working on it. The first, “Do right by the victims” the second “Don’t fuck up the honour killing drama for the BBC, Vinay, that would be really, really bad.” It was a hell of a privileged position to be in, I knew that, and it sucked up every thought, every feeling and I became monofocused like never before. I was very, very neglectful as a person during that time and probably not much fun to be around. I’m not going to seek out confirmation of that, but finding myself sobbing uncontrollably in the corner of an AirBnB room in Edinburgh during the Fringe (familiar to the Fringe, perhaps, but I didn’t even have a show on) told me all I needed to know. In way, this is the level of dedication a project like that needed, I don’t regret that at all, BUT! But…you can still probably approach it better.

I had an interesting conversation one day on set with Adeel where I asked him how he managed to play a character like that and still keep himself sane. I had so many dark nights writing him. Adeel told me that there was a tiny part of his brain that he didn’t let that character access. The part which had everything he cared about in it. Shahzad could take over every part of his mind apart from that part. At the time I think I dismissed it as an actor-y thing, but thinking on it later, I wished I had known how to do that myself.

I don’t think I fully grasped how much MBMF haunted me until it actually came out and I felt all the anxiety again but ramped up further still, exacerbated by the responsibilities you have to take for it existing. I love theatre deeply (despite my moaning) but it hadn’t prepared me for the very public responsibility that comes with television. TV can and does go anywhere and everywhere, which is both its strength and its curse. There’s the potential to be judged not just for your take on a topic but on your reasoning for doing it and that judgement can come from literally anyone on earth with access to an internet connection.

Within the production, we had had discussions about staying off social media for the duration of its launch. That was a sensible approach, but I vehemently disagreed with it. I don’t think you can drop something like that show on people and then not be out there, so everything that happened was stuff I was asking for, I accept that. No one forced me to be involved. But it felt necessary and part of my job to take responsibility for what I had helped create. This was no Roland-Barthes-Death-of-the-author stuff. We wanted it to have an impact, so I felt like I needed to take the resulting “hit”. It also was – somewhat contradictory to this post – the first thing in ages that gave me a sense of purpose and frankly I was grateful to grasp it. I did all the interview requests that came in, I wrote articles, posed for some pictures, the lot.

I was surprised and humbled by the overwhelmingly positive response that piece got, but within that there are things that stick and you have to take the good with the bad and sometimes the line between the two isn’t that evident. There’s the man who finds you on Facebook to tell you it reminds him of his own father’s abuse in 1950s Wiltshire and how that experience traumatised him forever. You can’t ignore him, but are you qualified to talk to him about that? Do you risk hurting them even more? There’s a woman who tweets you to say that her Pakistani friend in Northern Ireland was approached by a stranger and asked “Is this what you all do to your kids?” The friend was shaken and furious. My response that I was sorry to hear that (and I was) but sadly, this mostly stems from a lack of diverse representation on TV beyond dramas on these issues, felt truthful but still handwring-y. There’s nothing you could’ve done about it, but it’s still partly your fault.

The few out-and-out bright spots from this time was watching all types of kids take on this issue fully and discuss it with nuance. I also got to chat to so many young adults making their first forays into journalism and fiction writing and activism. I got to do interviews with them (and I liked them way more than the ‘bigger’ ones). I got to read some beautiful response poems. I got to go to an event in a pub in East London where what must’ve been near a hundred young women and men gathered to hear talks and performances about what feminism was and want they wanted it to be.

I was particularly heartened that so many of them were Asian too. It’s everything I wanted to exist when I was a kid and had tentative dreams of wanting to work in the arts but wasn’t sure how to ever make that happen. There was no path that was clear to me. How lovely then to engage with kids who see many different paths ahead of them.

Considering my low bar for MBMF was “don’t start a race war”, this was all a massive bonus. But making it wrung me out and responding to it wrung me out more and was a lesson in being careful in both how you approach a project and how you decompress from it. I was very lucky that by this point I had taken my misery to a GP (it took me getting drunk and swearing aggressively at some nice strangers for me to do that) and I had started four weeks of CBT just before it came out. Those sessions acted as a buffer against the worst of it.

3) Burn out. Again, a bit vague, but I suppose it makes sense. When I first told people I felt a bit off in October last year, just after MBMF had wrapped, they were very insistent that I’d been Working Very Hard For A Very Long Time and that I Needed A Holiday. I’d been on a couple of trips the last few years, mostly for weddings, but I genuinely couldn’t remember when I last went on a proper holiday. I wasn’t even that sure how you did it anymore. Truthfully, I’d rather have spent it in my pants, on the sofa, playing the PS4 I had bought but had not unboxed any games for because there was too much to do. I was then convinced by others that this wasn’t good enough.

So I tried to have a holiday. A few weeks later I found myself in a hotel room in Barcelona, quite a nice hotel room since I’d decided that I Deserve This. It was ok. I walked around a lot and listened to podcasts. But I found the stress of finding vegetarian food in a hugely carnivorous city enormous. I couldn’t bring myself to get on the subway. The football team weren’t even playing that week. I found myself on Diwali night sat in an Indian restaurant alone, overhearing a furiously red-faced Englishman explain curry to a patient Spanish woman, and all the while I wishing I was back home on the sofa, in my pants, playing my PS4.

The morning after I sat in my hotel room all day, writing an email that still sits in the drafts of my inbox that I never sent but can’t bring myself to delete. It was a long plea to my friends to not hate me if they didn’t hear from me for ages because I wanted to just disappear. I didn’t know how to be a good friend to them or how to be present in any meaningful way. I loathed everything about myself in that moment, probably more than I ever have.

So maybe it was this stuff. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was just lingering concerns I have about my personality, my inconsistency, my ability to be a functional adult human enlarging themselves til they clouded out everything else. But what’s the upshot of it all?

The bad is that I’ve turned down loads of projects. I’ve even paid back a commission. I chastise myself for not being able to take better advantage of or more enjoyment from this moment in my life and career which by all measures is going fine. More than fine, pretty damn good. I want to grasp every opportunity, I want to be able to have a Jack Thorne-esque level of consistency and productivity but the truth is I can’t really handle it and it’s been better for me to consciously step back and sharpen my focus on fewer things. I might manage to get myself back to spinning lots of projects at the same time, but definitely won’t be doing that soon. It hurts me to say no, but I know it’ll hurt me more to say yes.

The good is that the CBT has started to give me a bit of a framework to make a comeback from. The hourly journalling of mood let me see when I was best placed to operate. Setting tiny goals has been an unexpected revelation. When the big goals disappear as a source of drive and value, I’ve found pushing yourself to consistently do the little things really does help. Cooking a meal for my housemate. Making the time to ring home. Read a book (until this month, it’d be nearly a year since I’d read a work of fiction that wasn’t a play. And even then, not many of those).

Slowly by slowly, through diligent little acts of humanity and progress, the static is coming into focus. I’ve even started using wanky metaphors myself.

Why Master of None Isn’t Just Good Telly – It’s Everything I Always Hoped For

There is a moment from my year as an MA writing student that haunts me and I bring it up a lot because, for lack of a less wanky phrase, it was a moment of social awakening.

As part of the course, we were split into groups and had to individually develop characters in a sitcom. I got given the everyman lead character in my group, and I made him black. I remember that decision clearly because when doing it, it felt like I was being deliberately antagonistic. Which was a bloody weird way to feel. Like I’d internalised the neutrality of whiteness and any other race as “statement.” I’d already caught myself saying “I want to write stories about Asian characters, but also normal stories as well” earlier in the course and wanted to throw up over myself when I realised I’d done so so I stuck with the decision, interested to see what would happen.

We went back into class the next week and explained how we had enriched our respective characters. When I mentioned the details of what I’d done with mine, both the tutor and a fellow student said words to the effect of “Oh no, I didn’t see him as black.” And no-one else seemed to find this a problematic statement. To be clear: it would not have impacted the narrative in any significant way. It wasn’t a show about race. Yet that was the casual reaction from my peers. From my instructors. Now I don’t think they’re bad people for that, it just demonstrated to me how deep the unconscious bias sits. Characters of Colour (as it were) feel unable to be platforms from which to tell “everyman” stories. It’s not quite a “yuck factor” but in the moment it really didn’t feel far off.

It isn’t just me worrying about this, of course. On a scheme I was a part of last year, I had a long conversation with an American writer of Mexican extraction. He was a phenomenal writer (who’s doing big things now so kudos) who said he wanted to write something about his family, but felt it wouldn’t be considered American enough. I was very much “Dude, America as a state is an immigrant nation – any story is American. The lives of Mexican-American families are for everyone to know, indulge in, consume, enjoy.” But of course I know what he meant. You probably know what he meant too, right? It’s inside and out.

Bearing these stories in mind, I want to explain why Aziz Ansari’s new sitcom (?) Master of None is such a big deal to me and why I can finally (hopefully) exorcise that MA story from my mind. You can enjoy MoN as a sharp and witty and insightful sitcom about being a middle-class thirty something in the Big City. And it is that. Kids! Weddings! Friends With Real Jobs! Nothing groundbreaking story-wise. You could watch it all on a long weekend afternoon and have a nice time.

Yet I think for me watching it has been a seminal moment in my writing career and, heck, life. It’s the positive anti-thesis to that awkward classroom five years ago. Does that sound too grand? Right from the opening I knew I was watching something that would mean a lot to me, even if it seemed small potatoes to others. In that first scene, there was a straight Asian man on my screen, existing as a sexual being. I realised I’ve actually seen more gay Asian male characters given sexual characteristics in drama than I ever have hetero characters which is brilliant in one way of course, but I simply hadn’t clocked how much I’d felt that absence.

An idle “checking out” of the series, rapidly turned into an instant binge watch. By episode six I kicked my knackered housemate’s door down and demand he watched it with me. Having both (relatively) recently broken up with people, we cringed in recognition as the broader comedy gave way to hard truth in the brutal arguments Dev had with Rachel, his girlfriend. We both recognised ourselves in that relationship. Both of us. Keep that in your head, it becomes important later.

Dev & Rachel

I should probably state right now that I don’t say this all as an Ansari fanboy. If anything, knowing him mainly from his standup, I used to find his delivery mildly annoying and his whackier physicality (and voices) not particularly funny. In contrast, I laughed out loud a lot whilst watching Master of None. It might be that I grew familiar with Ansari’s style and accepted it, it might be the more humane touches that he applies to the work that lets you in beyond the “front”. You can feel the Louie influence in this series, even if this is very much its own beast.

But I also think though I was just enjoying being able to fully identify with a lead character’s predicaments for once, in nearly every sense and having their predicaments in their entirety be the central point of empathy for the show. I’ve spent my entire life (happily) transmuting stories of white Western characters/families into my own experience. It doesn’t ask a lot of me. I still want to be Indian(a) Jones. Here, in this show, was the first time I’m properly seen a modern Western Asian character in the mainstream that a majority white audience would have to engage with as their anchor in a show. The “mainstream” part of that is important to me.

Here is an admission that is likely not music to the ears of people who I am currently under commission to. As a writer, I’m more driven by the roles I can create, the cultural artefacts that I can make exist than the stories themselves. That’s not to say I don’t care about stories, of course I do, but it’s the potential social shift around them as well as within them that really gets me going and drives me through the doldrums. This is part the stories, part audience development, part placement/marketing and doing all of this in attempt to mainstream marginal narratives seems one of the most important you can do. It feels radical to move those stories into a non-radical frame within the industry/people’s expectations. And when I say I want to mainstream, I mean it to include the entirety of the lives of those characters within those narratives.

That’s a distinction I’ve been making to a lot of my writer friends of late, particularly theatre ones: What I want most of all is not parts that could be played by anyone, I want what I guess I would call the possibility of Stage Four diversity. What are Stages One, Two and Three, you ask? Here is a rough guide that I just made up.

Stage One – Ethnics exist. Somewhere. Usually at the back. They may be doing some cleaning, or maybe have a couple of lines. If they’re in space, they will likely do both before dying horribly by airlock/alien/asteroid.

Stage Two – Ethnics exist. They’ve a significant presence. And an accent. They’re downtrodden folk from a land elsewhere…but hopeful! It might be great. It might be a “crossover hit”. But it’s mostly in a box. In the corner. And it’s something you usually feel like you should see rather than something you want to see. This is more likely than not an art house movie. You probably saw it on a date. It was probably nominated for an Oscar that it didn’t win (or if it did win, people will question why).

Stage Three – Ethnics exist as a main character. Usually not quite the central character, but up there as significant in a gang show. If they aren’t the lead, they might still have a funny accent. Crucially, if they are the lead, their ethnicity/background doesn’t affect the story in any way. They are led by the plot. They might have been called “Dennis” and renamed to “Dinesh” to meet ethnic quotas. Or a “Gary” that could easily have been white, but you’ve let a black actor play. Less cynically, think Luther. Now there’s a lot to be said for Stage Three. it’s a great and useful space. It’s important that it exists.

Just many consider this the “everyman” space, the Promised Land, and it sort of is. Sort of. But the true everyman experience is…*bing*

Stage Four – Ethnics exist as a main character (in a mainstream work). The character is a lead and their ethnic/cultural background inflects the story and their world. But it’s not an overwhelming part of the show. They are great. They are flawed. They are you. They are read as everyone in the way that white characters traditionally are.

This is the important part, so I’ll say it again with a little more oomph: The character is a lead and their ethnic/cultural background inflects the story and their world to the extent that they are not interchangeable but said background doesn’t dominate the broader context and concerns of the show.

To me, this is truest form of integrative, empathetic diversity in storytelling you can create. Everymanning with detail, not erasure. It’s saying in a more complex way than the blank canvas of stage three “Hey! This is someone that doesn’t look necessarily a lot like you or you mates, some of their ways are alien to you, but it’s still you in there.”

Master of None does this, and well. It doesn’t compel you into the character’s journey via an integration story, it’s an intergrated story. It doesn’t ignore the racial/cultural specifics of its characters yet the show is so damn generous with its invariably niche material when it delves into it. For a large part, that’s because it runs said material through its comic set ups which we all get because we all understand comedy. Like the pre-titles sequence of episode two with the two Asian dads (South and East) is amazing and funny and a little heart-rending if you recognise those characters from your life. But as a comic beat, it’s presented as a “parents work hard and kids are such assholes in comparison”. You don’t need to be Asian to recognise the structure of that joke, even if the detail might be lost on you:

Hahaha, well, that's how I feel when I watch all the white people shows. https://t.co/wCpxrBsxXX

— Aziz Ansari (@azizansari) November 7, 2015

On a couple of smaller notes, can I just take a second to say this series *looks* great too. Mostly filmic and the only times this looks like TV is when it wants to. (Even though that aesthetic difference has collapsed in recent years…anyway, for another blog, that). I also love how each episode functions as its own explicit exploration of themes that all feel relevant to me as a young(ish) tech-head in the city. In its construction, it references work I adore, including the awkward character comedy of (good) Woody Allen and the humane pacing of Richard Linklater. There’s even a quasi Before Sunrise episode.

Of course, whilst I think the show is ambitious and interesting beyond its central characters, it isn’t in any way perfect. The very segmented episodes can leave the wider show feeling a little bit uneven. The non-actor parents might annoy (Nida). I love them for their awkward performances, the mum in particular reminds me of my own gran’s discomfort at being filmed, but I get that at least. And yes, Dev is still not quite me. He’s not even the same kinda Indian (Tamil and Gujarati folk being found at complete other ends of the subcontinent) but the cultural identification was still strong. Honestly, even just the visual identification felt like a rush. I don’t think my TV has had to hold the colour brown in the centre of the screen so frequently since I last watched the beach sequence in Saving Private Ryan.

Master of None nails and transcends everything I’ve wanted to do in my writing, particularly with True Brits, and it *probably* torpedoes a couple of things I had in the works. It probably does what I’ve wanted to do better than I ever will. I don’t care. This feels like a fucking great moment. Maybe this is how some of my friends felt when Girls turned up (Or, for that matter, Michaela Coel’s excellent Chewing Gum, currently on E4.)

I exist in the world that I love. In a way that doesn’t deny background but that anyone can empathise with. And just fucking enjoy if that’s all you want to do. People of all sorts have too, and that matters. It’s rocking it, critically and ratings wise.

Watching Master of None has refreshed me more than a holiday I’m about to go on.

It’s wonderful.

Productivity Goals

 
In what is a first in motivation experimentation, nothing focuses the mind to the task of writing like sitting diligently by your sink, bailing out the wastewater that backs up into it from the public sewer.

Lambeth, yer testing me.

A Haircut

You might have noticed I don’t write on this blog as much as I used to. I want to believe this is because I’ve only a limited amount of words in me and that I need to save them for paid/creative work. In reality it’s a fudge of garden-variety laziness and having projects that don’t allow me to really talk about writing process as much as I’d like to. (I intend to work around that in future).

But as I’m currently in a state where sleep-deprivation and sheer brute force of deadlines have combined to leave me crying whenever I listen to the Jurassic Park soundtrack (top writer tip: It is *the* soundtrack to write to) here’s a quick 7/7-related post. I’ve held off a for a few days because it’s quite a self-involved post about image and how it implants itself in the soul. I have no meaningful insight into domestic terrorism or the pain of those who died or were injured on the day itself – there are a lot of excellent reads on those topics out there that I can point you to if you want.

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On Tuesday I got my haircut. I got my haircut because after a month of trying to be a hero to my trade I was rocking quite a trampy look, which is generally fine by me except that my passport had just run out and I needed a new mugshot. A mugshot that would broadly hold true to my personality/look over the next ten years. That idea – of an official photo as statement of personality –  started as an idle thought and strayed into me thinking more seriously on my old passport photo which I had taken in June 2005, a month before the London bombings.

I’ve made a lot of jokes about that photo – the long hair, the beard, the slightly dead eyes. Lots of people look back at photos of themselves looking supposedly cool years later and ask “what was I thinking?”. It’s rarer to go from “You know what, I look bloody cool” to “You know what, I look like a bloody terrorist” in the space of a month and it’s, to put it mildly, a bit of head fuck.

The vaguely beardy, vaguely brown, dangerous young male has become one of the defining images of the last decade and it’s humbling to think how much such a thing can shape your life from the minutiae to the profound. The way others see you, the way you are expected to be seen, the way you see others. The stories you write and are expected to write. The injustices you connect to. The time you spend going through airport security. The guilt you feel as you’re questioned. The near constant wondering “what’s my face look like at the moment? Angry? I hope not angry?”. The smile you develop to thrown on at times of uncertainty. The insidious but pervasive thought at your bathroom mirror: “oh I’m starting to look a bit terroristy – maybe I had better shave.” (For me this perhaps explains my not joining whole-heartedly into the hipster beard revolution though I am clearly a prime candidate.) Reflecting on my naivety back then and how it contrasts to who I am today dragged up a well of feeling I’d forgotten existed in between those two states. I mean, I certainly remembered what it was like to be at a party amongst your intellectual peers (wanky but I was excited) and be told by someone that you should be stopped and searched at airports, white people shouldn’t, and that’s just the way it is. And no-one saying anything. I remember that. The stares, the comments in the streets, the suspicious parents, the headbutts, the cracked teeth, I remember all of it.

What I’d forgotten, perhaps repressed a little, was how fucking furious I felt. I wanted to hurt people, including myself. What a lie I’d sold myself that this place was where I belonged. The slightly paranoid, often xenophobic comments some of my family would spout were actually true. These people around me would never really be my friends. How could they be? They’d never understand. In fact, whilst I’m not proud to admit it, I was genuinely angry with my white friends for a while. I really hated them and felt increasingly distant. Forgetting that we all have our own troubles, I hated their easy access to society, I resented everything that I’d gladly done to appease. Every awkward joke made to basically go “look, it’s fine! I’m no threat!” Most of all, I hated that this was even a thing in my head and that it would never be in theirs.

I wanted to talk to someone about it, but didn’t really have an outlet (I didn’t have a huge amount of Asian friends at the time), so it ended up in my diaries, on this blog, in my creative work instead. Part of that anger dissipating over the years has led me from going: “I want to write brown stuff *as well as* “normal” things” to “I want to write as many, diverse, wonderful, terrible, powerful, angry, sexy, passionate, depressed, hopeful, scheming, anxious, brown folk as possible and for that to *be* normal and identifiable and everyman and everywoman and, fuck-it-why-not, popular if it’s possible.

I still wonder about the counter-factuals. If 7/7 had never happened, would I have been driven to write half the things I have? Maybe I’d have ended up doing a law conversion like every other person I know did. After all, I’m not a Muslim and for better or worse, people have gotten a bit more nuanced in their intolerance and the worst of it passes me by now. However, I never want to be grateful for that. I don’t want to co-opt a suffering, I just don’t want to make it easy for people to make others suffer, whether it be through direct action (abuse/violence) or my tacit acknowledgement or my actively distancing myself. I don’t want to let a man sitting next to me at the airport ask cautiously “You a Muslim?” and, when I reply in the negative, have him follow up with “oh you lot are all right, but those guys…”.  I don’t want to, as many a family member has suggested, shave because otherwise you’re “asking for it.”

And yet for that new passport photo I’ve short hair and I’m relatively clean shaven. I’d like to believe that’s a conscious choice, that I now think *that* looks cool, rather than trying to dodge airport inconvenience. I’ve got the two photos, the two mes (what *is* the plural of me?) sitting side-by-side on my desk: One, a 29-year-old, face grown fatter and a hairline grown thinner through alcohol and ageing. He seems a bit pissed off but can’t help that – the deep dark circles around the eyes aren’t going to become anything but deeper and darker soon. The other, a skinny 19-year-old who had been waiting 4 years to grow his hair out and thought he looked so awesome, so like Dave Grohl, that he wanted to make that his official face for a whole decade. You weren’t allowed to smile, even back then, but there’s a hint of it on his lips and why not. He was super enthusiastic, still a bit overwhelmed by university and saw little but possibility ahead. Well, possibility and Pot Noodles. Whilst life has settled into a place I’m broadly happy with, the outlook has diminished a little and criminally so has the diet, so I miss the 19-year-old quite a bit.

But I don’t envy him the years ahead.

Jyoti

I’ve not seen the name ‘Jyoti’ around as much as I have the last few days, for obvious reasons surrounding the “India’s Daughter” documentary, and it’s made me think about my maternal grandmother who shared that name. I had the good fortune of being raised and tolerated by some kind and very patient women who are thankfully still in my life and so today seems a good time to reflect on the one who isn’t.

My “Biji Ba” (basically meaning ‘other grandma’, which isn’t a great nickname in hindsight but felt affectionate enough growing up) was really bloody small, I think the smallest in a family of tiny ladies. I sometimes forget her face and voice, but the *lightness* of her is baked into my muscle memory.

She got to ‘pick’ my granddad from a selection of other blokes. My granddad showing me the photo that won it for him – casual pose, smart suit – is one of my favourite adult memories. She was a lot younger than him and it was still effectively an arranged marriage, but theirs was the strongest, most loving relationship in my family and I still hold it as a model for the affection and utter respect that married life should be built on.

She was naturally excellent at maths, despite not really having an education, which served her well when she moved over here and worked in a screw factory, enduring the taunts and spits of the other workers, some of whom I understand were members of the union that my granddad was a representative of. Which must’ve led to some interesting dinner-time conversations…

Of course, she wasn’t a saint herself, she had some objectionable old-school views, but she was progressive in enough ways – including regarding difference in caste between my Dad and my Mum – that overall I’m ok with giving her a pass.

Her death, nearly ten years ago now, had as a profound effect on me as her life, since she was the first person close to me to die. The dissonance between her last physical states – seeing her scared and struggling to breathe in a hospital and then hard as granite in the backroom of an undertakers a few days later – still sits with me. But her last act does more so: She gave all the money she had to buy computers for a girls’ orphanage in India so those kids could get the education she was always denied. I remember hearing about that as a scruffy, sad 19 year old who just delivered a speech at her funeral and that fact punching through the misery and just leaving me totally in awe of her.

My Biji Ba, and the women of her generation, have a legacy of courage and perseverance that’s flourished into better lives with varied prospects for those that followed them. I see it in my sister – a former marine engineer, fixing engines on ships all over the world, now back home running the shops that my mum was a driving force in creating. I see it in my cousin who’s overcome horrific illness that I can’t imagine how I’d begin to handle with resilience and grace and now has a job in law as she always wanted (even if she is a bit mental when it comes to cats).

They’re incredible, sophisticated, messy people whose narratives and aspirations, as a gender, tend to get buried under the histories of Great Men, so it’s been wonderful seeing some of those tales get excavated over the last few days and it excites me to imagine all the stories our daughters will get to tell – both of their lives and the ones that are yet to come.

Ode

So the aforementioned emotional and draining week was immediately followed up by my 28th birthday yesterday and the imminent departure to foreign lands of my housemate, best friend and former fellow band member, Crawf (as I know him).

Saturday’s birthday celebration was a successful 12 (and a half) hour jolly in a pub and though a great time was had, it was the friend-leaving that dominated my thoughts as the day got towards its end. Crawf and I have known each other since we were 11, becoming proper friends at 15. We started a band together, suffered through French class and I saw him go through his first serious relationship (which started at Reading Festival 2002, post-GCSE results, whilst I was sleeping in the same tent…).

This was followed by going to the same uni, where we didn’t see each other a huge amount but shared a few friends, and then finally we ended up living together for 5 1/2 years after that, 4 in this same flat I’m in right now. We’ve gone on trips abroad, explored the depths of London, done each other’s washing up and got very much used to each other’s foibles. I’ve come to rely on him quite heavily as a confidant and schemer. Whilst everyone around us seemed to be settling down, getting married, moving away or becoming monstrously career driven, we sort of pottered along together. Not unfocused, or undriven – he taught himself Korean and studied accountancy from scratch, I have started carving out a minor career in scriptwriting – but somewhat partners in low-level-life crime.

Crawf, having diligently focused for a few years whilst working a job that didn’t quite fulfil, decided to travel to shake things up. But then he also announced that he’d work abroad if he possibly could so this was going to be more than month long jape – it was potentially forever. I knew it was coming, so today isn’t a surprise, and there were little stages of readiness – researching destinations, booking the flights, quitting his job. All in preparation for a fundamental change in his life. However, what I hadn’t realised until very recently is quite how much his grand shift was going to alter my own existence. We tend to drift merrily (or not-so-merrily) through our lives, embracing a sort of stasis so much so that when change suddenly sets upon you, it lurches both your routine and your heart. In an instant, the old ways cease, your world is alien and there is absolutely no going back.

The last few hours of his time here have had that searing quality of utter reality that burns through the everyday humdrum. Sod the water bill: This Is Happening. Life Is Going To Be Very Different. Not in the big ways, but in a thousand little cumulative ways that together mean so much more:

I won’t be able to knock on his door whenever to show him an article I think he’ll enjoy.

I won’t be able to throw a line at him to see if he laughs (and thus know it’s funny).

We won’t drop anything to have a session of Super Smash Brothers on the N64 at a moment’s notice.

I won’t be able to make terribly un-PC remarks knowing I’m not being judged.

I won’t be able to sit on his bed and work whilst he’s playing DragonAge for the 20th time.

I won’t be able to tell him of my women woes and have him judge me for my lack of courage and foresight (although I might still be able to swing that one on Skype).

We won’t make impromptu burrito runs.

Along with all that, I won’t be able to so easily share the joys of my future artistic endeavours, which obviously mean a great deal to me. My choice of career is utterly ridiculous and unstable and emotionally demanding. I honestly don’t think I’d have got to where I am at the moment, early though it still is, if it hadn’t been for Crawf’s presence, wisdom and unflagging friendship over the last half a decade. He’s backed every project, come to every performance (that I’ve invited him to), and was my first point of call for any ideas I had.

So right now, knowing all of that is about to change profoundly, I feel desperately sad.

But, watching this all finally end so soon after turning 28, I think that I also finally feel very much like an adult. You’re my best friend, Crawf – thanks for helping me get here.