LIFE’S TOO SHORT … and so am I
The following account of my writing career was written as as part of an Open University course I am doing in which you had to sum up your writing “history” in fewer than 250 words. I’m not boasting but I’ve been doing this for so long now that even in bullet point form it was going to be a squeeze.
So this is my potted history which I suppose I should write now that it seems people are actually reading this website. If you’re interested, this is how I got started and how I got to where I am today. Feel free to skim.
I was born in Dumfries in Scotland in the year Queen Elizabeth the Second (and First) was crowned.
Dumfries is a picturesque town in the South-West of the country which has variously over recent years been voted the best place in Britain to live and the “Drugs Capital” of Scotland. The two may not be unconnected. Dumfries is also where Robert Burns died and the bicycle was invented. These two events are, as far as I know, unconnected.
The first thing I wrote was a really bad poem which I recited at my primary school prize-giving when I was about 10. I was the poor kid in the village and my deadly rival was Kathleen Robson, the policeman’s daughter. Her granny was sitting behind my mother in the church hall when I got up in my scratchy tweed shorts and jacket to declaim my doggerel. “He never wrote that,” said Granny Robson, in a loud whisper. “I read it in a book in Australia.” She and my mother had to be separated by burly men.
In retrospect, this may be why I ended up here in Sydney … subconsciously looking for the book of infantile rhymes that I had plagiarised.
When I was about 14, I sent a different really bad poem to one of my big sister’s teen magazines (Jackie, I think it was called). They published the poem with one line changed and sent me a cheque for 20 Guineas (honest!). I wrote a snooty letter of protest about the line change but cashed the cheque all the same.
I got my first piece of life-changingly bad advice at the age of 16 when the careers master at my state school in Scotland scoffed at my desire to be a journalist: “You’ll have to work on the pathetic local rag as a tea boy,” he said. “Go off to university and study to be an engineer.” So I did, studying mostly the structural qualities of cigarette papers joined together with spit (this was so long ago that bongs had not been yet invented). Nine years later finally I got a job at my “pathetic local rag” not quite as a tea boy but as trainee sub-editor. I have been racing to catch up ever since.
I have since worked in newspapers in Glasgow, London, Nairobi, Auckland and here in Sydney. In 1990 I decided to stop working as a full-time sub-editor and thought I would become a writer. This lasted two weeks until panic set in and I did a few casual shifts at Woman’s Day that turned into a two-year stint as the magazine’s chief-sub. I gave that up the day I dismissed as a publicity stunt the news that Christopher Reeves had fallen off his horse and might never walk again. Too cynical.
A friend introduced me to John O’Grady, then head of comedy at ABC TV, and I sent him a sitcom script. He told me it was one of the worst things he’d ever read. A friend of his was looking for new writers to develop comedy for the producers of “A Country Practice” and John recommended me.
From that I got a gig as a trainee script editor on ACP. We were plotting my first episode when the show was cancelled.
I then got a job on a terrible sketch show called “The Comedy Sale” which had such rising stars as Mikey Robbins, The Umbilical Brothers, Kitty Flanagan and Lano and Woodley in it. It died a sudden but not even remotely premature death after one episode. My breakthrough in comedy (nearly) followed when I was invited to write an episode of Hey Dad! Channel Seven canned the show while they were rehearsing my episode. The next year I got two of the three nominations for Australian Writers Guild awards for sitcom writing. The third nominee won.
At some point, because I was yet again playing catch-up, I decided I would never turn down a paying gig in television which led me to all sorts of weird and not-so-wonderful places: head writer on the Logies and two series of Gladiators, for instance. But the contacts I made doing that allowed me to pitch a brand new soap called Breakers to Screentime and through them to Channel 10 and the BBC. It ran for 300+ episodes and was the first teen soap to have an aboriginal and a gay character as regular cast members, leading to the Daily Record in Scotland running the headline: “The man who wants to bring gay underage sex to afternoon TV” over my picture. My mother got into a fight in a butcher’s shop over that one and had to be subdued by burly men.
Realising that no one with any sense was going to hire me to work on their shows, I went on to create two other series (Crash Palace and Rain Shadow) and still did jobbing work on entertainment shows.
In the meantime, I wrote a children’s book, a biography of a Vietnam war hero and two books about property (specifically, apartment living.) From the latter I was given a weekly column in the Sydney Morning Herald’s property section which has now been running for about six years. I also have two websites. The one about apartments gets about 50,000 hits a month. The other is this vanity project that I suspect I am the only person to visit.
I seem to be moving from TV to books. Snitch is out, I’m rewriting my Vietnam biography as a third-person military history and I have a sporting biography to ghost. Meanwhile, I am busily composing pitch documents and bibles for television comedy dramas (that will never get made) for both here and the USA. I am also working on the umpteenth rewrite of a treatment for a feature film about the Chelmsford Deep Sleep scandal of the 70s and 80s.
So why exactly am I doing an Open University course, I hear those of you who are still awake asking yourselves. Because from the moment I stepped on the stage of that church hall, in my scratchy little tweed suit, 40-odd years ago, I knew what I wanted to do but had no idea how to do it.
Nothing has changed.