I was born in 77...
… The queue reached back all the way past Woolworths and around the corner onto the high-street. The Oldman and I shuffled slowly forward until we were right there in the doorway. That’s when the manager announced the cinema was full.
That first abortive attempt to see Star Wars was a fail and, for veracity, I suspect it was probably sometime in 1978 not 1977, but the call back to Steven Wilson and the beautiful circularity of 67 v 77 means story truth wins every time.
I did eventually see Star Wars, and then again at least 12 more times in various cinemas over the following decades, and I’m more than happy to admit it quite literally changed my life. BSW I was a child of the TV age and comfortably addicted to the glowing cathode square in the corner. ASW, my eyes were open to the galaxies of possibility to be found in front of a more spectacular and far more expansive screen.
But even then, and all the way up to my final (failing) year in high-school in South Africa, I never imagined I might make a living working and ultimately writing in Film and TV. That was just not the sort of career the grandson of a Nottingham coal miner might aspire to while queuing to see Star Wars in Wigan.
How I went from that wet Wigan street to getting paid to do the thing I have now proved I’ll happily do for free is a series of happy accidents, unexpected opportunities and wilfully naïve choices. But that is, as ‘they’ say another story, one that 10 year old boy standing in a queue with his dad wouldn’t believe even if you told it in Technicolour. Honestly, the 58 year old man writing this now still sorta doesn’t. Don’t pinch me, I don’t wanna wake up.
Not everyone that gets an email promising incredible things from Nigeria has the same experience I did.
When Steve Gukas contacted me from Logos to ask if I wanted to write a film and could I get on a plane and come for a recce, I will own that I was not entirely convinced this was legit and took a beat to check the details and establish a safe word.
Even after I’d done the research and the recce and started to write this film about the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Lagos, I really didn’t expect it to ever actually get made. Most films aren’t. But Steve Gukas and his producing partner Dotun Olakunri are surprisingly resilient and shockingly resourceful. Within of that first unsolicited e-mail we had the script that Danny Glover absolutely refused to cameo in, even as a personal favour to Steve. ‘However’, he said. ‘He would quite happily play one of the leads…’
When Ochre Moving Pictures first set about developing IP for what they hoped would be international TV series, Robbie Thorpe invited me to come and write a story he believed was worth telling. Inspired by Collen Chauke, the series would tell the story of the former ANC freedom fighter turned Cash-in-Transit bandit and the former Apartheid cop tasked by the ANC government to catch him.
As a working title, we took the name from a inscription on a sundial detailed in the incredible Shite Town podcast. Five years and uncountable drafts later, we couldn’t collectively come up with a better title so that’s what went out across Africa on Netflix and will hopefully get eventually seen in territories around the world.
Watch
Soon Comes Night (Netflix South Africa)
I can’t claim Marillion was the first thing I searched when we finally got Internet acces in my Joburg office (circa 1996?). That first search was almost certainly Rush. But Marillion would have come soon after. Having been ‘trapped’ in the deep South for over a decade, even after the end of the (highly effective and entirely justified) cultural boycott, there was no way bands like Marillion were ever coming to play in South Africa and, distressingly, it now transpired they had made almost no video/concert material available to fill that void.
By 1998 video technology had advanced to the point where the lines between domestic and professional equipment were quickly blurring and it was possible to imagine producing video on an affordable and attainable shoestring. After listening to the freshly landed Radiation on a late-night drive, my production partner and I got it into our heads (oh you sweet summer children!) to contact the band and offer our professional services.
Very long and quite fun story short, the following summer saw us arrive in Oxford to shoot two days of rehearsal footage before shooting a three day summer fan event at The Zodiac in Oxford. Shot in the Dark would be the first of a series of projects made with and alongside Marillion and the time we spent with the band and their incredible road crews remains one of the highlights of my career.
I'll almost certainly have to do a blog to unpick, unpeel and explore my involvement in Space Mutiny. Suffice to say, the funnest part is uncredited. It was supposed to be just A.N.Other bit of B-Movie nonsenes, exploiting a South African tax loop-hole to make some people money irregardless of the dubious quality of the actual film. What made it so, so much more was its inclusion in the incomparably brilliant MST3K. Even if I hadn't worked on the film, I'd still think this was one of their funnier shows. The fact I helped make something so incredibly bad it was featured on this show makes me unapologetically and endlessly happy. When all else fails, immortality can be achieved via spactacular error. All I need to do now is suffer a dramatic, flame-framed railing-related death and my life will be complete.
According to Malcolm, 10 000 hours is the key, right? So, lemme break it down for y’all.
Honeytown ran 2 seasons of 13 hours
Jacob’s Cross season 2 is another 13, then it gets blurry, but I worked on at least another 2 seasons of that.
Zone 14 was 2 seasons of 52 half hours.
Isibaya ran (I think) 8 seasons of 252 half hours.
Umbuso ran 13 hours.
Soon Comes Night is 6 hours.
Those are just the shows on which I was some version or combination of writer, story-liner, editor, head-writer.
Throw in Inkaba, House of Zwide, Scandal and various others, then add in the movies, the pilot scripts, the re-writes, the corporate films and the development projects and I can truthfully claim to have worked on hundreds and thousands of hours of TV and film.
Pretty sure I got my 10k awhile back and the clock keeps relnetlessly ticking.
I haven’t loved it all, it hasn’t all been great or even good TV, but I can honestly say, I’ve loved doing all of it - even the bits I absolutely hated (y’all know who you are).
It remains astonishing to imagine getting paid to do this and - after developing an epic TV series about coal mining in Wales - I'm even more inclined to admit, even at its very worst, writing for TV is a long, long way from coal mining.
Long may it continue.
Probably the single best review I ever received for anything from anyone. #Seen
Paul S Rowlston on IMDB
