Continue reading »]]>

These past few weeks have mainly seen me flitting between three writing projects. The first, Return to Earth draft 2 – still not quite complete (six pages to go!); the second, developing an idea for a TV series based on the bits I’ve cut out of the first draft of Return to Earth; and thirdly, the just-for-fun adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s ‘The Wee Free Men’.

Now, it just so happened that at the beginning of the week I found myself working my way through the scene in The Wee Free Men where Tiffany finds herself in a dream not too dissimilar to Richard Dadd’s “The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke”.

Being a bit of a fan of the painting (and the song by Queen) I decided I’d do a bit of research to get a better feel for it, and thanks to the nice, relatively hi-res, image on Wikipedia, I printed myself off a few copies, sticking them up next to my desks at work and at home.

This morning, my good friend and work colleague, Adrian Phipps, and I were making a fresh cup of tea and chatting about the painting. Being the knowledgable chap he is (part of his degree was in Art History) we discussed the curious nature of the painting, the precision with which Dadd has placed everything and the strange deformities of some of the Fairy’s depicted in the scene.

Two things in particular jumped out at him. If you take a look at the painting you’ll see the Fairy Feller, his axe held aloft waiting for the sign from the Patriarch, the grey haired man watching him with the huge hat. Just below the Patriarch are two fairies with very squashed heads. ‘Hmm’, says Adrian, ‘those heads look like eyes. And the folds of that fairy’s cloak looks like a nose and the Fellers hat looks like a mouth’.

I looked closely and pointed out that the mound upon which Oberon and Titania stand (just above the Patriarch), looks like the curve of the top of a head, and the coat of the fairy to the left of the pinky-red cloaked fairy looks like an ear.

As soon as we’d seen it, it seemed obvious that Dadd must have intended the face to be there, perhaps just for fun, but it felt too prominent to be a coincidence. All I could see when I looked at the picture was the face and wondered why I hadn’t noticed it before. We found some other possible faces elsewhere in the painting, but none were as clearly defined as this one.

So this evening, I threw the image into Photoshop and messed around with the levels a little. A few things started to bug me:

• Firstly, the pinky-red cloak of the (female?) squashed head fairy, directly below the Patriarchs beard, lacks detail (which doesn’t match the clothes of the rest of the Fairies).
• Secondly, if her head is meant to be an eye, it doesn’t quite tie up with the eye/head of her partner.
• Thirdly, what’s with her partner’s foot? He’s crossing his legs at a very awkward angle.
• Fourthly, the hidden face is almost at the centre of the painting but not quite, it felt a little too far to the right and off balance.

Then I noticed the gold curve that stretches round the right hand side of the Patriarch’s hat.

And I saw it.

The profile of an Ape!

What’s more it’s the profile of an Ape overlaid over the profile of a man’s face, much like Apple Finder Icon.

Suddenly, it all made sense.

• The cloak is the smooth pink part of the Apes face.
• The Eyes don’t match as the Ape’s eye is looking to the right, and the man’s eye is looking forward.
• The awkwardly placed foot of the partner makes up the Ape’s nose.
• When you put the outline of the Ape and the Man together it’s right, slap bang in the middle of the picture, thusly:

Whoah, thinks I. What’s that about? Ape and Man? Evolution?

Now there’s been a lot in the papers and on the radio recently about Charles Darwin, so I knew that he would have been a contemporary of Richard Dadd. I did a bit of digging on t’interweb and found quite a few similarities between the two men.

• They both travelled extensively in their early careers.
• They both apparently suffered from Bi-polar disorder.
• Both had strong links with Kent.
• (You might even argue that they were both murderers, one of his father, the other of religion)
• Dadd painted The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke between 1855 and 1864, Darwin published Origin of the Species on the 22 November 1859.

So would Dadd, locked away in Bethlem in Beckenham, Kent, have known of Darwin’s ideas, perhaps even known Darwin, who after all lived a mere seven miles away in Downe?

Dadd painted The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke for one George Henry Hayden, the head steward at Bethlem Royal Hospital at the time.

A quick Google search revealed records of correspondence between George Henry Hayden and Charles Darwin at darwin-online.org.uk. I have no idea what was in those letters, but it’s not the greatest leap of logic to think that Hayden knew Darwin, possibly treated him, and spoke to Dadd about Darwin and his theories. As a gift, Dadd hid the image of the man and the ape in the painting for Hayden. Perhaps the hidden man is Hayden? Who knows? Pure speculation.

But great fun.

I’m with Neil Gaiman, who suggests that the ‘Pedagogue’ – the little bald, bearded chappy (or Sneebs as Terry Pratchett calls him), is in fact an old version of Dadd himself. I like the way he’s sat right on the shoulder of both the Ape and the Man.

I feel like one of those diabolicals from Umberto Eco’s ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’, which, incidentally, will be my next just-for-fun adaptation.

What do you think?

Continue reading »]]>

Image via Wikipedia

It’s that time of year again, where we all go nuts and try to write 50,000 words in 30 days.  I did it last year and loved it, so I’m having a go again this year.  

But this year, I’m doing it all a bit different.

In honour of two of my favourite authors, Robert Rankin and Neil Gaiman, I’ll be doing it with a pen and paper (it also gets me away from the computer and this darned distracting interweb).

I was a bit unsure of this approach at first – how would I cope without being able to check my tweets every five minutes?

As it turns out, it was great, but it still left me with a couple of unresolved issues.

Firstly; which type of pen to use?

I met Robert Rankin a few years ago when he was one of the speakers at a comedy writing workshop. Here he espoused the virtues of the Bic Biro.  For him, no other pen came close – he even complained when I asked him to sign my book with my fountain pen.  

No such complaints I feel would issue forth from Mr Gaiman, who takes writing with an ink pen to a whole new level.

So what to do? Easy – 25000 words with a Biro, followed by 25000 words with my trusty parker fountain pen (I think a straight ink pen is probably a bit ambitious for someone as clumsy as me). 

Sorted.

My second, and possibly more significant quandary, was what to write.  After much deliberation (more than was probably necessary) I’ve decided that, rather than go for a straight novel, I should try something a little different.  

I went up to London last week to the very cool Tuttle Club at the ICA (see me here at the bar getting a coffee) and met a very splendid man who goes by the moniker of Sizemore (he’s the one in the checked shirt, sat down).  He told me about a project he’s working on which inspired me (along with Adrian Mead’s very excellent Making It As a Screenwriter) to write something for television.

So what I shall do for NaNoWriMo is write out a six episode TV series in long hand prose, with the intention of then adapting it directly to screenplay format afterwards.  

I’ve done all the calculations to try to keep me on track both with NaNoWriMo itself, and the pacing of the screenplays.  It’ll be a six chapter book, with 8500-9000 words per chapter; each chapter = one episode. I’ve no idea if it will work, but I’m 1758 words in so far (roughly, manual counting is a pain) and all feels good.

See you on the other side… and good luck to @missread, @ricgalbraith, @warriorgrrl and @splinister and everyone else doing it.

(Yes I know, I’m halfway through Return to Earth draft 2 but I’m following Adrian Mead’s advice and trying to get a wider variety of work into my portfolio – and I have no TV scripts in the bank at the moment)

Continue reading »]]> You may recall from way back in the dim and distant past (well, the end of last year) I mentioned the little project that Sony and John Malkovich were running.

Well today the fruits of the project have gone live, and most intriguing they are too. A fascinating little animation, perplexing in it’s storytelling (what else would expect from Malkovich?). I don’t get it, but that’s why David Lynch is my favourite director. People like Malkovich and Lynch aren’t afraid to leave things unexplained, to let non-sequiturs hang. That’s where the magic of cinema lies, when we take it away with us and it takes on a life of its own in our heads after we’ve stepped out of the theatre. I think that’s when it really affects us.

Anyway, before I get too carried away here is the final animation – I think everyone who took part deserves a big pat on the back:

I like it. I wish I’d taken part now… In fact, watching it back again now I’ve just embedded in the page here, it reminds me a little of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, which I’m really looking forward to seeing when it comes out.