Sunday 8 January 2017

Promotional New Year's Messages

Hello,
I hope you are well. I've had a rotten year following things I believed in being systematically destroyed and people I loved and admired dying. Professionally, it was much better, damn that faint praise.

So last year, after Vienna series 3 came out, I had another Rifftrax Presents release with Matthew J Elliott Flight to Mars, which was a lot of fun and I think strikes the nice balance of being a movie that's just about watchable without a riff over the top and having some nice silly jokes layer on it.
You may disagree. I'd not be surprised or disappointed. There's another riff close to recording right now. We'd have liked to have got it out last year, but life kept getting in the way.

I also wrote three Doctor Who audio stories, one released, two due for release in 2017, The Becoming, The British Invasion and Cortex Fire, an episode of the Doctor Who spin off The New Counter-Measures, a play for another audio series that hasn't been announced yet and two episodes of the audio reconstructions of missing episodes of The Avengers, Death on the Slipway and Dragonsfield.

The last project is a really interesting one, because in the case of both stories I did the scripts are missing and the reconstructions rely on TV listings, brief synopses and surviving photographs, primarily tele-snaps, an off air record of the show as it went out, in the case of these episodes about 80 over an hour of TV.

Obviously, they will never be the same as the original show, and there has to be a lot of educated guess work involved but my aim with the two I adapted was to mirror the approach of the episodes of The Avengers that survive or we have scripts for from that first year of production and to adhere closely to the style of the two original writers James Mitchell and Terence Feely, looking at how they approached both their later Avengers episodes and their other work before and after this period.
It proved instructive and when an additional season 1 episode was recovered later in the year I was quite pleased by how stylistically close it was to what we'd done. I hope if you listen to the plays our deep respect for all the cast and crew for this incredible series comes through.

Oh, and I did my half marathon. Not as quickly as I would have liked but I got there.

Happy New Year!