Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Writer and showrunner best known for creating Peep Show and Succession, winning 19 Emmys.
On the island
Eight records
The Beatles were the sort of the first band I loved. I had a cassette of the white album that I play when I was you know a little boy, almost nine, ten. And I guess the mixture of some of the melodies and even lyrics are sort of childlike. You know, there's some quite child-friendly songs and then there's some extremely avant-garde stuff that blew my head off, I guess, when I was first listening to it. When they were probably at their cultural nadir in the eighties, I was a strong, strong Beatles fan.
I found it really hard to choose. I was thinking about Ceremony, which is the song I think that was like a New Order song that they took from the Joy Division. Yeah, you'll know better than me, the catalogue, and you can almost hear when Bernard Sumner's singing it and sort of finding his voice. This is obviously before that era. It's Ian Curtis still singing before Joy Division turned into New Order, which they did when he took his life. And I guess, you know, we were talking about the Beatles, and they were a bit like the Beatles of my generation. This is from about 1980 and their Ibiza album Technique came out in like the end of the 89, 90. And they feel like they underwent a similar level of evolution from that kind of post-war Manchester sound to, you know, a drug-infused, balaric dance music. And so feeling that version of a story really appeals to me.
this one references the surrealist film Anchen Andelou, which is Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali. And Frank Black, who from the Pixies, did a course at UMass where I went, where they taught this short film, and I think he took his inspiration from it. So there's a sort of connection there for me in my mind, and I love the song.
Georgia on My MindFavourite
It reminds me it's one of those direct hits of there's nothing like a song for taking you back to somewhere and to a very happy time my wife and I spent relatively early in our relationship on holiday in Italy and um There was a garden and I was doing a lot of cooking from the garden and working my way through a book on the essentials of Italian cookery and yeah, it's just a very, very fond memory.
it's for my kids. They're older now, but Schoolhouse Rock and American sort of educational work is what they sample in this song. And we used to play this song around the house, and I also used to play Schoolhouse Rock, which is good to dance to with kids. So it makes me think of them.
New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down
This is a downbeat song and as we'd say in the writer's room it's very on the nose because New York I do love you but it's not the hardest thing in the world writing or making a TV show but sometimes it felt hard to me especially leaving family behind and the dislocation of that and the great joy of having something that people respond to but the growing responsibility of trying to keep the quality up of something that you think, you know what, this is about as good as I can do and I really want it to carry on being good and that becomes its own pressure which can be a lot. It's almost too directly singable by me.
John Berryman is not my necessarily my favourite poet, and this isn't necessarily my favourite poem even of his, but when we were travelling in the car and we'd have a playlist, I had it either by accident or design on amongst playlists to play on long journeys. And so we'd go from Arctic Monkeys or Jesse Jay or something, and suddenly the kids and family would be hit with he was quite a troubled alcoholic poet, John Berryman, and you'd suddenly be hit by this rather wonderful reading. And I think it initially elicited groans, but slowly people got used to it.
I like to write with music going on. I found that Baroque music is the best for me. And then we also actually ended up using this as the entrance music for Logan's funeral when the coffin comes in. Some people felt it was a bit upbeat, but I quite liked its oddly triumphal sound in that scene.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:43Is [getting the tone right] something that you have in mind from the beginning, like the atmosphere of a piece that you want to create, or does it come in the making of it?
Yeah, I was waiting for you to get to the end of that sentence to find out what wisdom I had coming and I didn't disagree with it, but I think what's so very difficult about it is you can't sit down and write a tone, right? I guess it comes from a culmination of your experiences and the other stuff you've watched and what you want to do, and then you have to achieve it through a script, through the casting, through your collaborators in all the different departments if it's a TV show. And that's, I guess, what the showrunner role is, is somebody who's trying to protect or create that tone.
Presenter asks
2:24Could you try and kind of explain [the tone of] succession, for example? What's the tone that you're trying to hit there?
When I pitched the show, it was Feston meets Dallas. Feston Meets Dallas. So it's a a Danish art film about a dysfunctional family and Dallas. Most of your listeners of our age will know what Dallas was. Irresistible. Commissioned instantly. So I guess you know, it has a sort of grabby melodramatic family, Who's going to be the boss of this conglomerate going forward story, but shot like Feston in in a rather a documentary way and interested in the details of people's lives.
The keepsakes
The book
The Norton Anthology of Poetry
Various (edited by Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy)
It would be the Norton Anthology of Poetry. I think you should give people who don't pick either that or another poetry anthology a really hard time... Clearly, you can just go back to this again and again and again... Also, I did my research... The Norton is considerably bigger, and I think I could use it to potentially crush a mouse... the book I think I could use as a as a weapon.
The luxury
A football. I'm not very good at football, really, but I've played all through my life... I think maybe if I do Keepe Uppies on a beach for about twenty years, maybe there'll be an incremental... I guess as I get older, maybe I'll just manage to maintain my level if I do keepy uppies until there's a rescue.
Presenter asks
7:11What was important at home then? Are we talking like, you know, music, art, ideas, politics, all of that stuff?
Hippie was, yeah, it's gone through different phases. I got maybe a pejorative kind of kneel from the Young Ones Ring. They they probably wouldn't have liked the full lentil hippie tag. But yeah, basically I think my dad had moved to the countryside to sort of been in nature in a slightly sixties way and I met my mum there in a border market town with rural traditions. But there was a a slightly separate coterie of people who'd moved there in the more like the seventies and early eighties. Through my young childhood we lived out of town in the countryside with chickens and edging towards the good life, self-sufficiency, weighing the runner beans as they came in.
Presenter asks
23:21The form of Peep Show obviously incredibly distinctive, this first-person camera coupled with the character's interior monologue. How did you come up with that?
So the original idea was to have David and Robert watch quite cheap format watching clips on T V like Beavis and Butthead talking over them sarcastically, taking the Mickey out what they were watching. And it needed some elements to Link those together was the idea. Me and Sam came up with a bunch, but this was by far the best. And I think it came out of a bit of the scene in Annie Hall where you see their relationship subtitled. There was a weird show on with the supermodel Caprice with a camera on her head, just going around her flat and doing things like thinking about how much yogurt and jam she had left in the fridge. And there was a bit of Sam had a deep interest in Buddhism and he'd been on a silent retreat and he came back, I remember very struck with by listening to the quality of his own thoughts and how odd and repetitive and funny and weird your thoughts are. You know, obviously, people have done voiceovers and what people are thinking before, and it's sort of what novels are, but it felt like with that first-person camera work, it lent it a different quality.
Presenter asks
27:24Do you think [Four Lions] would be made today or could be made today?
Well, it almost wasn't made then, so I don't think there's much difference. It was Chris's perseverance through a lot of no's to get to a yes. I I think it would be really hard, but I think it could. Not essential. It was it was Chris's idea. Me and Sam were surprised that he thought there was a story in there that could be funny. His research real cases, real people was so complete that you've got to be tonally perfect, right, if you're in that area. And your knowledge has got to be... Right, if you're And so that you as a white non Muslim person are completely comfortable in all the areas that you're of culture and society that you're dealing with, so that you're completely confident and Chris was. So he knew the area, he knew the places where the jokes could be and where they couldn't be. So we were we were really led by him. But it was his achievement to see the way that you could step through a minefield of wrong decisions to find the way to make a really interesting and true film I think.
Presenter asks
34:40What does [the showrunner role] actually involve?
I didn't really know what the hell it was going to involve. The primary thing is you're in charge of the scripts, you know, and coming up with the show. So I wrote the pilot, set that tonal world. With Adam McKay, who directed the pilot, we cast the episode and with HBO, and then with Mark Milod, long-term director, you keep an eye on the tone and the look and the direction of the show. But mainly my role, or what I felt was the key to my role, was running the writing room and overseeing the scripts written by myself and my colleagues. And then you have some sort of practical day-to-day, which comes as rather a shock, sort of production jobs about running what is quite an enormous organization, a big TV show. But the heart of it.
“you can't sit down and write a tone, right? I guess it comes from a culmination of your experiences and the other stuff you've watched and what you want to do, and then you have to achieve it through a script, through the casting, through your collaborators in all the different departments if it's a TV show.”
“When I pitched the show, it was Feston meets Dallas. Feston Meets Dallas. So it's a a Danish art film about a dysfunctional family and Dallas.”
“I always feel a certain degree of sympathy for those kids, the kids of a Redstone, of a Murdoch, because you are put into a world, especially these families, right? It's not just money with them. Money brings its own stuff. But this is money plus power plus cultural buzz and excitement that happens around your Sunday dinner table in a way that makes it so magnetic. How do you break away from that?”
“All the good writers I know that I've ever met are riddled with self-doubt and lack of certainty about whether what they've just done is good.”
“I hope I go mad quickly rather than slowly. I'd like to maybe get a coconut and sort of hollow it out and turn it into a crash helmet and walk around, weave myself something, a cloak and start seeing Jerusalem and march around.”
“I think any prose work, do you really want to read even Madame Bovry's like six times? I think you can just go back to poetry again and again and again, and it'll keep on giving.”