Those First Draft Demons by Emma Pass

When I first start a new story, I’m always excited. It’s a shiny new idea, one I’ve thought about for months, even years, and I can’t wait to plunge in and start that mysterious process of alchemy which brings my plot and characters to life. But then uncertainty sets in. All my insecurities come flooding through. This is the worst idea ever. I didn’t plan it enough. My characters suck. My writing sucks. I suck.

…You get the idea.

It used to paralyse me. I couldn’t keep going with anything. I’d rip every story up and start over, again and again, until I had to give up on them because I’d completely lost sight of what I was trying to write about in the first place.

Something had to change.

One day, I happened upon a quote from Jacqueline Wilson, where she said that with each book she writes, about halfway in, she starts to doubt whether it’s ever going to work, and that she ‘never write[s] with great confidence.”

Yes, you read that right – Jacqueline Wilson. Former children’s laureate and bestselling, multi-award-winning author of around 90 books. Books which fill almost half a shelf in the library where I used to work – when they’re there, that is, which isn’t often because they get borrowed so often (she’s one of the most borrowed authors in the UK).

I was astonished, because back then, if you’d asked me who I thought was least likely to have confidence crises in the middle of writing something, I’d have said Jacqueline Wilson.

It made me think. Apparently, other writers suffer from First Draft Doubt too. Writers who are published, and published many times. So how do they deal with it? How do they get their books finished? Is there a top secret formula which, when applied to wavering plotlines or flagging characters, will bring them round as effectively as a sharp smack in the face (or smelling salts, if violence isn't your thing)?

Of course not.

Because there is no secret.

It’s normal to doubt your first draft. You should doubt your first draft, because that’s what drives you to make it better. And you shouldn’t let that get in the way of you writing it.

That’s not to say if it’s not working that you shouldn’t find out why. These days, I do this by writing letters to myself, starting them “What needs to happen next?” Then I keep writing, trying to switching off my conscious, logical brain and allowing my characters and plot to lead me from my unconscious brain, where the answers have usually been brewing all along.

I also turn to my favourite book about writing and storytelling - STORY: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee. Although it’s not an easy read – I had to take notes the first two times I read it! – I’ve learnt so much from this book. If I’m having a serious plot problem, a combination of dipping into this book and a What Happens Next letter get it back on track.

The most important thing I’ve learnt, though, is that the first draft doesn’t need to be perfect. It can’t be perfect. It’s a sketch, a roughing-out, a shuffling-together of ideas, and if you try to make it perfect, it won’t get done. Instead, ignore those doubts, accept and note your story’s flaws, and get the damn thing down anyway. Because then you’ve got something to work with. Something to make better. Material for a second draft. And that’s where the real fun begins.

What about you? Is there a particular point in your writing where you always lose confidence? And how do you deal with it when you get there?

Emma Pass lives in the north east Midlands. Her YA novels ACID and The Fearless are published by Corgi Children’s Books/Penguin Random House. You can find more details about her writing and workshops on her website at www.emmapassauthor.wordpress.com.

Book Pen Pals (Part 2) by Sophia Bennett

They've been at it again.

Year 8. Writing. Two schools of them now. Lots more questions to answer.

I’m an Author Pen Pal. If you want to see how it all started, check out my December post here.

These are some of the questions Year 8s ask writers if they get half a chance. And some of my answers.

      How long have you been writing for? 

There are lots of answers to that question. I’ve been writing since I was six or seven, when I wrote my first book, ‘Harry the Horse’. But a lot of that was school writing and business writing. I’ve been writing books for about twenty years, but half of that time I wasn’t published. I’ve been writing books and getting paid for it for ten years, almost exactly.

      Did you like English in your childhood? 

You’d think so, wouldn’t you? I loved English if it involved reading or creative writing, but didn’t enjoy it at all if we were required to criticise a book. I was never very good at it. It took many years for me to realise there’s no perfect ‘answer’ to what a book is about. You just have to learn a particular style of criticism and apply it. My favourite way to criticise books is just to read them and chat about them with friends. I still think it’s the best way to do it, but you can’t be examined very easily that way. 

When it comes to creative writing, I like it when you’re given an idea and you can just do whatever you feel like. However, I learned a lot from all the grammar and punctuation and style lessons I had. They taught me how to appreciate good writing – why it was good. I'm still grateful for that.

      What are you reading at the moment?

A book by a writer who recently died called William Goldman. It’s called ‘Adventures in the Screen Trade’ and it’s all about his life as a screenwriter and how, in Hollywood ‘nobody knows anything’. It’s full of anecdotes about famous actors and films and I’m really enjoying it.

     What is it that made you become a writer? Was it a certain book/author? 

I think what made me want to be a writer was moving to Hong Kong (on the other side of the world) when I was seven, and leaving all my schoolfriends behind. I was very lonely for a while and read a lot of books to keep myself occupied. I loved those books – by writers like E Nesbit, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Joan Aiken and Noel Streatfeild – very much and wanted to do it too. 

But I didn’t have the courage to try until another book came out many many years later. That book was ‘Harry Potter’, and once I’d read it I gave up my job and started writing seriously. I didn’t get published for another 10 years, but that’s when I properly started.

     How did you get into writing? 

By doing it. Literally just that. I didn’t know anyone who was an author, or worked in publishing. I didn’t know how you were supposed to start, or what was supposed to be in a story. But I read a lot and I had all these ideas and I just practised and practised until I came up with something I thought was good. And it got rejected. And so did the next one. And so did the next one. And so did the next one. But the one after that got published and so did the next nine. (Malorie Blackman, who wrote ‘Noughts and Crosses’ among many other great books, got rejected over 80 times!)

     How did you know you wanted to be a writer? 

All those story ideas. I had to get them out somehow.

           Would you ever change your job? 

Quite possibly, if it stops paying the bills. Even writers need to eat.

          If you did change it, what would it be? 

In a perfect world, dancer.

In the real world, I’m not sure. Maybe someone who runs a B&B. I love the idea of all those people coming to stay and all the stories you’d find out about them. But that would just make me a writer again … 

1       Did you ever wish you weren’t a writer?

No. It really is the best job in the world. Not the best paid, but the best.

           If you could tell your younger writer self something, what would it be?

Practise copying other writers. Seriously. If you publish something that’s copied it’s called plagiarism. But if you just do it as a writing exercise you learn how good writers put stories, jokes and characters together. Then you can develop your own style. I didn’t really do that as I was growing up, but I think it would have been very useful if I had. 

      Also - it will happen. Incredible as it may seem, if you keep trying hard enough, you'll be a published author. 

          How can someone become a good writer? 

Read. A lot. Copy, a bit. And write as much as you can. By writing a lot of rubbish you learn to write something good one day. Also, find other people who love books and talk about stories with them.

1       Do you have any tips for English?

Short sentences are very useful.
See if you can learn a new word every day.
Read your work out loud before you submit it. It’s the best way of checking for mistakes. 

 

Coherent Driblets - Nick Garlick

For years I’ve thought that there was a formula for writing. I don’t mean the ingredients of a story – characters, action, setting – but a formula for how to write. Something along the lines of Be at the desk by such and such a time and don’t get up until you’ve produced this many words and keep going like this until the book’s done and all you have to do is polish it up for the publisher.

This may well work for Stephen King, or Neal Stephenson, or Ken Follet. William Manchester was said to be able to pound out thousands of words in punishing 18 to 24 hour marathons. Woody Allen and Edward Albee have both spoken about working the whole story out in advance and then getting it down on paper. Fast.

None of this works for me. Most weeks I write from Monday to Friday, in the mornings. I try to write 6 pages, or about 1500 words. But there are days when what I write is just rubbish. And I know it’s rubbish as I’m writing it. That’s not only really depressing, but it can stop me writing for days as a big fat cloud of What’s the point? descends.

But just a few weeks ago, I discovered this quote by Aldous Huxley in one of my favourite books. (The Writer’s Chapbook.) 

I know very dimly when I start what’s going to happen. I just have a very general idea, and then the thing develops as I write. Sometimes – and it’s happened to me more than once – I will write a great deal, then find it just doesn’t work, and have to throw the whole thing away… Things come to me in driblets, and when the driblets come I have to work hard to make them into something coherent.

Reading that felt like somebody had pulled a curtain aside and let in the light. Those words described so perfectly how I write that it could have been me saying them. And since I’ve read them, it hasn’t made my writing any easier, but it most definitely has made it easier to keep writing, getting the words down, working on them, making them better. Always making them better. Making them ‘into something coherent’.

Not to mention remembering what the late, great Harlan Ellison once said: ‘Of course it’s hard. If it were easy, everybody would do it.’

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www.nickgarlick.com   www.nickgarlickisreading.com

10 tips for a great romance in Paris - Clémentine Beauvais

Cheating a bit today, but since my book In Paris with you, translated by Sam Taylor, is now out in the US with Wednesday Books, I thought I'd republish an article I wrote for a magazine at the time when the British version came out.

I know that at least ONE person got a great romantic Parisian weekend out of it. So there.

Warning: Might not be devoid of some sarcasm.

10 TIPS FOR A GREAT ROMANCE IN PARIS

1. Don’t actually be a Parisienne

I was a Parisienne for 18 years and frankly, there was very little I found romantic when I lived there. Intense emotion occurred only when the bus stop was cleaned, or when my favourite kebab introduced a new sauce. However, now that I’ve been a Britannique for 12 years, going back to Paris fills me with joy and longing, and a dirty Abribus is lovely to behold.

2. Be in love amidst skulls

Not enough lovers visit the Catacombs, which is weird, because the perspective is appealing : kilometers of underground passages whose walls and ceilings are almost entirely made up of the skulls and bones of people who died of plague at some point. Go there hand in hand and meditate on love and death. It’s like drifting across a Dutch vanity painting, for hours.

3. Whatever you do, don’t lock your love to a bridge

There’s a special place in hell for the sad, absurd couples who do this. That place is dull, smells of cabbage, and the couples there are condemned for the rest of eternity to bicker about which way the toilet roll should hang. Love locks are ugly, what they symbolise is ugly, and they quite literally break centuries-old architecture. In lieu of that, here’s other things to tie to things if that’s your thing : your lover’s hands, to a bedpost.

4. Don’t go up the Eiffel Tower

The Eiffel Tower is too high. It bulldozes the beautiful Parisian cityscape into a greenish-grey flatland. Instead, walk up the escargot-like chalky staircases of Notre-Dame, and kiss right next to the bells and the Gruffalesque gargoyles. Much more romantic, much better views.

5. A quirky story to tell your lover, walking down the Seine, when you’ve run out of things to say.

Because there’s nothing like a story of drowning to revive a waning conversation. In the 1880s, a woman was pulled out of the Seine’s murky waters, drowned, but extremely beautiful indeed, to the extent that she was exhibited publically for all to see. A death mask was made of her fine features, which many people then acquired to hang on their walls (normal). She became known as L’Inconnue de la Seine. Many years later, in the 1950s, her face was used to create the first CPR mannequin. So, if you’ve ever done a first aid course, chances are you applied your lips to a face very much like that of this mysterious fin de siècle French beauty.

6. Don’t give them your 06

« Hey mademoiselle, tu me files ton 06 ? » - hey miss, give me your 06 ! – is what some catcallers used to shout at you in a desperate attempt to win access to mobile phone numbers (which mostly start with 06 in France). Catcallers today might ask for your snapchat or instagram handle instead, but whatever they’re trying to do, they are the plague of Parisian streets and the antithesis of romance. Don’t give them your 06.

7. Find a late-night alcove in a hotel bar

For instance, the tiny, beautiful bar of the Hôtel des Beaux-Arts in the 6th arrondissement. There’s never anyone there, they serve good cocktails, it’s all plump cuhsions and velvety armchairs, and the plush alcoves are good at keeping secrets.

8. 8 books to read before you go to Paris

Or during, when you don’t feel like talking to your lover, like, 24/7, because we all need space from time to time, don’t we ? L’inconnue de la Seine, conveniently, is a prominent presence in one of the most splendid love stories in French literature, Louis Aragon’s Aurélien. You should also read my book, I think : In Paris with You, translated by Sam Taylor. Another six facets of Paris : Emile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise ; Colette’s Claudine in Paris ; Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins ; Tardi’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec ; Tiphaine Rivière’s Notes on a Thesis ; and Virginie Despentes’ Vernon Subutex.

9. Find those nine things and kiss in front of them

A fun game to play if you’re both getting a bit bored of each other by now. One mural of Gainsbourg and Birkin. Two Statues of Liberty. Three Space Invaders. Two windmills. One statue of a rhinoceros.

10. Ten cheeses to fix a broken heart

In case the trip to Paris didn’t turn out as romantic as expected, and s/he finally ditched you in front of that rhinoceros (damn rhinoceros). A cœur de Neufchâtel seems appropriate to begin with. Then a lovely Saint-Nectaire, runny like your nose ; a mimolette vieille, as rusty and flaky as your self-confidence ; a crottin de Chavignol (crottin means little turd : like your ex), a tiny bouton de culotte (pants’ button) to remind yourself of that crottin’s underwear ; an époisses and a maroilles, because you don’t care about what your breath smells like anymore ; some fourme d’Ambert, black and blue and mouldy like your poor heart ; and a slice of Chaussée aux Moines, because a monk-like existence is what you’re likely to have now and forever.

And finally, a nice big chunk of gorgonzola dolce, to make you want to fly off to Italy : it’s much more romantic there.

Enjoy!

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Clémentine Beauvais is a writer and literary translator. Her YA novels in English are Piglettes (Pushkin, 2017) and In Paris with You (trans. Sam Taylor, Faber, 2018).

No Joke

Today a comedy writer who has become known for his 'views' about transgender people joked on Twitter that he had been commissioned to write some YA novels from a 'gender critical' standpoint. I had written a long post about it, and in particular why he might have picked YA novels to make that joke. But I got bored. I am tired of transphobia. I am tired of people picking on young people and talking about teenagers as if they are puppets in a world of meddling and misguided adults. I am tired of earnestly pointing people towards Googleable information written by experts. So I'll just say this: as long as I am writing YA it will never be a joke to me. The concerns of marginalised young people will never be a joke to me. My next novel is out in September and I have started work on another, so I am relying on YA readers to hold me to account, and perhaps that is all that matters. Here is a picture of the sky outside my back door the other morning. Sometimes it's good to get off social media, open the door to the outside and realise that nature is queer and bigger than people's opinions, and that it tells itself in many more ways than we can hope to express on Twitter, or even in a novel. It's going to be OK.

Transing the sky

KUNG HEI FAT CHOI - Happy Chinese New Year, by Saviour Pirotta

This year Chinese New Year starts on February the 5th.  It's the year of the pig!  Here's a legend that many Chinese children will hear many times in the coming days. It tells how the famous dragon dance became such an iconic part of the festivities.  It features the Nian, a terrifying creature thought to be one of the most ancient monsters in the world.

The Nian is believed to make its homes in hard-to-reach mountain caves in the remotest parts of China, or in caverns deep at the bottom of the ocean.  Since no one has looked at the terrifying Nian and lived to tell the tale, no one is quite sure what it looks like.  Some say it is part ox, part lion and part unicorn.  Others insist it looks like a giant lion but has horns on its head.  Yet others believe it is a massive hairy beast with small eyes that are always burning with rage.

Legend has it that every Spring the Nian used to creep out of its hiding place to devour livestock and people, usually children.  One year it stumbled across a small village were a wise man lived.  The hermit noticed several things about the Nian. It stayed away from people making too much noise, and it gave a child dressed in bright red a white berth. The monster hated noise, and was scared of the colour red!

At the next Spring festival, the people in the village were prepared for the Nian.  They had festooned their houses with red lanterns.  Red banners flapped at every door and window.  As the Nian approached, growling at the red lanterns, the gate to the mayor’s house opened and a dreadful, ear-splitting noise was heard.  A lion pounced out of the shadows, shaking its massive head and roaring. The Nian winced at the terrible racket. When the villagers leapt out of their houses, beating ladles and brooms on buckets and washtubs, he turned tail and fled.  No one, livestock or child, was devoured by the hungry monster that year.

The lion was, of course, the wise old hermit wearing an enormous mask, but the Nian had been fooled. Ever since then, the Chinese people have welcomed the New Year with a lion dance in which they make as much noise as possible, especially by letting off firecrackers.

In another, more humorous, variant of the myth, a famous monk called HongJun LaoZu, seeks out the Nian in its mountain lair.

‘Why don’t you eat the snakes that live in the valley instead of children?’ suggests HongJun, hoping the poison in the vipers would kill the Nian.  The Nian gobbles up the snake but survives. 

‘Now why don’t you eat the dragon on the other side of the mountain?’ HongJun says next.

The Nian survives the dragon too, despite the fire in its throat.  ‘Now little man, it’s time I ate YOU,’ it growls.

‘Just let me take my robe off,’ replies the monk.  ‘You don’t want the cotton to get caught in your teeth.’

HongJun peels of his clothes to reveal bright red underpants.  The Nian howls in fright and hastily backs off.  The monk hurries back to the village and instructs the people there to hang red lanterns at their doors and windows. Ever since then, people in China have considered red a lucky colour. And every New Year they give each other lucky money tucked inside a small envelope – a red one, to scare off the Nian in case it decides to come back….

KUNG HEI FAT CHOI - Happy New Year. Don't forget to love everyone, whether they are pigs, horses, cats or whatever.

Saviour is the author of Multicultural Stories from China and We Love Chinese New Year, both published by Hachette. His latest book The Golden Horsemen of Baghdad, published by Bloomsbury.

Follow Saviour on twitter @spirotta.com

The Difficult Second Album by Steve Gladwin

Imagine you have just created one of the most popular TV series of all times. Any creator needs fresh inspiration, the need to stretch yourself and try something new. Sometimes that inspiration comes in the form of a person. The inspiration Simpsons creator Matt Groening found was writer and Simpsons producer David X Cohen and the series they would create together was Futurama. The rest – although hardly likely to match The Simpsons success, might have been plain sailing but in the end turned out to be anything but.. Even the initial pitching of the series in 1998 – which Groening and Cohen had already pretty well mapped out – was tough, something which Groening described as ‘by far the most difficult experience of my adult life.’ Fox, who had never been allowed to exert any creative control over The Simpsons, immediately found three things they didn’t like, in the idea of suicide booths, the character of Zoidberg and the anti-social behaviour of Futurama's robot hero Bender.

Futurama co-creators David X Cohen and Matt Groening, (Wikipedia)

Establishing the premise of the series will make all this easier to understand. Futurama concerns pizza delivery boy and all round loser Philip J Fry who while delivering a pizza, (which actually turns out to be a joke addressed to I.C. Wiener) on new year’s eve 1999, accidentally falls into a cyrogenic chamber and is frozen until a thousand years have passed. Emerging in the year 3,000, the shocked Fry wakes up to a world he can hardly recognise. In New New York, where there are suicide booths on every street corner and robots of as many varieties as there are humans and aliens, transportation is by shooting through a series of interconnected transparent tubes from place to place like glorified mail. He soon finds employment with Planet Express, an interplanetary delivery series run by his own ancient nephew, the eccentrically deranged Professor Hubert Farnsworth, who keeps a lava pit leading to the earth’s core in the basement, and a cloning machine in his lab. Farnsworth is half mad professor and half senile, prone to heralding the announcement of news, good or bad, by crying ‘Good news, everyone!’ This, more often than not will include crew assignments where death is a near certainty.

Fry,back in his old job as the delivery boy, is part of the new original crew of three, (best not to ask about the previous ones!) Accompanying him is Turanga Leela, the one-eyed purple haired pilot- for a long time is assumed to be one of the Cyclops race - and one of the jewels in Futurama’s crown, the cigar smoking, alcohol fuelled, thieving, utterly reprehensible but somehow lovable, ‘’bite my shiny metal ass’ spouting, Bender Bending Rodriguez, one of a batch of bending robots produced by Mom Corps, whose titular head is almost as old as her old lover Professor Farnsworth, and as corrupt and money grubbing a super villain as you can imagine. She is also ever ready to don the sweet old lady guise which hides the metal dominatrix beneath. Mom has three idiot sons who she swats as casually as flies, with the violence being passed down the line, so that the youngest Igner suffers it most. The three sons are based on The Three Stooges, possibly on the fact that the third stooge Curly was beaten and thrown about so often that he suffered permanent brain damage.

In Futurama, the underworld of the old city of Old New York is a network of tunnels and sewers where the discarded mutants live,(two of whom turn out to be Leela’s true parents) There is also a museum of preserved celebrity heads, including all of the US presidents, of whose number Richard Nixon, ends up as ruler of the Earthicans in a memorable double act with Spiro Agnew’s body. The show has a cast of seven regulars, each pretty much an archetype of one sort or another. Apart from the naive slob Fry, the resident Fool, Leela the Heroine and Bender, the anti-hero, there are also Farnsworths’s intern, Amy Wong, flighty slutty and proud of it, whose parents own half of Mars, Hermes Conrad, a rather strange and excitable rastafarian West Indian and low level bureaucrat, (and proud of it) responsible for the accounts and making sure everything stays tidy and Professor Farnsworth, the crotchety old man/Pantolone figure.

Then there is Zoidberg;one of the subjects of one of Fox’s objections. Many years ago when Futurama was being shown on Channel 4, I would catch the occasional glimpse of Zoidberg and he would rather freak me out,(I know – what a wimp!) Having now become not just a Futurama convert but pretty much a Zoidbergian zealot, I now know that he is Doctor John Zoidberg, one of the lobster-like Decapodian race, and a specialist doctor in alien technology. Unfortunately Planet Express has no aliens apart from Zoidberg, so his expertise in alien anatomy. is at best useless and at worst positively life threatening. Needless to say the writers have much fun with this concept, but it also means poor Zoidberg is left potentially with next to no role in the team. The fact that he stinks, continually blubbers at the slightest thing, and lives in a dumpster means that the rest of the crew despise him.

Dr John Zoidberg, courtesy of amazon.com

This is a character who shouldn’t work then, especially in the shadow of the mighty Bender, but voice genius Billy West who provides us with Fry, Farnsworth, and Zoidberg saves the day by making Zoidberg Jewish. There’s apparently a lot of self-deprecating Jewish humour in Futurama, and not just in Zoidberg. For all the exhausting frame and cell building and storyboard work that goes into your average animation, it’s the voice actors who provide the final icing on the cake. Who could imagine The Simpsons with someone instead of Dan Castellanetta as Homer, (who incidentally has a whale of a time as the Robot Devil in Futurama), Stewie Griffin without Seth Macfarlane, Kung Fu Panda without Jack Black or Mike and Sully from Monsters Inc and Monsters University with voices other than Billy Crystal and John Goodman. Anyone could do it, right? Hmm!

We’ve recently been listening to Stephen Fry, who has almost become Mr Audible of late reading the whole canon of Sherlock Holmes and I have renewed respect for what he can do as he manages to metamorphose his voice into a whole host of characters and accents and ages. And we always forget that it’s Doctor Watson who’s the narrator of these stories, so the first thing you need when tackling these is a Doctor Watson voice, because you’re going to use it a lot.

I’m not sure if Stephen Fry is a fan of talented American voice maestro Phil Hartman, who added to The Simpsons voice roster with washed up actor Troy ‘you may remember me from such films' as’ Maclure, or useless ambulance chasing lawyer Lionel Hutz. The third of the jewels in the Futurama crown is the character of Captain Zapp Brannigan, a useless walking ego in a mini-skirt uniform and a long suffering alien side-kick called Kif, prone to uttering world weary sighs when his superior asks for him to do almost anything. Zapp Brannigan is the fourth character on the Billy West voice roster, but when you first hear him he sounds like Phil Hartman.

The sad fact is that Phil Hartman was supposed to be Zapp Brannigan, until he was shot by his disturbed wife. Out of this appalling tragedy was to come Hartman’s final legacy, the Phil Hartman voice that Billy West gives to Zapp. It’s almost as if he were still with us. A lot of the comedy in Zapp, besides his sheer uselessness, comes from the disastrous one night stand he has with Leela, which she is never allowed to forget and where Zapp spends the rest of the serious trying for a re-match, including at one point having an affair with and almost marrying Leela’s mother, Munda, to make her jealous.

But what does all this mean to the casual reader of this blog? Surely there’s few things more boring than someone enthusing at length about a show you either haven’t seen or have no interest in watching. Because there’s nothing especially ground breaking in Futurama, just a cumulative level of excellence in animation, ideas and effects which is pretty much the norm nowadays. If you hate the yellow of the Simpsons, then surely you’re going to equally hate the purple and pink of Futurama. But the only way I can speak about it is as a critical fan, rather than just a critic. So here are a few great reasons to try Futurama.

Fry, Bender and Leela, Futurama Fandom

* You get to go on a new adventure every week. If you’re a fan of sci-fi of the Star Trek and Doctor Who ‘monster of the week’ variety, then Futurama provides you with a great opportunity to visit crazy planets and solar systems, meet suitably benevolent and murderous aliens, get beaten up, shot, tortured or killed and still rise again in time for the end of the episode.

NB This is not always strictly true as more than once member or all of the magnificent seven die, change change shape, lose their skins, go back and change time so they do not exist etc etc.

* Bender is great. You only need a few seconds of hearing John Di Maggio’s magnificent gravel-voiced portrayal to get Bender, a character who makes Bart Simpson seem like Martin Prince. Bender is the clown prince, the devious scam meister, no conscience, out and out rogue we all secretly long to be.

* The regular characters apart from the main seven are worth their screen time. I’m probably not the only one to have a major beef with the weakness of much of the Simpsons supporting cast, where a catch phrase or stereotype can often seem to make the whole character and every event in Springfield is attended by the same old tired procession. For every Troy Maclure and Krusty the Clown there’s a Hans Moleman or Bumble Bee Man awaiting the chance for his one joke.

In Futurama you have great but daft villains like the Robot Devil and The Don Bot, along with his two sidekicks, one of whom, a hatchet faced robot called Clamps, uses every opportunity to use his trademark hand weapons. You have Lrrr, leader of Omicron Persei 8, Elzar the four armed Venusian chef with his spice weasels, (literally weasels that squirt spices from their backsides) Calculon, the really lovey actor robot and star of Bender’s favourite TV show, ‘All my Circuits.’ Of course there are a fair few gems in the Simpson universe, but in Futurama the list goes on.

* The satire is as good as The Simpsons and often better. I think most people who don’t get The Simpsons are unlikely to be Futurama fans, but usually they’re glossing over how much of each show’s brilliance comes from the gags and satire. In both show it’s literally a case of if you blink you miss a sight gag and while you’re picking the wax from your ears, two verbal ones. Futurama, like The Simpsons at it’s best, can feel like an assault battery of wit and cleverness, where a line about how sad and pathetic Fry is can sometimes mask something really poignant.

* Futurama has a love story. It’s the unrequited and ultimately successful romance between shirker Fry and over achiever mutant Leela that gives the show a lot of its heart. This third millennium no hope saga keeps us guessing and caring and finally quietly cheering. It’s made even funnier because Zapp Brannigan, Leela’s secret shame,is constantly getting himself. But shambolic Fry is our hero and Zapp will usually end up totally humiliated and fail to learn from it.

* Futurama has real heart. I’ve lost touch with The Simpsons, but in its earlier series it had real heart and poignancy, which is something Futurama gives us on a regular basis. This is usually round either Fry, Leela or Zoidberg and even Bender has his moments as he’s such a child at robot heart. One episode, Jurassic Bark, is infamous for being a real heart tugger, (but not in a Disney/schmalzy or even Pixar/Randy Newman song way) that it has gone into the annals of animation history. Watching it and especially the final sequence – as searching and moving as the beginning of ‘Up’, really moved me in a way that few things do. Not since Lisa Simpson and her plaintive saxophone playing on the bridge with Bleeding Gums Murphy, or the ‘unofficial’ Michael Jackson voice over episode, when Homer’s new friend from the psychiatric ward helps Bart compose a birthday song for Lisa, has there been anything as quietly sob inducing. And that’s just one I can think of.

* It’s funny, folks! It really is. Bender and Fry as equally slobby room mates in the Robot Apartments, Leela and Zapp as a new and combative Adam and Eve, the professor’s tendency to appear naked as often as possible, (Futurama has far more of an adult content than The Simpsons, and in one case the issue of robosexuality, (in this case between the ever willing bad boy loving Amy and the try anything you fancy Bender) is explored as a social topic. Then there’s the classic Roswell episode, The Late Philip J Fry,where Zoidberg is the alien on the dissecting table and Fry accidentally sleeps with his own grandmother, (don’t ask!) And yet for all of this supposedly adult content, Futurama is completely adult and children friendly in completely different ways.

Futurama Crew - Creative-Analytics.

OK, enough already, as Zoidberg might say. I may not have either converted you or tempted you to try Futurama, (and I have to say that catching the middle of the odd episode is maybe not the way of appreciating its virtues - beginning at the beginning will serve it best), or put you off. Who cares? It's up to you! But if a TV series can be cancelled, only to return in four feature length episodes due to the popularity of its re-runs, only to return after several years absence for a final two series and pretty much keep up that high standard combination of wit, invention and heart which sums it up, well surely the world's a better place than it might have been.

Steve Gladwin


'Tales From The Realm' - Story and Screen Dream

Connecting Myth, Faerie and Magic

Author of 'The Seven' - Shortlisted for Welsh Books Prize, 2014