Archives: T.V.

Although we sleep in this morning, it’s still a wake-up dictated my alarm-clock, which is getting slightly tiresome for a supposed holiday period.

The alarm gets us (well, me) up at 10am and I make K a cup of tea and take my Fosemax tabs – horrible things I may have written about before, which are supposed to deliver calcium-enriching…things… to the body to help prevent loss of bone density and Osteoperosis (and I’ll thank the medics reading not to point out that they’re essentially the same thing) but that require the tablets to be take on an empty stomach with a full glass of water and not to be followed by any other food or drink bar water for the next hour or more. They’re pretty nasty things and my stomach isn’t a huge fan of having a load of water dumped in it unaccompanied first thing in the morning, so I always end up feeling a little squiffy until I can eat something. Mind you, it’s better than not being able to run or do fun stuff for fear of snapping bones all over the shop.

We’re up and out of the house just after 11 to get to my appointment in Newport for 11.20, where I have a hasty blood test to keep an eye on my CMV levels to prevent any recurrance, then we head off into town to hit the sales.

I hate sales shopping with a passion. When I shop I like to look around, take my time and not feel rushed, not to grab whatever I can as I’m bustled passed the racks of goods by the ebbing tide of the sales-masses. Still, K wants to hit them up to spend our Christmas vouchers, so I tag along.

We start by finding parking, which is a mini-epic of it’s own, but eventually end up getting somewhere near M&S, a minor miracle. We decide to start at the furthest place and work back towards the car, so we hit the O2 store to return my busted Blackberry, but it’s rammed and quite clear that customer service is going to be a while, so I give up on it straight away – I’ve been using my old phone for over a month now, so a couple more weeks to fix the new/old one isn’t a big headache.

We make our way round to the Apple store, my mini-Mecca, but without time or the cash to stop and fully appreciate their wares (re: to buy their wares), we hit them up for an iTunes voucher, which they don’t sell in the range we want.

0 for 0 from 2 shops, we hit the soon-to-be-defunct Zavvi to see if we can gather ourselves some bargains in the closing-down sales. It’s like a zoo where they’ve let the monkeys feed the elephants in there and we fight our way around the DVD racks hunting out interesting pieces and debating how much we can afford to splurge.

We come away with a stack of DVDs and a couple of CDs and break out of the madness before it consumes us. I shoot across the Place to Waterstones to see if they’ve got a book I’m after which they do, and reduced by half as well, but when I get to the counter, they tell me it’s not reduced at all so, with the flashing totaliser of the Zavvi spend in my brain and the knowledge of an impending Borders trip, I pass it up and move on.

As K heads for M&S for underwear shopping and voucher-spending, I make a dash to the bank to pay in a cheque, then catch up with her in the Minotaur’s maze that is the Lingerie section of the ‘Sparks. Slightly bored/self-conscious of being surround by women sizing up and purchasing their unmentionables, I opt to head to homewares to see what we can pick up with our Christmas vouchers.

By the time K’s finished up I’ve noted a few options and we settle on a 3-tiered hob-steamer and a blender. Once we’ve paid and got out to the car, it strikes us how upsettingly grown-up we are buying things that are actualy useful with gift vouchers and being genuinely happy and excited about what we’ve got. We resolve to correct it by buying something frivolous at Borders.

We hit up the Big B and grab some cards for impending birthdays and babies, then K hits the sales racks while I go off hunting for the book I missed out on in Waterstones. I come up with nothing, but very nearly bag a whole load more DVDs before thinking better of it and heading back up to the till where I find K with an epic bag full of stuff she’s just grabbed, so I jump in the queue to get my solitary DVD, impressed at my restraint, and manage to pick up the right-sized iTunes voucher at the till point as well.

We shoot over to Deanshanger to collect the couple of bits we left there last week, including K’s complete Calvin and Hobbes set Santa brought her, and Mama D, like the classic Ma that she is, provides us with nourishment in the form of bacon sarnies after which, like the ungrateful offspring we are, we jump straight back in the car and head off again (we did say thank you, though).

We make K’s day by stopping in at TK Max on the way home and she picks me up a cafetierre – a present she had intended to get me for Christmas but then a case of crossed-wires with other family members meant I ended up not getting one. We also grab b’day presents for friends and then head to Tesco over the road to stock up on all the New Year’s Eve party stuff we’ll need for our Wii Party – crisps, dips and softies for those who aren’t bringing a bottle.

We head home, unpack all the bags, then hurriedly change into our going-out gear and head down the road to a friend’s 30th. Being pregnant and newly-installed in their freshly extended house, it’s an open-house affair and we arrive in time to see her family off from their day in the den, but have enough time to catch up with them first, which is cool.

We can’t stay long as we’re then off to a big Chrimbo meal with our friends organised, bizarrely, by the only one of us who no longer lives in MK. It’s great to see the whole gang again though, minus the odd couple of peeps, and we have a good giggle over some tasty Mexican food, even if they don’t know how to make a Caesar salad.

Our friend plus baby is there and K goes into broody mode, taking the baby away so that Mummy can eat her dinner, but loving every minute of it. As everyone is taking the mick and pulling my leg about the impedning pressure for sproglets, I’m forced to admit that I’m actually on the same page as K right now and am loving the number of baby cuddles we’re getting.

I take my turn and we head off to investigate the flashing lights on the Christmas tree (we don’t like standing still), then find an interesting plant that has leaves that are rough and not like normal flower or plant leaves at all, which keeps us interested for a good few minutes while Daddy finishes up his dinner and gets the car seat ready.

With baby out of the picture, we’re forced to interact with our peers once more and continue to have a good giggle. The meal done, almost everyone else is headed across the way to the pub for a drink, but with the knowledge of an early start tomorrow and a long day’s driving, we call it a night and head home.

We get back in and empty out some more of the bags while we grab a cuppa and watch a bit of telly before quitting for the night and hitting the hay, where I desperately try to get into my slow-starting book which I’m praying will improve. After a couple of chapters with no joy, I call it quits for the night and put my head down.

We’re up unconscionably early for the morning after the night before at around 9am to grab a bacon sarnie and hot cup of much needed caffeine-delivery before jumping into the cars for a 3-hour trip into London to Twickenham, where my Godfather has a box.

Once there, we are treated to more wine (from a regular bottle, this time – if a 2001 can be called “regular”) and another fine meal before adding as many layers as we were able to carry with us to perch outside in the stadium for Harlequins vs Leicester. As a Northampton Saints fan, I’m duty-bound not to support the Tigers, but since Quins were sporting an old school friend wearing their captains armband, it stopped me having any kind of conflicted of – dare I say it – neutral feelings about the game.

Entertainingly, for a game without huge excitement, my old school buddy gets himself sin-binned 10 minutes from half-time, during which time he sees his side ship 13 points to the visitors. The second half isn’t a whole lot more entertaining, until the last 10 minutes when Quins come back from 26-16 down to draw the game with a last minute try and conversion which is all but the last kick of the game. Stunning come back that had me properly out of my seat.

After a warming glass of brandy and some good steak pies, we all pile back into the cars and head back. Wtih my eyes arguing with my brain about staying awake, I’m glad I opted to stop the extra night in Ipswich so I don’t have to do any driving this evening. As soon as we’re out of London, my body sides with my eyes and sends me to sleep before waking just short of the Dartford crossing, from where I stay awake-but-monosyllabic for the rest of the ride back.

We get back and all grab a thirst-quencher (mostly non-alcoholic) and chill in the living room, introducing my ‘rents to the glory of Outnumbered, after which K hits the hay early and I challenge Dad to a game of his newly-acquired Really Nasty Golf, a board game that’s far more interesting and entertaining that it sounds, I promise, even if you don’t like golf. Mum excuses herself to bed as we play and slowly the house quietens as people head off for kip, before we head up to follow them at the end of the game, around 11pm.

So far this week has been pretty tiring, although I’m actually enjoying it quite a lot.

On top of my usual Sunday session at the Grove Youth Theatre, I went along and did the Tuesday night session, too, as I’m unavailable this weekend as I’m away with Live Life Then Give Life for a weekend of planning and other fun stuff (more on that next week).

Working with the younger groups was certainly challenging, as they’re all from very different backgrounds to the kids who went to the MK Theatre Youth Theatre.  But there’s still something energising about working with youngsters who still have that energy and vitality, not to mention still clinging on to their imaginations in the face of all their school teachers and (often) parents trying to drum it out of them.

There’s nothing sadder to me in modern society than how early children start to lose their imaginations.  Many of us could (and do) jump to blame the whole thing on Xboxes, Wiis, PlayStations and all the rest, but in truth it’s just as much the fault of parents and teachers as it is the computer games and TV industries.

Children who are creative, who day-dream and enjoy their own little fantasy worlds are seen as being behind other children and somehow inferior.  It is celebrated when a child can focus and concentrate on a Maths problem for half-an-hour, but derided if they spend the same half-hour lost in a world of their own creation.

Theatre is the one art form that can really help to encourage, develop and nuture an imagination.  Not only in performing and “play-acting”, but also simply by being part of an audience.  The magic of Theatre is often lost on the majority of the population now – that sense of amazement and wonder which casts a spell over young people seems to ebb away as we grow.  At the pantomimes every year, the adults go along because they want to recapture a little bit of that spirit, but we all know that we only boo the baddie because we know that’s what we’re supposed to do.  For the children, though, they put their whole heart and soul into it – they really mean it when they boo, it’s not simply customary.

It shouldn’t just be every Christmas that children can explore their theatrical imaginations though and it’s not just pantomimes that can engage them.  The beauty of taking children to the theatre is that they are often the least critical audience who will take up a seat in any auditorium.  If they see characters that they know and/or love and can engage with (not always in a physical/vocal sense), they get completely lost in the performance.

More than that, though, theatrical shows give children a chance to develop their imaginations as they can’t present everything that a child may see on TV.  Take something like Noddy or Lazy Town Live – it’s impossible to recreate the look of the TV show, but you can recreate the feel of the show and it up to their imaginations to complete the illusion.

If you find yourself feeling cynical about the rubbish that’s churned out on TV (for old and young alike) or you see you child drifting into dream-less oblivion, pick yourselves  up some tickets to go and see a show and even if you can’t bear the show, watch your little one’s face instead.  I guarantee it’ll be a picture.

I say family, because to me my Godson is my family, although technically the bloodline isn’t there. But today I got to spend a few hours round at his place playing, chatting, introducing K to him and his wonderful parents and it was so lovely as to be almost indescribable. But you know me, I’m going to try…

K had to work all morning, which left me at home to my own devices, something which is never the greatest of ideas when I’ve got something to look forward to in the afternoon, because I tend to not be able to think of much else and so meaningful work is always a little hit-and-miss.

As it happens, I managed to use the time to surf the internet for filmmaking websites and news and such, which has helped inspire and drive me forward with a few of the projects I’ve got rolling along in the background at the moment. My docs at Harefield are keen for me not to start doing any “real” work for a while (6-12 months post-op), which is both freeing and frustrating. There are many things I want to do with myself right now and a few projects I REALLY want to get going on, but at the same time I’m sure in the long run the enforced slow-down will only benefit them all by making me take stock of them properly and devote enough time to thinking them through and planning them properly.

I picked K up from work at half two and we shot straight over to Little R’s house to catch up with them for the first time in…well…. blinkin’ ages. I thought his Mum wasn’t ever going to let me go from the massive bear-hug I was enveloped in no sooner had I stepped over the threshold. Not that I’m moaning, you understand, since I felt pretty much the same way seeing all them again.

I feel like I’ve been so much out of R’s life for so long now, since he lives so close, but it’s been such a struggle for me to get to see him. Now I’m starting out again, I’m hoping we can rebuild our relationship back to how it was early on before I got too ill to do anything with him. We’re already planning an ice-skating trip for the Easter holidays!

Plus, I got to be made hugely jealous at the family’s beautiful home cinema set-up. Not only have they got a PS3 (with Blu-ray, which just won the HD DVD format war for those of you who missed that piece of news) but also a gorgous 40″ HDTV and surround sound system to play it through. I’m not the most materialistic man on the planet, but I have to confes to a slight weakening of the knees when it comes to film-watching in the home (and filmmaking outside of the home…). Anything else I can take or leave – if it’s film-related I think I’d rather take it. Terrible of me, I know.

K and I then came back and veg’d good and proper for the night – some lovely sausage-and-chips comfort food and a night in front of the telly.

We caught the new series on BBC3 Being Human, which I have to say massively impressed me. The idea of a flat-share between a Vampire, a Werewolf and a Ghost didn’t do a whole lot for me on reading the listings, but the result was much more heartfelt, funny, dramatic and touching than I ever expected. It’s well worth checking out, if you can cope with the scary subject matter. It’s not really gory, but they have invested a good chunk of cash in a couple of big transformation scenes for the wolfman. What really impressed me, though, was the way it was shot and cut together. For the first time in ages watching a new British drama (particularly BBC), they have finally steered away from the ridiculous music-video manic-camera movements which blight so much UK output. Instead they trusted the really very strong performances of their lead cast and let the camera linger on them without wobble, shake or zoom. Well done that team.

Today I saw my Gramps for the first time since my op – he’s up visiting the ‘rents for the weekend and K and I stopped over for the afternoon to catch up. It was brilliant to see him again – after quite a long while, too – and he was suitably impressed with my turnaround from the last time I saw him. I love to see the look in people’s eyes when they see me for the first time since the op; it’s a wondrous mixture of the most complex emotions, with happiness and relief dominating.

This afternoon was not a great one, sporting-wise, which makes it lucky the rest of the day was so happy and pleasant.

First up, I arrived at Mum and Dad’s in time to sit and watch the Saints drop miserably out of the FA Cup to the mighty Bristol Rovers… they of an entire footballing division below us. Not that the difference in league standing made an impact on the game, since the majority of the Saints team (ok, the entire Saints team) completely failed to turn up for the match anyway. Maybe they thought they were playing Bristol City instead.

Following that disappointment, we hastily beat a retreat from the sofa to the pretty little village of Olney, where we took my Gramps and his lady friend for a nice afternoon stroll around the little boutique shops and stopped at a perfectly quaint little tea shop for afternoon tea and teacakes and crumpets – incredibly refined even if I do say so myself.

We found a beautiful little gift shop there, too, a real little gem, with sparkling jewelery which attracted the magpie-like K and some lovely little tokens and miniature statues and the like.

We eventually wandered ourselves back to the car and back to the ‘rents just in time to sit and watch Man Utd demolish Arsenal. Felt very sorry for K – being an ardent Gunner – but was remarkable to watch. And Dad and I did enjoy making the most of it because, let’s face it, K gets enough comedy mileage out of our following Southampton, so it’s only right for us to take advantage while we can.

We then settled into a lovely evening’s roast dinner (I guess Mum got confused and thought it was Sunday…) and chatted about all sorts of weird and wonderful things as we tend to do when we get together as a family.

It’s been a lovely day seeing Gramps again, going out for a stroll around a small town with him – something I’ve not been able to enjoy for some time, like so much of what I do these days. The firsts are stacking up so fast I keep thinking that I must have run out by now, but then another will pop up and remind me how well I’m doing and how great this new life is.

Full post coming later, as per usual, but just a quickie to say you can see the all new fit and healthy me on Anglia News tonight at 6.30pm.  Failing which, for those of you too impatient to wait for the news or who live outside the Anglia region, you can click the link below and watch the piece on the good ol’ interweb.

Watch in amazement as I run up stairs, talk rubbishly about post-transplantyness and stand on a freezing cold lakeshore with K pretending to look like we’re there for fun!  And look out for Mummy L’s perfect post-tx soundbite….

http://www.itvlocal.com/anglia/news/?player=ANG_Home_26&void=134327

Well, someone was listening to me last night, because today has, indeed, been a better day so far. That’s not to say things are all fine and dandy, or that the picture is yet all rosy, but side-by-side with yesterday, today has been a Good Day.

I managed to get almost straight to sleep last night, sometime after 11pm, which is rare forr me these days. Not only that, but I managed to sleep quite solidly, too – no constant waking to switch position or readjust myself. It may have been thanks to having fiddled with Neve and pushed the pressures up ever-so-slightly, or a slightly improvement on the chest front, or simply thanks to complete exhaustion and my body not having any other choice but sleeping it off. My guess would be it was a healthy mix of the three.

Bizarrely, and somewhat annoyingly, I woke up bright-as-a-button(ish) around 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep, no matter how hard I tried. I had planned to lay in a bit today and do my morning dose a little later than usual, but given that I was awake anyway, I decided to switch the plans and get up early and get them out of the way, which would have the knock-on effect of allowing me an earlier night tonight.

I got up, got my dose running and sat myself a the computer to surf around and catch up on the over-night writers’ strike news, during which time my chest was doing all kinds of weird things, making me breathless one minute and fine the next, and I developed a bit of a killer headache.

By the time my drugs had finished, I decided it’d be a good idea to try to get some physio out of the way before I got myself back to bed, so I did another very uncomfortable session – very hard work again. Having said which, I definitely felt the benefit afterwards, even through it didn’t feel like I’d cleared a lot. I did my anti-biotic nebs and then took myself to bed around 9am.

Interestingly, for those who keep tabs on this sort of thing, 9am is also the time that the construction workers begin work on resurfacing the road outside the front of where we live. With the sun beating a nice, hot set of rays down on the bedroom window, keeping them shut was out of the question, so keeping the noise out was also not a part of the plan.

As it happened, noisy as they were, I needed sleep more, and I managed to doze on-and-off for another few hours till the early afternoon.

I rolled out of bed feeling much better for the physio and sleep, grabbed a cuppa with K and chatted for a bit, talked to my ‘rents to catch them up on over-night progress and then headed back for more physio. It was a much better session than this mornings, and much easier, too, making things look brighter already.

After physio, I got some calories down me and then headed back to bed to chill out with K and watch the first ep of the first season of 24 – a season I’ve seen but K hasn’t and is next on our TV-DVD marathon. I’m amazed at how much I don’t remember from the first time it aired, and also at how much of what I do remember they’ve crammed into the first ep – there must be a whole heap more that I don’t remember to come, which is promising.

After chilling in bed for a while, K gets up to do some more revision and I sit and read GQ for a while, before K heads off to college and I do my 3rd physio session of the day. I’m determined to crack the back of this while I can.

Physio out of the way, I jump online for a while and do a bit of Chrimbo shopping (have to bow to the inevitable eventually, I suppose) and look into a couple of other random bits and pieces while the Shepherd’s Pie Mum made me yesterday cooks.  I sit and eat it while watching the last episode of Extras from the DVD that I’d never got round to seeing, then wash up and get back to the study, going over a couple of old scripts till K gets home.

We watch some programmes from Sky+ and I do some more physio (a really good late-night session, actually), and before I know it my evening drugs are all done and it’s time to hit the sack.  Things are still very up-and-down, and I suspect they will be for a good few days yet, but today’s been a massive improvement on yesterday, and that’s a big step forward.  Well, at least a little one.

Today has been, hands down, one of the hardest days I’ve had in a very long while – harking back really as far as my admission in June, where every day was a challenge.

Luckily, the benefit of hindsight and such tells me that it’s not quite that bad – one horrible day in a week can’t possibly be as bad as one passable day in a week – but it’s only thanks to a little bit of let-up in the relentless onslaught of tiredness, breathlessness and exhaustion that allows me an ounce of philosophy in my outlook.

It started, oddly, not too badly – I woke this morning having had very little sleep but not feeling too bad about it. I clearly had a lot on my chest, but was also managing to get quite a bit off just by being up and about. Early mornings are usually the time when you find out what kind of crap is on your chest, since the very process of getting up and moving around tends to make you cough and splutter, which in turn lets you see a) how productive you are b) how easily it’s moving and c) how out-of-breath it makes you when you do.

I was moving stuff pretty easily, although it was exhausting to cough and my throat was still causing problems with getting the big lumps up. (Nice, I know, but this is a full-disclosure blog, so if you don’t like it it’s not for you, I guess!). Having got my morning dose of drugs out of the way, I crawled back to bed feeling breathless but not too bad.

I woke again around 12.30, later than I’d planned and wanted to. With a 2.30 appointment in Oxford, I’d have to be out of the house in under an hour, so would need to pick and choose the most important elements out of bathing, dressing, eating, doing physio and doing nebs, as well as getting my things together for the Oxford trip (it always involves taking a book things as well as my physio-helping device, which all need to be collected into a bag – it may not sound like much but believe me, it was a task-and-a-half today).

I settled on food and nebs being the two most important things, so threw on some clothes in a very slow and deliberate manner and made a sandwich, which I sat and munched before doing a neb and collecting my things, all of which filled the next 45 minutes and made me incredibly, uncomfortably breathless.

At Oxford things didn’t improve a whole lot. My nurse changed my port needle, which was fine with the exception of the bioclusive (clear plastic) dressing pulling off a good chunk of surface skin by my under-arm area, which was then healthily swabbed with alcohol prior to the insertion of the new needle. Yes, it smarts.

My physio session was really, really hard work – harder than I’ve had for a long time. I was breathless, tired and my airways were irritable and not playing ball, the gunk on my chest refusing to be moved around and brought up, so it felt like we weren’t really achieving much.

Seeing as I’m now sliding into my 4th week on IVs, the team wanted me to check in with the Doc to see if they wanted to do anything different. I’m loathe to change anything at the moment for several reasons, partially because I believe that once I’ve kicked the cold the drugs will do their job, but mostly because any change in IVs is likely to mean switching to one that I don’t get on with quite so well, which in turn would mean that they’d have to have me in and on the ward for a few days so they could keep an eye on me. I’m not keen on the ward at the best of times, but when I’m not getting a whole lot of sleep at home, it’s even less appealing because I know that I won’t get any on the ward.

While I was waiting to be fitted into the doc’s queue, I had another fantastic session of physio with the wonderful back/neck specialist, who worked me over really well. She did what she calls “mobilizing the joints” followed by “mobilizing the soft tissue”. One of the nurses said that the soft-tissue stuff looked like a massage to her, but the physio helpfully pointed out that the big difference was that massages are pleasurable.

Neck attacked, I popped across to the clinic to catch up with the doc, who reluctantly agreed to give the drugs a few days to see if they can kick in after the cold. We agreed that if things are no better by the weekend, then I’ll be straight in. If I’m picking up they’ll leave me out and check my progress after the weekend and we’ll see where we stand.

By this time it was well after 4.30, which meant a slow journey home in the evening traffic. We made an executive decision to take the scenic route which, although dark and not at all scenic, would at least guarantee that we’d be back inside an hour and a half, which is impossible to be sure of if you take the A34.

Back home just after 6 I was completely exhausted, to the level of a childish sense of having no idea what to do with myself. Every single part of me wanted to go to sleep, but I knew if I did I would have no chance at all of getting to sleep. Instead, I sat myself in the study chair to be as comfy as possible and surfed the ‘net for a while, before hopping into a bath to try and freshen up a bit.

It worked – to a limited extent – and we then managed to get through our usual Wednesday night where our bestest bud Dazz pops in to catch up on a Sky+’d ep of Entourage (our guilty pleasure) followed by this week’s Heroes.

With those out of the way, I didn’t have much else to do with myself than dump my exhuasted, knackered, b*ggered old body in the sack and pray for a good night’s sleep. And while I was there, I put in a small request to have a better day tomorrow, please, too.

I’ve long held an affinity for the way the American’s make their television.  They have a solid work ethic, a prodigious output and some incredibly high-quality programming which is all churned out based on a very rigid formula of writing and producing a season of some 20-25 episodes per year.

Most US shows work on a rolling basis, with a team of writers (the “Writers’ Room”, supervised by the Executive Producer/Head Writer or “Showrunner”) coming together to pitch storylines, plot character arcs and map out the direction of the show for the coming weeks and months pretty regularly, then going away and writing individual episodes alone.  Every show has a slightly different way of doing things, but most hour-long or half-hour shows work to the same essential template – Lost, Desperate Housewives, 24, Bones, E.R., Scrubs, House, Friends, you name it, they’re all run the same way.

A big part of the success of American television, of course, is the sheer size of the budgets that they throw at their dramatic or comedic output.  Compared to the cash we spend on our “series”, the Americans spend a small fortune on each episode, treating each 43-minutes of screen time (for an hour-long show, to make way for the commericals) as a mini-feature film.  We might think we have big-budget blockbuster shows over here, but even our biggest extravagances like Dr Who or Robin Hood pale in comparison – and they only run for 13 eps a season.

This extra money goes not only into “on screen” elements, but also means that they can afford the “writers’ rooms” which create the shows, something which is prohibitvely expensive over here.  If you’re creating a 6-part series (as most shows are over here, ignoring the tent-pole BBC Who and Hood and the “continuing dramas” which we refer to as “Soaps”), it’s much cheaper and easier to use one or two writers to write the whole thing, with a little creative input from the Producer(s) and possibly director(s) as you go than to hire a team of writers to work together on it.

In any case, British writers aren’t schooled in the writers’ room methods, meaning that even if we did try to do it their way, we’d probably end up turning out TV-Camels* rather than the American’s well-practiced Horses. (That said, there are still a huge number of US shows which fail to hit the mark and never see more than a few episodes or a single season.  Just look at Studio 60, or try Googling “Viva Laughlin”, it’s just that we rarely see them over here because our networks don’t pick them up)

All of which is just a long preamble into talking about what’s going on in the States at the moment, namely the Writers’ Guild of America strike which has seen writers from all of the country’s top shows – as well as their rubbish ones, too – down pencils, power-down desktops, shut their notebooks and hit the picket lines after negotiations on their new contract with the studios who produce their work broke down.

Essentially, the Writers’ Guild of America is like any other labour union (or, since they’re American, labor union) in that they negotiate the basic rates of pay that their members can expect and, indeed, demand, if they are working on studio movies and/or TV shows.  As part of the minimum deal, writers are entitled to “residuals”, which means every time the show is aired on TV, they get a small payment (based on what money the Studio makes) and every time someone buys a copy of the DVD they get a small payment.  As it stands, they receive a whopping $0.04 per $18.99 DVD sold.

The main bone of contention, however, is not with the DVD residuals (although they would like to double it to $0.08 per DVD, it’s not a deal-breaker, by most accounts), it is with digital “airplay” – the streaming of episodes via the Studio’s websites or the downloading of the shows through new-media outlets like iTunes and their ilk.  Right now, the writers who create the shows and are valued enough to earn good money and acceptable residuals on TV-play and DVD-sales get nothing for internet use of their work.  Nothing at all.

Now, the in’s and out’s of all this are clearly numerous and well-covered in many places across the ‘net – if you want to know more and more specifics, click the logo above right to go to the striker’s website, or see the explanations on YouTube – but suffice it to say from me that it seems completely, bafflingly down-right criminal that the Studios should be claiming that they don’t make money from paid-for downloads of shows and from the advertising they sell to tack on to the streamed versions.

The writers, honestly and fairly I believe, think that they are entitled to a similar cut of the profits of their shows from the internet as they get from all other forms of their distribution.   And since it’s very likely that more and more TV is likely to be seen via the ‘net in the years to come – indeed, many people are predicting that the ‘net will become the primary source for our television consumption in the next decade or so – it stands to reason that the writers want in on it.

There are always going to be the people who disagree with the principle of writers receiving residuals for work they’ve already done and I’m not really interested in trying to turn those people around, but beyond there I don’t see how anyone can say that writers don’t deserve a cut of the digital profits.  It’s not greed, it’s just fair and decent.  If you accept the principal that they should be paid a cut of the profits from screenings and sales of their work, then online sales has to come into the equation.

Anyway, all of that is a very, very long-winded and roundabout way of saying that I’m wholeheartedly supporting the American writers in their strike action and that if I were being paid to write now, I’d be putting my pencil down and if I could walk more than 10m without needing a long sit-down, I’d be with them on the picket lines.  If I was in the States.  As it is, I’ve just signed this petition.  Which is about all I can do, as well as urging you to do it too.

For now, the strike is having little impact on our TV schedules, but if it goes on more than a few more weeks, we’re going to see pretty big holes open up in our Spring schedules, including things like Season 2 of Heroes, Season 4 of Lost and many others besides.

It’s nice to write about something other than feeling rubbish.

* the old famous saying, “A camel is a horse designed by a committee.”

I am very much asleep when the alarm goes off this morning and I prize myself out of bed in a slow and careful manner. Drugs duely flowing, I try my hardest to stay awake while they run through, watching some Making of Toy Story DVD as I do.

Once the drugs are done I’m about focused enough to run K into work, but when I get home I take myself straight back to bed for another hour’s kip, which is rudely interrupted 45 mins in (just when it’s about perfect snoozing) by the postman, who can’t let himself in again (to the building, that is – he doesn’t try to break into our flat of a morning).

I decide it’s pointless trying to re-claim my 15 minutes and so head for a bath instead, then check my email quickly before Mum arrives to whisk me over to Oxford for my physio appointment.

My CF team in Oxford have recently reached a deal with the physio department whereby they can cross-pollinate departments – whereas I used to only be able to see chest-specialist physios (who are paid for under the CF-care banner) if I wanted to see any other type of physio, it would have to be a paid-for referral either from my GP (who’s in the wrong PCT) or the chest team (who can’t afford the extra fees). Charging issues ironed out, however, I am free to go and see a muscular-skeletal physio who is part of the Churchill team up the corridor from my usual clinic.

What a difference a specialist makes. My two regular physios sat in on the session too, eager to learn the basics of what they could do to help me (and others) out with my neck/back problems, all of which stem from the extra work my respiratory muscles are having to do to make up for the cruddy condition of my lungs. After half and hour’s poking, prodding and manipulation, I can already feel a difference, and the physio promises if I can get up there every week she’ll find 10 minutes to have another go and keep the main parts mobilized, with the eventual aim that I’ll be able to strengthen the muscles back up to pull more weight without so much strain.

After my neck session, I head down to the treatment centre with my regular physio for a regular chest physio session, at which we also do my L-F, which stands back up at a healthy (relatively) 0.8/1.5, which is good to see. Even more astonishingly, my weight has now hit 56kg on the clinic scales, and that’s without a thick jumper on. I’ve NEVER been this heavy before, and it feels like a real achievement.

Back home I feel terrible because K’s had a bad day at work and only been home half an hour but all I can do when I walk in the door is fold myself into bed and fall asleep. Rested an recovered after an hour or so, I try to make it up with Tea (which is usually a good place to start) and she appears not to harbour any of the kind of grudge I think I would given reversed circumstances. It’s times like these that my “frailties” really bug me – it seems such a small thing to ask to be able just to chill and have a cuddle after a bad day, but when I’m tired, especially from travel, I’m really not in a state to do anything. What makes K so wonderful is the fact that no matter what the situation, she never complains at all.

In the evening, an old school friend who’s recently moved back over from France pops round and we have a giggle-some night of pizza and board games. We discover, much to our disppointment, that Operation really isn’t that difficult if you’re any older than about 10. None of us had played it for years, but he’d had it at home and thought it was in marvelously bad taste to bring it round (which we both readily agreed). Naturally, they let me win, since otherwise it would just have been rude.

Another couple of games of Scene It (of which I won neither, let the record show – for those of you who think I must just walk it every time), and B headed off home. My drugs were due later than normal because of bad planning on my part so K headed to bed while I did my last dose, watching some Sky+’d Simpsons and the start of The American President, which I’d recorded a while ago before surfing the ‘net for a while during my evening nebs.

I eventually make it to bed about 1.30am, where I read Kevin Smith just long enough to make my eyelids heavy then settle down for the night.