The Write Stuff!

I’m currently having a moral dilemma. Channel 4 are running a competition for unproduced playwrights with the winner getting the chance to have a play staged in the West End. This is a good thing and as an aspiring playwright it’s something I should be entering as I’m back writing after a lengthy lay-off and am steadily amassing a pile of rejections from the some of the finest theatres in the land.

Unfortunately there’s a catch...

This competition is actually part of some sort of TV reality show where the wannabe scribes are whittled down to ten then filmed as the selection process whittles them down to a winner who gets the prize of a West End production. It’s a sort of high-brow Big Brother.

Now in our household reality TV sits somewhere between Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein when it comes to naming the evils of the world. Just look at The Farm, a reality show on Channel 5 at the moment where celebrities have to run a small holding and embark on all manner of bizarre tasks. Shoddy nasty rubbish! One of the entrants on this is porn star Ron Jeremy, a man who often makes his living by having anal sex in front of the camera – and I thought even he would have had more dignity than to appear in this degrading nonsense.

So what to do? Not enter and potentially miss out but maintain the moral high ground – or potentially subject myself and, god forbid, my wife and stepson to the sort of insightful rubbish and half-arsed interviews that such shows usually produce?

I reckon the world already has enough nano-celebrities so it’s back to the rejection letters...