Waiting...

I am currently waiting for a phone call to tell me whether or not I’ve got an interview for a new job. I applied for this a while ago and was told I was short-listed last week and had a subbing test to complete over the weekend. This was pretty straightforward and now I’m waiting to see if it’s going to go any further...

Sadly, waiting is something I have never being very good at. Many people say that patience is a virtue but if this is the case then I am the patience equivalent of an ageing dockside whore whose virtue was shot away by a fleet of pox-ridden Russian sailors many moons ago.

Fortunately I have several distractions to take my mind off my current torture...

The first of these is a new game called Real-deal TV where you take an already established TV show and turn it into a more brutal version of itself. My current favourite in this game is my version of You’ve Been Framed! This involved Jeremy Beadle and Lisa Riley going on holiday to Turkey, secretly having their suitcases stuffed with Class A narcotics while they’re in Duty Free then getting arrested, imprisoned and brutalised in a Turkish jail by a variety of wardens even more obese than Riley. It would then be edited down to 30-minute segments and shown over several weeks. If viewing figures flagged a new celebrity, say Jeremy Clarkson or any Tory politician of choice, could be introduced.

My version of Big Brother comes a close second. This would be slightly renamed Bug Brother and the bunch of celeb-wannabes all keen to get their mugs on the telly would enter the house then have to avoid various insect attacks, starting with ants, slowly building up to cockroaches and then ending with a carnage-tastic attack of those flesh-eating scarab beetles from The Mummy and The Mummy Returns. This may sound cruel as everyone dies but it would deprive us of a new generation of no-talents. Think of it as mercy killing and it doesn’t seem so bad.

Away from Real-deal TV I am also getting on with my current play, Trust, about political corruption in a small northern town. I’m close to the half-way point of the first draft and I’m still not wanting to bin it yet which is usually a good sign. I expressed my confidence in the project to my missus yesterday with some comment along the lines of ‘I’m writing some really good stuff here you know.’

She replied with: ‘I’ll be the judge of that...’ I wasn’t at the meeting where she promoted to my script-editor but this seems to be a fait accomplit now so I’ll quietly accept it.

Work, of course, is also taking up some time but I try not to think of this as it reminds me I want a new job which reminds of... Bugger. See how easy it is to not be distracted? Back to my new Real-deal TV show idea, BeastEnders, I reckon...