ARTICLES

I had never tried writing articles until I suddenly found myself writing them for a living, the story of which can be found here. And just in the nick of time too. With a new baby in the house, I suddenly had to buckle down and take life seriously. No more whooping it up all day selling driving lessons over the phone: “’Ow much are yer lessons?” “Thank you for your call, can I just get your number please, in case we get cut―” “Never mind that, I just want to know ’ow much are yer lessons.” “Well sir, we have a range of courses available, perhaps if I could take a few de―” Click. All day every day. And Monday mornings were the worst, when they rang in furious that their instructor hadn’t turned up over the weekend. As if we could do anything to help them get back those few lost precious hours of their lives. And then there were the jokers who liked to call up to shout abuse at you, or pretend they’d just won a Lamborghini in a raffle and needed a crash course. “Geddit? A crash course… har har har.”

Where was I? Oh yes, articles. For about five years I wrote nothing but.

The Proscenium articles are the ad hoc pieces the company I worked for was asked to provide for the various theatres up and down the country who commissioned their programmes from us. We supplied between twenty and thirty venues and there was a regular turnover of productions, so you can imagine how hectic the schedule was. Looking at the dates at the ends of these pieces now, I’m frankly amazed at how many we must have compiled over the years. And this was in the days before Google and Wikipedia – all the research had to be done the old-fashioned way, in the library with books. (Books are blocks of printed matter comprising individual pages with writing on them.) We were lucky that the Central Library on College Green was literally five minutes away round the corner from the offices on Bristol City Centre, but even so you would sometimes have to cast your net wide and keep your fingers crossed you would be able to come up with enough background on, say, the railway system of South Africa for an Athol Fugard at Theatr Clwyd, or biographical details on 19th-century Russian playwright Alexander Ostrovsky, better known in the west these days as ‘Who?’

Occasionally, in the case of a living author, we would get the chance to interview them over the phone, the old landline type with the big handset, usually during lunchtime when they would much rather have been filling their faces (who wouldn’t?), but if they were feeling genial and you were sensible enough to ask the right questions, their answers would supply 90% of the content. (If you had no shorthand, as I hadn’t, and you ended up with eight pages of scribbled notes you couldn’t read back and no memory of what they said because you were too busy writing it down, you might come to the conclusion it was time to invest in a small tape recorder.)

Alternatively, a profile might comprise half-interview and half-background detail that you’d gleaned from other sources, like a press release or an introduction to the published works. But in the case of a writer who was no longer with us, you would end up writing a straightforward biography, mashed together from the salient points in any other official publications you could get your hands on. I personally always enjoyed compiling these as, apart from anything else, it’s a very good discipline for any writer to develop the ability to assimilate large quantities of material from various sources and meld it all into a hopefully compelling narrative. It also teaches literary confidence: the first thing you drop from your vocabulary is the word ‘apparently’. You may not have known the first thing about the subject before you started researching them, but the finished article must show no sign that such a state of ignorance ever existed. No matter how strange or shocking or unusual the revealed facts, the narrator must remain poker-faced, omniscient and unmoved – except when the subject was a particular personal favourite about which one had done one’s own independent research, in which case one allowed oneself to show off a bit. Or at least I mean I did. This is why the pieces on the likes of Evelyn Waugh and JM Barrie are so compendious: I had my own reasons for looking into them in depth, and I was happy to bring a lot of previous knowledge to bear.

The programmes Proscenium used to put together for classical music concerts and festivals were among the more elegant and stylish of all our product. They usually consisted of biographies and pictures of the conductors, soloists and orchestras, provided by the individuals themselves or their agents, together with sometimes highly technical analyses of the pieces they were playing. These were invariably put together by specialists who knew their Ashkenazys from their Elgars, and I learnt a lot from them. But just occasionally – and increasingly more frequently as the money started to run out and we were urged to produce more of these in house – I was allowed, then invited, and finally obliged, to pitch in my penn’orth from the cheap seats. I could not talk authoritatively about the music itself, of course, even on the rare occasions I was familiar with the piece, but I could research a neat little biography and the circumstances of how the thing came to be written, and in time, as I gradually explored the repertoire and became more familiar with the jargon, I was even emboldened to start offering a few independent insights of my own. Whether I ever fooled any of the afficionados who really knew what they were listening to is unlikely, but I was certainly careful not to make too many obvious bloomers. We never received any nasty letters anyway, so I suppose we got away with it. Which is about the best you can hope for with any piece of writing really: so long as you stay just beyond the reach of the howls of derision and dissent, you can live to type another day.