Your comment on my blog got me interested, so I thought I’d take a look. I read your piece on female sexual tourism and found it quite thought provoking. These articles regularly turn up in women’s mags, too, which you don’t mention (perhaps not your preferred reading material!) I’ve just had a leaf through my housemate’s pile of mags and can’t find any examples, but I definitely have read some before and it’s usually in a bit of a confessional tone – “ooh look what I did!” and with a kind of disclaimer at the end saying guess what, this might not be a very safe thing to do.

I’m just speaking off the top of my head here, having not really thought about the subject until now. But it seems to me that people will often behave in the way that we expect them to behave – we generally conform to expectations. So the more we tell women that their emotions entitle them to behave in ways that we would not expect men to, the less responsibility they take for those emotions and their ensuing actions. I see this all the time among my friends, with PMT. You’re expected to act irrationally, therefore it’s ok if you do. But… really… it’s still you that chose to hit your boyfriend, PMTor no. And if we present men who visit prostitutes as monsters and perverts, does it influence them to act the part? That’s probably too strong – I mean something subtler and more hidden in the subconscious.

If society were already condemning me for one thing – paying a high price for safe sex with a consenting and unpressured woman, for example – perhaps it would be less of a leap to a worse thing – a potentially enslaved, forced, or just plain penniless and hungry woman – than if not. My, that’s a convoluted sentence – I hope it makes sense!

Thanks for dropping into the site and commenting. Although, I didn’t spend an entire four years writing the script. I had a first crack at it back in 2005 and then went back to it from time to time. I was working on other things at the same time and improving as a writer. See front page of site for links to published articles. I handed it in when I was happy with it, as per the advice on the BBC site.

“Firstly a half hour sitcom script is at least 50 pages, if your script looked thin then it wouldn’t have even been read.”

When you do professional writing, you learn to obey the specs and those were the specs listed on the Writer’s Room site. There’s a rule of thumb that they refer to that says one page should equal one minute of screen time. Try googling for more info. They specified that a sitcom script should be 28 mins. You can find out more about their submission specs on the site – http://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/writing/submission_guidelines.shtml

Although, as I say, I’m not going to bother with Writer’s Room for future projects.

Very important send it in the correct scrip format if you want it to be read, use courier 12 font.

Nice to hear from you.

(re: Micro Mart) Heh, it really is a small world. If you turn up as a centerfold model in an issue of Transsexual Times, I’m going to be officially spooked.

I’m sure our paths will cross again at MM/Dennis.

Thanks again for the interest.

Kieron

Now I’ve had more time to think about it, I think that WR encourages a pie in the sky approach to working in entertainment. It’s a bit like those manufactured pop band documentary thingies – when you watch the singers burst into tears, you wonder how they can be contemplating a career in the entertainment industry when they invest so much of themselves in a single audition.

In fact, I think that the BBC have probably created it so that they have a ready answer to all of the people who ask if they can send a script in. When you’re sending your script in against 10,000 other scripts, the whole thing ends up being a lottery. Finishing a 28 page script and a series outline was a useful experience in itself, but it’s too much work to do without a guarantee of payback.

The TUOL script was one of my first attempts at writing something, and in all honesty, it wasn’t that fantastic. Since I first started working on it, I’ve done quite a lot of writing in other fields, and subsequently, I’ve improved as a writer. In particular, some of the earliest material in TOUL now looks a embarrassingly ropey to me. I might one day have a go at resurrecting the characters and the scenario though.

I need do some full treatments for some of my ideas, but I’m not writing a 28 page script again for what amounts to a competition. I might have a go at stand up or see if a local drama club could use a writer. I’m going to try and weasel my way in sneakily and legitimately, rather than betting it all on being really really lucky.