It is my custom to spend my first night in Singapore at The Iguana Cafe. I can sit at the bar there without feeling too much of a sad fuck and watch the masses go by. After a few margaritas I begin to get into the Singapore mood. Singapore is Margaritas, beautiful Malay Chinese women and Channel 5, the last TV Channel to ever broadcast a series written by me. I am beginning to wonder if it will be the last ever!
And as I write this, three margaritas down, I am chatting to my sister on Facebook and she is telling me that Alan Plater has died. Alan Plater once gave me a prize for writing when he was the head of the UK's Writers' Guild. This made me feel like the last person who liked anything I wrote died. But the truth is when he handed me the prize he didn't know me from Adam despite meeting me years before at a writers' workshop, where he quoted a line from a script of mine. It was, I quote, "I always wanted a son-in-law with a flare for mail order." I was a writer of droll northern English comedies in those days. Nobody ever made them, which made me give up bothering to be droll and I started to opt more for psychotic.
And being the kind of multi-tasking guy I am, I'm also chatting with Tammy Ho, who's delivering a paper at an academic convention here in Singapore. I am explaining to her that three parts Baby Lotion and one part Gin, make a party. I don't think she understands despite being a writer of erotic poetry. But then her speciality is Dickens and there's not a lot of how's yer father in Dickens. Instead there is a strange obsession with dying children and idiot brides.
Tammy is doing post graduate work at the University of London and discovering that come lunch time Londoners stand around in the streets, in their suits, sloshing down pints of bitter. Of course, when they hit the colonies they become sober and hard working.
What a weird old cyber world we do live in.
Tomorrow I shall meet up with Kelvin Sng, who produced "The Most Erotic Singaporean film ever made." And Derrick Lui, who also made a local movie featuring a goodly measure of art house skin. We're plotting the next moves for a story I blithely describe as Fawlty Towers meets Gey Lang! Which on the face of it might well show that quite a bit of time, jet lagging and cultural cross hatching has filled in my features since Mr Plater commented on my fine comic sensibilities, but you know what, I'm still a droll northern comic. Only now I do it in a hotter climate.
For those of you who are interested, and there seem to be a lot of you nowadays, I shall be teaching screenwriting at the Singapore Media Academy all week. The course I am teaching consists mostly of the students writing a script and trying to get a reaction from their audience. WIth any luck I might learn something. That is the best part of teaching.