HOW I STUMBLED on COMMON SENSE

At the beginning of the 1990s, I was working at a television production company. Euston Films, now defunct, was the subsidiary that made drama on film for Thames Television when the latter held the ITV franchise for broadcasting on weekdays in London.

Rather to my surprise, for it was hardly my natural territory, I was acting as script executive (script editor, as we called the post when I began in television and as I think of it still) for one of the big guns in ITV’s drama output, Minder. It fell to me, indeed, to devise the character – name, relationship to Arthur Daley, general function – who would replace Dennis Waterman’s Terry as the eponym. I am happy to report that the casting did not come under my purview.

One day a call came through to my office from Michael Church, an old chum from journalism days, who was then features editor on a national newspaper. He asked if I would like to consider writing a regular column for the paper. Most would no doubt accept such an offer at once and wing it. Doubtless too diligent for my own good, I instinctively felt that my script editing was a full-time job and that I could render neither it nor a column justice by trying to do them simultaneously. Without more ado, I reluctantly declined.

But “consider” lodged in my head. Middle-aged as I was, I had begun to feel utterly out of sorts with the times, not merely with the drawn-out demise of Tory rule but with the whole Zeitgeist. I had only to stroll down the street to feel alienated. As that camp old gargoyle Ernest Thesiger said of fighting in the World War I trenches: “My dear, the noise! And the people!” Of course it was a function of getting older but it seemed more deep-rooted than that. I felt that our values had come adrift and that this everyone-for-the-lifeboats and devil-take-the-hindmost mentality, much gingered up by the cult of greed that characterized the Thatcherite view of anti-society, was manifesting itself in multifarious ways, both vast and minuscule.

The promise that fulfilling the script editor function on Minder and on Euston’s short-lived and fraught new project (a drama series-cum-serial about a psychiatric practice called Shrinks) would be rewarded with my return to producing was not made good. Anyway, I got taken off both shows. Towards the end of the second year of my contract, it was clear that Thames would lose to Carlton its fight to keep the ITV franchise and, one by one, the company script editors were told that their contracts would not be renewed. By this time, needless to say, Michael Church was no longer a features editor.

I put together a few sample columns under the title ‘Now Don’t Get Me Started …’ and sent them around. No features editor was remotely interested. Eventually the country had had enough of the Tories and elected something calling itself New Labour. By the time well-merited disillusion had set in with that regime, I had decided that Now Don’t Get Me Started … could be a book ...

To read entirely free of charge that book, now entitled Common Sense, please click on the link in the sidebar

COMMON SENSE: The BOOK

and you will go to the webpage where the book is available as a download