This interview was conducted by Scott Montgomery for the Strontium Dog fanzine "Dogbreath". Since Scott had already interviewed me for the Megazine, it re-used some elements not included in the published version of that earlier article.
Dog Breath Interview
1. Can you briefly tell us of your background and how you came to be involved with Big Finish?
I started off translating Japanese animation, which is an industry where you do sometimes literally have just eight hours to get a workable English script out 60 pages of handwritten squiggles. I did several dozen of those, and made it up to voice director, so I was used to working in audio. A couple of years ago, I was writing scripts for Halcyon Sun, which was part-game, part TV series. Big Finish found out about me because of that, and because of several other projects I worked on, including the Thunderbirds game.
2. As writer of "Down to Earth", you had the job of adapting the Strontium Dog universe. Was it a daunting task, or were you familiar with the character's history?
I remember Johnny Alpha from Star Lord, but I wasn't sure anyone else would. So I spent all Christmas 2001 poring over old issues trying to decide what needed to be brought to the forefront of any story about the characters.
3. What were the main (if any) problems you encountered when writing Strontium Dog or Judge Dredd?
The problem with Strontium Dog was selling it to some people who didn't need to be told who Johnny Alpha was, and a second audience who simply had to be told - particularly with the cast we had. I was expecting, for example, Spaced fans to be buying it who had never even read 2000ad before. I had to fill in the blanks about the characters and the milieu - make sure that new listeners could get a crash-course in Strontium Dog without spoiling the enjoyment. That's the first problem, covering the Story So Far.
The second is that SD is very funny, but I doubt many of its fans remember it that way, because a lot of the jokes flew over their heads… well, they flew over my head when I was seven, anyway. I was worried that two of the characters, Wulf and the Gronk, would initially come across as too campy for anyone to take it seriously. That's the thing with SD, it's deadly serious. The comics can be very surreal, but while you might laugh at their world, they never do. So I thought I'd keep Wulf out of the way for a while, so people got used to the other voices and the general tone.
So, I thought, "I know, Wulf gets kidnapped, and Johnny has to get him back." That keeps him out of the loop for half the story. "And he gets kidnapped by someone because of [Story So Far]." Two birds with one stone. Once I'd answered the question "Who would want to kidnap Wulf?" I had my plot.
4. Are you on hand for studio recording, should any last minute re-writes come up, etc?
Writers are often about as welcome in a studio as a fart in an elevator, but Big Finish let me go to all the 2000ad recordings of my work. I keep quiet, but sometimes an actor will come up with something they want to change, and it helps if I'm there to say yes, or on occasion, throw things at them. That's particularly prevalent with Mark McDonnell (McNulty), who often comes up with gems of filthy Scottishness that are far better than my dimly remembered slang from the year I spent in Scotland.
In a perfect world, a script is performable without the writer present, but you can never predict what people are going to miss. I wasn't allowed in the recording booth for 99 Code Red, and there were several errors that crept in to the final version as a result. I was a tad miffed about it, because if you're going to do an on-the-spot rewrite and the author is only ten feet away, it doesn't hurt to consult him.
5. Do you actually enjoy the audio medium? It must be quite frustrating to write descriptive and expository dialogue, without being too obvious to the listener.
There aren't any pictures, but you can use that to your advantage by choosing stories that thrive on it. You search out times when someone is in a situation where descriptive dialogue is natural. If you hear:
FX: BREEP BREEP
Man: Hello? Yes! I'm on the train!
It doesn't sound unnatural because you hear dialogue like that every day, whether you want to or not. If two people are talking on the phone, one of them has to explain to the other one what's going on. It was also the genesis of the car-chase sequence in Down to Earth. Normally, there's no way you could do a convincing car-chase in audio, not unless it was completely dark and the passenger was shouting directions to the blind driver. And that would never happen unless the passenger could see in infrared…
Ironically, I always find myself thinking first of how the cover image would look on 2000ad, then translating it into audio. For Down to Earth, I saw Johnny sitting by a space station window, with the Earth looming above him outside - it's the last scene I wrote in the script, and the first we recorded.
6. Strontium Dog is a particularly British strip (class struggle, racism, etc). What are your feelings on the allegorical elements of the story?
I was really proud of a line I had one of the policemen say in the squad car, when they're having a good laugh about mutants, and one of them says: "You know, your basic spakkers." I think it's really chilling, because that scene opens up a whole new topic about the mutants who don't make it to adulthood - there's likely to be a lot of them, and I deliberately chose an insulting, vile word that would hit bone with a contemporary audience. I also made sure that the MKPD had plenty of lines that would ring true in our world, particularly when they start complaining about how the mutants don't know how lucky they are to be living in a ghetto.
The most crucial difference is that Johnny Alpha looks like he's a character out of a spaghetti western, but he actually comes from England. I think a lot of people "hear" him with an American accent in their head. Meanwhile, Dredd is often embroiled in very British stories and cultural references, and I think people often "hear" him with an English accent, even though he's American. Obviously in audio, you have to come clean and have them sound the way they're supposed to.
Dredd is a loner, and a laconic one at that. It's difficult to give him enough to say, without having him sound over-talkative. You need to do what they do with Jackie Chan's Hollywood movies - surround him with motormouth characters who talk all the time, and set up gags, and start arguments, anything to keep him talking, and feed him new lines. That way, he still talks in one-liners, but he gets more chances to say them.
The other problem with Dredd is that it's difficult working out which era's Dredd, which writer's Dredd is the one you really want to emulate. In the end, I decided to go back before Wagner, to his original inspiration in Dirty Harry, and write it not for Dredd, but for Clint Eastwood playing Dredd.
If push comes to shove, though, I like Strontium Dog a little bit more because I have a permanent ensemble cast to work with. With Dredd, you can always have wisecracks and arguments, but ultimately he's on his own. If you get too deep into non-expository dialogue, you have to focus on characters other than Dredd to carry the conversation, and it's very important with Dredd to keep him at the centre of anything that's going on. With Strontium Dog, Johnny has this whole "family" (and they are like a family for him), and I can get some really good bickering going. Dredd's just that little bit more difficult to write for audio, but there are ways around it.
8. Why do you think we like the character of Judge Dredd so much? (after all he's a grumpy fascist b*****d at heart!)
Dredd isn't a fascist, Dredd is pure of heart. He's the only knight who can bring back the Holy Grail. That's why we like him. He's a grumpy Galahad.
9. "…Titan" has references that stretch right back to Rico Dredd. Can the comic continuity be restricting or inspiring?
Normally, inspiring. I only have to leaf through a couple of old issues, and I'll find something that someone's set up for me - a cool supporting character, or a dangling plot thread that I can fix with a new story. With the audios, I'm keen to always root them somewhere in continuity, to make it clear that I know where the stories are coming from, that I'm not just winging it.
The great thing about a scene with Rico in it is that it doesn't cost you an extra actor. He's a clone of Fargo just like Dredd, so there's nothing wrong with having Toby Longworth play both parts. In fact, Toby would quite happily play all the parts if he could - this started off as a joke, but in the final Big Finish audio, Judge Dredd: Solo, we will actually be making Toby do the entire show single-handed.
There was one time when 2000ad history put paid to something I was planning, and that was when I wanted to have Dredd use Joe Cain as his false name in the prison. It was an opportunity for some nice double meanings in the dialogue, particularly on matters fraternal, but it was disallowed on the grounds that most 2000ad fans would hear the name Cain and think of Missionary Man, rather than the Book of Genesis.
The other restriction is when 2000ad rule something is off limits. There were several things I pitched for the second round of commissioning, only to be told: "Sorry, Wagner's doing a story about (x) next year. Pick something else."
10. What has fan reaction been like towards the audios? Do you take criticism onboard? Presumably though, fandom should never dictate what creative people like you come up with next?
Right, this isn't a democracy. If it were, Johnny Alpha would be a vampire hobbit with large breasts and a cape. And he would be starring in a manga-style crossover with the Micronauts.
The fan reaction has been very good. I think the 2000ad message board voted on the best audio of the year, and Down to Earth was number one, and Trapped on Titan was number two, so I can't ask for better than that.
I watch reviews very carefully for any sense that the scripts are drifting too far from what is regarded as canonically acceptable. I look for what presses the right buttons with audiences, if there are any particular set-pieces they are looking for. There are Electro-nux in use in Down to Earth, but they're never named as such, chiefly because I didn't want to confuse the actors and crew. But the fans made it clear they wanted to hear Johnny say the word.
Someone mentioned that they really liked it when McNulty sings. He gets to do "Loch Lomond" in the style of a pub singer in Fire From Heaven - there's a bit of singing in all my audios. In fact, I'm one of the rappers performing "Umpty Got Some Sugar" in 99 Code Red.
I got Big Finish to send a copy of Down to Earth to Essex Radio, but for some reason they never got in touch… John Ainsworth did get to do an interview with a radio station in Milton Keynes about it, though. I think he was scared they were going to string him up. Apparently they didn't take too kindly to being a mutant ghetto.
11. Tell us about your second Strontium Dog story "Fire From Heaven". Simon Pegg is a superb choice of actor for Alpha.
A lot of people forget that Simon Pegg is an actor. He's an actor in my mind before he's a comedian, and a lot of his funniest moments in Spaced are where he is being utterly, utterly deadpan and serious, while the rest of the cast are behaving like idiots. And that's what you want in a Johnny Alpha - someone who is trying to get on with saving the world, while McNulty is chasing the Gronk around the room with a hand grenade, and Wulf is threatening to flatten them both with a Happy Stick.
The fans want Johnny to have a load of gadgets, but in the first audio, I didn't want to confuse new listeners with all the new words. I remembered that scene in For Your Eyes Only when James Bond climbs up a sheer cliff just using a shoelace, and that's when I realised how hard 007 really was. I wanted to do that with Johnny Alpha - strip everything away until you saw the hero beneath the costume.
12. There's some wonderful interplay between Johnny and Middenface…
It was an accident that McNulty appeared at all in Down to Earth. I only wrote him in at Alan Barnes's suggestion, because I couldn't have Durham Red in that time period. But something seemed to click between Simon Pegg (Johnny) and Mark McDonnell (McNulty) - there's a scene when they're driving along in the car arguing about when the Barrier Disaster was, and you genuinely feel that these two have known each other for years, even though they'd only met that morning. So McNulty had to come back for Fire From Heaven. In fact, Big Finish actually rescheduled the production so that they could get Simon and Mark in the same studio together, rather than having to record them separately without that spark.
For Fire From Heaven, I had this "cover image" in my head of one of those pulp novels, with a hero rescuing a virgin sacrifice from the altar of a religious cult. But I pictured Johnny as the swashbuckling rescuer, and Wulf as the sacrificial victim. And I tried to think of what kind of god the fanatics would be worshipping, and I suddenly thought of a perfect image, which gave me my twist before I had anything to twist. Then I worked back from there.
13. Then, you wrote another Dredd audio, "99 Code Red". A story about a plague in a Big Meg hospital. The quarantined setting is particularly effective. Is it difficult to get the right balance of 2000AD action, thrills, contemporary references, etc?
Writing for an audio is a little like running a role-playing game or directing for the theatre. There is this vast world out there, but you want to keep your audience on limited rails for as much as possible. I know it's a maxim that audio can show you anything, but the trick is to imply you're showing a lot when actually you're keeping things quite small. Scenes need to have a limited number of characters, backgrounds need to be defined. It's easier for the writer if you're on a train, in a car, or trapped in a hospital, or in the middle of a desert. And although the listener may not notice, their brain has less trouble drawing the scene for them that way. Dredd audios seem to have more trouble appealing to non-fans for that reason - people who haven't read 2000ad simply can't see Mega-City One in all its glory when all they have to go on is a few car horns and whooshing noises.
The problem I have is the one that everyone in the 2000ad universe has, which is writing for "children of all ages." I can write for children, and I can write for 30-year-olds, but with 2000ad, you are obliged to write for both. I remember when I wrote Rat Town for the Megazine, one of the main editorial alterations was to kiddify some of the proper nouns a bit. 2000ad has to be for adults, but still retain a few vestiges of its origins as entertainment for teenagers.
15.What are your favourite 2000AD audios so far? (including the ones you've worked on).
I like Down to Earth, because of the opening 15 minutes. Nobody picked up on it in the reviews, but from the moment it begins to the time Johnny and Squid are thrown in the cells, it's one continuous take, as if the camera is looking over Johnny's shoulder for 15 minutes in real-time. I think it really adds to the energy, and the sensation that you literally can't press Pause until you're round the next corner… and the next…
16. With the benefit of hindsight, are there any stories that you think could've been better? Or is there anything you would've done differently?
There was one thing that I wish I'd made clearer in Trapped on Titan, which was that anyone who'd been there for a while was obviously a former Judge. True to real-world tradition (courtesy of a great little book I own called You Are Going to Prison), everyone on Titan is reluctant to discuss their former lives, but that back-fired because some listeners wanted to hear some acknowledgement that Dredd was walking among former Judges. I could have fixed that with a line or two, but it simply didn't occur to me that it would be an issue.
I was not happy at all with 99 Code Red, which involved the unfortunate coincidence of a director and a sound mixer who had not worked for Big Finish in those capacities before. I was literally seething when I first heard it, but it's grown on me over time, as I have forgotten what I originally wanted, and come to accept it for what it is.
18. You're about to start work on the script for the Big Finish Judge Dredd/Strontium Dog crossover story "Pre-Emptive Revenge". Both characters have met before in the comics, and forged a very uneasy mutual respect. What will your take on it be?
They hate each other. Dredd is every authority figure Johnny has ever fought, and Johnny is every mutant that Dredd has kicked out into the Cursed Earth. And now they are stuck a thousand miles from civilisation, and forced to cooperate in the aftermath of Judgement Day - I wasn't going to engineer yet another meeting across time, I figured I might as well do an untold story that happens after their last team-up.
My virtual cover image is a steal from Reservoir Dogs, of Mr White and Mr Pink with their guns at each other's heads - mutually assured destruction, unless they quit arguing and work together. By a strange coincidence, I met Garth Ennis in a pub and we had a long talk about Johnny and Dredd, but I was incredibly drunk at the time, so I can't remember a thing he said.
19. It's also been announced that you will be writing "Ruthless" - a Strontium Dog novel, for Black Flame Publishing. We know you're sworn to secrecy, but is there anything you can tell us about it?
I'll tell you anything you like! Johnny Alpha has a sister called Ruth who was never seen in the comics after Portrait of a Mutant. Johnny mentions her once in Fire From Heaven, only to point out that she's a completely normal human. That was my way of testing 2000ad, to see if Alan Barnes allowed it through. He did, so…
I always wondered what happened to her after she left Earth with her fiancé. I was thinking, what if a bounty went up for her arrest? This is is the girl who did everything right, and planned to marry a nice boy and settle down. This is the girl who defied her own father, who helped Johnny bust out of jail... and suddenly she's listed as a criminal! Johnny would want to get to her first, to find out how she'd ended up in that situation. He'd do anything, even go against other bounty hunters and break the law himself. He'd call in any favours he had to to get her back - hoping against hope that there was some kind of mistake, because he can't bear the thought of a universe that doesn't have her in it.
With Ruthless, I'm trying to do what I did with Down to Earth, which is to find a new way to re-introduce Johnny for another audience. I thought putting him temporarily on the wrong side of the law would be a good way of doing that.
20. In addition to your 2000AD-related material, you've also penned a "Doctor Who: Unbound" audio, the "Highwaymen" movie novelisation, and popular history books. Are there any other types of writing you'd like to explore?
I've always wanted to write an unpopular history book, just to see what people throw… No, my next book is actually a book about the Vikings, in the Brief History series published by Constable/Robinson. I'm going to see what the chances are of including a picture of Wulf Sternhammer in the photo section as an example of "modern myths."
Jonathan, thanks very much for taking time out from your busy schedule to answer these questions.
If Pre-Emptive Revenge comes out a day late, you'll only have yourself to blame!