Megazine 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. I also wrote several books, as well as stuff for Action Man comic back in the 1990s. 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 (and did a grand job!). 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 have 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.
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're on a submarine, someone is going to have to tell you what's going on. So I pitched a story set on a submarine. If two people are talking on the phone, one of them has to explain to the other one what's going on. So I had McNulty stalking someone, and phoning in reports to Johnny. 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…
There are things that you can only do in audio, and I try to use them. There's no controversy when Dredd takes his helmet off in Trapped on Titan, because you can't see what he looks like. You can fill in your own image - perfect audio!
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?
For me, Johnny Alpha is an exiled prince waiting to reclaim the throne. His origin-story is a movie just waiting to happen - son of dictator turns out to be a member of the persecuted minority, runs away from home, leads resistance. Wins but is exiled. The high concept is sitting right there. Like all the best myths, it blows very familiar family tensions (father-mother-brother-sister) into all-out war. It's got some great contemporary angles, too - disability, prejudice, asylum-seekers… and this is all there during the space-cowboy bounty-hunter stories, hanging over his head like the Sword of Damocles.
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.
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 sound.
The problem with Dredd is that he's 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 there are contradictory precedents for him. 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. I was really pleased with a review of Trapped on Titan that focussed on the fact that Dredd has a kind of inner goodness about him which, when he's undercover, actually earns the respect of perps in the prison who don't know who he really is. Although he remained as stoney-faced as ever, people around him related to him as if he's a friend and confidante, and I liked that.
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 - he's already had to have audio fights with himself on several occasions.
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.
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?
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.
Another person 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 - it's getting to be a little signature of mine; there's a bit of singing in all my audios.
There was one guy who complained that a particular character repeated the same phrase too often, but he told me five times, so perhaps he was protesting a little too much.
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.
11. You directed "I Love Judge Dredd". BF's first all-out comedy release. It shows the flexibility of the character and premise (and is very funny into the bargain). Sometimes though, the comic used to go over the top with contemporary pop culture references and movie/TV pastiches. Is there a danger that BF could fall into this trap?
I think there's definitely a place for things like I Love Judge Dredd, because it's in keeping with a particular era of Dredd comics. There's also not a single wasted word in it; there's something funny on every line. But I wouldn't want to see too many like it - it's good to do a funny one, especially after something as dark as Get Karter. But I prefer to think of Dredd as a cop show rather than a media satire. The thing is, though, that for a large proportion of the Mega City One population, watching TV is genuinely the only thing they do all day, so it's not surprising that there are so many media-based stories, even in the comic.
12. Tell us about the return of Strontium Dog in "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.
For Down to Earth, I took away all Johnny's gadgets. He hits Earth with no armour, no guns, nothing, and has to use his wits. That's good for audio, but it also helps establish just how tough he is. I remember 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.
But some fans have come to regard Johnny's gadgets as touchstones of his whole character - they want to see him, sorry, hear him using them, otherwise it doesn't feel right to them. So Fire From Heaven was my chance to put them all back in. If you were a complete newcomer whose first encounter with Johnny was Down to Earth, then Fire From Heaven is the Advanced course that introduces Electro-nux, Life Wire and the Westinghouse 440.
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.
When we finished, Simon Pegg came over and shook my hand, saying "This was better than the last one, and the last one was fantastic." I think Fire From Heaven definitely has the potential to be even better than Down to Earth, but I haven't heard the final mix yet, so I'll have to wait until it come out like everyone else.
13. 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…
14. 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.
15. Are there any other 2000AD/Megazine characters you'd like to hear (and/or adapt) for audio?
I try not to think too much about it, because I can get all excited about something, only to discover that it's creator-owned, or that the readers hated it. So I just sit back and wait for Big Finish to tell me what's coming up next. I'll take what I'm given.
16. Would you like to see BF experimenting more with the format? How about a Dredd/SD crossover? As you've penned scripts for both characters, you'd be the ideal man to write it…
Economically, a Dredd/SD crossover would be relatively cheap, because Toby Longworth plays Dredd and Wulf Sternhammer, so we'd get two for one. Creatively, well, it's a possibility, but they've already had a meeting engineered through time-travel in the mag, and surely once is enough? I did have an idea for a story that started in Dredd's time, and has a self-contained conclusion in Johnny's, but would require Dredd and Johnny's actors to cross-over between the two audios. So you would only see it as a cross-over if you wanted to buy them both. Less gimmicky that way, I think.
But I digress… experiment with the format? Like how? I wouldn't mind double-CD Dredds like they have for the Doctor Whos, but there's already a hell of a lot of space for experimentation already within a 60-minute CD. On a Big Finish CD, you're looking at a script the size of an entire series in the Megazine or 2000ad, and you get to fire that all into your listener's brain in one sitting. That's a great opportunity for storytelling. With the longer ones like Trapped on Titan, you're actually producing something that's only slightly smaller than a movie script.
There are many ways of telling a story on audio. Flashbacks, interviews, interrogations, media shows, narrations, wire taps… there's always something new to try. I pretty much like the format the way it is. Some people have suggested they might like some anthology stuff, you know, like shorter stories, but I think you can get short stories in the Megazine. The audio CDs present great opportunities to really explore all kinds of aspects of Dredd's world.
17. Finally, what have you got lined up for the future?
I'm finishing the next Judge Dredd audio, 99 Code Red, which has Dredd trying to keep control in a hospital that's been quarantined for an outbreak of Pustule Plague. I also have a pitch called Funky Mo-Pad - imagine having to stake out a drugs den that's doing 200 miles an hour at all times. I have an idea for a Holocaust Judges story called Dead Men Walking, but I haven't decided yet whether I'm pitching that at Big Finish or the Megazine as an actual strip. And while I was doing this interview, I was trying to think of examples to give you of situations where audio can really shine, and I came up with a Mega City court-room drama, with Dredd up before a Judge tribunal. I'm going to send that one off to Big Finish tonight! And I want to pitch a Strontium Dog story that has the cast fighting their own doubles - a sort of Mirror Mirror, with an evil Gronk, a beardless Wulf and a sane McNulty. Make the cast work twice as hard…
I've just completed Rat Town, a prose short story for the Megazine, (that might even have appeared by the time this sees print) and I'm currently in negotiations with the Black Library about their line of 2000ad novels. There's one in particular that I would like to do, which is an SD story called Ruthless - and if you want to know what it's about, there's a hint of the storyline in an off-hand comment Johnny makes in Fire From Heaven. And I'll say no more than that.