L’Esprit d’Escalier

29th May, Broadcasting House: the birth of a new brand of surreal, panic-fuelled Factory work.

In the foyer six of us (Linda, Bailey, Alex H, T’Evans, Muller and me, Fed) talked, absurdly, about death and dementia until we were led into a holding studio. Here we were promised sandwiches and water and I was given enough paper to write a novel.
Half of us were wearing Converse Trainers - so we talked about this for a while. At this stage none of us really knew what we were there for.

We seem to have moved from Hamlet in which we had lines we could bang through before we went up - to The Seagull in which, less solidly, we have units to discuss and look at - to this, where we find we can do nothing before the show but stare at each other’s shoes.
Truly the Factory is pushing itself off higher and higher buildings.

We were taken down to a studio where Wendy Cope (sorry Josh Hartnett - The Globe was Yesterday’s Triumph) and Ian Macmillan (we’re there for his programme it turns out) were gathered. The programme began - Ian asked T’Ev and Alex what the hell the Factory was and then he gave us our challenge:
On the train into London Ian likes to sit in the bit in between the carriages which is peaceful and he can be undisturbed. The guy who collects the rubbish always manages to put his bag down in this space, which disturbs him very much. This morning, and it seemed simultaneously with this disturbance, he was sitting outside Grantham (why Grantham?) watching a golfer taking a hopeful swing, watched by his mates, and toppling arse-over-tit missing the ball. Perfect sunny day, total humiliation. Perfect little in-between-the-carriages world, total invasion. So he wanted us to take this offering which he summed up as: Frustration - and make a 3-6 minute audio something of it. We were to return to the studio in twenty-five minutes to present, indeed record, our audio piece.
In one take.
Oh and because Wendy Cope was there he wanted something to rhyme.
Rhyme.
I ask you.
I can’t rhyme things - I feel about 6 when I try. I’ll do meter - but I’m so not Wendy Cope. When it came to it - someone else came up with the rhyme.

At the end of the programme, after we had done it, Ian asked how we “came up with that?” It was a very difficult question to answer. It looked a bit like what follows which I think looks a bit like a compression of any creative process and what we have been doing on Monday nights with various BBC producers.

I took notes on nearly everything that was said in the studio from the moment we walked in - honestly you start taking notes and it all starts to look like poetry. Wendy Cope has sweetener on her porridge. Ian jams and thinks thought is the enemy of improvisation. Alex says a spade can be a skull. T’Evan’s does not plug the Pleasance gig. Because he is too cool and the Factory doesn’t advertise - not even when handed a free spot on national radio. (Even Radio 3 has an audience of millions, T’Ev…)

We grabbed props on the way out - a plastic sandwich tray lid, a bottle, sandwiches, other interesting things, sandwiches, food mainly.
And then we had something to talk about.

T’ev and Alex were doing some kicking each other about not saying the perfect thing when asked what the hell the Factory was. As usual they couldn’t work themselves into a paranoic lather like real people. They just faked it for a minute. Balanced mincers.
Bailey came up with the beautiful phrase L’Esprit d’Escalier. Staircase wit. The sensation of coming up with the perfect reply or phrase once it is too late (and then she demonstrated getting one foot on the stairs and realizing what might have been… which I will cherish.)
We rapped about many things that naturally arose from Ian’s offer: his precious train domain, the beautiful day outside, the real world impinging on these little stories of Perfect Peace, the golfer making a t*** of himself ruining a lovely day.
How we congratulated ourselves when Muller pointed out that Thatcher came to power thirty years ago today - and here we are on a sunny day outside Grantham. But we had to ditch that as it kind of took us nowhere.
There was also a lot of self-referential stuff about being a bunch of actors frustratedly trying to come up with... that was quickly dumped thankgod.

We kept coming back to this Rubbish Guy - this little guy doing his job - so we decided he was our Hero. We quickly ran through various techniques we have learned on Monday nights: creating an environment, sources of dialogue (phone calls etc), the traveling mic and threw them together into a little melange in which (hopefully) we travel with the Bin Guy who we called “The Collector” (the title also) as he travelled through a train carriage collecting people’s recyclables, crisp bags and coffee cups as well as their personal frustrations and emotional waste.
Simon was elected that man. The repository for everyone’s crap - a large plastic bag his only friend.

On the way he encountered Alex very cross about a sandwich he’s allergic to (“I’ve paid £4 for anaphylactic shock. £4!”); Linda scrabbling about on the floor looking for her sweetener (“I’m sorry I simply can’t drink my coffee without it.”); Bailey peeling an orange and talking on the phone (“Don’t go. Don’t go. Not you - the rubbish guy. Yes you. No, not you. You.”) and Alex and me regretting that we hadn’t done some interview properly (“I left out the shameless plug”). In the end Bin Guy goes through the shushing doors and we return to his internal dialogue interrupted by Ian wanting him to put his rubbish down somewhere else. In Rhyme.

It was a typical Monday night exercise but we were operating under a lot, lot more pressure.
Twenty-five minutes.
Radio 3 - no, I mean, Radio 3.
(Wendy Cope. Really.)

You must know - calm reader - that when we went down to the studio to record this thing we had never run it through. No, no rehearsal. At all. Just frantic discussion. Luckily this is the Factory and rehearsal is anathema.
Why, and heck, we’ve never rehearsed the Seagull either.
Rehearsal is anathema and so is the writer. Who knows who wrote what? - we all pulled it together. I remember scribbling furiously for twenty minutes but emerged with only two-and-half pages of hieroglyphs, not much of which we really needed. I thought: "the imprint of the writer is but a watermark in this enterprise"… but I thought that on the Escaliers.

We tipped out of Broadcasting House like a bunch of amateurs who’d just done the Royal Variety Show. We had our photo taken in front of the bronze British Broadcasting Corporation plaque.

God knows what it sounds like.

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