The Script

I’d originally thought that Prescott had been murdered shortly before completing his weblog on www.the-firm.org, but we needed someone to introduce the film, and since he started his working life as a journalist before turning gumshoe he seemed a good choice, especially with his friend Phil Bryant as the inside man.

I’d written a little scene between the two, and enjoyed the contrasts – Prescott thinks he’s a smart, cynical and savvy operator, and therefore cleverer than Bryant, who clearly has ideals, but Bryant show shim that this isn’t so. In the story online, Prescott finally sticks his neck out a foot too far, and loses his job trying to solve the case, but right until the end I never knew if Prescott cared more about saving the students than he did about the kudos of being seen to do it, along with the TV appearances and the book deal. In truth, I don’t know if he did either. If her is a hero, he’s a thoroughly flawed one, and that’s why I wanted to play him; I find him a very attractive character.

One aspect of the tone of the story mirrors the yarn online; it looks you very squarely in the eye, and tells you lie after fib after shameless whopper, with no Pythonesque eye-rolling or the ‘Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away…’

Something that it reminds me of is Dean Swift’s satire on the excellent recommendations for eating children; the first three members of staff used as talking heads seem so reasonable, then you realize that what they are justifying is beating teenagers, and still none of them sound like the raving pedagogues that they most certainly are. The second set of talking heads are just the same, only worse (because we’re in on the joke by then); they see themselves as honest, decent people, doing what they know to be right; it just happens to be against the law. They really are opening their hearts – in much the same way as old (and not so old) gangsters fondly reminisce about punch-ups with other gangsters.

The gangs all had to have their own style, and I didn’t want any of them to come across as very nice, even New School and Heavy, who are technically the good guys. I did get New School as far into the depths of Chavery as I could, but I don’t think Heavy came across as the serious force I’d originally intended: It doesn’t help that the Zoe character has to carry most of the internet link part of the story .

The Blue Brigade scene was by far the most fun to write because villains can say things nobody else can. I was using the language of the extreme right, but the huge Blue Brigade logo replace the Swastika, and Birgit bought her own ‘Life of Vlad the Impaler’ to read. Marlene’s description of Rosalee as a ‘filthy little… degenerate’ implies a banked down visceral hatred, while Jo’s is a much more direct (and stolen from ‘Snatch’) ‘I funkin’ hate Pikeys’. Marlene wouldn’t put it like that, she’s so sincere in her wish to be the acceptable face of mindless prejudice that she’s started to believe that she really is on the side of the angels.

The chocolates were a nod to Ian McKellern’s Richard III, who munches chocs while watching the newsreel of his own coronation and plotting the princes’ murder.

There’s some difficulty in writing Old School, because most of the development of the gang ethos was driven by someone that just wanted to avoid being at a disadvantage in any way whatsoever, while at the same time demanding that I think of all the answers, and in the end the answer seemed to be that they were up to something very clandestine and sinister, but nobody really knew what; originally the person in question was cast as the Old School spokes-girl, and she approved the lines as we’d written them, but I think it’s unfortunate that they don’t have any hidden Achilles’ heel, because it makes them less interesting. I found myself falling back on Machiavelli, If… and Manchurian Candidate staples.

Sharp Set were so much easier to write for because they’re gangsters, with all the naked greed and amorality of career crooks, with no self-deceit whatsoever beyond the snappy suits, and there is so much material to be stolen from Bugsy Seigel (whose picture appears in the scene) to Bugsy Malone (whose doesn’t).

As I mentioned above, I don’t think that Heavy really got their due, but beyond the heavy rock and booze, I didn’t really know that much about them, and I really feel the same about Punk; in both cases I really need another mind to come up with ideas to develop what’s already there. I’m relying on the visuals and performances to carry the ideas, and hopefully someone will come forward.

The flashback to 1986 that forms part of Scene 26 is part of an interview with Mary Schofield, the Labour MP that did much of the work to make the LCPS a reality. When I invented Mary Schofield on top of a Warwickshire bus in 2005, I’d envisaged a proto-New-Labourite, very much in the mould of Harriet Harmon or Barbara Roche, but somehow wrong – that is more wrong! Someone that could fit in with the whole Labour ideology, but still be entirely committed to CP, and be totally unscrupulous in upholding it, even to the point of breaking numerous laws, and risking public disgrace and imprisonment, and getting away with it.

In Mary Schofield’s speech to camera, I was trying to use 1980s Conservative language – Freedom of Choice – as a weapon of a Labour MP, flying in the face of her own party’s agenda, and in the most sensible and reasonable terms. If Edwina Currie or Ann Winterton had come out with the same stuff, I don’t think anyone would have looked twice, but there should have been hell up over someone like Mary Schofield doing it; that she clearly got away with it implies that Kinnock’s spin doctors somehow got transmission stopped, but goodness knows how she escaped with her career intact – which she obviously did – that’s one of the frightening things about her; she’s not just transparently evil, she’s a survivor.