Happy Anachistmas!
This week: Foiled writing stats, lab-grown meat, and buying a month's worth of gas...
Happy Friday!
And welcome to the final newsletter before the remote recording of Series 4 of Foiled!
The show is normally done and dusted by the summer, but obviously this year things have been interrupted somewhat. If you’re interested in how a BBC radio sitcom gets made during a pandemic, let me tell you a little about the process…
Before we get into that, here are links to this week’s three reads for those of you who prefer to read outside the inbox:
How to write a BBC radio sitcom during a global pandemic (3 minute read)
The charity/solidarity files: cooking on gas/happy anachistmas! (3 minute read)
He’s not the messiah, he’s an ethically ambiguous cut of lab-grown meat (2 minute read)
Beth Granville and I started working on the scripts at the end of March, making use of the uncertainty of the first lockdown to produce first drafts of three of the four episodes. We worked remotely, of course, and although we shared script ideas and weekly phone calls, we wrote more or less independently during this first phase.
(For the writing data geeks among you 👋 I spent 75.5 hours working on the project over those three months of sunny loneliness.)
We took a hiatus over the summer months and then, slapped with a November deadline, took up our keyboards again at the beginning of October.
I don’t mind sharing with you the fact that our producer hated two of the draft episodes we’d handed in. It’s hard to say whether that was down to the distance between Beth and I, the distractions of the health crisis or—I think most likely—the natural process of writing anything.
This second, autumnal phase was marked by much closer collaboration, with phone calls every other day and the luxury of ten days of in-person time, spread over three blocks. There was a lot of work to be done.
But gradually, as the hours totted up, the scripts, as they do, started to fall into place. We got great feedback from the producer, first on one episode (‘Oh my giddy aunt this is wonderful’), then on another (‘Hoorah! This is fucking WONDERFUL’) and finally on the series closer (‘I think this is the best episode you’ve ever done’).
There was just one problem: we’d been hired to write four episodes, not three. Episode 1, that big bang series opener, didn’t exist yet. This was last Tuesday, the last Tuesday in November. Our deadline was the first Tuesday in December.
We made that deadline.
I don’t know how, but we started, muddled and finished a 30-page radio sitcom episode in a week. Actually, I do know how: by spending a lot of time writing.
(Precisely 30.5 hours from my side, plus more from Beth and a day with comedian Adam Hess. Incidentally, this episode broke last year’s three-week record for fastest ever script—but the number of hours spent writing were identical.)
On Wednesday, we heard from our producer: ‘This is fucking great. Funny, feasible, surprising but makes sense—it’s ticking all my comedy boxes.’
Finally, 8 months, 213.5 logged writing hours and a global pandemic after we started, we have (almost) finished.
(This compares with our experiences last year. I estimated that Series 3 took about 50 hours per episode, but that excluded time spent talking through story with Beth. The ~54 hours per episode this year includes most of that time. Although our 2020 writing process has felt quite different, the amount of effort has been identical.)
Foiled is due for broadcast on BBC Radio Wales and BBC Sounds in late January. I hope you enjoy listening as much as we’ve enjoyed writing. There really is no substitute for putting the hours in.
The Solidarity Files
It’s December, which means that many people are thinking about making chartiable donations. As you’ll know if you’ve been following closely, I really don’t like to call my financial donations ‘charity’. I much prefer the word ‘solidarity’.
This shift in vocabulary leads to an interesting shift in mindset that opens up potentially more impactful uses for my money. Many groups doing great work can’t afford (in money, time, privilege or expertise) to become official charities, but they have as great if not greater need for donations.
1. Cooking On Gas
Wednesday was Khora’s birthday. To celebrate, I bought them a month’s worth of gas.
What the hell am I talking about? Re-e-wind.
This week, Khora Community Kitchen celebrated one whole year of its latest incarnation. The kitchen couldn’t have re-opened at a more critical time and has continued to serve a thousand meals a day to refugees, migrants and people in need living through lockdown in Athens, Greece.
A thousand meals a day doesn’t come for free, of course. Funded by solidarity donations from across the world, Khora gives everyone the chance to contribute by chipping in for cooking oil, vegetables or even a month’s worth of gas—‘You buy the food, we serve the meals.’
You can help Khora by buying them washing up liquid (€4), tea for a day (€10) or bread for a week (€100) in their online ‘store’.
It’s a remarkable project that you can now see for yourself in this epic video of Kareem and the crew preparing Palestinian maqluba (mmm!) for about 950 people. You can also watch on Instagram or Facebook.
2. Happy Anachistmas!
You might have seen the wonderful Dope magazine being sold by street vendors around the UK. If you haven’t, then it’s basically a better version of The Big Issue (better for readers, better for the vendors), but it’s not a charity—and deliberately so.
Dope is completely free for vendors and the vendors keep all of the £3 cover price. The writing, design, printing and distribution of Dope is funded by solidarity contributions on Patreon and people buying copies of the magazine directly from publisher Dog Section Press.
In contrast, The Big Issue costs vendors £1.25 and they make only £1.25 profit per issue sold. The Big Issue makes a big noise about how their 1500 vendors made £5.5m in profits last year, but that’s only £3,700 for each vendor on average—nowhere near enough money to even begin to think about a life off the streets. And, with a 50/50 profit share, it means that The Big Issue itself made £5.5m in profits.
This is not to say that The Big Issue are necessarily doing bad things with that money—I honestly have no idea—only that they could be helping people much more directly. If Dope had similar distribution and sales, vendors would be making an average of £8,800 each. Now, this is not a fortune for anyone, but it is just enough money for vendors to support themselves, on the streets or off.
Vive la solidarité!
What about you? I’d love to hear of any other non-charity contributions that this little newsletter community makes or would recommend.
He’s not the messiah, he’s an ethically ambiguous cut of lab-grown meat
Yesterday, a friend sent me a Guardian article that announced the regulatory authority approval in Singapore of lab-grown meat. It’s news that has been met with cautious optimism.
Unlike livestock, lab-grown meat doesn’t need to be injected with antibiotics, which—quite apart from being healthier for meat-eaters—would also help protect even non-meat-eaters against what the World Health Organisation calls ‘one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today’: antibiotic resistance.
If lab-grown meat replaces animal-grown meat consumption, then it could also reduce the amount of land used to raise livestock and thus remove one of the biggest drivers for land use change, a major contributor to the current climate and biodiversity crises.
Reading this news article more closely, it becomes clear that it is still a story of ‘ifs’ and ‘coulds’:
The small scale of current cultured meat production requires a relatively high use of energy and therefore carbon emissions. But once scaled up its manufacturers say it will produce much lower emissions and use far less water and land than conventional meat.
My question is: how far would lab-grown meat have to come before it could challenge a plant-based diet for lowest environmental impact?
Even if it does, it’s far from a given that lab-grown meat actually would replace animal-grown meat. What if the only market for lab-grown meat turns out to be people currently eating a plant-based diet for ethical reasons and animal-grown meat continues to rise unabated?
Surprisingly, a 2019 study that examined dietary data from 137 countries around the world found that the level of meat production has a bigger influence on what we eat than our appetites: the more meat that is grown, the more we eat. So what if lab-grown meat makes us more dependent on animal meat rather than less?
The study also found that the two biggest drivers of rising global meat consumption are income and rate of urbanisation. Given that the rate of urbanisation is highest in countries like Uganda, Burundi, Liberia, Laos and Afghanistan, what reason is there to think that these people would have access to expensive lab-meat factories?
The word ‘news’ comes from the Latin ‘novus’, which means ‘unusual’. News stories, like this Guardian article, are stories that are unusual. Most of the time, that means there is a more mundane, less ‘newsworthy’ story. In this case: a surer way of reducing landscape use change and our vulnerability to antibiotic resistance is to lose our taste for flesh, however it’s grown.
Any more for any more?
Next Thursday, as part of what has to be called an all star cast, Foiled creator and co-writer Beth Granville is performing (performing!) a staged reading of Agatha Christie’s The Hollow in front of a live audience (a live audience!) at the Riverside Studios in London. It’s Covid-secure and all proceeds go towards Theatre Support Fund+ and Acting for Others. Book your bubble here!
Tomorrow morning, I’ll be going for my first Mental Health Swim, a brilliant community initiative that helps people discover the awesome properties of jumping into cold water (see also: Wim Hof). Their motto, ‘dips not distances, community not competition’, says it all. Huge thanks to R for hosting the Bournemouth chapter! Always take the swim.
The weekend brings the finishing touches to Foiled before the recording on Thursday and Friday. Beyond that, I’m planning a long walk before Christmas. The living room is slowly filling with miscellaneous pieces of camping and hiking equipment: excitement is building.
I’m far from being even an amateur weather forecaster, but the sky over the ocean is scalloped so I’d better finish here and get out for a run before the rain begins.
Big love,
dc:
CREDITS
Hello, I’m David Charles and I wrote this newsletter. I publish another newsletter about reading called Books Make Books. I’m co-writer of BBC Radio Wales sitcom Foiled, and also write for The Bike Project, the Center for International Forestry Research and Thighs of Steel. Reply to this email, or delve into the archive on davidcharles.info.
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