I am quite sure that I am not alone in having regrets about something I should have done but didn’t. There must be loads of people who once fancied a dabble on some dark-horse penny-share but decided not to take the risk and then watched it go stratospheric. Or perhaps they once thought of a great product -idea but couldn’t be bothered to pursue it only to see that same product in the shops five years and later selling like hot-cakes.
For me, it was the hit-stage play that I envisaged but never wrote. It was about a young couple who met at University in the sixties while they were both throwing themselves headlong into the counter-culture revolution as a means of rejecting the stuffy, conservative values of their staid, suburban parents.
Fast forward three decades and they are now both pillars of the Nulabour establishment. He is a journalist and she is a human rights lawyer. Their Islington home is a shrine to their innumerable cherished causes. Life is a series of earnest campaigns fuelled by a diet of polenta with rockett salad, washed down by ‘fairtrade’ Nicaraguan coffee. They are comfortable, happy cadres of the metropolitan elite blessed with an unshakeable moral certainty.
Until, that is, their teenage daughter returns home from University where she has discovered Ayn Rand and become a fiery devotee of free-market capitalism.
Then the comedy begins.
At the time I was jobbing as a scriptwriter churning out formulaic boilerplate for cable television and being quite handsomely rewarded for doing so. I had the basic characters and the outline plot but I suppose I was too addicted to the money stream to take the time off that actually writing the damn thing would have necessitated. So it never got written.
And now, it’s too late. What would have been groundbreaking comedy has been overtaken by reality: [From UK Times so no link]
Seventeen years after Huey Lewis and The News sang Hip to be Square, young people are joining the Tory party as a way of rebelling against their Labour-voting parents.
The Times interviewed new recruits and found many from a staunch Labour or Liberal Democrat background who relished the fact that being a Tory marked them out from the rest of their family and sometimes from the area they grew up in, too.
Looks like I was ahead of the curve.
One new recruit to the Tories, Caroline Hunt, 18, said: “In a way the role of opposition is to be the rebel, so yes it is a bit rebellious. Our lecturers at college are very left wing and they couldn’t believe how many of us were Tories all of a sudden. Out of a small class, eight of us put our hands up and said we were strong Conservatives”.
The ’68 generation may just be about to learn that what goes around, comes around.
And, by the way, a note to all readers: if you have a good idea, act on it immediately. The world will not wait for you.
Write it! It sounds like a great idea for a situation comedy. Art certainly can, and should, reflect contemporary reality. Now is the perfect time, it just won’t reflect how prophetic your idea truly was.
Sounds kind of like an American sitcom from the 80’s called “Family Ties”. A pair of aging hippies with a young Reaganite for a son…
It is wrong to say that you were ahead of the cureve. The better way to look at it is:
Now I have a market. Time to get a product.
Yeah, the screw’s gonna turn. One day all those aging radicals are going to wake up and realize what they’ve brought on themselves, and it’s not going to be pretty. Why?
Because they violated the first rule of politics: Never give your friends the kind of power that you wouldn’t want your enemies to have.
Or, put a little differently, every revolution eats its children.
Lol, I have been predicting this for several years. Just like Thatcher’s children are more radical than their parents, this lot are rebelling against the ludicrous middle-ground/third-way idea. I always liked Family Ties, because of Alex.
Probably better as a play than as a sitcom. The remoralisation of the young vs. the cynicism of the middleaged.
I’m not sure if I welcome this development. I can see this ghastly parade of ‘Virgins for Bloodsports’ marching down Whitehall.
Except these kids are Tories – not libertarians.
We hate the Tories – don’t we?
“Virgins for Bloodsports” huh?
*pop*
Heh…I GRADUATED with a bunch of Alex Keatons in 1985…If those born before 1965 are known as Boomers and those born after 1980 are known as GenX…who the heck are those born between 1965 and 1979????
I’d really like to know, because I was born in 1967 and I understood that the whole reason for teh 80s was to thumb noses at the hippies. No one I grew up with ever wanted to be said to follow in his boomer father/mother’s footsteps. And that meant conservatism.
I’ll never understand I guess.
“who the heck are those born between 1965 and 1979????”
Sheep to be shorn to keep the Boomers comfortable in their retirement.
Hi David,
Go for it, and write it. BTW, what do you think of this idea (sort of borrowed from Charles Dickens). I had this weird dream, last night, after watching the penultimate 24. It seems very serendipitous reading your post, this morning, but no word of lie, the play started something like this:
The Waterfall
Scene: Gordon Brown wakes up late one night, around 2am, the wind blowing outside in Whitehall. He’s been lying on a grubby sleeping bag in his office in the Treasury, surrounded by dead whisky bottles and curry boxes. With his usual dyed black hair slopping over his fat jowls, he’s wearing the usual cheap black suit, and soup-stained red tie, over an expanding waistline.
A ghost enters the room, the pale glimmering shape, at first, of a very old man, but somehow, familiar. The image clears, (behind a cloud of carbon dioxide) to reveal a slim man in a beautifully cut white suit, with an immaculate pink silk tie, laughter lines around his eyes, and a trim white-haired haircut – he looks a bit like one of those Prometheus statues on the front of Ayn Rand novels. He’s very handsome, but there’s something disturbing about one of his eyes, and you can’t quite place the face:
Ghost: A waterfall, Gordon, the economy’s on the edge of waterfall…whooohhh!!!! (he raises his hands, in a ghost-like way, and laughs)
Gordon: Who the hell are you?
Ghost: I’m you Gordon, in about thirty years.
Gordon: Prove it, you wee ghostie! (he sounds confident)
Ghost: You know that Murray Rothbard book, you’ve got there hidden in that wee beastie closet…(a bony finger points at the said closet)
Gordon: (Gordon’s eyes shoot to the closet) What book?
Ghost: You can’t fool me, Gordon boy, I’m you remember…that book…the one you’re afraid of reading, Man, Economy and State?
Gordon: (sounding slightly afraid) Err…what about it?
Ghost: Well, you will read it.
Gordon: I will never read that book!
Ghost: Oh no, Gordon? (the ghost smiles) You’re going to start reading it before the curtain comes down (the ghost winks at the audience)
Gordon: (Gordon looks out into the audience, he can’t see them) What curtain?
Ghost: Never mind, but you’re going to read that book.
Gordon: And what makes you so sure. Are you Phillip Gould?
Ghost: (the voice suddenly booms) No James Gordon Brown, you wittering fool, I’m you!!! (the floor of the office shakes, and piles of paper blow up in the air)
Gordon: No, no, the Budget, it’s all hanging by a thread, it’s only those pieces of paper which can hold it all together (he runs round, desperately clutching up his budget plans)
Ghost: Forget it, Gordon. You’re deluding ye-self.
Gordon: No, I’ve found the Philosophers’ Stone, I can make socialism work!
Ghost: (The ghost laughs, a chilling laugh, for about 20 seconds) So, have ye? How do you know?
Gordon: It’s working, it’s all working.
Ghost: The waterfall, Gordon, the waterfall. You’ve been living on borrowed time. And ye know it.
Gordon: But I’ve removed Boom and Bust…
Ghost: …But you’re borrowing on the business cycle, aren’t you, and you always use that as an excuse when your borrowing is mentioned. But what the hell is a business cycle, but a period of boom and bust? Come on, boy, tell me?
Gordon: I’ve got rid of inflation…
Ghost: Any government can get rid of inflation. All they have to do is stop inflating (the ghost laughs again)
Gordon: I will not listen to this calumny.
Ghost: I’m afraid you have to, you horrible toad. Because I’m here to save you, and your budget. I don’t want to go down as the laughing stock of history.
Gordon: (a pause, Gordon slumps down at his big oak desk) How can you save me? (he’s still clutching his Budget, like a new born babe)
Ghost: I’ve already told ye, had ye the wit to listen. You’re going to read that book.
Gordon: And what happens then?
Ghost: You turn into me.
Gordon: And what the hell are you?
Ghost: Can’t ye guess? You used to be clever once, when we were a wee boy.
Gordon: (shakes his head, dumbfounded)
Ghost: I am a Rothbardian…In fact, some say that I am THE Rothbardian…
And so it continues, till the end of the play, 2 acts later, when Gordon opens the book, just before the curtain comes down.
Oh well, keeps me off the streets! 🙂
Rgds,
AndyD
Hey, what’s wrong with polenta?