Song To The Siren

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Hello from out here on the Thames Delta.

Notes on episode three of THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT, “Song To The Siren,” are towards the bottom of this letter. You can have a listen to the episode first if you want.

OPERATIONS

I’m a little low energy this week, if I’m honest. I looked at my schedule and realised that the only way I was going to get it back on track was a period of producing ten finished pages a day. I’m writing this bit on Saturday morning before I go and get my ten, which will mean sixty pages in six days. That’s the equivalent of three comics scripts, an hour-long tv episode or half a screenplay. This is a stupid thing to be doing at my age, or frankly at any age. But! I can still do it.

Sometimes I need to know I can still do it.

Nobody in my family lived long enough to get dementia. Everyone I’m aware of died by 65. My genetic heritage says I’m into my last ten years of life. I feel fine, by the way. But, having experienced aphasia, and looking at the stats that say dementia has been the leading cause of death in the UK in the last ten years… well, it’s not necessarily the death that worries you. It’s everything before that. It’s all the things that mean I won’t be able to get up and write ten pages with intent when I want to.

I dunno. Maybe I’m just tired. But this week two old friends of mine ended up in hospital and there’s a fair chance they won’t make it out again, another one’s heading towards an assisted-living facility and yet another is now on a cane, and they’re all around my age. So, yeah. Some weeks you wonder how long you can keep doing the things.

Just enjoy doing them while you can, I guess.

Hey, when Knausgaard has a whiny complain everyone fucking laps it up.

Tomorrow morning I’m digging out a tree.

Normal service next week!

ORBITAL

STUFF

Alfred Gough and Miles Millar have acquired film rights to my favourite monthly comic book, ICE CREAM MAN.

A short film for Richard Skelton’s “Bearer,”

Former Apple chief designed Jony Ive now makes jackets.

Camp Mograph.

THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT

EPISODE 103: “SONG TO THE SIREN”

This is the “outlier” episode - the one that doesn’t use dark matter. Illustrating that the series doesn’t have to be all about that.

I’d had this thing in a notebook for something like fifteen years - I’d read somewhere that sonics could affect brain proteomics badly. So I’d had this one note about brain proteins being destabilised by sound, and never had anywhere to use it that quite fit. Until I was reminded of the Hungarian suicide song. “Gloomy Sunday.” Whose original title, apparently, translated as “The World Is Ending.”

We couldn’t actually use the song in its fullness, as it’s still in copyright in some places. But I hadn’t intended to. There’s a lot of “Au Clair de la Lune” in the music Carnack plays through the imp3 player, a French folk song that was the first music ever recorded to physical media, in 1860. That media has been recovered and can be heard in various places, including here. Once again, this is me relating things back to the beginnings of mechanical sound transmission.

So this one is a weird crime story. While tying back to elements introduced in earlier episodes. It presents another path for the show to possibly explore in the future. And James Callis as a detective seems so obvious I can’t believe it hasn’t happened before.

Trey Toy, who created our theme and incidental pieces, put the music together for us, with all its weird pulses, and did an unsettling, marvellous job. Creepy thing, innit? It was a difficult ask, and he nailed it, eerie binaurals and all.

Adrianne Palicki, the woman who beat the shit out of John Wick. And would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for that pesky Willem Dafoe. Another casting coup by Meredith. She was a lot of fun to work with.

(Her brother, noted writer Eric Palicki, wrote to me to tell me that Adrianne had never mentioned this job to him, that he had to find out about it from a press release, and that she is dead to him now. Oops. )

Note: if your actors have to perform vomiting, try and move it to the very end of the session. I learned that during my set visit to the GLOBAL FREQUENCY pilot way back when, when John Rogers stepped in to get Jenni Baird to fake-puke with less force. The act of energetically performing a good hard gut-chuck can blow out an actor’s throat. And since an actor always wants to give their best, you move that bit to the end of the day in case they hurt themselves.

Episode 4 goes live on Tuesday.

GOT MORE TIME?

LTD

Notes on the Netflix show KAOS.

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Hold on tight. See you next week.

W