Out on the Razz

On Tuesday of this week I had the great pleasure of participating in an event that gave money to the deserving poor. It was nothing to do with the Lottery, though the poor people in this case were playwrights, and they had won £5,000 apiece.

The Pearson Television Playwrights Scheme organizes this annual prizegiving. Their motives, though laudable, are not entirely altruistic. Television needs writers. Without writers it would turn its tube to the corner of the room and die. It's a fact that quite a lot of seemingly intelligent television reviewers do not realize that writers are involved in the production of a drama. Actors are used to fans approaching them in the street and saying, ‘I saw you in that thing on TV last night. I don't know how you make those words up on the spur of the moment, but what you said was very clever/very funny/made me cry.’

A few actors accept this badly misguided praise. ‘How very kind, they murmur modestly whilst scribbling their immodest, flamboyant signatures inside the fan's autograph book or whichever crumpled piece of paper is dredged up from the bottom of a handbag. Other, more honest, actors tell the blunt truth: ‘I don't make the words up. A writer does.’ But this does not usually go down too well. It's a bit like trying to explain to a ten-year-old child that Michael Jackson used to be black or that Dame Edna Everage is actually a man called Barry Humphries who has a taste for high culture and a particular interest in classical literature.

So I am obviously pleased to be a part of a scheme that celebrates and encourages young playwrights. In truth, they are not that young, but these things are relative. I'm used to seeing twelve-year-old policemen flexing their batons. I was in a shop recently when a fraught customer, holding a faulty purse, called for the manager. To my surprise, I saw an eight-year-old girl stroll out of the back room. This child (who should have been at home playing mummies and daddies with Barbie and Ken) proceeded to reel off a whole clause of the Consumer Protection Act as it related to the purse, whose press stud had fallen off some three months earlier. Anyway, I mustn't get sidetracked, though I have to say that, unusually for me, my sympathies this time lay with the shop. The owner of the purse looked to me as though she'd be very heavy on a press stud. She'd obviously violently wrenched her purse open one too many times; and anyway, why wait three months to complain? She said herself that she worked in the town. Why not call in and complain on the first day that the purse failed to fasten? Anyway, I mustn't get sidetracked. But I'll just tell you the outcome of this small human drama. The child/manageress offered the woman a credit note for the cost of the purse (which was very magnanimous of her, I thought). The complainant then cast a cursory eye over the huge range of purses on sale and declared that she didn't like a single one of them and wanted £9.99 cash in hand. At this point, I wanted to join in and remonstrate with the purse woman, but I managed to draw back from the brink, only allowing myself to signal my solidarity with the child/manageress by a system of smiles and eye-rolling. Anyway, as I said earlier, I mustn't get sidetracked.

After the playwrights' cheques had been handed out, there was a small reception: drink was taken, vegetables were dipped, and we posed for photographs. Eventually, people drifted away, leaving only the playwrights, a playwright's dancer girlfriend, a few bottles of wine and myself. A dangerous combination.

Much, much later, our party fell into a black cab, and the last I saw of the playwrights and the dancer was them standing in a Soho street waving happily as my cab sped me to St Pancras station and the train to Leicester.

At 11.30 p.m. I phoned my husband from the train using the words that are so mocked by those who despise mobile phones: ‘Hello. I'm on the train.’ I had slept past Kettering, Market Harborough and Leicester, and God knows where else, and awoke to find myself in a stationary train on a dark, deserted railway station. My footsteps echoed as I walked out of the station. Nottingham was devoid of humans. Taxi drivers were snoring under their duvets. A man wearing a neck brace let me into a small hotel near the station. ‘Cash only,’ he said suspiciously. I've rarely seen so much Formica in such a small space, but I slept soundly enough. In the morning I looked out of the bedroom window and saw that the canal, murky and deep, lay below. I thought briefly about throwing myself in but decided that life, even for somebody as stupid as me, has to go on.