This book is dedicated to Marc Beeby.
He was a man of remarkable talent who, with just one or two exceptions, produced all the BBC radio dramas and comedy series that Caroline and I wrote over a period of about twenty years, including the two series of plays about Norman Birkett, the barrister on whom Skelton is very loosely based.
He died at the end of 2020.
Marc was blessed with rare insight. He understood not just how writers work, but intuitively how we worked, and it was the same with actors. After a particularly bad take, while Caroline and I were hoping he’d seriously consider recasting at least a couple of the parts, Marc would be thinking. Then he’d pop into the studio and, 376full of encouragement, put everything right. Often his remarks to the cast seemed to have little to do with what, it seemed to us, was going wrong. But Marc understood the psychology of acting, the insecurities and other troubles that can bind talent. He knew exactly how to calm, chivvy or coax. Often the difference between take one and take two was the miraculous equivalent of turning water into wine.
Though sometimes in the pub afterwards, he would confess to wanting to murder this or that member of the cast – and at times I’m fairly sure he wanted to murder us – I never once saw him lose his rag in the studio.
He was erudite and very funny.
I don’t think we’ll be writing for radio any more. It wouldn’t be the same without Marc. We miss him.
Nearly all the stories in the book – main plots and minor subplots – are based in some measure on real events.
The annoying thing about true stories is that they’re usually too complicated or too simple to make a decent narrative. The protagonists learn of the twist in the tale too early or too late, or they come upon it too easily; or there is no twist and one has to be manufactured. Events are often too bizarre for plausibility or too mundane to be interesting. And, in real life, people often do things apparently for no reason – again an unacceptable trait in what usually passes as a decent story (although Shakespeare flirted with the idea in Hamlet). 377
The burning car mystery dominated the headlines at the end of 1930. The names and many of the incidents have been changed in this heavily fictionalised version but many of the details – even some of the stranger ones – are based in fact. I won’t mention which ones because, if you’re working backwards and reading this before embarking on the book itself, it might give the game away.
The medical electrician subplot too, is based on a real case, again heavily fictionalised, this time largely because the real events were downright distressing and would have added notes of dread and gloom where they would have been inappropriate.
Trawling though old newspapers is a wonderful way of avoiding the pain of actual writing and can happily fill days and weeks. I try to convince myself it’s something more than procrastination—that all the time I’m reading about the Heysham Ramblers’ Club Annual Picnic in The Morecambe Guardian or studying the five-a-side football results in the Linlithgowshire Gazette, the book is forming itself magically in my head. But this is a glaring delusion.
Having said that, though the book’s never going to get written this way, one does now and then turn up nuggets of pure gold that make the hours spent prospecting spuriously worthwhile.
The events at the Lord Mayor’s show – which are all true (you can even watch some of the parade on YouTube) were a delightful discovery and came in useful, as did the incident with the eels. Both contributed to the bubbling of doubts 378that, in the end, leads Skelton to reassess the course of his career.
The ‘knickerbocker/plus fours’ case probably fits into the category of ‘too bizarre to be plausible’ but it did indeed happen at the Eastbourne County Court in August 1930, and, unlike the plus fours in question, needed very little alteration to be a good fit for Skelton.
The inept safe-cracker story is almost entirely true, as is case of the sweating policeman and – with the dates shifted by a few months – many of the things Rose and Vernon witness in Heidelberg.
Oh, and if your appetite for Czech cubist furniture has been whetted, you’ll be glad to know there’s a permanent exhibition displaying some fine examples at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague.
David Stafford 28/06/2022