Interviews Robin Bell - Twisted Showcase by DJ Forrest

(2^nd October 2017)

I don’t know what it is with me and technology. I spent the first 30 seconds searching for the speakers on the laptop, so that I could rest the voice recorder against it.

Robin’s dog, a cute little Shih Tzu, busily played with a squeaky toy during the interview, what a cute little dog it is.

Twisted Showcase is something I’ve only seen a few episodes of, mostly of which were the episodes Gareth appeared in, but from a writing point of view, I wanted to know more about the web series, and the ideas behind the show and indeed the creator of the series – Robin Bell.

So, naturally I started the questions off with Payback, the episode which saw Gareth as a ‘head in a box’ which goes a little further than Captain Jack with his head in a jar!!!

What was the story idea behind Payback, as I didn’t understand why Chris’ ‘friend’ had gone to such extremes - what had Gareth’s character done to annoy him?

Robin: There’s something there in the background isn’t there, but we just wanted to play it out as the story about those pay day loans that you see and how horrible they are, but then it turns out that it’s a friend getting some sort of payback or taking over this guy’s life.

It did run a little bit longer initially, taking his feet then his arms and then his head, but we went for feet, then going straight to his head. We didn’t know if we were going to pull off the special effect or not. I thought it looked pretty good. Gareth’s dead head in a box!!!

Where did the ideas come from when you first started writing for Twisted Showcase?

Robin: I think initially we were a lot freer with the ideas, and as we kind of made the show, we thought, let’s make things that have meaning to us and then have this kind of factoring like a normal idea of someone being in debt, and strapped about paying back that debt, then let’s take it to the next level and see how far we can take that idea to make it kind of scary. Some people have found Payback quite funny, the loan that you pay back with your body.

Like we had an episode with Norman Lovett, where recently he was getting annoyed with internet trolls, and the opinions online, so we had the character starts paying back these people with feeding them, (he laughs), his own kind of, he calls it toilet soup? But it’s made from…(well, I'm sure you can guess). 

So yeah, we kind of thought we wanted to have ideas that had meanings to us but push them to that level where they could either seem tremendously scary or tremendously silly or a mixture of the two really. They kind of tread that fine wire between the two, like Be My Head.

Why was it a reason to make Twisted Showcase a web series and not mainstream? Was it the level of material you were using?

Robin: Yeah, when we started out, just basically me and a few mates thinking ‘Let’s make some stuff,’ really. We wrote the episode Peter and Paul, and we realised it had two characters that needed to be played by the same actor, and thought Oh my God we need someone really good to play this. So, I was at a ComicCon and Gareth was in attendance and someone said,

‘Why don’t you ask Gareth?’ I thought, that’s a ridiculous idea, he’d never do this.

But we asked him, and he said, ‘Send us the script.’ So, we sent him the script, and we still never thought we’d hear from him again, and then he got in touch within a week or two said this is a really interesting idea, I want to be a part of it, so it all started from there really. Then we got named in the Guardian. We decided to carry on making them and Gareth’s come back again as being Payback, and he’s come back to being Be My Head which he’s directing as well so it’s quite exciting.

I think Twisted Showcase can be quite scary but it’s more about being – odd, I think.

What have been the most challenging of episodes for Twisted Showcase?

Robin: I think Payback was quite challenging and then we had a couple of special effects in there which we tried a couple in Series Three. They all come with different sorts of challenges really. Be My Head was, because we always try and shoot the films within a day and Be My Head is 15 minutes long which is the longest film we’ve done. So, we have to shoot an awful lot within the day to get that done so that was quite challenging.

It’s always odd when you’re on set, it’s so exhilarating and exciting to get through it and see your words be changed by the actors and brought to life. It’s quite exciting when you’re there. I think challenging is getting everything together so you’ve got the director and the crew and the cast altogether on the same day. You’ve got hotels booked and because I’m not a very organised person anyway, getting all that organised, is a difficult thing. And so when you’re on a set, right, this is the exciting bit now.

Even if you are organised, there’s always something you forget though, isn’t there?

Robin: Yeah, like launching the first episode tomorrow,(3^rd October 2017), I’ve got to get all the Press releases out and I’ve got to make sure I’ve told all these people that …. and you don’t want to kind of offend anyone as well.

You’ve answered one of my other questions with regards to the length of each episode.

Robin: Yeah, we normally aim for the script to be between 5 and 7 pages, so yeah usually about 5 and 8 minutes long. With Be My Head, me and Gareth sent it back and forth co-writing so it would start with 9 pages and it ended up being round about 11, and there was a bit of improvisation on set so, then being a little bit longer than it was. You’ll probably see the improvised bits with Mark’s character who’s a kind of two hander with Gareth, and you can sort of see where his hands are a little bit unhinged and he’s off on a tangent and it’s really brilliant in the episode but it was like ‘Oh my God where is he going now?’ Do we have to draw this back, and we did every time?

Is that the Mark that’s in CBBC Wolfblood?

Robin: Yes, he’s in Wolfblood, and he’s in Being Human. (Both of us then tried to think of the actor who played the vampire in the first series before Aidan Turner – both of us failed – if anyone knows this – please put us out of our misery!)

We’ve got the creator of Wolfblood – Debbie Moon in the second episode for Twisted Showcase.

I read or heard it on your SoundCloud interview that Twisted Showcase is a platform for new writers and actors?

Robin: Yeah, we’ve had a bit of both really. A Script call outs for Series One, Two, I don’t think we did one for Series Three but we did a spin off series of One Off horror films so we put a call out for those as well. So, we’ve found a lot of new writers on there. When we’ve been using new actors, it’s usually been local actors, or we did use kind of new actors and we’ve paid for travel for Series One. We’ve recently used a new actor who has gone onto a big Netflix film with Henry Cavill and someone big who’s in there. It’s quite interesting to find that someone you worked with years ago now has gone on to some big stuff. So, wow, brilliant!

We try and use new talent when we can and get a mixture of names that will attract people in – Gareth and Norman Lovett, and people like that and Sarah Louise Madison and as well and people we haven’t seen before as well. It’s good to have them both really, because when you have actors that you don’t know from anywhere else, it’s like I don’t have any preconception of whether these actors are going to be kind of good guys or bad guys, or have a shady side to them, so it’s quite interesting to have new people on board.

Have you ever had ideas for stories that have worked better on paper than in practice?

Robin: Yeah, a few of those, and we did do two eBooks of Twisted Showcase short stories which I think they’re both on Amazon for about £2 each. They’re about eight stories in both of those. I take back half of those stories and we’ll do these in Twisted Showcase, but they had just too many locations or demanded too many special effects or there were certain kind of elements that just…There was one of my stories called Repeat where this character just uses the same bit, like Groundhog Day and does the same thing over and over again, and getting that little bit darker each time, and as a script it was just really boring, starting over and over again, but with the language in the story you could change it slightly and oh, something’s changed there and made it a little bit scary, so yeah, there’s quite a lot we couldn’t do and some that were too stupid to do as well.

When we co-wrote them they’ve been really good and then when we looked back at them the next day it’s like, Oh my God what were we thinking?

I saw up on Twitter that a fan had posted up the boxset of Twisted Showcase, where can you get these, is it online only?

Robin: Yes, it’s online only. There’s a link on our website to purchase it, but be quick as there’s only about 5 left and we’d limited it to 50. They’re £15, so £5 per series.

Thank you so much for an awesome interview, Robin.

We’d reached the end of the interview, which was sad for me, because I was certain there were more questions I could have asked, but I think personally, I need to watch more Twisted Showcase, which will then arm me with more questions. We then discussed our warped minds and what possessed us to write something so absolutely terrifying.

I’m looking forward to watching the beginning of Series 4, Gareth’s directorial debut, and arm me with more questions for one hell of a big interview, yet to come.

I also look forward to chatting more with Robin in the coming months, a catch up of questions as I’m sure I’ll have many more to put to him.

Thank you, Robin again for a brilliant interview – I must revisit Wrecsam some day!