Interviews Frank Cottrell Boyce by DJ Forrest

I settled down to an interview with Frank Cottrell Boyce, a writer with whom I have been keen to interview for ever such a long time. We always seem to miss each other, what with one thing or another, but tonight I managed to put my questions to him before he relaxed for the evening.

I made my apologies for not having seen the new film 'Goodbye Christopher Robin' but knowing my Mum had already seen it, and had given me more or less the blow by blow account, that I already knew the ending before reaching the steps of the cinema with my popcorn - I was at least certain of the questions I wanted to put to Frank.

I also thanked him for his novel 'Sputnik's Guide to Life on Earth', which is aimed at the 9-12-year-old age group. This book told me the ingredients of vinegar, which I'd never really known before, so it was educational, not just for the many children who read his books, but also for this big kid here. *waves*

So, armed with my questions, I began the interview...

Hi Frank, you're a screenwriter as well as a children's novelist, what came first?

Frank: Oh, screenwriting, straight away. I worked on Brookside to start with. I've worked in television for a long time. My first book was Millions which was 2004 and set in Liverpool.

You wrote the 'Debbie & Damon' story, the spin off series from 'Brookside'?

Frank: (laughs), How do you know that, oh God.

I confessed to have done a little research of my own! I loved Brookside, it was one of those early soaps on Channel 4, before HollyOaks came into being. It was one of those dramas that dealt with real life issues, as far as I was concerned, it was much better than Corrie and Eastenders in my humble opinion. So, when Debbie & Damon covered the story of the two teenage lovers, heading out on their own, I was distraught to say the least, when one of them died at the end of the spin off series. So, it sparked the question...

Was it your idea, and that of the creator Phil Redmond's, to kill off Damon at the end of the series, or was it because the actor was leaving the show and you had to write him out?

Frank: He must have been. I don't remember now. He must have been. I don't have that level of power, you know. It must have been a way of writing him out. I still see him Simon O’Brien, he's great. He's got a DIY programme and just built this beautiful library for his kid's school. It's just stunning. He's a great guy.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang musical was a classic, but apart from that I didn't realise other novels had been written, and then I happened to internet search Frank's career and found a few extra books that weren't listed elsewhere, and so had to ask.

Frank: It was originally a book by Ian Fleming, and I think it was the last thing that Fleming wrote, he was very ill when he wrote it. He intended to write it, and if you think about it, it is James Bond for kids. You've got the car. You've got a weird foreign dictator, it's got caper, and all those things. He wrote it for his son but he sadly died, and he always intended to write more. His niece got in touch with me and asked if I'd write the sequels, so I did, and it was fun to do.

I like the Sputnik's Guide to Life on Earth as it's set around Dumfries, and I know that area quite well, but there were a few places in the book that I wasn't sure if they were real, or not.

Frank: I probably made up the name. I think of it as, if you think of the Robbie Burns Centre, those flats behind there. That's what I see in my head.

When I read the story about Sputnik, there was a sense of personal attachment to the Grandad in the book and I had a feeling that Frank was writing about someone he knew, because it resonated with someone close to me.

The Grandad in the story, has early onset dementia, was he based on someone you knew? There seemed an awful lot of personal stuff wrapped around that character.

Frank: Yeah, I think that is the most personal I've written in that book and I've never written about a family member before but he's kind of gone beyond being able to read, so it’s not going to impact on him at all. And I wanted to get something down, you know. It's funny, I've genuinely never written about a family member before that book, it's sort of all in there. And I think, I couldn't have written anything else, because you'll know, it takes up all of your head space. I look after him like one and a half days a week and for the rest of the week I'm thinking about him, you know.

You also know a lot, from the book, about life on other planets, and all the planetary stuff, that I'm learning so much about, that I'm going to have to pick your brains when it comes to writing my sci fi novel. So, is that something you're passionate about?

Frank: Yes, I really like my sci fi as you know, and I read a lot of science as well, as that is my thing and I do read a lot of science books. There's one physics book. French one. (Frank delves down the side of desk and lifts a huge book, holding it to the screen and can't recommend it enough - so naturally, that's on my next book list for Waterstones).

"The Universe in Your Hand" but honestly, if you write sci fi, you should read that book. It's like an imaginary trip to the end of the universe using what physics we have and it's really, really great.

In Sputnik's Guide to Life on Earth, the young girl Jessie blows a dog whistle loudly, and Sputnik responds by pulling a gun from his rucksack, with plans of shooting the 'whistle blower'. In an ordinary story aimed for a much older audience that sort of thing wouldn't bother me, but a story aimed at the 9-12 age group, I felt really uncomfortable reading this part, so I put this question to Frank.

Frank: We've had lots of arguments about that. Not with my publisher actually just with my kids in fact who were more sensitive about it than I was. I didn't come across any rules about it and I would normally be very against that. I mean, I've never written a villain and I don't really believe in villains, or anything like that but it just seemed to come out of him. He just seemed to be a completely lawless character.

I guess he's sort of not real. You kind of know that if he did fire that gun, that it wouldn't hurt, do you know what I mean? I don't know how to kind of untangle this. It's still kind of working at the moment with him, with that character because I'm working on the film at the moment and it's like 'how would that work?'

So, I kind of think, you know how that's not a serious threat to the kid because whatever's going on with that gun is not really a gun somehow.

The lightsaber seemed to be MUCH worse however (laughs)

Frank: The lightsaber is what I read when I go to the schools. I read that section out loud and kids love that. And they love the fact that it's transgressive, that it's scary and its horror and stuff, so…

Well, kids love scary stuff though. The things that kids watch these days which is pretty much more than I would watch, I'm either behind a cushion or peering through my fingers!!! (Wimp, me? Yes)

It was something I always wondered, especially as a new writer, as to how far you could push the boundaries before someone said, no, no, no you can't write it. You're going to have to have a cut off point.

Frank: You are cautious. I am cautious, but Sputnik just takes over. I guess it's an instinctive thing. If it works, it works, you know.

You've written two Doctor Who episodes, Smile and In the Forest of the Night - which instantly made me think of the poem, Tiger. Back in the early days of Who, the story Human Nature was written for the Seventh Doctor in book form, but was made into an episode for the 10th Doctor. Was In the Forest of the Night written for any other Doctor or specifically for the 12th?

Frank: No, it was written very much for the 12th Doctor. It had quite a specific place in the arc of the series because if you remember it was the episode before the death of Danny Pink. So, I had this basic idea for a story and what Steven wanted me to, as he called it 'take a big back swing' for that character Danny Pink, so we knew we were going to kill him in the next episode, so we were giving him an episode that was part of the brief. So, it had a specific slot in the arc of the series.

In the episode 'Smile', the idea of the nano things that all came apart from the whole building, where did that idea come from?

Frank: Right, that's a very specific thing, I work on part of a project, where a writer works with a scientist, and I was working with a guy called Andrew Vardy, who those robots are named after, who works at the University of Newfoundland and Andrew works on tiny robots. Not Nano robots which are the size of a molecule but very small robots like the size of my fingernail, that perform tasks and they swarm in order to perform the tasks.

I was really thrilled at them, I thought they were great and they've got a kind of autonomy and if you watch them, they work. I call it 'starling technology'. They were my main pitch for this episode but we realised as we started planning it out, to do a lot with those…people think that CGI is free but CGI is very expensive. So, I kind of wanted the building to morph and move and disappear and reappear. We couldn't get anywhere near that. So, we came up with that kind of interim idea that there would be these tiny robots but they would have shepherds which are the emoji bots

Ahh, got you, as originally I was thinking along the lines of the Vashta Nerada, Silence in the library.

Frank: Ahh yes, a lot of people have said that, but honestly, it was Gretna starlings and Andrew Vardy's real robots.

Will you be writing more Doctor Who episodes?

Frank: I don't know really. I haven't been asked, so...I guess that's not for the next series anyway. I think Chris is wanting to really, really wipe the slate clean, you know like, you probably know by now that Bill isn't in the next series?

I had heard something about that.

Frank: Yeah, that's quite unusual to get rid of a companion if you're getting a new Doctor, because you usually keep a companion.  And, I'm insanely busy at the moment and happy not to be doing it to be honest.

My next question was going to be, if you were going to be writing any more, could you bring the Sea Devils back?

Frank: I loved the Sea Devils you know. I thought they were amazing. They've really really stayed with me, yeah, and any time I see those offshore fortresses I'm always a little bit spooked by them. And please don't tell me anything about it because all I've got is a couple of childhood images that if I looked it up or watched it on YT I'm sure it would be rubbish

Are you looking forward to the 13th Doctor?

Frank: Yeah, who isn't? I look forward to every Doctor to be honest. All my life I've always wanted to know who the next Doctor was going to be but she's going to be fantastic isn't she?

I confessed that although I was looking forward to Jodie appearing as the new Doctor, that my initial thoughts regarding a female Doctor were more or less, the same as many of the people who were less positive. But then I had to look beyond that, and with so much talk regarding transgender these days in the news, on social media and television that perhaps the change of gender for the Doctor was no different to that of the transgender community, and when I looked at it that way, I could accept that, and I had no issues regarding the 13th Doctor.

Frank: We didn't care when the Master was a woman did we?

Yeah, but she wasn't the Master, she was the wife of the Master. When that was finally revealed that kind of killed it for me. I thought 'dammit' I was waiting for the regeneration. Missy was great, just a pity she was killed off really.

Who was your Doctor when you were growing up?

Frank: Jon Pertwee.

If you had to choose from the new Who, who would it be?

Frank: Favourite? I absolutely love Peter Capaldi. I mean, obviously, I've enjoyed all of them, but I like the idea of the Doctor as the teacher. Do you know what I mean, the Doctor not as a potential boyfriend. You've got someone who is a mentor - that wiser, older, more damaged, more flawed. I love him. I think he's fantastic.

Goodbye Christopher Robin

You know when you're writing about a real person, how much research do you have to cover about that one character?

Frank: I obviously like to research. I think partly because that's the thing I most enjoy about writing. I really enjoy finding stuff out. I enjoy interviewing people and I really enjoy kind of looking for and finding things, because then you don't have to write them. I do remember, years ago, one of the films I first made, it was called 'Hilary and Jackie' and it was about the cellist, Jacqueline du Pré, and I remember going to have supper with her sister and honestly, after an hour and a half of chatting to her, coming out with three or four great scenes already in my head, and the main thrust of the film just from talking to her. And I love that, when you engage with the reality of something, you gain so much and it's all fresh, it's all stuff you...I know it's an old cliche to say, but you couldn't make it up.

I laughed at this point. The phrase 'You couldn't make this up' reflected upon the job I do in my real life (away from the website). So for a few minutes we discussed the possibilities of writing my sci fi novel based around my day job, and the characters, and the people who visit my place of work, and it truly was an interesting topic which probably shocked Frank far more than I really intended.

Frank: The more truly autobiographical something is the more fantastic it has to be. I think the most fantastical story the most autobiographical story ever written is Metamorphosis where he changed into a beetle. I think that's so like the way my Dad is at the moment. I just think that's exactly right. That's what's happened. He's turned into a beetle, basically.

But also, I'm thinking it's like the housing estate which I grew up on, I moved to it when I was a little boy, and it was so exciting and now it's full of old people. I wouldn't want to write about it because I know everybody there and was thinking this is what it will be like if we build a colony on Mars. The first inhabitants will be young couples with kids, it would be dead exciting, and then they'll all grow old together and that housing estate, if I was going to write about it, I would definitely write about it as a Martian colony.

So, I think you're on the right track, I love the idea of sci fi-ing the Gretna Blacksmith's thing, that's a great idea, because it is a sci fi idea isn't it, because people are stopping off there for whatever reason.

Also, when you're writing about your characters for Christopher Robin, were there some things you couldn't actually write, maybe some other details you couldn't get a hold of, so you'd have to use poetic licence?

Frank: In the film we couldn't touch anything to do with Winnie the Pooh because Disney owns it all. So, we couldn't go near it, no. That was actually quite liberating though as it meant we had to write something else. Most of the films I've made have been about real people, and I've always been quite cautious and always gone to speak to the people involved to see what they didn't want in it because I don't think anyone should be compromised just to entertain everybody else.

So, in 24 Hour Party People that was about the Manchester Music Scene, and there was one scene in it that the two people involved in it that were still quite angry with each other, so I just got one of the real people to play...it plays out his drama, and then one of the real people who was really in that scene just walked onto camera and goes 'this didn't happen like this, it happened like this, and this.'

What prompted the idea for the film?

Frank: That film was already in development when they came to me, and I think it was always going to come to me because I'm an English screenwriter who likes writing about real people and I'm also a children's novelist, so it was always a perfect fit for me. And I didn't want to do it, and it came across my desk and I looked at it and thought, 'no I do want to do this.'

I'd built such a strong connection with Winnie the Pooh and with also the whole thing of Dads, you know, and I've got lots of children, and as soon as I looked at it. ‘I know how to do that’. which is a big thing, because normally you spend ages trying to figure out how to do something, and the minute I saw that material I thought, I know how to do this.

You were co-writer on the movie,

Frank: Yeah, there was a guy, Simon Vaughan, who had already written the script. We didn't write together as he had already written the script, which did the job of explaining that there was a story there and Simon would admit this but Simon's not really a writer, but he is a huge Winnie the Pooh fan. He's a producer really. He'd already made a film called 'A Bear Called Winnie' about the bear and then he wanted to go on to make the one about the boy, and the script was just not good enough at all. And so, I had free rein to re-write it.

Ahh, I just wondered how the role of co-writer worked. Does one have the idea and the other one writes it. I wasn't quite sure how that moulded together.

Frank: This is what they call a Page One rewrite. It kept the same focus but I don't think there's a word to sandwich it

You come back to South West Scotland quite a lot, do you get most of your ideas for writing here? I know with Sputnik story but...

Frank: I never write when I'm there, but I think that's quite a good thing, that is because you write pretty relentlessly at home and I think I don't ever have time to think. And when we're in Dumfries & Galloway I don't do any work. But actually, I think that's when you do your most valuable work.

Except for the novel Millions the book which I wrote, when my son, had a job at Mabie Farm Park and getting there and back was a nightmare, so I used to drive him down and think, 'it's just not worth going home', so I would sit in the car park there at the picnic table and that's where I wrote most of Millions.

Thank you, Frank, for an awesome interview, and I look forward to seeing you very soon!

Photos courtesy of Frank Cottrell Boyce, Pan Books, Goodbye Christopher Robin film poster, BBC News, and BBC Doctor Who.

Who Reviews Smile by Tony J Fyler

Cutesy robots. Gods of sci-fi, save us all from cutesy robots.

Smile, when it was announced, had fandom balanced on a knife-edge. On the one hand, it was cutesy robots, and Frank Cottrell-Boyce, he of many really good things, and In The Forest Of The Night, and some in fandom held their breath, expecting another softly-plotted mushfest.

Cutesy robots, though…It seems to be a fascination of Steven Moffat’s that things which look friendly and smiley and cute can turn in an instant and bite your hand off. Whether that’s a hangover from truly classic Who stories like Robots of Death, or whether he’s watched one too many Star Trek episodes, we’re not sure, but his idea of the Smilers from The Beast Below, which were somehow made scary when their heads turned around and their unhappy faces were on display, refuses to die a death any time soon.

That’s probably not a bad thing, because you could see it from a purely childlike point of view as an analogy of parents – lovely, smiley, friendly people, who can turn to unhappy, unsmiley people in an instant, and from whom you then have to run. Creepy stuff, thought of in that light.

The Emojibots of course have that same central idea at their core – the fleeting, world-altering instability of emotions – but this time in a more net-centric world. The Emojibots could have worked as social media friends who suddenly, without warning, block you, bully you, turn on you in a heartbeat. So they had potential before we sat down to watch them.

What’s more, there’s the potential for an elegantly Orwellian story in a colony that communicates with its infrastructure and its slave-class only through emojis. As the language is reduced and reduced, filtered down to pictograms, the nuance of expression is lost, and before you know where you are, you’re in a world of ‘double-plus-good,’ or in this case ‘two-thumbs-up.’

So as we say, there’s potential for some creepy dystopian sci-fi in the premise of Smile.

And then you remember it’s Frank Cottrell-Boyce and cutesy robots, and you almost automatically adjust your expectations.

An unfair adjustment, as it turns out, because Smile leans more on the creepy dystopian sci-fi angle than perhaps you’d expect. The smiley-creepy robots work significantly better than Moffat’s Smilers, because their moods are more instantly changeable and capricious, because of some clever invention from Cottrell-Boyce (the mood-patches particularly), and because of the underlying simplicity of what went wrong – no-one thought to create an emoji for grief, because, as we mentioned, grief is probably a more nuanced, complex emotional state than can necessarily be parsed in a single emoji. And Cottrell-Boyce’s world has a fundamental underlying logic to it: grief as plague from the human point of view looks like an increasingly double-thumbs-up smiley-face world from the viewpoint of the Vardy.

Is Smile a little dry in places? Absolutely, but don’t forget, for the most part it’s a two-hander, the Doctor and Bill walking around an enormous complex (and by the way, beeeeautiful choice of location – Who has rarely looked prettier), working out the reason for the silence, for the emptiness. That said, it works on a number of levels: Bill, still in the optimistic early stages of her companionship, seeing the Doctor as an amazing tutor who can take her to the most wonderful places in all of time and space; the Doctor taking a paternalistic, even egotistic pride in showing her things, revelling in the hero worship; the Vardy as an emergent life form and a revolting slave-class; and the simple, fatal price of human hubris, thinking we’ve got everything figured out, every potential programming glitch, every quirk there could possibly be…while simultaneously reducing the content of our own emotional intercourse to pictograms and acronyms – the smiley-faces and lols of our social world. Cottrell-Boyce does a good job in Smile of showing us the incompatibility of these two strains of thought, and while everyone punches the air and realises the Ark In Space connection, there’s deeper sci-fi at work here, there are bits of Blade Runner, bits of 2001, as the Vardy find consciousness and take their human cohabitants down a path the organics would not wish to go down.

Arguably, there are a couple of wasted guest stars in Smile, Mina Anwar and Ralf Little having the chance to add very little to the drama. But in terms of a companion’s first real glimpse of the future, there’s more meat on the bones of Smile than the likes of The End of the World, and it stands its ground alongside the likes of Gridlock and Planet of the Ood, while showing yet new colours to Peter Capaldi’s portrayal as the Twelfth Doctor (his action man sequence while blowing up the engine brought a new shade of relevance to the Pertwee comparison that’s been made since he arrived).

Overall, while it’s one of the talkier episodes we’ve had in a while, leading to areas of seeming flatness as far as the energy and the oomph is concerned, the second episode of Doctor Who from Frank Cottrell-Boyce will go down as a curiously rewatchable affair, which if never exactly challenging the viewer to cling on by their fingernails still offers enough in terms of the growing dynamic between the Twelfth Doctor and Bill to make it feel like the first time we really see them together, properly, fully, as a Tardis crew. That, and some intelligent decisions from Cottrell-Boyce over the nature of the threats he deploys to get us through the episode, make us give Smile at least one thumbs-up.

Possibly two.

Who Reviews Smile by Jeffrey Zyra

Written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce

“So, where is everyone? Don't tell me we've come halfway across the universe and they've all gone out. We should've texted first or something.”

When this story was first announced and from what was shown during the trailers I thought this story was going to be really stupid and one of the worst of all time.  Well for Sleep No More and Love and Monsters their title of one of the worst stories ever is still in their possession.  Smile was in fact a very entertaining and enjoyable story.  I never would have thought a story about Emojibots would be entertaining or in that fact good considering the writer is the same that gave us the very forgettable "In the Forest of the Night". 

What was good about this story was that it was the tried but true robot turning on it controllers like in “Robots of Death” and “Voyage of the Damned”.  I like that tyoe of story and done right make for really good Doctor Who stories and by adding in the unhappiness of the coloniest into the mix it makes for a very robotic version of “The Happiness Patrol”.  With the Emojibots in charge of keeping everyone happy tthey have to eliminate anyone who is not happy.  The solution to that problem is to kill the unhappy colonist.  The Emojibots didn’t have basic human emotions programmed and did not understand grief especially when the first colonist died.  Thus, begins the mass killings.  While the solution at the end was pretty simple and once again resorted to a reset button it was a pretty satisfying solution and one that didn’t result in the destruction of the robots.  Sometimes the simplest solutions are best and for “Smile” it works.

“Smile” also has something in it that doesn’t happen all that often The Doctor being wrong.  At first, he thinks it would be simple to just blow up the Emojibots and the mini robots that make up the city but what Bill finds is that the colonist are already on the planet.  So, The Doctor has to backtrack and stop the ship from blowing up.  This is pretty clever as it shows that the solution is not to always blow things up hence reverting to the reset switch solution to prevent the colonist from doing the same thing.  

While “Smile” was a pretty simple story it did continue along with the classic Who feel to it that “The Pilot” started.  I think that has to do with the way they deal with The Doctor and Bill this series and having it of a more traditional Doctor and companion relationship instead of the Clara Show that we have had previously.  So far, the new series has gotten off to a good start and I’ve been enjoying it so far unlike the way I felt about Series 9.

Grade B.