I can hear Michael Buerk’s sorrowful voice-over, on Emergency 999: “. . . and when they found her body, it was clear the hypothermia set in in the unhappily unprotected area above the stocking tops.”
I pity the poor actress having to reenact my stupid day. She’ll never move on to Holby with material as poor as this to work on. “Gigantic cold dead idiot dressed as sci-fi nerd/exotic dancer.”
An hour earlier, before we got lost, it had all been so different. Walking the Cumbrian Path between the burning red maples and white, pre-Christmas frosts, I’d turned into “Brilliant” from The Fast Show.
“Aren’t paths AMAZING!” I’d been shouting. “One of the first big ideas humans ever had! Psychological and engineering evolution!”
On these paths, you walk inside the ghosts of every other person ever here: barefoot, hobnail booted, cloaks swishing. In the days before printing press, telegraph, and phone, this was how ideas and news traveled: knowledge of a forthcoming invasion—a plague—a new poem—moving at the speed of shoes.
If you could see it, speeded up, from space, you’d witness the whole of Britain slowly lighting up over the centuries, as communities connected like neural pathways along these tracks. We’re at war! We’re at peace! Cholera is not a vapor, but hides in the water! Dr. Frankenstein’s monster lives!
Each idea held like a torch in someone’s head as they walked towards villages of new people, who would then also be lit up by them. Each of these old ways are the delivery system of the future, illuminating us from Neolithic, to medieval, to Georgian.
I felt the same rush of history twenty years ago, on the Byzantine Road, in Paros. Built by Christian Romans, the stones first smoothed by soldier sandals crushing the same Greek myrtle my cheap gladiator-style sandals were crushing now.
In a hot, oily, herbal fug, we passed the broken, hillside marble quarry that Alexandros of Antioch bought a block of marble from, and made his Venus de Milo. The nearby churchyard was full of white gravestones made of the same marble.
“If we took one of those gravestones, and got creative, we could give her her arms back,” I pointed out to my husband.
Back in Cumbria, in the otherwise empty moorland between Wilson Place and Colwith Force waterfall, we passed a joke. A huge, dead tree hangs, perpendicular, over the route, and into its sponge bark, someone, a long time ago, pushed an old twopence coin, now verdigris green. The next traveler had obviously smiled at the idea—a rotting tree leafing coins!—and pushed his coin in next to it.
Now, hundreds of coins stud the tree—a little decades-long gag for every walker who passes here and joins in. Another simple transmission of human ideas, even when the valley is silent save the hawthorn, and the robin.
And sometimes, the idea that pathways transmit is the idea of pathways themselves. The Lakes now live as a network of tracks, laid down over fell tops like lace, that people fly the world to walk. But whose idea were these paths? They lay, useless, on private estates until 1932 and the mass trespass of Kinder Scout—when factory workers from Manchester and Bolton and Sheffield and Liverpool broke the law, and walked the hills, and showed Britain how much more beautiful a hillside looks studded with a line of knitted bobble hats, sitting on a drystone wall, drinking from a thermos—hearts full of love for the slate and the rowan and the poetry and the cloud. These pathways pumped blood up into these hills again, like veins, and brought them alive.
It was one of those knitted bobble hats who found us on Busk Pike, at dusk, and took us back down to Little Langdale. Eighty-two years old, from Manchester, he was walking through the rain on the path like it was just popping round the corner, for milk.
“Nice day for it!” he said, cheerily, as we waved him good-bye. And even though it was raining and we were exhausted, he was right.
How Wind Turbines Keep Us Free
We don’t really tend to think of much as happening in the countryside—the cities are the places for people; the places where we think, and where things change.
But just as those footpaths on blasted hillsides were the first neural routes for news, so the blasted hillsides now are full of the things that might just set us free: wind turbines.
Holidays—Cornwall, then Wales, and all the great stretches of motorway in between. The kids are on their iPhones, showing each other pictures of themselves on Instagram that they took thirty seconds ago—twenty seconds ago—now, right now.
I cannot believe the kids are looking at their phones rather than what is out of the window. Out of the window is astonishing.
“Look! Look at those windmills!” I keep shouting—pointing at what would have blown my mind when I was their ages.
There are vast, handsome wind turbines lining the cold corridors of the M4, the M5, the A30, the A470. Alone, in clusters—massed, and marching across the top of ridgeways, and mountains. Each one two hundred feet of sheer metal muscle, scything at the sky—like the Seattle Space Needle, angling for a fight.
Turbines are the recurrent markers in exposed places, now—our odd companions whenever the landscape veers towards the bleak. Huge white priests praying above the tiny tin cars on the tarmac below.
If I’d seen just one of these in 1986, I would have freaked out: back then, the tallest thing you’d see from a car window was a tree, or maybe a large dog. Now, we line our travel routes with skyscrapers, and Angels of the North, and these buff swords, tearing at clouds. Do the children know how amazing they are?
“Yeah, yeah—it’s a windmill,” Nancy confirms when I make her look at the eight hundred-meter high giants that stand guard over Bristol—facing out into the Bristol Channel, stealing the breath out of Wales. “Big. Whevs.”
The thing is, I can understand why the children are offhand about them—they are, after all, teenagers. Their job, for the next seven years, is to be studiedly unimpressed by everything, lest anyone discover their most passionately concealed secret: they are so terribly, terribly young.
But what I can’t understand is any adult who dislikes turbines. Even more—becomes convulsed with hatred for them: fulminating against wind power as others might fulminate against cancer, or locusts. Every possible antagonism towards them seems bizarre. To argue that they’re ugly recalls people arguing that the young Barbra Streisand was ugly. It may not be to your taste, dude—but many of us have pictures on the wall, and would travel for a glimpse, and swoon, just a little, when we see them at sunset. Children still buy bright paper windmills to top their sand castles; adults dream of living in Caractacus Pott’s windmill home. A windmill is often a loved thing.
Then there’s “Ban turbines—turbines kill wildlife,” championed by those who have previously kept their mad passion for nature on the down-low, and have notably never followed up their concerns by suggesting Britain outlaw pet cats, which kill an estimated 275 million wild animals a year—and all without powering a single dishwasher, to boot.
The third complaint is equally odd: to argue turbines are so ugly that they ruin the countryside is, I think, to betray a quiet, unrecognized self-loathing of your own species. The British countryside is all a confection of man—the sheep-stripped hills of Wales and Scotland; the fishing harbors of Devon and Cornwall; the patchwork, hedge-hemmed quilt of Gloucester, Shropshire, and the Cotswolds: all made by us. All fashioned, by us, out of what was before: forests filled with wolves, and the sea bashing at rocks, and neither place good for a person to live. We have always done with the land what we want, and need, to survive—and is there anything right now we want, or need, more than these thin, white, humming windmills, across our hills, and alongside our roads, giving us not just our power but our freedom?
Because that is what you are looking at when you look at a wind turbine—freedom. A certain measure of freedom from the bloody, terrifying events exploding in Russia, Ukraine, and the Middle East. While this country’s energy supply rests on careful diplomatic negotiations—pipelines across Afghanistan and Europe, nuclear power stations built by China, caref
ul meetings with cruel potentates, turning a blind eye to the abuse of human rights—the potential for Britain to do good in the world is horribly compromised. We cannot speak freely—we cannot be wholly moral—when we know that unwelcome honesty with another country might result in our streetlights going off, our cities going dark in winter. And that’s before we talk about the morality of dirty fuel and global warming: all those floodlights in Glasgow, during the Commonwealth Games, flooding the very Pacific island nations that had come to compete against us. A tiny, terrible circle of causers and effectees.
So that’s why I love wind turbines. Why I basically fancy them, and their cousins—those fields full of solar panels, basking, like lizards, in the sun. It’s not just that they’re sexy, nerdy inventions: rivets and wires rigged up to catch the explosive energy that has been swirling around us since the Big Bang. It’s that they will allow us to be better people, too.
Russell T. Davies: The Man Who Changed the World, Just a Little Bit
An interview with the man who’s done more to change the way that I write than anyone else: Russell T. Davies, the man who made sci-fi not only sexy—cor, David Tennant! Doctor PHWOARGH, more like—but also inclusive, limitless, and all about the human spirit.
I met him once, at a party, when I was but a young writer, and he greeted me, hooting, and crying, “Do you know what you are, darling? You’re an ENTHUSIAST!” And it was like getting Glinda’s kiss while lost in Oz. I’d been identified and named as a thing. “An enthusiast.” No more snark, or dolorousness. I was for joy, excellence, playfulness—the future.
Russell’s passion for social change through the medium of a bloody good time on television is genuinely inspiring. He knows you can have your life changed by a line, a look—a kiss—all beamed to you from the corner of your living room, and shared with seven million other people. His last project, Cucumber, had both an extraordinary purpose, and an extraordinary story.
“Ooooh, I tell you what,” Julie Hesmondhalgh—best known to the world as the late Hayley Cropper from Coronation Street—says, sitting in the dazzling late September sunshine, smoothing her skirt over her knees. “They’ve spent some money on this.”
We’re sitting outside a cricket club in the posh outskirts of Manchester—“This is where all the footballers and the WAGs live. It’s all beauty salons, and fine dining,” Julie explains.
The lawns are immaculate—the old oaks starting to bronze. The roses are full, and well attended.
There are around fifty extras, all dressed for the occasion, smoking in between takes. There’s a large buffet which, to everyone’s sorrow, can’t be touched—“Continuity!”
The demographic spread of the extras is extraordinary and unusual—gay men in their midforties, teenagers of every subcultural and sexual persuasion, and ballsy, capable middle-aged women. More than half are black. I have never seen this kind of diversity on any drama I have ever written about.
But this explosion of amazing, and previously unseen, characters is no surprise when you know where we are: for this is a location shoot for Channel 4’s new flagship drama, Cucumber—the eagerly awaited return to adult drama for Russell T. Davies, arguably Britain’s most influential and inarguably Britain’s most exciting, entertaining, and inventive screenwriter, after a five-year absence.
I can’t tell you any more details about what’s happening here, as it would spoil a massive plot twist—but suffice to say, the man who made gay drama mainstream (Queer as Folk), resurrected Jesus in modern-day Manchester (The Second Coming), reinvented Casanova as a scrawny, gobby, charming David Tennant (Casanova), and rebooted the long-dead and derided Doctor Who as one of the world’s biggest and most thrilling shows is not coming back quietly.
Hesmondhalgh talks about how, when she first read the script, there was a flashback to a wedding:
“The full thing—in a church, dozens of extras, big wedding dress, everything. For this five-second flashback. And I thought, as an old pro, ‘Well, that’ll be the first scene they lose. A half-day shoot in a church for a five-second flashback—they’ll never cough up for that.’ And it was one of the first scenes we shot. They’ve gone full out for this.”
“When Russell comes to you with an idea, you just go for it,” executive producer Nicola Schindler says, joining us on the terrace. “Anything and everything he writes, I want to shoot—because there’s no one else like him. Russell tells stories no one else would dream of. And it’s a word people shy away from using, but what he does is important. He tells us who we are. And who we could be.”
At this point, Davies himself comes over—approximately nine hundred feet tall, in a suit, hooting, as is his wont, in mock fury.
“They wouldn’t let me take a Cadbury’s Mini Roll from the buffet. I said, ‘That buffet would not be here without me! I wrote that Mini Roll!’” he roars. “Oooh, it’s just like when I worked with [redacted] and they swanned off and won [redacted]—no gratitude! No gratitude at all!”
He dissolves into laughter—a big fizzing, hooting laugh.
So what IS Cucumber all about, then? I ask—gesturing to the hive of industry around us. Why are we all here today?
“Sex,” Russell says, immediately. “This whole thing is about sex. Gay sex. That is its subject, in great detail. In every episode. Its stare is unwavering. It is all about fucking. So, it will provoke a bit of a . . . response.”
And then he starts laughing again.
When Russell T. Davies left Doctor Who in 2009, it was to start a whole new life. The last five years had been spent coping with the kind of workload that would cripple most writers—not only show-running Doctor Who, but also creating, writing, and overseeing both the darker, for-adults Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures for CBBC.
At the time, he explained why he had taken on what were essentially three full-time jobs, concurrently: “In this industry, more than half of your energy goes into getting things made. Most writers would kill to have their projects made. So when you’re hot, you just go for it. Because if you wait until a point where you have more time to write these things, you won’t be hot anymore, and those things won’t get made. Ever. And that’s all you ever want. For people to see your stories.”
At this point, Davies had been voted the fourteenth most influential man in British media—he’d been given an OBE, and become one of the biggest revenue streams, via an unstoppable flow of Doctor Who merchandise and spin-offs, for an otherwise beleaguered BBC. Exhausted but triumphant, he left Britain to start a new, golden life—he gave up his great love, smoking; moved to Los Angeles with his partner, Andy; and started work on a new project, Cucumber, for an American network.
These were to be the glory years—finally enjoying life, in the sunshine, with a partner he just “hadn’t seen that much. Because Doctor Who takes up everything. There was always an edit to attend. A Judoon whose head had fallen off, hahaha.”
America loved the scripts for Cucumber. Huge names were being discussed for casting. This was to be the next stage of Davies’s career.
But then, Andy started saying odd things.
“The problem is, my boyfriend has always been mad,” Davies says.
We have left the shoot, now—we’re in the back of a black cab. Davies’s legs are cramped up, despite the car being so roomy. He is approximately three miles tall.
“He’s fucking nuts,” Davies goes on. “He’s always had synesthesia—saying random things like, ‘You know the name ‘Richard’? That’s a bunch of twigs in a pot in a white kitchen.’ Completely bizarre and annoying. I would always tell him to shut up. It’s an annoying trait. You say ‘Susan,’ and he’ll say ‘Fudge.’ Gah! So when he started saying, ‘I keep seeing an Edwardian lady smiling sarcastically at me,’ it seemed quite normal. I ignored him.”
Davies continued with his first draft of Cucumber. The spark for it had been unexpected: Graham Norton.
“Graham Norton shamed me into doing it!” Davies hoots. “Shamed me on Radio 2, liv
e on air, while I was doing promo for Doctor Who. ‘Why don’t you write something proper, about real gay men, again?’ he said. ‘Like Queer as Folk?’ I walked across Manchester’s MediaCity feeling chastised. But he was right. Graham Norton was right, thank God.”
Ten years before, Queer as Folk had been Davies’s calling card to the wider world. Despite having spent the previous ten years writing Children’s Ward, Why Don’t You?, The Grand, and Dark Season—which starred a very young Kate Winslet—Queer as Folk was clearly a whole different league: something so unmistakably from the heart; so wildly inventive; so joyous, angry, filthy, and funny that it changed people’s ideas of “gay drama” overnight. It was genuinely revolutionary.
“Before it went out, everyone thought it was going to be Channel 4’s worthy gay drama,” Davies recalls. “All vegan protestors and AIDS, hahaha! The only gay characters we’d had [on British TV] before were ones dying on EastEnders, God bless them. People weren’t expecting this.”
For “this” was a gigantic, classic love story between sexy, handsome Stuart (Aidan Gillen) and reliable, lovelorn Vince (Craig Kelly), set in Manchester’s Gay Village—a place which came across as a hi-NRG Narnia, or Oz. A place where young gay men and lesbians could reinvent themselves as the heroes of their own stories, and feel, for the first time, normal. More than normal—amazing. Watching it, as a straight teenage girl, I wanted to be a gay man. To feel I was a part of a world as connected, joyous, and fearless as Davies’s.
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