Inside John Patrick Higgins: The Box Set.

I've completed the first "season" of my podcast Inside John Patrick Higgins. Twelve episodes. Two hundred and forty minutes. Four whole hours of whispering and insinuating about giants, mysterious packages in the post, witchy hairdressers, plastic penises with a mind of their own and an ancient order of comedy monks. I've really enjoyed it. I think the story choices were mostly right - there is a definite IJPH feel. I think the performances got better as it went along and I got to inflict a welter of confusing accents on a terrified public. 

I've had some feedback too, things people liked and things they were not so sure about. As a thin skinned, angry man who jealously guards his treasures, my first instinct was to argue and, where that failed, belittle and sneer. It is a tactic many men employ when praise is not flowing like sweet wine and instead your brimming cup is filled with the bitter brine of constructive criticism. But that's the old me. And if attempting to get work writing has taught me anything, it has taught me humility. And how to cadge a drink at the bar. 

Remember drinking in bars? Wow. Were we ever that young and drunk? 

So my exclusive focus group has revealed to me that the shorter, more self contained and obviously realised stories - A Giant Undertaking or The Narwhal for instance - are preferred to the more elusive tales. Please, Please Mr Postman came up more than once in this discussion. I get it. This isn't a short story. It is a podcast, or an audiobook if you want to quibble. 

(Me: Listen to my podcast, please. Friend: I don't like audiobooks. Me: Its a podcast. Friend: No it isn't.)

 (I have terrible friends). 

It is a different format with different rules. A book is a marvellous machine: a planet pressed into wood pulp. You read each sentence but you can drop back if you feel you've missed something or want to more fully experience something that pays off later in the story. Its not precisely linear and you can drift backwards and forwards, or read a beautiful sentence five times. This also works with boring ones. As a writer you can bury things in the text,- you can suggest things in quiet ways. Years later may look up from their chicken bhuna and exclaim "Oh. That's what that was about!"

This is probably not the case with a podcast. Its annoying rewinding things you may have missed. It isn't reading, after all - this is someone telling you a story. A voice in your head and an extremely intimate thing if you're wearing headphones. The reader has been invited in so you might at least finish the story, you might at least do the punchline. People were actually annoyed that I didn't explicitly describe the contents of Clive's packages in Please, Please, Mr Postman. I was asked if it was a two-parter. I was told that you can't fuck about with people like that. I had them in the palm of my hand like a passion fish, and then I just threw them back into the passion sea. 

I was annoyed at the time. There are clues buried in the fodder: Swedish is not a difficult language to learn. COME ON. Surely every one has seen the "Frozen Fear" segment of Asylum. That film is freely available to purchase on-line, so its not like I was being deliberately obscure. The Prose Edda is a thousand years old, for goodness sake. 

Not sure what any of that has to do with The Marvelettes though. 

It is a different thing, a podcast. It pays to be clear. It pays to satisfy the audience. It's a campfire tale, it's M R James shitting up undergraduates after Christmas dinner. Lesson learned. I'll be clearer. 

More problematic is universality. I was told by my focus group that though they appreciate the eighties-ness of No One Remembers The Gatecrasher's Name, they worried that younger people wouldn't understand it. But beneath the surface detail of Momus songs and Fat Willy's Surf Shack T shirts, its a story about a pretentious young man, drinking bad beer, crashing a shit party and kicking a Rugby player in the balls. Surely that's as universal as it gets. Young people must still be crashing parties, feeling alienated and crushed by class consciousness, having strained relationships with their parents and wanting tomorrow to be brighter and more exciting. Unless human nature has changed completely in the last thirty years. 

Perhaps it has. The full ramifications of what the internet has done to the condition of humanity are not yet known, but value-free and democratic access to all the information in the world, coupled to the certain knowledge you will never own a house and your parents and grandparents are continuing to destroy the planet, would make me want to reject everything about the previous generation's culture. Why would you want to watch their boring old Apocalypse Now films or listen to tedious Led Zeppelin records? And if spending 14 hours a day watching someone else play Fortnite on your phone pisses of the oppressive and monied super-culture, then there's a good reason to do it. Oh Sgt Pepper's the greatest record of all time is it? Don't care - I'm going to watch someone unpack things from a suitcase neatly. It has a sense of ritual and comfort that Being For The Benefit of Mr Kite never quite achieves. 

I dunno. Is there any point in trying to be that inclusive? I am the enemy now. My rubbish generation - Gen X - very much the hyphen generation - are the sort of quisling enablers of the Boomers. Most of the current cabinet are Gen X, though I suspect they wouldn't recognise the term. There may well be a massive cultural break with the 20th Century coming. All those references forgotten, the icons smashed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGURiqmQgw4

But people will still go to parties. They'll still get drunk. They'll still want to cop off with someone and feel alienated, rejected and alone. And braying posh boys will still need a hoof in the knackers. The specifics will fall away but the image of a foot crushing the testicles of a bully from a more advantaged socio-economic group must surely be universal. 

Tramp the dirt down.