James and Leonie. I really can’t manage to care.
Please SW’s can we have some stories about sympathetic characters facing interesting challenges that we can empathise with.
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You could almost hear the script pages turn as they read their lines into the microphone.
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now that could be a touch tricky, ftc.
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To make matters worse, they inflict such shite scripts on two of the best radio actors around (Assuming they’re still played by Jasmine Hyde and Roger May - not had a chance to hear tonight’s yet)
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Joe, you are right.
The reign of SO’C severed my connection with the characters. It must also have drastically severed the SWs’ connection with the characters and it doesn’t seem to have come back for them yet. It can’t come back for me, of course, unless they get it first.
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Having finally got a chance to listen, I have to say no blame attaches to the actors; they did their best with an appallingly cliched script.
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It was by Keri, which makes it worse; he can do better.
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I think I might be floundering under the circs, if I were a SW. Come on though, chaps and chapesses, England, and Wales (me), and the rest of the world, awaits.
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But can he? Or is he perhaps living on the past glories of the odd few “successes” and those only look good because of the unmitigated dross, churned out by so many of the others?
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[quote=“Used2B, post:9, topic:435”]But can he? Or is he perhaps living on the past glories of the odd few “successes”[/quote]This is my view.
I’m a latecomer to all this and he does seem to have a nice & approachable manner and he certainly has a bit of legend status, but frankly I’ve seen nothing to warrant it.
Unfair maybe, but there you go.
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I try to cut him some slack because many of my favourite authors write books I find boring (books I like plus a person I like as their writer is rarer than I would like) and vice versa; I’m sure he’s a lovely man in person, though I think the beard is a bit foofy, but I just wish he would cut out the music, and stop trying to be friends with the boards by putting in references to what is said there. Not everyone on any notice-board feels the same way, and by pleasing some of them he is likely to bore others or make them think him a creep.
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Indeed. But I don’t find him quite as creepy as I do the members of the ‘Mr Keri’ fan club.
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Does liking or disliking the author as a person colour your reaction to a book? I must admit to getting rather irritated by the ‘so and so was beastly to his wife and therefore I don’t like/won’t read his books’ syndrome.
Recently I had the opportunity to discover that an author whose early works I thoroughly enjoyed but who is imo now a spent force is in reality an arrogant and snitty little tit. I still enjoy the early books and don’t think any worse of the later books than I already did, iyswim.
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For me it depends on how the author’s life is tied up with the work. If someone beat up his wife and painted landscapes, that’s not as significant a drawback to me as someone who beat up his wife and wrote domestic dramas.
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I take your point, but I would still be more influenced by whether the domestic dramas were any good.
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I didn’t say creepy, Gus; I said a creep, which is quite different. Creepy is like Savile, say; a creep is someone trying to be the teacher’s pet by smarm.
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Fair enough. For ‘creepy’ read ‘creepish’.
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I am suspicious of what the home-life may be of someone who always seems to write women being abused one way or another, Hedgers. I’d want to be quite sure he wasn’t like that in his personal behaviour before I became friends with him.
The two out-and-out-horror writers I know are themselves very pleasant people; but then, they write stuff other than horror as well.
But I cannot be doing with people who can’t listen to Wagner because of his politics (or what they suppose to have been his politics). There may be good reasons not to listen to Wagner, but that is not one of them. Anyone who refused to read P.G. Wodehouse because they thought he had Nazi sympathies was cutting off his or her nose in a face-spiting exercise, and the Cathedral Choir books by William Mayne don’t seem to me to have suffered as a result of the discovery fifty years after their publication that he had assaulted eleven girls sexually.
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If I CBA, I’d embroider that on a cushion. Or perhaps a piano-stool cover.
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And plenty of reasons why one should…
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