Coffee With Colin
In Edinburgh again today and, after the staff briefing, I had arranged to meet Colin MacDonald in a little coffee shop on Holyrood Road. Colin was the writer of King of Hearts and we had a good chin-wag about the play and reaction to it. He told me how taxi drivers in Edinburgh had recognised him from last Saturday's front page story in the , but that he'd had more messages of congratulations for his appearance on Off The Ball than for the play itself.
Colin writes mainly for television these days. His credits include Sharpe and a forthcoming crime drama. He told me a few behind-the-scenes stories about television production, including how he'd once written a simple scene involving a piece of toast popping from a toaster and landing in a pan of milk. Simple enough on the page, but it involved a special effects man flown up from London and several hours of filming while they tried to make the toast land in the milk. Finally the cameraman had the bright idea of filming the toast popping up and then filmed another shot as they simply dropped the toast into the milk.
No wonder television costs so much. On radio you could simply have the character on the phone saying to a friend:
"I'm having dreadful trouble with that toaster.. bread popped up and landed in the milk again. Worse than that, I'm looking out of the window and three alien spaceships are zooming towards me."
Like we always say, on radio the pictures are better. And cheaper.
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