This blog comes with a shameless plug for a major project I've just launched, but let's take a moment before we get to it.
'Helly Johnston is miserable. Her mother is thinking of marrying again, but Helly doesn’t want a stepfather, certainly not this one. She sobs her way out of the classroom all the way down to the cloakroom and the depths of despondency. There, forceful Kitty Killin comes to the rescue.Kitty’s not known for sensitivity or tact, but she’s been through it all herself - her mother married the silver-haired, chocolate-bearing, goggle-eyed Gerald. Kitty begins to unfold her tale of how her mother seems so changed by Gerald’s presence, of how her little sister takes to him at once, and how Old Goggle-Eyes remains a perpetual thorn in Kitty’s side.'
That is the blurb on a novel I listened to on cassette when I was about seven or eight, the first of many 'parent gets new partner that child can't stand' stories that dominate children's and YA fiction. The story is called Goggle-Eyes, it's by former Children's Laureate Anne Fine, and it won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.
Now, you might be thinking, 'This is meant to be an activism blog, why is George recommending a children's book?' Well, because I re-read it in my twenties, and I realised that the main plot line of the sisters, their mother and their obnoxious stepfather is just a smokescreen. In spite of the title, the blurb and the promotion, this is actually a book about nuclear war, weapons and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The story is set in Scotland in the 1980s when the CND movement was particularly strong in Scotland, and if you read the book as an adult you can see that there's a political undercurrent running right the way through the narrative. The girls' mother, a nurse in a hospital, is an important member of the local CND branch, and regularly participates in calls to action against nuclear weapons. Her daughters, main character Kitty and younger sister Jude, have been brought up in and around this movement and have got to know their mother's activist friends, and Kitty herself is clearly becoming increasingly aware of the importance of the movement. And the reason why Kitty takes such an immediate dislike to her mother's new partner, the crux of the plot, is because he's actively opposed to this movement. His presence is a threat to everything Kitty is growing up to stand for, and she cannot understand why her mother, who feels as strongly about these issues as she does, wants to spend her time with him.
The current edition of the book has an afterword by the author Anne Fine, where she talks about her own history of activism and her thought process behind the book. As I expected, her need to tackle the issue of nuclear weapons and activism against them came first. It was after attending Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp in 1981 that Fine had the idea to write this into one of her books. However, she stresses the importance of not just lecturing readers, so she had to turn it into a personal story about real characters as well. She invented the sisters, their mother and their new stepfather, turned them into a thriving family and set it with the backdrop of a world living under fear of nuclear war.
When I was a child, I wasn't exactly consciously aware of the political backdrop of this story - I was more just entertained by the characters' day-to-day lives in the same way I would be in any other story. However, I think something of this must have gone in subconsciously. When I re-read this book as an adult I got shivers down my spine, because so much of it resembles the kind of work that I've grown up to do. Like Anne Fine, I like to write stories that are about original characters, who have lives and interests and personalities that you can get into, but that are all influenced by the sociopolitical zeitgeist of the time. More importantly, I think it's really important to tell stories about the lives of activists. Activists in stories are often depicted as what tvtropes.org calls a 'Soapbox Sadie' - defined as 'A character, often a child or teenager and almost Always Female, who cares deeply about all worthy causes. She wants to protect the environment from polluters, prove that women aren't inferior to men, and Free the Frogs. If she's the main character of the show, she spends a lot of time struggling with her idealism and whether it is too unrealistic. Soap Box Sadie is usually a post-hippie, the type of girl who would have been a hippie had she not been born in the wrong decade. Sometimes she's updated to the more recent counter-cultures of the time like emos, goths, hipsters, etc.' Examples of this kind of character include Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter stories when she goes off on one about the house-elves, and Lisa Simpson about various causes at various points in the show's history. And even that's assuming that they're depicted positively at all - in many stories, they're just depicted as slightly unhinged extremists.
Rarely do you have characters in stories who have their own lives and identities, are going on their own personal journey, but also are aware of the injustices of the world and aren't afraid to speak out about them. This is something that my partner and I have tried to do in our TV drama Square. We define Square as 'a TV drama series about the world today, the lives of many people living in Bristol and the bewilderment of spending your life trying to achieve something'. The main characters have lives, relationships, affairs, job interviews and lots of other personal stories, but they're all linked by wanting to do good in this world, and much of the story is set within the backdrop of Bristol's anti-war activism scene. We created this format in 2018 and then spent several years trying to develop it and turn it into something. In 2021 we created a pilot off the back of a crowdfunding campaign, which I will embed below. Since then, we've continued to try to turn it into a full series, but unfortunately the entertainment world has proven absolutely impossible to break into. It's bad enough at the best of times, but when your format rocks the boat as much as ours does, it sometimes feels like you'd have more luck buying a lottery ticket.
Happily, we aren't giving up. Particularly taking into account how terrible things are in the Gaza Strip and how important it is at the moment to have really good stories about anti-war activism, we've decided to try to fund the series ourselves. We are doing this by putting our pilot episode online and then taking pre-orders for the full series. This is not a crowdfunder, it's a pre-order - when we've made the full six-episode series, we'll sell it at £10 per episode or £50 for the whole series in one go (this is the equivalent of getting one episode free). So at the moment, we're taking payments until we've raised enough money to make the whole thing, and the people who have already paid will obviously get immediate access.
Although doing it this way is going to be incredibly hard, I'm also really excited about it because there's something beautifully meta about this. Our story is about grassroots people trying to achieve something off their own backs, and that's also what we're doing with our means of creation. If we pull this off, it will change the way the industry works - much of the time, people in the industry behave in a really arrogant, bullying way because they believe that you need them and that you'll take it. I really hope that much like the #metoo movement made great strides at reducing sexual harassment within the entertainment world, this will have a similar outcome and create a world in which people who want to create something special are treated with more respect.
Here is our pilot episode - it's 50 minutes long.
If you'd like to support us to make a full series, the pre-order form is here - there's a lot of information on there as well about how we came to be doing this work and what we hope to achieve with it.
It would mean so much to us if you'd help us out - I do truly believe that telling stories is the best way of changing the world for the better. Storytelling exists in every culture in the world, it unlocks the imagination and it makes people dream of something better. And having dreamed it, they start to demand it. Let's do this together.
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