by Elizabeth Baines
I’m currently working with a producer to develop ideas for radio drama, and it’s got me thinking about the business of commissioning and its implications for literary production and our culture.
COMMISSIONED TO INVENT
Ben HatchInterview: Karen Roy
Ben Hatch is a former journalist and the author of Lawnmower Celebrity and Are We Nearly There Yet? 8000 Misguided Miles Round Britain in a Vauxhall Astra. He was born in London and has also lived in Manchester and Buckinghamshire.
Did you know you were going to write Are We Nearly There Yet? when on tour for the Frommer's book, or did you decide to do it later?
I had no idea it would turn into a travelogue/memoir at the time. I just set out to write the best guidebook I could. It was only later when my guidebook editor at Frommer’s, Mark Henshall, suggested it, that I thought, ’he’s right, it would make a good story’.
Lawnmower Celebrity is obviously autobiographical (Ben's father was Sir David Hatch of BBC Radio). Did you really sneak out your dad's contact book and make spoof calls to the likes of Henry Kelly, Paul Daniels and Noel Edmonds?
Agility in Writing – From Literary Fiction to Comedy and Back
by Catherine Mcnamara
My first published story was called ‘Elton John’s Mother’ and though the curious reader might expect to find some gossip about the great star’s mum, the story had nothing to do with David Furnace’s talented husband. Instead it was a take-off of welfare mothers living in a caravan park along the Queensland coast, one of whom named her kids after pop stars. Though it seemed funny and was written in local slang with some sharp humour, the narrator suffered from post-natal depression, a child was kidnapped, kids were produced for welfare cheques and little else, the boyfriends abused the women and the women abused the system. It was an environment that provided absolutely no hope. To my surprise the story was included in the publisher’s big anthology, along with the biggie Australian authors of the time. Comedy? Literary Fiction? What was really going on there?
