Who, precisely, is it that decides buying a book of scripts is a good idea?
Let me explain myself a little. Obviously aspiring scriptwriters can learn an awful lot from reading previously made scripts. Similarly, film or television students probably find scripts to be enormously helpful to study their arts – perhaps noting the differences between what was on the page and what was filmed.
But for most of us, surely a scriptbook is simply the tackiest and tawdriest type of commercial cash-in available on the market (excluding anthing that Carol Vordermann puts her name to obviously – in particular electronic sudoku games that . The kind of thing I’m really talking about are these: “Extras”: The Illustrated Scripts – Series One and Two, Am I Bovvered?: The “Catherine Tate Show” Scripts and, “Little Britain”: The Complete Scripts and Stuff – Series Three (perhaps they’ll look really neat next to series one and two).
In a pre- DVD boxset age, these books probably made sense. You could hone your favourite routines for the playground, and these books were the only way you were easily going relive some of those scenes. But now you can watch the BBC Three repeats, watch clips on YouTube, by the DVDs, and watch the shows just about permamently on UKTV Gold 2 +1. So why would you buy the book?
OK – these sales do count as “book” sales, and this time of year brings more people into bookshops than at any other. And these infrequent visitors are probably scared and intimidated by the range available. So they make a beeline for the table at the front of the shop full of comedy books by famous people, chuck a couple of those in their basket and make a dash for the exit before they’re drowned by the literary atmosphere. As boookseller Steerforth mentioned a few days ago, a lot of people bought the Shane Ritchie autobiography last Christmas on the basis that their gift’s recipient liked the Alfie Moon character on Eastenders. Yet when the mass market paperback came out in the summer, nobody was interested. Indeed, no-one even reads these books. I suspect that the oft-quoted stat about how few people ever read A Brief History of Time compared to how many copies were sold has nothing on this genre.
Not having bought, or even gone as far as flicking through one of these tomes, I don’t know to what extent they really are the scripts as written (although I’d have thought that Extras had a certain amount of improvisation going on), but I suspect that many of them might actually be transcripts of the programmes as broadcast instead, packed out with a fullsome selection of publicity stills.
I was going to suggest that the publishers just bring out a Cathering Tate Show Annual and be done with it, except… [I was so hoping that there was an actual annual, but there isn’t] that’d mean somebody conjouring up some new content. Still, who wouldn’t want to read short stories about Lou and Andy done in a comic-strip format in a prospective Little Britain 2007 Annual?