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The 'argh' moment

It’s pretty much a given that when devising there are thousands of these moments. I reckon we must have an ‘argh’ moment between 20 - 30 times per day when creating material. The cycle starts something like this, person has an idea, person get’s ridiculously over excited about said idea to the point where they’re flapping around like a deranged chicken, person says idea, everyone then excitedly flaps around like a group of deranged chickens, everyone tries idea, someone realises that if we go with said idea then it undermines the entirety of the rest of the show and we’d have to remake it. All of it. Then comes the ‘argh’ and so on and so forth.

I can honestly say that in our five years of making shows, there are only two super ‘argh’ moments that stick in my mind. All of the others fade away, forgotten and bereft under a glow of other great ideas that come together beautifully, ignoring completely that the ‘argh’s’ were needed to get the good ones in the first place.

The first moment was when we made CELL and we were trying to thrash out the remaining narrative of the show and what our main character Ted could give to Annette as the ultimate symbol his lasting affection upon their departure. No biggy. We were super chuffed with ourselves when we came up with him giving her his pet fish, who had travelled with him every step of the way. We then spent the rest of the day working out the heart breaking moment where Ted leaves and hands over his much loved companion. Of course, it wasn’t until halfway through the next day that we realised if we gave away the fish, in the moments where we flashback to Ted at home, post meeting Annette, he would have nothing and no-one to interact with and we would have to re-block and re-create the entire last 30 minutes of the show. THANK YOU SLEEP DEPRIVATION AND PREMIERE BUILD UP PRESSURE. Massive ‘argh’, back to square one.

​The second moment happened during this phase of In Our Hands, whilst we were recently in Cornwall. There have been many challenges in making a show about Trawler fishing, which we completely expected and relished, hence the reason we chose this subject matter. However, I don’t think we anticipated how difficult it would be to develop the narrative. Ultimately, there are very few set answers to the problems that the fishing industry are facing and as a result of this, we struggled to create a resolution to the show. When I say resolution, I don’t mean a nice tidy happy ending but something to show the progression of the characters and their stories and not leave the audience completely dissatisfied. It was really important for us not to just present the facts but presents human lives too. So, this ‘argh’ moment must have gone on for about 3 - 4 days, ​the longest one we have EVER experienced. We sat on the floor of the St Ives Arts Club with a thousand scraps of paper with narrative segments scribbled on strewn across the floor, the first half of them in perfect firm order, the second half in complete disarray. We tried so many ideas, we tried all the ideas but they just didn’t seem to fit and we even got to that point where everyone was like yea, cool, i’m happy, because we just couldn’t make our brains do any more. That is very dangerous territory, making something that is mediocre and doesn’t feel right, not searching for the best and we very nearly fell down that hole.

Thankfully, Matt had the balls to smash through a really hard week of rehearsals and say that he didn’t think it was right, that he didn’t know what the answer was but that we had to keep looking. So we turned our attention to what has inspired us so far on this journey, who we had spoken to, what had conjured up brilliant images and what had touched us. It was at this point that we landed back upon the story of Stefan Glinksy, a sardine fisherman from Newlyn, Cornwall. We met him back in June 2014, at the very start of all of this and he has stuck in our minds ever since. When Stefan was very young, he saw a gap in the market for sardines. There is an abundance of them in our oceans but they just weren’t very popular so he converted his boat to fish sardines and bought a PR company. Whilst he fished the sardines, the PR company worked tirelessly to improve the reputation and popularity of sardines, getting them into all of the big restaurants and supermarkets. Stefan is now hugely successful and fishes in a way that is more sustainable and environmentally friendly. It was this story that ended up inspiring the end of our narrative, it was this story that helped us reconcile Alf and Ben, it was this story that gave us a ladder for that hole and turned that ‘argh’ moment into an ‘aha!’ moment. Thank you Stefan and thank you Cornwall.

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