The Illustrated Finale

From 11 a.m. BST on today I'll be illustrating the winning lines in The Society of Authors Twitter short story Grand Finale.


Neil Gaiman's opening line will be posted at 11 a.m. BST. Using the #soatale search tag, you can tweet the next line until 11.30. Whilst the judges are judging, I'll illustrate the opening line here.


At 12.00 the winning line goes up and again, when entries close at 12.30, I'll post an illustration. The final line goes live at 3.00 so there are 5 lines and 5 illustrations in all. Good luck and I hope I illustrate one of YOUR lines!




The FIRST LINE:  I didn't expect the God of Thunder to live in Clapham. I definitely didn't expect to learn it from a card in a newsagent's window. #SoAtale

2nd LINE by Naomi_Adams: He opened the door unshaved wearing one sock, and a pair of pants as silent lightning streaked across the blackened sky. #soatale

'3rd LINE by @Laura_E_James : Flu,' he mumbled. 'Bad head. Shh.' I walked in and waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. 'There.' He pointed. I looked. #soatale

4th LINE by @will_lefleming :Strewn across the floor: leather breastplates and swords. A pair of wings hanging by the stairs. 'You know what to do,' he said #soatale

5th & LAST LINE by @stroodlights : He told me of the curse,but who cares about that when you're the new Thunder God? I soared, and filled the sky with fire and music. #soatale

GRAND FINALE PART 2 - Join the Society of Authors again at 6pm tonight for the start of the SECOND short story by Neil Gaiman. And I'll be back here doing cartoons of the winning lines.

Short Story, Big Campaign

Last week authors from all over the world collaborated on a short story with Joanne Harris. The week before, they worked on one by Simon Brett. And before that, Sarah Waters and  Ian Rankin. Why have these world-renowned writers sought co-authors?

It’s the Society of Authors Twitterthon.

The BBC have  decided to cut back on the number of short stories broadcast on Radio 4, in order to make room for news. They will drop from five a week to one. More news is obviously just what we need, rather than diversity, an opportunity to stretch our imaginations or, perish the thought, a chance to relax.

The cutback reduces even further the number of outlets for an endangered art form. The Radio 4 spot exposes short stories to the maximum possible audience. And it exposes the Radio 4 audience to a wide range of viewpoints, voices and imagination.

There is a vigorous campaign to oppose the cuts and at the forefront of the protest is The Society of Authors. As part of the campaign, for the past five weeks the SoA has been running a weekly Twitterthon. 

Each Wednesday morning, at 11 a.m. BST, the SoA posts an opening line written by a famous writer. Twitternautes have 30 minutes to compose the next line. A jury of wise authors then picks the winning line. At 12 noon, that line goes up and the story continues.

There are five lines in all so each story is succinct, punchy and can shoot off in any direction. Last week’s certainly did. The bedroom clown scene was all my fault.

Entries are coming in from all over the globe. UK and French media outlets have written about the Tweetathon and Stephen Fry is tweeting about it to his 6 billion followers. And from 19th October the winning entries will be read out by actors Brenda Blethyn, Bill Nighy, Maureen Lipman and Hugh Bonneville.

The campaign is already having results with BBC Radio 4 executing a partial u-turn, by doubling the proposed number of weekly short stories from one to …um… two.

It all ends tomorrow with a grand finale. The guest writer will be offering two opening lines - at 11 a.m. and 6 p.m. (North American writers and those who sleep in, please note).

And the writer will be … TADAA! … Neil Gaiman. Expect the unexpected.

On a personal note, I've always had an ambition to illustrate a Neil Gaiman story so I’ll be blogging a cartoon for each winning line as it is posted on Twitter. 

To join in and collaborate with Neil, follow The Society of Authors on Twitter and use/include the #soatale tag in your tweets.

And when you’ve done, go sign the petition and fight the cuts.

To read more about the grand finale, go here

To read the stories so far, see here

BBC Goes Radio Gaga

Yesterday the BBC announced it’s cuts to slash 20 percent it’s operating costs. The cuts cover a wide range of broadcasting and a lot of staff are going to suffer. The Beeb has a lot of waste, so doubtless some cuts were necessary. But one of the more indefensible was the decision to eviscerate BBC local radio .

As part of the cuts, my local station, BBC Radio Cumbria will now have local content only at peak hours, relying on relaying Radio 4 during the evening. I am not sure how much this will save but I doubt it will be much, in the general scheme of cutbacks. Even across all the local radio stations, it probably will only just equal the salaries of a couple of big name stars on BBC1.

To the local community, however, the cut is going to have much more impact. The whole reason for the existence of local radio (apart from the BBC planting it’s foot somewhere before commercial radio got a toehold) is the local community. It supports the station, listens to it, gets breaking news from it and interacts with it. During the 2001 foot and mouth crisis, Radio Cumbria was breaking news of national interest, scooping  bigger stations and giving a ground-eye view on how the outbreak was effecting people who live and work in the area. It was local radio at its best and Radio Cumbria deservedly got an award for it.

The decision to cut back the station has left me feeling a bit cross. You may be able to tell. I'm not the only one. Our redoubtable local MP has waded in with his support and there are campaigns on Facebook and Twitter.

The Beeb will have spent nearly £1b relocating staff and production facilities from London to Manchester in a bid to be less London-centric and support the regions. Then it saves £5.3m by cutting local radio programming to rebroadcast Radio 4 from London. Brilliant.

According to the Telegraph, the BBC has 382 staff earning more than £100,000 a year. 100 of its senior staff get a salary totalling more than £20m a year. 

So perhaps the BBC should preserve BBC local radio's distinctive voice and look elsewhere for its cutbacks. Here are a few suggestions. I'm sure you can think of more

1. Fiona Bruce is nice to look at but, frankly, so is the virtual assistant on my online insurance site and I'm sure she could read out the news just as well.

2. Andrew Marr is reputed to earn £600,000 a year. Perhaps it would be cheaper to get someone less well-known to do one weekly radio show, a Sunday TV programme and annoy viewers by getting in the way of the scenery on an occasional documentary series.

3. Switch off Radio 1 between midnight and 6 a.m., when most of its listeners are out clubbing or looting anyway.

4. Stop making pointless and expensive adverts for BBC programmes which we were either going to watch or avoid anyway. A list onscreen would do.

5. Sack the person who thinks it is a good idea to talk all over the end credits of TV programmes.

6. The BBC director general’s salary could go back down to what it was when Greg Dyke was an arguably more popular and adept DG. That £400,000 would be very welcome in local radio.

7. Switch off daytime TV. Students should be out doing part-time jobs to pay back their student loans.

8. Do we really need 24 hour news on television? Really? Can't the less attractive newsreaders get jobs doing something else?

9. There are fast food outlets everywhere. Do we really need 478,000 cookery programmes a week?

10. Downsize the department which thinks up BBC job titles like Head of Brand Guardianship, Content Manager (Culture), Controller of Multi-Platform and Portfolio (£177,000 annual salary), Solutions Architect, Change Management Leader and Director of Audiences.

Home and Away

There were three stories for the cartoon in this week’s Westmorland Gazette. One of them was the lead - that’s always an attraction - although it was a subject I had tackled before and that’s usually a put-off. But this time it was a subject close to my heart, which I have railed against so many times, the Gazette banned me from tackling it for a while … holiday homes.

Or more precisely, the need to build new homes for locals. The two are the same. Despite what holiday home owners will tell you, the blight of second homes in the Lake District is resulting in closed schools, reduced facilities and fewer young people able to afford homes in the communities in which they grew up.

The Lake District National Park Authority has identified potential sites for 900 new homes in the area. Understandably, a lot of locals are opposed to all this building - the more so because so many houses remain empty for so much of the year.

Grr.

Anyway, I had four goes at the subject and sent them off to the editor. Esteemed editor came back and pointed out that they weren’t particularly funny, would I try again? 

Grr squared. 

I fired off a 5^th. Then a 6^th. And I’d actually got a 7^th ready but by then I was seriously pushing the deadline and it was never sent. Fortunately, one of the cartoons had already been deemed suitable. Time to move onto the final artwork.

Which you can see on my website or in the newspaper from Thursday. Meanwhile, I leave you with the preliminary sketches …

Wild Things

Cumbria is full of strange and exotic creatures.

Red deer, ospreys, char, golden eagles, Bownessie, ostritches, tigers, giraffes, even the occasional cartoonist. Many of these exotic animals (not the cartoonist) live at South Lakes Wild Animal Park, which has plans to expand to include even more exotic animls (still no cartoonists).

Local councillors have other ideas, however, and there is something of a stand-off occurring at present. Two sides to a conflict, each with a voluble spokesperson - an ideal lead for any newspaper.

The other story which whiffled past the cartoonist this week, is one which is bound to create controversy. Emma Thompson, actress and daughter of the narrator of Magic Roundabout, is writing a sequel to Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, set in Scotland.

I had a few ideas what this might be like, most of which were judged unsuitable for a family newspaper. Fortunately we’re made of more robust stuff here, so you can see the ideas sketched out below. To discover which cartoon is on the front of this week’s Westmorland Gazette, buy the paper or waft over to my website from Thursday morning. In case you were hoping, it isn’t number one …

Winds of change

The cold winds of change are tugging at political skirts around Cumbria at the moment. 

The Parliamentary Commission on Boundary Changes, Gerrymandering and Fiddling Round the Edges has recommended that Cumbria’s political boundaries be randomly hacked about in order to generate correspondence and boost sales of local newspapers.

And I think it may work. Residents of Hawkshead and Windermere, for instance, who have hitherto been content to share their MP with the fine folk of Kendal will be more than a little dischuffed to discover they’ve got to share one with the lower class oiks from St Bees and the west coast. They’ll be reaching for the headed notepaper in droves. But they’ll be out of luck. Droves is now lumped in with Carlisle and Penrith.

As it is a cartoonist’s task to get outraged before the readers, the target for this week’s newspaper cartoon was clear.

But lo, there was a second story worthy of attention. Kendal is suffering declining air quality. For once, this was not caused by the thick fumes which belch forth from the dozens of mint cake factories on the outskirts of town. It is caused by traffic. And probably traffic at a standstill; in addition to high concentrations of nitrogen and carbon monoxide particles, tears of frustration were found in the dense smog.

Here are the four ideas I submitted to my editor this week. As usual, you can find out which was the lucky winner of the Caribean cruise by shimmying over to my website.

A Pressing Concern

We’ve all done it.

We’ve picked up the remote control, fiddled around and pressed the wrong button. 

Before we know it, the video has turned off halfway through a recording, the neighbour’s garage door has opened or we’ve launched a major air-sea search-and-rescue incident.

This is exactly what happened to a gentleman on Ullswater last week. He was on his boat, demonstrating his radio to his grandchildren. Unfortunately he pressed the Mayday button and sent a signal to Liverpool coast guards.

They in turn triggered rescue boats from Ullswater Outward Bound Centre, a nine man team from Patterdale Mountain Rescue and crews aboard the Ullswater Steamers.

The man was eventually found, three hours later, at a local marina, blissfully unaware of the havoc he’d caused and, probably by this stage, introducing his grandkids to the delights of Werther’s Originals.

The leader of the Mountain Rescue Team commented, with commendable restraint: “I wouldn’t implore his intention of checking his equipment although I would query how well he actually did it.”

This, clearly, is ideal stuff for a newspaper cartoon. Below you can see the pencil sketches submitted to the editor. It’s really one idea plus four variations; it sort of grew on me.

To see which one adorns the front of Thursday’s Westmorland Gazette, rush over to my website urgently!