Screw the World, I Want To Get Off

There was a large manila envelope waiting for me on the dining room table this morning. I recognised it immediately. I’d addressed it to myself a long time ago.

Rejection is like holding a conversation with yourself, only with a matter of months separating the reply from the question. ‘Will they like your work, Dick?’ I asked back in May when I sent the script for a radio comedy to the BBC’s Writer’s Room. ‘They bloody hated it!’ came the answer, written in my own hand, today.

Since I sent this script way, I’ve written a dozen sketches for NewsJack, dozens of jokes and one-liners, which were all ignored. The standard opinion within the BBC is that I’m not funny. So, I suppose this package shouldn’t come as a surprise. Yet I don’t know how to take more rejection from the BBC, who only seems to exist in order to torment me. I haven’t the heart to open the package and, thankfully, Judy hasn’t asked me about it. It’s her belief that my next project should be in my own name. She doesn’t see the point of my writing and submitting work in the name of my alter-ego, Gus Scrottee.

I suppose I really should open it...

Rejection letters come in many forms. I’ve had compliment slips that read ‘Not this time’ (a favourite phrase of editors and agents as if to imply that there might actually be a time). Then there’s the formal letter which is sent with every manuscript that doesn’t take their fancy. When I say ‘their fancy’, I mean the fancy of the eighteen year old trainee who they’ve hired to open every envelope in their slush pile and tip the contents into the Self-Addressed Envelope. I figure most agents are off cosying up to the next Z list celebrity to whom they’ve offered a book deal. This week, we’re told that £1.5 million has been offered to Peter Andre for writing a cookbook. A cookbook!

Meanwhile, in the world of Gus Scrottee...

Okay. I’ll open it.

It’s a form letter, only this one actually grades my sense of failure. In the case of the BBC’s Writer’s Room, they receive 10,000 scripts a year and less than 10% get through the first sift. I didn’t make it past the first sift. They didn’t bother to read more than the first ten pages. They thought it was rubbish.

What am I to do? Accept that some other would-be writer out there has read this and doesn’t like it? But who is it? Some hack who produces the usual crap I listen to on Radio 4?

Or do I have to question my own sense of self-worth? Was it really so bad? Is it so much less than every Radio 4 comedy out there? Am I really than unfunny?

Screw them. Screw the lot of them. They’ll never understand Gus Scrottee. Never.

Meanwhile, I’ve put the script in ‘the vault’ where those in the know can read it and wallow in the misery of another poorly written script.

[NOTE: Not that this has anything to do with anything but I fail to see the point of projects like this.]