24 Doodles - 16 to 24

What, did you think just because I started a series called '24 Doodles' on December 1st, it was some kind of advent thing? Well, I don't know where you got that idea. I'm sure I never said so. No, the idea was always to post one every one or two days for about a fortnight, and then the rest all in one splurge on New Year's Eve. So here, as part of the plan that was definitely the plan all along, are the other nine. Happy New Year!

16. First try at a young Ezra Pound, July, British Library, working on 'English For Pony-Lovers'.

17. Second shot. July, BL, E for P-L.

18. Tiny little doodle that I'm rather fond of, London, November, working on Souvenir Programme

19. Little girl looking for fish in a pond. With, as you see, some success. (It was a very low fence, by the way. She's not a giant little girl.) St Albans, September, working on Souvenir Cabin. 

20. Victorian gent in a photograph on a pub wall. Durham, February, working on the thing that later became Wysinnwyg.

21. Statue. Leros, Greece, April,  working on another element that later became Wysinnwyg. (Wysinnwyg gave me the most trouble of all the Double Acts.)

22. Man off the telly. London, February, working on an idea for a Double Act later abandoned.

23. Weather house people. London, November, during the recording of Hot Desk.

24. Your guess is as good as mine. But I wouldn't want to meet it on a dark night.  Dorset, December, working on Souvenir Programme. 

24 Doodles - 15

Two people who passed my window in November, while I was finishing The Goliath Window. (The woman was carrying a white bag, by the way; she's not dressed as a French maid...)

24 Doodles - 14

...and here's the more stylised version.

(The red stains on both come from a drop of candle wax, which fell on the second page, and then, next time I left the book in the sun, melted and seeped through to the first page as well. I rather like the way that, purely by chance, this makes the second stain look like a stylised version of the first.)

24 Doodles - 13

Here's my first attempt at the Edwardian paterfamilias in a photograph hanging in the room in which I was working on Hot Desk in August...

24 Doodles - 12

You know I said a while ago sometimes my doodling is extremely literal minded? Well, here's half a page of notes from Dorset in September on Red-Handed. Yeah. It's not exactly wild, creative, free association, is it?

(By the way... I would just like to make it clear that I'm not putting these - any of these - doodles up because I think they're good. They're all genuinely what I was doodling in the margins while I was working, and so most of them are rubbish- these hands certainly are. This is not 'Behold - pages from my sketchbook' it's 'Look what nonsense my hands got up to while my brain was trying to solve plot problems.')

24 Doodles - 11

Here is a marginal piglet from Tuttlingen in Germany in May, in a pleasant Gasthaus where I ended up doing so much useful plot work on English For Pony Lovers that I set the episode there in its honour.

24 Doodles - 10

More experimenting with repetition to achieve stylisation, this time from March, in a fish restaurant in Greece. By the end I got to something which I think would make quite a fun character design for a druid or something, but really has very little to do with the poor chap enjoying his calamari across the way. For one thing, he seemed to age twenty years with each iteration...

Meanwhile, the notes are the very first seed of what eventually became The Goliath Window, though as you can see nothing about the story beyond the first idea of 'portrait painter and sitter' emerged that evening, with the possible exception of the idea of a model's discomfort at having to pose upside down for St Peter, which arguably eventually turned into the 'holding the spear aloft' sequence. Though just as arguably, it didn't. 

(Incidentally, the French painter I was trying to remember was Géricault.  )

24 Doodles - 9

From August, in London. How are you feeling about those deadlines, John?

24 Doodles - 8

Back to the Souvenir Programme notebook, and back to a bloke who sat near me in a pub, this time in Hampstead. Poor blokes who sit near me in pubs. One day, one them's going to notice. That will be a bad day for me. (Though if it happens in Hampstead, I'll probably be ok.)

24 Doodles - 7

Here's a little bit of research I diligently did into stained glass terminology for The Goliath Window at the British Library in October... none of which ended up in the script. But then, you never know what will be useful until you do it.

That 'Why's it funny?' question was one I had to keep reminding myself to ask whilst writing Double Acts - it was easy to get seduced by the story-telling aspects, and then realise later a page had gone by without any jokes. The answers I came up with here are largely not the answers I ended up with, but at least it reminded me to bear in mind it was a comedy.

24 Doodles - 6

This is from August, when I was working on Hot Desk. There was a photo of a girl on a horse lying around on the table I was working on. I like the horse's legs in this, but not much of the rest of it.

(Incidentally, the 'Aesop version' actually turned out to be The Tortoise That Fell In Love With A Hare. But the rabbit and the lion were useful staging posts to getting me there.)

24 Doodles - 5

Changing notebooks, here's a quick and scrappy doodle of a sphinx from a page of my Souvenir Programme notebook where I was trying to work out a sketch about the riddle of the Sphinx. Sometimes my doodling can be quite literal-minded.

24 Doodles - 4

They haven't been all that doodle-y yet, have they? Here's a properly doodle-y one, from May, when I was working on Wysinnwyg in Dorset. It started off entirely abstract, but I think at the last minute the middle section sort of morphed into a picture of one of the characters...

24 Doodles - 3

This chap was sitting along from me in the British Library in June, while I was working on what became English For Pony Lovers. I've been trying to learn to be more stylistic with my drawing, which I only seem to be able to do by doing the same drawing repeatedly, only more so each time.

24 Doodles - 2

A quick sketch of Evelyn Waugh, drawn in March, on the island of Kos, whilst listening to an interview with him which contained the seed from which A Flock of Tigers grew. The man from whom Edmund Willard got his initials, and some of his opinions. (Though Edmund is fundamentally nicer than I fear Evelyn was, at least by this age.)

24 Doodles - 1

This chap sat over the way from me in the Union Jack pub in Waterloo this February, while I was working on the plot that eventually became Wysinnwyg. You might be able to read the note that says 'Is the problem that the Sues and Adele come from different sitcoms?' The answer to this was... yes.