The latest in the LWH series of interviews is a fascinating insight into a collaborative book project which began life as a blog on one level of reality, developing into a novel through a cult social media following, but even before that, in another Time, actually began life hiding behind the sofa cushions long before the authors were even born…
Interview with Mark Charlesworth and Chris Newton about Life Begins at Forty published by Hirst. Interview by Daisy Baldwin
Mark and Chris will be appearing at the next Word Soup event – Being Human – on Thursday 24th March 2011.
When I meet Chris and Mark off the train they immediately offer me a (vegan-friendly) biscuit, and later proceed to offer them to the bar staff at the pub. It’s official, Northerners really are friendlier.
Once outside Euston station they sprint across the busy road, leaving me dithering on the other side, waiting for the lights to change. Post-interview this incident begins to take a deeper significance – it becomes apparent that Chris and Mark don’t wait around for something to happen; they have an idea and they run with it. Which is why at the same age as me (just twenty-four) they’ve achieved such a lot, and I fully expect will go on to even greater things. This is definitely a creative partnership to keep an eye out for.
LWH: So how long did it take you to write the book?
Mark: Well we came up with the idea last January, so it’s been less than a year from start to finish.
Chris: It’s a bit of a strange one really – it came from a conversation we had while we were working on another project. Copious amounts of tea had been drunk and Mark said that there should be a comedy about these two guys –
Mark: I was joking.
Chris: And then he came back into the room and said ‘We’ll write it!’
Mark: And that was that!
Chris: It gathered steam really quickly.
Mark: We started it as a blog [Pete and Jeff's Blog] and we updated it monthly, which I think was actually a really good way to start because it didn’t seem too ambitious.
Chris: Then we scattered the links around the internet and it was really well received – people seemed to love it. So we kept updating monthly, and then in May we met Tim (Hirst, of Hirst Publishing) who wanted to turn it into a novel. We actually finished it in about three months, didn’t we?
Mark: It was basically ready to go by September.
Chris: I spent most of my August sitting in a room with the curtains drawn and fairy lights on, listening to Christmas music to write the December part!
Mark: It’s funny because usually we’re meticulous about planning things and then this project just seemed to miraculously happen.
LWH: Where you both big fans of Dr Who to start with, and if so did you become more involved while you were writing the book, or do you feel like you need a break now?
Chris: Oh no, you can never have too much Dr Who!
A few years ago a friend of mine noticed I had a Tardis key ring and he said, ‘Oh you like Dr Who, when did you get into it?’ And I just looked at him blankly, like I can’t remember a time when Dr Who wasn’t part of my life.
We’re that unusual generation who grew up when it wasn’t actually on the telly. So people assume the people of our generation didn’t see it – which is preposterous, because it was all on video! My Nan used to take me to Bispham library every week and I’d get a new Dr Who video each time. It was so exciting, I loved it because it was silly and exciting and scary and just everything you wanted as a kid.
Mark: And it was repeated every Sunday morning.
Chris: Yeah there’s absolutely no excuse.
>> That’s interesting, because on the face of it, we’re the Lost Generation aren’t we- the only ones who grew up without new episodes.
Chris: It’s funny, we make a big thing of it in the book, about it being cancelled, but in reality I never thought of it as being cancelled, it just wasn’t on the telly for the moment, but I always thought it would come back.
>> Like it was in hibernation.
Mark: Well that’s how the production team referred to it, just having a rest for a bit (17 years!)
Chris: People assume you can’t have seen it just because it wasn’t being made when you were a kid but look at Star Wars, that wasn’t being made when I was young but I still watched it. We all watched it.
Mark: The show is beautiful and wonderful, and for people who embrace it, it can be an all-encompassing philosophy.
Chris: Definitely. I mean the people who don’t get it might think it’s weird that so many adults get so involved in a children’s program.
Mark: It’s NOT a children’s program!
Chris: Well I think it’s genuinely a family program. A lot of things are branded as ‘family shows’ because adults watch them with their kids –
Mark: ‘Family’ is usually a by-word for children.
Chris: But Dr Who is a show where the parents and the children and the teenagers and the grandparents all watch it, and all love it. It’s constantly being refreshed – that’s the nature of the show. It’s got a very modern feel.
>> Do you feel the older shows have dated?
Mark: It might look dated, but the scripts haven’t dated. It’s all about the story.
Chris: Yeah you might say it’s all about special effects but by that token in a decade or so the ‘new’ Dr Who will look rubbish. But the acting is great, the stories are great and that’s all that matters really.
Mark: Interestingly, if you look at the old Dr Who, from the 70s, they’re very moral. You know, they’re dealing with a lot of moral issues – and that doesn’t date.
Chris: If you look at a modern episode, ‘The Hungry Earth’, that’s basically a rehash of a 1970s episode.
Mark: Pretty much word for word.
Chris: So the issues are still extremely relevant.
Chris: Back in the old days they used to novelise all the material, so the kids could relive the adventures, and apparently the novelisation went into a lot of detail about the Silurians which the TV show didn’t touch on, so the new one looked at the novel and expanded it.
Mark: I suppose the biggest difference was that they humanised the monsters in the novel and they did that in the new episode.
Chris: Exactly… Essentially it’s an anti-racism statement.
Mark: Absolutely. A lot of the old episodes are incredibly moral. The Dr is sort of the ultimate moral hero.
Chris: It’s inherent in the character. If you look at a lot of action heroes, they all have weapons, while the Dr has a screwdriver… Screwdrivers are used to fix things rather than destroy them. That says so much about his character and the show. In the episode Matt Smith used the screwdriver to disarm a Sylurian and he made a big point of saying that he held it upright rather than pointing it at them, to make clear it was non-aggressive.
LWH: It has to be asked, who is your favourite Dr?
Both, immediately: Jon Pertwee
Chris: We had this conversation recently actually and we said you could probably give a very plausible argument with each Dr, about why they were the best; I love them all for different reasons. We both adore Matt Smith. And Tom Baker, obviously. But the Jon Pertwee episodes were the first ones we saw. My parents grew up watching the episodes with him, so they were the first ones they showed me. There’s maybe a slight childhood gloss on it. Also I met him when I was about seven years old.
>> It’s a sign of how infectious their enthusiasm is that I’m genuinely excited by this.
Wow!
But even being objective about it, the acting was the best, the storylines were the best.
Mark: Also the production values were pretty good in that period.
Chris: Yeah like the one with the shop window dummies, because it was just dummies, and they’re always the same, it doesn’t look dated.
Mark: That episode is incredible, it’s still so creepy.
LWH: I think our readers will be interested to know about the dynamics of co-authoring a book?
Chris: A lot of people ask about that, they think it would be inherently more difficult; people often tell me that they couldn’t write something with someone else. And I’d actually agree with that, but with us it’s almost like I’m not writing it with someone else at all, we’ve got an incredible symbiosis.
Mark: Almost like a psychic connection.
Chris: We’ve been best friends for… pretty much forever. School, college.
Mark: I like to think, when I’ve come up with an idea, I will tell Chris at some point, but he probably already knows. It usually works like that. One of us will write something and then the other person will be like, that’s so weird I was going to pick up on that too…
Chris: We do normal stuff too! Drinks, you know.
Mark: Sometimes a curry.
Chris: If we’re feeling particularly crazy. But mainly, ever since we were twelve years old all we’ve ever done is create things together. We used to write song lyrics together, short stories, poems.
Everything you do is a learning process, you learn from your mistakes, and because we’ve been writing together for so long, our writing processes have sort of intertwined.
Mark: We have the same mind really.
Chris: I can’t imagine writing with anyone else though.
Mark: Oh no, me either. I suppose you get these creative partnerships, like Mitchell and Webb, Moffat and Gatiss. They’re so established people don’t tend to think of the mechanics of it but it’s the same thing.
It’s hard to explain, it is sort of magical. We work on something and then later it’s like we were writing in the same room.
>> Do you ever write in the same room?
Chris: It tends to be 50/50. But that’s another one of the things which makes it a joy. I mean obviously we posted it online in the beginning but really we only ever wrote it for ourselves, and one of the reasons it was so enjoyable to write is because I knew I’d get to read it to Mark. We make each other laugh.
Mark: And I always think if we can make one another laugh it’s likely to make other people laugh. It’s a great sounding board. It’s kind of like having an editor. It almost feels like it’s a work in progress until I’ve shown it to Chris.
Chris: It’s that old saying, a problem shared is a problem halved – an idea shared becomes twice as good.
LWH: Reading it I felt the characterisation is very successful – did you base some elements on people you know?
Chris: A lot of the characters in the book are people we’ve written about before, in short stories.
Mark: Yeah this book was a good home for a lot of our characters.
Chris: I tend to think most characters are a facet of yourself in some way, exaggerated. Which sort of links into the way that a lot of the events in the book – they’re not things which have actually happened to us – but they’re often based on scenarios we’ve found ourselves in and get to thinking, what if this went badly wrong…? Let’s write about that. So I suppose in a way with the characters we were doing the same thing – what if they were OCD, or agoraphobic? Or depressed. The whole thing is a massive exaggeration. Even Dr Who itself, despite the fact we’ve gone on about it for about an hour, it isn’t the most important thing in our lives. But with Pete and Jeff it IS their lives, they can’t escape it. They can’t see beyond it.
Mark: Which I think is the best joke of all.
They refuse to grow up and try to apply a fantasy TV show to every element of a supposedly adult life.
>> I especially liked the way that at different times in the book one of them would appear quite sensible, and then you’d realise they were only sensible in relation to the other!
Mark: Both of them think they’re more intelligent than the other but the great tragedy is in reality they’re both dragging each other down.
>> Sort of the reversal of your friendship.
Mark: I guess so, yeah that’s an astute observation.
LWH: One of the characters Pete is agoraphobic. Did you do any research into agoraphobia?
Mark: It’s actually something I felt I could relate to.
>> I think to an extent it’s something we all relate to isn’t it? The feeling that we can’t control or understand what’s outside of ourselves – agoraphobia is perhaps an extreme extension of that.
I was certainly keen to make sure it wasn’t something just used for comic effect. I tried to be careful with how we dealt with it, not making it seem like something which could just be brushed away easily.
Chris: I think the agoraphobia is dealt with seriously, but that we make fun of Pete. In the same way some people might think that at times the novel is making fun of Dr Who; it isn’t, it’s making fun of the people who obsess about it.
Mark: Including ourselves! I think you have to be self-deprecating.
Chris: Yeah. Some of the projects we’ve worked on in the past – music, poetry, are fairly serious, so people tend to assume we’re brooding and intense.
Mark (deadpan): Which we are.
Chris: But it’s important to be able to laugh at yourself.
LWH: People are going to assume it was difficult to write about characters who are significantly older than you, did you find it a challenge?
Chris: That’s a good question. Actually in the taxi on the way to the train station this morning, the driver asked us what we were doing in London, I said we’d written a book, and he asked us what it was called. When I said ‘Life Begins at Forty’ he looked at me suspiciously in the rear view mirror, ‘You’re not forty!’
It frustrates me so much. I sincerely doubt you know that when JK Rowling said she’d written a book about wizards anyone looked at her and said ‘but you’re not a wizard!’ Fiction is fiction; it’s writing make-believe. The title is a joke because from the outset we said ‘Let’s write a book about a couple of people in their late thirties who basically have the mental age of teenagers.’
>>I was going to make that point, that in fact the characters’ true age is probably younger than you.
Chris: Age doesn’t mean anything, it’s all about perception. I’m very afraid of ageing, I’m about to turn twenty-five and I’m terrified – so the bits in the novel where they worry about turning thirty-nine is basically just me worrying about turning twenty five! I think however old you are you worry about getting older; you worry about the passing of time.
Mark: It’s ironic really because they are essentially kids, and we’re perfectly qualified to talk about kids. They’re stuck in the bodies of thirty-nine year olds but at heart they’re nineteen.
Chris: Which I think is exemplified by the fact that – as you know, there are flashbacks to their childhood diaries throughout, and it’s an obviously younger voice writing those, but when you get right to the end and they’re eighteen and writing the diary and suddenly it’s their voice; they essentially haven’t changed since they were eighteen. Personally I know a great many people in their forties who haven’t settled down and don’t have a long-term job, and at the same time I know plenty of people in their twenties who have a career and a family. Age is irrelevant I think. You shouldn’t judge people on their age.
We’re actually working on the early stages of another project in which the main characters are in their early twenties, and I found it much more difficult to write about that. That’s something I never really felt a part of.
Mark: It’s the sort of thing I tried to make myself a part of but in reality observed from a distance.
Chris: I definitely found it harder to imagine life from the point of view of a fashionable twenty year old than I did to write as an unfashionable thirty-nine year old!
As if by magic, Pulp’s Common People comes on; a welcome break from the steady soundtrack of Take That and James Blunt we’ve been listening to.
Chris: We were really into music in the early nineties, when we were kids, maybe in the next book we could write ‘Pete and Jeff; the University years’.
Mark: Which is perhaps the age at which most people get into music.
>> I’m glad you said that, I’m sitting here feeling I’m not from the same generation as you are.
Mark: Yeah I suppose we experienced that earlier than a lot of people, probably because of our parents.
Chris: It is strange. I suppose if you think about it, when I was ten years old I was watching a retro TV show and listening to modern music.
>> Whereas I was watching modern TV (Sharky and George being a particular favourite) and listening to old music (my mum was a massive fan of Donovan.)
I feel like I have more in common with my fifty year old Dad than my fourteen year old brother. There’s this massive divide between before and after 1990 because of the digital revolution. Nowadays it’s all digital downloads and mp3s.
Mark: They communicate on a totally different level.
Chris: They do, I mean we didn’t have the internet as kids. We grew up with cassettes and vinyl.
>> Really?? I had the internet when I was a kid, and I didn’t have cassettes and vinyl.
Both: Really?
>> No!
I think the explanation is more a question of awareness. My recollection is that CD’s came into being at around the time I became properly aware of music, and the internet came about at the same time as I became interested in the outside world. And so I don’t remember a time before these things, whereas I get the impression that Mark and Chris was far more culturally observant youths. Either that or they grew up in a parallel universe.
Mark: A lot of people from our generation don’t have the same nostalgia for the nineties, it’s true. I sometimes feel older than my contemporaries. Not in a superior way! I feel like I’m on a constant crusade to get into ‘young people music’.
>> What would you consider to be young people’s music?
Chris: Well you were saying you’d tried to get into the Arctic Monkeys – is that what they’re called?
Mark (sorrowfully): I really tried, and you know, Interpol and the Editors.
Chris: Most of the music we like is from the nineties and before.
Mark: It seems to me that music was so much more sincere before the end of the nineties. Now it’s all ironic, and going out on the lash and that.
And back to the book!
LWH: The ending is surprising and very dramatic. Is it something which evolved as you were writing it, or did you have it in mind from the outset?
Chris: When we were updating it as a blog we just aimed to have something funny every month. But then when we were turning it into a novel we needed to know where it was going. I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s a book full of Dr Who references and Dr Who always ends on a cliff-hanger…
Mark: I hope it will shock people.
>> And will the cliff-hanger be resolved?? Is there a sequel in the works?
Mark: We hope so. Let’s just say it’s looking good.
I’d say it’s looking very good.
Life Begins at Forty is on sale in all the usual places and especially direct from Hirst Publishing where if you’re lucky you’ll get a signed copy.
Mark Charlesworth and Chris Newton will be appearing at the next Word Soup event – Being Human – on Thursday 24th March 2011.
I’m on the bill with Mark and Chris on the 24th and am currently reading ‘Life Begins at Forty.’ My review will be osted on this site shortly, looking forward to meeting you both.