New influences
As the millennium approached I found myself tiring of television, of the
cumbersome commissioning processes and the endless chase for ratings. I was making a good living developing projects that fell at the last post or being asked to write a vehicle for some soap star whether or not they were suitable for the part. I was also beginning to feel stale. I needed new influences, and these came without searching far.
My Buddhist son was working in a remote province in Vietnam. Going out
there to visit him changed my life and put so much else in perspective.
cumbersome commissioning processes and the endless chase for ratings. I was making a good living developing projects that fell at the last post or being asked to write a vehicle for some soap star whether or not they were suitable for the part. I was also beginning to feel stale. I needed new influences, and these came without searching far.
My Buddhist son was working in a remote province in Vietnam. Going out
there to visit him changed my life and put so much else in perspective.
Most of the older people in Vietnam spoke French. I longed to talk to them in depth but was horribly aware of the inadequacies of my rusty O’level grasp of the language.
As soon as I got back to London I enrolled at the Institut Francais where I started again from scratch. After a year or so I started writing in French and won a writing competition in the magazine “La Vie Outre Manche.” I won again the following year and was then invited to submit stories on a professional basis.
By then I was avidly reading French novels and plays and had moved on to Advanced French classes at the City Lit.
Meanwhile I had started to go to Paris regularly, made friends with French
actors and writers and went to plays and films with them. The French influence began to show in some of my radio plays and more recently has led to my writing my stage play “We’ll always have Paris.”
The Vietnamese influence continues too. My son, Ben, has a beautiful Vietnamese wife, Vy, and two lovely children. My little grandson is Downs Syndrome: another new world I have entered.
As soon as I got back to London I enrolled at the Institut Francais where I started again from scratch. After a year or so I started writing in French and won a writing competition in the magazine “La Vie Outre Manche.” I won again the following year and was then invited to submit stories on a professional basis.
By then I was avidly reading French novels and plays and had moved on to Advanced French classes at the City Lit.
Meanwhile I had started to go to Paris regularly, made friends with French
actors and writers and went to plays and films with them. The French influence began to show in some of my radio plays and more recently has led to my writing my stage play “We’ll always have Paris.”
The Vietnamese influence continues too. My son, Ben, has a beautiful Vietnamese wife, Vy, and two lovely children. My little grandson is Downs Syndrome: another new world I have entered.
Ben and his family live in California near to Vy’s parents who emigrated there after the war. They still live, Vietnamese-style, close to their old friends in the area known as Little Saigon where I am given a warm welcome whenever I visit them.
And so the doors continue to open...
