Life Bites – A new series of monologues

Keep looking for opportunities they say. With no chance of Bolton Little Theater or indeed anyone else’s theaters opening for business anytime soon, creatives are turning to the internet to tell stories and keep connected with their audience. Quite a few local theaters and film-making groups have ventured into monologues, with their obvious advantage of combining lockdown friendly simplicity with potentially great acting and writing. After all, Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads is considered a drama benchmark. Not that I am presenting BLT’s own contribution to the genre as anything like on that level, but it is a versatile format and I hope our Life Bites are going to exploit it.

I was first approached in August with the idea of making short videos for Bolton Little Theater by Carol Butler, who has joined me as producer on this series. She had noticed several of our rivals were already producing them and felt our group was getting left behind. So we proposed the idea to the committee and it was accepted, along with plans for a larger group video filmed at the theater called Stages in Waiting and a short excerpt from ‘Allo ‘Allo, the play we would have been producing in September. Sandra Leatherbarrow suggested the title of Life Bites and it felt right immediately to me. My next act was to set up a dedicated YouTube account and create an animated ident out of the theatre’s logo. A simple coming together of the front symbol and the background coloured square.

Like me, Carol is a writer and performer and had recently been compiling her stories and poems into a forthcoming anthology. She drew on one of these comic stories for the first instalment and recorded it on her smartphone in an impressive feat of learning unknown technology. All I had to do was create the title sequence. I was influenced by the old BBC Play for Today credits from the Seventies. Since these monologues are likely to be all close-ups of performers, I did my best to find photos from old BLT productions which were a good close up of an interesting face and it was actually quite hard to find suitable images in my library. However I persevered and found enough to make the right length of montage, shuffling the actors around to find the best mix. The music was from YouTube’s copyright free music library. Why invite trouble?

Carol’s Pink Fluffy Handcuffs went down really well and has easily been the most successful episode so far. It was followed by Gig 13, Dean Lane’s comic tale of a nightmare gig, not drawn from his own musical career but inspired by it. Dean is an excellent storyteller as well as songwriter. Then there was lull.

After several busy weekends, I finally had time to venture into the local parkland and find a secluded spot to record my entry Helpline. I originally wrote this for the Octagon Theater’s 2014 Best of Bolton evening for local writers, where it was performed by Hylton Collins, before he became a regular on Emmerdale as Tubby Dingle. The idea was one of those that just came into my head and doesn’t have a defined origin. I was just trying to think of a quick story that would fit on a single page. For this video I revised it a bit further, making it a little punchier and adding a contemporary joke. In the end the version I filmed was a little improvised, using the script as a guide because I had not given myself enough time to learn it word perfect. I quite enjoyed editing it, adding a blue filter, some digital distortion, creating an animated message card and filtering the dialogue to give it that monitor quality. Now its out there and I would love you take a look at one of first bits of personal filmmaking I have done in quite a while.