Fresh

Welcome to two thousand and ten and three.

A new year means a brand new challenge: to reuse that 2009 Whitney Houston calendar for a fifth consecutive year. You're going to need a lot of Tipp-Ex and a lot of not minding that she's dead now.

2012 was a year of diverse months. This year promises to be no different.

I only wrote 112 blog posts in 2012. That's a drop of, like, 80% from the previous year (or something). I need to slow this decline. And the only way to do it is by typing, not griping; writing, not blighting; living, not not-living.

Since NaNoWriMo, which I totally forgot to mention in my end-of-year review, I haven't done much creative writing. I'm going to remedy that by creating a brand new concept.

I'm tired of sitcoms and films about people being chased. I'm going to change tack. I think my next concept should be one of those Saturday evening family shows, like Doctor Who, or Sherlock, or Merlin.

I've never really seen Doctor Who, but I have watched all of Sherlock, and I have to say that I've found it preferable to staring at a blank screen for ninety minutes.

People like Sherlock. And Doctor Who. Or so it seems. There are lots of merchandising opportunities, and you don't have to worry about dialogue or characters - you just need imaginative concepts and actors that everyone finds attractive for some reason.

Of course, both Sherlock and the modern Doctor Who are built on existing, well-established, properties. I should do the same. People want a fresh new take on an old favourite. I can't just create something from nothing. You can't have a fresh new take on something that doesn't exist yet. That would just be an initial take. People hate initial takes. Initial takes take(s) effort. People don't want to put effort into something on a Saturday evening. They want to turn off their brains and watch sequins and listen to klaxons.

That's why you need a fresh new take. Let those chumps in the past do the leg work. They've already seen the initial take. It's up to us (the Future People) to sit back and enjoy a fresh new take on something people in the past sat back and enjoyed because there were only three channels then.  

So, what should my existing property be? I don't want to relaunch, reboot, prequelise, sequelise, or equalise a television programme from the past. I think I'd be better off taking a Sherlock approach, where you take something that's been beaten in to the ground, dust it off, and convince people it's revolutionary by having one of the characters use Twitter.

It might be best if the property is in the public domain. We don't want to get into any legal disputes. So Scrooge McDuck is out.

I'm thinking Blyton. What about The Famous Five? I doubt that's in the public domain, but English people are less litigious than Disney probably.

We'd have to modernise it, of course. And rename it.

The obvious choice is to simplify it to Five. But there's still the boy-band stigma of 5ive to deal with. Plus, these series seem to do best when named after a character. Dick is out for obvious reasons.

What about George? She's the most interesting character anyway. We could play up her androgyny. I don't think Saturday tea time is ready for a transsexual lead character. I mean, it would be interesting, important, and long overdue to have a well-written transsexual character on mainstream television.

But who's to say that it wouldn't be equally interesting and important to just have a sexy girl in a low-cut top who happens to have quite short hair? There can be a salacious lesbian undercurrent too. Saturday tea time is ready for a sexy gay character as long as they're a) female, b) attractive, and c) not really gay when it comes down to it.

We need Julian and Dick to have weird faces that girls might pretend to like to make themselves seem eclectic.

***

I wrote the above yesterday, but lost confidence in the idea. Because I started with all that stuff about the new year, I need to post it soon, or else I'll have to wait until January 2014.

I don't know if George has legs, either as a television programme or as content for a blog post. I probably would have gone on to write about:

• how they should actually be famous, constantly followed by paparazzi
• we need a modern equivalent of smugglers, like internet... smugglers... some kind of iPad cult...
• a hilarious modern Aunt Fanny equivalent
• Timmy as a wise-cracking, foul-mouthed CGI mutt, voiced by Michael Madsen

It would have been brilliant.

But that was yesterday. Today I'm worried about everything, and have no time for redundant cultural satire.

This year hasn't gotten off on the right foot, attention span-wise. But at least I'm not dead!

Drink some flat champagne. Toast me.

Toast me and my BIG IDEAS.