Hangover Hall – the origins of and some surprising revelations about memory…
In which your author is surprised about the rubbish that lurks in the attics of your mind*
*(Could have been canyons or windmills, but attic is closer the mark)
Before the next instalment of this novel is unleashed to the massed tumbleweeds of Substack, a brief diversion as there is something in the roots of this story that really surprised me when I tumbled to it. You may not think it as such, but it gave me a funny turn about the state of my memory, I can assure you.
I started Hangover Hall back in 1989, as a sit-com script with no aliens or fantasy elements. It was inspired by my starting to read PG Wodehouse and also a short-lived Canadian sit-com called ‘Marblehead Manor’ which was shown on C4 in the UK and starred Linda Thorson. I wanted to transpose the country house absurdity of that into a more British idiom, as I like country house stories (although I have severe misgivings about the class that usually built them). This is based on my reading since childhood, I suppose. It’s like school stories in that it gives characters an enclosed environment in which to play out their stories with little outside interference. It can also be ‘timeless’ as you can strip a lot of the surrounding social and historical detail.
Anyway, the fantasy and alien element came in because I was reading some Terry Pratchett and Robert Rankin, and it seemed a nice idea to add that for some extra jokes, situations, etc. The second script came into being, and then I decided to turn it into a novel when the script didn’t sell. So, the first 80pp were written, and then languished until the mid-90’s when, after doing a spoken word version for someone’s tiny cassette label, I got to finishing it. By this time, I’d got some non-fiction books out and was on the second of three rubbish agents I had during this period. Pitching involved using Pratchett and Wodehouse as references, which then turned into using Rowling as a substitute reference for Pratchett as the noughties progressed and I was out on my own. The thinking here being it combined the equally enclosed school story format with magic and so melded to Wodehouse’s country house tropes and gave any potential publisher a market…
Obviously, this was flawed thinking. It didn’t sell and Hangover went into abeyance for another decade until I started a blog which had a second Hangover novel, written from scratch. This one went to 25,000 words before being halted by an e-book contract for a publisher which went under*. Thanks to a long-standing acquaintance, there was then a new sit-com script based on the original book. This went to the wire with Dave, which channel was looking for a fantasy-based sit-com. It lost out to Zapped, which did three seasons and was actually quite good (though it took me some time to watch it in my miff). And so it was back in the drawer until Substack in August this year gave me the idea to just publish in parts anyway…
*(I had also kindled the original novel at this point, which I withdrew for the same reason, under the name Downturn Abyss, a play on Downton Abbey and another terrible attempt to make a pitch reference. However, it did stay up long enough to get a couple of nice reviews, one of which pointed out a similarity to Douglas Adams, which I couldn’t see myself, but made sense as I loved Hitchhiker’s Guide as a teenager. Similarly, Terry Freedman on Substack drew a parallel with Saki and Professor Branestawm, which I would never have thought of, but again made sense.)
For thirty-four years I thought that Hangover Hall was the bastard child of Marblehead Manor and PG Wodehouse, put through a sci-fi blender. Then, last year, I stumbled on something that makes me almost a plagiarist!
Looking up some details on the actor William Mervyn after seeing him on TV, I came across the name Tottering Towers in his credits, from 1971. A kids TV series of 13 episodes. I didn’t remember it (I am the right age) and so I googled it. A couple of articles came up, and the series is lost, but there were descriptions and some photographs. And then it came back…
I loved that at the time. Partly because of the country house setting, partly because it was about a genial mad inventor who was the incumbent m’lord, and partly because it had Stacey Gregg in it as a distant relative who walks into the daftness and is a young girl - for the purposes of audience identification, no doubt. Well, I identified as she was the first crush I can remember. Except of course I hadn’t, until the Proustian Madelaine (pity her name wasn’t that in the series, but it was – crushingly – Daffy) of the series came up.
There are a number of differences, but the basics are the same: country house, stupid science, mad inventor, dodgy staff, young girl walking into fray as outside eyes (don’t think I’ve posted the chapter with her arrival yet). I am an unconscious plagiarist – most writers are, really: discuss – but what really shook me was that I could now remember the series clearly, and how much I’d adored it as a seven-year-old. How was it possible that I now had that recall, where a week before a mention of Tottering Towers without any background would have been met with a blank stare and an even blanker (!) mind.
How odd is memory: we fear it going as part of fearing dementia, but it’s nowhere near as reliable as we think it is. Things don’t come back to us easily even though they may still lurk in the synapses. Things get remembered incorrectly as the memories are corrupted by other information that intrudes and distorts. We pride ourselves on good recall when there is nothing to challenge it. How often is it wrong and we aren’t aware of this? Can we actually rely on our memory, or are our pasts actually not what we think but the construct that we can remember?
I’m just going to have a little lie down…