White Van Man: The Journey From Head To Screen
Adrian Poynton | 17:59 UK time, Wednesday, 16 March 2011
Okay, so this feels weird. After four years work, a silly amount of writing and god knows how many litres of tea, White Van Man is going to be shown on the TV. It doesn't exactly seem real and I'm still not totally convinced it's actually going to happen... and here's why: I had two dreams as a child.
- To write a TV comedy series and
- To write an episode of Doctor Who.
Apparently, I've just done 50% of that. Yikes.
It turns out, the idea and all the characters for the show had been in my head for years, I just hadn't realised it at first.
The show, really, is about two things:
- Me and my Dad
- The place I grew up (Lichfield in Staffordshire).
My Dad (who just so happens to be called Tony and has a little white moustache - just like the Dad in the show) is from a very different generation of people than me. He grew up in a working class household, didn't do great at school and started working at a very early age. He did a lot of manual labour jobs like building, plumbing, painting people's houses etc. You know, the sort of jobs that make you want to say 'Grrrrr' a lot.
Me on the other hand, I'm a numpty who spends half his time prancing around on stage trying to make people laugh and the other half sitting in front of a computer, having delusions of being some grand storyteller.
I mean, my Dad single-handedly built the extension on my Mum and Dad's house, whereas I got in a huff this morning because we were out of green tea. We're very different people.
One day I started to wonder what it would be like if my Dad couldn't do any of that stuff anymore. Would I have to step up? And boom! Just like that, the idea for White Van Man was born. I'd sort of been living it for years.
Although let's be honest, that 'boom' could well have been the result of me trying to rewire a plug. We may never know.
I also suddenly realised, I'd grown up living in the setting for the show too.
I grew up in the Midlands, but it doesn't matter if you grew up in the north or the south or wherever, so much of the experiences people seem to have of their hometowns are surprisingly universal. That's why I made up a town name for the show.
To me Maplebury is Lichfield. I know to Will Mellor, it's Stockport. I hope for you, it's where you grew up. Believe me; you might even meet some characters in the show you already know from home. You might even see yourself in there. In which case, if you do - sorry.
That's been the real joy creating this show. Everyone who has read it has seemed to get it. They all just seemed to understand the world because they had, in someway, grown up in it.