No stranger to the P45 - The Movie -
As if...
www.nostrangertothep45.com
Welcome to Danland As a writer of a book (see Book) it is oddly inevitable that one day I would imagine meeting an individual eager to adapt this shit for the screen. Don’t fret, dear friends, it really is purely my imagination...
Shortly before the romper-suits and the pac-a-macs of the guardians of convention bludgeon me into obscurity with a biscuit and half a shoe, barely a moment prior to hurling me into the back of a unicorn-drawn turnip and whipping me away to yet another job in a shop, I thought I’d take this opportunity to write a new introduction to my book. Whyever not? I ponder aloud. And then immediately realise that no one in this café has a clue of what I’m talking about. A middle-aged couple stare at me as if I’m mad. An attractive woman laughs with a horsey-snort. Out of nowhere I emit a half-cough-halfsneeze. I decide to call it a snough. And now I feel very silly indeed. In one chapter of the book (see Book) I describe - a somewhat loose and rather inaccurate term - a brief job on a million-dollar film. I began writing that piece by imagining a scenario way beyond my pickled shock in which I flog the rights to the book and the whole wodge of this pudding-like nonsense is one day made into a movie. Of course, there’s a great deal of spitting-out both my dignity and whatever basic capability I have for rational thought right across the table - much in the same way that hearing of the sheer absurdity of the notion one 1
would splurt the crumbs of a croissant, or perhaps a slice of cake. For now though, since I have nothing better to do I’m going to pursue this stupidity and imagine the scenario once more. This time I’m going to imagine the movie as if it had a trailer. Sorry about that.
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First, try and remember one of the most recent movie trailers you have seen. If you were in a cinema try not to recall how angry you were at paying such an absurd amount of money for popcorn or even the seat, or if you were at home the infuriating advert in the commercial break that very nearly pushed you beyond mere rage as some motherfucker tried yet again to embed a directory service’s telephone number into your head barely seconds after trying yet again to embed a directory service’s telephone number into your head, barely seconds after trying to embed a directory service’s telephone number into your head... On and on it goes. And on and on and on and on and... JUST FUCK OFF! IT’S NOT FUNNY. IT NEVER WAS. I WOULDN’T EVEN USE YOUR FUCKING SERVICE IF IT WAS THE ONLY POSSIBLE WAY IN THE WORLD TO STOP THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER FROM IMPLODING ALL ELEVEN KNOWN DIMENSIONS INTO ONE ANOTHER IN AN INSTANT, THUS ELIMINATING THE FABRIC OF ALL KNOWN EXISTENCE... FOREVER. IN ALL HONESTY, IT WOULD BE SOMETHING OF A RELIEF NEVER TO HEAR THAT SHIT AGAIN... AND AGAIN AND AGAIN, AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND... 3
Oops. Where was I? Oh. Okay. Try to forget all that and listen to your mind’s ear and to the deep, guttural, tension-building idiolect of a movie-trailer voiceover. The trailer of No stranger to the P45 begins thus...
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[Blank screen, image fading in] ‘Almost forty years in the making...
Across two
continents...’ We’re in a vast warehouse with cabinets and boxes stacked a mile high. The warehouse stretches out as far as the eye can see. There’s a gremlin sitting on the lid of a dustbin and he’s playing the mouthorgan. He tips us a wink and nods his head towards a box. It opens and images leap out like fireworks. In one, a gentle wind blows tumbleweed across a desert floor. The voiceover continues... ‘One man stands alone... He’s thinking. He really shouldn’t being doing that...’ Within the image the camera pans around and focuses upon a distant figure gawping into nothing from the summit of a rocky outcrop. It travels past him and speeds way off into the distance. We’re suddenly at a velocity similar to that of a fighter jet as both the ground below and the clouds above rush by as if travelling far beyond the speed of even time itself. We stop, and we see that same distant figure. He’s closer now. And he’s 5
sipping a cup of coffee in the evening. We’ve paused in an almost-gothic, city-centre square. A horse-drawn carriage trundles past. Ronnie Corbett is dressed in drag and has his arms around two pretty waitresses. Moments later and we see our hero again, standing in a doorway. A crocodile hurtles through the air towards his head. Far away and a whistle blows as steam billows out through the pistons of a sixties locomotive somewhere in Eastern bloc Poland. Suddenly another image flashes across the screen: it’s the immediate aftermath of an armed robbery and the police are in rapid pursuit as beautiful girls in cocktail dresses fire AK47s out through the windows of a Ferrari. A BMW explodes on another city street. The camera’s shutter closes and immediately reopens revealing the carnage of a thousand corpses of the undead scattered about: zombies and chavs in pools of blood as a wideangle shot takes in the Royal Crescent being obliterated by the vast fireball of an alien mothership. A moment passes and then that same gravelly voice of before speaks over scenes of beauty and calm; over the lush green meadows of rolling hills, over sandy beaches and moors strewn with boulders and gorse. It speaks of narcotics trafficking, of mercenaries and of international organised crime. It speaks of political intrigue and the ‘World’s Most Powerful Man’. It speaks of 6
corporate fraud, of sex and champagne and of superstar actors and musicians. Disco lights merge into the flashes of the paparazzi while Russian mobsters mill about eating bags of chips. There’s passion, unrequited love and a great many biscuits. Chilling, bloody violence fills the screen along with a stealthy assassin and a homemade nuclear bomb. Casino chips roll across smooth green felt as Bambi is forced into a blender with a hammer. Black-clad figures of the SAS drop from helicopters and hurl flash-bangs through windows of a portacabin. In the Oval Office our hero’s imagination very nearly becomes the cause of World War Three. Sometime later and it very nearly gets him shot by the US Secret Service, too. A surreal time-travelling incident, Gandalph, and a rainbow of preposterous poodles flash by as if captured within a dream. A marauding crowd of the mass populace pursue our hero with burning torches and pitchforks while waving copies of books by Katie Price. A crescendo of orchestral music melts into a heartbeat, slowing into a single tone as the camera pans out from the mind of our hero: a man sitting alone in a cafe, his face a gawp into nothing, his mouth catching flies as a dribble of saliva drips onto the page of an empty pad. 7
The camera pulls further out: out above the cafe, above the City of Bath and beyond the Earth. With the lid of the box in one hand, his mouthorgan in the other, with the dexterity of a being of great skill the gremlin pushes each of those images back inside the box. He turns to the camera, gives a wink, a sigh and a shrug and says simply, ‘Welcome to Danland’. [Blackout] And... CUT! Hmmm... Okay... Sorry about that.
And... CU
T!
And so, there it is: my imaginary trailer for a movie concept so absurd that the mere mention of such a thing almost invokes in me a snivelling mess of lunacy, not to mention its inevitable resignation to the limits of the normalities of the mass populace. At least it’s given me a few minutes of preoccupation which, perhaps you: my solitary reader (nay, bored sociopath with frequent, uncontrollable masochistic urges to read gibberish and shite) may find of interest. You may be inclined, on the basis of what you’ve read in these pages, to draw the conclusion that this is absolute nonsense; that this is, in fact, a work of complete fiction. It would of course be a fair conclusion to draw were it not for the fact that everything within is actually, to all intents and purposes, true. Welcome to Danland. Welcome to No stranger to the P45. And please, help yourself to a doughnut.
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There is no chance that this will ever be a
SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
No stranger to the P45 by
Dan W.Griffin ‘It’s not shit - it’s Art!’ - Marvellous Malcolm ‘Buy this book! (or else)’ - Andy McNab, Author Bravo Two Zero ‘Dan, you should be in prison’ - Mrs H.Downing
WARNING Contains strong language, bloody violence and scenes of a sexual nature FOR AWARDS CONSIDERATION PURPOSES ONLY. (Ha, Ha, Ha!) www.nostrangertothep45.com
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for more excerpts from the book plus videos & games (including one about an ostrich and another about a yeti thwacking a penguin with a bat) please visit....
www.nostrangertothep45.com
Copyright Š Dan W.Griffin ALL RIGHTS RESERVED The rights of Dan W.Griffin to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 Downloading of this file is subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be reproduced, stored in an alternative retrieval system, transmitted elsewhere or otherwise circulated in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author. This document is for single machine viewing purposes only.
Sorry about that...