The other ideas

For the record, these were the other ideas on the shortlist. I'm confident we've picked the right two but if anyone is particularly interested in the others let me know.

Invincible Dave

Dave lives in Godalming, Surrey. As he has his entire life except for 3 years at uni, in Reading.

Dave is not one for adventure. Nor is he really one for giving back to the community. So it is arguable if you were to pick anyone on this planet to discover that they’re completely invincible Dave would not be it.

And indeed when he does discover it he does not see why this should in anyway change his life. But his mate Harry thinks this is his way out of Godalming. If only he can persuade Dave to act like a superhero. It’s important to note that Dave has no other superpowers. He’s not fast or strong or able shoot bolts of lightning from his eyes. It’s just you can’t kill him. You can make him hurt but he doesn’t get cut or burnt or broken. It just brushes off him. Still hurts a lot though so he’s not that keen on going into burning buildings etc.

This could go big in terms of actually foiling big criminals etc. or it could never leave Surrey. I think I prefer the latter. Certainly there should be no other invincible people or supervillains or anything like that. It’s just another of my something weird happens to one person in an otherwise perfectly normal world.


If you ask nicely

Tom is passionate, idealistic and frustrated at his failure to make a difference to the world. He feels powerless when he wishes to make such a difference.

Fate changes when he discovers that his young niece can get anyone to agree to any request as she says please. (This doesn’t work when you know it but if you don’t then you’ll end up doing it to your own bemusement).

Tom believes that all he needs is to get his niece to talk to powerful people and change can be made. And with a big G20 conference coming up this is his chance to commit powerful people to making real change. He just somehow needs to get his niece to meet these people.


Rom-Com Rules

I’m struggling to piece this together but I really want to find a way to do ‘Scream’ for rom-coms. I.e. to make a rom-com about a couple who are obsessed by rom-coms and know all the rules but end of falling in love in that way despite it.



Getting My Vote

Toby comes from a very politically active Labour voting family but couldn’t begin to give a fuck personally. When a crucial by-election happens back in his hometown they urge him to get involved but he has no intention of doing so.

However he meets a pretty girl and determined to win her attention end up volunteering with the Conservatives, desperately trying to keep it secret from his parents.

I’ve done quite a lot of work on this, treatments, bits of script etc if you’d like to have a look.


The Backy

I don’t really have a structure behind this but basically it has this beginning:

A guy who needs to get across London in 10 minutes when the tubes are fucked and the traffice is gridlocked. So he hails down a courier and asks for a backy. It turns out that the girl courier is someone he’d been in love with when he was 16.

He wants to start a relationship and has projected onto her the role of the ‘kook’ who will break him free from his uptight shackles with her free wheeling spark and joie de vivre. The problem is she isn’t really that sparky and more imporatantly he isn’t that uptight. This is a story about a guy who discovers, that for him personally, he’s much happier in his not very sexy job, not being a slightly exciting/unstable individual and doesn’t need some outside influence to make him blossom. He’s actually blossomed and he just needs to realise it.

It’s kind of a response to Garden State, and to a certain extent, 500 Days of Summer. But I want it to be funny. And I want it to be upbeat. Probably not romantic in the traditional sense because on one level it’s saying that he doesn’t need someone else to make him comfortable in who he is. Although I still quite want to give him someone, just not the courier who he obsesses over.



Love Capital Flow

A journalist discovers that there is a ‘Love exchange’ where people buy stocks and shares in other people’s relationships. It started off by being about celebrity relationships but now people are on there betting on whether friends will hook up, break up or get married. She discovers that there is one guy on there who people meet and presume will soon be with someone so put money on but always get burnt as he never seals the deal. She decides to do a report on him and discover where he seems to be going so wrong.


This came to me in a sleep deprived haze last night after a friend of mine in publishing said she and her boyfriend had come up with a title but no story. I’m not sure it’s totally coherent yet but I quite like this idea of a facebook geek making shit loads of money on people’s gossip back and forth and people discovering what friends think their chances of being with someone are.



Student Life Assistant

A graduate has come straight out of Oxbridge into a high pressured business environment. He was so ready to leave for about two years thinking only of his job, of success and entering the grown up world. He didn’t really enjoy uni. Hadn’t really given it much of a chance.

He’s called into the Boss’s office just three months in and is overwhelmed with excitement that he’s already been earmarked for a specific job. He’s somewhat underwhelmed to discover that the boss wants him to be essentially a PA to his young daughter, the first member of his family to go to uni, who is going to his old college next week. He’s there to make sure she gets the most out of her time. To attend the lectures she misses, makes sure she goes to all the right parties, signs up to the right extracurricular activities and generally make sure her life goes smoothly. Mortified as he is by this task he accepts it because of the big dangling carrot of a serious promotion after he’s done one year of it.

So he finds himself back at the place he ran from, having to pretend to be doing a masters and picking up the pieces of the scatty, feckless and rather beautiful daddy’s girl who’s starting at uni.



Korean gangsters in Suburbia

I have this vague idea of having this guy obsessed with all those kind of hyper tough Korean films like Old Boy who starts dating a british Korean girl who lives in New Malden (which is half highly British suburb, half little Seoul) and becomes convinced that her slightly menacing dad is indeed one of the tough guy gangsters from the film.