Five years of "Brenty Four"

Allow me this little indulgence as we near the end of the fifth annual Brenty Four serial. It’s a bit of a look back and a look behind the scenes at the five epic serials which have been the acknowledged highlights of the festive season.

The idea for Brenty Four came to me rather late in the day. The website was some six weeks old and I thought an advent calendar with a twist would be officially a good thing. On the 30^th of November at around 8pm the whole thing came to me in one big lump. It was a struggle to get it written in the short time available but I think it worked out ok. I like the fact that I pinched the exciting climax from "The Ark" – anyone can borrow from good sources but it takes a special kind of genius to think that borrowing from a bad course is an idea and a half. The first serial was mostly written at work. The office was closing down forever at the end of December and we that were left had absolutely nothing to do. Not even internet access. So, like people in the olden days, we had to make our own entertainment. Mine was Brenty Four.

24 is of course the inspiration for these serials. I see a lot of Dennis Brent in Jack Bauer and vice versa. If anyone were to play Dennis in a movie I like to think it would be Kiefer Sutherland. The irony of course is that I watched the first series of 24 and that was enough for me. I found it much too much like hard work. So of course I borrow the most difficult element of it and torture myself for a month every year. Rest assured however that, unlike 24, Brenty Four is not written by neo-conservatives with an extremely right wing agenda.

I learned from my mistakes the first time around and when it came to the second Brenty Four – believe it or not I originally wanted to do one mid-year which seems unthinkable now – I actually planned ahead. The first one was a ramshackle affair which reflected its hand-to-mouth creation. The second one had a plan. I knew where it would end before I knew where it would begin. I wanted to take them on a journey but, the format being as restrictive as it is, the journey had to take place in real time. There isn’t the option to skip a day or two and transport Dennis to America in a sentence. So I worked backwards from the (hopefully) astonishing final scene right the way back to his kitchen and blocked out how long to spend at airports, how long the flight would be, how long they would be on the train and so on. The second serial is probably my least favourite because the structure meant there was too much time where nothing was happening. The plane ride was seven hours long and I tried to liven it up by having Dennis and Ian (as he was then) commit one of the seven deadly sins each hour but the serial was basically an opening episode, a (hopefully) astonishing final twist and twenty two hours of padding in the middle.

Not that padding is a bad thing necessarily because the whole point of Dennis is that his is such a pathetically small world and he focuses on the tiny details while missing out on everything else. So much of the humour comes from him doing ordinary things. It’s just that seven hours on a plan isn’t an ordinary thing. It’s an astonishingly dull thing and I could’ve ditched the whole travel angle and still had the (hopefully) astonishing final surprise. The second serial is also the only one with what I hope was a real I-didn’t-see-that-coming ending.

So I knew that too rigid a structure was a bad thing so by the third serial I’d figured out that a theme was much more important than a flowchart. The text freely admits the whole idea of a bet that you’ll say "Yes" to every question is pinched from Danny Wallace’s excellent book "The Yes Man". It seemed to fit Dennis so well – he is a horrible little man who doubtless says "No" to just about anything anyone ever asks him so it was a ripe subject for a bet. The only problem was who he’d make the bet with. In my mind (and in one or two of his Matrix 2.0 anecdotes) he refers to his nemesis – Britain’s coolest telehistorian, Philip Stiffit. Perfect – Dennis would only be forced into a wager like that with someone he really despised. The only problem was that Philip Stiffit hadn’t actually been officially introduced. He was there in my head for months just waiting for something to do but I’d never actually written him in. Hence the hasty pre-serial teaser which appeared on the site’s third birthday. Enter Philip Stiffit and his irritating habit of calling our hero "Den" to which Dennis cannot help but mutter "…nis Brent" before replying.

If I have a favourite Brenty Four – and I do – it is the third one. I like the freedom offered by both the wager and the idea that Dennis starts out a few yards from his house but because he can’t say no it takes him almost an entire day to actually get home. It was written in little chunks – I have memories of emailing myself bits of dialogue or the odd paragraph of what I like to think of as prose – and knitted together like a jigsaw. The scene with the prostitute in the tent has been quoted as a favourite – the unusual sexual antics are all given the names of obscure professional wrestling submission holds. There are levels and levels to the in-jokes.

The fourth annual Brenty Four was going to be something akin to "It’s a Wonderful Life". I wanted Dennis to see something about how everything would’ve been different without him. The problem with that is that everything would be better without him hence the change in focus. Everyone thinks Dennis is dead because the local paper said he was dead. The natives are all now nice to Dennis because they are convinced he must be someone else. It could be taken as a devastating satire on the power of the media – indeed please do take it as a devastating satire on the power of the media – but it wasn’t really that well thought out. I just wanted to do something that had never been done before – a whole day of people being terribly terribly nice to Dennis.

It had a fraught creation though as I’d written the first two chapters – which I think are possibly the weakest two episodes in the history of Brenty Four – and then my PC died rather severely. Through a combination of PC World’s incompetence with computers and PC World’s incompetence with telephones it was two months before I got it back. I was ready to give the whole serial up as a bad job but relented eventually and wrote the whole thing on my old Macintosh. It took so long to convince myself to actually do it that I was never more than a day or two ahead. The exciting, action-packed final episode was posted at about 8pm on Christmas Eve and was only started at 6pm on Christmas Eve. But it was finished and people seemed to like it and that is what counts. I wasn’t able to update the website as in previous years but the whole thing was posted in its traditional daily instalments on a message board so my record stands unblemished.

My favourite bit has to be when Dennis almost gets sex from a lusty temptress with an unhealthy interest in telehistory. While the most obscure in-joke has to be Felicity Bobbins Stiffit’s closing "My love to Steve" comment. Sir Graham Forbes says it a few times in the Paul Temple serials and it just came out as I was writing the scene. It also features Dennis’s long standing non-friend associate and colleague’s name change. It was partially done to make it less like an unnamed record producer’s name but also because I wanted to give him a middle name – we already knew it began with F – and I knew immediately that Ian Francois Devine would simply adore calling himself "I. Francois Devine" that I decided to change it for good. Besides, there are Ia(i)ns who write for this site and didn’t want them drawn into Dennis’s personal hell.

As I write this, the current serial is just over half way through. I’ve almost finished writing it (ish) as I was determined not to get in the sort of sticky mess I was in last year. The genesis of the story was obviously the exciting final scene from the third season of New Doctor Who. They could have the Titanic smashing through the wall of the Tardis so why couldn’t I have something titanic smashing through the wall of Dennis’s drawing room? I hadn’t planned for Francois Devine to be trapped in the wall for quite such a long time as the serial was meant to be Dennis trapped in his drawing room for twenty four hours but it worked quite well having him wedged there so I kept it going for about a third of the run. The serial also features what I think are the debuts of three oft-mentioned characters. As far as I can remember none has ever actually appeared before. I haven’t checked, obviously, but I’m guessing in good faith. Uncle Gaylord, the blackmail man (who I decided not to capitalise because he’s not meant to be a super hero even though it looks odd all lower case) and Doctor Flapjack. Flapjack wrote a few medical columns years ago but he’s never actually been a character in either the diaries or the serials. As far as I can remember. Probably.

I’m assuming there will be a sixth serial. I’ve just watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail so I’d quite like to send Dennis on a holy quest but that idea won’t last the winter. Of course, the exiting climax (there isn’t actually an exciting climax) to the fifth serial might lead to choruses of boos so vociferous that the whole idea of Brenty Four will have to be put in a box and buried in the Blue Peter garden until the year 3000. But I hope not.