Tim Firth- "Four Dead Rats Floating"

There are few people better suited to a Rambling Club than a writer. After all, if anyone understands the importance of starting somewhere and having absolutely no idea where you're going to end up, it's a playwright. This week, our guest President is the remarkable Tim Firth, writer, dramatist, screenwriter, songwriter and the man behind everything from Neville's Island and Calendar Girls to The Girls, Our House and The Rottentrolls.

With Tony's magic bingo machine selecting our destinations, we leave the Presidential Garden Shed and head into the great outdoors, where the rambling can begin. And perhaps appropriately for a man whose career has taken so many unexpected turns, the first number sends us somewhere rather useful.

371.3: Methods of Instruction and Study.

Do we actually need a particular methodology when it comes to teaching and learning? And how did Tim's own experiences of education eventually lead him towards a career in writing?

His story includes an extraordinary turning point: an Arvon writing course in Yorkshire run by Willy Russell, attended when Tim was just 18.

But what happens when the lessons end and the professional world begins? How has the process of commissioning scripts changed? What does a writer actually have to navigate before an idea ever reaches an audience? And, somewhere along the way, what on earth is all this about a modern Macbeth in the style of Marillion?

Next, the machine produces 788: Wind and Percussion Instruments.

Which, naturally, means musicals.

Tim's career has taken him into some extraordinary musical territory, from Our House, created around the music of Madness, to The Girls, his musical collaboration with Gary Barlow, and The Band, built around the music of Take That.

So how did a writer of plays find himself working with Madness? What happens when you collaborate with someone like Gary Barlow? And where does the musical instinct come from in the first place?

That takes us back to Tim's childhood and his father, Gordon Firth, whose creativity would eventually become part of one of Tim's best-loved achievements: Roger and the Rottentrolls.

614: The Incidence and Prevention of Disease.

There could hardly be a more appropriate route into one of the Rambling Club's most important subjects: Tony Slattery.

Tim and Tony worked together on Neville's Island, Tim's hugely successful comedy about four businessmen whose team-building exercise goes catastrophically wrong. The original West End production featured Tony alongside Jeff Rawle, James Fleet and Paul Raffield, and the play has subsequently travelled around the world.

Tony, of course, possessed a particular fascination with disease and all its component parts. So what could possibly connect Tim, Tony, a theatre and some dead rats?

You'll have to join us in the great outdoors to find out.

And as the ramble winds its way through education, music, writing, theatre, television and memories of an extraordinary performer, one thing becomes increasingly apparent:

Tim Firth knows how to tell a story.

Which is fortunate.

Because once Tony's magic bingo machine has finished with him, there's every chance we'll be here for a while.

Presented by Paul Carmichael & Allan Lear

Music composed and performed by Michael Livesley & Andy Frizell

The voice of Pwfthhh- Michael Livesley

www.michaellivesley.com

Series Producers- Erica Lear and Mark Hutchinson

Producers- Alan Dyebing & Stuart Morris

Executive Producer- Mark Strickson

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