ABOUT THE BOOK
Good News, Bad News opens by introducing us to Charlie Millar, an everyday bloke with a dead-end job in an Oxford Circus tube station photo kiosk. He whiles away the hours with his rather eccentric colleague George. Customers come, customers go, and nothing much happens from one day to the next. But appearances can be deceptive: we soon discover that Charlie and George are actually secret agents working undercover. They have been both posted – separately and by mistake – to the same place, and that is where their problems begin. Their missions are revealed in codes contained in some photos delivered for processing. The most important order is signified by a blank 13th frame – that means a ‘wet job’, or assassination; the face in the 14th frame identifies the target. Charlie and George have just seen through each other, realised their predicament and begun an edgy friendship – encouraged by mutual disgruntlement with the secret service – when they both receive blank 13th frames, and next see each other’s face in the 14th frame. To remain alive they realise that they need to double-bluff their spymasters and try to escape whoever it is who wants them dead.
As one would expect, there is plenty of description of the secrets of ‘tradecraft’ – how to ‘dry-clean’ your tracks if your being followed, how and where to organise a secret meeting. However, the spy game in Good News, Bad News is not the glamorous world of James Bond. The book makes great play of authentic-sounding descriptions of the mundanity and bureaucracy of the service. Bored ‘spies’ spend their time working in sandwich bars and photo kiosks all over London waiting for orders whilst their seniors work in airless, badly carpeted offices and struggle with the arcane language of inter-departmental memos. The plot turns on basic bureaucratic and human errors such as the coincidental posting of Charlie and George to two separate missions in the same pub on the same night – a pub that Charlie’s wife also happened to visit that night.
The title Good News, Bad News comes from a playground craze that swept through Wolstencroft's primary school, George Watson's College. The idea was to give your friend an unfortunate scenario, from which they would have to find a way out. For example: ‘Good news: you're on a plane to Jamaica. Bad news: the engine's conked out.’ The friend would then say: ‘Good news: you've got a parachute. Bad news: it's got a hole in it,’ and so on, until one partner reached a dead end. In the book, Charlie’s brilliance at this game at school is what led him to be interested in becoming a spy – predicting the worst possible future outcome and then figuring out how to get out of it is what espionage is all about. He plays the game with himself periodically throughout the book to try to get out of various predicaments.
“Every thriller that you read sets up a situation and then undermines it,” Wolstencroft says. “The Good News, Bad News game is based on exactly the same idea. Anyone in a dangerous situation has to consider the worst possible outcome, but that can become a serious psychological issue. If you are always searching for the negative, how can you possibly live, or enjoy, a normal life?” (The Scotsman, Jan ‘05)
Good News, Bad News is David Wolstencroft’s first book, but as the writer of top-rated TV spy drama Spooks he is hardly a novice in the world of espionage thrillers. However, he has not actually had any direct experience of the world of spying himself. Born to a teacher mum and astrophysicist dad in 1969 he grew up in Hawaii and Edinburgh. After school, he flirted briefly with the idea of becoming a Wall Street financier, but one economics lecture at Cambridge University put paid to that, so he switched to English literature and history. Like many British entertainment figures, he cut his creative teeth with Cambridge Footlights, writing and directing their comedic productions. He soon realised this was the career for him, and set about writing scripts and sketches in the hope of his big break. Two conversations made that big break happen. Firstly, he went to LA. “I needed to learn more about TV, and thought it was the ideal place to go, so put my overdraft to good use and went for a week. I managed to set up a meeting with the prolific screenwriter David Koepp [screenwriter on the films of Mission: Impossible, Panic Room, Spiderman and the new War of the Worlds movie amongst others], which proved momentous. He was tremendously inspirational, but challenging. He asked me how many screenplays I'd written and, although at 24 I was quite proud of my two and a half, he said I should be on my eighth. He said, ‘If you write seven scripts, the eighth one will be eight times better than the first, and you'll be very glad you didn't send out numbers two or three. Then you'll not only learn how to write, but you'll be a writer.’” So Wolstencroft came home and set about writing one screenplay every six months.
The second conversation was with his best friend, Robby Steel. The pair would meet for sporadic heart-to-hearts, and during one such chat, Steel talked of his trials as a young psychiatrist. His tales gave Wolstencroft the idea for a TV show. It became script number eight, and it sold. That script became Psychos, the drama series that ran on Channel 4 in 1997 starring Douglas Henshall. It was the break he'd longed for and the deal that clinched his career in television. Psychos was nominated for a BAFTA award for Best Television series (2000) and Wolstencroft won the 1999 RTS award for Best Newcomer Behind The Screen.
But, although Psychos opened the door, it wasn't until he came up with Spooks that his place was secured at the top. Spooks is a tense spy drama, produced by Kudos for BBC1. It has been a phenomenal success, winning the BAFTA for Best Drama Series in 2003 and attracting millions of viewers each week. The fourth series is set to air later this year.
Wolstencroft says of writing in general that “As a novelist you are writer, director, producer, sound recorder and actor," he says. "Without the practical limitations of a film set, you have boundless creativity. But there are very many things I am still having to learn. I hadn't realised how paralysing that freedom can be because, actually, it's how the hero overcomes his adversity that makes him intriguing. Only when your options are limited can you be truly creative” (all quotes from The Scotsman, 14/01/05).
