Monday, September the 19th, 2005

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Home From the Hills

Hooting Yard is back again after a fortnight's break. During this time your editor has been engaged in exciting discussions with Hollywood moguls about a new television series. Zeigler And Locke will be a spin-off from two existing shows, featuring Toby Zeigler from The West Wing and Mr Locke from Lost. No one seemed to know what to do with the partnership. Should they be crusaders against evil, like Batman and Superman? Arch-rivals perhaps? Or just buddies on a pointless road trip?

I am not sure why I was called in as a consultant. I messed around with a few templates—Steptoe and Son, Boswell and Johnson, Cagney and Lacey—but my parting advice, before coming home from the hills, was that Zeigler and Locke would work best by having the two protagonists as argumentative ornithologists roaming the hills and fields of a distant country, never agreeing on the identification of the various birds they spot. In each hour-long episode they would come upon one bird, and the conceit would be that every single time neither of them would be correct. In my pilot episode, what Zeigler argues is a peewit, and Locke insists is a moorhen, turns out to be a grebe.