I’m heading towards smug at the moment, which is never a good thing. But I’ve come up with two play outlines and script samples for each in the past week, and I’m really happy with them. And whether or not the theatre people who asked for the ideas bite, I’m more than satisfied that I’ve come up with concepts worth developing further one day, as stage or radio pieces probably.

The two concepts are very different. One is concerned with terrorism and celebrity, and hopefully has a satirical element. The main development process involved taking note of John Truby’s take on raising the stakes in a drama (it’s far from original with Truby, but I dipped into his Anatomy of Story for a refresher), so the story gets more and more intense as it continues, each new piece of information threatening to topple the whole over. That was a fairly technical approach, and it worked well, and made me realise how close thrillers and farces are structurally. Both follow that pattern of the stakes being raised, and tension is the result: the big difference is that farces resolve that tension with humour.

The other idea I’d got started as a small fun one, drawing on a world that fans of Shameless and Withnail and I would enjoy. But it became increasingly dissatifying as I wondered how to turn that seed into a full script. I wanted more, but I didn’t know what I wanted more of. Except that I didn’t want to get stuck in a world of seedy characters having misadventures. For all sorts of reasons, many of which I can’t articulate, I wanted to do something bigger and stranger and other than that.

If you’re stuck in your thinking, put on someone else’s head. It’s something I’ve done quite a bit over the years, getting psyched up to come up with ideas by giving myself guidance from the imagined perspective of writers I admire for one reason or another. And somehow I knew that the writer I wanted to step into the shoes of for this project was Pete Milligan. I’ve written about my admiration for his comics work, which is effortlessly sophisticated and multi-layered and resonates with some fascinating influences, and I knew I wanted some of that for my play.

All very well, but how to go about that? I used to write myself notes as those other writers, and have even coached myself aloud as Alan Moore and others, but I’ve never tapped into my version of Pete Milligan before and those methods seemed redundant. I just waited, and then had an epiphany. Like you do. I realised that the protagonists of my story could transcend their seedy junkie beginnings, and become iconic English figures. And not just any English icons: they’d be St George and Boudicca, sharing a flat.

Quite how all this transpired, I couldn’t tell you. I know that ‘I’ didn’t come up with it. But when ‘I’ decided to write it influenced by Milligan, that’s the solution that came up, and I knew immediately it was the right one. Why St George? Well, it was his day on the 23rd, and something interests me about the fact that many people are kind of embarrassed by the English flag. It’s associated with football fans and the far right, and I think that’s sad. Not that I’m any kind of patriot, but I don’t see why this potent iconography should be tarnished. A bit of research turned up the fact that St George had a Roman father and Palestinian mother. Perfect: what could be more English than an immigrant, given that the nation’s history is one of successive waves of migrants?

Something about St George and Boudicca sharing a squalid flat and being visited by their drugs worker ignited all kinds of notions in me, and what’s resulted — in the plotting of it, and the brief extract I’ve written — is the nearest I’ve so far got to a state of the nation play. Blimey. Whether the theatre company are interested in that play, or the other one, I’m chuffed that I’ve come up with two strong ideas that have stretched me in good ways. And I’d like to thank the version of Pete Milligan that exists somewhere within me, for contributing to the process. Nice one Pete. Thanks also to Ms Chapple for valuable feedback.