Jamie Anderson and Nicholas Briggs’ First Action Bureau arrived last year, released as a podcast; it’s now available complete from Big Finish as a download, or Anderson Entertainment as a CD box set. Shortly after its launch in 2020, Paul Simpson caught up with Anderson to discuss the series…

 

Where did the idea for First Action Bureau spring from?

I wanted to do something which was a non-traditional approach to putting together a new piece of IP. Because traditionally, you do a load of development work on something new for TV or film or whatever and you spend loads of money and loads of time and then you go pitching and nobody in the audience ever sees anything. And at the end of it, eventually you get a commission – although commission in telly and stuff at the minute is taking five to eight years on average, from the start of development. But even if you get there, you’ve spent a load of money and time on something which is not presentable to the public.

Part of the idea of this was “let’s put it to the public and see what they think”. Obviously audio drama is a great way to do that. Nick Briggs and I had been wanting to work on something for a really long time and we kept trying to find little bits and pieces to do. Then this cropped up. I said, “I want to do something Anderson-y and sci-fi-y, I want to work with Genevieve Gaunt” and all this bits and pieces came together. It was then a case of chucking in bits and pieces that Dad had talked about doing.

Just chatting with Nick about these potential nascent ideas he said, ‘Oh spies, it’s got to be spies and it’s got to be utopia’ and all those things fitted with what we were trying to put together.

So yes, loads of different influences and places, and a bit of ‘right time, right place’ going on in terms of Nick’s availability. Then obviously when lockdown came in we were like, “Right let’s get on with this, because chances are if we want to get some interesting cast members and we want to get some time to do this then now is possibly the best time we’ve ever had to do it.”

How long then have you been chatting about it?

Not that long. We probably just first touched on it August/September time [2019] and I really mean like ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be nice if we did something cool Anderson-y and new?’. It wasn’t until the end of 2019 we just talked about it a bit more then sitting having a fry up, we started to get into the meat of it.

We didn’t start writing it until after [the first] lockdown really, other than chucking a few ideas back and forth. Nick had given me a few film references and things that he thought might be quite inspiring but the first quarter of the year it was just bubbling away in the back of my mind, trying to come up with scenarios that would work for  the short form series.

Obviously it’s a slightly different form of writing, directing and acting in that sort of short form because you can’t do the same sort of usual dramatic W: it’s the Flash Gordon school – you’ve got to get them back next week. When you were plotting out the story, was that a consideration? Did the form lead to content?

When I originally said to Nick I wanted to do it in this unusual format of ten minute episodes he said he recalled hearing a production from years and years ago, and they were all in this short form. He found it a bit exhausting that it was this massive cliffhanger every ten or fifteen minutes. It felt a bit forced for the structure. So we had to find a way where we could have cliffhangers in some way or at least a kind of intriguing jumping off point for the next one.

Having heard the first three, it does feel like it’s having to maintain quite a high pitch.

It does but hopefully it doesn’t feel like ‘Oh here’s an artificial cliffhanger coming’. We don’t get to the end of episode 1 and our hero is dangling out of a building about to drop to her death. It’s time to leap into action, that’s more of the kind of feeling.

It certainly was a consideration that we would have to have something intriguing at the very least at the end of each piece. So that definitely meant that we were compressing some elements to fit the format but we’re trying to be really careful not to make it relentlessly exhausting at the same time.

I know from talking to producers doing long form stuff for Netflix that that has been a huge consideration in writers rooms: they have had to try to deal with people who watched one episode then came back to it later, as well as the binge watchers. How much of a consideration was that or have you focused more on the ten minute element of it?

I know it definitely worked on the ten minute thing because that was going to be the delivery element for it

It’s interesting: obviously we were planning this before COVID-19 when people were still commuting a lot more, but initially I was worried about that because people haven’t got the structure to their day necessarily where they have time on a commute to grab an episode of this.

But I think it’s harder actually to do a half hour or hour thing for a non-commute than it is to do this ten minute format. It was always written as we were going through, “Right OK so if we pull out this crashing closing titles line and we just carried on as if it was the next scene, would it work?” I think it does work as a kind of audio movie essentially, because you’ve got a 90 minute more or less complete piece. I’ve been amazed by the number of people who’ve emailed and said ‘Oh, I don’t want to download this thing for free, I want to buy it in a physical form’.

It does work surprisingly well when you pull out the endings. I guess it feels like micro acts rather than the usual three acts structure as an audio feature.

There’s no reprise type elements. The only time we’ve got that is the start of episode 4 because we felt like people who have maybe done the first three episodes then waited for a week maybe have slightly forgotten what’s going on. In context it actually works and won’t, in the feature version, feel like we’re doing that.

So, you described it as being “Anderson-y”…What does that mean? There’s Gerry Anderson, there’s Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, there’s Gerry Anderson post Sylvia and then there’s you interpreting your Dad. To say Anderson-y, what bit are you referring to? Because Anderson-y can just mean Jamie.

(Laughs) Well, hopefully it’s a bit Jamie-y as well. If you start to pull at the threads of pretty much any Anderson series, and I mean any series that has had Dad’s involvement, let’s say from Fireball onwards, you have got a science fiction setting. Generally speaking it is utopian or semi-utopian – or at least there is some positivity from that future, we’re not living in the grungy dystopian Blade Runner futures. There is use of technology by an agency of some sort, be they secret or official and shiny like the World Space Patrol through to more secret organisations like SHADO.

Those core elements I think span the whole Anderson canon; doesn’t really matter what show you pick, those elements are there throughout.

Then that basic world building structure is now layered with a more contemporary thing which I think Nick and I have brought to it, which is more based around what the future might hold based on contemporary concerns. Having said that, that’s also a layer you’d see in most Anderson shows, particularly UFO and Captain Scarlet and that sort of thing.

It’s the contemporary worries extrapolated, those are all the respects in which I think it’s Anderson-y.

The thing that this reminds me most of, in a funny way is The Protectors.

(Laughs) Yes.

Because it’s got that spy element. I could see Nyree Dawn Porter playing Genevieve’s role. I did wonder if this had been something that your Dad had talked about doing a different version of that this had built out of somewhere.

There was a project he wanted to work on, well, he did start working on, in the late 70s early 80s, Operation Shockwave, which was a little more terrorism-centric than First Action Bureau is but still that kind of fascination and government structures trying to deal with that kind of stuff going on. That was one of the unmade elements that he was hoping to do at some point that has influenced First Action Bureau.

To me listening to it, particularly the first scene, felt as far removed from Anderson as you could almost get.

Yes.

And there was a little bit of me that felt like it was you guys going “Now we can do something different with this because we’re being more adult”, which doesn’t always come across. If you came into it expecting something on the lines of Gemini Force, that first scene is going to be quite a shock.

(Laughs) It’s meant to be and yet there’s a certain freedom that comes with audio and a certain freedom that comes with not going with a preformed project. This is very much a 13+ audience that we’re looking towards.

There’s a group of Anderson fans who want perfect recreations of the old shows. This is a different approach because we’re hoping that there’s a segment of the Anderson audience that comes along for the ride and feels the Anderson-ness but also feels the maturity of it, but to be blunt and to use the c-word (by which I mean commercial), one has to be sensitive that if you want to get stuff made.

It has to be commercially appealing. We haven’t bowed to any commercial pressure, because we’re doing it without having to worry about that, but you’ve got to have some awareness of what is working in the world today and what might bring in a wider audience. So, we’ve allowed ourselves these freedoms accordingly.

You’ve pulled together a hell of a cast for this which obviously lockdown has helped with. How did they come together?

I’d wanted to work with Paterson Joseph for ages. I almost cast him in Hour of the Cybermen for Big Finish a while ago. I wanted him to be one of the UNIT bigwigs but he wasn’t available. This seemed like a perfect opportunity and when we were writing this I could only hear this as Paterson now so I really hoped we could get him.

Sacha Dhawan, I think because of his recent Master portrayal people have really gone ‘Wow, this guy has got some range’ and Nick suggested that we could and should approach Sacha. Obviously Nicola Walker has Big Finish credentials so Nick knew of her. It was a lot of shifting around and negotiation on dates because even though we were in lockdown, these guys were still working, still busy doing all sorts of bits and pieces.

Absolutely Nick’s award winning credentials and history on Big Finish were a help but a lot of them were agents I’d dealt with through Big Finish stuff. So there was some awareness and we were hopefully going to turn out something of reasonable quality and not just get some names attached for some dross.

What’s been the biggest challenge for you, because you’ve talked about this being part of an Anderson-verse?

Not making it so fancy and overly clever that it becomes restrictive. The projects that currently exist in that shared universe are quite far apart in time, so we’re not trying to make all this happen at once contemporaneously.

So it’s not going to be like a TV21 shared universe where you get references to Fireball in the Stingray strip or whatever?

Not in that way. I wanted something that was part of an entire future timeline. So you get characters crossing over because they’re close enough in time but you’re not going to see the stories taking place while other organisations exist. So we will see Nero Jones in her fifties in one of the bits of IP in the Ander-verse but she won’t be fighting alongside the Terrahawks for example.

Yes, although obviously when you do that you immediately remove the danger from the character when they’re younger.

Well, it’s a bit like the Doctor isn’t it? Trying to do new stories now, you know he’s going to survive?

 

First Action Bureau is available to download from Big Finish now, or as a CD Collector’s Set from Anderson Entertainment