Writing ‘a lonely and private business’ — author

Press, 19 February 1988, Page 15

Writing ‘a lonely and private business’ — author

A book that took Gerald Seymour out of television after 15 eventful years as a reporter, made him a small fortune, and changed the course of his life has ironically led him back to the small screen. Yorkshire Television dangled a golden carrot to coax him into adapting his first novel, “Harry’s Game” into three onehour episodes, the second of which screens tonight at 9 on One.

So Seymour’s first book, which has earned him 300,000 pounds in hardbook royalties since it was published in 1975, has also become his first screenplay. Seymour, who now has several successful novels behind him and lives in Eire, where he enjoys generous tax dispensations, says: “Writing is a lonely and private business: Nobody’s all that interested until you deliver the goods. “You have to go into your room, close the door, look at the wall, and say no to all dinner invitations and no, really we don’t want you to come and stay with us. “I used to manage 10 pages a day. Now it’s down to eight — typed, like most journalists, using two fingers. And no matter how the book’s going, each Monday morning is as hard as the previous Monday.”

Semour admits he was a bit shy when he set out to see “Harry’s Game” being filmed. “It would have been nice just to have gone along as a voyeur and watched from a street corner. I didn’t want the production team

to think, ‘Heavens, we’ve got the author here ... somebody take him to the pub, for God’s sake, and keep him out of the way.’ So I confined myself to a day in three different locations, just to see how people worked.

“I felt a bit of a stranger, as if I’d no right to be there, but it was very pleasant to be back with a television team again. I realised how much I’d missed that contact w'hile I’d been writing books.

Gerald Seymour filed away the character of Harry Brown in 1967, as a reporter on assignment in Aden. “We were in a sandbagged place on top of a hill, he says. “One of the squaddies pointed down to a chap in Arab clothes who was hammering together a little hut. He said, ‘You see that guy

... he’s S.A.S.’ I wished I hadn’t been told. I was afraid I might get terribly drunk one night and accidentally repeat it in a loud voice.”

Nobody wins “Harry’s Game,” just as Seymour believes there will be no victor in the Northern Ireland conflict. “You can go to penalties,” he says, “and still nobody wins.” When Gerald Seymour first saw a film rough-cut of “Harry’s Game” he was staggered by the contribution of the director and actors. “The amount of menace and threat — as well as humour and sadness — that they’ve brought to the story really knocked me over. I was very chuffed indeed.”

The final of “Harry’s Game” screens at 9 tomorrow night.