Archive for the ‘Ford Cortina’ Category

Went back to an old project today. Started trying to put Serious and Organised to bed. Tidying up the text, adding descriptions of Characteristics to reduce the wiggle factor for rules lawyers while trying to avoid the game creeping into needing lots more Characteristics if I define the ones I’ve included too tightly. Dull but unfortunately required. However since I’m planning it for E-pub length isn’t so much of an issue. Unless someone wants to print it out of course.

I’ve been revisiting my notes for Serious and Organised after enough time for the ideas to mature a little more. After a bit of editing to cut fluff I got down to writing a background to go with it drawing on the classic 70s and 80s cop shows for inspiration. A bit more polishing and it should be fit for a play test.

So this is what 100 posts feels like and here is where I’m at…

Walking to work has up moments and down moments. You get to see wild life. You get drenched by the rain. I’ll not blather on/wax lyrical on the subject today. The big plus is time to think. So when I started this outpouring of my incomplete concepts I had an idea for a 70s TV Cop Show game knocking around. Last week I was all enthuses by the new Serious and Organised Crime Agency. Real rocket science moment to put those to together. So here it is. What if “Serious and Organised” was formed in the 60s working secretly to fight crime when dear old Dixon couldn’t cope! Now I can use the concept to cover five decades of Action Cop drama gaming.

So tonight I opened the game’s file and I think it might just work.

I had been going to blog about the need for a cool modern (what a few years ago would have been a Cool Britannia) logo for the show. SOCA beat me to the logo and the BBC beat me to the analysis.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4876818.stm

"It’s not our policy to comment on the logo or the agency itself, we want to keep a low profile," says a spokesman according to the BBC. So why the big launch then? Or does saying that start to build the mystique?

The expert at the Beeb says it’s a butch logo but a cat is more than brute power. It’s agile, it has a reputation for cunning, for landing on it’s feet, for speed, for being sleek and possibly not a good analogy toying with it’s prey. The cat on that logo isn’t Tom chasing Jerry it’s a serious hunter.

So what does our hypothetical show need to make it a hit. First a pair of tough crime fighters. But this isn’t the masogonistic 70s so one will be a woman. She’ll be hard as nails, dug from the same quarry as Buffy, ex special forces. For a bit of a role reversal he’ll be more of a pretty boy, the charmer and undercover expert. They will have cool gadgets and fast cars. Their boss will think of them as loose cannons he can barely control but secretly he’s a big fan. There will be someone at work who doesn’t like them. Someone with an agenda.

Now this isn’t the 20th Century. We’ve seen how shows like ER and CSI can develop an ensemble cast of supporting characters who we come to know and love. They’ll need:

• Tech support/computer
• An armourer
• A forensics expert
• Maybe a psychologist
• An accountant to follow the money
• Other squad members for backup and leg work

And so it will sell to the US it will have guns. Lots of guns. Big guns.

It may just be me but behind all the serious talk today about the launch of SOCA there was a faint hint of a wink and a smirk. As though a few civil servants who like 70 and 80s cop shows had come up with it after a heavy night of drinking…

“Ya know what the problem with police recruitment today is?”

“Na”

“Cop shows.”

“What ya mean The Bill, Waking the Dead and the one in a village with the entire UK annual murder total?”

“Precisely”

“Aint nothing wrong with them”

“There all so grim and intellectual though. We need something with some punch, some action some glamour.”

“What like the Sweeney and the Profesionals.”

“Precisely”

An hour later the whole thing had been scrawled on the back of an envelope…

• A cool sounding acronym “SOCA”
• Law enforcement officers or Agents not Policemen
• The powers of the police, customs and imigration service
• Make life hell for the Mr Bigs world wide
• Operate undercover
• Operating around the world
• Targetting Drug-smuggling, Money Laundering and People Traficking

So coming soon to ITV 1: Serious and Organised