Hatstand Interview with Angelfish
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| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Hatstand Interview with Angelfish |
| Interviewer: | Metabolick |
| Interviewee: | Angelfish |
| Date(s): | June 2010 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | The Professionals |
| External Links: | interview is here, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
A 2010 interview with Angelfish is at The Hatstand.
For others in this series, see Hatstand Interview Series.
Some Excerpts
In a haze of wild, well-hidden surmise and delight in 1977. I was a massive S&H fan but even at the age of 12 was capable of a very British embarrassment at their emotional excesses. (When you're 12 years old in the UK, saying hello to someone is an emotional excess.) I sat in my gran's living room in a northeast fishing town watching the first episodes and undergoing the wonderful revelation that the love and devotion I needed to see could be portrayed with restraint and hard-edged dignity. The very lack of overt display set me thinking about why and how I was seeking and detecting that love. It set my mind to filling in the gaps.
That [first story B/D I wrote] was called On The Rack and I never finished it. I wrote it in shorthand then dropped the notepad in the bath. It was totally self-indulgent. I felt lonely and isolated so needed to portray D (that animus of mine) in a situation of extreme isolation which B and B alone can cure. I think I was reminding myself that it can be cured; I was writing myself a safe path out of my own unhappiness. But there's only so much of D being extremely needy and weak and B laying out superhuman devotion and support that you -- or even I -- can take, and I recognise that stories written as self-therapy do not necessarily make good fiction.
I'm a sucker for H/C. I didn't even know what that was until I discovered not only fanfic but categories of fanfic on the internet. I was actually mildly chagrined to discover there was such a neat label for the stories I'd been writing; that they belonged to a type. (You know, you like to think you're so original...) And I still prefer those stories and derive great pleasure from writing them. I think I've learned to do so with sufficient detachment, however, that they're not so self-indulgent as to be unpublishable!
[What originally attracted me to Bodie and Doyle] Oh, first of all that weird teenage lust (though perhaps some of the people reading this won't find it so weird) that seizes onto male beauty and wants it directed at other male beauty (I never even thought of wanting it for myself, or imagined it wanting me). So -- shallow physical charm, sad to say. And humour. Always a sucker for that. I loved their sweet, abrasive interaction. And the way they understood one another, their wordless flashes of complicity. I did want that for myself -- a companion like that, I mean, and they were thin on the ground in my convent school, I can tell you. So all the more attractive on screen.
[Do I have an online presence]? Not really. Honest, it just never occurred, although I have unbent so far as to set up a Live Journal account. The internet's a phase -- you'll see.
[Regarding someone else rewriting an ending or doing a sequel, unauthorized or with permission of one of my stories]: Goodness! I've never had that happen -- not as far as I'm aware, anyway. I don't think I'd mind. It would be a compliment, I suppose, provided they didn't simply find your own ending so godawful they felt overpoweringly compelled to rewrite it.