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In the summer of 1997, with the support of a sweet and loyal friend, an unemployed politics graduate created his own satirical publication in London. Scour magazine was sold in pubs around Clapham Common, gained the backing of radio host Tommy Boyd, and launched the writing career of its creator which would lift him from private obscurity and into a world of public acclaim.

 

Or so he thought at the time. In fact, David Manson would remain almost entirely unknown. Into the 2020s, and to the present day. 

 

This is the story of how it all never happened for him. Until now. 

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Part One. A Most Enduring Obscurity....

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Despite the efforts of Tommy Boyd and of others, the Scour project ended in 1998 without further troubling the world, and David Manson returned to his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon, feeling more than a little deflated. 

 

Still, his ambition to be a writer remained, and his relocation would prove a good move professionally. At the time, Stratford was also the home of Cromwell Productions, an independent maker of history and arts documentaries for television. David met their senior producer socially, and quickly secured a position as Cromwell’s in-house scriptwriter.

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For the next two-and-a-half years, he wrote scripts for broadcast series which gained him a genuine public identity as a writer. Indeed, for a time during 2002, programmes written by David Manson could be seen every week on the Discovery or History channels, including such titles as Battlefield, Line of Fire, and Lost Treasures of the Ancient World.

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It didn't last. Twenty years on, David's documentary work remains his most visible achievement as a writer. Indeed, his only other commercial writing credit is for a compilation of quotations by football manager Arsène Wenger which began as another self-produced affair and ended with publication by Virgin in 2005. Just at the moment when Wenger’s Arsenal team stopped winning trophies…

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Still, the Wenger book helped its compiler secure proofreading and editing jobs with Arsenal’s own publishers. Similar work was forthcoming from Cromwell’s successor company Eagle Media. And in 2007, David made a more substantial contribution to the online republication of a book by American political scientist R.J. Rummel - an original thinker whose five-volume Understanding Peace and War was once memorably reviewed as a “gigantic philosophical scheme of immoderate pretensions.” 

 

David Manson was familiar with such critique, for he had himself spent two years of his own life on a wildly ambitious book project which he termed Ambient Non-Fiction Volume One and which ended up as a 92,000-word manuscript submitted to Virgin (and duly rejected) in 2006. 

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By this time, he had also collected a stack of rejection letters for  sundry sitcom scripts. For sure, there were some positive comments along the way, especially concerning a proposed series about a news magazine in 18th century London. One nice producer went so far as to praise The Amusement as "a colourful and funny work."

 

But no commissions were forthcoming. And so, for a two-year period, David gave up on writing altogether and threw himself into a sustained period of reading, as he began a long spell of work at an antiquarian bookshop in Stratford. 

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Indeed, he had books to read. As the 2010s began, he acquired a number of volumes to which he ought to have turned a long time previously. For all his years of obscurity, his ambitions as a writer still remained. Now, at last, he took steps towards their fulfilment in fully mature works.

 

Three scripts, to be precise…

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