Paul A Mendelson was sitting watching The Queen’s Gambit with his wife one evening when he suddenly realised that he had been to the American high school, Henry Clay High in Lexington, Kentucky, featured in that episode.
He recalls: “I said to my wife: ‘I went there when I was 16!’”
Paul was transported back to his teenage years, in 1967, when he took his first trip without his family on an exchange organised by the English Speaking Union for pupils from Scotland to go to America.
The writer, who is kindly, witty and generally a delight to talk to on the phone ahead of the publication of new novel The Forever Moment couldn’t believe it was the same school. The memories came flooding back.
“About 30 of us went to Lexington and stayed with families,” he says, “And I was thinking this could make a great romantic comedy.
“I thought: ‘Well, what if the guy and a girl had a relationship during the exchange then, 20 years later, he encountered her again?’”
He had originally thought that the idea would make a great film script but says: “The film company didn’t buy it – they loved the story, but said it has to be from the woman’s point of view and my hero was a man. So I thought: ‘Well, I’ll write it as a book.’”
May to December
Paul, who is the writer behind much-loved BBC sitcoms including May To December and My Hero, spent his high school years in Glasgow – and his writing still echoes that city’s famous dry sense of humour.
An only child, Paul moved from the north of England to Glasgow during his early high school years before leaving at 16 to move to London with his family.
His father worked for Disney, getting their movies into cinemas, and the family’s moves followed his work.
After a short stint working as a solicitor, Paul decided that law wasn’t for him and took up a role as an advertising copywriter before making the move into television script writing.
More recently, he has turned his talents to writing novels. The Forever Moment is his seventh book, with five adult fiction and two stories for eight to 12-year-old children under his belt.
Paul’s trip to America may have inspired his character Charles Dickens’ adventures in The Forever Moment, but he points out that while a few of the humorous incidents in the book are based on personal experience, the romantic plotline certainly isn’t.
“I certainly didn’t have this torrid affair!” laughs Paul. He did stay with a family and in the grounds of the hospital mentioned in the book.
He has fond memories of the trip. “It was wonderful,” he says, “because I was just about to move to London and I was terrified because I’d heard that they weren’t terribly friendly there and I didn’t know anybody.
“The Americans gave me such confidence, you know, by being so interested in anything that I had to say – it was a brilliant sort of watershed for me.”
Finding his voice in America
“What I realised was that I could be funny and that was possibly my selling point! I hadn’t really made that many people laugh before.” He ponders that fact that Scottish people might be slower to give you the benefit of laughing at your jokes. “Exactly! Why should we expel good air on you?”
Paul’s choice of name for his principal character makes for hilarious moments in the book, but is also a nod to the author’s Jewish heritage.
“Jewish people tended to Anglicise their names when they came to the UK – sadly there was prejudice, so they picked really ‘English’ names,” he says.
Why Charles Dickens?
“With Charles Dickens, obviously a parent calling him Charles was just wicked, really!
“It allowed me to have a reason why he chooses a pen name – so that he’s not really recognised by anyone when he when comes back to America.”
Some of the experiences that made it into the book include a conversation Paul remembers having had with a lady in a record shop.
“Obviously it was interesting for the townspeople to have all these Scottish people – some of whom were in kilts – in town,” he says.
“A little old lady came up to me and said: ‘You’re from Scotland? Do you speak English?’ I said: ‘No, we learned it on the plane coming out.’ And of course this went around the town and people were saying: ‘Didn’t they do well?’”
Life inspiration in The Forever Moment
I wonder whether Paul thinks there is a fine line between autobiography and absolute fiction in any book or screenplay he writes?
“I think you always put yourself into your novels because you can only write things that you know,” he says.
“My first novel was based on a case that I handled as a lawyer but then for the second novel, A Meeting In Seville, my wife and I went to Seville in Semana Santa (Holy Week) just as we did on our honeymoon.”
Paul said to his wife: “Wouldn’t it be weird if we met our honeymooning selves here? She just rolled her eyes – as she usually does when I tell her I have an idea,” he laughs. “But I wrote it.”
The story started out as a radio script before becoming a book and a film script, which Paul hopes might make it on to the big screen.
“Although the characters aren’t really anything like us, the genesis of it was something that happened to us – the spark of the idea.”
The Forever Moment is sprinkled with Paul’s easy humour as he pokes fun at his young protagonist and he believes he has honed the skill of writing comedy in his years working in television.
“When you’re writing a comedy series, each and every line has to do three things,” he explains. “It has to tell the story, make people laugh and it’s got to be in character – so it’s quite intense. You learn to do that and have brevity as well – it’s a good discipline.”
His most recent sitcom success was with My Hero, which starred Ardal O’Hanlon backed by a cast of household names, including Hugh Dennis. “It ran for six series – more than 50 episodes,” he says. “It was fantastic fun to do and, although it was on at 8.30pm, it was the most watched programme by children of 12 and under, which is lovely.”
It will come as no surprise that the dialogue in Paul’s novels is also hugely important to him. “When I’m writing a book I’m hearing the conversations in my head.
“The rhythm of the sentence has to be right, because when you’re writing comedy, the timing and the rhythm of how people speak is so important. You can add an extra syllable and it will kill a joke.”
He has had to make some adjustments to his writing to make it work for the readers of his fiction. “I’ve had to get better at description,” he admits, “and still, if I’m describing something, I tend to do it through the eyes of somebody rather than just saying: ‘The leaves of the trees were green.’ It always has to have an emotional context to it.”
First love
The Forever Moment examines a subject writers return to again and again, whether in fiction or on the big or small screen – first love and how it can shape our futures.
“You do idolise your first love because it’s your first experience of anything emotional – so it takes on a much greater proportion than I think it might merit if it were in other circumstances,” he says.
“That is, to some extent, what this guy did and it has tortured him.”
Paul points out that in this story, there is the added excitement of our hero being 3,000 miles away from home.
He says: “And being treated like a grown-up for the first time. Everybody makes a fuss of you just because you’ve got a different accent – the whole thing is so heady and then when something goes wrong, it really does go wrong.”
Unlike Charlie, Paul’s first love was “the one” – he has been with his wife since he was a teenager and they have two daughters and grandchildren.
He has taken a step back from writing for TV as he is enjoying the experience of novel writing so much. “Now I just write because I want to write and it seems that people like it, which is lovely,” he says – but he doesn’t take his success for granted.
“This business is such a rollercoaster, I don’t know if I would have survived if I was just starting out.”
“This business is such a rollercoaster, I don’t know if I would have survived if I was just starting out.”
Looking ahead, Paul hopes that The Forever Moment might one day make it to the big screen.
“That was kind of part of the plan,” he says, “I always script my books so the screenplay is already written and it has been released.
“It’s the first book of mine to be set in the US,” says the writer, which he hopes will make it more attractive to Hollywood.
With another novel scheduled for release next year, it looks like Paul won’t be putting his pen down anytime soon – whether his work makes it on to the big screen or not.
The Forever Moment by Paul A Mendelson is out now, £8.99, The Book Guild Ltd.
