Having to ban one of your own books is hopefully a once in a lifetime experience – and a pretty odd one at that. Usually, having a book or anything banned is a double-edged sword. Stacks of publicity and illicit sales and a whole bunch of people who want to interview you or sue you. Or kill you. DIY banning is when the tree does fall in the forest and no-one is there. I can tell you how that sounds.  

In my case it started out as a quick check into what did or did not constitute plagiarism. Although many sorts of satire from spoof to mashup rely on convenient adaptation of a given situation they can also rely on someone else’s original work.

Having penned what I thought might even be my magnum hocus-pocus in the form of an updated and fully satirised version of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milkwood: A Play for Voices, I suddenly realised that it might have to be strangled at birth. Or in this case at adulthood given I’d finished it and was actually quite pleased with it.

COALITION COURSE

Under Milksops: A Play for Lifestyle Choices was written during our last Coalition Government – who seemed fair game at the time.

So 120 pages of rockin’ fun was now subject to a sort of internal legal scrutiny.

Interestingly in legal terms and precedent, the Government is indeed fair game to be parodied. This is enshrined somewhere within our freedoms of expression and rights to hold them to account. Similarly, a parody of someone else’s work is also allowable provided it is set out as such, typically by the inclusion of a subtitle ‘A Parody’. This is so everyone is clear on what you have set out to do and have done. That was easy. Two minute job. The play gained a quite slick subtitle and I was ready to click ‘Publish’.

However. Big legal however, although the Government is fair game, it turns out that what you can’t do is use someone else’s original concept or idea in order to parody the Government. Apparently, you can get away with a sentence or two mimicking someone else’s style but that’s your lot unless the originally writer or their estate agrees or commissions your work.

THAT’S A ‘NO’ FROM ME

The Estate from Carmarthen said ‘No’. The legal premise seemed a bit murky but the gist of it is that if you break the speed limit on a pushbike everyone thinks it’s a laugh. If you ride a stranger’s bike round their garden they’ll probably get annoyed. But if you stole the bike from their garden to break the speed limit, it’s still theft.   

Which feels like a shame. It was a lot of work and although the sting of the wasted effort has faded along with the relevance of political events at the time, it still smarts. Legal lesson learned though, I could after all be stacking shelves in Merthyr Tydfil’s prison library.

Listen. Sometimes on a bright spring morning when I’m alone, I open the file and pay a visit to my old friends in the Memory Stick Dark, the long-drowned characters who have been unread so long they have forgotten they were ever in power. Oops there I go.