Today we let Andy Linden take the reigns and talk about how the book Baxter vs The Bookies by Roy Granville came to life on stage..

I’m a massive fan of horse-racing. I’m always engrossed in pouring over stats, enjoy putting on regular (small!) bets at my local bookies and love going along in person to Epsom, Ascot and Cheltenham when I can. So, when I decided to do a one-man theatre show for The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, horse-racing seemed like an ideal subject for me to tackle. But what character? What plot? Just as I was tossing ideas around, I came across a book of short stories called ‘Baxter vs The Bookies’ by Roy Granville, which had been published in 2004 and was illustrated with great little cartoons by Lezz. I raced through them, b-boom, and instantly fell in love with the character of Baxter, a long-suffering, out-of-date horse-racing tipster who gets caught up in all sorts of outlandish scrapes. 

I contacted the author Roy, who is a lovely man who loves horse-racing and paid him for the adaptation rights. And I got his permission to embellish for theatrical effect.

“I ramped up the drama to make this story the climax of the show.“

In the book, Baxter was already an aging out-modded character, struggling with modern technology, just like me, but in my adaptation, I decided to make him working class, firstly cos I am, having been brought up in Tottenham, and secondly to make him even more of an underdog, struggling against the odds.

The book is full of great shaggy dog stories that lead you down unexpected paths and I picked the three that I felt were most theatrical. They are peopled with great secondary characters that I knew I could bring to life of the stage, and I heightened them all for drama: I made Armstrong, Baxter’s local bookie, whiskey-sodden, irascible and perennially suspicious; I changed the ending to the story of Wilfred, Baxter’s diminutive postman, who has prophetic hallucinations about winners while on dodgy back-pain medicine, to make Baxter kinder to Wilfred, to let the audience like him; and I added to the third story of Will Bow, Baxter’s nemesis, the college educated upstart bookmaker, who has no time for the horses themselves but makes a mint predicting winners merely by analysing stats and crunching the numbers. I ramped up the drama to make this story the climax of the show.

” I instantly fell in love with the character of Baxter…”

I set all three stories in one disastrous year of betting. I piled the pressure on Baxter with the order of the stories, showing him getting ever more stressed. I brought characters from one story into another to tie them together. And I added a new story of my own, to give poor old Baxter a lost love, to bring him more humanity and heighten the obsessive lonely life that he has now. I put one medium sized race at that beginning of the show, to draw the audience into Baxter’s precarious world of tension and a huge do-or-die race at the end, on which Baxter risks everything he owns and his whole reputation, to give a satisfying nail-biting finale.

Finally, I added a sprinkling of out-and-out one-liners: ‘why must you never be rude to jump jockeys… because they might take a fence!’ Offence! Get it. Yeah alright!

Come along to see Baxter vs The Bookies by Andy Linden at Gilded Balloon Patter House – Snug (Venue 24) – at 1pm between the 30th July-25th August

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