METTLEDETECTORS ...FROM THE GLIMMER TO THE JIG. In the week that Les Mis turns 40, we take a look at how great stories make it out into the world…

Someone walks into a luggage shop in LA to replace his battered briefcase ...walks out with Schindler’s List.

Someone else pops into their local for a pint, walks out with War Horse.

Like Andy and Lance in The Detectorists, we are all, to some extent or another, on the look-out for stories rich in precious mettle, the ability to overcome desperate straits by means of spirit and resilience.

And none more so than us in The Business of Pleasure.

We mine it from our own experiences, from snatches of overhead conversation ...or pushy Polish luggage salesman.  

And then we spend significant chunks of our allotted time on this planet bringing it to the surface, refining and polishing it, before holding it up, with hope in our hearts, to the gatekeepers who can unlock our audiences …those countless regiments of souls whose own mettledetectors bleep like Extratone metronomes when they locate stories of the human spirit triumphing over adversity.

I recall sitting with a friend on the top of a bus, earwigging two elderly Russian ladies as one described how her husband, as a young man, had been on guard duty in the Kremlin when Lenin was given a lethal injection… rather than falling into a coma due to ‘stroke complications’ as per the official version.

There’s a blinding Chapter One kick-off served up on a plate (or in this case the Number 14 to Piccadilly).

And the aged cloakroom attendant (Jack, a former RSM in the Royal Horse Artillery) who casually mentioned to me that he had been present in the Vatican (also, coincidentally, on guard duty) as the newly-elected Pope took up his new office by descending from the ceiling in a gold cable car…*

...But what if the golden cables had suddenly snapped? And Jack and his squad had been involved in the hastily-staged touch-line Papal substitution..?

I was on the bus again (a favourite listening/detecting post) when I happened upon ‘Searching For Schindler: A Memoir by Thomas Keneally.**

Back in 1980, and braving the Santa Ana heat of Wilshire Boulevard in search of a new briefcase, the author’s eye had been caught by a ‘discount’ sign in the window of The Handbag Studio.

 “Stop!” cried the proprietor, “It’s 105 degrees out here and you don’t want to come into my air-conditioned store???  D’you think I’ll eat you???”

Leopold ‘Poldeck’ Pfefferberg (later known as Leopold Page) made the sale, and while his assistant, Saul, called through Keneally’s credit card details (this was after all 1980) Poldeck asked him why he was visiting LA?

“I’ve just had a book out in the U.S.” Keneally replied, “…Confederates. "

“My God!” Poldeck replied, “Saul, is that not the same book I just read the review of in Newsweek?”

Unbeknown to Keneally, for decades Poldeck had been regaling customers to his store with stories about how Oskar Schindler had save him and his wife’s lives. Now finally, and magnificently, he had struck gold.

It’s not often (or, sadly, probably ever) that we’ll have a Poldeck to propel us into a great new story.

So what is there about a particular idea or story that demands our attention?

And how closely do we weigh it up in our heads before we leap in? ...Or bin it?

For most us of there will be a pause after the initial buzz of discovery, and a process of evaluation, as a paper published early this year explored in great detail.***

'…The current research builds on the dominant neurocognitive view of creativity, which describes it as a dual process, divided into generation phase and evaluation phase.  In the generation phase, individuals form novel associations: they link seemingly unrelated concepts and produce a wide variety of potentially creative ideas.  This phase can be facilitated by memory structure, associative abilities and cognitive flexibility, enabling individuals to navigate between different concepts during idea generation.  The generation phase has been the main focus of creativity research in the past.  On the other hand, the evaluation phase of the creative process, during which candidate ideas are assessed for their creativity, has been largely overlooked. Yet, this step is critical, as shown in studies where individuals with better evaluation skills achieved greater creative performance…

In this study, we conceptualise the evaluation step of creativity as a specific case of decision-making; similar to food options in dietary choices, creative options are compared, and the most satisfactory one is selected. We hypothesise that creative evaluation involves individual preferences and decision-making computations that methods from neuroeconomics**** can help us study. Specifically, we argue that creative evaluation involves a valuation process.

In neuroeconomics, valuation consists of assigning a subjective value to an item, reflecting how valuable the item is, how much the subject likes it. This subjective value then guides selection. Similarly, we propose that the subjective value of a creative idea reflects the satisfaction it provides and plays a crucial role in guiding idea selection.  In a previous work we demonstrated that creativity indeed involves valuation. In particular, that study first showed that the speed at which individuals produced ideas correlated to how much they liked them, suggesting that the subjective valuation of ideas energises creative production. Second, the value given to an idea was a function of its originality and adequacy, indicating that subjective valuation integrates the fundamental criteria of creativity. This integration varied across individuals, with some giving more weight to originality than adequacy. Finally we showed that individuals favouring originality or a balance of originality and adequacy yielded greater creativity (based on word-association performance, alternative uses fluency, and self-reports) than those favouring adequacy, showing the impact of valuation patterns on creative abilities. Overall, this seminal study empirically established that originality and adequacy are integrated into the valuation of ideas, and that valuation plays a central role in creativity. In other words, the dimensions of defining creative product (originality and adequacy) are implemented in the creative process (originality and adequacy are used to form subjective values, which guide idea production). In the current study, we replicate those results and identify the neural underpinnings of the evaluation processes involved in creative thinking.'

I don’t know the extent to which Poldeck's Newsweek review (mentioned above) touched upon the central themes of Keneally’s previous (16) works.  How their historical settings (including wars) would provide the backdrop for struggles between individual conscience and authority, and shine a light on moral ambiguity?  But I doubt if Poldeck could have ever, in his wildest dreams, have imagined finding a story-teller for whom Oskar Schindler's story would resonate so powerfully (or how, to put it in more neurophysiological terms, it immediately scored a treble-twenty on Kenneally's evaluation/valuation dartboard).

In a similar vein, there were initially two ‘ideas’ that fused together in Michael Morpurgo’s mind to provide the spark for War Horse.

Firstly there was the tale of a WWI veteran which he had overheard in The Duke of York pub, Iddesleigh.

Secondly, there had been a boy staying on Michael’s ‘Farm For Children’ who rarely spoke to adults but who began speaking freely to one of the horses.

“I suddenly saw a story connecting that boy, that horse, and the old soldier.”

But would either story have resonated quite so profoundly if Michael's family (and therefore his childhood) hadn’t been so deeply impacted by the death of his Uncle Pieter, an RAF pilot who had been shot down over the Channel in his late teens?

Of course, motivations ('subjective valuations') are rarely simple and sourced from a single point of origin.  When Victor Hugo saw ‘a poor man being arrested for stealing a loaf of bread’ (Hugo’s original note) he did not anticipate that his moral outcry against the social and legal injustices of the day would grow to a bookshelf-buckling 700,000 words.

But he was a big fan of Charles Dickens and his knack of deftly interweaving social critique with hugely popular story-telling across extremely lengthy story-lines.

…And the international fame and fortune it had amassed for London’s world-best-selling literary power-house (the critics of the day actually referred to Les Misérables as ‘the French Bleak House,’ which Dickens had brought in at a mere 370,000 words).

(In a similar vein, Boublil and Schöenberg, the writers of the musical Les Misérables, had been inspired by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar, which had, in turn. been inspired by Lionel Bart’s Dickens-based Oliver!)

Of course, there is nothing totally new under the sun.

But just like Andy and Lance, both The Business of Pleasure (and hopefully the audiences we serve) will be treading our respective fields on the look-out for great stories (and dancing our little jigs when we uncover them) until that gazillion kilowatt lightbulb sky goes out …and beyond.

DT

11 October, 2025

PS: In one of the great(er) ironies of my life, the Director of Schindler's List (and War Horse, the movie) approached me during the interval of Oliver! at the London Palladium. It was his daughter's (21st?) birthday, and I was looking after him and his party (with a copy of my latest screenplay thrust into my back pocket) when Spielberg took me aside, looked up (and up) with hope in his eyes, and told me, sotto voce: " I've got this great idea for a Musical... "

Aaaaaaagh!

*later, Jack was guarding the Royal Enclosure at Ascot when a freak downpour flooded the paddock.  The Royals (and onlythe Royals) were escorted to lunch through a tunnel, stranding the cream of the nobility a hundred yards away from the champagne and caviar. “Right Lads, trouser legs up!” shrieked the wily RSM. And then Jack’s squad of uniformed squaddies, those doughty Tommy Atkins that had risked all in the defence of The Realm, had piggy-backed the Lords and Ladies, in their top-hats and fascinators, across the quagmire …for a fiver a trip.

**https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/b00dz936

***The human reward system encodes the subjective value of ideas during creative thinking, Sarah Moreno-Rodriguez, Benoît Béranger, Emmanuelle Volle, Alizée Lopez-Persem, Commun Biol 8, 37 Biology, 10 January 2025

****What happens in the brain when we make economic decisions, e.g. the switch cost in mental effort when someone veers from one task, rule or strategy to another.