Open Degree Students

No one in the audience for the opening night of The Living End watched more intently than Open University student, and now graduate, Walter Smith.

The OU took a leading part in getting 73-year old Walter’s black comedy about coping with retirement onto the stage and launching his new career as a playwright.

Years earlier aged 66 and a retiree from the engineering industry his new life of leisure was, in his own words, “sending him mad”.

“I was in a vacuum,” said Walter, from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire.

“You can’t play golf five times a day and I am no gardener,” he said.

So he turned to the OU to keep his mind active and it was a toss-up between the arts and sciences.

Walter had always been interested in the arts despite having a fulfilling career in Project Engineering.

“At grammar school I was asked by the careers teacher what I was interested in and I said drawing – so he sent me to Raleigh Cycles where I became a draughtsman!” he said

He started writing in 1976 while off duty from working on an oil and gas plant in Orkney.

“There was not a lot else to do up there.

“It was mostly short stories and about my own life,” he said.

He began several OU short courses in writing.

“I was enrolling for a new one and someone said why don’t you do a degree?”

This year he finished an Open Degree in English Literature and it was the creative writing elements which encouraged him to write plays.

He entered The Living End in a local competition. It did not win but it was picked up by Brightside Productions in Mansfield and staged by them last September.

Set in the near future it sees a government solving the problem of rising pensions costs by launching a lottery with one lucky couple winning a blissful retirement – and the rest getting the bullet!

With widows exempt and some children keen to offload their parents it raises all kinds of questions about old age.

Walter, who writes under the name Harry Osbourne, says he was not influenced by his own experience of retirement but a story from 17^th century France where a Duke tries to impose euthanasia on the peasants.

“Seeing your words come to life on stage is quite a memorable thing,” said Walter, “and the OU played its part.”

He would “absolutely recommend” studying with the OU to other retirees and his experience of the course and the support he got was positive.

“It is fulfilling and there is a point to it. It saved my sanity,” he said.

Walter is planning to take his degree to Honours with the Advanced Creative Writing Module A363.