Scriptwriter Abel Mutua vividly recalls how, one day, his female housekeeper found him lying unconscious in the bathroom. He says that this ranks among the highlights of his career as an actor and scriptwriter.
"To this day, I still wonder what she saw. I was naked, after all, but she saved me. Had she not found me, who knows what could have happened to me in that state?” Mutua says this with his trademark cheeky laugh.
A lot was happening in his life at the time. He was a budding actor who, along with a few other stars, had just broken into the limelight thanks to his acting prowess in one of the most popular TV shows at the time, Tahidi High.
But Abel wasn't just an actor on the show. He had also become a gifted scriptwriter for Tahidi High and another popular TV show, Mother-in-Law, for which he was tasked with developing scripts simultaneously.
"I was working flat out on these scripts and acting. Around the same time, I had just had my daughter and was scared that if I didn't work hard enough, I wouldn't be able to provide for her. I had no choice but to overwork myself. When I collapsed, it was from fatigue caused by going many nights without enough sleep and rest,” he recalls.
To multitask, he would show up for the Tahidi shooting session as a cast member during the day and spend the rest of the night scriptwriting.
"During the day, I would show up as a cast member. When I wasn't involved in the scene we were shooting, I would work behind the scenes as a camera operator. Once we had finished shooting and everyone had gone to bed, I would stay up all night developing the script for the next episode. I would get home from the set, get straight onto my computer and the next thing I knew, it was dawn. I would then shower and leave the house. That was the routine until the day I collapsed and realised I needed to change things.”
After four years on the show, Abel decided to end it.
"The show was still popular," he said, "But after four years, many of the cast members were tired of it. Sometimes I would write a script for a particular cast, but then on the day of shooting, they wouldn't show up, so I'd have to rewrite the script. Other times, the cast would show up for the shoot, but then disappear when you needed them for the next one. So the show became unmanageable, and I had to ‘kill’ it,” he explains.
