Play for today

As soon as you've read this, I'm off: first to various family bits but thence to Leeds and a performance of a play of mine.

Also other people's; it's another festival of new writing, as I'm sure I've told you before. So compared to Innocence it's a very small thing, but then compared to Innocence it's been a much easier and slicker process. I go tonight looking forward to it and I'm grateful to the theatre because this rounds out my drama year with a good production.

Bit nervous, actually. I always am, now: I thought it would get easier but this is my fourth production and I'm not going to be relaxed until it's done.

I would say that when you're starting out scriptwriting, you get so many rejections that the process becomes a battleground where you're trying to succeed on the page and your audience is the producer, the director, the script editor, the theatre's literary editor. You start to think of your audience as that one person, not the audience you should be aiming for, and your focus is on that A4 sheet, not the final theatre/film/radio production. So when something goes through and will play out in front of a paying crowd, it's terribly unsettling.

I would say that because I suspect it's true. But I also feel the same unsettled surprise over my journalism, which has been going steadily well for a very long time now. This week a reader phoned Radio Times to complain about my absence in the On This Day column but, I'm told, was too shy to speak to me when the that was offered. I had a tremendously chuffing email from a favourite editor. And I've now had so many emails about how I shouldn't drop the UK DVD Review podcast that I am struggling to reply to them all.

All fantastic. A tough year's getting a lot better.

Bugger, I'm late. Could you read faster in future? Off to Leeds we go.

William