Self Distract

Done To Do, what's next?

2012-01-23T06:38:00.000-08:00

You start easy at first. It's just a bit of fun. You've got your iPhone with you, there's nothing bad about writing a little note that you need to buy bread on the way home.

But then you get that high when your iPhone spots that you've left the office and it bleeps to remind you about the loaf.

Suddenly, you get home and you've got bread. Instead of a niggling feeling that you've forgotten something, you've got the makings of a sandwich.

I know, it's crazy.

Only, tomorrow you need more. You need to remember your mother's birthday.

Then you're at work and it's just that little bit easier to make some To Dos than to keep going back to your email to see what you have to do next. It's sensible and it's also free. Apple's own Reminders app, it's right there, it's free, it does that trick with popping up when you leave or arrive places.

It's nothing, you're just doing this to be sociable. You can stop any time you want.

But Wunderlist comes next. Just a bit more power to your elbow. Lets you break down big tasks into bits, into smaller tasks. There are myriad To Do apps on iPhone and Wunderlist is deservedly very popular. I've never used it.

I used to get my kicks from Appigo Todo instead. Loved that app. Lived in that app. The iPhone one now costs £2.99 but you also want the iPad one. That's £2.99 too. And you should have the Mac one too. That's another £10.49.

Soon you're dividing your To Do list into categories. Stuff for work, stuff for home. A shopping list. Repeating tasks; those things you have to do every day like "Ignore new year's resolution".

It all makes sense.

It's only the next bit that gets tricky.

Back about five months ago, I was an Appigo Todo evangelist. Today, I'm not. In between there was a little curiosity about something else, then a bit of a plunge-taking, then a lot, a lot and three times a lot of annoyance, anger and rage. The annoyance was that I'd bought something fairly expensive: I think now it's cheap but it's only that when you know it is what you need. When you think you've wasted your money, it's a lot of cash.

The anger came from it not doing what I needed it to do. This more-expensive, much more highly recommended, ostensibly much, much, much more powerful piece of software could not do things that my Appigo Todo could.

And then the rage.

The rage because as annoying as this new software was, there were bits in it so good that it was too late. So good that I bought another version. And then a third. I hated all three versions of this new one but I could never go back to Appigo.

But ask me today, and it's completely different: it feels now as if I bought the new software in Damascus.

I even have evenings off. Sometimes, anyway.

Because I've switched to using OmniFocus.

If you don't use this yourself, the quick way to describe it is to say that it's a To Do list. If you do use it, you are right now emailing me to say come on, that's like saying XXXXXX is a football team or YYYYYY is a car when really ZZZZZZZZZZ. (Hey, it's your email, you do the metaphor.)

There is one version that is difficult to use, that I mean you look at it and wonder where in the world you even start. But the real difficulty and the reason you tend to break through it and abruptly find this all incredibly useful, is more a conceptual thing.

Todo was a To Do list. OmniFocus is more a list of things that Can Be Done.

Follow.

If I get a job or think of something I have to do, it used to go in my Todo list and sit there until it was done, with this enormous growing pile of things. I used to find it very satisfying when I could get the number of tasks down from some giant number to some less-giant number.

Now, I'll do the same with OmniFocus in that I'll chuck anything from the smallest need for a loaf to a book commission into it. But the difference is that later I'll check through those new ones and start working on them. That's for the British Film Institute, that's for Radio Times, this is for when I get around to it, this is if I can be bothered. But the BFI thing might not be due for a month and I probably can't start it until next week. So, whack, start next Thursday, finish a week on Friday, I don't have to think about it again.

It takes longer to describe this to you than to do it.

And the result is that I can look at my OmniFocus list and, if I want to, see only what I need to do today. If I'm in London, it's typically for Radio Times but this week I've got a BBC Radio 4 meeting there so I can also see tasks by location: I can look to see what else I can get done while I'm there. Or types. I've got ten minutes before my train, I can immediately see what emails or phone calls I need to get done while I wait.

So you see, it is Tasks You Can Get Done Now more than it is Tasks To Do. Take a look at the difference:

I took that screen grab just before I stopped running OmniFocus and Todo in parallel. So it was for the same day, with the same lists of tasks to do. With Appigo's Todo - which I'm not knocking, I liked it a great deal until I found OmniFocus suited me better - I obviously didn't have to do all 30 that day, but I had to keep going into it to see what I could do now, what I could postpone. With OmniFocus, though I was getting through the same amount of work, one glance told me that yes, I could knock off for the night.

I thought that having tasks only show up when it was time to do them would mean I would forget them and would be forever behind but somehow it means the opposite. I know I'll get to them, I know I'm making better use of my time overall. And there are many ways in which OmniFocus shows you what's coming up, so that you can usefully tell when you can and can't take on anything else. This is my favourite: the Forecast view in OmniFocus for iPhone:

Things that I have to do at the top, tasks I need to get started in the middle, and below that a quick calendar of the day. There's more up above and down below.

There's also a way to see only the tasks to do with, say, my book. So this coming Thursday, for instance, I can see I've only got one thing that truly has to be done then so I can take on more. In fact, I'm probably spending Thursday on my book for that very reason – and come Thursday, I'll have OmniFocus just show me the tasks I need to do for that one project.

I think this all sounds like a lot of work and that was part of the reason I found OmniFocus annoying at first. Felt like I had too much to think about, that I could spend longer playing with this than in getting the work done. Yet in practice, it all just flows so easily - especially on the iPhone and iPad versions - that I spend much less time than I used to thinking about whether I've got everything covered.

The location reminders don't work as well for me as they should (and OmniFocus Support can't fathom out why) and I'd like the Mac version to be as slick as the iPad one or at least just a bit more slick. But I love how when I get an email on my Mac that I'll need to reply to later, I can tap a couple of keys and it's in OmniFocus as a task with what it's about and a link to that email.

I also love that I jot down something on my iPhone and know that it'll be on my iPad and my Mac the next time I look.

So I'm a convert. Join me. Come to the dark side. But only tell me about it after you've got through the bad bits and are a fan too.

Just so you know, there are three versions of OmniFocus and you don't need all of them but you will end up buying the lot. OmniFocus for iPad (£27.99) is the best, OmniFocus for iPhone (£13.99) is the handiest, OmniFocus for Mac (£54.99) is the toughest to use. There's no PC version.

So where was I?

2011-12-29T06:01:00.000-08:00

Something that just tickles me, that I look forward to and gleefully enjoy, is reading friends' blogs where they're saying what work they've got coming out next. Usually I do already know, I mean, they're friends, but I also know that things have been a long time coming. So when Jason Arnopp's film gets its US premiere, when Piers Beckley's theatre company announces its Christmas programme, when Laura Cousins unveils an event, when John Dorney writes a new Doctor Who or is in a new play, when Ken Armstrong has a play on or a film released online, when Angela Gallagher releases new jewellery, when Gigi Blum Peterkin is hosting panels at SXSW then it is a delight because I also know how long they've waited.

(There is a similar yet slightly different thing with Andrea Mann: there you don't have to wait long at all for her to say something so funny you'll go telling everyone you know.)

It's like a triple delight: there's the news itself, that something great is happening, that there's been ages when they were contractually not able to say anything publicly and invariably there's also been a long stretch when they knew it might not happen. Alan Plater used to say to me that he didn't believe any commission until the cameras were actually rolling on set.

I have a couple of these things myself now. And from this end, it's slightly confusing. What's new is old and what's old is going to be new.

Follow.

This time last year, I was dreading 2011. It looked like it was going to be a tough one and I suppose it was: I picked up a couple of scars and a blister along the way. But nothing I would change now. And instead the year overall was transformative.

That's the word. Transformative. Creatively, professionally, personally, and even financially, I'm not the guy I was a year ago. A lot of that is down to my wife, Angela Gallagher.

But the greatest things I can actually tell you about that happened for me this year won't come out until next.

I did have my first Doctor Who out this year: it was actually released late December 2010 but all the reviews I read were 2011. (I was compared to Steven Moffat and Russell T Davies. "He's not as good as Steven Moffatt and Russell T Davies.") So 2011 started with my finding that my Who was a hit and I do remember listening to the final cut very late one winter's night. Peter Davison as the Doctor, reading my dialogue. Sarah Sutton reading my lines as Nyssa and after the recording, thanking me for the script.

But I also remember walking through Euston station reading an email from Alan Barnes - the best editor I've never met - about whether I might be up for another one. I have no idea how we got from that to what I can now tell you is called Wirrn Isle.

Except March 2011 was the coldest place on Earth for me, and me alone, sitting in my office writing this four-part Colin Baker tale set on an ice-covered Loch Lomond. Fiction is the hardest thing for me, and consequently the richest, most satisfying. I can't wait for you to hear the end result.

I got to hear it being recorded in June 2011. Even by then, though, the script had felt a long time in the past. Now both script and recording day feel dim-and-distant yet when people ask me if I've got any more Doctor Who coming, I have to tell them the truth: I do, Wirrn Isle. It's out in March 2012. Take a look at the pre-order page: I'm not trying to twist your arm, I just want you to see artist Simon Holub's cover with my byline on it. I think he's done a simply beautiful job. There's a larger, clean copy on his Flickr page.

Nicholas Briggs directed Wirrn Isle and alongside Colin Baker, producer David Richardson assembled a marvellous cast: Lisa Greenwood as Flip, Tim Bentinck - yep, the one with that great voice in The Archers – Jenny Funnell, Tessa Nicholson, Rikki Lawton, Dan Starkey, Helen Goldwyn and Glynn Sweet. I just looked them all up to make sure I was spelling them correctly and, do you know, it made me beam: seeing their real names next to my character names.

That is out in the first half of 2012, then, and for me the writing and making of it occupied the first half of 2011.

The second half of 2011 was devoted to my first book. The British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan will publish "BFI Television Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair" some time in 2012.

When you and I are done here, I'm off to continue scanning in Beiderbecke cuttings and photographs that Barbara Flynn loaned me. I took all the ones I needed for the book but she's trusted me with this great collection and I promised to not only return it but make her digital copies of everything too.

Barbara Flynn

Barbara Flynn is simply great joyous fun to talk to. She made me laugh aloud at stories from the filming of this tremendous TV drama by Alan Plater, even though so very often she would immediately follow a tale with "But of course you can't say that in the book". Come round for a mug of tea, I'll tell you her tales off the record.

If you know Beiderbecke, you know it starred Flynn with James Bolam. Just between us, I've had a lot of praise for getting him to talk because he is famously reticent to be interviewed. (An aside. I got angry looks at Birmingham Central Library one day for laughing at a TV Times interview from 1987. The piece had begun with a comment about how Bolam does not talk to the press but this time he had. Then it went into many paragraphs of quotes from him, except I knew they were copied verbatim from the previous interview TV Times did with him in 1985.)

He really did speak to me, we really did sit for a natter in BBC Television Centre. But he didn't do it for me. He was particularly keen that I note that he was breaking this rule against talking to journalists specifically because this was about The Beiderbecke Affair and he wanted to do it for Alan Plater and Alan's wife, Shirley Rubinstein.

Since Alan died, Shirley and I have talked often but usually not about him. But we spoke at length for the book and I think we both had a great time. If you listen to the recordings of that interview, you hear me being hesitant and confused a lot: I wasn't sure how either of us would take to talking about him and she was also my first interviewee for the book so I wasn't yet sure what I was after from her.

If you listen to the tape of me with James Bolam, you hear me much more certain of what I'm after yet also a bit more wary: I'd been warned he could be prickly. He was charming with me and I had a ball talking not just about Beiderbecke but other shows of his that are favourites of mine, like When the Boat Comes in. And we talked so much about the state of BBC and television drama in general that you often hear both of us audibly remembering that we should get back on topic.

Wait. I'm starting to go through the entire Beiderbecke research process with you. There won't be anything left for the book. I'll shut up.

Except if you do know The Beiderbecke Affair, you know its music. And I've got to tell you that Frank Ricotti is a funny and fascinating guy, hell bent on insisting that he did nothing "but write down the notes" and that it was the boys in the band who did the work.

And if you remember the famous title sequence from the show, you will also understand why I sat upright in shock when the phone rang and an unfamiliar voice said she was Diana Dunn. Diana created that sequence and was on my list to interview when complicated circumstances meant she ended up phoning me about someone else I'd been trying to reach. I am sure she didn't expect me to know who she was, the daft eejit. I wonder now if I shouted when she rang. I should ask her.

And the someone else I'd been trying to reach was David Cunliffe. I knew his name from years of Yorkshire TV dramas and you'll read more about him in the book. But he and Diana took me to lunch at the Garrick Club where they say no, no, you don't look overawed, William, not at all.

Blimey. That's all come back to me now, telling you. Thanks: I had a brilliant year and I nearly didn't say so, I nearly let it all go by without note. I haven't even mentioned signing autographs at the Big Finish day. That was tremendous.

And as I glow about 2011, I can of course now look forward to a 2012 which will see the release of my Doctor Who: Wirrn Isle and my Beiderbecke Affair book – er, I hope I actually get to write something too. Have you got anything you need writing in 2012? I do books, plays and Bar/Bat Mitzvahs.

Exit BBC, stage left

2011-10-31T10:59:00.000-07:00

It's 18:00 on October 31, 2011 and as of this moment, I no longer work at all for the BBC. Slightly strangely, I haven’t left the Corporation – the BBC has left me.

Strictly speaking I am a freelance writer but it’s complicated. Perhaps ten years ago, the BBC was my biggest, most regular client and I'd have continued like that but for how they told me one day that there was no more freelance budget. But if I wanted to go on staff, they said, that would be good. I’m wondering now if this was my first real experience of the logic of BBC budgeting but all I thought at the time was that the fee worked out to be the same, so what did I care?

Later I’d care a lot or at least I’d care roughly annually because it doesn’t half make your tax complicated. I’d be on salary for a couple of days a week, then freelance - and oftentimes the freelance work would be for another end of the same company.

But on the other hand, by this time I’d already had the Freelance Coronary: the moment when everything, every client, every job, just collapses. I wasn’t working for the BBC on that day and the worst I’ve had with the Corporation since is the odd Freelance Chest Pain. You don’t forget it, though, so I took that staff post. I’m glad I did, too, because later the recession coincided with one of the BBC’s cost-cutting drives. That wasn’t a remarkable coincidence: the BBC is always cutting something.

For instance, I know it was cutting something when I first joined but I’ve no idea what because I can’t remember when that was. I do remember an earlier approach, I remember being a schoolboy and going to BBC Pebble Mill to just ask for work. It was embarrassing. I was embarrassing. I should stop doing that.

Sometimes it works, though.

I remember vividly how exciting it was when I got work experience at BBC Radio WM. Don’t ask me, I don’t know when it was. I’m surprised at all this: I suspect my subconscious is preventing me remembering so that I can’t tell you and therefore you can’t figure out how many thousands of years ago it was. Might’ve been 1990s. I think it was.

I did do a spot of work on Micro Live, a BBC TV show in the 1980s - and met the great, delightful Terry Marsh. If she’s ever googling herself and finds this amidst all the stories about boxers, do please picture me waving.

Somewhere around this time I think I started pitching to BBC Radio 4. Aghast to think I still am, still unsuccessfully. Though these days it’s drama and then it was documentary: I don’t think I was really suited to docs. Used to find these great ideas and have little interest in actually making the programmes.

BBC Radio WM was much more successful for me. It was definitely my first exposure to BBC politics. It's where I learnt to not to say that in a blog. So moving on... I remember the breakfast show producer Kathryn being tremendous and someone I instantly liked, instantly liked a lot. She was succeeded by someone else I didn’t rate and who definitely didn’t rate me but I am completely blank about her name. I’m okay with that.

At that time, I used to get up around 4am to go to work on the WM breakfast show; then the show ended at 9am but I had a deal whereby I’d leave at 8:30am. That was so I could get over to a technical writing job outside the BBC, an office job that ran 9am-5pm. Then the evenings would either be working at BHBN Hospital Radio or at Focus Newspapers.

Sudden memory: leaving that office job one day when it was belting down with rain. I ran out of there with a friend who mentioned it the next day, mentioned how overwhelming that rain had been. It took me half a minute to understand what she meant: to her the rain was last night, to me it was two shifts ago.

Oh! Another sudden memory from the same place. That technical writing thing was a very long-term job; you’d have an urgent meeting there that would be about whether you could finish a particular job within the next eight months. At BBC local radio, we might have deadlines no longer than the time it takes to open a fader and take a mic live.

I’m not saying one is better than the other, but I am saying that the perspective I got from having both changed how I saw each. I don’t know now what I thought I’d get from the BBC but this is one of the things I did and that shaped me. I’m still very good at handling deadlines, I’m still a little scared of running out of time. If I’m due to phone you at 3pm, I’ll phone at 3pm. If it’s now 2:59pm, I know I can write an email in that minute and I will.

When I’m hanging on the phone listening to muzak and the tune comes to an end, I still sit up a bit, expecting the person I’m calling to wait until the right point in the fade and come in with a back anno about the piece and then into what I want.

Maybe the BBC gets into you, maybe you’re already a bit BBC and that’s why you’re drawn there. Definitely radio gets into your soul.

If you don’t like the BBC and especially if you’ve not felt the tug toward it that so many of us do, let me give you an example of how it can matter to people. Once when I was actually working for BBC WM, when I’d moved on from unpaid work experience, I wrote a letter to someone on BBC stationery. Just another letter, just another day. I suddenly recall noticing the tiniest of black dots on the page: I tried to brush it off before seeing that it was printed on. Right there beneath the BBC logo there was a little dot and it was there because you were supposed to begin all typed letters at that point on the page.

Grief. Typing. Typewriters.

I don’t remember what the letter was now, but it happened to be to someone I knew a little and later I found that she’d kept it. Treasured it. Obviously not because it came from me, I’m pretty certain not because of the content, but because it was BBC. Even though I was the same as her, even as I would’ve felt the same, it was a little Damascus moment because I saw something could be both important and trivial. That things I felt were daunting from one perspective were almost certainly not from another.

I’ll bet you anything that this fed in to my decision to go freelance. That was a gigantic move for me, a huge mountain that I put off for a years. And yet the instant it was done, I was only surprised it had taken me so long. I said earlier that it was 1996 when I jumped out of salaried employment; I now don’t actually remember that date, I remember 2006. By chance, someone asked me about it in 2006 and I realised it was my tenth anniversary. That’s what sticks with me, the actual event seeming so simple and obvious and unmemorable next to the happenstance of spotting the anniversary.

Whatever seems impossibly huge is, well, not. That doesn’t mean it’s achievable. Definitely doesn’t mean it’s easy. Might not mean it’s worth it. Does not mean it isn’t exquisite and delicious and vital.

But it does mean you should bloody well get on with it.

While there’s time.

Hang on, this hasn’t half gone off the point. The straight, simple fact is that as of 6pm tonight, I ceased to be employed by BBC Magazines, a division of BBC Worldwide. This is because BBC Magazines is no longer part of Worldwide, is no longer anything. Radio Times magazine and website are now part of Immediate Media, or at least they will be as of tomorrow and so will I.

Today the RT website team went to Television Centre for one last lunch at the BBC Club.

It was closed.

Tomorrow I’m still working for Radio Times. On Wednesday, I’m still working for them. This Thursday I’ll back to freelancing with big photography collation project for my book; Friday I have a pitch to make and a script to progress. Saturday and Sunday, more drama work. Then Monday back to Radio Times.

There’s a line - isn’t there? - that goes something like “a difference that makes no difference is no difference”.

I can readily see the similarities between today and tomorrow, between the work I did and I will do, definitely see that I’ll still be working precisely as closely with precise the same excellent Radio Times people. For at least a while, when I go to London I will go to the same desk in the same BBC building.

But it will be different.

It’s certainly 15 years since I started doing anything with the BBC, might even be twenty. I cannot tell you the number of times the Corporation has made me livid. Won’t tell you the number of times I’ve made a prat of myself within a BBC building.

(Hint: it's approximately the same number of times I’ve done it outside.)

But I’m happy I worked at the BBC, I think I did some good if ephemeral things there, I know the BBC is part of who I am. It’s not all of me, but it’s a part and it’s a part that I’m glad I have.

Jobs in computing

2011-10-06T06:13:00.001-07:00

There’s this guy. He thinks I’m a computer geek and I can’t change his mind about it. Normally you’d give up trying, you’d soon shrug but it did start to matter a little bit when he kept consulting me on anti-virus software he was thinking of buying.

“Have you read the back of the box?” I asked him. “Then you know more than I do.”

It seems he thought I was being nice and encouraging, that I was praising his expertise. I know that he actually doesn’t comprehend that I can have not the faintest idea about computer viruses. This is not a conceivable thing for him and he chuckles sometimes like he knows I’m trying to make a joke and he wants to be polite.

I used to work in computing, did I tell you that? Studied the things for a bit, managed to get out and onto computer magazines. I was always a magazine man more than a computer one, more of a drama nut than anything else. More into people than wires.

But you do learn a thing or two and it is surprising what still lurks in the back of my head so when he told me his several new computers were having trouble connecting to the internet and asked me to take a look, I did. How long could it take?

Five hours.

And I failed.

I don’t feel very awful about failing to get these PCs online because Dell didn’t manage it either. Some support expert from across the world dialled into the PCs and couldn’t fix them. (How? How can you dial in, connect remotely, but not have fixed the internet? Mysteries. Alchemy.)

What I most remember about that day, though, was sitting there in front of each PC in turn, entirely failing to get them to recognise that there is such a thing as wifi - while I looked up technical advice online through my MacBook. Plopped myself down by the PC, opened the MacBook, told it which wifi network I wanted, was online before I’d really finished opening the lid.

Those PCs never worked reliably with the internet, not over wifi.

And as time ticked by, this guy replaced them all.

Now, on the one hand, I’m still using my Mac from a couple of years before he bought these PCs, but I think the issue is not how fast PCs wear out but how this fella bought three more PCs of the same type.

I did mention Macs.

Quite a bit.

He argues, though, that Macs are expensive and they don’t do anything you can’t do with PCs.

His new PCs had the same problem.

I’m missing an episode now because at some point something did happen to get them online eventually. But the next time I am involved, it’s to set up a couple of laptops.

Two identical Windows laptops, bought from the same shop, bought in the same week.

One of them couldn’t play the sound off DVDs.

The speakers are fine, it could play anything else. But not DVDs.

I downloaded drivers, I changed settings, to be frank I was stabbing wildly at any option presented to me and nodding sagely whenever asked “Is it done yet?”. Eventually, I found a really clever workaround. I can’t remember what it was now, but I was actually proud of myself: I’d thought my way around and over a problem. Immensely satisfying.

For about a minute.

This is what computing is to this guy. A pain. A pain where two identical Windows computers don’t work the same and in fact don’t work.

He doesn’t think I’m a geek because I once studied computers, he thinks it because I spend all day at one and in the evening turn to another. Choosing to put yourself through that, to voluntarily keep going back to a computer, that equals geek.

The difference is that I use Macs. You know this already, you know this is where I’m going with all this. And you know why I’m saying it today. But actually, I want to argue that the difference is that I don’t use computers.

I don’t get up in the morning and think ooh, I can boot up my computer now. I don’t think I’ve got five minutes, I can spend more time at my computer.

Instead, what I’m doing is turning to the book I’m writing. I’m turning to the film I started watching on the train yesterday. I’m reading the news. I’m editing video, cutting audio, photo editing, laying out pages, I’m interviewing people, I’m transcribing audio, I’m listening to the radio, I’m watching TV. I’m doing a lot of work here in the UK and I’m doing some in the States, from that same Mac.

It all goes through my Mac, yes. But it also all goes through my MacBook, my iPad, my iPhone.

It goes through me.

I reach for the work and for the fun, I don’t reach for a computer to geek out over and I never have to.

I have had people ask me to recommend a phone and when I’ve said iPhone, they’ve tutted. Typical, they say. It would be Apple. Nobody needs that stuff and I bet they never use any of that fancy stuff, they can’t, they can’t understand it, it’s rubbish. You’re an Apple fanboy: it’s all style, you’re buying into the Apple hype when I’m being real, you’re a fashion victim and I know the truth that this ten quid Nokia phone and twenty quid PC are far, far better.

“So why’d you want me to recommend a new phone then?” I asked.

I know that I’m not won over by hype. Microsoft hypes a lot more but I don’t get interested in their stuff, probably because they’re better at the hype than at delivering the product. Microsoft hypes away about what they’re releasing next year. Apple hypes away about what they’re bringing out today.

But I did wonder about me when I found I was waiting to hear Apple’s news this week about the next iPhone. So, for pure curiosity, I kept an eye on how often I used my iPhone.

You know it’s going to be a big figure. I knew it would be. Several dozen times, easy.

It was 230.

Exactly 230 times in one normal day, including six phone calls but not including how ever often it was that I used to look at it to see the time.

Apple kit is woven into my life. Maybe it is in yours, maybe it isn’t, I’m not here to tell you anything but how I roll.

Apple is more than one man. But Steve Jobs made a dramatic difference in how I live and we have lost someone remarkable today.

Strictly between you and me

2011-09-08T13:03:00.001-07:00

I know I can't have always wanted to visit the Strictly Come Dancing set because the show's only been running for a few years. But it feels like I have because I've wanted it that much.

I came close once: Angela got to go to a live show and I drove her and Lesley, a friend, to London, spent the evening kicking my heels, giving a lift to some tourists who'd come to the wrong hotel, crashed my car, wrote it off, got a hire car and drove Angela and Lesley home again.

Angela and I have different emotions about that night.

But today, it was going to happen. I was booked to go to Studio 1, BBC Television Centre for the first of two days filming the Radio Times photo shoot with all the dancers and their celebrity partners.

You'll see who got who on Saturday night when the launch show is aired but it was recorded yesterday evening. (And you're wondering, or at least I've always wondered, but no, nobody knows who they're getting before the launch show.)

Last night, Studio 1 had the full ballroom set. Tess's area. The judges' table. The band pit.

This morning, nothing remained. Not a sequin, not a speck of glitter.

Instead, this huge studio was divided into four or five areas. I don't know what each one was but Radio Times had one and there was a big green-screen portion where the title sequence was being filmed. That sequence we get very familiar with each year that shows the contestants and their professional partner swirling amid glitterballtastic sparkles.

I watched Rory Bremner and [redacted] film theirs. Was tickled by Anton's stream of beaming good humour with [redacted].

And Strictly is all about fantasy, isn't it? You think about what it would be like to take part. Allow me one little fantasy. Which goes thisaway:

I watched Katya and [redacted] filming their spot and she kept watching me. I'd pass her in the studio and she'd look me over. I know it was suspicion and that anyway I had a chocolate biscuit stain on my shirt, but you could believe that she fancied me.

Okay, you couldn't. But I could.

Okay, I can't either.

I'm using the new Google Blogger app on my iPhone: this button here is either Delete And Don't Make a Fool of Yourself William or it's Publish.

Small moves, Ellie

2011-07-16T07:56:00.000-07:00

May there be a God and when he's done sorting everything else out, may this God take a minute to forgive me: I'm being organised and it's working. I want to tell you about it and I'm not sure whether it's to get it off my chest, whether it's ask you to glare at me until I stop being lazy, or whether I'm hoping to groom you into joining this Organisation.

I honestly hate this in me. I used to enjoy writing in the middle of the night, writing an inch before the deadline, writing 50 pages in day when absolutely necessary. I used to just enjoy the night: going to bed before 1am feels sinfully wrong. It's a good way to work, it conjures up the kind of sound and furious action that I so relished in newsroom writing.

But it was always reacting to something, some deadline set by someone else. Things were getting done but not enough and not well enough and I would always be having ideas for projects I just couldn't find the time to do. I would forever be busy and I mean forever: there was never, not ever a point when I'd be able to say I was done for the day. I enjoyed that, I still enjoy it now, but sheer harsh, cold self-examination is never kind. Last year was very successful for me but it is easy to see that it should've been much more so: perhaps not in terms of what writing I got produced, perhaps not financially, but in terms of me and what I was able to create.

So.

January the 1st was 196 days ago.

I know this because for every one of those 196 days I've written for at least an hour. If the day was spent writing on Radio Times or Doctor Who, for example, I still wrote something else for an hour afterwards.

That's all. Not a big deal, not really worth shouting about, but...

Because of this unbroken pattern, since the start of the year I have - wait, I haven't worked this out yet and it may depress me; grief, I hope it's a lot of work... okay... well... it's not bad. Since 1 January I've written a four-part Doctor Who audio (recorded the other week, due out some time next year), half a new stage play that I abandoned on account of it being rubbish, a half-hour film, a one-hour film, a 15-minute sitcom, a one-hour telly spec. I also wrote 90,000 words of a novel but threw away 40,000 before sending it to Paul the Agent Guy.

Plus I'm only about 2,000 words into my book but I'm running the research for it in a rinkydinky FileMaker Pro database of mine and currently I figure I must've written about 10,000 of the words in that. I suppose I also wrote and shot a couple of How To videos for friends - I'm easier to bear when you can pause or fastwind me - and probably made about eight or ten pitches to people.

I can't work out how many pages or words I've revised on top of this but I know, for instance, that I began the year with a substantial rewrite of a stage play which is now with a producer who's raising cash to stage it. At a rough guess, I've at least revised 300 pages of my own scripts. And if you tell me that I've read fewer than 2,000 pages of other people's scripts, I'll believe you but want to see your working out.

I don't know.

Doesn't matter, really. A lot or a little, worthwhile or rubbish, all that's important is that it is geometrically more than I wrote last year or the year before. And more of it is out there getting produced or commissioned than before, too.

If I decide that this is a lot of writing, then it sounds like I'm saying quantity is key.

I think I'm saying quantity is key.

Since I cannot dare speak to the quality, I can at least look at how there's that abandoned stage play, for instance: last year I might've had the idea but not got around to it. Now I've tried it, I know it doesn't work, it's gone.

And this one-hour-per-day minimum is brilliant and exciting and satisfying when you're in the middle of a script and you know you can't wait for the next unbroken hour on that project. It's still pretty brilliant when you know what bit you have to do in that hour and you're afraid of it. It's hard when it's already 1am and you have't started.

But it's only actually awful when you're between projects and have not the faintest idea what to do but you won't cheat.

I call those Forced Hours. An hour where at the start you have zero in your head but you're going to bloody well sit there and work until you've got something. I've had about four of these in the 196 days so far and each time I've ended up with a new idea. Last year I had the problem that I never got around to ideas, now I'm trying to get through them quickly so that I can get to the next ones I've now got waiting. I have a queue. Can't believe it. A queue.

I can cope with this level of organisation. There's a line in Carl Sagan's Contact that Angela and I often quote to one another: "Small moves, Ellie". Doing a little bit often appears to work for me and I'm okay with that. I can feel a drama precedent in it, so long as I don't examine it too closely. So long as I don't, for instance, blog about it.

Anyway, there's a problem. By May I was aware that I hadn't yet skipped a day and it didn't look like I was going to. So I added to it. Can't tell you what, but as well as this hour writing I added a mandatory daily half-hour on this other thing. Then in June I was commissioned to write a book and it was one that would take a lot of research work, so I added again: half an hour every day on the book too.

These two half hours are not enough for their particular jobs but guaranteeing to do them means I start them and almost always burst the measure, spend longer than the thirty minutes. Same with the hour's writing.

But setting a limit and being able to see that it is working over time, it means there have been five nights this year when I honestly felt I was done for the evening and could relax.

That was horrible.

So that's a problem I haven't solved yet.

Also, I used to live in my Todo list, constantly chewing over deadlines and pitches, yet I'd only glance at my calendar when my days at Radio Times changed around. Now for some reason the work I'm doing takes a lot longer and means me blocking out times to do this, periods to be here, days I must be elsewhere. I spend ages dragging appointment blocks around my week's calendar like I'm playing Slow Tetris.

Suddenly I'm really good at estimating how long a job will take. I can tell you what time I'll finish today. I can clear a hole in the week and know by when I'll have made up that time or that work.

Except the hour per day. That's inviolate. Sacrosanct.

And of course I recommend it or I wouldn't be bending your ear about this madness. Only, if you do this, if you do find that it works for you, promise me you won't start your day's two hours at 1am. I have fallen asleep while writing my hour that late at night; you look again in the morning and your very nightmares are on the page. You've written whole scenes, huge arguments, between characters you've never heard of about topics you don't understand. It's borderline psychotic and if it's funny sometimes, there are other moments when it is profoundly, frighteningly disturbing.

So, you know, there are some wrinkles in this plan.

But I'll work them out.

Probably an hour at a time.

William

Sign here. And here.

2011-06-15T09:24:00.000-07:00

Listen, I've no clue how to start this but I'm burning to tell you so can you just grab a biscuit and we'll crack on? Last Saturday I was at the Big Finish Day in Barking and I was signing autographs.

Maybe you should get two biscuits.

Plainly, I was not alone on that day and I'm far from the first person to squiggle on papers and if you know Big Finish, you know this was Doctor Who. And you certainly know just as well as I do that Doctor Who somehow comes with a magnifying glass: I was included there because of the way the lens of Doctor Who burns into so many of us.

There were some 60 people signing and I don't know how many guests: a few hundred through the day? I'm rubbish at estimating anything. But I did have a quick gander through the guest list and without question I had done the least of them all: so far I've only had one 25-minute Doctor Who audio episode made. It turned out to be popular, but it's still only a one-off 25-minuter. I've got a four-parter coming out next year so hopefully if I get to go to the next one I'll feel less of a fraud.

But as frauds go, I am struggling to remember a day when I had more fun. It is a hell of a boost having people asking you autograph your writing, it's even more of one when they've come seeking you out. I was happy just being one more person on a table that people worked their way along. To be asked if I'm the William Gallagher they're looking for and having to answer that no, I'm not the man who wrote Lark Rise to Candleford or used to play in Oasis, is a treat.

More than that, it's a delight and I won't pretend it isn't.

But if you knew me in my podcast, you'll know what I really liked, what made this a stand-out day for me: I got to natter to people. Oodles of people. Every body up and interesting and enjoying themselves. I was going to say that equally included fans as well as other writers, but there's not a lot of difference: in breaks I'd nip into other autograph sessions and be a fan myself.

So many struggles in my head, though: from why would anyone want my autograph - I'm not kidding, I don't understand autographs at all, let alone mine - to why I might think you'd want to know about it. I don't. But I'm having such a bubbly time I had to tell you.

So. Spill. What's happening with you? I want details.

William

Last one down the pub buys the drinks

2011-06-10T02:22:00.001-07:00

Wait, that doesn't work, does it? What's everybody else supposed to do while I hold them up?

I feel like I'm the last one to the party here but also a wee bit chastened: I've been so busy - heavy, dramatic sigh, bring on the gypsy violinist - that I've not caught up with Danny Stack's Liquid Lunch series. I look back at what I've been so heavily, dramatically, sighingly, violinistly busy on and can't quite see anything. And in the meantime, he's got three episodes out along with backstage videos and the scripts.

Consequently all I'm really doing here is getting in your way when you want to go watch Liquid Lunch. Tell you what, you head for the site that is Liquid Lunch and I'll get the drinks in.

What're you having?
William

Signing autographs on Saturday

2011-06-10T01:44:00.001-07:00

I mean, yes, the actual news is that there's a Doctor Who event in London this weekend. And of course big news is that Big FInish is announcing the new companion for the Colin Baker Doctor Who stories.

Then the kicker, the real detail alongside the news, is that this all takes place during a gigantic sale of Big Finish audios that is going to entirely consume what they paid me to write for them.

But that's what I'm focusing on. Only with you, okay? Only because you understand. Forget news, forget Colin Baker, forget new companion, forget bargains: I am signing autographs at this event.

In theory, anyway. It rather depends on anyone wanting my autograph. So you may find I go very quiet about it on here afterwards.

If you're going anyway, if you're now tempted by the news and the bargains, it would be a treat to see you there. I'll even sign anything you like, bar cheques.

Full and proper details of everything are on the organisers' official site.

William

Writing Does Not Get Harder Than This - Live

2011-06-07T05:50:00.000-07:00

“My name’s William Gallagher, I’m a dynamic young force in writing. Don’t tell me I can’t write something, just tell me where the paper is and watch me fly.” Gallagher flicks his hair and smiles that rogueish smile we’ve come to know from the opening title sequence. “Don’t tell me Shakespeare’s better, I don’t know from any Shakespeare. I just know he didn’t give writing 110 percent like I do, nor maths neither.

“Words are my life: I was born with a crayon that I still use for cheques. When I go to the beach I wear a diphthong, and if you can’t correctly use the word myriad in my company, stand aside for a man who can - every time.”

It’s been a tough journey for Gallagher but if he thought mastering the keyboard’s shift key would be enough to see him through, now he’s really got to face the challenge of his entire writing life.

Our top-class judges - Jeffrey Archer, Dan Brown, the Estate of Enid Blyton and Cheryl Cole - mean business. Gallagher must complete this blog: it must reach all the way to the end. The slightest hitch and he’s out of here in the car we call the dreaded write-off.

Coming up: will first-day nerves destroy his chances? And there’s a calamity over the cap of a biro. I’m Vacuous Poorly-Paid, don’t go away.

Welcome back. We’re following William Gallagher as he attempts to beat first-day nerves and hopes against hope that he can get the cap off his biro. But what colour pen will it be? Join Claudia to find out later in Writing Blog Challenge 2011: The Extra Sentence on ITV7.

But here, right here, right now, our would-be writer’s journey is just beginning.

“I know I’ve got it in me to reach the end of this blog,” says Gallagher. “I’ve beaten scores of people to get even this far. Emily Dickinson, for instance, I really rated her chances, I thought she was the one to beat, but she fell at the first hurdle because she couldn’t even write the correct website address of the blog. Kept saying it couldn’t be three ws and nobody writes ‘forward slash’.

“Then Carrie Fisher wrote cleverly and wittily but it turns out the one thing she just can’t write is the correct account username. Aaron Sorkin, Alan Bleasdale and the men and women who wrote The Simpsons back when it was good, none of them could go that extra step and pull off entering my correct password.

“I did have a sleepless night when I learnt Paul Auster guessed that I was one of the many who always use the password ‘myriad’. But he just threw his shot away by turning in a draft blog about a character called Paul Auster guessing a password to let him write a draft blog to turn in to a writing contest. It was embarrassing. I didn’t know where to look, to be honest.

“So now it’s down to me. The blog is mine to lose but I’ve practiced, I’ve worked hard, I’m not ashamed to tell you that I’ve prayed and now I know I can achieve this. It’s inside me, it is. And I also know that the judges are 109 percent behind me.”

Archer looked up from his Blackberry. “Never heard of him,” he said. “And I’m billing you for these 12 words.”

“I’m dead anyway,” said the Estate of Enid Blyton. “What I really miss is ginger beer.”

Dan Brown said: “William is going to look at the blank screen and I just know he’ll be reminded of the Knights Templar, The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon (Latin: Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici), commonly known as the Knights Templar, the Order of the Temple (French: Ordre du Temple or Templiers) or simply as Templars, who were among the most famous of the Western Christian military orders.[3] The organization existed for approximately two centuries in the Middle Ages and what they didn’t know about blogging then, nobody did.”

“You’re so right, Dan,” said Cheryl Cole. “That’s like exactly what I was going to say.”

Coming up: Gallagher has to take the plunge and switch on his computer. Will the epic journey of waiting for Word to load take its toll? Will the computer even get that far without every writer’s most-feared demon, the blue screen of death?

Welcome back. The epic Word journey has begun and -

“I’m on a Mac, it started ages ago while you you were off on the commercial break,” claims Gallagher. “I’ve written half the blog already.”

Brave words from the man who only dates women with names like Polly Syllable or Paige Turner and who so far never date him back. He’s got to be hoping being crowned Yet Another Blogger will change his fortunes.

But in the meantime, behind the outward signs masking the inner hidden turmoil of the apparently calm but really invisibly visibly quaking man, things have actually got off to a very bad start.

Gallagher, taking what was surely the deepest breath of his life and giving us the most up ever of thumbs-up signs, crosses to the writing desk -

- but there's a chair already there.

“I tell you, I wasn’t expecting that, I haven't practiced for there being a chair, it just wasn’t in the plan,” he says. “There’s no indication I can see of how to use it or whether it’s even meant to be used. I have to be think that someone could be simply storing it here and there is no way to tell. This is huge. This could wreck everything for me.”

With time ticking away, Gallagher has to make a decision. But he knows only too well that if he gets it wrong even a little bit, he’s going to have backache for the rest of the day.

He’s taken the plunge! He’s gone to sit on the chair -

and he’s missed!

This is terrible!

“A chair is a stable, raised surface used to sit on, commonly for use by one person,” explained head judge Dan Brown. “In ancient Egypt chairs appear to have been of great richness and splendor [citation needed]. Fashioned of ebony and ivory, or of carved and gilded wood, they were covered with costly materials, magnificent patterns and supported upon representations of the legs of beasts or the figures of captives. During Tang dynasty (618 - 907 AD), a higher seat first started to appear amongst the Chinese elite and their usage soon spread to all levels of society. By the 12th century seating on the floor was rare in China, unlike in other Asian countries where the custom continued, and the chair, or more commonly the stool, was used in the vast majority of houses throughout the country.”

“Golly,” said the Estate of Enid Blyton. “Really, just a little ginger beer, it’s not that much to ask.”

“Now you owe me for 21 words,” said Archer. “Plus VAT.”

Coming up: can William Gallagher recover from this disaster? Will a set-back mean a set-to with the judges? Will there be a stand-off over the standfirst?

Then just who is going to lose their cool over a paper jam - and who will get hot under the collar about the cost of replacement ink cartridges? Don’t go away now.

Watching through my fingers: it's Stormhouse

2011-05-14T09:11:00.000-07:00

Finally, a horror trailer I don't have to watch - not because I haven't the nerve or the stomach, though you know that's true but because I've already seen the film. What tattered nerves I had left after hearing about Stormhouse were entirely shattered watching the film at a Bafta screening.

I am now, therefore, totally without nerves. Consequently, I want you to watch this but I plan on washing my hair for the next 54 seconds or so.

Bossypants book review: it's alive

2011-05-11T15:26:00.000-07:00

I have never reviewed a book here before and I do not do it now because it's seven million years since I last blogged, but rather because I am burning to talk and to try persuading you to buy a book. Specifically, Bossypants, an autobiography by Tina Fey.

Do you want a star rating? Five out of five, ten out of ten, take your pick.

It’s a very funny and warmly clever book: somehow I think you can miss how difficult that is to achieve because you just expect Tina Fey to be funny and clever.

I’m probably not the intended audience for this book - and I don’t say that because I’m a man. There is, though, a nice moment toward the end when Fey wryly acknowledges the sense (in the book? in the promotion? in my ignorant presumption?) that the book is aimed at women. “If you are male,” she writes, about a metaphor she’s just used involving tampon strings, ”I would liken it to touching your own eyeball, and thank you for buying this book.”

Early on she also refers to “us women” but effortlessly makes it both including for women readers (I presume) yet not excluding for men. I can’t explain grammatically or linguistically how she pulls that off but she does. And perhaps with that line, certainly with the book as a whole, she’s become a writer I admire as much as I enjoy.

The reasons I’m really not the intended audience, though, are that I’m in the UK where Saturday Night Live is quite little known, that I’ve only seen perhaps three episodes of 30 Rock and that I didn’t know she famously has a scar. I knew enough to have formed an impression of Fey as being funny and smart, which meant I read an extract of this book online, which then inevitably meant I bought the book.

I think she does a generally excellent job in neither over-explaining her career nor assuming you know anything about her at all. The only time I was confused was over references to “MVP episode 204” or similar. Is that a 30 Rock term? Is it just a general American one I don’t happen to know? I know “Most Valued Person/People/Professional” but I don’t understand the episodes part. If you want to tell me I am stupid and missing the obvious, I will completely believe you.

Looking back over the book, I think Fey is a technically very accomplished and talented writer but, best of all, you don’t stop to think about that as you first read it. She sounds alive on the page with such energy and verve that it’s an exciting and fast read. She’ll do jokes that rewardingly take pages to play out and then have ones that are quick and just deliciously, delightfully silly. I laughed aloud many, many times; I sat shaking, shaking more times and I read most of it beaming like this woman was telling me these stories to my face.

I’m going to say that I hope you don’t see this as a recommendation per se, more an urging you to buy it. I do have criticisms but not of the book or Fey per se, only with the presentation in iBooks.

The first line of every chapter is followed by an ugly linespace gap because there’s a kind-of drop cap at the start. Then Fey uses a lot of footnote gags but for some reason they are all bundled at the end of the book: not as endnotes, they are one-note-per-page footnotes that are clearly meant to be read alongside their main pages but without any clue what those pages are.

That meant I rather glossed over them but they also added significantly to the page count, which meant the book was really finished some 20 pages before the end of the iBook. When you’re trying so hard to make it last, that came as a blow.

I hope Tina Fey writes more books and I’ll be getting the box sets of 30 Rock now.

I've been keeping something from you

2011-03-17T02:50:00.000-07:00

To be fair, I've done it very badly. If you've kept up with my occasionally incessant nattering on twitter then you'll almost certainly have seen me posing and sometimes that will have been about this. If you've caught up with my updates on Facebook then you'll have seen me wobbling about it. But, until now, I've not said to you here that I wrote a Doctor Who audio play.

You thought it was going to be something more exciting. But it is for me and since I tell you everything, I actually don't want to focus on that play, I want to examine why I've been so reluctant to talk about it. More than reluctant, I've positively refused to write to you about it. I will tell you right away that this boils down to how I tell you the truth here.

So you know immediately that this is me, it isn't you. People who get Doctor Who, who have it wired into them as I and so many of us have, they've all been very generous. People who don't get Doctor Who but see that I do or see why it's such a hard show to write for, they've been tremendous.

Yet I'm of course fully aware of how small my Who is in comparison to the hundreds of Doctor Who stories out there. Equally, I know it’s tiny next to the, say, twenty-part BBC Radio 4 serials I stuff my ears with. My little Doctor Who is a trifle, but hopefully a nice trifle. To be clear, what I wrote was one single 25-minute audio episode of Doctor Who starring Peter Davison and Sarah Sutton from the TV show. It guest-stars Susan Kyd, who has a particularly fantastic voice, Duncan Wisbey who can and does play just about every character in the piece, and John Dorney, who took my Janson Hart character and forever, for better changed how I’d heard that character on the page.

My tale is called Doing Time and is third of four such one-parters on the release Doctor Who: The Demons of Red Lodge and Other Stories. Those other stories are by Jason Arnopp, Rick Briggs and that same John Dorney who by now is just showing off.

So I find I'm in good company and I think my piece stands comparison. It's as good as it is because of my working with script editor Alan Barnes, director Ken Bentley and Big Finish producer David Richardson. On the recording day, Peter Davison asked some smart questions and we all improved it on the spot. I love that drama is a collaboration yet I also love that when you listen to the four plays on this release, you know it is impossible that any one of us could've written any of the other stories. Doctor Who is freeing and alive and open to myriad ways of telling stories - even as it's, technically, an extraordinarily hard format to write for. Let me buy you a drink and lecture you on how Doctor Who, of all things, is not about time.

That's a slight problem for me because, dramatically, time is my big thing. I don't mean time travel, I mean time: it seems to me that time is a prison and the best any of us can do is bang on the pipes a bit to pass messages on. I'm interested in how we change over time, how our perceptions of events can be utterly reversed just by when we start to observe them. I am particularly drawn to how none of us can ever undo anything we've done. Living with what you've done, living with something you cannot live with.

You can see why I didn't enjoy writing for Crossroads.

And you can see why I'm drawn to the TARDIS. In fact, for as long as I've been writing, I've fantasised about the day I could type the scene heading: INT. TARDIS.

I'm still waiting for that. With Doing Time, I couldn't work the TARDIS into the story and instead I got a true shiver running through me the day I wrote my first line of dialogue for the Doctor. All he said in it is:

DOCTOR: August, I think you’ll find.

Doesn’t sound like a classic right off the page, but I could hear Peter Davison’s Doctor saying it in my head as I typed. And a few months later I heard him outside my head.

I remember working out when I'd had a million words published in magazines or whathaveyou; can't remember now when that was but it was before I went freelancing in 1996. In all those words then and all these words since, I'd not had a shiver, not expected to, not heard of anyone else having them. But there it was.

Only, I still couldn't wedge the TARDIS into the story without some almighty contortion and I so wanted to. I did it, actually, I got it in there in the first draft. I almighty contorted. But the aforementioned Alan Barnes just looked at me. Actually, he looked at me down the phone but I understood. "You've almighty contorted there, haven't you?"

So, no TARDIS and anyway, Doctor Who is not about time. You can think of examples where it is, especially in Steven Moffat's very best stories. But on the whole, the TARDIS is a vehicle to deliver the Doctor to where the trouble is and that's it.

Yet, as I say, it's time and not time travel that I'm interested in. Long, long before I got to pitch to Big Finish, I was thinking about what time means to the Doctor. On the one hand he's very old so his perception is different to ours. (There's a lovely line by Johnny Byrne in Arc of Infinity where Peter Davison's Doctor says: "Oh, you know how it is. You put things off for a day and next thing you know it's a hundred years later.")

The Doctor also darts about a lot. Never stays anywhere for very long. It's a function of the series and its need to get him on to the next story but it seems to me that this is a key part of him. I wanted to know what he would feel if he couldn't leave, if he knew for certain that there was nothing he could do but stay somewhere.

So I put him in prison.

Locked away with the absolute knowledge that he was going to be there for a year.

I think I was originally going to be serious to the point of boredom. You may feel I do this. I think I was very intense about it all when I worked on Doctor Who Adventures magazine and found editor Moray Laing knew his Who a thousand times better than I did. I owe Moray for a great time writing for him, I owe the then-deputy editor Annie Gibson for the same thing, but Moray also led me to Big Finish. Helen Hanff has a nice line about Q, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, where she thanks him in a dedication saying that it is "not to repay a debt, but to acknowledge it."

Moray introduces me to Big Finish and - at least two years later - I'm writing for them and Alan is pointing out that I've started my script by describing the prison doors as being like the ones in Porridge. You don't have to be serious about being serious, we concluded. Then Jason Arnopp gave me the great title Doing Time (I'd been wedded to Folly, the name of the planet it’s set on, and later Cool Hand Doctor) and we were off.

If you write drama then this is all old hat to you but despite everything I've done - a little TV, lots of little theatre, many radio projects that failed at hurdles - this job taught me why drama is the hardest and the most rewarding form of writing I know.

When you do it right, you are telling a story using only what people are not saying.

I'm a dialogue fan and I've had rows where, much later, I've realised my opponent believes dialogue is speeches ("Is this a dagger I see before me and if it is, can I use it to win this argument and save all the yapping?") where I see it as speech ("Yeah, I'm fine").

There are plenty of speeches in Doing Time. Plenty more where I maybe too-literally explain the action in dialogue. Hard to like that. But my favourite thing in the whole story is what happens to Nyssa: while the Doctor is in prison, his companion has got a year out there alone on an alien planet. You hear many scenes with her and I'm proud of them, but the majority of her story takes place inside your head and I'm much more proud of that.

I've said before that I don't believe one can be taught scriptwriting. I think you can have your eyes opened, though, and a thing that did this to me - I may have told you this before, I call it a Damascus moment - came from something Russell T Davies wrote. Before Doctor Who, I was a fan of his for Queer as Folk and its sheer verve. In the liner notes for the DVD release, he talked about the difference between writing for soap and writing drama. He'd had to learn this, he said, and realised that it boiled down to one major thought: in soaps, people say everything they're thinking; in drama they don't even know what they're thinking.

Boom. Seriously. Eye-popping boom. I already knew that in drama we lie, I hadn't thought that we were the mess we are in real life. Scripts I wrote after that day are better than the the ones before and what more could someone give you?

Possibly they could also give you how to wedge a very complicated story into 25 minutes but I accept that is an unreasonable thing to expect from a DVD liner note.

Still, writing Doing Time, I have Nyssa not quite aware how much she's enjoying her time outside prison with a man we never meet. Then I have the Doctor not quite understanding why she seems so happy when he's frustrated at being stuck there. I wanted Nyssa to have a life and, importantly, a job away from the Doctor. I gave her that and I also ended up giving her a flawed romance; I think now that the romance was one beat too far. When you have a woman character, it is cheap and easy to give her a romance storyline and so of course I think I was wrong to do that. If I never do it again, I might let myself off because I did also enjoy the tale and Sarah Sutton played it with the light touch I wanted.

But this comes right back to why I haven't told you any of this before.

Hoping to never do that type of romance story again, to not do it cheaply, means that I've been hoping to write more Doctor Who. Of course I have.

But it's more than that. So long as Doing Time was all I'd done, I found couldn't actually enjoy it. I tried. I know without question how excited I would've been as a boy if you'd told me this is what I'd do. And Big Finish did a tremendous job. But I'm just after telling you how it felt to write what turned out to be a successful Doctor Who story and so far as I was concerned, it wasn't and couldn't be a success until it led to something else. Unless it led to another Doctor Who: if get another one then you really did do your first one right. Or right enough.

I do write to explore these things that obsess me and getting to do that is a privilege. It’s not luck and it’s certainly not chance, but it is a privilege. I obviously write to eat too. But my overriding goal of writing is to keep me writing: I've got to know what happens next, I've got to keep writing and keep writing better, like.

I was commissioned this morning.

I'm writing a four-part Doctor Who drama for Big Finish.

Actually, if you want to be completely accurate about it, I'm not but I should be. I'm commissioned, I have the deadline and when I learnt this earlier today I punched the air. I must've also shouted "Yes!" a lot louder than I thought or perhaps forgot I was at Radio Times because suddenly there were all these people looking at me.

I'll deny this if you tell anyone else but I nipped out to a wide area by the stairs, away from everybody, and I span and span and span.

The deadline is tight enough to cut into that joyous exultant release and actually I've moved on to gulping about telling what's a rather complicated story that still won't feature any scenes in the bloody sodding TARDIS.

Fortunately, I can put that out of my mind because you and are I talking. I thought this would be when I’d gush at you, finally able to enjoy Doing Time, and yet there’s a part of me that is using you to put off writing the next bit. I’m using you. I’m a horrible man but you’re very nice and I thank you.

Listen, the deadline on this script is really tight. But that also means it’ll be over soon and I can get right back to worrying about whether I can get another one. I’ve got to stop worrying like this: you really need to give me a talking to.

The strings take the melody

2011-02-17T12:30:00.000-08:00

You're so the only person I can tell this story to that I am convinced I may have tried before. But I have a new ending. Can I have a go at talking about Broadcast News?

You remember the film, of course, it was released in 1987. I really liked it - I'm a journalist, I'm a drama nut and love dialogue so a movie about news written by James L Brooks would have me grabbed whether or not it starred Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks - but I also particularly enjoyed the soundtrack by Bill Conti. At the time I didn't believe an album had been released: I think now that there was one but only in the States and this was pre-internet. This was a disappointment for two reasons: obviously I wanted it, but I also wanted to know what a particular French track is that gets played in it.

Flashforward to the DVD release a few years ago. For some reason I still can't find a listing for a soundtrack album but I've bought the DVD - and I rip the end-credit music.

It's on my iPod now. Lasts about five minutes and of course it has the orchestral music score parts in it, maybe a bit repetitive now, maybe I like it more for having liked it then, but there it is, the main score theme. But it's also got other parts of the music, including not only a long segment of that French track, but also for the second verse, the sound of Albert Brooks singing over it in character, just as he did in the film. And it's even got a version of the bit of the film when people come into the news studio to play their syntho-sequency-type new theme for the bulletin: a cheap synth with them sing-explaining along the way "NEWS! NEWS! The strings take the melody! LAAAA la da daa daaaa - COUNTER MELODY! Da dad daaa daaa dadaa a adaaaaa BIG FINISH - ba badda BA!".

I adore this five minute slice of the film.

And a little while ago I realised something. Call me slow.

But this slice has the French track in it.

It has a substantial part of the track.

You know Shazam, right? It's an iPhone app, one of those that just makes you go wow. Hold your iPhone next to a speaker, tap a button and Shazam "listens" to the music. Then it trots off, finds what the track is for you and gives you various options for buying it. Really, very impressive stuff to see in operation.

So I saw it in operation. I played my Broadcast News rip and when it got to the French track, I tapped the button.

The track is "Edition spéciale" by Francis Cabrel and I bought it.

It's in my ears right now. Hear thirty seconds of it yourself on the US iTunes Store or the UK iTunes Store.

It's taken me 24 years to find this song. I am singing along to the same bits Albert Brooks does and this, specifically this, is why you and I should both be glad this is not an Audioboo entry.

Wherein I deign to give you writing advice

2011-01-16T11:42:00.000-08:00

It does strike me that for a blog about writing, and by a writer, I've not often talked about writing and How To Do It. This is very bad because of course without me, what hope have you got? I know you look to me for leadership and it's a burden, I won't pretend it isn't. So it's time I gave you the Secret.

Perhaps you want to be a Hollywood A-list writer, perhaps you want to be the next Shakespeare. As someone who is neither, I am willing to share the secret at no cost. I feel a need to break the sarcasm for just a second and mention that if nothing else I do write for a living and have done so for most of my career. And now you, too, can benefit from my brilliance. Please, hold your applause.

I ask only that in return for the Secret, I be allowed to ask you to do something and that I then get to wibble on about My Most Unexpected Influence. Do we have a deal?

I'm going to pretend we do or this is a short blog.

The thing I would ask is that, if you're a scriptwriter, write dialogue. If you don't write dialogue or if you think dialogue doesn't matter, there are many career opportunities open to you in retail.

So, now, the Secret.

Park your bum on the seat and write.

That's it. I accept PayPal.

What I'm saying is that I don't think you can be taught to write. I think you can learn to shed certain things, I think you can be exposed to influences that shape and improve you. I've been on courses where types of writing, such as thrillers, have been analysed in such a way that they made me think, that made explore ideas. But then I've been on courses where I've been told exactly how to write soap. I've sat in talks where an expert has given us all the precise steps on how to get into TV and I've known, actually known, it was bollocks. Demonstrable bollocks.

Alan Plater used to teach at Arden and that's a course I wish I'd gone on. But - have I told you this already? Stop me if you know it. He told me that the best thing he did was to enable a writer, to let someone write. There was a particular guy who just wanted, just needed, to be left alone in a corner to write. Alan talked to him every now and again but otherwise, that was it. You could argue that he should've been able to sit at home and do it rather than pay whatever Arden charges for courses, but it took the course, it took Alan, it took being allowed to write.

I should do research before I talk to you: I've forgotten again who the guy was. But later on he thanked Alan the night he won his first Bafta.

So I'm saying you don't need the course parts of a course, you need the time and the focus. When you've parked your bum on the seat, you can get this at home too.

Follow. Earlier today, I was faffing about doing no work at all and half feeling guilty, half-enjoying. I channel-flicked on the TV and came across an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It's not Alan Plater, but I'd forgotten that I do regard that show as the best course in TV writing I ever took.

I'm not saying it's the best TV show ever. One of my first newspaper articles was a feature about DS9 and I gave the pilot a fairly bad review: primarily because I found the acting in it to be so very poor. But you know Star Trek is a big, big business: I read years ago that it had earned Paramount over a billion dollars and a lot of that came from the merchandise. If it could conceivably become a shrinkwrapped product, it was and as the barrel was scraped, eventually there came the last thing possible. With barrel tar in its fingernails, Paramount sold the scripts.

They released two CD-ROMs (do you even remember CD-ROMs?) containing all the scripts to Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. That's 354 one-hour screenplays, all wedged into some annoying faux Starfleet screen designed to fight you reading a line. But you could easily prang the scripts over into Microsoft Word instead and read them there.

So I did.

All of them.

Now, I've seen most of The Next Generation and enjoyed it well enough, but the scripts were a chore. Really a struggle. I would not have realised it until I read the scripts but The Next Generation wasn't made of what I'd call stories, it was made of puzzles. What is causing this technobabble problem? How will the Enterprise escape? Once you knew the answer, because you'd seen the show, the scripts had nothing else. No meat, no real characters. If you're a fan, you're disagreeing with me and I'd be on your side if I hadn't read the scripts and found this.

Can't remember how long it took me to work through the Star Trek: The Next Generation scripts but it was a long time. Possibly years.

I'm surprised that I made it, and more surprised that I then turned to the Deep Space Nine ones: I'd had a bad experience with TNG and I hardly knew DS9 beyond giving it a bad review in The Independent. But this was a chance to read seven seasons of scripts, to see how a successful show starts, finds its feet, moves on and progresses and concludes.

Besides, two scripts in to Deep Space Nine, I was enjoying them. Real characters bitching at each other, enormous political and religious pressures, a lot more wit than TNG and good people doing bad things, I flew through the scripts in a couple of months. They read like a novel.

I liked them so much I began watching the series and I began really gingerly with that pilot. By now I knew the characters extremely well, I knew where the show was going, I was going to like the pilot more. Yes. But only a bit. The acting is still startlingly poor. I watched it again tonight (I bought all seven seasons on DVD) and it looks like every scene was shot at 2am and odd line readings are left in because they had no more time.

I know that a lot really were shot at that time, too, because if DS9 was a great TV course, there's a book that I am equally a fan of: the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion by Terry J. Erdmann and Paula M. Block. Can't remember what it retailed for when I bought it but I just looked for you on Amazon and it's changing hands for £95. Well worth it. It's billed as being about the backstage stories of the show and it is, but it's really about the writing: every one of its 176 episodes is detailed with interviews with the writers and producers. What the original idea was, why it changed if it did, how it worked, why it was successful and - this is really key - why it wasn't. The episodes the writers wish they'd never done. That makes it more believable when they speak of episodes they are proud of: this isn't a promo piece, it's you sitting down with these writers.

I went back to the start. I'd read the script, I'd watch the episode, then I'd read the Companion's notes. What did I agree with, what worked for me, what I didn't and didn't.

I wish there'd be something like this for Lou Grant or Tutti Frutti. The Beiderbecke Affair. The Sandbaggers. But I have a lot of respect for Deep Space Nine and right now, I'm really tempted to read it all again.

I can't promise it'd be any use or interest to you, we all have to find what works for us, but maybe we have to be willing to look in unexpected places. And reading scripts, reading scripts, reading scripts. That's also part of the Secret. So:

Park your bum on the seat and write.
When you're not writing, read scripts.

'Ere, let me give you a head start: those 176 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine scripts are now all online.

Shush now. I'm off to read episode 1, Emissary, by Michael Piller.

And then sit down to do some work.

Strictly: Best Final, Worst Show Dances

2010-12-19T11:51:00.000-08:00

This is a lie but I believed it for a whole week: I would have been happy whoever won this year’s Strictly Come Dancing.

Wait.

I mean, I would’ve been happy whichever one of these particular three won. Let’s not get carried away. Matt Baker, Pamela Stephenson, Kara Tointon, any one of them could’ve won and whichever one pulled it off, I was certain I would be happy.

Until the gap between the two shows. Twitter scuttlebutt had it that Pamela was doing well: people trying to phone vote for her seemed to be having more difficulty getting through than others. So much for Twitter, but I realised that in fact I would be very disappointed if she beat Kara.

Then we came back from the break and Pamela was out

And I was disappointed again.

But maybe you don’t want me to detail my minute-by-minute disappointments and satisfactions, you don’t want me to count my blessings or alphabetise my woes. Instead, let’s look at the big disappointment of the night.

The show dances.

I’ve looked forward to these all week and none of them worked. Pamela’s was the best by a considerable way but it wasn’t tremendous. Kara’s timing was worse than mine and Matt’s had great, great and three times great moments but an hour’s wait in between each one.

You didn’t hear this because you weren’t here but Angela said it first: the show was wrong to make them do four dances. If they’d given us three and padded out the time with more Take That or something, perhaps there would’ve been chance for the show dances to be polished.

Yet, despite the highlight of the night being weak, this really was the best final we’ve had in years. Now it’s perhaps easy to see and to say that Kara was certain to win but at 7pm on Saturday night, you did not know. More, there was no Christopher Parker, no Ann Widdecombe. There was no one who seemed to be incorrectly favoured: to this day I smart over Darren Gough snatching the trophy from Zoe Ball back in 2005.

Grief. Five years ago. I should probably get over that.

I do think Matt Baker was incorrectly marked or perhaps not incorrectly, more unjustly. His opening dance was a rousing, roaring start and it put him right back in the very top of the frame for me. I have no technical knowledge, no technical skill, I do this by what connects with me somehow and I thought he had it there.

Then Kara had that same thing tenfold so to give her marks that were close to the heavily criticised Matt seemed wrong. I don’t often disagree with Craig but saying she was better than last time and then giving her the same score had me looking at him. Yes, exactly like that.

I’ll let him off eventually: you know I’m not one to bear grudges. I can’t bear them at all.

And part of Strictly is its friendliness: writer Ken Armstrong commented on Twitter that: “If I had to say a difference, I would say that 'Strictly' is a good-natured show while the 'Other One' is not. There was camaraderie and delight from contestants in the friends they have made. It seemed real.”

He’s right: it’s one of those observations that seems obvious once it’s been made yet I’d not thought it before. Strictly is built on a spirit that seems to extend out to its audience and I’m going to miss that.

Because it’s Sunday night and there’s no results show. Tomorrow there won’t be an It Takes Two. You’ll be aware that next Saturday is December 25 when there’s some big quasi-religious event, Doctor Who or something, but there is also a special Strictly at 7pm.

John Barrowman and Ronni Ancona are among the new celebrity dancers. What did they feel when they were asked? It must be fantastic to get the call from Strictly but then to be effectively told it’s a one-off and you’ll never get the main series, how does that feel?

And while I’m asking you questions, what will Kara and Artem have to talk about now?

Myself, I’m going back to blogging about what we write and what we write with, when we can be bothered to write. Strictly is out, my own prattling is back in - starting shortly with my Doctor Who audio. But that’s another story.

Thanks for the comments and the tweets and the nattering. That’s why I did this on my own blog this year when, for production reasons, it couldn’t continue on RadioTimes.com.

So, altogether now: keeeeeeeeep nattering.

William

Strictly: But first, the news...

2010-12-13T06:41:00.000-08:00

Okay, I give in. The pink frock, the beauty of the dance... You were right, I was wrong: I do have a crush on Kara Tointon. Oh, stop looking so smug.

Obviously, then, I needed her to get into the final but actually this is the first year I’ve ever watched the semis with my fingers crossed. It was essential Kara got in, it was essential Gavin got out. I also wanted Pamela in so thereafter it was a numbers game: how much I would care if Scott was out, how bothered would I be if Matt left.

Not that much, really. But on the narrowest of balances, I did want Matt and we’ve got him.

Only, I may have changed my mind a little because of some news. But speaking of news...

Remember that odd moment last week with Len talking about the best-ever Viennese waltzs? Catherine explained the mystery in the blog comments here: “I think the best Viennese waltz comments were directed at Alesha then Kara, but the camera didn't allow us to see Len pointing to Alesha, only Kara so it came across as a bit confusing.”

Then the whole question of whether the swingathon was prerecorded or not. We have the answer. A friend of a friend was at that edition and reports that it was live. I don’t know the friend of the friend but I do the friend and if it’s Strictly, she knows.

But because she also knows other things, I’m going to pretend she doesn’t have a name. She is sans name.

Let’s call her Sans.

Sans also told me: “Bruce's duet and the pros' dance (for Sunday) were pre-recorded that night, however. Also, Matt was furious with his comments, with Scott and Natalie having to try and calm him down afterwards. Ironic how things turned out.”

It’s a disappointment but it’s not a surprise. Instead of the now slightly tedious two-shot of the couples coming out of the studio door and happening to find a camera crew there, this week we just saw Matt fly by pursued by a studio assistant.

It might even have been the very same studio assistant who had to get Gavin and Katya off the floor after they failed to notice they were ejected from the swingathon. Though the show probably has more than one, you’re right.

What to think, though. Kara was an obvious choice for the final for me - oh, get off my back, it's her dancing! - and Pamela was obviously right to get through for her dancing too. And part of me would like to see Pamela beat the Strictly casting, the way she was picked to fill the role of the older contestant who bows out early.

I’m just not sure now about Matt. We saw him give a quiet sob and I admit that did make me warm to him. The man’s caught up in the emotion, thats what it is.

So I’m pretty sure I still prefer him in the final than Scott and I do so because his dancing is better.

It’s a bit like the Dancing with the Stars final: I didn’t like Jennifer Grey as a person but her dancing was terrific.

Mind you, she was up against two total non-dancing no-hopers in her US final where the UK one could go any way, could really have any of those finalists lifting the trophy.

It’s been a very good year for the show in every sense. Next time you hear Tess Daly asking someone about the pressure of dancing on live TV, listen for the numbers she uses. At the start of this series she’d say “What’s it like dancing in front of 10 million people?” It’s steadily gone up until this week she asked Gavin about the pressure of “14 million people”.

I think she even had a little glee in her voice. And quite right too.

Strictly: Was It Recorded?

2010-12-10T15:01:00.000-08:00

You think I fancy Kara Tointon and there is a tiny chance that the next thing I’m going to say is going to convince you.

She has tremendous legs.

Now, hang on just one sentence: she has fantastic arms, too.

I was thinking when we watched Pamela and James tonight that - well, first I was thinking that her dress was dreadful but then I was enjoying the dance. And then I went back to the dress. That frock’s job was to show off her legs and if I meant all this the way you’re thinking that I do, then yes, Pamela Stephenson has good legs.

But there is something wrong. There’s a kind of lag to her leg movements. It’s not that she has heavy or big legs but they look heavy, they don’t have this much-talked-of musicality in them.

Whereas Kara’s limbs are all preternaturally light and moving: she doesn’t seem, for instance, to be lifting her legs in a kick or flick, it feels that it’s the music lifting her.

This is why she’s described as a natural and I completely agree that she is, except that I completely disagree that she should be called it.

Maybe Kara is a natural but somehow saying that diminishes her work. I got ratty tonight at Len for nicely telling Gavin he was unlucky that his dance hadn’t suited him because he claimed that Kara’s had been right for her. I do believe that certain dances work for certain people but the implication was that Kara hadn’t had to work.

She did. You do not get to be that good, you cannot ever be good without work.

It’s great that Kara Tointon makes dancing look easy, but we’re not supposed to be stupid enough to ever think that it is.

Mind you, did you hear Gavin on one of the video packages? “Counting? You mean that 1, 2, 3 thing?” Did you understand Len’s thing about the two best Viennese waltzes being Kara’s one?

Then did you hear Bruce Forysth’s jokes? No, I wasn’t listening either, I was looking away.

Much like the judges must be during poor Matt’s dance. I don’t really doubt them, they are three professional judges and Alesha Dixon, but they did feel harsh tonight. So much so that Matt Baker was visibly crushed and so much so that I felt crushed alongside him.

Crushed. It’s a funny word: so similar to “rushed”, which Matt and Aliona then were.

I don’t know if tonight’s show was really done live: it felt so but if it was then Matt and Aliona had very little time to get changed for the swingathon. They could’ve done it, we’ve seen fast changes before, but while I don’t question that they could manage to get into the next costume that quickly, I do question the fairness.

Not just because the swingathon was all about stamina and every other couple had time to recover from their dances. But because if it were live, then Matt was on stage again just moments after the worst bruising he has ever had from the judges.

I found I wanted him to win the swingathon. If the phone lines had been open tonight, I might’ve voted for him.

I mean yes, Kara’s dance was everything I watch this show for, but I would say that, apparently I fancy her rotten, don’t I?

Harrumph.

Ann Widdecombe for President! Or something

2010-12-05T15:01:00.000-08:00

Anything, really. King. Queen. National icon, I don’t care. I sat here saying this, repeating it like a mantra, with my eyes closed and my fingers crossed as we waited to hear whether she was out or not.

I do think the comments against her were scaldingly personal and I recognise what a sport she was for taking that. I’m also aware that I didn’t like her before the show so it was going to take an enormous amount to win me over.

Yet I’m now rather pro Pamela Stephenson: I still find the psychiatry schtick a pain, most especially because her Shrink Rap TV series threw away the opportunity to do a new Face to Face level interview and instead was a platform for her to talk. But fast forward ten weeks and I was a wee bit choked during her dance this time. I’m not going to hide that I felt a bit teary when she got that first 10 from Craig, too.

Thinks. Sudden need to remind you I’m a man.

I suspect that just did it: the feeble need to remind you was masculine enough. Though I’m also going to say that if you could possibly vote for the professional and not the celebrity, I’d have voted for Katya Virshilas.

Anyway.

Ann Widdecombe.

I offer that one reason people like her is that she doesn’t suffer fools - and that a reason I don’t is that she somehow expects fools to suffer her.

I think I’ve just called myself a fool.

Still, I don’t see you disagreeing. Let’s move on.

You could disagree a little bit, you know.

I’m not saying you have to mean it.

Anyway.

Ann Widdecombe.

If she’s been the only problem in the series for me this year, there have been odd niggles and they seemed to resurface this week. Claudia Winkleman got an unexpected send-off: you could really only infer that she isn’t doing the rest of the results shows, it wasn’t announced per se. We just had Tess with that Borg-protrosion heavy metal nail gun frock suddenly getting emotional over Claudia for anywhere up to a fifth of a second.

Then on Saturday night’s show both Tess and Bruce kept emphasising the wrong day: “We’re back Friday, Saturday and Sunday!” with heavy underlining of the word “and”. It was as if the Sunday show was the new and unexpected one, not the Friday.

Maybe it’s because the Friday/Saturday split makes sense to them and it’s news, to their mind, that Bruce is doing the Sunday again. Not quite news enough for them to tell us explicitly, though, it’s as if we are supposed to know these things. That’s what niggles me; it’s like the contortion over the results show, the way we have to pretend the results are called out in two batches when it looks reasonably certain that it’s one go edited.

We do know that everyone is to do three dances next week: two individual and one group one. We also know that if they did this in one go the show would overlap with The X Factor so perhaps we do understand why it has to begin on Friday.

There was a moment this weekend when it was asked whether Ann Widdecombe could manage to learn three dances for next week. Obviously now she doesn’t have to, obviously I just wondered why it was asked when she'd yet to learn any dances that I could see.

But it actually made me wonder about Scott.

Watching him fall asleep for half a second in training, falling asleep standing up, was a little scary. I’ve done it myself, I recognised the sensation, and I feel for the guy. But in a slip of the tongue, he said that he was jaded, not tired. The man was exhausted and you can’t expect him to be jolly while that wrecked, but still he’s right: there is a jaded feel to him and I think he’s lost it.

It’s for this reason that I thought he’d go this week. I think now that he will go next.

Not that he should, there’s little question that Gavin is the one who ought to be leaving next. But I’ve been voting for Katya, so.

Duncing with the stars

2010-11-28T14:26:00.000-08:00

I mistimed Ann Widdecombe’s dance: I’d already got a cup of tea before she came on. But as worked hard at getting down to the tea leaves rather than watch her, I had a vision of the future.

It was a very specific vision, the kind of vision you get only by accidentally treading on your Sky+ remote and starting playback of the finale of America’s Dancing with the Stars. But it came to me like a vision of Christmas future because this year’s finale there had many a similarity to what we’re facing here.

They had three people in their finale: Jennifer Grey, Bristol Palin and Kyle Somebody. Kyle Somebody plainly made a big impression on me. Jennifer Grey was rather irritating somehow but she could and did dance. And Bristol, daughter of Sarah “Which is north again?” Palin was the Ann Widdecombe.

That’s a little unfair. Bristol Palin can’t dance, she has no music in her, but you watch for a moment and all you think is that she’s just young. Have another go in the future, bless.

But she made it to the final off the back of the public vote: she needed to get votes from ill-informed people who can’t see the evidence of their own eyes so, actually, she was fine there. You could’ve predicted she’d make it to the end.

The problem was with the judges and this is where it’s scaring me. If we vote Ann Widdecombe into the final or perhaps even to win, we have ourselves to blame. But if the judges copy what appeared to happen in America, they will start giving Ann better and better marks.

We’ve already seen Len switch to the “it’s fabulous entertainment” side. And this week we saw votes that bore more relation to how we’re near the end of the series than to the quality of the dances: Pamela did not deserve 10s, even my previous favourite Kara did not deserve her 9s.

Kara made a disappointing start because while the steps were there, the musicality wasn’t. Nobody had that this week, nobody.

They’re just all jiggered from their jigs, aren’t they?

If I look up now, by the way, I can see the spines of two Titanic books on my shelves. Up in my office I’ve probably got another four. Two weeks ago, I touched a piece of the Titanic’s hull at the Las Vegas exhibition. A real piece. The real hull. The actual metal of the ship. It was a moment like an electric shock.

And still I couldn’t keep my attention on Ann and Anton’s Titanic-themed dance.

It's time to meet the stars of our zzzzzz

2010-11-20T13:14:00.000-08:00

“Will you be home in time to see it tonight?” writer Katharine Robb asked me at an event today. I have rarely been so certain in my answer yes, so rarely correct and yet simultaneously so entirely wrong. While you were enjoying Kara Tointon and the best dance of the night, I was at home. Asleep.

It hits you at odd times, the post-travel jetlag zero-exercise no-stamina need for a pillow, but it is the first time Strictly has sent me nodding off.

Bless the wonder that is Sky+, though: I got to watch the whole thing, as live but delayed by an hour or so. And the only consequence was that as I reached for the phone to vote for Kara, Tess Daly said on the telly: “No, William, you’ve messed it up again, voting closed about a minute ago.”

I may be paraphrasing there.

Funny night, don’t you think? Blackpool feels very different: we got many more camera angles from behind a row or two of audience and somehow I had a sense throughout that all the dancers were farther away than usual. I felt the distance, felt less connected at times.

And I can only account for the scoring by assuming the judges have finer eyesight and better seats than I do. Matt Baker’s tens were kind, Pamela and James’s ones were a kind of stock clearance, using up the tens before the show finished for the night. And while I could well accept Len’s logic about Kara’s dance not being as advertised, I was disappointed with Craig only giving her a 9.

But as my mind wandered during Ann Widdencombe’s Canary Waif routine,I kept coming back to Anonymous’s comment last week: the point that I was wrong about celebrity dancers and the Argentine Tango. I’d posited that Kara Tointon’s was the first time a celebrity had done it that well and Anon said no: what about Mark Ramprakash?

It’s a true and a good point. I’d forgotten him - and yet I hadn’t forgotten that dance. He and Karen Hardy dancing the Argentine Tango back in series 4, way back in 2006, that was one of the highlights of the whole of Strictly. I can see it now, vividly clearly remember her dance steps, his lifting her, her stroking a leg against him like a preying mantis.

Yet I forgot him because I realise now that I see the Argentine Tango as the woman’s dance. The man is there to frame, to support, the woman does all the work.

Which means Anonymous sent me off doubting my memory and brings me back ever more sure of what I said: Kara Tointon isn’t a pro but I really think she dances like one.

I’ll say it again: give her the trophy now.

Not that she really stands a chance at beating Ann Widdecombe. Seriously.

Strictly from Vegas – the real one

2010-11-14T23:00:00.001-08:00

Perhaps you had the sound muted because Bruce Forsyth was making the funnies but if you caught him contorting a gag about the Las Vegas of the North, please picture me with a cold slice of pizza and a surprised look: I'm in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas of the, er, Nevada.

Angela and I are here, it's a work thing, I'd tell you but I promise you'd be bored by the fifteenth paragraph and I'd be irritatingly giddy, so, you know, enough. The fact that Bruce made this gag that way was disconcerting, that's all. No more about me and half-choked, half-cooked pizza.

Instead, you'll also have seen Pamela and James opening their routine typing on computers. Do you want to know what they were doing? They'd set their Macs in their home office to record Strictly Come Dancing via EyeTV, a teeny Freeview box about the size of a prayer that plugs TV signals into your computer. This EyeTV lark recorded the show for them, it transcoded it into a smaller file size and copied it up for my to my MobileMe cloud space where I was able to pull it down onto the MacBook I brought with me to work on.

If the BBC would just open up the iPlayer to international viewers, I'd have been able to concentrate on my work instead of figuring all this out.

But then it did also occur to me that this is Vegas: would the glamour of Strictly Come Dancing suddenly appear a bit limp to me? Would I have to hide behind geeking out just for something to say? Might I turn to, I don't know, which satellite I bounced the cloud signal off just so I didn't give in and rage at you about Ann Widdecombe?

No, if it had come to that I'd just have told you that The A Team movie is very funny when you watch it on an airplane because all the airplane-blowing-up bits of the plot have been removed. It's like watching Casualty when Gold used to show it during the daytime: you'd get the oh-oh, there's trouble, then the oh-yes, it's that big railing spike they keep cutting to and there'd be ominous music if Casualty had a budget, then there's the eh-what? as the big accident of the week is deleted.

Speaking of Ann Widdecombe, I am just bored. I'm not a fan of the woman anyway, I can acknowledge that she's handling all this aplombably but I just want her gone. So Len's effectively positioning the judges on her side did not win me over.

Nor did Kara Tointon's dance.

But that's because I was won over by her last week, I'm on this woman's side, I expect to enjoy her dances and I truly do believe she should win the whole contest this year. We've seen many a good Argentine Tango on the show but this was the first brilliant one danced by a celebrity.

Next week Strictly is in Blackpool, the Vegas of the North, and I am not. Did you spend that boring half hour applying for tickets to each episode of Strictly separately? Every week now I am reminded of that afternoon because the BBC ticket office regularly now emails me to say tough luck but there may be spaces for a hilarious new Radio 3 comedy about ducks.

Still.

I feel a bit bad complaining about never getting to travel to Strictly since I am currently 5,212 miles away.

Right. Sorry about that. I must away to the gaming tables. Someone's got to fund this trip, you know.

It's okay.

I have a system.

William

Talking, talking, talking at the London Screenwriters' Festival 2010

2010-11-08T10:40:00.000-08:00

So it turns out that I can talk. Possibly you’re not surprised, especially if you followed a link here expecting Strictly Come Dancing chatter. There is plenty and it contains News: you’ll find it here, which is the metric equivalent of about an inch down the page.

Anyway. Talking. Possibly you think my problem is more on the shutting up side, more likely you’ve never spent a second thinking about it.

But it turns out I can talk and it was a little startling to me.

Specifically, I can pitch.

At speed.

The one thing that spoiled the London Screenwriters’ Festival for me last weekend was the dread and the fear of pitching an idea to people in a speed-pitching session. And then the things that risked overwhelming the whole festival for me were the fire in me when I got to do the pitching and the elation when it went so well.

It’s interesting to me that what I got out of a writing festival was speech but that was always going to be the way. No matter what anyone tells you about courses, nobody can teach you how to write. Get better at it. Get more successful at it. But writing itself, no. I don’t know if this troubles you at all, but in case it does I will also point out that there are many fine people who state without question that if you were to spend 10,000 hours on your writing you would become a fantastic writer.

If you believe that, please come back when you’re on hour 9,999 and we’ll talk.

Even then, see, it’s all about talking. I used to truly wonder if writers are the people who don’t write.

Then I met several hundred who all wrote, all the time, and still had lives so long as you count other jobs and wine o’clock as lives.

I did get into a natter about science that had nothing to do with writing and everything to do with entirely fascinating me. I did meet people who proved to be as funny in the flesh as they do on Twitter.

And every one of them has at least one great script or great project - oftentimes they left it up to you to work out which it was - and every one of them was increasingly fired up by this festival weekend.

I wasn’t going to the London Screenwriters’ Festival until I got a bursary for it from Screen West Midlands: thank you very much to them. It’s first time I’ve been directly funded for an arts event and it was an event I was very keen to go to so that was particularly good news that could not possibly have even a hint of a dark cloud.

It had rain instead.

I learnt that as part of the bursary, I got to take part in the speed pitching sessions. I just had to tell them ahead of time what my project was so the organisers could match me up with people who might be interested. The project I got the bursary on wouldn’t do: it’s tied up with a producer already. So I said the first one that came to mind, the first script of mine I could think of.

I contemplated pitching the idea without rereading the script or even entirely fully remembering a single thing about it.

Somehow that just seemed to make a five-minute speed pitch feel like it was going to last an hour. So I read. And, since it’s you, I’ll tell you I enjoyed the piece. It’d been a year since I looked at it and I’d forgotten so much that I got into the story again.

Let me skip ahead: all three people I pitched to liked the idea.

But let me skip back: I’m a writer on a bursary who has to show what he’s got and do it at lightspeed. I was genuinely scared going in to this session and it coloured the whole first day of the festival for me.

 Since you ask, the colour was a kind of Doppler effect: all blue in the morning before it, all brilliant red in the afternoon after. I left that room ten feet tall and wouldn’t have noticed if the rest of the festival was bad or perhaps if it even happened at all.

I’m bubbly about this event just talking to you, feeling anew that rush that came before the chin-on-desk slump when I got back home to work. There were things that didn’t go well at the festival: one speaker advised new writers to write a spec Absolutely Fabulous script. Silly man. “Hello, Mr or Mrs or Ms Producer, here’s a script I’ve written for a show that finished ten years ago. I promise I haven’t spent a decade on it and I do know that comedy has moved on a bit since then. Can I have a commission now, please?”

But I learnt that soaps are brutal and harsh and so very like the newsrooms I was trained in that they appeal to me again. I found out that German television makes a billion and a half single dramas every hour where UK TV hasn’t since the 1960s. I fortunately also found out that German television translates British-language scripts.

And of all the events, I had the best time in a crime one run by Barbara Machin. Finally, someone else who likes crime and doesn’t care whodunit. Or rather, that’s the least important thing in a crime tale that’s any good.

It sounds a bit off, but hearing people you rate saying the same things you believe is rather invigorating. Please agree with me in the comments here and make me feel great.

I have learnt for next year, however. I’ve learnt that I need to practice my trade more, I need to build up writing muscles, I need to exercise what resilient skills I have: oh yes, next year I too must be able to stay up drinking Pepsi until 7am and losing my voice.

If you want to know more about Screen West Midlands who funded me, they have a particularly fine website here. And as for the London Screenwriters’ Festival 2011, you’ll probably hear about it first on creative director Chris Jones’s blog.

Strictly: Who to Blame and Who to Thank for this year

2010-11-08T09:54:00.000-08:00

I’ve said to you before that there’s no Strictly blog on RadioTimes.com this year and this is true. Would I lie to you? When you could catch me out that easily?

But there is today a piece I’ve written for them about Ann Widdecombe staying in while good dancers go out. For balance, the piece also covers a similar thing that is apparently happening on The X Factor with someone called Wagner but, really, I phoned that bit of the piece in.

RadioTimes.com: Are Novelty Acts Spoiling Strictly and X Factor?

Tell me you didn’t look at the final leaderboard this week and gasp: “Scott’s at the bottom!” even though Ann was below him. Tell me it’s not you voting to keep her in every week. We can get past this, our friendship can survive the blow, but if we have nothing else, we have to have honesty.

It would be nice to have news. I’m a newsy guy. And I have some. If Ann Widdecombe is the bit of Strictly that should go, perhaps in an ideal world taking all the props with her, then in a fair and just world, there is someone we should be thanking for how very much better the show is this year.

It’s not the fabulous Dave Arch who can’t be bothered to take his headphones off. It’s not the fella with a hat who sits behind him. It’s not any headgear person at all because this one isn’t directly in the production, isn’t even credited at the end.

She’s Katie Taylor, head of entertainment and events at BBC Television and she dun it. It helped that the BBC has invested more money and there is a new executive producer too but Taylor is responsible for the revamp.

And she told Broadcast magazine this week that she may not be done with the show just yet. “Nothing can stay the same or the audience will get bored, and when that happens, they switch over,” she said. “The format is the format, but it’s there to be tweaked.”

You see the word tweak and you think Bruce Forsyth but, no, he’s not on the way out just yet despite skipping the results shows this year. “Bruce is 83 and his energy is quite something,” she told Broadcast. “But it was tiring doing both shows, and Claudia, who is already part of the Strictly family, is so witty and really lives and breathes the show, so Bruce was really happy with it. I am sure he will call me up if he decides to leave, but we’ve not had that conversation yet.”

I’m ready to declare a winner, by the way. I’m ready to call it. Kara Tointon for champion. You saw it here first, unless you saw it anywhere else before me and didn’t mention it.

Yes, the tricks as she called them were quite eye-popping but what got me convinced was the return of what I’ve briefly seen before with her: a moment or three when she wasn’t dancing steps, wasn’t following choreography, she was in the music.

I don’t think there’s anything more I could want.

Except for Ann Widdecombe to do a John Sergeant and leave gracefully. For gracefully read quickly, but gracefully is good too.

Strictly Come Texting

2010-11-01T06:58:00.001-07:00

Perhaps you already do this and I'm certain you’d enjoy it if you did: watch Strictly while using twitter to discuss it blow by blow, frock by frock, lift by stumble.

Now, if you do that during drama, if you do that during In Treatment, then you and I are going to have words. After the show. But in shiny floor entertainment, not only is it a genuine boon, last year it was often all that made Strictly worth watching.

This year, things are much better so tweeting isn’t necessary and in fact if you’ve been affected by the subjects discussed in this blog, please contact the helpline on @wgallagher.

But this week I was off. Away. I’m getting reluctantly used to missing episodes of It Takes Two when necessary, I’m itchy but acceptant about delaying watching the main show if Angela’s away or we’re off together. But this week it was me, gone, away, off. By heart-wringing agreement, Angela was left to watch Strictly without me.

And to text me with Very Unhelpfully Tantalising Not To Say Cruel messages.

Such as this one. I’m in a pub. It’s work, okay? I’m not enjo - well, I am, alright, but It’s Kind of Work, and I get the familiar throb over my heart as the iPhone in my shirt pocket vibrates this text at me: “How did Brendan do that with his waistcoat?”

Followed by “Not a great music choice.”

I tell you, after a few of these it is entirely possible that I was chatting with you in that bar and wouldn’t know.

“Vincent has the cutest son.”

Okay. Okay. This has all been by text, it’s all been direct texts from Angela to me. But I’ve still got twitter. Yes, yes, thanks, mine’s a Coke on the rocks, I’ll be with you in a sec.

“I just realised, Kara’s paso dress is the same as Alesha’s AMAZING FLYING CAPE DRESS! I need to get out more” @PadsterMo

“Well that took the sex right out of the Argentine Tango” @gibbzer

Wait, Angela’s back texting: “How do they do those eyes on Jimi?”

Thanks for the Coke, I need a whisky chaser now.

Flashforward to the results show and my beloved Angela texts me on my train home saying: “Shock - I didn’t expect them to go!”

TEASE

Angela: “Did I tell you we had the first 10s of the series?”

TEASE.

Here’s what I’ve learnt from the weekend. I have yet to see one dance, one vote, one frock and this is all bad.

It’s rather fundamentally bad and it must be stopped, I must watch our Sky+ recording immediately.

But on the good side, it was by far the most tantalising and tense Strictly I’ve ever not watched.

Next week, we continue the science experiment by attempting to watch The X Factor without drinking.

Strictly: Stockings and suspense

2010-10-25T04:10:00.000-07:00

Two reasons the US Dancing with the Stars doesn’t work. They use props to disguise that they’ve not got the dancing chops and the celebrities are overmarked so much that you wonder what happens to our Len and Bruno on their transatlantic flights.

Now on Strictly Come Dancing, we’re getting props aplenty: this week the Play School windows with Matt and Aliona, the “strumpet” wine glasses with Felicity and Vincent, the flying rig for Ann Widdecombe. Plus we’ve had card tricks and even wellies. There was a time when Len used to object if they had so much as a cape.

We’re also getting very high marks: couples this week, a month into the three-month series, came within whiskers of getting 10s.

But not unreasonably so. Unlike previous Strictly and unlike all Dancing with the Stars, the dances have boomed into life immediately and the standard now is what we’re used to seeing much later in the series. I’ve even had a brief glimpse of that intangible moment that makes Strictly so good: the dance that blows you away. While Kara Tointon’s routine was niggle-marked by the judges, she had the music. Wasn’t just doing the steps well, she was dancing the music.

Reminds me of when I knew John Sergeant was going to be trouble. On one of those “we’ve just met for the first time, really” items, his professional dance partner Kristina Rihanoff asked if he could hear the music. “I’m not deaf,” he said. Despite his known Broadway dance experience and the way his frame is as ruggedly athletic as mine, that’s when I knew he’d be out in a week.

Well.

Things you might not want to know: Strictly’s results show is indeed recorded on Saturday nights while we’re all out but naughty people allegedly post the outcome online around 10:30pm. I haven’t looked. Let it be between you and your conscience if you bookmark the DigitalSpy.co.uk forums. I would offer that betting shops have probably figured this trick out by now.

Things you have no reason knowing: I am the only man on Earth who does not, um, respond to stockings and suspenders. I think they look silly. Consequently Erin had the worst costume of the night for me.

But then it was a poor night for frockwatch: it’s always a little bit rubbish when Tess Daly gets the best outfits.

Still, if the dresses were lacking, the dancing wasn’t and that’s probably the best way around, sulk, stomps foot, shrugs like a teenager. And the dances are good: it’s hard to remember how much conversation and nipping out to put the kettle on we used to be able to have during last year’s routines.

You do wonder if the standard can keep up - and whether it’ll be a bit dull if they all get to 10s in week five and have nowhere else to go for the rest of the series. I’m not saying a word about 11, but we’re all thinking it.

We just need to get rid of the deadwood now. And with Peter Shilton gone, we’re making a start.

Strictly Shock: Bruce was funny

2010-10-18T01:44:00.000-07:00

Let's not get carried away. But Bruce Forsyth was funny enough that I looked to see whether there was a new writer on the credits. What do you mean, you didn't know there was a writer?

This time last year I would've seized on this because the dancing itself was giving me problems. Writing on Radio Times, I did wonder first whether RT would be all that impressed with my criticising every inch of the show. They were. If that's the way it is, they said, what else can you do? After a few weeks of that, though, it became that I wondered whether you'd be all that impressed. Another week, another criticism. I was running out of gags.

But it feels a world away now because this new series is flying. We're seeing real dancing already and moreover it feels like real competition. So soon. And with so many frontrunners: Matt Baker, Kara Tointon, Pamela Stephenson, Scott Maslen. All of them doing well and in fact much better than they should be so soon into the run.

I want to add Felicity Kendal into the list of people doing well but I can't watch her. No human being should be able to bend like that. You know those bent over double back-spraining moves? I can't make that move going forwards.

I can look before she dances, though, and she does consistently get the good frocks. So does Flavia. I swear to God that Ola's costume made her look fatter this week: it cannot be so, it is not physically possible to make her look fat, but it tried.

Again, I'm not a man at all. Men should be newsy, right? Let me have a go. Tina O'Brien got a bye this week because of her chicken pox but if she's still unwell next week, that's it. Chicken pox usually lasts 7-10 days (see? You're getting hard facts here) so it's surely touch and go whether she'll be back at all, let alone whether she'll be back in time to rehearse enough.

You're wondering what's going to happen with Brendan Cole too, aren't you? He's out next week: he's flown home to New Zealand following the death of his father. But Michelle Williams will be dancing: she's reportedly going to be partnered for one week by Ian Waite.

That'll be confirmed, presumably, in tonight's Strictly Come Dancing: It Takes Two. Last year this series was better than the main show; this year the main show is catching up with it. So now it's only the Sunday night results show that needs fixing.

Strictly: Silenced is Goldie

2010-10-12T03:52:00.000-07:00

Silenced is Goldie and my eyes can’t see quite why. I wasn’t a fan, I don’t especially mind he’s out, but he could move a bit and so far Peter Shilton is just the bloke who gets to stand there watching Erin Boag dance closer up than the rest of us.

Do you ever think you’d forget to dance? That you’d just get lost watching your professional partner dance so stunningly? A poet once performed close-up poetry on me, her nose practically touching mine. Mesmerising. Not all that hygienic, but mesmerising. If I were a celebrity partnered with someone as good as these dancers, I would just find myself enjoying their dance and entirely forgetting mine.

Oh, come on, you’ve thought about it too.

Anyway.

Maybe it’s because I’m completely untouched by football that I don’t appreciate Peter Shilton and can only take it on trust that he has in some way done something important for someone, some time. It was vital, I know that. It was more important than anything I’ve ever done, I actually do know that.

I should say that while I wouldn’t miss him and I won’t miss Goldie, it’s nothing personal in either case. The only feeling I had when Goldie’s name was finally announced was a mild case of immense, total and overwhelming relief.

Because I didn’t see Strictly until Monday night and the power of Twitter meant that I knew the outcome where Angela, with more self-control and anyway she's a Facebook user, did not. I hate knowing the future.

Much easier knowing the past. Such as the way in every previous Strictly series we’ve had a few duff yet entertaining weeks as these folks find their feet. How it takes a good month before we start seeing anything interesting and the reason we watch is promise and anticipation more than any great reward.

But to give this year’s series credit, we’re on the second week and it already feels as if we’re deep into the contest. Maybe there’s still no utter wow of a dance but there is spectacular, there is strong dancing and there is a sense of competition fight in people.

We’re also somehow finding favourites sooner. Last year I hung on to hoping Craig Kelly would get better because I just liked the guy.

This year I’m a little the opposite. I don’t happen to like Ann Widdecombe so I’m not engaged with her routines, much as I can respect how she’s handling it. I don’t happen to like Paul Daniels, but that’s not his fault, that’s just an opportunity for a tea break.

There does seem to be more personal comments and jibes this time around. Daniels got described as Yoda - like it not did he, a lot not he like - which seemed unnecessarily cruel when he’s a bit more like Golum, really.

The jibes surprise me a little, the newfound use of dance props reminds me more of the US Dancing with the Stars than Strictly: if Erin brought out those mannequins now, would it still be Muppetgate?

Yet the biggest surprise was the mess of the results show with Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman. Do you see the logic of how how the saved and the unsaved couples were announced? If there’s anything shiny floor entertainment shows are not, it’s complicated. Yet splitting things up, looking like they’d recorded it all in one go and edited it around, I felt I parked my interest until they’d brought out the two muggins facing the chop.

Claudia Winkelman’s name came up in a couple of meetings I had the other week and in each I was unable to convince people that I don’t rate her because I fancy the woman. Look at how quick-witted she is, I argued fruitlessly. Yeah, but wait to see how good she’ll be on the results show. How much better she’ll be than Bruce Forsyth.

I hate not knowing the future.

Strictly: “There was nothing average about that...”

2010-10-04T00:13:00.001-07:00

True, Saturday’s show wasn’t as good as Friday’s but this is already a better series than last year’s. Enough so that you can relax into it and immediately enjoy those familiar Strictly staples.

Such as the contractually-negotiated introductions. Jimi Mistry is “movie star Jimi Mistry” when he walks down the stairs, much as Jo Wood was an “entrepreneur” last time. Then “Patsy Kensit has done a lot of things in her career,” began Brucie as lawyers fretted about her CV and BBC producers fretted over how Bruce’s jokes would dent the ratings.

Those producers have made more visible changes than any before them and generally they’re very good changes. It is hard not to miss the old spangly purple title sequence but the new one has style and flair and it is impossible to miss the new Enormous Lettering for the celebrities’ names.

We’ve got a new set that keeps the action in one place with Tess’s backstage area now only elevated so it feels inclusive, it feels like it’s part of the action. It does also feel a little cruel to make the dancers have to dart up those stairs before they’ve caught their breath. And – tell me you didn’t think this – the new arrangement and the new camera angels on the dancers bouncing up those stairs are, um, intended to keep a certain half of the viewing audience interested.

Anyway.

We’ve not had a dance that really carries you away yet but the way the new set was lit in fairytale blue for Pamela Stephenson’s dance came close. It is quite an amazing set: that blue for Stephenson, then a sea of twinkly lights for Robbie Williams and Gary Barlow.

It’s not really the Strictly set, though, it’s the Earth Defense Directorate from Buck Rogers. Or at least it was when Michelle Williams and Brendan Cole danced.

Bruce maintained that Michelle Williams was the finest singer with the surname Williams, only as a gag against Robbie but unthinkingly also forgetting both Andy and Dar.

But then Bruce also inadvertently set up the most tellingly ambiguous comment of the weekend. After his spiel about the judges being average, Len told Jimi Mistry that “there was nothing average” about his dance. Breath was held, but he meant it as a good thing.

Which is nice. Even nicer is how we can already disagree with the judges. How they are already seeing different dances than we are. If you watched with someone else, how often did you turn to look at each other and say “Eh?” A clue: it would be exactly the same number of times we saw standing ovations.

Nobody warranted a standing ovation, few were very good, some were terrible. You knew Paul Daniels was in trouble from the start when his wee little magic trick would’ve had three-year-olds shrugging.

He wasn’t bad enough to stop your mind wandering during his dance. And he’s not good enough to get your mind wondering if he’s going to win. Ola Jordan will be available for bar and bat mitzvahs from about week 2. She’ll provide her own costume, but you may not be able to spot it.

It is startling how often the costumes in Strictly cause problems. Kara Tointon must have true precision dancing skills the way the poor woman managed to catch a heel in material as thin as superstring. And that after having her entire personality erased by the makeup and hair styling department.

Erin Boag, Felicity Kendal and Katya Virshilas got the best out of the costume department while Flavia Cacace did best by the hair stylers with gorgeous vivid red streaks in her dark hair.

I’m not a man at all, am I?

I did spot that thing with the camera angles.

A couple of things to tell you. There’s no Strictly blog on RadioTimes.com this year, that’s why I’m waving at you from here, but there is a lot of very good Strictly material on that site. I’ve just cut a series of videos for there showing the celebrities and their professional partners posing for the Radio Times covershoot. You can see that, plus the photos and considerably more at radiotimes.com/strictly.

Whereas I just went to bbc.co.uk/strictly to check the spelling of Katya Virshilas’s name and the spangly new site has remarkably off-putting photographs. Someone at the BBC has discovered Photoshop’s Sketch and Stylise filters. They must be stopped.

Is that harsh? Am I obsessing too much with the new set and Flavia’s hair? As soon as I can figure out how to do it, I’m switching off the thing that means you have to register to shout comments at me here. This does mean we can expect a lot of offers for sex aids and financial windfalls, some written in Chinese. But if we just ignore them, they’ll go play somewhere else.

Strictly: Poor Anton

2010-09-11T15:32:00.000-07:00

"It's never too early to start panicking on this show," said Len and with that we're instantly back into Strictly: lapping up the atmosphere, being aghast at the frocks, pitying Anton and automatically tuning out Alesha Dixon.

We've just never been away. Yet this does feel like a shaken up Strictly. "This is the best lineup ever," said Len, this time reading from his contract. Yet there is some truth in it: this is the first series in years where the celebrities are better known than the professional dancers. Then the new graphics are more nicely Hollywood than Shepherds Bush and the redesigned set is smart.

Plus of course, the whole idea of a launch show is new - to Strictly, at least. The format of the launch show is very familiar if you remember sports day at school or you've ever spent quality time at a meat market.

There wasn't the promised tension and excitement over who was paired with whom, not when you could guess most with one squint at their respective heights. But we did have the little frisson over who is genuinely pleased, who is truly appalled and who had comments that were well enough prepared to make you suspect a fix.

There was a fix. Strictly is always cast as carefully as a drama and there is no random shuffle on who got whom but Anton got the joke: forget that Ann Widdecombe has been hired as the new John Sergeant, just look at the sixteen feet height difference. "If you are a politician of course you're going to say what you think," said Widdecombe during an interview recorded before we watched her and Anton pretending to be pleased with each other. That was rather sweet, her demonstrating the same grasp of reality she applies to Catholicism.

"That was seriously quite good," said Bruce as the hour came quite quickly to an end. That was the best part - not that it ended but that it seemed to fly by. It's easy to criticise the show but it does still have atmosphere, its artifice is balanced by fun and just often enough there are dances that lift you.

Not tonight, unfortunately, but you know they're coming and you know you'll be watching. Waddya say, round my place for a Strictly party on Friday 1 October?

Strictly Come Dancing: Um, about this launch show...

2010-09-08T02:28:00.000-07:00

Last year, someone dropped out of Strictly Come Dancing with about a biscuit and a half to go before all the celebrities were due to be announced. Nobody's saying who it was, but it's because of them that we got to see the hips and the moves of Richard Dunwoody.

So that was a success all round.

The Mystery Celebrity tried it out, thought long and hard about how very much they prefer a game of soldiers and vanished with only the production team and the professional dancer knowing who that masked man was.

It's happened before, you could've bet that it would happen again but it can't now. The reveal of who this year's celebrities are to be was originally going to come out this Saturday night in the new launch show. Given that it's being recorded today at BBC Television Centre, someone had a Damascus moment and realised they weren't going to be able to keep it out of tomorrow's papers.

So instead, the celebrities were leaked and the officially announced late last night - and the new twist is that neither we nor the celebrities know who the professional dancers will be. If that's entirely true, the first time the celebrities meet their partner and have a good go is sometime this morning.

Maybe the people who got tickets to today's recording aren't as lucky as they thought.

But if there's no cooling off period for celebrities to change their mind and run away this year, that's really more a problem for them than for us. We'll get to see the ones who are truly suffering, and you are very cruel for thinking of that.

It's a questionable move and it'll be interesting to see if the launch show idea is repeated next year, but you do have the sense that things are being shaken up that needed to be shaken up. This year you've heard of at least most of the celebrities, for one thing. And Alesha Dixon is back judging.

So there's swings and roundabouts.

There's also some very, very odd photography. Last year the official Strictly photos were done under tight security and at the last minute but almost all of them were very strikingly well done shots. This year, all the official ones are truly dreadful: they look like they were taken on a phone and they've ramped up the cheesiness to a degree one can only hope the show does not follow.

Roll up, roll up: see for yourself Patsy Kensit trying to hold her stomach in, Peter Shilton looking like you've just ordered the wrong wine and Paul Daniels rather resembling Golum.

That's a link to the official BBC Strictly Come Dancing site. You can also get news of the show on Radio Times but note that unfortunately there won't be an RT Strictly blog this year.

William

Alan Plater

2010-07-08T20:45:00.000-07:00

I first met Alan Plater in the mid-1980s and if you can ever pull it off, this is the way to meet someone who's going to become a friend: I interviewed him. It was for a long piece in the BFI's television magazine, Primetime, and it was thirty ways exciting: my first long piece, my first writing about drama, actually one of my first pieces of journalism, and certainly the first time interviewing someone I was a fan of.

That doesn't always go well, mentioning no names Trevor Eve, but it did then. I was a little bit starstruck. I remember right now this moment, talking to you, that I was drawn then to the walls of bookshelves he and his wife Shirley Rubinstein had in the flat they lived in at the time. And I realise right now, just glancing up, that I went the same way, that I got the shelves and I got the books and they mean everything to me.

Never got a dog, though. I can picture Shirley bringing Alan and I a cup of tea and being surprised that we'd got down to the interview so nervously fast. And her not being surprised that their dog, the Duke, had plonked himself across my feet, pinning me down and just being so warm that it was lovely.

It's perhaps too obvious to say that the whole afternoon was much the same but I'll say it anyway. The Duke was very heavy. The interview was not. The peg for the piece was that The Beiderbecke Connection was due shortly on ITV, the third and final of Alan's four tales about a woodwork teacher and an English one. If you've seen the Beiderbecke trilogy until your off-air tapes have worn out, get the DVD: it includes Get Lost!, a precursor to the show you remember.

I learnt all this on that day and, really, next time you meet someone, interview them. Somehow the brief for the piece ranged very wide and I pumped this nice guy for details of everything, his entire career and life. Yet still we had time to meander off onto other topics. He was adamant that he'd never change from a typewriter to a word processor, adamant. Also remarkably persuasive: I was then a nascent version of the geek I am today and even I could see his arguments.

The next time I saw him he'd bought a PC. I helped him onto a Mac later but never got him onto an iPhone. Shirley secretly fancies an iPad, I can tell you that.

I don't remember anything else about the second time we met. But it was dark when I was leaving their flat that first afternoon and it must've been December because I can still picture Shirley at their door, asking if I minded popping a pile of Christmas cards into the postbox downstairs. I can picture the corridor outside their flat, I can just about picture the cards. I can't see the postbox so clearly. I'm suddenly worrying about that.

The article had two mistakes in it. All these years later, I remember the mistakes. But then that's little to do with Alan and Shirley, I just remember mistakes and berate myself in the middle of the night for errors ten years in the past. You can't believe the cockups I did once or twice at BBC Ceefax; I can see my editor there, the dear and tremendous Lucie Maguire, gently starting to tell me what I'd done and I can feel my legs going the way they did.

I see a lot, don't I? Remember a lot. Strikingly clearly, sometimes. Not always over important things, not always for an understandable reason. But certainly over people and times that matter to me.

Such as the handwriting on the letter that so sweetly told me I'd made those mistakes: Shirley and Alan having no interest in whether I got something right or wrong about them, but keen to make sure I knew my jazz history. If you ever find the BFI piece online and read it, let me know so I can tell you what I got wrong about Ellington.

Strange to think of handwriting and letters when it feels now as if Alan, Shirley and I have always emailed a lot. That letter's long gone, I'm not one to keep mementoes and anyway what would've felt like one then doesn't now: at some point and quickly, Alan went from an interviewee to a friend.

He read my first ever stab at a script, a piece called The Strawberry Thief. Still a good title. Still a rubbish script. And he said so. But he said so in such a way that I was inevitably going to pick myself up and have another go. He told me then that the stage directions I'd written had often made him laugh out loud and that I should get that into the dialogue where viewers would see it. When I did, he told me it was a great step for writerkind.

It is to my now permanent regret that I didn't get further with my writing while he could see it. I can point to a hundred things I've done, including television like Crossroads, certainly to all the journalism and stage pieces - years later Alan and Shirley came up to Birmingham to see my very first one, came during a busy time, came for just about exactly the two hours it took to see my play and get back to the train - and not only can I point to these things, but I do and I will. Still I've not achieved what I wanted, what I think he wanted for me, what I sometimes like to think he expected. You didn't have to say much on the day he died to make me choke, but a text from a friend did it and does it still: Andrea Gibb told me to go get drama work in his memory.

I will. I should tell you immediately that for all regret and all hope for the future, it is to my permanent and cherished and unshakeable pride that I am a better writer because of Alan Plater.

After my brother died, I took my mother to Leeds to see a play of Alan's and to finally meet him and Shirley. While I was at the bar, they talked to her about writing and writers and how there are some people who have it, who are writers, and there are those who just don't and never will. They told my mother that I had it, that I was a writer.

As much as that means to me, it also amuses me that I know because they very soon blabbed to me that they'd said this and my mother eventually mentioned it too. There were other things going on, other things rather monopolising thoughts but I also think she was processing it. I am too.

A quick, unexpected memory. I once gave Alan a lift from a talk he had given, one of the myriad talks he gave to writers everywhere, and the conversation became unexpectedly awkward, I felt for a second like I was right back to being the fan interviewing a hero. And I realised why: we had such similar views on whatever the conversation was about, doubtlessly drama, that I sounded sycophantic. "Thank God I don't like football," I told him, "because otherwise we agree on everything."

The last time I saw Alan he was trying to watch the World Cup and to explain something or other to me about football, again. I promise I waited until the little men with the ball thing had finished, though I'm not always sure what's a highlight, a repeat or just the same boring patch of grass. Might've been a goal. Then while he paid as little attention to ITV1's presenters as everyone else, we meandered again.

For some reason, and I do not remember why, we meandered onto the topic of Misterioso. I knew and you know that Alan wrote a stunning amount, that his body of work is incredible. I knew that then and I was still surprised to hear at the funeral how little I knew of it all. Hundreds of pieces of TV, stage, film, books, music. Any single one piece of which you'd be exultant to have written yourself. And when, inevitably, there is debate over what was his best, the contenders are lined up from here to the Mexican border.

I can't tell you if Misterioso is his best, it's probably not: the version that means so much to me is the original novel and that's a quiet, soft, gentle piece I've only read twenty times since it came out. "Bless you," said Alan on that last time I saw him, "I haven't read it since I wrote it." I informed him then that it wasn't his any more, it was mine. Tough. It's long felt like that: I know I can hear his voice in the writing but it's that story and that way of telling it with these characters that make this a book I hold close to me. I've probably recommended it to you already, that's how much I like it. And you've probably been disappointed because it's not been in print for years and you're never getting my hardback.

Nor has the TV version been released on DVD. Alan and Shirley got me a copy a few years ago and it is at this moment on my iPad. At the time they were both disappointed that the project had become a one-off instead of the serial they'd intended and I should have been disappointed because this was a TV adaptation of a book I loved. That rarely works out but here it's as if I have two Misteriosos, one a dear book and one a dear TV film. Come round my place some time, with all its books and bookshelves, and I'll show it to you.

Bring lunch. You'll have to watch The Beiderbecke Affair too. And Fortunes of War, the joyously beautifully perfect Fortunes of War. The last lines of which made me cry then and do today, do right this second as I remember them: not because they're sad, not because they're a weepie melodrama, but because they are right.

I told you I'm not one for mementoes. I told you that Alan Plater became a friend, became family really, and so much so that it's hard to remember just being a fan all those years ago. But there is a memento, just one.

The watch I was wearing that day I met Alan broke a short while afterwards but I kept it anyway. Because I'd worn it that day. I wore it again last Monday at his funeral.

William

Making a math of it

2010-06-28T01:03:00.000-07:00

People are telling me this with a straight face: yes, England lost 4-1 to Germany or whichever team it was, but if one goal hadn't been disallowed, England would've won. People had been telling me with only slightly less of a straight face that, the other day, America beat some team 2-2.

Alan Plater wrote a stage play called Confessions of a City Supporter in which characters, fans of Hull City FC, would regularly insist a defeat was a moral victory: "We smashed 'em, nil-two."

Football maths. I love this, just love it, because it feels like a collision between math and drama. In drama people lie and misunderstand and don't know and don't realise what they know, it's a seething mass of contradiction. Whereas the beauty of math is that it's right. You can debate whether it was really Pythagoras who spotted what triangles get up to and there are gorgeous stories of lying bastards who got glory for other people's brilliant mathematics - but the math is correct. Triangles, hypotenuse, you know how it goes, it's true and it will always be true.

Seriously, always.

Science is about asking questions, it's about figuring something out then testing, testing, testing until it looks pretty solid. And yet it will forever be questioned, forever tested and the moment it breaks, science will drop it. Scientific method: it seems to be misunderstood these days, newspapers seem to believe today's science is absolute and that boffins - they're always boffins; if you've read a book, you're a boffin - think they know everything.

If a science experiment demonstrates that something happens 99 times out of 100, that's fair enough, that's a good, working, practical conclusion and science will use it until it breaks. Writers, on the other hand, work with issues and feelings and topics that actually do not make any sense at all, except that they make every sense.

Then mathematicians work in proof. That 99 out of 100? Not good enough. Not even close to being good enough. The math behind the security of every credit card transaction in the world is based on something that so far has not been proved. How many billion transactions happen every day? How crucial is this math to the world? Actually, it's crucial enough that banks hire mathematicians and pay them very, very well to try either proving or breaking it. Billions of pounds are spent relying on this math, millions are spent trying to break it before anyone else does and before they take down practically our entire economy.

But because it's not proved, this math is stubbornly called a theory. It's the Riemann Hypothesis. I am no mathematician but when it's explained as well as, say, Marcus du Sautoy does in The Music of the Primes book (UK edition, US edition) then I can see some of the sheer beauty of it. Enough that I wish I'd been a better student at school.

Quick example of how rigorous math is? This is one of my favourite jokes. Actually, it might come from that du Sautoy book. Not sure now. Anyway, are you ready?

A writer, a scientist and a mathematician are on a train travelling from England to Scotland. As they cross the border, the writer looks out and exclaims: "Look! Sheep are black in Scotland!" The scientist takes a look and says no: "In Scotland," he insists, "there is one sheep who is black."

The mathematician peeks over their shoulders and says no. "In Scotland, there is one sheep, one side of which is black."

William

Apple's iPad for writers

2010-06-04T00:30:00.000-07:00

This is the kind of thing I wanted to know before I bought an iPad and it's what I've found after about a week's moderate use of it. So it's about the keyboard, it's about the apps and it's also about disappointments and the odd surprise.

You zoomed in on that word "disappointments", didn't you? Let's start there then.

Disappointments with the iPad

There have been two. First, I unthinkingly expected the box to include the wee little dock, the iPad equivalent of what comes with the iPhone. Apple's quite clear that it doesn't and I'm fine with how it doesn't come with headphones, so I shouldn't have been disappointed but I was. (You get a mains plug and a cable that attaches either to that or to your computer for docking.)

More seriously, the keyboard. This is an odd one because on the whole I'm so pleased with it as to be relieved, surprised and delighted. I will not be buying an external keyboard for it - though I think I've got a kludgy old keyboard somewhere that will connect wirelessly to it, maybe I'll give it a try some time.

Yet there were disappointments with the keyboard and it is what you, as a writer, spend most of your time on. I found the size and shape of the keys good, but the layout, not so much. It appears firstly, for instance, that there is no apostrophe on the main keyboard: you have to press a button marked .?123 which changes the QWERTY letters to 1234... numbers and includes punctuation. There is a secondly, though, which makes this better. Press and hold the comma button for an instant and the apostrophe appears.

So that's good. Except that I now find it easier to go to that numbers screen for it rather than hold up my writing for even that brief instant you have to wait. Plus, the iPad is even better at inserting apostrophes for you as you type than the iPhone is. That's great and and I did just type "thats", letting it correct me. But I type well, I like typing, so I'm having to train myself to let it have its way.

This kind of intelligent interference causes me problems with capitals. The iPad, especially in the excellent Pages app (£5.99 UK, $10 US) assumes quite rightly that every sentence begins with a capital letter. I hold this to be self-evident but that means I go to do it too: I tap the shift key, thinking I need it. Since Pages has already pressed shift, so to speak, I find I'm really un-pressing it and my sentences begin with a lowercase letter.

For some reason my fingers can't get used to where the wee little shift keys are either, so I find I'm pausing to find them and then pausing to go back to correct this uppercase/lowercase issue.

But that said, the automatic correction is rather impressive. I loathe predictive text on phones but here it's more what-you-really-meant. Very nicely, the iPad is good at spotting when the mistake is that you've left out a space: it's smart at recognising when one mistyped word is really two correctly-typed ones run together.

And the whole feel of typing on glass is very, very good. I should say I am in the minority who likes the iPhone keyboard even for protracted typing so maybe your mileage will vary. I also wonder if it will be as good for women or anyone who doesn't have a nervous fingernail issue.

Last, you do need to prop the iPad up to type on. Well, you don't. It's flat in front of me now but that means your hands tend to hide some of what you're typing. I bought Apple's iPad case (£30 from Apple Stores) and it's mixed, leaning toward good, and works very well as a stand that tilts the iPad to a good angle for typing. Also for reading: I've found I leave it propped up at that angle even when I'm actually using another computer. I tend to refer to the iPad for my calendar, for Twitter, for reading books in stolen moments.

Apps for writers

Buy Pages. I bought it before I bought the iPad. It's a good, strong word processor and is preposterously cheap. I thought the desktop Mac version was preposterously cheap but this is under a tenner.

Pages will read and write Microsoft Word documents though I expect not very complex ones. Getting documents in and out of Pages is not great: you end up emailing them around and thereby getting a bit in a tangle over which is the latest version of what document. You can copy your documents to and from your computer using iTunes but I've yet to even try, it's sufficiently inelegant. You can share your documents over iWork.com but I've not even looked at that.

If you can think of Word as just the thing you need to send documents to people, if you don't think of Pages as trying to be a Word clone, you will like Apple's word processor. More: you'll be impressed. And when you go back to Word on your Mac or PC, you'll find yourself poking a finger at the screen.

That's how good Pages is and also how good the iPad's touch screen is. Using a mouse and proper keyboard do very quickly feel archaic, even wrong.

I did find it hard to see how to name the documents you create in Pages: turns out when you have the list of documents open (it looks a little like Cover Flow) then pressing and holding on the name lets you set it.

Once you've bought Pages

There are writing tools on the iPad app store, some of which are exactly the worthless distraction we seek but a few are close to essential.

For most writers, I'd say that in includes Evernote (free). The app lets you jot down anything, stray lines, ideas, images even and then later examine them right there in the app or on any computer that you can point at Evernote.com. I have a problem with some of the graphics, just aesthetically, and they happen to be one of the few bits you can't customise. So I recommend Evernote but am still looking around

Reading

I thought I wanted an iPad for iBooks, for being able to read a lot.

Damn right.

For all that I write on the iPad, watch a lot of TV and video on it, listen to a lot of music and radio programmes, and spend far too much time on Twitter with it, by far the thing that has given me most pleasure is reading.

What I didn't expect was that iBooks isn't the only game in town.

There are three.

By far the best to use for straight reading and for buying books too, Apple's iBooks could be all you need. But there aren't that many books yet on the iBooks Store. Whereas there are many, many times more books downloadable from Amazon for its Kindle and Barnes and Noble for its Nook device.

Fortunately, both companies make free iPad and iPhone apps. Both are fine, leaning toward very good, though iBooks wins because buying books is much more obviously easy and simple in that. Dangerously so.

You may be thinking that I've sequed away from the topic of iPad for writers. But you can't write if you don't also read and reading on the iPad is a joy.

Plus, it's possible if a little tricky to get your own books into your copy of iTunes and iBooks. I did a pitch recently that reworked 10,000 words and reading it again on the iPad was a bit of a treat.

I'm not certain I'll write the next 10,000 words on it. But I've written all of this blog entry on my iPad: I think I've done it more slowly than I would've done on a full keyboard but I also think part of that is how I still need to get used to the keyboard layout differences.

Apple's iPad is available from online and real Apple Stores. Other tablet computers are available - apparently - but if they were any good, you'd not have read this far about iPads.

Prejudice is bad, if quick

2010-05-28T08:45:00.000-07:00

I've a colleague who watched all of The Wire, every season, every episode, because she hoped she'd get to like it. I'm a hard, hard man: I want everything to be fantastic but if episode 1 doesn't hold me in some way, in any way, I'm off. And I think I'm wrong: this is the prejudice of the title, the rather less socially significant but since we're writers who want our work to keep people's attention, still important prejudice.

Follow. Back in the mid-1990s I saw the movie Stargate and didn't happen to like it. Consequently I saw only the odd channel-hopping sliver of its TV follow-up, Stargate: SG-1. Didn't watch a single frame of that show's follow up, Stargate Atlantis. Until checking this out before talking to you, I had never even heard of Stargate Infinity.

But now I'd probably call myself a fan, certainly an addict, of the latest series, Stargate Universe. That's happy for me. Only, as well as just enjoying the drama, I am agog at the differences between this and previous series: differences that are led by how the new show is written. I'm so agog that I've gone nipping back into the other Stargates, sampling this, trying that, running away again from the film. Some of it can be exciting, some of it can be funny and I'm not knocking the shows at all, I'm just saying they're not my kind of drama.

All the previous Stargate shows were science fiction adventure tales about fairly square-jawed hero types who usually spoke in one-liners when they weren't reciting technobabble. They were fast-paced shows, high-stakes, high explosions, big, epic, aliens, wooo, all of that.

Stargate Universe, on the other hand, is serious, it's about very real people under pressure and their problems are not resolved by the end of the hour, they go on week to week, getting worse week to week. This is my cup of tea. I enjoy it so much, I look forward to it so much each week that I want to thank Daniel Hardy: he listens and has contributed to the UK DVD Review podcast I do and it was solely on his recommendation that I gave this new show a go.

It's entirely my own fault that I've gone poking about the other series.

What I've found is that these other Stargate series are made by the same company, they share broadly the same premise in that they have these Stargate things. They share storylines, they share some characters and actors. And they are written by much the same people.

So have a look and see if you're as startled by the differences as I am.

First up, Stargate SG-1. Nip along to 3'50 in this and watch a typical "Gentlemen, there is a crack in the world" type of sci-fi scene. It's also a key scene for the Hero, Richard Dean Anderson as Jack O'Neill and Amanda Tapping as Sam Carter. I watched through my hand.

Next, the opening to the pilot episode of Stargate Universe.

I'l bet money your first thought is the money. Stargate Universe looks much more expensive. I believe it is, too. I worry that your thought after that is how slow the beginning is. Watching it with you now on YouTube with the wee little screen, it doesn't have the strong, arresting, intriguing, feature-film-like feel at first but is that true or is it just that I've seen it before? Not knowing what's going on, I think you're curious and as the show zooms in on the ship and through its broken corridors, maybe it builds some nice tension. It did with me on my telly.

I admire the opening for how completely still it is and then how completely the quietness is punctured by the arrival of that first character, Lt. Scott. And then the mayhem. So quickly you go from this utter stillness to a very human fear and panic.

I'm also going to bet money that you are more tempted to carry on watching Stargate Universe than you are Stargate SG-1, just based on these excerpts. So why not? The show is on Sky1 on Tuesday nights in the UK, it's on Syfy in the US on Fridays - though in both cases it's about to reach the end of its first season. I'd recommend starting at the beginning which I'm sure will loop around again on Sky and Syfy but is out on DVD shortly and on iTunes now.

I recommend it so thoroughly that I'm surprised I've forgotten to mention Robert Carlyle stars in it. I recommend it so thoroughly despite having learnt that every single atom of the show that I enjoy this much is detested by fans of the old SG-1 series.

There are people who long for this series to be cancelled and their favourite SG-1 to be revived. Fortunately, as well as being a bit unlikely anyway, these vocal voices appear to belong to an intense but small group of fans who need to let go.

Or to go live in what I've been dying all day to call a stargated community.

William

Mac vs PC: can we end this once and for all?

2010-05-21T02:46:00.000-07:00

If you buy a PC, you’ve just bought a PC. If you buy a Mac, somehow you’re a Machead, a cultist, an Apple fanboy or girl, you’ve joined a religion, you worship Steve Jobs and Jonny Ive, you’ve been fooled by the hype, you’re trying to be cool, you think shiny is good, the list goes on.

You hear much the same degree of jeering between football fans but at least with that there are fans on both sides. Who’s actually fan of Windows PCs? But okay, if Apple is a religion, it’s the Church of the One That Works.

If Microsoft comes out with something, I’ll probably hear about it at some point. I don’t follow many of the techie news sites I used to when I worked in computers but I’ll hear eventually. Mostly because it takes so long: a pretty standard spiel from Microsoft is that our new product will kill Apple/Google/Everybody as soon as it’s launched in three to four years. And it’s cheaper too, so there. Will be cheaper.

There was a nice-looking tablet computer they did this about: if you saw the articles, you quite fancied this. It was a wee way off, they said, and now the other day they cancelled it entirely.

In comparison, Apple loves making big announcements about fancy technology and ending with the words “Available today”. I’m not sure whether you’d call that smug or gleeful, but I think they earn whichever it is. The famous Apple secrecy up to the launch of a product has some unpleasant sides but ultimately where so many firms talk about what they’re going to do, Apple tends to just do it first.

Seriously first, too. They nicked the idea for a graphical computer back when there used to be any other sort. Microsoft nicked it from the same place an hour later. But where Apple took Xerox PARC’s idea and made it commercially practical, commercially available, Microsoft Windows has been copying the Mac for nearly thirty years and it’s still not there.

You have a mouse. You wouldn’t have if Apple hadn’t done it first, or at least if someone hadn’t, because Microsoft came late to mice. If you’ve got a laptop, it has the keyboard pushed to the back so you can type comfortably and it’s got a slick touchpad. Because of Apple. I was at the UK launch of their first PowerBook with that touchpad and they crowed about how they had patented it.

Apple patents are plainly rubbish, but there you go.

When Apple does come out with something new, I hear about it much, much faster because these days I’m looking. I’ve got a couple of Mac sites on my iPhone’s newsreader and I’ll read them not through fervour, not because they happen to update while I’m bowing toward Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino.

I read them because of Apple’s track record and how the firm thinks things through.

One example. I hope this has changed in Windows 7 but it lasted for the first twenty years of Windows so it’s a fair illustration of how the technology doesn’t matter, it’s the people behind it. Copy some documents to a floppy disk, if you can find a floppy disk.

Windows gives you a nice, pretty graphic of paper airplanes flying between an icon of your hard disk and an icon of your floppy one. Until suddenly the floppy is full and it panics. “Error!” it screams. I can’t remember the unmemorably techie error message but its meaning is very clear: it’s your fault. You’ve got it wrong, not Windows.

Do the same thing on a Mac and it looks first. Tells you there’s not going to be enough room on the floppy.

That’s it, it’s just sayin’.

Microsoft did the pretty icon fine, it just thinks that pretty is enough. Well, sort of. Windows XP has a very Fisher Price kind of look but Windows 7 is prettier. It’s just that pretty is as pretty does, I think: Apple products have a shine to them at least in very great part because they work and work so well. Before the iPhone, no phone looked anything like it. Since the iPhone, no phone has been released that hasn’t tried to copy it. That’s design, that’s thinking brilliantly.

That’s not trying to make a long list of features, that’s trying to make the things useful.

Not long ago I recommended that a friend did not switch to Macs because I felt he was so wedded to Windows and had so many applications that changing was a giant deal. He changed anyway. I’m very persuasive. And for weeks afterwards he’d phone me up laughing. Because he’d buy some new software, new hardware, something, and he’d read out the six pages of instructions for how you install them under Windows before delivering the punchline. For Mac, the instructions were always “Plug it in.” The End.

I used to actually like computers. I enjoyed fiddling, I even had a fair enough career in computer magazines though I always felt I was a magazine guy more than I was a computing one. And all the friends I still have from there are nodding now. Possibly also nodding off, but.

Today all I want is to work on a machine that works. Someone asked me recently how I could possibly enjoy computers so much. I had just repaired a ridiculous problem with his Windows Vista laptop but I swear we stared at each other as if across a gulf. I don’t like computers, I like that I can talk to you like this, I love that I can do my work wherever I am in the world, I adore that right now I’ve got music playing, that in a short while my Mac will record the Afternoon Play so I can listen in the car later. That BBC News channel is open on my right. That Twitter is updating in front of me. That the film I’m buying off iTunes will be ready to watch in a second or two.

And obviously I write. But for every advantage this Mac gives me for writing, it does offer a thousand distractions.

It’s just that I’m not distracted struggling to find a DLL, whatever in the hell that is, I’m not interrupted by WARNING! VIRUS! YOUR FAULT! messages. And when my disk is full, I know I’ve just been talking too much.

Why do women act?

2010-05-12T10:08:00.000-07:00

Easy one first: name a great woman actor. Got one? Got a hundred? It's a doddle. Straight off the top of my head, I immensely admire Jodie Foster, Judi Dench, Emily Watson, Barbara Flynn, Emily Mortimer, Allison Janney, Helen Hunt, Alison Pill, if I say any more I'll itch to sort them into alphabetical order. And anyway, you've got your own list.

But now name a great role for a woman. You can do it, each of these women has had a least one tremendous role or I wouldn't know to admire them, wouldn't know they are as talented as they are.

Yet most of the time the woman's role is as nothing more than being the unattainable object for the hero, who attains her by the end anyway. For instance, I just watched Se7en for a thriller-writing course run by Script in the West Midlands and, watching it as a writer, I kept wondering why Gwyneth Paltrow took the part she did. It's a great film and the parts for the leads, Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman are tremendous, but Paltrow is a big name and it's a tiny part.

How did Kim Basinger get an Oscar for LA Confidential? I'm not saying she was poor, but what did she actually have to do in the film? How did Judi Dench get an Oscar for thirty seconds of screen time in Shakespeare in Love?

Those two films are exceptions for me because both parts were fine, they just didn't have much to them. Whereas the majority of time, I find that as a viewer, I am prone to slapping my forehead. Particularly when the hero says he's going "to get the girl". I can't help it: I immediately hear him saying that today he's got to pick up the laundry, wash the car, get to the post office before 3pm and, oh, yes, collect the girl. Whoever she is in the story, she's not a person, she's not a character, she's a UPS parcel.

Yes, I'm pro-feminist. I think it's embarrassing that there's only one woman in the new British Government cabinet. It's bad that I can't bear her, but embarrassing too. But I don't slap my forehead from some ideological idea, I do it because this accepted norm of the woman as "the girl" to get is crippling to drama.

Follow. The hero falls for a "perfect" woman. Already she's boring me, but still, let's go with it. The hero is someone this woman would never look at and yet without him actually changing into someone worth being glanced over, she is required to change her mind by the end of the story. Usually this involves the hero doing something for 90 minutes when she isn't even in the room. We know nothing about her, we care nothing about her, she isn't actually anything: certainly not a character of any low number of dimensions. There's a good chance she's blonde. I wouldn't count on her wearing much in the way of a costume.

But if you don't care about this unattainable object that the hero is striving to attain, it's hard to keep your mind on the hero's striving. Hard to get behind a hero who's so shallow that this empty life-size poster of a woman is his ultimate goal.

So a will-they/won't-they tale rapidly becomes, for me, a will-he/why-would-she story. Then it's a who-is-she story, penultimately a who-is-he tale, then a what's-on-the-other-side-kind-of-drama.

There's always something on the other side. I'm just grumbling at you today because so much of it appears to be like this and I can't understand how all drama, all writers, all producers aren't grabbing talent. I actually can't understand why there are so many talented women actors when this is what's on offer for them.

Except, of course, when everything works. I only recently saw Emily Mortimer and Gerard Butler in Dear Frankie: a beautiful gem of a film by Andrea Gibb with real women, real men, real characters.

I can well see why women would want to act in drama like that. Because I want to write drama like that.

William

In Treatment: the Movie and other (Red) stories

2009-05-22T04:18:00.000-07:00

Nuts to me, my writing, even to the brilliance of Red Planet and the single most energising, invigorating, exhilarating day in my scribbling career to date (I may be underselling that). Instead, look at this gorgeous, glorious thing.

In Treatment is being screened at the Edinburgh Film Festival this year. Just the first week's worth, five episodes, but I guarantee any TV exec there will be on the phone trying to buy the rest the moment they've seen them. And I can be confident of this not only because of me, because of how utterly compelled I was by them, but because of HBO. The episodes being shown here are the first sessions with each of the characters in the show's first season and the whole week was shot as a five-part pilot for the US cable channel.

They paid for those five and on seeing them ordered up another 37. That's as addicted as I was, plus I only spent the price of the DVD.

I am a puppy, running up to you with this news. I am bouncing with it. Is there anything better than finding a show that so invades your life, so lifts you up and so stretches you?

Yes.

Writing one.

Which brings me back to Red Planet and how I should be going back to writing my writings, doing my doings, right now. But Jonathan Melville just told me this In Treatment news and I had to tell you. Wonder if I can get to Edinburgh?

William

A website in my hand and song in my heart

2009-05-02T11:07:00.000-07:00

So, first off, I have a new website. It's very like the old one in that it's plainly an expression of my wanton ego - I have a website, a blog, I'm on Facebook, Twitter and occasionally the phone - that I'm trying to come to terms with. And it's also at the same address, www.williamgallagher.com.

It's also the slightly altered home to my UK DVD Review podcast and, bugger, I forgot: I need to make the old podcast page redirect to the new. And I can't do that until my mass backup of the entire old site is done.

Um. I didn't think this through. I should've waited a touch. Ah, well, it's just you and me: have a look at the new site through that link and will be well. If you usually listen to my podcast on my site, then things will also be well, but perhaps not tonight. I'll see to it.

And in the meantime, hello. Piers Beckley has tagged me in an internet meme. This one has you list seven songs that you are into this moment, right now. That's the meme, that's who tagged me, let's play our game - except that I can't resist also throwing in this. Metafilter, the site that aggregates news stories and features from all the dark corners of the web that you would go to if you knew about them, recently found a timeline of all internet memes. And then removed it. Apparently it's not accurate, but when did that matter on the internet? And, besides, it's still fun to see something of where all this meme-ing started.

But back to the plot. The seven songs I'm really into really right now go thisaway:

After All - Dar Williams

From The Green World album, grief, was that in 2000? Typically, deceptively simple track, even a little pared down compared to some of Dar Williams's stuff, but also rather engrossing. I do love her material but this one popped up on a random playlist the other week and I've kept coming back to it. A tinge of yearning, a little upsetting, a little uplifting.

Why Do You Let Me Stay Here? - She & Him

I have no idea why this is in my head, but it's there. She is Zooey Deschanel, him is M Ward. I'd heard of her, at least. Jolly, bit of a sinister undertow depending on my mood when I hear it. Short.

Backstreets - Bruce Springsteen

Raw, gutteral, by the end you'd even throw in feral. From the Born to Run album. The Springsteen fanclub named its newsletter after this song, back in the day when there were such things as newsletters. Now there's a website.

One and Only - Mary Black

Another old favourite that's recently popped back into my random playlist life. I remember this from the brief time UK satellite TV had CMT, Country Music Television. As it got ever more desperate for anybody, just anybody to watch, please, now, go on, it introduced a strand called Rebel Country. This was its excuse to play more popular tracks and artists while pretending there was any country element to it at all. If it was in 4/4 time, that was good enough. Bruce Springsteen used to pop up here. This is actually where I first came across Dar Williams, with her wonderful As Cool as I Am, and it's where I first heard this Mary Black cut. Since then I've been taken with a lyric in it about having a child out of wedlock: "Blessed and unholy".

Pornographer's Dream - Suzanne Vega

A while ago I caught a series of poetry readings on BBC Radio 7 and found that many, many and indeed all three times many of the poems were really Suzanne Vega lyrics read aloud. This wasn't one of them, I just wanted to mention that. Pornographer's Dream is from her latest album, Beauty & Crime. I remember saying somewhere that were you often have a song in your head, after this I had the entire album. It probably helps that it's a bit of a paean to New York City; another track has a tremendously simple but evocative reference to "the midtown roar" there. But again, amongst everything else I love about this, there is one repeated lyric that catches me: "out of his hands / over his head / out of his reach". That one needs the music, I think.

Outlaw Pete - Bruce Springsteen

It's a very, very strange thing but this first track on Springsteen's album Working on a Dream is overwhelmingly glorious: very funny, very fast, very bitterly afraid and with a rather soaring mix of rock guitars and orchestral backing, I can't get enough of it. So far, not that strange, right? And the second track, My Lucky Day, I adore it. The third one, Working on a Dream, I'm having a ball now, this is a fantastic album. But then we get Queen of the Supermarket and I'm gone. It's not the potent subject matter Springsteen claims and the song feels very forced to me. And what's strange is that so do all the ones after it. It's like they're tainted. So, tracks 1-3 could even have made it on this list all together, tracks 4-13, not so much.

Whenever You're Ready - Mary Chapin Carpenter

I nicked this for an iPhone alarm tune, thinking it was a gentle start to mornings. And it is - after the first chord, which had me yanked out of the bed clutching my heart. I only used it the once but it's in my head forever now and it's from the album Time * Sex * Love, which appears to be just about the only album she's ever made that isn't in the iTunes Store. Hence the lack of a link. I could've semi-legitimately picked many of her songs, but that's the one looping in my noggin' and I like to tell you the truth on occasions.

Since it's you.

And while I often deadend these memes, everybody I know with a blog having been asked before me, this time I want to pass it on to Angela. It's her first internet meme: be gentle. And also Steve, if I can figure out how to point at his Facebook page wherein he might do this.

William

Writing In Treatment and other stories

2009-04-19T14:53:00.000-07:00

In Treatment writer Sarah Treem

"Writing In Treatment" is a bit of a come-on title, it's as if I've found some news for you and will be linking like crazy to insightful interviewers. And it is a little like that.

Here's the Los Angeles Times reviewing the new second season of In Treatment and saying "the stories are even better than they were last season and that's saying something". And The Boston Globe has a good piece about both the original Israeli series and the American adaptation.

But what that Boston Globe piece does that I'm trying to do today and really rather failed to do last time is talk about the writers. Perhaps chiefly because I want to enthuse about them but also because I think there are signs for the future here, both good and bad signs.

Last time I spoke of the writing, I didn't speak of the writers. I think I was a bit awash with writers at the time: I'd just seen 43 episodes over 14 days, most of which had individual writers but some were team-written, and 42 of them were direct translation/adaptations of the Israeli originals by more writers.

Then there was a showrunner on the US version who wrote the first five episodes to set the style and doubtlessly worked at least in part on all the other episodes. That was Rodrigo Garcia but there was also a showrunner/writer on the Israeli show, Be'Tipul and he created the whole thing: Hagai Levi.

I watched the show for the same reason you watch anything: it sounded good, I thought I'd like it. Then I really, really liked it and it was a can't-stuff-your-face-fast-enough race to the end of the season.

Now I'm watching it again. But as a writer. And I'm slicing it a different way. Rather than one episode of Laura's therapy sessions, then Alex's, then Sophie's, then Jake and Amy, then Paul's, rinse, repeat, I'm watching all of Sophie's. And by focusing on the one, and I'll admit aided by a handy writer list on the DVD box that I hadn't noticed before, I'm seeing that Sarah Treem wrote the last eight of the nine Sophie episodes. (Garcia did the first of this one as well.) That link is to her IMDb list, as are most of the links here, but in her case don't bother: it just lists In Treatment. Instead, try the New York Times which has a review of A Feminine Ending, a stage play of hers. But it also has audio of Treem herself talking about that play. Then The Village Voice talks about how Treem and other new writers made up the whole of the 2007/8 season for the Playwrights Horizons company. That company claims to always champion new writing but for that year, it did nothing else and - this is not directly stated but it's only barely hidden - it was because its regular writers were rubbish.

That's a little harsh.

I don't know much yet about any of the other writers on In Treatment but even if Sarah Treem is the only newcomer, isn't that marvellous? In Treatment was a fairly chancy commission for HBO and it wasn't like they dabbled in it. There was apparently a five-part pilot made, which presumably makes up week 1 of the series, but still you can't imagine ITV1 commissioning 40-odd episodes of anything new. If they ever did, if any major British television company did risk commissioning that many episodes of a non-soap drama, can you imagine them ever trying new writers on it?

Yes.

Life on Mars did. One episode of that was to be written by a new writer to television, I don't know who, I only know it was a man. Something happened, again I don't know what, and his script was not used but there was that willingness to take a chance. Similarly, Ashes to Ashes was the first producing job for Beth Willis and look at her now: she's the new co-exec producer on Doctor Who.

It's called taking a chance for a reason, though. You chance your arm, you try your hand, you sometimes burn your fingers. If a brand new writer fails to deliver a filmable script of The Bill - um, bad example, sorry. If a brand new writer fails to deliver a filmable episode of Hustle, that's a gigantic production machine derailed. You've got to believe they'll deliver the goods, they've got to be as much of a safe pair of hands as you can manage. I've felt precisely this when I've commissioned new writers on magazines and I've had bad experiences from that. Also some good, actually, and that keeps you doing it, but a lot of bad. And a bad experience for me means having to write an emergency article in a couple of hours, that's substantially easier than writing an hour's television over a weekend.

This is the reason we're all guided to soaps: they can be derailed too but they're hardy little buggers and they can cope better. And it's fair enough: if you've written 100 episodes of a soap, you're someone who delivers. When you cannot have a blank screen, that's a very tempting and very practical thing to look for in a new writer.

I think it's a calamitous side-effect that soaps have become seen as the only route through and moreover that because such a proportion of new writers and producers come through the soap route that it's seen as the right way to do drama. People who don't write soaps are very dismissive of the genre, but fortunately people who do write soaps believe they're already writing every type of drama so the general wrongness just balances out. Funnily enough, there is huge, rich drama in the gap between: when drama writers try soap and soap writers try drama.

Anyway, In Treatment, just to yank this back to the topic, is not a soap. It's far more painful than that and if a story is about someone fancying someone, it cuts truer than the soap version would. It's willing to go down areas that might end the story early. It does end the story early. More than one patient does not last the whole nine weeks of the series. And then it sees what happens next, what's underlying everything, what's deeper. Rather like therapy, actually. Apparently the original Israeli series had a therapist advising the writers and he or she did complain a lot: not about inaccuracy but about how the scripts didn't dig deep enough. So then they did.

There's a lot of hyperbole about the original show, about how it's the greatest drama Israeli television has ever produced. It's certainly the only one I've heard of, so maybe that's true. But there is also the harsh, practical fact that it may well be the cheapest.

It's certainly, surely, HBO's cheapest-ever drama. Some sources say each episode took two days to film, others say it was only one. It is only half an hour per episode, but compare that to a ten-day shoot for a typical one-hour US drama and it's probably cheaper than even reality TV.

I don't want to see British television drama budgets cut. But they're being cut. I think it's a preposterously short-sighted notion: notice how ITV1 is in trouble but ITV3 is doing very well - because it's showing all the dramas ITV used to make. You can't repeat Britain's Got Talent, you can and they do repeat successfully repeat Thunderbirds over and over.

If there's any good to come from lower budgets, it's that we may see things like In Treatment. BBC4 is already making cheap dramas that are punching well above their weight: think of the dramatisations of the lives of people like Hughie Green. Trevor Eve received the greatest share of the praise for that, and his performance was superb, he managed to convey not only a tremendous impression of Hughie Green but all the nuances and the strengths of the script. It's just that it was the writer, Tony Basgallop who put those nuances and those strengths in there.

Fast-cutting scenes, action and stupendous locations cost money: tight, tense, intimate writing, not so much. Unfortunately, the type of writing that keeps you compelled without any eye candy, that involves you in characters without melodrama, that's cripplingly hard to do. The rewards are richer, for the viewer, but the gamble is higher for the writer. And it's a harsh and unpalatable fact that being given the chance to write this type of work is not even a remote guarantee that you're capable of it.

If drama budgets are cut, we're going to see an awful lot of crap. But we might see things like In Treatment and they might bring us new writers, new voices.

I'm obviously arguing with my writing hat on: I said as much at the top. But I'm a drama nut and as a viewer I just want to be in the story, whatever it is and however much it cost. As a writer, mind, I should tell you I'm available. I'm here through Thursday, two-drink minimum, see your waitress for details.

William

In Treatment

2009-04-14T17:00:00.000-07:00

I'm so tired. It's 2am, but I've got to talk to you. I've got to Talk Things Through.

This is my problem: if I know something, I take it for granted that you do too and that in fact you've always known it. I'm not 100% sure how I square this with my job as a journalist or in the delight I have when I find out something and want to rush up to you with the news like a puppy.

This time, I'm pretty sure you don't know anything about In Treatment. If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you'll have seen me obsessing about it but otherwise, you're probably blank. That's because it's an American TV show that has never aired in the UK. Plus, I do follow US TV, I read about the pilots and the upfronts and the network presentations, and still I missed this

until it came out on US DVD about three weeks ago. Actually, I didn't even notice it then: I stumbled across an article online that mentioned it enough to intrigue me and then I read more and more until I ordered the DVD.

I want you to buy it too. No, really I think I want BBC4 to buy the series: it would be perfect for that favourite channel of mine. And here's why.

In Treatment is a HBO series that last year was made up of 43 half-hour episodes, each one of which was a single session of therapy with Gabrielle Byrne as the therapist, Paul. Each Monday night HBO showed his session with Laura (Melissa George). Tuesdays were Alex (Blair Underwood). Wednesdays were Sophie (an incredible Mia Wasikowska), on Thursdays he did couples' counselling with Jake and Amy (Josh Charles and Embeth Davidtz). Every Friday night, you'd see Paul meeting with his own therapist, Gina (Diane Wiest). Next week, it all starts over again.

The entire half hour is the therapist and his patient or on Thursday his patients, plural. No one else, at least not often. It's all talking heads and very often not talking heads: long stretches where no one talks at all. If I have one criticism, it's that very often when the patient leaves the room at the end of the episode, I found myself feeling for the actor. Not the character who'd been through this session but the actor who had performed such an intense and difficult role. That's not to say I didn't feel for the characters. Sophie is a particular worry: I was as concerned for her as if she were real. There's one patient I really didn't like but when a bad thing happens to him, I felt - and still feel - upset.

Still, talking heads for 43 half-hour episodes. And not many talking heads. And sometimes talking heads not talking. Plus this repetitive thing of each Monday being Laura and so on. I think it sounds tough going, I think it could even sound boringly rigid and the truth is that the series goes to every length and trick it can to break up the rhythms and surprise you. For instance, one Thursday session with Jake and Amy ends after five minutes: you entirely understand why they're leaving early but you can't believe it, you can't believe the episode is going to fill its remaining 25 minutes or whatever it is. And the time is filled to perfection.

So there are these stunts, these gags and in fact one episode takes place entirely away from the therapy room. Only, the show's many, many tremendously powerful moments are when it doesn't do any tricks, when it is precisely what it claims to be and is just allowing one human being to tell a story.

And the rigidity of the format doesn't constrain the show, it makes it entirely compelling. I watched it on DVD so I could just keep on watching whenever I could, but still there was a compulsive rigidity to knowing who the next episode is about. At first, you know Paul's going to his own shrink at the end of the week, so you're terribly curious to see what he has to say about these patients you've been following. Then you start to see what the patients do to him is echoed in what he does with other patients: whether he likes it or not, Paul the therapist is being affected by these patients.

He's especially affected by one of them. I don't want to reveal, but I do want to celebrate so allow me to just say that it's no chance the entire season begins with a Monday session with Laura. What happens there punches throughout the season.

More, at least two patient stories suddenly overlap, perhaps 15 or 20 episodes in. Then the compulsion is turned into addiction: you cannot, cannot, just cannot watch one patient recounting a date without demanding to see the next episode with the other patient telling the same story. Every thing you've just imagined about how different the tales are is exactly right, and the drama of that is beautifully exploited, but each patient is also dating the other for different, sometimes conflicting reasons. Then there's Paul and his therapist on Friday: what will he be saying about this pair? And why is he lying about them too?

Sometimes the next episode is a little tease, a way of holding you up before you get to the next week and the next part of one particular patient's story. In America, In Treatment is on iTunes and as well as choosing to buy individual episodes or an entire season, you have the option to just buy Laura's Story. Or Sophie's. And so on. If you have the chance to buy it over iTunes, do not take these options: buy the season. Whichever patient interests you the most, you learn more about them from watching the whole thing.

I have never been busier than I am right now. So much going on, so many drama projects I've tended to for a long time are now alive and taking every spare second I've got. But it's 14 days since I watched my first episode of In Treatment and tonight, about 1am after a 6am start and a drive to and from London, I watched the last one. Forty-three episodes in two weeks. Tell me it's not compulsive.

The second season is now underway in America: Gabrielle Byrne is back as Paul but I believe at least most of the patients are new. I know for certain that John Mahoney plays one of them: don't you immediately know that's going to be great?

There is a difference this year. Instead of one half hour each weeknight, HBO is bunching episodes together: I think it's two one night, three the next. I'm not sure why that disappoints me since I've been racing through, but it does feel like a compromise to get ratings.

You need to know a couple of things and I need to tell you some, too. Starting with Be'Tipul. This is the original Isreali series that HBO adapted for America; you can find some clips on YouTube. It has a beautiful title sequence but as yet I've not been able to follow anything else. But speaking of YouTube, there are some short promo features about the show: here's the one about Sophie.

And last, In Treatment is on US DVD. If you can play American discs, you've probably got a preferred supplier but for once try Amazon.co.uk. After weighing up the postage costs and retail prices, I decided to skip my usual dvdpacific.com and even the American Amazon to instead buy it via the UK Amazon site. It'll cost you around £30.

Or you could wait for a UK broadcaster to pick it up. Waiting is good. I'm telling myself that waiting is good because the second season DVD presumably won't be out until at least that second season has finished airing in the States. It's been running for two weeks, they're ten episodes in. It's going to be months before I can carry on watching.

It's going to be a hard couple of months. I'd best try writing my own immensely intense dramas in the meantime.

William

Red in tooth and claw

2009-04-14T14:51:00.000-07:00

Previously... the Red Planet Prize could've been made for me - but it wasn't. Not this year, anyway. I got to the finals, which was without question the single most affirming thing that's happened in my writing career. I mean, stage plays, yes, Radio Times, no doubt. But Red Planet wanted one-hour TV drama and that's my bag. That is the reason I am a writer at all. (qv Lou Grant.)

It was so affirming that it was practically enough to just be a finalist. I was disappointed not to win (and overdue congratulations to Mark Wilkinson who did) and in fact it was quite measurably disappointing: I've entered many contests where I didn't give a monkey's if I placed, I just used them as a deadline. I've entered some where to this day I have no idea if I won, though one has to assume they'd have mentioned it to me by now. Red Planet Prize, being so perfectly made for me, was more disappointing than anything else has ever been.

Except, you know, I couldn't and I can't shake that sense of affirmation I got from being a finalist: here are people whose work I admire, saying that I'm doing work they like. Moreover, I'm doing the work: that's all that ever matters to me, getting my hands dirty and doing the work: doing it for this contest and getting into the finals is doing the work, it's no longer playing at the job. What could be better? Well, winning, obviously.

But there was also a further issue, a second thing that made the Red Planet tingle. You know that some number entered, right, you know that so many were finalists and that one was the winner. But a selection of those finalists were also going to be invited to a workshop with Tony Jordan at Red Planet. I've no idea how many finalists would get this, but certainly not all, I was specifically told it wouldn't be all.

I'm one of them.

I just heard this afternoon. Punched the air, somehow accidentally caught a Radio Times PC right in the reset button and had to contain myself long enough to make sure their computer was okay.

Jason Arnopp is another on the course, and I've read his Red Planet script, he'll be winning it next year unless I can spike enough drinks, and so is Dave Turner. Haven't read his script, will bring arsenic just in case and if necessary I am willing to tickle him during the serious bits of the workshop.

So. I have not the faintest idea what the workshop will entail, but I get to find out next month. Just after I return home from New York City.

May's looking great, isn't it? Especially when I calm down and find a way to get my radio series recorded then too.

William

It's not the years, it's the mileage

2009-03-11T13:53:00.000-07:00

"The way I work generally is I figure a code, a general measuring stick parameter. A thirty scene thing means that each scene is going to be around four pages long... I have a tendency to work rather mathematically about all this stuff. As I build this up, you'll see it's done vaguely by the numbers."

Aren't you rushing to see the movie this fella is planning? I think you knew it was a man. But it's George Lucas and he's speaking privately in the first of five story conferences, five nine-hour story conferences about Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1978. He's spitballing away with Steven Spielberg, briefing screenwriter Laurence Kasdan.

Fancy reading the whole thing? A transcript of the entire thing is available right here in PDF.

I think I've said before that a reason the latest Indiana Jones film was so poor was that it was just a series of stunts with some bits to string them together. There were other reasons too, but that was one and it's a failing of a lot of films. But as I'd thought I'd heard and now know for sure, it's precisely how Raiders of the Lost Ark was done.

More, the stunt scenes they couldn't fit in went on to become the next couple of films.

So maybe George Lucas has a point.

Nah.

Mathematical screenwriting? What's that line of Aaron Sorkin's? I can't find my copy of his book but it was a crack about network TV executives saying you can't have politics on TV, can't have people with moustaches... Sorking said something along the lines of: "People make up rules because it's considerably easier than learning the real ones."

Blimey. From Lucas to Sorkin in one blog. There is actually a chance these two fellas have never been talked about in the same breath.

But anyway, I was fascinated by the Raiders documents: the torrent of ideas, for one thing, but more how we know so very well how Kasdan absorbed all this and wrote something so very good.

William

I had nothing to do with it

2009-03-09T05:29:00.000-07:00

I've had some wonderful nights in theatre and I'm going to admit to you that up to now the best have really been when it's been my own material on stage. Sitting in an audience, feeling them laugh and choke, knowing that an idea you had in your head is now working. Does it honestly get better?

Yes.

On Saturday night I was at the Carriageworks Theatre in Leeds where my wife Angela Gallagher's first-ever play, Rainwatching was performed.

You can't imagine how good it was. It went down a hurricane. Rainwatching closed out the whole festival of new writing and when the lights came up, the audience was in tears. There was a writer/actor/audience discussion panel right after it and most of the other plays were skipped over in seconds but Angela's was all anyone wanted to discuss. I may be biased there, but still.

The piece is a very raw, apparently simple but truly rich and very powerful monologue about a cancer patient with a right git of a husband. And during the panel discussion, the theatre announced to the audience that Rainwatching was to be restaged over the summer - in a trilogy including a monologue for the git husband.

I've written that. And I've written the final part of the trilogy, a piece about another character in both the first two monologues. It's the best thing I've ever written.

It's funny but one of the strongest reactions on Saturday night was about this husband character, Len, who we only hear about, we never see in Angela's Rainwatching. And another strong reaction was to the idea of seeing him in mine: everybody wants to see him, everybody wants to hear his side. But women who had been cheery with me until this point, positively turned on me: challenging me, I mean really threateningly challenging me, to try justifying this git. The look in their eyes!

I've never had such a good night - and nothing of mine was actually performed. But the power of Angela's piece, it was wonderfully affirming to see an audience reacting the way I believed they would.

What I didn't expect was the reaction after the show. Because of the panel, the audience knew what Angela looked like so they kept seeking her out in the bar. When we were leaving, people abandoned their conversations in mid-word to come over to her: not just to congratulate her, but to actually thank her for writing it.

And to give me a funny look about the sequel.

Wish you could've been there. I'll let you know when dates for the trilogy are announced - and in the meantime, fancy seeing what the fabulous writer Angela Gallagher looks like? Stop by her Breast Cancer Walk donations page and say Mr Angela sent you.

William

No news is great news

2009-02-22T15:00:00.001-08:00

Listen, sorry in advance: I'm about to not tell you something. But it's fantastic.

I'm writing/producing a three-part radio drama called Attachment. It's for Rhubarb Radio in the Midlands, a new internet radio station, and thereafter we're releasing it to iTunes. All this has been bubbling away and I'm obviously very busy, very happy doing it.

But tonight, about twenty minutes ago, I cast one of the parts. Someone has agreed to play a key role in the series and I cannot, cannot tell you who. But if I did, you would now be saying bloody hell. Even bloody hell and a half.

One reason I can't tell you is that it's much more fun this way. But another is that it's schedule-dependent: and this person isn't half busy. If it cripples me, I will fit around her schedule.

Ooops. There was a clue, wasn't there? Her.

It's all you're getting, I'm afraid.

William

24 things about me

2009-02-11T04:54:00.000-08:00

I'm so far behind this meme that I had to do something to get you to read, didn't I? It is 24, there's a reason. And you already know all the bits about tagging 25 other people including the geezer who tagged me, right? So, all of that, very good. Now let's play our game:

1. I'm papyrophobic. It means afraid of paper: I am a writer who's afraid of paper. Really that's a bit strong; I don't go around cowering at receipts, despite anything my accountant says. It's more a revulsion and it's only very broadly predictable: I'm fine with A4, for instance, I usually do okay with A5. Post-It notes are so much a problem that even writing this sentence was difficult. Broadsheet newspapers are great until the instant I've bought them. Anyway. Actually, receipts are tricky.

2. I said I'm a writer and so I know that I ought to be saying to you that my inspiration was Shakespeare - and the fella really knew some onions - or Stoppard or someone. I can say both of those and I can add Alan Plater, Aaron Sorkin, many more. Even William Goldman, except that he now irritates me so much I struggle to read his material. But the full truth is that I'm a writer because of Gene Reynolds, Leon Tokatyan, April Smith, Seth Freeman and Michelle Gallery: the writers of Lou Grant.

3. I've failed at least four driving tests but, I believe uniquely, I've also passed twice. Alcohol was not involved: see below.

4. I don't drink. Never have. Even working in a bar, I tried the odd thing, didn't like any of it. For most of my adult life the mantra has been Coke with a curry, Pepsi with a pizza, though my current spherical shape is making me reconsider.

5. I believe I lost my religion when I went to college. Before then, everybody I knew was Irish Descent - I cap that up because at the time I believed that to be an actual term, like Jewish - and they were also all Roman Catholic. At college, nobody else was either of these things and it was fantastic: so many people, so many ideas, such wonderful and wide-open experiences. Pity about the course: I studied computing and envy anyone who got to be immersed in literature instead. I was going to say that it surprises me how useful computing has been, even way over here in another career. But this 25 things lark is a Facebook meme and it took me a day to find where to write it on Facebook, so maybe not.

6. If I've got a song in my head and I stub my toe, catch my finger in a door, do anything physical that involves pain, I don't swear, I just say whatever lyric I've got to. This isn't my being prudish, it isn't calculated, it's entirely involuntary: if you open a door in my face I may well bellow "I'm loving angels instead".

7. I will buy anything by Dar Williams, Suzanne Vega, Cyndi Lauper, Bruce Springsteen or Paul Auster. Hovering around the automatic purchase are writers like Carrie Fisher, Paul Reiser and Mary Chapin Carpenter. I should do links here, shouldn't I?

8. Half my idiolect is made up of quotes; nothing is especially recognisable ("It's my job, it's what I do" is from a thousand bad TV shows) and usually there's no obvious reason why I've absorbed it. But people who know me very well do report watching ancient films or US sitcoms in the middle of the night and catching phrases they believed were mine. They think it's funny but me, not so much.

9. If you show up at my door, I will be delighted. If I show up at yours, I will have conjured a reason, some practical excuse. It's not you.

10. I'm a patzer. And I'm okay with that. I adore chess, I relish Scrabble, it doesn't mean I'm any good at either of them.

11. I love things that are strawberry, orange or tomato flavoured but I don't like strawberries, oranges or tomatoes.

12. I wish I'd written Veronica Mars. Also Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, obviously.

13. This is the reason there are only 24 things: this one was going to be the shock, but just in time I remembered who could be reading it. I'm going to say phew now.

14. I would not kill to write like Dar Williams. But I'd maim. Please focus: I'm not going to reveal what number 13 was, okay?

15. My favourite place is New York City. I can't tell you why: it's not another secret, it's just that I don't know why. I'm fully aware of its problems, yet when I step out onto its streets, I am taller.

16. I'm a cartography nut. Actually, I'm a drama nut, that's at the heart of most things about me but in this case I am fascinated by seeing how maps purport to tell us directions yet are really revealing so much more about the people who drew them. What they choose to include, what they choose to omit. How big or small they draw enemy countries. The lies, the hopes, the politics. I'm rubbish finding my way on OS maps but I'll bore your teeth off about the fact that it's because it's called Ordnance Survey that the UK is the most-mapped region of the world. Military, doncha know?

17. I believe radio drama can do anything. I'm now producing radio and realising that yep, it's true, but it's bloody hard.

18. I've taken two big gambles in my career and the first one paid off brilliantly. Frightening to think I nearly didn't do it; I could be writing bad computer software even now. It would be really bad: full of surprise plot twists. The second gamble isn't half taking a long time, but I believe the prize is worth it.

19. I am very good at multitasking. Hang on, I also listen, I effortlessly remember birthdays and I've only ever been to half a single football match: I'm not a man at all, am I? Though I have caught myself watching digital TV in the middle of the night and getting too interested in documentaries like Hitler's Pets.

20. This will seem unlikely since I've left it to point 20, but I am more interested in you than I am in me. After all, I've been here, I've seen me do it, I want to know about you instead. Plus, you dress better, and you know you do.

21. If something - a drama, script, prose, film - is somehow right, just, you know, right, it will make me choke. I don't mean sentimental, I don't mean soppy. Just, every piece of work sets out to do something and when it seems to me that it has got there, got there with gusto, I appreciate it the way you might art. You'd never believe some of the things that have done this to me, but there is one Dar Williams song that is so exquisitely done that it has repeatedly left me with hot tears running down my cheeks. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit did it three times: Jeanette Winterson's novel, her screenplay and the BBC TV dramatisation.

22. I'm writing this to you in the bizarre idea that you'd be interested, though, face it, what are the odds you'll read all the way? I'm safe, I can say anything. Except 13, obviously. But still, here we are, 24 things about me, and I also have a blog, a Facebook page and a podcast. In all seriousness, I do have ego and self-worth problems.

23. I am really, really good at reading situations and seeing what's going on - unless I am in any way involved myself. Most of my friends are women, I don't know why but it's statistically noticeable, and so obviously I've had many conversations about rubbish boyfriends. So when I was in college, I went to another university to see a woman I had been besotted with at school: she starts telling me how rubbish her boy is and I automatically go into counselling mode. It took me seven years to realise that the reason she was getting red and exasperated was that she was offering me a chance. I'm relieved to tell you that I think it worked out for the best, but still, it's scary to be so sharp and empathetic yet to have a total blind spot like this. If you fancy me, you have to tell me or I will never know. I promise that I have NHS Direct on speed dial, I can get you the help that you need.

24. I once walked up to a random door at BBC Television Centre, knocked, went in and pitched for work without the slightest idea what was in that office. I didn't get it. But similarly, I once randomly phoned up the Los Angeles Times, said I was in town, and talked my way into a bylined piece in the paper. If you know Lou Grant you know why this was special for me.

25. The last one ought to be a kicker, shouldn't it? But I've already spent my kicks on number 13, so I may have to go with a wimper. What if I tell you that one of these 24 things is a lie? Or what about that boilerplate instruction text that comes with all these and has the line "If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you"? I can't help but read that as "25 is a hell of a big number, I'm running out, you'll do". If you read it that way too, I promise it isn't true this time: see point 20 for details.

Besides, you've no interest in my 25, you just want a good excuse to write yours, don't you? And I want to read it, so everybody wins and it costs us nothing.

What I'm fantastic at

2009-01-06T11:22:00.000-08:00

Remember your careers teachers telling you that interviewers are going to ask you what your weaknesses are? And that you should say "Well, perhaps I can be too much of a perfectionist"?

Such bollocks. And yet, it was prescient bollocks because it foresaw the world of the writer's blog: obviously one writes in order to communicate precisely how huge our egos are but, still, there's at the very least a frisson of self-advertising in doing it. I don't think I've got any work through talking to you like this but I can immediately think of times when an editor has read what I've written so I'm aware that this cannot be the entirely relaxed, artless chat that one would like.

So when Piers picks up a meme from Lara, and others before her, asking for us all to say what we're good and bad at in writing, I'm going to go out on limbs and say the Good just might be emphasised over the bad. Even down to initial capital letters.

And why not? I hear the challenge and I dive in with gusto:

WHAT I'M FANTASTIC AT
Dialogue, characters and pace that mean my material has life and verve right there on the page.

what i'm bad at
Well, perhaps I can be too much of a perfectionist.

William

Contains emotional intense scenes

2008-12-30T14:26:00.000-08:00

On the Mac in my office, there's a half-written review of my 2008. I made some notes on my iPhone too. But here, sitting in front of my PowerBook, I realise one thing: I have too many computers.

And I'll delete all of it because I also realise that there really is only one thing to say: Angela's breast cancer has been treated and, so far as you can ever get anything like an all-clear, the treatment has done its job.

So, see you in 2009?

Okay, well. This time last year I wrote a huge amount about quite a little; it was all success, success and three times success but primarily so that I could then slap you with the news of Angela's diagnosis. I like a punchline. When I thought about the year ahead, rather than just day-to-day and appointment-to-appointment, it was to mentally write the whole of 2008 off. But it's been a stubborn bugger of a year and a great deal of it seems to have been rather successful again, almost as if it's in spite of me.

Well, I say that and I don't believe it: this year I have obviously looked after Angela before anything else yet still I've had three stage play productions, worked on two new magazines, become a finalist in one contest. Plus the annual dance around BBC Radio 4 just seemed to be more fun this time. I won a spot on an invitation-only BBC Writers' Room course. I did a Doctor Who blog that became the most popular read on the RadioTimes.com website. I shot short films for Radio Times, worked on commercial DVDs, I've had an overwhelming worldwide reaction to a casual aside I made that I might give up doing the UK DVD Review podcast.

And it's all come from pitching every day. Every working day for the year.

It might not have been much: I counted meetings, phone calls, emails, script submissions, contest entries, all sorts of things as being the pitch for the day but I did it. Well, I have one more to do but I suspect I'll manage.

If I'm to be 100% honest, I should tell you that I have also managed to lose a lot of work this year: quite a bit of Radio Times magazine work went away - all for quite fine reasons, all very amicable and fine, but still I do miss some of it. But then you compare the loss of On This Day to the time I had to hold Angela upright in the chair at the GP surgery. How she had a bad allergic reaction to one of the chemotherapy drugs and because I raised the alarm, the entire medical staff ran to her with a crash-cart. You can live without On This Day.

Still, it's been tremendous having readers complain to RT. One woman from Sussex, I think, phoned the reader services department to say she'd seen I wasn't writing the feature and wanted to ask if I were okay.

I used to think that work was everything and, well, I still do. But we're writers, we can handle contradictions: I simultaneously think that people are everything. I said I pitched every day; sometimes I'd forget that was what I was doing. The people on Doctor Who Adventures magazine, for instance, are just so nice I amble over to see them when I can and probably I ought to be bringing ideas, I ought to have had a Pitch In Mind. Often enough I have, I suppose, but usually it's an amble. Similarly with Radio 4, I think: there are producers in R4 whose work is fantastic and I just enjoy talking with them. Radio's a funny world: I did have a proper pitch meeting with a radio producer and it looks like I will get the work I was after, but the best bit was nattering about radio in general. For a couple of hours.

Which is what I'll end up doing with you if I don't shut up. I did just write you a few hundred more words about all the great things that have happened with my work this year, but let me skip: in so many ways, and for so many obvious reasons, I'm ready to move on from 2008.

But some years won't let you go easily. Like 1983. Follow: I went to the Longleat Doctor Who thing in 1983 and this week I learn from a DVD feature about it that there were 70,000 people over the two days of the event. If you don't know about this event, Who writer Paul Cornell described it only mildly-jokingly as Doctor Who's Woodstock.

Now of those 35,000 each day, I'm on the 25th Anniversary DVD of Doctor Who: The Five Doctors. Imagine my jaw flapping about as I watched this DVD a few days ago. Have a look:

I have rarely had so much hair. Or a duffel coat.

Normally, I've got to tell you, I don't like photographs from that long ago. I'm not keen on one taken 20 minutes back. But seeing myself at Longleat like that, so unexpectedly, I don't know: I'm just sure that the me back then would be pleased at the me I am now.

Though if we could've just had a natter, I'd have told me to tell me to hurry up. And to get Angela's breast examined earlier.

That's the reason I'm glad to be done with 2008. But I'm also looking forward to 2009 for all the work that's ahead of me - and because I'm going back to New York City in May.

Have a good new year,
William

PS I figured out Blogger's location-aware bits. And how to make it lie.

Location aware

2008-12-15T13:46:00.000-08:00

I'm in a cottage that would suit Wuthering Heights - well, bar the wireless broadband, the Sky Freesat and a kitchen to dine for - but otherwise, Bronte territory. Well, I say her territory, it's actually the Lake District.

Okay, I'm in a place called Stone Cottage but whirling around outside is a storm the like of which Cathy would feel at home. The view out of the window is the same as the view inside: the night is so dark the windows are like mirrors. And they got that dark around 4pm this afternoon.

It's only December 15 but since I'm on a holiday that has been planned all year, that is something Angela has been looking forward to all year, and since it's been a chemotherapy-laden year, I'm now so relaxed that I feel 2008 is over. It helps that I just did an end-of-year edition of UK DVD Review.

For which I've got to thank all the listeners who came on: I've thanked them personally but they're so good on the show, they should be shouted about here. Have a listen to them all in the best edition I've done all year.

What's great for me is that while you only hear a minute or two of each person, I got to have a great blather with them all. In each case I could've played out twice as much as I did, it was difficult to slice in and out to keep the show flying.

In one such conversation, Richard Smith brought up the topic of how I apparently sound as if I'm talking just to you, not to some large group. I think that's the greatest compliment I can remember: it's how I believe radio should be done, it's how I think it's best and why radio is so great, and it's of course what I always aim for.

Can't bear the zoo format where a presenter has a posse and we're blessed to be listening in. Even when there is a pair of presenters, it's rarely good for me. In the eighties there was suddenly a fashion for TV shows to be fronted by two hosts who, basically, told each other what was going on. I could never watch that without thinking the other fella should've paid more attention in rehearsals.

Anyway, I slugged this entry Location Aware. Do you know the term? Obviously you understand it but it happens to be what iPhone applications are called when they do something that requires them to know where you are. The great Vicinity, for instance, uses GPS to check where you are and then offers you lists of the nearest banks, restaurants, hotels, endless other things.

And now Blogger is location aware. Hang on, I have to press a button.

Oh. I pressed it. Has anything happened? I'm in Patterdale, Cumbria, and you may or may not see a map of this. I'm not excited yet.

This relaxing lark is so complicated.

William

"Mounting to dangerous heights and travelling into the vast inane"

2008-12-05T09:18:00.000-08:00

That's a quote and a half of full cream milk, isn't it? You'd put it on a sweatshirt if it didn't need XXL to get all the words on. That may not remain a problem for me for as long as I'd hope.

And there's a way to find the words "vast inane" a little insulting. There's a way to find "dangerous heights" a little cocky. But right now, as I'm working on end of year stuff and so getting all reflective, it's hard not to think of 2008 as having seen some serious career climbing progression. Normally, I would be shrugging at you about now: my own mother does not maintain a chart of my progress, why would I imagine you'd be interested? It'd be nice if she did. Anyway.

Part of it does involve getting into the finals of the Red Planet contest. And there won't be news on that until next year so there's plenty of exciting pratfall potential in any boasting I might do about getting this far. That's one thing.

And there's that quote, "mounting to dangerous heights and travelling into the vast inane", which is an old favourite and which you are a wee bit intrigued about. I like the unintended sense of it that achievement is ridiculous, that perhaps we choose what we call achievement and that this, the choosing, is part of our great inanity.

It doesn't actually mean any of that. Talk about reading things into something.

The quote is really from Pao Phu Tao by Ko Hung - I can hear you go "Ah!" - and it is believed to be the earliest reference to helicopters, to rotary flight. It was written sometime in the fourth century AD and t'was but a short step from there to Airwolf.

My Red Planet submission is called Wasps and it's set, primarily, in the air with said helicopters and the police people who fly a lot of them. And I didn't realise it until the day I got the email about being in the finals that my very first script, the first screenplay I completed, was also about helicopters. In fact, if Wasps ever went to series, the things that have to happen in episode 2 happened in The Strawberry Thief some years ago.

I need you to know that no piece I've written in between these two has featured helicopters at all. I'm not, well, strange about them. I have flown them, but rotor time is so expensive I can't claim the lessons I had amounted to much at all. Still, watching the whole world tilt under your feet, and knowing it's your cack-handed use of the controls, that's the most exciting way I've ever had to make myself feel sick. And there was metaphor even in lesson 1: my instructor told me I was a natural at hovering.

Anyway. Red Planet means a huge amount to me because it's precisely, I mean to the nickel, about the type of writing I want to do. I've said it before, if the prize also included a bacon sandwich and an iPhone, I'd be convinced the whole thing was invented for me.

So to get some affirmation, even just this amount, that I can do the thing I want to do, is of course a dangerous height. To have it over a piece whose roots go back that far and which effectively charts my progression as a writer more than my mother does, that's got to have a little bit of a deliciously vast inane.

Funny thing: Wasps is the most commercial thing I've ever written, but it's simultaneously the least. I mean I hope it's high drama but I think it's more low cunning, and if I have better characters and dialogue than any helicopter TV show since Whirlybirds, that's not a bleedin' difficult thing to do. But just putting a helicopter in is expensive. Doing the things I need them to do, priceless.

And the week my best action thriller script ever got this little spot of recognition happened to be the week I wrote my most acutely personal, non-commercial, bitterly felt stage writing. I wrote a piece that was frightening. Not the subject matter or how I was doing it, really, but having this piece inside me and having to get it out, having to. But simultaneously being honestly scared of it. The phone would ring and I'd grab it, glad to escape the writing. And then if the call went on too long, I was frightened that I'd lose the moment and be unable to carry on writing.

I was honestly feeling pale from the writing. And it's funny that I should keep using the word "honestly" because I think that was the thing. It's the most honest, truthful, unpleasantly raw piece I've done. All writing is a peek into someone's soul, or at least into their view of the world, and it's a good thing if the reader catches you bleeding. What I didn't really feel until this piece was that you can do this, I can seemingly do this, I can make a piece so raw it is painful and yet it's fiction. An utter lie.

How can truthful writing be all lies? Ask me last month and I couldn't have told you. Ask me now and I still can't, but I can write it.

So this is why I'm unexpectedly seeing 2008 as a year of dangerous heights. I fully accept that as heights go, it's not that dangerous, that it's less mountaineering and more an exercise step class, but I'm hoping that means 2009 will entail more climbing.

I'd mentally written 2008 off, right back in 2007: I knew the year would be taken up with Angela's chemotherapy. And it's bizarrely great to tell you that now, this moment, she's in the kitchen sorting out a delivery of fish. I loathe fish, I especially hate cooking the stuff, touching it, smelling it, but I did it often enough during the year. What I mean is that she's well enough to stand, that she's doing what she wants to do instead of at times being unable to move. And though there's a way to go, when I think of what some of the chemo drugs could've done, it makes dangerous heights and vast inanes feel smaller. (A single example: one drug she had to take has been known, commonly, to remove all feeling from your finger tips for a decade.)

So. I'm surprised that 2008 went as well for my writing as it has - previously on 2008: Red Planet you know about, this personal honest writing lark too, but also two produced stage plays and one big fat not, also getting new journalism work including on Doctor Who Adventures magazine, which may be my favourite thing of the year.

Now 2009 feels wide open, unbound, unconstrained. If Red Planet would like to hire me on January 1 that would be okay. And, hey, I have the story for episode 2 ready to go.

William

Now entering Damascus: Please Drive Carefully

2008-12-04T11:28:00.000-08:00

You like ebooks, you're an eejit. You think novels on dinky screens are great, you're mad. And now, as of midafternoon today, I am amazed and a little apologetic to say I stand beside you.

I've been reading Pride & Prejudice on my iPhone.

Look, it's not like I haven't had a go before. The idea of thousands of books where you had one before is simultaneously great and awful: I rather love having thousands of books. And no ebook reader has ever made me forget what a bleedin' tedious phrase "ebook reader" is. Just let me have the damn book, okay?

And Amazon's Kindle. Whose fault is that? I hear the screen is good, but it takes an age to turn a page and I read really, really and I'm going to say it a third time because at my reading speed this sentence is nowhere near long enough, really fast. Seriously: I never speed read, I do no trickery, I just happen to read at 600 words per minute. Back in the day, I used to type at 120wpm. You can imagine how handy this is in my game.

But this just means I am not even all that happy with turning real pages in real books; until I'm into it, that's another interruption, another distraction. With the Kindle, apparently you touch a corner of page and it gets around to it in its own time.

But then, the Kindle may be the ugliest device I've ever seen. You cannot, cannot hold even the display models I have and not put them right back on the shelf, thanks, goodbye, is that the time really?

Mind you, is 1970s crap the new black? I watch those TV ads for the DS Lite and I'm embarrassed: the graphics are right up there with BBC Micro, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum ones at best. Celebrities play with these pieces of plastic and try not to look ashamed. Go ahead, look ashamed: there are some feelings one has to be true to and playing with plastic that Mattell would've rejected in 1944 is one of them.

Only...

I read a lot on my iPhone. I mean, a lot. An awful lot. At the least I read several hundred news stories a day via the news reader Manifesto. (Link opens up the App Store in iTunes.) And as dispiriting as it is to to see 1,780 or more unread artlcles sometimes, it's a bit more dispiriting to read 0. I get itchy. I'm on a train, I've read everything I have to read and there's either not enough battery power left in my iPhone to watch a movie or there are plenty enough people looking like they'd take the phone off my hands, no questions answered, I get itchy.

And Stanza is free from the App Store.

In the space of an afternoon, I'm converted. You don't expect me to say it's better than reading a book, but I didn't expect to be saying that it's good. I was lost in Pride & Prejudice the story, it was invisible to me that I was holding an iPhone and tapping for the next page. No scrolling, just a light tap and you move on. And it moves so fast that it doesn't delay me and my freakish reading speed.

This reminds me of when online bookstores were just coming along. The big argument was that they could never replace real bookshops and as we've seen the answer is that nope, they didn't. They didn't need to, either: you could now have a really good time browsing the world for books online, you could have a really good time in a bricks-and-mortar bookshop too. It became two lots of really good, and I like really good.

I expect you're partial to a bit of really good, too.

So there you go. This morning, never! This evening, ooh, what would Jane Austen say about this then?

Fortunately, we know the answer. From Austen's own private correspondence we can hear the woman herself speaking across all these years to ask about battery life on the iPhone and doesn't the Kindle look so very 16th Century?

William

The Simpsons get an Apple Store

2008-12-01T07:25:00.000-08:00

What do you mean, I've had my head down writing, everybody's already seen this? It is spreading like bejaysis, but only because it's very good: Springfield Mall gets an Apple Store.

William

Seeing Red

2008-11-26T13:43:00.000-08:00

In the new tradition of short gurgling entries, as championed by Jason Arnopp, I'm a finalist in this year's Red Planet Pictures screenwriting contest.

I've said it before and I won't half say it again now, but this is the best television writing competition I've ever seen.

William

Two minutes back

2008-11-24T09:36:00.000-08:00

Laurence Timms and I have been blathering about Sports Night in the chain of comments to my last entry, Special powers and this is not uncommon. I'm a blatherer. And this was about Sports Night. I occasionally pause to wonder at how deeply I can adore that series when I simultaneously have zero interest in sports. Any sports. All sports.

Does that tell you how good the show must be? I hope so. But one thing it tells me, and one thing Laurence and I have been discussing, is how remarkably well it conjures up the feeling of making a live broadcast. (It's a comedy by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin about the people who make a late night sports TV show.)

It'd be easy to say the show conjures up the excitement, and I think actually I have said that, but it's much richer than excitement. Pilots have told me they see the world very differently since they first started flying, that it's the same world but more 3D somehow. And I used to live in a Birmingham village where there were many roads leading to a central island and I knew every one of them intensely, except one. I don't know why I didn't know that one, but if I ever did come down it, I would be caught by how the familiar island looked so different.

Sports Night captures that with how the characters react to time. It's like every studio I've ever been in, the way that time becomes a commodity and also loses and gains its duration.

I was in a radio studio on Friday, just visiting a lecturer and her students with a very nice radio facility. Ninety seconds before the 10am news bulletin, nobody was in the studio. And that was right, that felt right. Ninety seconds is an age and every one of those ninety was used in rewriting the news, updating it.

But then after the five-minute bulletin, it was hard to give up the time for a post-mortem because you were focused on the 11am one instead. Ninety seconds is an age, 55 minutes is nowhere near long enough.

The last time I worked in local radio I did it remotely; just recording items from my own office studio where I make the UK DVD Review podcast. And I'd email the audio over to BBC Hereford & Worcester. I enjoyed that, I love the success of my little podcast - especially now, at this time of year when listeners are voting for their favourite release of 2008 - but Friday was fantastic. Being in a studio, just being there, not even doing anything, but standing in the middle of the rush. Wonderful.

Funny thing. I've described this as if it were solely a radio studio but the students' newsroom fed both radio and television. The TV stuff was fine, looked very good, but it was the atomic clocks and the clean feed audio in the radio studios that won me over.

There's a smell to radio studios; all very clean and neat, but there's a smell you can feel. I was back in there for two minutes, a depressing number of years since I used to work in BBC local radio, and I had that sense, that feel, that smell. You're expecting me to say it was as if I'd never been gone and you're right in a way, I do certainly feel that. But if I hadn't loved, if I didn't love everything I went away from radio to do, I'd be saying now that I'd made the wrong decision.

There's nothing like a radio studio, nothing in the world. Not when it's live or preparing to be live. Not when everything's done for the day, either.

If you've never worked in a radio studio, I hope you get to. And if you have or you do, what's your address and how can I come over?

William

Special powers

2008-11-20T05:58:00.000-08:00

Here's the thing. And it is a thing. I'm in a stealing mood. I don't know why, I think it's maybe because I just had my first experience of hanging with litigators and winning, baby, winning.

Do you notice how I can't say "baby"?

But I was thinking of doing something bad. It was even bad in two parts. I might go so far as to call it Evil. Well, no, that's too harsh. Call it Evil-.

Evil- part 1: Jason Arnopp said this thing the other week about looking at key drama moments in his blog, really exploring what makes us writers want to write. He hasn't done a huge amount of this yet, though there is this about Apparitions. I would like to steal his idea. Don't copy me. If you do this too, it becomes an internet meme and where's the Evil- in that?

But, wait, Evil- part 2: I was actually thinking of popping something up onto YouTube so that I could point you at it and claim, all innocent-like, that it was a wonderful coincidence that some Evil+ person should rip it off and put it up there at that precise same moment.

Only, someone has. Not this very minute, but not an awfully long time ago. Somewhen back in August this year.

So. They've done the ripping off, I've acknowledged that I'm stealing from your man Jason Arnopp, let's play our game.

If you know me at all, you know the joy of drama for me is in people talking. I might have them in helicopters, I'm not immune to some of yer action, but ultimately it's where two people shouting at each other can take us. And you'll not be surprised that my favourite writers are ones who are hot on dialogue and rhythms of speech, language, such as Carrie Fisher. Wait, I need to stop that sentence for a sec: I'll resume the list of favourite linguistic writers after this public service announcement. I just checked Carrie Fisher's website and it's alright, but it hasn't been updated since the dawn of time. However, she has a new book out any second now so it'll probably get some welly into the site. And if it doesn't, you can just buy her book. If I love writers who play with language, I adore good titles even more. Her book's an autobiography called Wishful Drinking.

I was going to rattle off a lot of names but I can see you're in a hurry. Let me cut to one: Aaron Sorkin. You know this fella for his dialogue. Maybe for a lot of other things, but dialogue and in fact dialogue at speed, right? While walking? If you're thinking of The West Wing, ratch it up a notch and you've got Sports Night. The same lightspeed dialogue exchanges but even faster because the show was only half an hour.

If we met in a bar, and had run out of conversation so much and so fast that you were reduced to asking me what car/vegetable/animal I would be, I would steer you to this topic instead. My favourite Sports Night scene. Please remember that this is a fast, fast show, that its verve and wit and ferociously powerful way of grabbing you is famously down to the dialogue. Now have a look at the opening to season 2, episode 1, Special Powers by Aaron Sorkin. Whoever put this on YouTube put the first ten minutes up but I just want you to watch the top 90 seconds.

Have a look right here.

What did you think? Admit it, you know I meant up to "It's been 90 days" but you carried right on watching.

There is something special about the opening moments of a new season. You need to be confident but not cocky, you need to know you're good and be as good as you think you are. And you need to seduce people in. The very first episode of Sports Night did it with a smash-bang start, throwing you right into the action, but this second run took 45 seconds before there was any dialogue at all. Without commercials, the show runs 22 minutes and Aaron Sorkin chose to take 90 seconds before there was any meaningful dialogue. And this in a show where every script typically ran 20 pages longer than standard because of the volume of dialogue.

I think that's quite brave, I think it's quite wonderful. And I'd forgotten that while he subverted expectations of what Sports Night would be like, Sports Night itself was subverting what sitcoms were meant to be like. This is less obvious now because so many shows work the same way but in its day (1999/2000) this was a multi-camera sitcom yet done like no other had been. Sports Night looks like a film, not another variant on the I Love Lucy standard three-wall set and four-camera shoot.

For instance, watch that first shot again of Casey McCall (Peter Krause) throwing paper into a bin: you know, you just know it took a hell of a long time to get that looking so perfect. But now name any other sitcom of the period that would spend the effort.

I'd like to know if you hadn't seen the show before and yet this drew you in: when I saw that clip I'd already seen 20+ episodes so the relationship it was describing was very familiar to me. I think it works regardless, but you can never unwatch something to find out.

The clip also has that music, She Will Have Her Way by Neill Finn. I watched the episode on the new DVD set and then rewound it, pointed my iPhone at the screen and tapped on Shazam to find out what the music was and buy it over iTunes. Normally I don't rate Aaron Sorkin's music choices; they're often superb but equally often just a bit smaltzy for me. But here, I'd never heard the track before and I've heard it an awful lot since.

Aaron Sorkin has got dialogue, yes, but he's got pace and rhythm too. I find it very hard to slow down, it's as if I want to throw things at you until you like one. But I'm consciously taking a breath, looking for the visual way to showcase dialogue, the way to lead you in to a story in as fresh and new a way as I can, looking to steal an approach and an idea I admire greatly.

Listen, whoever did the YouTube thing, you know they put the whole episode up, doncha? Watch it if ye may, but then buy the DVD set, okay? Some 40-odd episodes and it's a gem.

Hang on, I started this hours ago and kept nipping off to check out Carrie Fisher websites for you. (The others I was going to include were Paul Auster, Dar Williams, Suzanne Vega, by the way.)

I think someone's stolen my evening. How did they do that?

William

There's one born every... what?

2008-11-10T09:19:00.000-08:00

Okay, you can tell this isn't going to be my most precise piece of maths since I wrote a feature on how to model the UK economy in Excel*. And perhaps the first clue to how many decimal places of accuracy I'm aiming for will come when you reach the word "Wikipedia".

Wikipedia - that didn't take long; I thought you'd trust me at least a little longer - says the world's population is growing at 75 million people per year. Now, I make that 0.007 people every minute. So that's 1,428.6 minutes per person. Most people will tell you it takes three minutes and nine months to make a person, but you heard the truth here first: it's 23 hours, 48 minutes, 57 seconds.

Now, that leaves you 11 minutes and 3 seconds to relax at the end of the day, but that's not what I'm looking for.

Instead, there's a news report today saying that spam email senders get one response for every 12.5 million emails they send.

And I can't join the dots. I so want to be able to say to you that therefore this means there is one sucker born every 9.7 seconds or something, but I've got one statistic in this hand, the other in that one, and I can't bring the two together. I think that part of it is that I'm missing an episode here, we don't have a comparative time basis for the two: do I need to know how long it takes 'em to send 12.5m emails? I think I do. I think I need to know how many they send per annum to conclusively figure it out.

Unless you know better. And can now take part in this Build a Reasonably Pointless But Faux Informative Punchline contest that I've just decided to come up with.

People, I got CSE grade 1 Maths: I'm far from proud of this, but I'm just saying. Any help welcomed.

William
*PS I really did do that, model the UK economy in Excel version 5. I think I've told you this before, but the economy's been on my mind a bit recently, I've been carrying some worry about whether my maths in that feature had any impact anywhere.

Play for today

2008-11-01T00:40:00.000-07:00

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

I'm Not That Keen on Lucy...

2008-10-27T04:07:00.000-07:00

But I understand other people love her. And even for me, this is a gem: watch the unaired pilot episode of I Love Lucy.

And since it became one of the most enormously successful sitcoms of all time, you just know it had a rocky start.

Via Metafilter.

William

Quo Vadimus

2008-10-23T02:41:00.000-07:00

Here’s a thing. I do radio podcast show, it's been very successful for me, getting into the iTunes top 20 of all podcasts in all categories, worldwide. Startling success. But it's been going for a while, I've done over 160 editions now and I have been thinking it's in the endgame.

Especially since we're approaching the show's busiest time. It's a DVD review podcast but November is heavy with a poll of the year. I'm proud of this: I do not now or have I ever given a stuff that Indiana Jones gets X votes or sells Y copies, I publicly distort the chart by how passionate voters have been. The math is rubbish, the statistical analysis isn't worth a damn, but we get ten DVDs that are each raved about by listeners. Ten DVDs that are their Sports Nights, their Battlestars.

And we do this list together, it's has the feel of a conspiracy between me and the listener, with the aim that it comes out early, say December 10. It's in time for us all to hear a top ten where every entry is there by passion and it's in time for us to buy them for Christmas. I especially love DVDs that I didn't like yet others adored. And then I get the most effusive, persuasive listener on to the show to make their case.

Couldn't love that episode any more than I do.

But it's also off the charts harder to produce than any other edition, and the ones that set up this voting aren't picnics either. For lots of reasons I have been looking at whether it's time to end the show and it'd make a tough couple of months easier if I dropped it now rather than later.

Only, this morning I watched the final Sports Night. And watched it again with the commentary, making me very late. And exactly as Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme were ending, I mean on the second of the last word, my iPhone pinged with an email from a listener saying how much they'd enjoyed my most recent edition.

You send these things out into the ether and though you obviously want listeners, it's such a surprise when you learn there are any. I was talking the other night about the abusive emails I've had, we've all had, in journalism and how it feels as if the senders don't realise there's a real person at the other end. (Because oftentimes I've replied and got back nothing short of an embarrassed "um" kind of reply and an about-face on whatever the topic was.) But maybe I'm the same, apparently I'm the same: as much work as you put into something, the conceptual leap that it might actually get the audience you want is beyond me.

It's much easier to end a show if you don't think it's being listened to. Equally, you can't just extend something beyond its natural life because it has an audience. But equally 2, the sequel, you can't go back. There’s a gag on that Sports Night commentary about now doing a movie of it, and for an instant there I wanted that. But I really don't think you can go back: when it’s gone, it’s gone and anything else you try to do has to be its own self, it can’t ever be part of what’s gone.

It’s not like I don’t get quite a bit of email about the podcast. But this one, coming in a precisely that second when I was lamenting how there was no more Sports Night, it gave me a buzz.

So I don't know if I'll wrap up my show but I'm going to think about it more and not so casually throw it away.

William

Theatre dates

2008-10-20T08:25:00.000-07:00

My "Harvest Festival, PI" leads off the final night of the Carriageworks Theatre's new writing festival.

That would be Saturday, November 1, so if you're in Leeds, come wave. They're saying tickets are selling fast, but that could just be to make me feel fantastic.

William

Obama, McCain... Bartlet? Roslin?

2008-10-18T13:12:00.000-07:00

Entertainment Weekly in the States was asking for your vote on who should be the next President of the United States: Jed Bartlet, Laura Roslin, David Palmer or Mackenzie Allen.

I say was because I thought I was pointing this out to you while there was still time to vote: maybe there is but now I go back to their page, I get neither a voting form nor a table of results. Hopefully your mileage will vary.

If not, let me tell you that when I looked earlier today, The West Wing's Jed Bartlet was winning, I think he had 42% of the vote compared to 32% for his nearest rival. Can't remember who that was. But running third at the time was Battlestar Galactica's Laura Roslin and I voted for her.

I'm wondering if I did that because she's a woman. I think it's cringingly embarrassing that America has never had a woman President and that the UK's only had one woman Prime Minister. But then I completely ignored Commander in Chief's Mackenzie Allen (Geena Davis). So maybe it's that I never watched C-in-C, that David Palmer was President on 24 so long ago that I couldn't remember his first name without looking him up. And that Roslin hasn't let me down by being written by someone else after four seasons.

But C-in-C was an interesting example of what I think is quite a new phenomenon in US TV drama: the dizzying height and the dizzying fall, all done at speed. You're used to shows dying, even especially being yanked off the air within a few episodes. But Commander in Chief came out like an instant hit - and then by the end of the first season, it was dying. Joan of Arcadia boomed into life and looked set for a long run which maybe it deserved but somehow nobody bothered tuning in for the second season.

I know that's only two examples but I did have a third until this paragraph. Can't fathom where my head was going. But is it too early to ask if long-running series have had their day?

Yes.

Okay, well, I only asked. You can be quite cutting sometimes.

I think Jed Bartlet is going to win and it was a joy to read Aaron Sorkin's account of a fictitious conversation between Bartlet and Obama. (You're going to have to explain to me why I used the word fictitious there: when only one character in a conversation is real, it's either fictitious or time to phone for help.) If you missed that, it was in The New York Times.

I write to you with a new monitor on my Mac. Just wanted to share that.

William

Criticism on toast

2008-10-17T01:37:00.000-07:00

I just like the term, I want to share it with you and since I thought it up, I want to say it like this: criticism on toast(TM).

You've had praise sandwiches, we all have. If you've just read the worst script imaginable, and you're obligated to comment helpfully, you find a few good things to say at the top, a few good ones to leave to the bottom, and you try to make the filling in between helpful but thin. When the script is so bad that you just have to get out fast, you use a praise sandwich.

I've been sent many a sandwich. It shouldn't work: as soon as you read an opening line that goes "Your typing is immaculate", you know you're in trouble. Perhaps it's just me, and how I'm a sucker for being praised for my typing (oh, if you only knew I was serious there), but I read this opening line of death and I am simultaneously aware I'm in for a beating but also mollified.

Once I read a script so bad I had to go take a two-hour bath to think up something good to say about it for the bread in the praise sandwich. And I still failed. In the end, I made up something: I said the opening was just like XXXXXX and then I went on to praise XXXXXX for a paragraph instead.

But the other day I got my first of a brand new type of script report, a type I am going to call criticism on toast. Because it went straight in on this doesn't work, that doesn't work, what were you thinking here and this is rubbish. Then it ended with comments about great gags, it praised me on the way out. Without the slightest doubt, this praise at the end was as false as the praise I give at the top and bottom when I don't like something. But because it came last, I liked it and let myself believe it.

If I were cleverer, I'd have written this entry criticising you at the top and then building to the praise you so thoroughly deserve at the bottom. But I'm not, so I didn't.

William

Things Wot Like I've Learnt a Lot

2008-10-16T08:49:00.001-07:00

This coming Sunday's UK DVD Review is probably going to be about comparing Grosse Pointe Blank with what's being called its spiritual sequel: War, Inc.

As I understand it, a spiritual sequel is a sequel in all ways bar any financial or legal ones. And yes, if you watch this new DVD you cannot doubt that its DNA is in Grosse Pointe. Unless you haven't seen the earlier film, in which case you can doubt all you like, doubt with gusto. But I do very strongly recommend that you watch Grosse Pointe Blank recommend you watch it; not so much so that we can discuss and debate, but just so that you can have a good time and not spend your money on War, Inc.

Ooops, given away a bit of the review there.

But for reasons I may jabber on about in the show, I've spent a lot of time analysing and comparing the two films. And I don't want to share any of that with you.

Except this. Because this is about the writing of the earlier, better film. It's something that won't come up in the podcast, but it's something that I've often kept in mind when writing. First, let me explain that this is the story of a hitman going home for his ten year high school reunion and that the film came out in 1997, now let me quote you from the revised first draft of the screenplay, by Tom Jankiewicz, DV deVincentis & SK Boatman & John Cusack:

INT. GYM - NIGHT

Martin and Debi enter and pause to take in the entire scene... Alumni are dancing.

ARLENE: Welcome back! I'm Arlene Oslott-Joseph.
MARTIN: I'm Martin Blank.
DEBI: Debi Newberry.

Debi heads off into the gym, smiling back as she strands Martin. Arlene rises. They have little to say. Martin wasn't part of her crowd.

ARLENE: Marty, you haven't changed a bit!
MARTIN: Don't say that.

Arlene gives him a NAMETAG. As a special torture, the tags have YEARBOOK PHOTOS. Martin looks at the name tag uncomfortably.

ARLENE: We had pictures put on, that way everybody knows who everybody was!

I don't like this segment. Part of it is unquestionably because it's not what's in the film and, by whatever mysterious process it is, things that were not in the final cut always read poorer than things that were. Mind you, oftentimes that's why they were cut.

I don't have a later draft of the script so I can't compare the stage directions but if you'll allow me, I'll write my own sufficient that you can see what's going on. Here's how that same scene played out in the final film.

INT. GROSSE POINT HIGH SCHOOL

Enter Martin and Debi.

ARLENE: Welcome back Pointers! It's Arlene Oslott-Joseph!
MARTIN: Hi!
DEBI: Hi.
MARTIN: How are you?
ARLENE: I'm good...

Awkward pause: she doesn't recognise them.

MARTIN: Martin. Blank.
ARLENE: Oh, Martin Blank, yes. [PICKS UP HIS PICTURE NAMETAG] My, you haven't changed a bit.
MARTIN: Don't say that!

Awkward pause: she does recognise Debi.

ARLENE: Hi, Debi, just love your show.
DEBI: Oh, thanks, well, you're our demographic.
MARTIN: You got married, Arlene.
ARLENE: Yes I did, and three children. It's really neat.
MARTIN: Yeah.
ARLENE: I had the yearbook pictures put on so everybody knows who everybody was!
MARTIN: Special torture!

Lots going on there that wasn't before, some of which you're not going to get from reading a segment, but what was a flat scene has some life and blood in it.

And most important of all, it takes that "special torture" line and puts it where we can see it.

The very first script I wrote got this comment from Alan Plater (hey, if you're going to ask advice, start from the top): he said that he had laughed aloud at the stage directions but the audience never sees those. When I managed to move the gags into dialogue, he called it a great step for writerkind.

Some day I should get a copy of War, Inc and see if they ignored his advice as much as it seems.

William

Pepperoni on wry

2008-10-15T12:27:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week I recorded my first narration for a DVD documentary. Can't tell you what it is yet because I don't think the DVD has been officially announced; as soon as it is, I'll get you a link because hopefully you'll want to buy it. And if you do, of course it's going to be because of me, not the title itself.

I can tell you, quite seriously, that the documentary is first class. I had a really good time playing back an almost-final assembly of the thing and then I had to go ruin it by talking all the way through. Don't you hate people like me?

But if I shouldn't tell you what it is (and I'm going to be honest here and say there is a Very Easy Way to find out and it involves a judicious use of the @ symbol), I can tell you that it's even harder to narrate than I had expected - and I'd expected it to be hard. By the end of the recording, my teeth felt looser, vibrated out of kilter. And I can tell you that of course it's immense fun: could you imagine my finding it dull?

I especially like how I didn't write the script, there was no writing involved at all, my only contribution was my voice. So the other day I get a little success from my photography, then I got news of another play being put on, then I'm a voice guy, and in a kind of mix of prose and picture research, I was today commissioned for a Doctor Who Adventures feature. Am I multimedia or what?

But you're wondering about the subject of this blog. And it's just this. Despite this being a vocal gig, despite all this other non-writing work, a great joy was found in coining a new phrase. I was asked to be more peppy but not hammy so I did it pepperonily.

Feel free to use this term wherever you may.

I'm in a blathery mood this week, aren't I?
William

Harvest Festival, PI

2008-10-14T02:11:00.000-07:00

Call him Harve.

A new short play of mine is being staged at the Carriageworks Theatre in Leeds in a festival of new writing on the theme of harvest festival. Two nights: 31 October and 1 November.

This is the theatre that did Manhattanhenge for me earlier in the year and I was invited to contribute another piece. It's a smaller event than Innocence but good to have another piece in production - and where the last one had audiences choking a little, this one's (so far) making people laugh.

And though I'm not billed on it - none of the writers in the festival are - I get a poster!

Sports Night scripts online

2008-10-13T02:28:00.000-07:00

They were going to be online here but now, not so much. I first got into Aaron Sorkin's Sports Night because I'd got into his The West Wing but I did also read some scripts that were unofficially released online. That's happy for me. And every once in a while when I'm back in a Sports Night mood, I'll rewatch the episodes and invariably head for the Sports Night script site.

Until the new DVD came out. Well, no, I headed for the site alright but the site was gone. For weeks now, it's been gone. But today, right now, this second in fact, and of course after I'd found a cunning way to salvage most of the scripts off there, that site is back.

The scripts on it range from early to late or shooting drafts and, especially if you know the series, it's fascinating to see the progress of the stories and the characters. And from a production perspective, to see how huge chunks of story moved around the series before ending up in the episodes they did. The clearest example, and done for the most obvious reason, is the second half of How are Things in Glocca Morra? This is the first-season episode that was being filmed when Robert Guillaume had a stroke in real life. The entire final half of the script moved to a second-season episode instead.

If you're less familiar with the show, I obviously think the scripts stand up as stories on their own but I do recognise that they're harder to read than the average. In every episode there are scenes where two characters, Dan and Casey, are presenting a TV show and are in front of cameras while up to eight other speaking parts are in the control room and any or all can be going between the two. Plus anything the control room people say can be heard by the Dan and Casey if a mic is switched on; anything Dan and Casey ever say can always be heard in the control room. So conversations roam across the two rooms, some dialogue is for broadcast, some is not, it flows gloriously on screen.

And the way Aaron Sorkin and his many co-writers get this on the page is... by ignoring it. You'll see long unbroken scenes where who is talking to whom and who can or can't hear is only rarely covered.

It doesn't help that this script site's formatting of the screenplays is confusing when you're used to real ones. So, what the hell? I managed to get one of the scripts, I spent some time making the formatting readable, lemme show you one anyway.

This is from the second season of Sports Night, it's The Cut Man Cometh by Bill Wrubel and Aaron Sorkin. There are hardly any differences between this draft and the aired version but who cares? It's one of the funniest and also one where I felt the most because it took me right back to disastrous nights in radio.

William

New book

2008-10-12T08:38:00.000-07:00

This month there were 800 new book titles published. One of them was Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook: it's a truly beautiful edition, a world class idea and a superb read but I choose to leave everyone else to rave about it because I'm not in it.

Whereas I am going to be in Metal Clay Beads: Techniques, Projects, Inspiration.

You're going to have to look quite closely because the truth is that I will get one teeny byline. But it's a photography byline. And this is a US book so I am again published internationally and for my photography.

You don't get to do this kind of thing without help. In front of every great jewellery photographer there is a great piece of jewellery. And I feel like walk-on extra telling you The Crucible is about the guy who brings in a glass of water for the judge because of course this isn't about me, it's about Angela Gallagher. The book is by Barbara Becker Simon but it contains a gallery of the finest jewellery (and photography, come on, throw me a bone here) and Angela's Heath Robinson piece is included.

Fancy a peek? This is how good you have to be to get international recognition in jewellery-making.

Click for a larger image. And to keep you going before the book's published early next year, you could, go on then, do no better in all this land than buy Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale.

William

House of the Future

2008-10-12T03:57:00.000-07:00

You've missed this now but Grand Designs Live was at the NEC. And Sony had a presentation there on The House of the Future: all of the exciting technologies we can all look forward to. Obviously all Sony-based. And presumably all after the credit crunch.

For example, in the bright Sony world, you can have all your music in one place. Never dig out a CD again, just scroll through the cover artwork on a screen and choose what you want. When you put in a CD to copy it into this wonder system, said system will look out across the internet, will cast its eye far and retrieve for you all the track names and details.

If you don't already do this routinely, you're at least expecting me to say that I do. Yes, of course. For years now. And it's because I've got a Mac. Got to tell you, my two-year-old Mac does this stuff vastly more smoothly, easily and without as much bloody fuss than this peek into the distant future of Sony.

I've always recognised that it's very hard, perhaps impossible really, to write about the future. Sony's solved this by being years behind and looking from there, which you have to agree is a cute way around the issue if ultimately unlikely to convince me to buy anything. But otherwise, nothing is ever what you expect in the future, you can't predict successfully, so give up now. This might be a problem for science fiction writers, of which I'm just not one, but I don't think so: SF is only costume drama that's (typically) in the future. Just as Jane Austen isn't dependent on crinoline for drama, Zonk Conquers The Galaxy is so much more than tin foil.

But somewhere along the way, television drama has screwed up the present too.

It used to be that characters on TV were glamorous, that they were in some or many ways aspirational idols. Jonathan and Jennifer Hart seemed so fabulously wealthy in the 1970s. The men and women from UNCLE were chic and sleek, they had their pen-based communicators. The Tomorrow People had their lava lamps.

Then we got computers.

TV characters, and really their writers, were faced with our knowing more than they did, of having more experience with this technology than they did. Drama is drama, I don't care whether Ena Sharples has an iPhone or a BlackBerry, but power changed, attitudes changed. And we began getting these slick characters still acting slick, still now seeming to act superior - possibly not Ena - yet they were using ZX81s to take over the world. It became embarrassing. Countless 1980s and 90s dramas had hacker characters visibly pretending to type, just banging keys at random or sometimes not even actually hitting the keys, while impossible data magically appeared on screen. My beloved Sports Night, as late as 1998, mentioned a website address that couldn't possibly work.

Old Doctor Who rested a plot turn on bubble memory: fine, I suppose, for about an hour in 1981 but there was a smugness that this was cutting-edge, that this was the latest thing. The Doctor even recognising what bubble memory was? I seem to remember knowing what it was at the time but I couldn't recognise it now, let alone see how to use it to save the universe. And there was a 1986 Doctor Who episode where Mel (Bonnie Langford) gasped at the dangerous weapon, a "megabyte modem".

I don't see how you can write that and still be employed.

It's not arrogant when it's true, when you do know something the rest of us don't. When the pilot of The West Wing introduced us to the term Potus, that felt genuinely new. Aaron Sorkin wrote somewhere about being worried about it, whether it was just a new term to him, and that he was talking a chance using it the way he did. (LAURIE: "Tell your friend Potus he has a stupid name." SAM: "I would but he isn't my friend, he's my boss. And it isn't his name, it's his title. President of the United States." Smash into the first episode's titles.)

Knowing something we don't and bringing to us, that's fabulous. But it is is arrogance and so very much more when you don't know what we do yet you carry on patronising anyway.

It's not a pretty thing. TV is still trying to be as aspirational but because it's failing, and failing stupidly, that's what it can look like: it can look and feel and be extremely patronising. It doesn't like looking stupid either, so it wants to tell technical stories - but because it's patronising and superior, it believes we can't understand these same stories. New writers on Casualty and the like will always jump up and down about their great idea for a Tourettes story, for instance. It's great, they say in the certainty that we've never heard of it before, because it's a disease that makes you swear all the time! Then they, sometimes amazingly slowly, put it together that primetime BBC1 is not going to allow a torrent of Tourettes language. So they water it down: he goes around saying Ooops all the time! That's drama!

There's an argument, too, that because we're all so very plainly stupid, our TV heroes mustn't be clever. You can see this in the US Presidential elections too: Sorkin wrote in the New York Times last month about how "The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it".

Consequently, if you're smart in a TV drama, you're inevitably a geek. If you're the one who knows that using Windows will ultimately bring down the entire global financial network, you cannot be the one who can do anything about it. You have to be the one who tells the hero - and the hero must always give you a little put-down for being so nerdy.

So all you have to do is switch over from Bugs, walk away from Bonekickers - that's a different argument but sound advice nonetheless - and don't question Knight Rider very closely, and then all's well. But just as technology has pervaded our lives for a very long time - I got my first email address 25 years ago - so it's invading all dramas. So it should. But then you get things like Casualty.

Last year a little girl held the entire NHS to ransom with a USB stick in Casualty. She was eventually persuaded to plug this 1Gb drive into a USB slot and instantly - instantly - the whole Holby network boomed back into life. Phew. Richard Curtis co-wrote that episode.

The argument, I believe, is that most people won't know what a USB stick is so I should get a life. But if you're going to rest your drama on something you believe most people don't know, how do you expect to involve them? Where are the stakes? What's the human connection if you don't know why these characters are so fussed? Isn't that just as bad as when you know what a USB stick is and therefore know all these characters are utter idiots who have no right to be treating the public?

I love television drama because it involves you. I have a difficulty when it just sits there and tells me I'm an idiot.

William
there

Take two blog posts into the shower?

2008-10-02T04:31:00.001-07:00

I'm just after being told off for not blogging at you so much lately, and here I am back in seconds with a, well, second.

I may have mentioned this before but if I did, it was to say that there's a type of dialogue I love that I've never been able to write. And I just have. By accident.

It's the line that makes no sense but in doing so, makes vastly more sense than a logical, rational version would. The example I would've given you is Billy Bragg's line about waiting for phone call, "when at last it didn't ring / I knew it wasn't you". What I've just written is a text to a friend. There's something up that she doesn't want to go into, but I wanted her to know we could natter about anything, this problem or just about anything to take her mind off it.

So what I wrote was: "Call if you don't want to talk."

If you think dialogue is just grand oratory or just something to slip in after you're tenth draft of a script, you're wasting your time. Consider directing. Real people talk absolute rubbish to each other, we hardly ever listen and we certainly don't wait our turn in the conversation politely, but in our selfish rubbish we understand each other and we give away so much.

And we also misunderstand, both other people and even especially ourselves and our own motives, plus of course we lie with abandon.

Drama is dialogue, and isn't that wonderful?

Consequently my entry to this year's Red Planet competition consists of very little talkin' and a lot more helicopter action than any reasonable TV company could ever afford.

William

Winged chariot

2008-10-02T03:36:00.000-07:00

Some months ago, my car's driver-side wing mirror had to be replaced on account of it being smashed off. Yesterday I took the car back for a service and waited for the phone call.

GARAGE: You know that wing mirror we fixed?
ME: Ye-ess.
GARAGE: It's fine.
ME: Er, good.
GARAGE: But the rest of the car...

William

Place your bets

2008-09-21T14:19:00.000-07:00

The Guardian says Jane Tranter is leaving. There doesn't seem to have been a confirmation yet so this may just be yet another in the long chain of rumours about her going that we've seen this year. Yet the Guardian is confident enough that it talks about who's likely to replace her as Controller, BBC Fiction.

I interviewed her once for something at BBC News, haven't the faintest idea what it was about now, but I came out of her office very impressed. And as a drama nut, really quite happy. So she's going to be tough to replace and the Guardian's list is interesting: all very strong candidates, most of them women as it happens. I feel that's a good thing but I do notice that I noticed: if the majority had been men, would I have thought to mention it?

But, anyway, I am so certain about this. So certain. Nobody's even hinted at it, and I have asked some of the people involved but they all deny it, yet I will bet you money that Jane Tranter will be replaced by Julie Gardner.

I think this will be good news too, though I also think it's great that there are so many genuinely strong candidates. Isn't British TV drama in good shape?

But it will be Julie Gardner.

Please place your bets and come back when I am made a fool of or I start typing very smugly.

William

Losing your Innocence

2008-09-17T01:39:00.000-07:00

Previously: my one-act thriller, Innocence, was to be staged at the Rose Theatre in Kidderminster 25-27 September. You've already seen the past tense, now read on.

The whole thing's been cancelled: both plays in the double bill, the entire thing. I don't know all the details and some of those I do I'm not really able to tell you here, but it's gone and I'm inappropriately fine about it. A production is a production, I wanted it on my CV, but I'm sure the organisers will understand my telling you that I wasn't at all happy about how it was going.

In the end, neither was the theatre. Innocence and another thriller were being produced by a group that works with the Rose Theatre but isn't entirely part of it. And I'm told it was the theatre management who pulled the plug.

I do have one regret. I had to write a bio of myself for the programme and that'll now never be printed. (The posters were, including the mistake with my name. You have to feel for the organisers: money spent like this. And I don't know what's happening with tickets. If you bought any, let me know: I'll refund you and get the money from them.)

But it occurs to me that the bio was fun to write and here's a platform for it. So, I don't know if it's possible for a blog to get any more egotistical, but let's have a good go: here's my bio from the Theatre Programme That Never Was.

William

WILLIAM GALLAGHER is a writer and journalist from the Midlands. He writes the daily TV history column On This Day plus radio and TV reviews and drama features for Radio Times magazine. He’s freelanced for newspapers such as The Independent, the Birmingham Post and The Los Angeles Times and magazines from Doctor Who Adventures to Sewing Today.

He’s been a journalist and columnist for BBC News and BBC Ceefax, editor for education and computing magazines, interviewed people from Stephen Fry to Maureen Lipman and spent one crazy day having afternoon tea in the mess room on a Russian nuclear submarine. He’d tell you more about that but he’s not honestly sure how it happened and regrets calling the place a dive.

He’s produced for BBC Radio 4, researched for the BBC World Service and reported for BBC 5 Live, BBC Radio WM and BBC Hereford & Worcester.

Scriptwriting includes ITV1’s Crossroads, the UK DVD Review podcast and radio adverts. Theatre writing includes Manhattanhenge at the Carriageworks Theatre’s new writing festival in Leeds earlier this year and Time and the Conway Twitty Appreciation Society at the Patrick Centre in the Birmingham Hippodrome in 2007.

William’s portrait and jewellery photography has been published in magazines and books in the UK and America and he’s filmed “Making Of” videos for BBC Worldwide. He’s now doing voiceover work for DVD documentaries, developing radio drama projects with BBC Birmingham and independent production companies. His literary agent is currently pitching William’s first novel to publishers.

My first theatre poster - updated

2008-09-07T09:15:00.000-07:00

It's quite a moment. As I've told you often enough now - you're very patient with me, thank you - my Innocence play is being staged 25-27 September at the Rose Theatre, Kidderminster. But now, for the very first time in my career, here's the poster:

Click it for a larger version. The theatre's website has details of both plays in this double bill and, go on, you know you're wondering about the other one. "Married to the Moby" by Martin Drury. Details of both are right here where you can also buy tickets.

I really enjoyed writing that last bit. Buy early, buy often!

William

On That Day

2008-08-29T09:02:00.000-07:00

I've just filed my last On This Day copy with Radio Times magazine. I couldn't have left on better terms, I couldn't be handing over to better people, but it's a sad time for me.

But I'll tell you one shock: the amount of time it's freeing up. I used to spend over the odds on it each week simply because I enjoyed it so much. When you add it all up, though, it's startling: I can actually afford to pitch for a book project I've been wanting to do.

Still, it's been a favourite gig. Hopefully On This Day will go from strength to strength and readers will no more remember me than they do the fella before.

Last entry will be on the Radio Times listings pages for Friday 26 September.

William

Lyrical punch

2008-08-20T14:12:00.000-07:00

How's this for a thought? The Salem Witch Trials were not about religion or fear or superstition, they were about soil.

Seriously. If you didn't already think this, and it hadn't ever occurred to me in my most geo-cynical mood*, then you are forever going to think it now because you just know it's true. Burn a widow as a witch and there's nobody left to stop you taking her land.

I love this kind of thing: the one starkly simple idea that's new yet feels so right that you must always have known it. And I didn't get this information - notice how it's already changed from a thought to information - from a documentary or a script or a novel. I also, despite the title of this piece, didn't get it from a song lyric. Not yet.

For Dar Williams has a new album coming, Promised Land, due September 9 in the US and hopefully the same day or sooner here. And there's an interview with Dar about it on YouTube. In it, she talks about having this same Damascus moment when a friend suggested this Witch Trial point to her. Now I believe she's done a song about it.

Funny: saying that feels trivial. Cor, there's this powerful notion, let's sing a song, let's put the show on right here. But I tell you, as I have told many before you, that while I wouldn't kill to write like Dar Williams, I would consider maiming.

If you don't know her work, I envy the fun of what's ahead of you, but if you do then you'll know that she has this huge range of material but generally it's always immensely memorable and catchy musically, and the lyrics are pounding with more thought than you might see in a novel.

Now, I'm a scriptwriter and in a script you have to carry an awful lot of information in dialogue. You're only doing it right when everyone still sounds natural. ("Whisky, eh? That's a strange drink for an attractive auburn-haired girl of twenty-nine."**) In a song it doesn't really seem to matter: if it did, if people listened to lyrics, how could anyone think Born in the USA was pro-American?

Yet here's Dar Williams, packing every song out with really pin-sharp puncturing ideas but doing it in such a way that you just unconsciously end up humming entire paragraphs as easily as you do the main chorus line of any chart song. She'll make you smile, she will make you laugh, and there are songs of hers that make me weep, I think they're so perfectly done.

She finds these truths, she conveys them with such intelligence and concise precision: Dar Williams doesn't write scripts, so far as I know, but she'd still be on my list if you were foolish enough to ask me to list my favourite scriptwriters.

William

*Honest, I get geo-cynical. Can you tell me how Gerry Mander managed to get *both* of his names immortalised? These are the things that keep me awake.

**That's from Timothy West's deliberately bad radio play. This Gun That I Have In My Right Hand Is Loaded. I told a friend I'd look out my copy for him, but that'd mean loaning a book so I'm compromising and releasing one sentence per blog entry.

Meme me

2008-08-15T01:52:00.000-07:00

I do like internet memes, even if I don't know how to pronounce that and am not 100% sure that it's the correct plural of meme. You couldn't put me straight, could you?

But of all these interest-of-the-moment ideas that float around blogs and to which everyone contributes their version, I've rarely been bothered - or at least, I've rarely been bothered in time. Bits about writing, bits about TV drama, I've had my opinions and I've kept my counsel primarily because I've just not been quick enough to slip into the zeitgeisty feel of it all.

I'm not any faster today.

But what I admit I've lost in speed, by God I'm going to make up for in enthusiasm. I am so enthusiastic about this one that I positively begged Piers Beckley to tag me in this meme lark so I could gush at you. It's the now probably long-forgotten meme about where we all work; the spaces we make for ourselves and our writing. You've got one, everyone's got one, I've probably seen yours on your blog too, but now it's me.

And I'd like to tell you for why.

I'm arrested by this whole meme because a simple desk in a corner becomes so important. Very, very good days flow through this - and so do very, very bad ones. When I'm up against deadlines so much that it's fraught and if I don't take five minutes out I will fry, the place I escape to from my keyboard is my keyboard. I lean back from Word or Photoshop and watch a bit of the news, or play some music, maybe flick through some of the hundreds of hours of TV drama I've got on my Mac.

It's like the way I am fascinated by keyboards. Partly it's a technical thing and an overhang from my computer magazine days when I'd use so many of them that I was very aware of the differences. I'm on my third keyboard for this Mac not because I needed to or that I'd worn out the earlier ones (though it is true, I have bled over my keyboards) but because I wanted to try new ones. Right now I'm using Apple's latest slimline thing, which observant people usually described with more pejorative words than "observant" will have seen used a lot in the Doctor Who story Silence in the Library. (Honest: I bought mine a year before that. Honest.)

But as well as the technical aspect, there's also the fact that writing feels right to me on a keyboard, much more so than with pen and paper. This is undoubtedly because my handwriting is shudderingly bad. But Aaron Sorkin had a Sports Night character say once that "writing is a tactile experience" for him and he meant using the keyboard. I really recognise that.

And what goes through our minds while we type? As I wrote that last paragraph, an email came through: my fingers never left the keys and my mind never really left the thought but I went from typing text to pressing Apple-tab to skip to my Mail programme, I hit Apple-R to do a Reply, wrote text in that message, clicked Send then right back to this. Practically uninterrupted, certainly very smoothly, and yet I'm treating the keyboard in such different ways throughout. I'd even forgotten this: I also tapped a key that set iTunes playing a new Dar Williams track.

I get similarly anoraksic about offices and workspaces. So much so that the real reason I'm a month behind everyone else on this meme is that I thought, right, I'm going to tidy this bloody place up for once. For years I've had bookshelves around me with everything wedged on wherever it would fit. So, as if you were about to pop by, I tidied it up. I mean, I really worked on this. And all the way through I had this notion of precisely the photograph I could take that would show you how this office is a kind of nest, how it really does echo my personality as I believe all offices do of their creators.

But I took that photo just now and it's appallingly bad. Instead, and I would underline that I've spent a month tidying this place, this is the photo that best shows where I work. And you can't see a bloody shelf in it. I even hoovered.

The toast is gone. The tea is a bit cold. But while you can't see it, there's a fox outside that window now. (Er, in the garden. I don't mean he's pawing at my first-floor window like a thing possessed and craving toast.) That is a BBC2 metal logo originally from a BBC press launch but given to me by a favourite friend. That is a Blake's 7 teleport bracelet behind it but I feel no urge to discuss that any further. And there's that keyboard. It's very good. In between the keyboard and the BBC2 logo is a cutting block: from back in the day when you used to cut tape to edit it, when anyone did that, you used a block like this. There's a central channel where you lay the tape, marked up with chinagraph pencil, and there are three slits for running your razor blade through. It always surprised me that colleagues didn't know why there were three of them: they're at progressively sharper angles and it changes how the edit sounds.

The image on the two monitors is mine: it's a closeup photograph I took of a discarded piece of glass at a glass factory.

But, ah, go on, if you've read this far, you want to see the naff photograph, don't you? And I appear to burn to show you. So:

There aren't usually cars outside the window: that's my neighbours' garden and they're repairing both of those. From where I sit I can see five gardens, though I've never yet figured out how to get out to my own. It's for want of trying.

I've also never once been able to straighten out that blind. But the clock the right side of it is managing to hide from me is a Rugby one: a clock tuned in to the Rugby transmitters. You should see it when the clocks change: it's almost worth being up working that late to see the hands suddenly whiz around by themselves.

And just for completeness, if you sit in that great Captain's Chair (that's its name, I promise you) and look back to where I took the photo, this is what you see:

What you can't see is that the bookshelves extend quite far either side: apart from the window and a small patch of wall where my Rugby clock is, this room is floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Some of those shelves are of my own cunning design: look at the rows of folders on the very top: I've extended the bookshelves out with those planks of MDF in order to fit them all on. They're still very disorganised but they amount to around 20 years of Radio Times issues that I use for my On This Day research. They're broadly the 1980s and 1990s, which is the period Birmingham Central Library's collection has the most gaps so it is a very great thing that I've got these.

Up in the corner there, where you can see two of my precarious new MDF shelves sticking out, there's a BBC Newsroom Entrance sign. I like the idea that the rest of the world outside my office is a newsroom. But I also nicked the sign from BBC Pebble Mill when it was being redecorated. I don't know why they bothered, really, since they've demolished the entire building since then.

One more picture? Just saying that about Radio Times reminds me. On the wall directly behind me there's a gorgeously-bound set of RT issues from 1999 onwards for a couple of years.

The curving on the left side of the shot is just because of the lens I happened to have on. But the curving under that shelf of the RT volumes is real and entirely down to the weight.

We'll see who breaks first - the shelf, my resolve to keep this place as tidy as it is today, or you and whether you managed to get this far.

Love this stuff,
William

Best news ever.

2008-08-07T08:55:00.000-07:00

Angela's just had the all-clear from the hospital: her hundred years of chemotherapy have worked, the bastard cancer is no more.

Been a bit preoccupied with this lately, since about last September. Thanks for your emails, they've been a help.

William "Off to celebrate" Gallagher

Ooops, forgot one

2008-06-29T11:35:00.000-07:00

If you're keeping track - presumably only so you can divine between the different William Gallaghers I mentioned - then I should say I'm in the new issue of MacFormat magazine.

I decided to get on top of my email usage; looking into rules and folders and whatever the other thing is, and I did it in part by writing about the same thing for MacFormat. It's a fun, good magazine and I learnt something doing the article, I hope if you read it you will to. Got to tell you now, best to let you down gentle like, if you're a PC user then my feature will teach you bugger all.

But, hey, I'm in so many magazines at the moment... Okay, that was boastful. But it was nice doing the shopping today and meandering past the shelves of magazines thinking I'm in that one, I'm in that one, I'm working for that one - and, ooh, Doctor Who Monthly's covermount is an old Who novel. I bought the Marco Polo one. It's not very good.

But the magazine is. I just am not 100% sure how I started off boasting at you that I was in all these magazines and end up recommending you read one I'm not.

William

The definition of success

2008-06-27T08:55:00.000-07:00

A friend is just after saying that he avoids writing blog entries about rejections, he chooses instead to focus on the successes he has. I couldn't fault that in the slightest, I've no doubt you see his point entirely: whatever else a blog is, or whatever else you claim it is when you're excusing the time you spend on it, a blog is an advert for you.

That may be a bit harsh: call it a promotion. I'm a professional writer so maybe it's more apparent with folks of my ilk (I sell my writing, here's some writing I do, I'm available through Thursday, rates on request, that kind of thing). But anyone's blog paints a picture of them for us all to see, just as all writing is terribly revealing of the writer.

So, successes.

Trouble is, you get me talking and I feel more comfortable talking about rejections. I've got more practice. Plus, I should say that there are successes I cannot tell you about: projects that have gone well financially, for instance, but otherwise don't have a lot of material to show for themselves. I'm sure I'll tell you about them some time, you're certain I'll never spill the beans about the beans they pay me.

(Just as an aside. There's a William Gallagher who used to edit Doctor Who fanzines. It isn't me. But once I stumbled across an internet discussion about him/me, lambasting my writing and being jealous of his incredible earnings. Even being one of the William Gallaghers involved, it was hard to unpick their confusion except that I'm guessing the incredible earnings are his. That would mean the lambasting was mine, but if I can't tell from your writing who you're talking about or what he's done, I think there's it's a fair bet it's not my writing you should be focusing on first.)

(Another aside. There is another William Gallagher. There are loads of him. But there's a new one, a new William Gallagher has started a blog. I can't read it, I don't even recognise the language for sure, but somehow Google's references to it are in English and he appears to be greatly concerned about internet dating. If you're here looking for advice on New Zealand dating practices, I thank you for your patience in reading this far and direct you please to this fella.

Now after all that, I've run out of time. Okay. Can't tell you about cash, can't tell you about contracts, can tell you I've had a great, great week. Three days on RadioTimes.com, two days on Doctor Who Adventures, five mornings and five evenings on Doctor Who Adventures, one day on Radio Times magazine. I realise this adds up to more than five days but that's because it did. It has. Er, it was. It's continuing to be.

Doctor Who Adventures is a delight: instantly liked everybody, instantly relished the work. Can't get enough of it.

Then that short play of mine has been kicking up some dust for me. If you'd asked, I'd say you were mad to write a piece that short but it is doing surprisingly well for me. And right now it's doing well on its own: I don't even have to tend it, I just hear positive noises every now and again.

Speaking of plays and scripts, I'm doing a thing in the gaps this week that is definitely one of the best ideas I've ever had. Not 100% sure I'm getting it down as well as I could but it's getting down and it's working.

And speaking of working, you'd be surprised how many people ask me to read their scripts. Hardly any. It used to come up a lot and I've even been a professional script reader for real money but a few months ago I had someone's piece in front of me and I just had enough. I truly believe it when producers say there are very few good scripts around because I don't see any either.

So I've stopped agreeing to read things. But I agreed last night and read something through that was a treat. Bit scary for my wimpy tastes, but dialogue that was alive on the page. Sounds so simple, but it's so rare.

As is my gushing. Sorry, I went off on one: it's really been a bouncy, great week and I just had to bubble at you for a time.

Did I mention how good Doctor Who Adventures is?

William

The Return of Wednesdays

2008-06-20T16:37:00.000-07:00

I'm a freelance writer but my most reliable gig is a part-time staff writer position at BBC Worldwide where I currently work three days a week on RadioTimes.com. My freelance work includes a lot for Radio Times magazine, so things get a bit confusing but that's another story. Today's story is the Return of Wednesday.

Those three days for RT.com vary enormously; I'm forever telling friends that I will always and only be in London on Thursdays but then they point out I'm standing there in a London pub saying this on a Tuesday. And I say it's three days, it can be four, it's been five.

When my wife Angela began having chemotherapy a thousand years ago, I decided to just simplify things as much as I could: I told Radio Times I wouldn't ever work for them on Wednesdays. Angela's clinic days were always Wednesdays, usually about three weeks apart, so I could've worked at least two Wednesdays out of every three, but it was messy. Just because Radio Times was being fantastic about my taking time out to look after Angela, there was no need to make it impossible for them to work out when I'd be where.

And as it happens, all those Wednesdays that weren't clinic days did get filled very quickly. Sometimes I'd go to the clinic for prescriptions, oftentimes I'd just help Angela. Once in a long while, she'd be well enough that we could take the day off and go out for lunch.

All that's over, and for the best of reasons: last Wednesday was the last Wednesday. Twelve sessions of devil drugs done and gone.

One odd thing. Many, many people assume that's it. Apparently even chemotherapy patients have been known to assume this: you've had your last chemo session, shouldn't you be feeling better? Well, er, no. Chemotherapy is such a variable beast that it's impossible to generalise but nonetheless, I'm going to generalise: chemo sessions take place every three weeks. And it's not because of NHS resources, it's for the very practical purpose that your body can only take so much. Remember white cells? Forget 'em. Every cell you own is smashed, pummelled, hung, drawn and quartered in every chemo session and you cannot have any more until the good cells have recovered sufficiently.

Have a guess how long that takes.

So you're not getting chemo sessions when it suits the hospital, you're getting them as fast on each other's heels as it is physically possible for you to have. And countless things can prolong the problems: in fact, you don't recover between sessions, you just recover enough. Angela was apparently unusual in how she made it through all 12 in exactly the time hoped for, without any reason to abandon the treatment at any stage. Though she did discover that she's allergic to yew trees. Seriously: the strongest, foulest, devil's brew drug, taxotere, is based in part on the bark of a yew tree (aren't you picturing three witches stirring a cauldron right now?) and Angela, like so many others, had an allergic reaction to it. That wasn't what you'd rank as a highlight in the treatment: me grabbing staff, crash-cart teams racing over to Angela.

Your mileage may vary, by the way. Got to say that. Even if you had precisely the same breast cancer as Angela, I mean precisely the same - frankly, if you were even Angela herself, you'd best not bet on needing or getting the same treatment. It's that variable, that different from person to person. And each person reacts all but immeasurably differently. So if you ever need taxotere, you may fly through it. I hope so, obviously.

Anyway, Angela's had her final session. But where so many people assume that's it, that on Thursday she'll be skipping, the truth is that of course she has at least three weeks in which she'll be recovering from the final session. We don't know how long it will take: every previous session has been capped by the next one coming through, so the odds are it won't be three weeks to the day. I have to tell you that some patients, a significant number, report feeling bone-tired for another year. And bone-tired is the right description: this stuff knackers your bone marrow.

Pleasant stuff, isn't it? But there are good things. All this violent medication gets rid of the cancer, so I do think of taxotere as the devil drug from heaven.

And right now Angela has booked a holiday in the Lake District. We've just come back from one, one we had during a lull in the cycle, and she's going again next month. The month after that, we're off for a short break to the Lake District. And I'm buying her a birthday present of an iPhone 3G and a Christmas break in the Lake District.

Did I mention she likes the Lake District? I've a feeling that's come up.

But for all I've just told you quite straight about the effects of chemotherapy, the truth is that it is over, so things are getting better. And I'm working Wednesdays again.

Next week it gets very complicated as I juggle days in order to work half the week on Radio Times, half on Doctor Who Adventures magazine. But the return of Wednesdays, it's a peculiar notion. I am stunningly lucky to have the job I do; I've always known this and I am reminded of it by getting a short gig on Doctor Who Adventures: I'm so looking forward to that work. It's been a sobering boon to be able to drop all Wednesdays for the last eight months or so; I know many or even most people cannot do it, but that and the ability to work at home 80% of the week, I'm very grateful for it.

So. I've got working Wednesdays now. If only I could get sleep back next.

Getting that New York vibe

2008-06-12T07:40:00.000-07:00

John Davison and Therase Neve in Manhattanhenge by William Gallagher, directed by Joanna Egan

Do you know how long I've had this open with a photo and no text? Since Wednesday, actually Thursday if you want to be picky: maybe around 2am. The instant I got back from the Carriageworks Theatre in Leeds where a short play of mine was performed: a short play, a small theatre, but a bit of a milestone for me.

You had to pay to see it. Last time, I had a larger audience and a longer piece but that audience was made up of producers, theatre agents, publishers, a fella from the National Theatre. It was a showcase, it was wonderful, but this week's one involved an audience paying cash.

And they loved it. I think it's fair to say that: one woman told me in an audience discussion afterwards that she'd had goosebumps at the ending. Another said she'd cried. And the cast told me they were proud to have been in it.

Now, okay, I'm always likely to think someone's just being nice but when they say things like that and you have to know that it was in the heat of the night, everyone pumped up from being in a success, all these things. But that's a good reason to be pumped and I choose to believe my cast.

I've been so lucky with cast that I'm starting to suspect all of them, all actors everywhere, are good. Mind you, I wrote a short sentence in Crossroads that had five meanings and the actor chose to deliver... none of them. Still not entirely sure how she was able to strip it of all five without actually dropping the line but I will tell you that mumbling was involved.

She also probably had no more than thirty seconds rehearsal time: it was a busy show.

I'd have liked to have been in rehearsals on Manhattanhenge. I'm not saying I'd have done things differently, but the process is great and I miss that. And I might have been able to fix a thing that bothers me: I've got a nice joke in it which is good but it's necessarily so close on the heels of something else that it gets a little lost. Let me show you.

You need to know that these two people have just met, they're strangers and they're really going to stay that way, it's just that for these few minutes, they're brought together by this mysterious thing called Manhattanhenge that I seem to shy away from explaining to you. He's 40s, fretful, American, a restaurant manager. She's 19, back-packing, gap-year British.

MICHAEL: They do say it makes you stop. It's a cleansing, spiritual breath that runs right through the city. That New York trick of being completely private and alone in a crowd, that loosens, dissipates. Connections are made. People just talk.

JOANNE: Look at us. Would we have talked?

MICHAEL: Probably. I'd have said "Hello, my name's Michael, our specials today are..."

JOANNE: And I'd have said "Hi, Michael, I'm Joanne, and what do you got for five dollars?"

MICHAEL: "The exit, madam."

It's that last line that felt on the night that it came in too close. Can't see what to do about it yet, the rhythm's right but the punch isn't there. Still, I think actually I may leave it precisely the way it is: the piece is not a comedy, that excerpt is not building to that joke and it's not that gigantic a gag anyway. And what does most definitely work, what was just a treat to see on the night, is that talking about the way they would normally be separate, would normally not really talk, heightens the fact that now they are.

Manhattanhenge very successfully sounds like a really, truly casual chat, a conversation that you could completely believe spontaneously happens between these people. It's unforced, bouncy and it hides how I've telescoped the scene down into its most economic form.

And I think that's part of the reason it worked. Now I've told you that people cried, you'd be looking for the punch or the tragedy and I think you might even be disappointed: you look for what I've done on the page and it's a tiny thing. But when you aren't looking for it, when you don't know something is coming, the fact is that you provide the tragedy: nothing bad happens here at all, not the slightest, tiniest thing.

It's the gap between what these characters know and what you do that makes the piece just a little shivery.

And I love that: I love fiction where it's taking place in your head as well as in front of you. I wrote a thriller thing once where you provided a character with an alibi, your assumptions provided her with it, and then I spent weeks making the reveal the smallest yet most unmistakeable moment I could. Something that would've passed you by, maybe even bored you, if it were one character giving another an alibi, becomes an almighty gasp because you knew the answers and you'd fooled yourself.

That piece got me a literary agent. I should go back to it.

Nothing's happening next with Manhattanhenge. A few people I rate highly are reading it, I'm toying with the rest of it: I have five Manhattanhenge stories, this was just the one that was right for stage. I suspect as good as the others are, I may throw them away and leave this one on its own. I don't mind a short, it's much better than a padded piece: a sketch is better than a stretch.

But I tell you, upsetting people is even better than seeing them shake with laughter. And that was pretty good.

I've just spent 12 hours driving over the last ten days or so, I swear since 2am on Thursday morning I've had my chin on the desk, I've been wondering what all these buttons are with letters on them.

William

Manhattanhenge

2008-05-28T11:38:00.000-07:00

I've only recently realised this so don't press me on the details, but when I leave a room, I just assume I'm forgotten. I'm not complaining. But imagine how it feels, then, to know that there's a cast and a director out there rehearsing my words.

Specifically, these words:

The golden sun hanging clearly in the sky, away from Manhattan island, high above the water. The sun in the distance over New York Harbour. Over Ellis Island. Striking the Statue of Liberty. The Brooklyn Bridge. And now imagine the view of the city from the East River, the sun still just barely above the buildings. It’s briefly blocked by the Empire State Building, then the Rockefeller Centre. And now it’s lower, nearer to the buildings, lower and lower, until you can see it. The city of New York looking like Stonehenge at solstice.

My short play, Manhattanhenge, is to be performed at the Carriageworks theatre in Leeds next month: it's a two-night festival of new writing and what I'm told is that my piece is to get a prime spot.

I'm even more pleased than you expect: Manhattanhenge is a tricky piece, it's taken a lot of work to get right and I hadn't expected it to fly. But you know how whenever you write, you try to write something new, something you've not reached for before: this time, I finished the tale and shivered at it. I've never done shiver before.

And though I've yet to meet the cast or the director, they're telling me they were moved by the piece. I can't wait to see them play it.

William

Anoraks in aisle 9

2008-05-25T12:19:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I had lunch with people selling geographic information systems and to the terror of their PR agent, they showed me how to make their software go wrong. I think they were pleased I knew what they were talking about: they had been used to selling to corporations, now they were aiming at the PC market and few of the journalists they'd met were all that interested. Even fewer knew about projections, I was the only one who would defend Mercator's system.

(Rant. I still will. Don't you knock Geradus Mercator in front of me. His way of translating a globe into a flat map is a working one: he wasn't pratting about settling political scores, he was getting ships to go where they were pointed. /Rant.)

So these people saw a fellow cartography fan in me and we had a ball. Shortly afterwards, the feature I wrote about them and various other GIS manufacturers got me a nomination for Magazine Writer of the Year at the PPA Awards. (I lost to a dog columnist in Bitch monthly. Quite seriously.)

I just relish the artistry in maps: the choice of what you show, what you don't. The way a map tells you as much about its artist and his or her society as it does about the lands it depicts. The lands it depicts: the far-distant shores, the pin-sharp accuracy of Ordnance Survey and the wild imagination of mappa mundi. Actually, also the imagination of Ordnance Survey: the way acres of military property will be marked "lake" or something. Shouldn't the OS mark ordnance when it finds it? I'd think that was a contractual obligation.

Anyway, I bring this up now because I wish to complain and I promise that there is no one but you I can tell in all this land. Here's the thing. My local hypermarket, a very big Sainsbury's, has been remodelling for six months: every time I go, and I go an awful lot lately, they've moved things. Now it's finally finished, it's all very good, but it's big and different so they have maps up.

They have maps, I have an iPhone that lets me blog here live from the freezer section, can you see where this is going yet?

I photographed the map with my iPhone. I wasn't planning to show it to you, or to anybody really. But standing there in aisle 9, I had no problem with people staring as I tapped the screen to zoom in on Light Bulbs, aisle 27.

Only, the map lies.

I put my social standing on the line for that map, and it lies.

There are no light bulbs in aisle 27. And I may be a man, but still I can ask questions: the staff directed me back toward aisles 3 through 7.

Maps exaggerate the prominence of enemy territory in wartime. They suggest safe passage where no such thing exists. It's through mapping we get gerrymandering - how did Gerry Mander get both his names remembered? - and it's through maps that we can see society change over centuries.

But we can't find light bulbs in Sainsbury's.

All that J Sainsbury money, all that Sainsbury graphic design, all that Sainsbury lying.

Hang on. I'm in Asda.

William

How do you get 17 People into a bottle?

2008-05-16T13:42:00.000-07:00

If a particular friend of mine is writing a script where it becomes vital that the protagonist knows the right time, she will introduce a blind watchmaker and his seven sons, sure an' they'll all have a tale to tell, in order to get someone to tell him or her it's eight o'clock. Myself, I'll write in a watch.

There's really no way to say which of is right in our approaches, except that obviously I am, because where I could muster arguments on practicality, your basic storytelling, and simple budget, she could argue that I have TV mentality. She's writing for a bigger canvas. I'm not saying that's what she argues, but she could and the next time we argue about this I've just given her some armament.

Besides, if you take my reluctance to introduce what I'd call superfluous characters to extreme, you know that any character you do see in my material is important. It's like when there's a gun to your head so you're watching Poirot: there is a limit to how many people can be the murderer because there's a finite group and the fine line between the importance of the roles is erased by looking at the cast list.

But I love, absolutely cherish working to very finite constraints. Each On This Day entry for Radio Times is between 89 and 94 words long, I wrote some 16,000 Ceefax pages that were extraordinarily constrained, Crossroads was so many minutes and so many cast, it goes on. And I also cherish it when someone else works to extreme constraints and does it well.

Hence 17 People. That's the title of a West Wing episode I'm particularly fond of. I re-read the script today while I was waiting for something and tonight I just re-watched the episode. I honestly don't think I realised this back in 2001 when it aired here, but it's what American TV calls a bottle show. I don't know what UK TV calls them. Probably "cheap". And in the intro to his published script, Aaron Sorkin says it was mandated: make this one cheap. No guest stars, no location filming, no new sets. "In other words, I got to write a play," he said.

If you know the series at all, this was the episode when Toby was told of the President's MS, but that doesn't matter. Well, not now, and not so much to me anymore: knowing what the story was and where it was going to go, this is still a glorious episode and the type of drama that makes me a drama nut. Usually I've said that drama is two people talking, but here it's two, three, seven people talking. Same principle, though: I read scripts about the end of the universe and I could care less, if I tried very hard. I read the script to 17 People and every scene is two or more people talking and I am transfixed.

By contrast, I switched on what I think I'll just call a Popular UK Drama the other night and it was exactly this, it was a scene with two people just talking. But every line was clichéd, it was quite remarkable how nobody need any new lines even to bridge between a couple of clichés. I was transfixed again, watching for their resolve to break and a fresh thought to come through but if they managed it, it wasn't before I'd switched to the news.

So maybe I'm just saying is that it's fine to have constraints, it doesn't mean you mustn't do anything with them.

And hiring Richard Schiff doesn't hurt.

William

It's about time.

2008-05-09T07:58:00.000-07:00

A friend who was in a brutal traffic accident a few years ago told me once of his utter anger at Casualty: a character had a similar accident and because he wasn't fairly immediately sanguine about losing his legs, the doctors and nurses fretted that he was unusual. They'd been treating him for several minutes, he should cop on to himself, sort himself out. I'm told it recently had a side story, a B-story in which someone learned they had cancer, went through all the chemotherapy and died within the one episode.

I did explain to my friend that it's written into Casualty that all accident stories, all guest stories will be completely dealt with in a single episode and, moreover, that one episode will cover one shift at A&E. Maybe we'll see someone going into work first, maybe coming out after, but otherwise, it's in that eight-hour period. But of course really what I was saying was precisely the same as my friend: we were both saying Casualty is unrealistic and aggravating, I was just using more words.

We all know this one-shift approach is rubbish and we have all complained about TV characters, in many shows, miraculously getting over amnesia/nuclear war/dry cleaning within a single episode. But I think we've been trained to accept it anyway.

Follow.

I was just re-watching Noél, a particular favourite episode of The West Wing from December 2000. I remember it being criticised a lot at the time for how, it was said, Josh Lyman gets over his post-traumatic stress in an hour.

But he didn't. The episode concentrated on the ten or so hours of one day, the first day in which he is diagnosed and after which he will begin treatment. More, the episode was actually set over a two-week period as we saw Josh crumble. So, two weeks, ten hours, the start of longterm treatment, it was exactly right. More, the reason for doing the episode was directly because Josh had been shot at the start of the season, the makers didn't want to pretend that goes away easily.

So how does The West Wing get criticised when it seems you have to be ill or in an accident to get mad at Casualty?

I don't know. I thought I'd figure it out if I just talked it over with you but I have to say you're being very quiet so far. I don't doubt that you agree Cas is wrong, Wing is right, but why the difference in perception for most people? It can't be that we expect less of Casualty, though I believe we do, because that suggests we expect more of the Wing and that it let us down but I can't see how. Nor can it really be that The West Wing is more popular than Casualty because, again while that's patently true worldwide, it's utterly the reverse in the UK. And it cannot be acting,it surely cannot be acting because Bradley Whitford is superb as Josh and, er, there are probably people in Casualty too, presumably.

Perhaps it's to do with how Casualty is bone-numbingly sequential: it will only tell a story in one direction, will only ever do this happens and then that happens and then the other happens. That West Wing, quite typically for the series, was focused on one day but it jumped through it while simultaneously taking us through those two weeks beforehand.

But I don't know, I really do not know. And because you have no doubt which approach I favour, I'm troubled by it all.

William

Doctor Who: Live Blogging

2008-04-26T11:53:00.000-07:00

Apparently there are sports blogs where the writer is not at the match, he or she is just plonked in front of a telly.

I mock these people.

Only...

I think I've just done the same. For the first time, my Radio Times Doctor Who blog has gone live the moment the show finished airing, and I know this because I put it live.

I have to be conscious that Helen Raynor writes a cracking hour's TV and I do - hang on, counts on fingers - 433 whole words, but I'm not comparing, I'm celebrating. When Doctor Who works now, it's a hurricane and I love it. The exuberance in it, there can't be a harder show to write.

Mind you, I learnt a lesson tonight: if you or I ever get to write one, we need to comb our hair and dress smartly: Helen is the first writer this series, besides Russell T Davies, to get interviewed on camera for Doctor Who Confidential.

William

Bloody hell

2008-04-23T12:54:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be annoying now: I'm going to tell you half a story and refuse to reveal the rest. But it's only a small thing, and I'm just bursting to tell you how huge it is.

There's this writer, okay, someone whose work I've admired pretty much forever: he's cropped up in the Radio Times On This Day malarky more times than I can count, I can be fairly certain you rate him too. Mr Anonymous has just read a script of mine and so has his wife, who'll have to be Ms Anonymous, and I spoke to them both a second ago.

Their quick, overall summary: "Worthy of Patricia Highsmith."

If you don't know her work, I honestly think you're missing out: Strangers on a Train? The Ripley books?

And here's a thing. I've been re-reading a lot of Anthony Minghella's scripts lately and in his introduction to one, he recounts how this very same Mr Anonymous had once described a work of his as having shades of Patricia Highsmith. Minghella had never heard of her before, but thought he'd best check her out. And you see what that led to? The Talented Mr Ripley.

'Course, I'll get notes and all the buts/ands/howevers presently but just for tonight I'm rocked.

William

New Doctor Who blog is up

2008-04-14T02:43:00.000-07:00

And you can reach it here at radiotimes.com/doctor-who-weekly.

If you're one of the people who commented on RT about the last one, under assorted suspicious names like Helena Handcart - surely a member of the Handbasket family who's been through Ellis Island - then thank you.

Page impressions are one thing, comments are disproportionately helpful. Especially disagreement: honestly, get in there and tell me what a daft prat I am, I'll love you for it. Though, please, no swearing: this is a family show.

But anyway, watching Doctor Who for money: what would my teenage self have thought of that?

William

PS. I don't know why this bothers me especially today, when it's always bothered me, but if you read that Who blog of mine you will see a certain police box spelt as Tardis. It's just wrong. It's the TARDIS, it always has been. But that's Radio Times style. I see the point, all-caps jolt out of the page: I once wrote a PC-DOS manual and sometimes the page would swim with those capitals, but still, this is the TARDIS!