Holby blues

So I'm thinking that I gave you the impression I'm rubbish at interviews, is that right? Given that you know the truth is always going to be somewhere in between, may I offer some anecdote about when I've been good at the job?

Because I actually am - or at least I am enough times that I can vividly see when I am not. Obviously I'm thinking primarily about work but something I'm also proud of in everyday life is that I am often able to see and to ask that certain right question. The question that nobody else has thought of and yet which the moment I've asked it, becomes the question everybody should've asked. That's an amazing feeling.

I get it a lot with my family, too. It's terribly gratifying to derail an entire conversation with one innocent little question that re-paints the whole topic. As you can imagine, it's only me who finds it fun, but there you go, you have to take what you fun you can.

And there is one situation I want to tell you about where I believe I did this but practically nobody else in the room did.

I say room, it was really a ward: I was at a press event once for the start of Holby City and we were in the fictional hospital's wards. (It's filmed in Elstree in a tower block that still holds EastEnders production offices and once housed the Top of the Pops ones. In fact, I'm almost certain it was the TOTP floor that was given over to Holby City. Gutted out, reworked with hospital gear, it's vastly more substantial than any studio set might be and because it's all around you, you start believing you're in a ward. It's many years since I was there but I was talking to an actor doing a regular guest spot recently and she said it's still precisely as odd when you get in the lift in a BBC reception and get out in hospital.)

So anyway, I think I was there representing BBC News Online, maybe BBC Ceefax, and there may have been a dozen more journalists with me. All or most from newspapers. And after a presentation of an episode or various clips, we got an en masse interview with some of the main cast. They'd sit in front of us, we'd sit in a semi-circle and ask our questions one by one.

George Irving was playing Anton Meyer at the time; he played him well and I have a lot of time for the guy but the quickest way to remind you who the character was is to say he's the typical gruff, unpleasant but brilliant surgeon.

You've heard actors say that interviews are just another performance, I'm sure, but with my position somewhere in the middle of the row of journalists, I had plenty of time to watch him act. And he did. Because he played a surgeon, he was asked if he'd ever wanted to be one. Had he learnt any medicine working on the show. Did he see any real operations. There was doubtlessly one about his love life but I can't even make one of those up.

He answered everything graciously, smoothly, giving every appearance of being full engaged with the journalist. But from where I sat, way over here, I believed I could see he wasn't. Don't misunderstand: he wasn't any inch less than professional, friendly, serious, but these were truly trivial questions that you or I could've made up answers to, let alone an actor who'd already gone through similar press events there earlier that same day.

And then it came to me.

I asked him about the way his character was always the scowling, sullen, brooding type: would it be difficult to keep that rigid persona interesting over a long run?

You can guess the answer and all I can really remember is that he gave a good one but what was great was seeing this man's mind switch back on: he was snapped out of the routine answer and into actually thinking about what I'd asked, it was tremendous. And then snapped back into routine by the fella next to me.

That's it. I just remembered that today and wanted to share. Incidentally, Angela Griffin was interviewed at that time and every question was about some boyfriend or romance or something. I talked to her afterwards and said that I hoped she has a happy lovelife but that I'd manage to make it through another day without knowing anything about it. I remember her nodding vigorously and appearing to look forward to what intelligent questions I would have for her.

I can't win 'em all.

William

Interviewing Stephen Fry

I should really have written this to you before or at least during BBC4's Stephen Fry Weekend but watching it reminded me. When I interviewed Stephen Fry for Radio Times about two years ago, everybody at the magazine treated me as if it were my very first interview with anyone. And here's the thing: so did I. 

Once a group of us counted how many words we'd actually had published: I can't remember theirs or how exactly we were able to work it out, but mine was closing in on a million and this would've been in the early 1990s. So I'm not inexperienced. And RT knows that well, I've had a lot of praise from editors on that over the years and I have written some good, strong pieces. But I suppose this was Stephen Fry.

And I suppose you don't often get to interview people you admire; I can only think of three people now. Dar Williams was a treat, I liked her even more after interviewing her. Trevor Eve, not so much. Well, actually so much that I'm surprised to say I ever did admire him. Maybe I just admired Shoestring.

And Stephen Fry.

Well, actually, I also interviewed Alan Plater in the mid-1980s and he was and remains a favourite writer but he's also a pal now so I kind of forget I ever did that. And you, plainly, when we've spoken I've been a bit tongue-tied but I've hid it well, I think, and I won't embarrass you by singling you out now.

Lots of people at RT told me I'd be okay, it'd be fine. One man said the trick to interviewing Stephen Fry was to ask a question and hit record on your tape. When the tape runs out, thank him and go. Not to nip ahead too far here, but that was pretty close to what happened: the man can spew. So can I, for that matter, but I don't sound like I had six weeks notice of your question and had researched it: his answers were all very fast but very considered and, to be honest, probably stronger than the questions really warranted.

I was asking him something about smart TV: he'd just been voted the cleverest man on the telly by readers of RadioTimes.com poll and my questions had to fall into two types: 1) how does that feel? 2) er, what else can I ask about and still stay on the topic?

Oh! I forgot this bit, seriously it's only just come back to me: I specifically was ordered not to ask that first part until the very end. It was thought, it was feared, that he'd be either too modest or just too unhappy with the poll to talk very much. And in the end he was extremely modest, very self-effacing and yet able to convey exactly the but-it's-really-nice that made me feel I was doing good.  But it meant I had to build up to that and I know we talked about what you might call smart TV, and what you'd definitely called dumbed-down TV. 

And I think I might as well have been on my first interview. I swear to you that it was because his answers were so good that I let him talk and talk but when I play back the tape it sounds like I'm simpering. And when I did interrupt him to steer the conversation somewhere else, my memory was that he'd said "Please do" (or something) and that it was the first time this had really become a conversation. But, again, listening back, he says "Please do" and it's more like thank-God-he's-asked-a-question-at-last. There's a chance I'm projecting.

Similarly, there was a point where he was making an analogy between dumbed-down television and health & safety rules. "Got to stop you there," I said. "My wife is a health and safety inspector." (Which she is, except when she's teaching jewellery-making. Have a look at her jewellery site.) And if you'd asked me ten minutes later, I'd have told you I just made Stephen Fry do an about-face on a topic.

Ask me the next morning, again after the tape, and no. He was slightly more complimentary to HSE but basically carried on precisely the same line: that companies use health and safety as an excuse for the most ridiculous things. I can't disagree, I don't want to disagree: remember all that stuff about HSE banning conkers in schools? Utter nonsense: the head of the school did it and blamed HSE. 

He said in one part of this BBC4 weekend that he's at pains to make people like him, that he goes to probably unhealthy and definitely unnecessary lengths to win you over. I was won when we nattered about iPods before starting the interview and much later when we were at his RT photo shoot, he gave me an including kind of look. I can't fault the man, I do like him, I continue to admire his writing just as much as I ever did.

But I can't see him without thinking I did a poor job and being very disappointed in myself. I did a rubbish job with Dar Williams for that matter: I think the interviews with her went well and I really enjoyed them but I never found the spine for the feature that followed so it reads a bit wet.  I've done a phone interview with Hugh Laurie too. He thought I was an idiot but was far too polite to say so.

So, conclusion 1: I should practice my interviewing more. When are you available? And conclusion 2: never listen to the bloody tape afterwards.

William

Decaf untempered schism

Red ready to read

Right then, that's my Red Planet ten pages written. How're you doing with yours?

I've also just written up my next Radio 4 proposal. Twice a year, by long tradition, I pitch something to Radio 4 and they turn it down. They like to kid. And while I'm not trying to knock my chances, straight statistics are against me and if I didn't love Radio 4 so much I'd look for an easier life.

But there is an unpalatable fact, or at least there has been for me, in these offers rounds. I can't remember how many I've been through, I could tell you a couple of horror stories along the way, but each time you do have to come up with something new. Many, many Radio 4 producers tell me this isn't true: they've often liked an idea of mine enough that they've recommended putting it up the next time. But if you're in this position, don't waste your shot: no matter how much the producers mean that today, when the next round comes by, your once-failed piece will be up against brand-new, exciting offers and there will be an inescapable whiff of staleness about yours.

I'm not saying you should abandon an idea forever; there's one I swear to you is not only good, not only perfect Radio 4, but also impossible to do anywhere in the world except on BBC Radio 4. My producer on that one still speaks fondly of it and has faith it will get somewhere. Sometime.

But actually, none of the ideas I've ever put forward are that bad. Usually I hate something the second I've entered it, and certainly when it's been rejected. And yet unless I'm mentally blocking out the worst ones, which is far from impossible, then a quick mental flick through the back catalogue is quite encouraging. Plenty of things I wouldn't do the same way now, lots of topical stuff that wouldn't fly today at all, but good and smart ideas.

And that's the unpalatable bit. Many times I honestly think R4 should've gone for a piece of mine - I did get a message back from an editor once saying that she regretted not commissioning me - but each time they reject you the pressure mounts to do better next time. And each idea I pitch is genuinely better than the last.

So I've been in a strop the last month or two, prevaricating over Red Planet, fretting over a book, worrying that I can't cap the R4 idea I tried last time.

But I think I have. It's actually far too early to say that, I've just written a one-page pitch and not a single page of script. But I can hear that script in my head and in reaching to do better, stronger, deeper, I have just ended up with a paragraph that chokes me.

Of course you might read it and only be able to smile politely while backing away, but I've never before gone for choking and it feels like when I move up a level in Scrabble on my Mac. Harder to win, yes, but the easier levels have irrevocably lost their appeal.

I cannot decide if this is a good or bad thing.

William

Yellow pencils

I miss 'em. Yellow chinagraph pencil in your teeth, offcuts of tape round your neck, and the total certainty that there is a wonderful edit in your hands if only you could find it.

Computers have ruined handicrafts, haven't they?

But may I boast at you about something? I can boast because it's not remotely important but I think it works so sweetly. And it's this: at 4'37" into this week's UK DVD Review podcast there's a clip that segues between two totally unrelated films that, for just a moment, you'll think were made for each other.

And, sorry, that link goes to my website's podcast page rather than directly to the audio because I also want you to see the photograph. It has no connection to anything, but I like it. Central Park, New York City, 2005.

Still got Suzanne Vega thumping away in my head,
William

Beat it

I need your help: I've either discovered a stunning secret to writing or I'm Joe 90.

Any chance you find this yourself? Do you absorb things, do you for instance write better dialogue immediately after watching The West Wing? Or better gags, better pacing rhythm after a Sports Night? And do you growl at people in lazy Klingon after Star Trek?

I'm almost serious. On the one hand I find it very hard to read fiction when I'm writing my own prose yet on the other I really can come away from something fired up. I've been doing the reading-ten-pages business, the suggestion that in preparation for entering the Red Planet contest you read the first ten pages of scripts you like and it happened that the one I looked at earlier tonight was The Bourne Identity by Tony Gilroy. Couldn't help myself, though, I watched the film again.

Had a long day, had a long week, but was sufficiently fired up by it to come back to the keys now.

'Course, the intent of writing up this scene that's been floating around my noggin' for a week has rather fallen by the wayside because I'm talking with you so I'd best go do that. But if I am an empty vessel that absorbs and moulds itself to the shape of anything I've just watched, I should do myself a showreel tape of the best things I can find. And play it a lot.

Just a thought.

Well, not just a thought, also a prevarication. Did I mention that I bought the Suzanne Vega album? Played it through twice without it making a single dent in my head - until a couple of days later when I realised I was humming half the tracks on it. Have since looped it incessantly on my iPod and am adoring it to the point of hating it.

Sometimes I think it's tiresome, even depressing, that the things I do to relax I can never relax to because I'm too aware of just how hard they were to make. But let's just crank up iTunes as high as it'll go, switch to my "Loud" playlist and get back to writing to the beat. Here come the drums, and all that.

William

News is news

May I show you something? This came up in a discussion I was having about newspapers: it's a quote from the book Yes, Prime Minister - The Diaries of the Right Hon. James Hacker by Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay. It'd be quick to say this is the novelisation of the TV series but that hides the fact that that books are excellent political satire all by themselves.

But you know the characters from the TV show. So in A Conflict of Interest, Prime Minister Hacker is nervous about how the press will report the latest debacle and Sir Humphrey thinks this is trivial:

"Humphrey knows nothing about newspapers. He's a Civil Servant. I'm a politician, I know all about them. I have to. They can make or break me. I know exactly who reads them. The Times is read by the people who run the country. The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country. The Morning Star is read by the people who think the country should be run by another country.

"The Independent is read by people who don't know who runs the country but are sure they're doing it wrong. The Financial Times is read by the people who own the country. The Daily Express is read by the people who think the country ought to be run as it used to be run. The Daily Telegraph is read by people who still think it is their country. And the Sun's readers don't care who runs the country providing she has big tits."

William

Pitching in

I've had trouble describing this blog to people - and they've had no problem at all describing it back. I suppose I asked for that. But seemingly I crave order in my life so can I explain what this has become so you know what to expect? It was supposed to support my local podcast, UK DVD Review, but that never happens because the show's doing so well without my yapping.

So it has become a mishmash and while I like that I can talk to you about anything, and I say again that you have that kind of face, you just make me open up, I'm firmly setting out my stall now. I do journalism, criticism, photography and radio work for a living; I'm trying to do more of each of these and also very firmly to build on the stage writing success to do more scripting. So this blog is going to be about journalism, criticism, photography, radio, scriptwriting. This doesn't clear much up for you, but I feel I understand me better now.

And so can, hopefully usefully, immediately give you directions to somewhere else. Have a look at this New York Times article, published today, about Fade In magazine's pitching session. Pay your money and you get to pitch to the great and the good, or at least the assistants of the great and the good. NYT paints it as hell on Earth, for both sides, but there's enough positive about it and also the practical sense that you may pitch badly today but this will help you pitch better tomorrow.

It's possible that you may have to register with New York Times to read the piece.

William

Rock follies

ITV1's forthcoming drama, Rock Rivals, will feature an ending chosen by public vote: it's Strictly Come Drama Idol Academy by Shed Productions, maker of Footballers' Wives and more. There's more about it on BBC News Online where, incidentally, you will see that NOL's picture budget isn't what it was: they have a shot of star Michelle Collins, but it's a library one of her with a Dalek.

Anyway, I'd like now to do the Critic's Trick.

It goes thisaway. I haven't seen a single frame, I haven't read the script, I don't know the story, and still I'm going to say to you that both endings will be poor. Or, put it another way, neither will work.

You can call this harsh and I wouldn't disagree. But don't think it's anything against Shed. As it happens, I don't believe there's been a Shed show that grabbed me but I think that's just chance: I like the firm's chutzpah and the lick it has to its writing. I hope Rock Rivals works. You always want a new drama to work. I just don't think this one will.

And this is why. The two endings.

This is always presented as an exciting new idea, every time it loops around, but it's predicated on the assumption that you can have two endings. That the ending is a module you buy in later. Instead, I'm pretty sure you'll agree, the ending is part of the whole: a story, even the most formulaic and predictable, is an organic piece that is building to its ending. Just look at that word: predictable. Even though you might not want a piece to be predictable, part of the reason that it becomes so is that every inch of the tale is pointing in one way.

When a story has enormous shocks along the way, they are usually very effective but they only stay with you, they only truly work when in retrospect they're no surprise at all. I think of this like rubbing your hand over a piece of wood: go one way, against the grain, and you're getting shards of wood cutting in to you, drawing blood, and yet rub your hand back the other way and it's perfectly smooth. Just blood-stained.

So if you build a piece in order to drop in one of a number of endings, either the story doesn't naturally point to that ending or it does point to the moment before the change. It's common to see the penultimate episode of a series being the very best one, just because endings are so tough, but abdicating the ending feels like giving up before you start.

Or how about an example? There was a recent episode of Lewis where I happen to know the ending was changed very late in they day; ITV wanted another twist before the last commercial break or something. I'm not sure what, really, but I know it was changed and when you watch it I swear you can tell the point when it switches tracks.

Two weeks ago I'd have harrumphed now and gone back to work with a so-there. But while I feel as strongly as I ever did about this insert-ending-here approach, I do now have an example that at least suggests I'm wrong. So I'd best tell you, hadn't I?

What if a show could legitimately build to two endings, simultaneously? Whichever was aired, we'd feel the absence of one of them but at least the one that was shown would work. I'm not convinced it's at all possible, but hold that thought. Now, what if a show's ending changed not only what you thought of its beginning but really changed the beginning? If a late decision coloured the start of a story in a way you didn't expect and the makers didn't intend?

It's happened with Doctor Who. Forgive me if you haven't seen the end of the latest series, and if you need to look away now just promise me you'll agree I've made a great point. Toward the end of the final episode, we learn that Captain Jack Harkness is the Face of Boe.

I found that inexpressibly sad. I don't know why: I liked Boe, I like Jack, I was just deeply saddened. And by chance, I caught an earlier episode on UKTV Gold the other day, the episode in which we first see Boe. He's just a figure in the background, he's really almost a joke: he enters with a parade of other startling aliens.

And all I could think of throughout the episode was how the Face of Boe must feel, seeing the Doctor and Rose.

It really made the episode better, but I know the Boe/Jack idea wasn't in place until a little later.

So maybe you can twist a beginning by changing the end. But I'll still bet money that Rock Rivals won't work.

What is point?

Outlining. What is point?

Okay, one line in and I'm already torn: do you recognise the Down the Line reference or don't you? I'm going to with yes, you do, because otherwise you're now thinking my grammar is shot to pieces and this would be a bad thought to give you when I'm about to talking Writing, with a capital W.

Or at least Outlining, with an O.

Previously on this subject: I don't outline. I know where I'm going with a story or I don't. Usually I'm aiming at a point, very often I end up somewhere else. But it works and the worst thing that has happened so far is that I've had to decide to delete 40,000 words. But they were also rubbish words, so I'm no martyr to my cause.

One reason for doing things this way is that my outlines rob the story of any interest for me. And one excuse for not doing outlines is that I am fast enough that even under pressure I've got time to revise things.

But, truth be told, the primary reason is that I know many, many people who first do an outline and then draw up a chart: scenes 7, 12 and 55 are easy ones, I'll do those today; 19, 1 and 13 are toughies. Then they tick off each one as done. Sure as anything, each of those scenes will be fine but they'll also be discrete and separate. I've never known any outline-kind of person to suddenly find the exit moment of a scene and allow themselves to go off early or bring in an entirely new scene. Or allow the characters to do anything except what they'd slavishly worked out before.

Consequently, each scene is complete in and of itself, it has a beginning, middle and end. Only, that means every scene starts, middles along a bit and ends. Put down one scene and pick up the next. Start. Stop. No flow, no energy carrying from scene to scene so no, in my opinion, compulsion. I see this in a lot of UK TV drama: stories are just a sequence of events, none especially more important than the other, at least not to the viewer, and time just passes along nicely enough.

I don't think stories should be full of crashes and incident, bangs and wallops, but you've only got people for a short time so there needs to be a driving force through it. It can be soft seduction, it can be peril, but it has to be alive. And as much as I believe writing is both a craft and an art, I think a too-mechanical approach to it does rob you of impetus and it can kill the story.

So I've been doing this outline, right?

It's for my Folly. I swear I may even name the script Folly. I mean it in the building sense; the way you have rich geezers paying people to build elaborate and pointless towers on their land. I pass one on the drive to London: totally worthless, but nicely made. That seems to be what I'm doing here. But I'm trying to do it quickly so I can get this story out of my head, like a writing exorcise, and get on to the now famous ten page debacle.

So I thought I'd outline.

But there's also the fact that one thing I am actually good at is building sequences. It comes from my radio training, I think, the ability to fashion a small sequence of scenes or clips that play against each other, that bounce you through, that together tell you more than the individual pieces do. And that just keep your interest. And the thing that is so annoying about this Folly idea, the thing that means I've got to get it out, is that I've seen it all as one gigantic sequence. I knew instantly what the entire shape of the tale was and there were myriad (okay, 30) scenes I immediately knew I'd have to do. It's one of those ideas, you'd think of the same 30 moments too.

So I thought I'd outline. Get them all down before I forget any.

I've now done this. I took advice from outliner types, I wrote it all down.

And here's the thing. The notes I made originally of these 30 scene ideas: no matter how I play with this outline or re-imagine the entire story, each one goes straight into precisely the same spot I first thought of them.

My outline is nothing but a nice list of the same points with a few tabs in.

Have I wasted my time outlining? Will I end up with the same kind of dead flat story I fear - and do so without gaining anything at all?

You'll never know: I'll never show you the final piece. I mean, it's a Folly.

But I'll confess if I think the end result works or not.

William

Off the grid

I went off the grid this afternoon: I delivered all the copy I had to and then snuck off to see Die Hard 4. There's something about nipping into a cinema in the daytime; although you can have your phone and you could walk out at any time, you don't and you don't. You agree to stay there for two hours and in more ways than just your phone, you switch off.

I love thrillers. I also love character and I know that if your dialogue isn't there, you don't have any characters. I might relish the plots of someone like Steven Moffat but even his intricacies and cleverness don't work if the characters aren't right or if what they're saying is just telling me the plot.

There's a bit of that in Die Hard 4. There's an awful lot of it in most thrillers and it's why I doubt I could name you five great ones. At least not without handing over two of the places to the Bourne flms. Similarly, how many great detective stories are there? I can think of 122 of them but they're all episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street.

But I go to thrillers and I go to detective films really wanting them to work. Er, that sounds like I go to comedies hoping they'll flop. I mean, I really want thrillers to work. There is something exultant about characters and a story that burn up the screen and that seem to really move, to scoop you up and carry you into mayhem. That seem to do what writers have trademarked as going on a journey.

I was exhausted at the end of Die Hard 4 but it didn't seem like John McClane had gone anywhere. He was still the man he was at the top and that was disappointing. It's also a mawkish film at times and it also uses a lot of the apparently hip thriller terms du jour, most prominently this "off the grid" rubbish. It wasn't rubbish when we heard it in The Bourne Identity, but it is is now.

Yet if I don't think Die Hard was 100% great, I seem to be thinking it was 70% good. I am unforgiving, usually, and if there's a moment or eight that reek of the-writer-couldn't-do-any-better or, worse, that the filmmakers think I want a pat the dog scene, I'm gone for good. Last time I nipped out to a cinema on a working day was to see Superman and I strolled out of there about half an hour in.

Die Hard 4 definitely has moments and it had momentum, I did want to see what happened next. I'm arguing three sides here, the two obvious rivals that it hasn't got great characters and it does have big thrills, and then the third side that the thrills don't work.

Some do. Actually, many do. But if I'm to forgive characterisation and wallow in spectacle, I have to believe it. It doesn't have to be believable, I just have to buy it. So a film can end with the most almighty impossibility and I'll be there if the film has carried me to it. The ending of DIe Hard works well - at least, the very end does; there's a hugely convenient leap right before it that disappoints me - and a lot of the start does too. As long as I can believe the hero could get out the way he does, I'll take anything. When Die Hard goes wrong, it's because the escape isn't believable.

This won't spoil the film because it's in the trailer anyway, but at one early point John McClane sends a car flying up into the air and into a helicopter.

I buy the destruction of the helicopter. I buy the car going through it. I just can't buy it taking off into the air.

It supposedly happens because he sends it hurtling into a ticket booth or somesuch and I can't make that connection, I can't make that work. Whereas moments before there is a scene with a fire hydrant and the helicopter which I do buy even though according to the people who write up goofs on IMDb, it's physically impossible.

I think what I'm slowly realising is that believability is skin deep. It's a very delicate line and it must also be personal taste. Like a pain threshold.

Now will I please get to work on my ten pages of script?

William

Self-distract

So there are a few people waiting to see the next draft of my play - and some of them even know they're waiting for it. That's obviously fantastic and I'm also feeling pretty good because I've actually written it now. All that hot air about how, oh yes, lots of ideas, absolutely, that's now in fact done. I'm at the stage of refusing to look at the script for a short while because otherwise you know I'll send it out and about one buggersecond later I'll realise something.

And there's thing with Piers Beckley and the BBC Drama Writing Academy: I'm waiting to hear he gets in, partly of course because that would be a good thing, but also because I'm looking forward to raging with vivid green jealousy.

But the truth is that what I should actually be doing now is writing my entry for the Red Planet contest.

And I'm not.

I mean, I've read the opening ten pages of every script I've written, in order to see if one of those will fly. There were a dozen, would you believe that? Twelve whole scripts, not including the dogs. Either I'm prolific or I'm rubbish but this is not the kind of question to ponder when you're entering a competition.

Still, some of the twelve look pretty good. None that I don't want to radically change, but good.

And Danny Stack recommended at the launch of this contest that we should read the opening ten pages of any scripts we really rate, to see what makes their start so good. Can't fault that advice, it's smart, but I just turned to my shelves and there must be over a thousand screenplays there in one form or another. I read a few West Wings. Shawshank. Trainspotting. Some Jack Rosenthal, some Alan Plater, John Hopkins, Troy Kennedy Martin, William Goldman, Paddy Chayefsky. Russell T Davies. Actually, I haven't re-read any of Davies's, I've just had a great time re-reading his introductions. In both the Queer as Folk and Doctor Who script books he does his intros as scripts and they are joyous.

Funny, though: no women in that list. I've just had to hunt to see that I do have Caroline Aherne, Connie Booth and Victoria Wood scripts. Oh! Also Emma Thompson's tremendous Sense & Sensibility. Oh Plus! Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Made me weep, that did.

But this is a big surprise to me, big enough that I've just been knocked off the point I was building up to. Mind if I just explore a concern here? I'm honestly stunned that my collection could be so impossibly male-biased. Dare I turn to my right to where the novels are? Jeanette Winterson again, Carrie Fisher, lots and lots of Margery Allingham, some Patricia Cornwall from before I got too scared to read those. One Jane Asher (you should really try hers: she has a great way of building a brooding tension). Patricia Highsmith. Helene Hanff. A bit of Bronte. A bit of Austen. Oooh, another Jane Asher. What happened to alphabetical order? And is Leslie Thomas a man or a woman?

It's not like I buy to a quota, this is just years of what I was drawn to. But I'm surprised because the reason I'm a writer is Lou Grant, the MTM television drama from the late 1970s and part of that show was watching how two writers whose work I admired climbed up the credits. One of them is Michelle Gallery who seemed to vanish a bit after that show but pops up occasionally with movie-of-the-week kind of screenplays. And then there's April Smith who I'm really excited to see has returned to TV. I only looked at her site to get the address for you and there it is, after a strong TV career and then latterly many years of writing novels, she's nipping back onto the telly.

So I'm happy again now, just enough to take my mind off this whole gender-stereotyping thing and back onto the point.

Which is that I'm latching on to any excuse not to write the ten pages I should for the contest. We all have a self-distract button and I am thumping mine repeatedly.

You may have noticed.

I even updated my website, williamgallagher.com with some new bits and pieces.

Cleaned the house.

Wrote a piece in this week's Radio Times magazine about the locations used in Harry Potter films.

Wrote up the results of a poll RT magazine has run about the best science fiction and fantasy shows. It's in next week's issue. Which reminds me, I had this exchange about the final pages with the art editor yesterday:

ART EDITOR: I don't know if they've been changed since you wrote the copy but it's very funny now.
ME: Definitely changed, then.

Um.

Alphabetised my book collection.

It's not that I'm struggling to find an idea, incidentally. I have one. It's just unfortunately absolutely 100% perfect for an existing TV series which will never, absolutely 100% never, look at a spec script. And one of the producers is on the panel for this Red Planet comp. There is no possible way in which I should write this script.

So I'm writing this script, right, and - actually, yes, I am writing it. Pointless, really, but you know what it's like when you're reading something you can't put down? When you've got to turn that page? I'm unable to shake this idea and I want to see what I can do with it. So I'm writing a script I'll never send to anyone.

Anyway.

Had a bath.

Played Scrabble a lot.

Refused to buy Suzanne Vega's new album until I've written the ten pages for the comp.

Decided what I really need to write the ten pages is to buy Suzanne Vega's new album.

And now, you're the only one standing between me and the pages. I'll take any suggestion for how I can prevaricate more, anything.

Hey! It's gone one o'clock! I'm going to break the habit of a working lifetime and have lunch. You're brilliant, thank you.

William

On That Day

Just back from the screenwriting festival, wanted to point you in the direction of the Red Planet Pictures' competition, hesitated, figured you'd only go and win the bleedin' thing, considered sending you to the Balamory site instead, decided that was mean and, more importantly, that you'd see through it immediately, so go on then, here you are, here's the Red Planet link.

Never seen a writing prize so good. Or do I mean I've never seen a writing prize more precisely in tune with what I want to do?

But less of what I want to do, more of what I do: there's a mistake in this week's Radio Times where the On This Day entry of mine for July 8 has somehow been repeated on July 10. If I'm still doing this next year, which I very much hope, then I'll reuse the missing one. You'll never guess when. In the meantime, though, in case it's of interest, it's below.

William

RT/ON THIS DAY/WEEK28/GALLAGHER

July 10, 1983

...24 Years Ago

“She was everything a woman should be; the perfect heroine and the ideal wife. What, then, is Helen Mirren doing in the part?”

RT saw her as “unarguably one of England’s most exciting actresses” but had some trouble picturing her in the title role of The BBC Television Shakespeare: Cymbeline. The playwright was unavailable for comment so director Elijah Moshinsky talked it through.

“I wanted an actress of great sexual voltage,” he said. “Helen can act enormously complex sexual emotions at war with each other.” William Gallagher

NOTES
Cover: Helen Mirren, RT 9-15 July 1983
Feature: p4, billing p25

Storms we cannot weather

I just like that line.  See you at the Cheltenham Screenwriters' Festival?

We could talk, I could buy you a drink, you could tell me this photograph was worth the trouble it took to get.

Cheers,

William

A bit late, but...

One of my cast from Time and the Conway Twitty Appreciation Society, Richard Sutton, was in last week's Dalziel and Pascoe on BBC1.

Now if the BBC iPlayer were up and running there might have been some point telling you this, but it isn't, so there isn't.

Um.

William

Damn, those iPhones are bigger than you think

It's not my image: the original and some others (I think, I may be mixing things up here) is on Flickr round about here.

Before you ask, yes, definitely. I loathe my current mobile and it's not even my current mobile: my real current one now just pretends to send texts, recently giving me a tedious hour in a pub while a friend had a tedious hour in a different pub wondering why I'd gone silent. So I swapped back to my previous current phone and the sound quality is bad, the contortions you have to go to just set an alarm, well, the only thing I can say in praise of my previous-current phone is that it's better than the real-current one in that respect.

So I was looking for a new phone and I have stopped. Don't care that word is the iPhone will be delayed in the UK until next year, don't care that nobody knows what operator it will be on. I've just told Vodafone that no, thank you, I don't want to sign up for another year's contract so at least I won't get any fee for breaking when I move. Because I'll move.

I am troubled by the cost but that's only painful at point of sale. Besides, an expensive phone that works is better than a mildly expensive phone that doesn't, am I right?  I used to work on PC magazines but even then, when it came to my own cash, I always bought Macintosh because I'm more interested in work than I am in the alchemy that is Windows.

Can't remember if I've said this to you before but you know I do a podcast DVD show? A lot of people seem to like it, which is fantastic, and I have a ball talking to you, writing radio scripts, studying DVD dramas like every writer should. I honestly don't think I'd have done it if I were on Windows. Since I had a Mac, it was moments from the idea to the first edition and I've now done over 100 of them and also got work in BBC local radio out of it.

I don't know if the iPhone will really be any good, but Apple's got form for me, I'm saving up.

And this is all on my mind tonight in part because America's getting all hyped up for the US release of the iPhone but also because tomorrow I've promised to help some friends set up their own Mac. They're devout Windows users but they've switched and have lots of questions about configuring this, setting that, adding the other. Angela's coming too but asked what we'd have to talk about after I say "Switch it on".

I hope I tell them what they need. I feel as if I got into computers by mistake, that I should really have pursued writing as I subsequently have, but then it's easy to forget how grounded in 'puting I used to be and how I still skip back and forth between Macs and PCs without thinking. I know there are things I don't realise I do so will I be any good at helping them?

Not sure why I just bent your ear about this, but you've got that kind of face, I can tell you anything, right?

William

Three Colours Trilogy

Um, I actually want to point you at a story about eleven colours, but there you go. While that heading's on my mind, I must watch Three Colours White. I've read the three, I loved Three Colours Blue when I saw it, but I couldn't get through White. Which means I've had Three Colours Red on my shelves for years and can't watch it yet.

Anyway, eleven colours. I found something interesting, though I notice now that it's a month or more old so you may have seen it already, in which case you won't be interested and I'm folding my arms, looking at you, tapping a foot, wondering why you didn't tell me about it yourself:

http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2007/05/01/11-great-color-legends/

Sometimes I type a random word into Google and just see where it takes me, but this time I came across this because of a Photoshop website. If I could only remember which one...

William

And finally, a bit

Listen, I haven't just won a Tony award, have I? That was just a dream, right?

I really am dreaming about my play and a substantial part of me recognises that this now bordering on silly, if you were to mention the word 'childish' I might be upset but I wouldn't entirely disagree.

But still, you know I did this play, you know it went spectacularly, gloriously, joyously well, what you might not know is that it went well twice. I won't keep going on about the day but I'd like you to come backstage with me to the first moment I felt the day was going to be good.

For whatever reason, the day included a very long lunch break and my director used that time to run through the two plays she was doing that afternoon. I roamed around the back of the theatre while she, writer Debbie McAndrew and their cast ran through the first play, Mari's Wake. I think my piece was a great, exuberant finish to the sessions but there's no question that Debbie's piece was the strongest play of the day. I'd already read the script so I was able to wander, enjoying the performance but also soaking in the atmosphere. For this lunch time run through there were probably ten people in the theatre; cast, director, writers, crew. Maybe fifteen. So it was a good time to relish that you were having a good time.

And at one point I stood right at the back, high up by the door, leaning like a more talented James Dean and looking fantastic.

Shows how much I know: two dear friends came in at that moment and report I was actually looking worried as hell. So much so that they sent my wife Angela to go calm me down.

And then I was up, my play's turn. No hanging around, no real time for anything, just enough minutes to have my play performed for me and that same fifteen or so crew and this is this the thing that got me into thinking the day would be good: the crew laughed. There's that laugh that you know isn't really earned: you're recognising there's a joke and you're being nice to the writer. I got some of those but I also got that surprised laugh, the genuinely amused laugh.

Fantastic.

Because of that, when the real audience came in, I was a lot less worried than I'd have expected. You could still have blended whisky on me but I was able to enjoy it.

Very interesting how audiences change, how one joke will fly higher with this group than that. And I've got friends who argue audiences are stupid, that they need everything explained but this enrages me because you know that's wrong, don't you? I'm an audience, you're an audience, when we're watching something on stage or on TV we don't miss a single thing - unless we've stopped watching, in which case boring us before patronising us is really not the way to go. Yet as much as I respect audiences, I underestimated this one: there was one joke they all, every single one of them, got a whole line early. Consequently the punch line, per se, felt like a clunk and I'll watch for that in future.

Gotta go, my ego's on a low light, it needs more stoking,

William

Tell me what you see

GRAHAM: Tell me what you see.

SAM: Well, that's Bristol Street. What's left of it, anyway. I remember that road, that was Holloway Head. But when I was here it was packed. Great bars. Now it's farm land, far as the eye can see. [BEAT] I remember when all this wasn't green fields.

GRAHAM: Shall I tell you what I see?

SAM: Is it any different?

GRAHAM: Just a little.

SAM: Okay. But -

GRAHAM: I see one, two, five, about ten rows of seats. We're in the past. So long ago now. It's 2007, there's an aisle up to the right. Main entrance over there. Sound team up in the box.

SAM: This was the Hippodrome? You converted the Hippodrome into a house? Where do they put plays on now?

GRAHAM: [POINTS IN THE DIRECTION OF THE MAIN HOUSE] That way.

"Feel-good nihilism"

Wouldn't you put that on a theatre poster immediately? "Feel-good nihilism - Faber & Faber".

Actually, I think it was this nice man from Faber but it could've been the National Theatre. Ah, who doesn't get those mixed up? After my play, I got to talk to a sea of faces in an interview, people I've admired, people I'm daunted by and most of all people who were nine people, a sea of nine people. When you walk in expecting three, and when you're nervous of three, facing nine in a circle doesn't help.

But they were great. I was so disappointed when my time was up and we had to stop talking.

Though I think now I should stop typing. I'm not being the clearest man in the world, am I? But I wanted to tell you that this day was spectacular. I wish you could've been there, I'm rocked that I was. I've just been sitting in a theatre with an audience laughing at my jokes.

Be careful what you wish for, because it's fantastic.

Thanks for all the encouragement,
William

Devils and details

Have a look at this, would you? It's one line from my play that we rehearsed yesterday. The characters are Graham and Samantha, I'm not fussed about their ages but they're probably mid-forties.

GRAHAM: It’s just, well, I know who you are, obviously I know who you are, and it’s an occasion.

Nothing unusual there. And when the actor read it for the first time about 10am on Monday, he read it just the same way I imagine you did and precisely the way I heard it in my head when I wrote the line in the first place. When he read it for the last time that day, I don't know, 5pm or something, he read it... in 100% the same way.

But between those two readings was everything.

Graham is an incredibly successful engineer, so successful that he's being interviewed by Sam, until very recently an incredibly successful actress. (Think Nicole Kidman, though maybe not quite so talented.) It's a star interviewer, a star interviewee. Only, while they talk there is a party going on in another room: was that the occasion or did I mean this star actress coming to the house? The answer was the actress.

And then the truth is that Graham and Sam worked together twenty years ago: is that what he means when he says he knows her or is it just because she's so famous an actress now? And, handily, the answer is Yes.

You get the idea, I'm sure: there were actually a fair few more iterations around that one line because there's a lot going on in this play and while as an audience you're supposed to be bounced through it, the cast need to know where they are in the story: what they're going to reveal later, so they know what they're hiding now, all that.

This was how Monday's rehearsal's went. On the great, great side, it was glorious to hear my dialogue fly. And nothing short of tremendous that we would strip a line down and then build it back up again, the director Caroline Jester would add emphasis, would ask for the actors to be thinking of this or that when saying the other - and the final result was in practically every case precisely what I wanted. More, it was precisely what I'd heard in my noggin' as I was writing.

And I expect we did all of this work directly on this one line in about 40 seconds: I remember the practical business about the occasion was instant, but equally the issues of where people are affected the lines before and the scenes afterwards so they were constantly referred to throughout the day. So that's 40 seconds on the specific line, eight hours on the issues.

A lot has been cut from the play, almost every bit of which I'm happy about, all of which I can wear. They're primarily cuts because of the staging: this is strictly speaking a rehearsed reading. Have you seen these before? I've only ever been to one, a chokingly-good rehearsed reading of Alan Plater's Sweet Sorrow at the Royal Court Theatre in London. It was a star cast - I want to say Barbara Flynn was in it, but maybe she was just in the audience - but anyway, you get the idea, this wasn't messin' about, and the way that one worked was that half a dozen cast sat on stools in a row on the stage.

That's not what's happening with mine. It won't be a full-dress piece, it will be a script-in-hand performance and there'll be plenty of sitting in a row, but also it booms out into the audience and my cast will roam the theatre. Still, there are limitations and two of them meant cuts were necessary: I don't have enough cast to do all the parts and I've got no props at all. Consequently even a reference to getting a drink has to be cut and as much as I'm quite happy about that kind of business, I loved it when one actor stopped later on in a scene to say he felt he really needed to be doing this or standing there or something. And that's what he would've been doing, that's where he would have been standing if we hadn't cut the lines.

I sound like I feel vindicated over objecting to cuts but no, seriously, 98% of the cuts are absolutely fine and I even made many of them myself. But what I feel great about is my stagecraft: writing on my little PowerBook, locked away in my office, I got the staging right - I mean, the staging physically and also emotionally, where people must go and what they must do in order to get across the point.

The staging and the dialogue. That's not too bad, is it?

You're wondering what is bad, aren't you? And that 2% is niggling at you. Okay, there's a moment toward the end of the play where rather than another line of dialogue (I have a habit of writing ping-pong dialogue, unceasingly back-and-forth and I try to throw that rhythm out when I can) I've written a gesture instead. Caroline simply doesn't like it. I've let it be cut, and also asked for the next couple of lines to go as well so that they don't seem nonsensical, but they're not going far. Many, many cuts and trims I agreed with or even suggested to cope with the lack of props or cast are ones that I'm going to keep for future versions of the play but this one is on an elastic band.

More seriously, there is a thing that lets me be a typical writer: I'm ecstatic about how well the rehearsals went, I know this is the best thing I've ever written, I know it is a joyous and clever piece, I know I've actually hit some things that are surprisingly profound, and I also cannot bear a word of the play. When I did a Crossroads script I was an amateur and I felt it in every nerve I own; with this, I was totally in command of my material yet unable to convey one key issue and at times I felt amateur again.

It's this. The characters were both actors once and I've got them being actors again; their most pompous speeches get interrupted by the "director", they each lose their lines at times, and they are heckled most enthusiastically from the audience.

The point of all these is to really strongly emphasise that most of the play is set right now, right this very second while you're watching it. It's this business that theatre is live and you shouldn't know what's coming next, so I make sure you don't and when I've set up something I hope you do expect, I cut it off at the knees.

It all reads fine, the actors are playing it well, but when you're doing that kind of analysis I said about the "occasion" line, you hit huge problems. Who are these people? The engineer and ex-actress of the future, the actor and actress of today? And then both characters are lying merrily away so there's a further layer to untangle. And the final moments of the play tell you something moderately unpleasant about one of the characters and why he or she is even here. So that's a, what, fourth level? You count, I can't.

You should be able to explain your play to your cast and your director, I should be able to explain my play to them. For this one element, I couldn't convey it. Part of it is the surprise (to me) that I write very instinctively and I can post-rationalise almost everything, but not everything.

Sometimes yesterday I wanted to strip back these elements, make it all simpler. And when I think that, I really don't like the idea that I can't: I can't change anything now for the Thursday performance.

Fortunately, most of the time I don't want to strip them back. I don't think it's any more complex than any other play about time and though I'm disappointed in my lack of eloquence with the cast, I'm not disappointed with these elements in the play.

But just as I said I'm a writer, I can hold these conflictingly arrogant and self-deprecating points equally dearly, I can also fully know that the purpose of this showcase is to teach me and yet be disappointed that I need more teaching. The play's not clear enough to the cast, though they're so good I swear they're selling it precisely correctly, and that means it isn't clear to my director either. So she's being very nice to me and I'm being very nice back, but I still feel some of that same old Crossroads amatuerishness.

Mind you, there's no question I was bad on Crossroads and, I think, quite equally no question that I'm much better here: my play's one of those pieces that just has life in it.

Stagecraft, dialogue, life, how can I be mithered about this?

Oh! One last thing. Usually rehearsed readings have someone reading out the stage directions. I've managed to make this unnecessary except for at the very, very start. And my cast read out that initial stage description really well. Even my stage directions are good, shouldn't I be the most smug man in the world?

William

The Real Thing

So, yes, of course it's very frustrating being a writer knocking on doors and part of the annoyance is when you see something you know you could've done better. But it's also very easy to say that and there's a lot less pressure on your writing when the only things involved are you and a subsequent rejection slip.

This is on my mind now because I'm in rehearsal tomorrow.

It's the real deal, eight hours solid rehearsal with a professional company. Performance on Thursday.

And there are five plays being done on this showcase day for agents and producers, but four of them are getting half-hour excerpts. I'm being done in full.

It's obviously because mine is a one-act that only takes about 45 minutes to do where presumably everyone else's is much longer. I've read one of them, Mari's Wake by Debbie McAndrew but the script just flew by, I have no idea what its running time is. I do know it's a very good piece, I'm a bit daunted by coming after it in the running order.

But, grief, running orders. Text messages from my director. Printing out rehearsal scripts. The sense that this is my play but as of tomorrow morning - well, actually as of when the director came on board - it's our play instead.

This is what I want, this is what I've worked for. I'm spinning.

Obviously I'm more excited than I can say, plainly I'm also nervous. Part of me thinks I'll enjoy all this more on Friday when it's done and gone, but another, much stronger part of me is regretting that I'm not in rehearsal next week for something else, too.

William

Quotation marks

I'd like to suggest to you that like all misunderstood groups, writers do plenty of misunderstanding too. And it seems somehow worse because our business is in communicating.

So, for example, I once had a deeply involved argument about the role of writers in film and I had it with the editor of an entertainment news website who specifically covered movies. Neither of us won, we might yet be at it if there hadn't been a deadline, but toward the end of the time we spent on it, I finally saw that she really did not know what a writer does. She did believe that the actors make up the words.

Now, you can argue that this is a little startling for a film editor, and I hope that it is unusual, but it took me so long to see it. Every argument I'd done up to that realisation was a complete waste, and all her arguments back were too, because it was as if she were talking about writers and I was talking about the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

A similiar thing happened to me last night. I'm trying to persuade a fella that dialogue in scripts is not just the decoration at the end of the writing process, the nice bit you add on your tenth draft, that in fact if you can't write dialogue, you just can't write scripts. His considered counter-argument was that this is bollocks. Plot is all.

I'm in a didactic mood this afternoon so let me say: if he doesn't change this, he will never write a good script.

I can feel him cracking his knuckles, ready to write a comment here that if I don't stop trading on my dialogue and my unexpected ability to write at lightspeed, if I don't buckle down to doing treatments and cork-board step-outlines, I'll never write a good script.

But where I battled it out with that editor because this was my life's goal in question, with this man I argued in the pub for hours because I want him to write that great script. If I thought he just couldn't write dialogue and it was never going to happen, I'd have suggested darts for the evening.

As it is, one small issue in the middle of the hours later seemed to me to be key. We talked about whether you come out of a film thinking about the dialogue. His position was that you never come out going "cor, that was a fantastic metaphor" and mine was that you might come out of a Bond film thinking that was a great explosion but you never come out saying "what about that 3lb explosive pack, and the way they supplemented that practical with the CGI in post was just amazing". Come out having been in the story, that's the aim, and I couldn't see why this fella didn't agree that atrocious dialogue prevents this.

Mark you, he also doesn't rate Aaron Sorkin's dialogue so I should've twigged this was another movies vs Mormon Tabernacle kind of discussion.

And I think I know where the kernel of this argument was now. It's that he thinks dialogue is speeches and I know it's speech.

Follow: here are two different pieces of dialogue, the first of which being one we both remembered last night:

RENTON: Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life. But why would I want to do a thing like that?

and

TOM: It's right what you say about remembering things. Our kid, he can tell you the teams that played at Wembley, the year Hull and Hull Kingston Rovers met in the Rugby League Final. He can also tell you the names of most of the people in the crowd. But I tell you the funny part. The only thing our kid can't remember is the score.

CHRISTINA: Why's that?

TOM: His team lost. Ten four.


The first is from John Hodges' screenplay for Trainspotting (and you may notice the filmed version is a little different) based on Irvine Welsh's novel, and the second is from Sweet Sorrow, a stage play by Alan Plater.

If I ask you what the difference is and you say one's film, one's stage, I'm amazed you've read this far. If you say there's no difference whatsoever, well, I've a lot more time for that argument.

I would say that there is a difference, that the choose life one is a definite speech, I want to say an iconic moment in Trainspotting but I'm probably misusing the word, whereas the second one is a conversation. But they're both doing the same job: both of them are telling us something and they're really telling us something else.

So with the Trainspotting one, most especially when Ewan McGregor delivers it so well but certainly even as you read it here, you know instantly that the speaker is against this whole choose life idea. How can you know that from the script? McGregor could've said it sarcastically and you'd have got it, but he was much more subtle and the script had no tricks, no "(caustic)" direction. It was there in the dialogue, on the page, right in your face and though you can't point to the one syllable that gave it away in that very first sentence, that's because it's only with really crap dialogue that you can.

In the second case, the punchline is a delicously creaking old gag, but stuff the rugby, forget the kid, what is Tom telling you about Tom? He's telling a story. Even a simple thing, he's fashioned it into a tale and what you get is that he is a storyteller, that maybe he's also just a little bit of a dreamer. I've actually compressed a longer sequence into those lines so you can see this but if I'd done the lot or you know the play, you'd also have got that he's a poetry fan.

That's what I call good dialogue. This is what I call bad:

TOM: I like poetry, it's really great.

RENTON: Drugs are better, man.

I think that dialogue is intensely hard to do, though unusually for me I believe I do it, but also that only half the fight is writing speech that sounds like a real person talking and conveys all these layers that we all do convey in our every conversation. And that the other half is in hiding the fact that it's so hard. When the dialogue feels constructed, as I'm afraid I agree Aaron Sorkin can do on his off days, then it's artifice and prangs out at you, it takes you out of the story and fights you getting back in. It's bad enough in films, it's even worse on the page because what else is there on the page but dialogue?

One last thought, if I may. When Dialogue Goes Bad. There's a line or three in the film Martha Meet Frank, Daniel and Lawrence (or somesuch title, I might be mixing up the order of names there) in which a character does indeed do Bad Dialogue. I can't remember it, I've blocked the film from my mind but he says something that it's very unlikely the character knows, it's absolutely rock certain that the character would never say it in that situation ("Oh, before you ring off, don't you think nuclear submarines are a pretty colour?"). And there isn't one single possible chance that the line is anything but the writer feeding us information. This is in all ways very, very crap.

But I cheered.

Right there in the cinema, I went Yes!

Because I knew without that stupid plotting dialogue, it would take the film a minimum of twenty more minutes to get us to the stage in the story that the line brought us to. If you're arguing that's actually good dialogue, ah, come on: go see the film, I refuse to take the blame when you don't like it, and you will see the line I mean. Prangs out at you.

So it was very poor, it would have thrown me out of the movie. But I was long, long thrown and that fudged rubbish meant the film must be nearly over.

That's why I cheered. Mind you, I don't know why I didn't just walk out an hour beforehand.

William

Brothers & Sisters

Sorry, I've had to take this entry off. So that the comments make sense - er, the comments remain, right? - then you need to know that this was about watching a whole season of this show, Brothers & Sisters, and whether it's an interesting writing exercise.

I'll put it back if I can.

w

Live from New York City

Er, that's about it. But while this is my fourth or fifth time here, it's the first one I've been like a tour guide: I'm showing my mother the place.

And I must be doing okay because she's said this holiday is the greatest experience of her life. She said it in the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, so maybe she just meant she'd had a Damascus moment there and joined the faith, I'm not sure.

But may I offer you a sample of the kind of indepth local knowledge I've been displaying?

New York City is the best place in the world.

There you go; I've often thought it, I've always thought it really, but I haven't said it to you.

William "Wearing his new NYC Sweatshirt and Only a Little Bit Embarrassed About It" Gallagher

RIP Veronica Mars

Rumours have lurched to the good and the bad for months but as of this afternoon, it's official: the US drama Veronica Mars is over.

Did you know? Did you spend the day checking all the US TV news feeds waiting for word? Because I did. And I would say that it's hard to remember the last time a show had me checking like this but it isn't: I was exactly the same at exactly this point last year. And it was exactly waiting to hear if Veronica Mars was to get a third season.

It did and, I'll tell you straight, the news improved the holiday I was having at the time.

I have to think that its time was up and that if it had gone on longer it would perhaps have weakened. But I have to think that because there's no other solace available.

There was about half a second of hope when the network, The CW, announced it was talking the Mars creator about some kind of related new series, but then they said words to the effect of "not that it'll come to anything". A lesson to us all: if you're going to dangle hope, don't destroy it in the second half of the same sentence.

w

The kids are all write. Maybe not all. But definitely some.

Have you seen Totally Doctor Who? It's a children's companion series to the drama, runs five o'clock on Fridays on BBC1 and at various times on CBBC as well. This week the guest was Helen Raynor, the writer of the current Dalek two-parter.

The writer.

I'm just not used to this: you see Russell T Davies everywhere but there's somehow a sense that he is Mr Who rather than a writer, at least in the minds of interviewers, so to get an actual episode writer front and centre seems unusual. This is the first time I've seen Totally, I was coughing away at home with man-flu, so perhaps they do it all the time but I hadn't thought so.

I've met Helen, I like her and I like her writing - she did a grand Torchwood and I envy that she got a Friday Play on BBC Radio 4 - but more importantly, she's a writer and she was being interviewed as one on a high-rating children's show. Can't you just imagine millions of kids with their faces too close to the screen, now being shown that such strange creatures as writers exist? I keep imagining some of them dreaming about become writers themselves.

Mark you, at the rate I'm going, they'll overtake me, the little bastards.

I realise we're in a more media-aware time than when I would've been their age, it's probably not as a big a deal as it seems to me, but when I was a young lad, writing was not something a young lad like me could aspire to doing. That sounds ridiculous, even to me as I type it, but I feel it was true. I do have a certain relative who repeatedly told me then to "keep your feet on the ground" if I ever ventured a plan about writing. This person now claims responsibility for my success, such as it is, and did tell me the other day that it'd be okay if I didn't thank her when I win some award. "That's all right," I said. "I won't."

I honestly think I became a writer because of Lou Grant, a newspaper drama from the company that would rapidly become more famous for Hill Street Blues. It was the first time I was aware of an hour drama as something crafted by people but I didn't think I could be one of them. So I went into computers by mistake, journalism by accident, scriptwriting by, er, let me come back to that one.

Would it have helped me if there'd been a writer interviewed on Magpie? I don't know, but I watched this Totally Doctor Who yesterday and it was invigorating. Okay, some of the show has a forced-jollity I find hard to endure, but dead centre in its everything-Who-is-fantastic approach was a writer. And, let's face a cold fact, there are plenty of writers who should not be allowed out in public, but Helen Raynor isn't one of them.

So a smart writer is championed on a hugely popular children's show. I think that's marvellous.

William

Would you credit it?

I've just got an acknowledgement in a book - and can't imagine what I did to deserve it. Now, this could be yet another embarrassing mixup between me and the various other William Gallaghers (there's a WG who's a Doctor Who fanzine editor and everybody asks if he's me). But in case I'm right and it's me getting acknowledged, I feel the need to earn it more. So can I tel you about the book?

It's actually books, plural: a truly exceptional five-volume set of reference books called The Kaleidoscope BBC Television Drama Research Guide 1936-2006. I can only think of one other title that's in the same league for depth of research and that's the same group's The Kaleidoscope British Independent Television Drama Research Guide 1955-2005 which covers all non-BBC drama in UK television.

Every programme, every episode, every cast, every crew, every thing. Details of those troubling problems (for me writing Radio Times's On This Day) when programmes were scheduled but pulled at the last second. Everything. The base research is from Radio Times but it's then supplemented with official information direct from the broadcasters and, increasingly, the Kaliedoscope group's own records.

You look at these ten volumes and cannot imagine what it would be like to be on day one of a research project like that. Then you look at the people who do it and they appear quite sane and normal, they appear to have social lives. I'm told that's a front, but at least they don't have the pale skin of people who never leave libraries.

And I do know the people in this group. I've bought their books for years, never knowing quite how close to my home they are, until one day I walked into Birmingham Central Library with my PowerBook, ready to do On This Day research from the Radio Times issues and found five people doing exactly the same thing. Given how much they do and how random my time in the library can be, it's surprising I hadn't seen them before.

But, grief, it was so handy. I realised who they must be just from the quiet, whispered fact-checking they were doing, and it was great. I could say to them: "Excuse me, but you wouldn't happen to know when the last episode of Warship aired, would you?"

Can't tell you the number of times I've asked people questions like that when I'm at the library but this was the first time the people didn't back away quietly. And instead told me instantly "March 29, 1977".

I was going to rabbit on at you about these books anyhow but I'm a very chuffed man this afternoon. I might go read the acknowledgements again.

William

Prices and links from UK DVD Review

I didn't talk about any DVDs on this week's UK DVD Review podcast, except that I also somehow managed to slip in more than I could reasonably hope to mention prices for as well.

Here are the prices, then, bar any postage and packing. So that I can give you links, I'm pointing you here to the Amazon.co.uk site. The prices are all pretty much the best you can get but nonetheless, shop around, okay?

And note that prices may vary from those below: these are correct as of writing.

Thanks,
William

Battlestar Galactica - The Mini Series [2004] £4.98

Groundhog Day (Collector's Edition) [1993] £4.98

Trainspotting: The Definitive Edition [DTS] [1996] price varies; see New & Used listing

Stranger Than Fiction [2006] £11.98

Shakespeare In Love [1999] £6.98

Sense And Sensibility [1996 £6.98]

Grosse Pointe Blank [1997] £6.97

The Mad About You Collection (REGION 1) (NTSC) note this is a US release and that the price varies

Stage one

"Time and the Conway Twitty Appreciation Society" by William Gallagher will be performed in Birmingham on June 14.

I'm afraid you're not invited, but you are the first I'm telling and it's also my first professional stage production. Details, some requiring my signature (!), are to follow and I don't even know the venue yet, but it will be directed by Caroline Jester from the Birmingham Rep.

William

Shove over

There's a thing I've just written for the On This Day column in Radio Times that I want to tell you about: I'm really in two minds whether to submit it to the mag so you may only see it here. Because On This Day is meant to always be about television history and of course never about me but this one entry, April 30, is about radio and sort of about me.

But before I tell you that, thank you very, very much: I'm in Birmingham Central Library and just nipped back to my On This Day database to check I was telling you the right date and I was. But I'd entered it into the wrong date on the database. I'm not sure I'd have caught that mistake if it weren't for you so I appreciate that.

Anyway, I'm in that library and I'm a bit rattled because I've just come across a feature in the 27 April to 3 May 1958 edition of Radio Times which begins: "Drop in at Birmingham Reference Library almost any Friday and you will see a thick-set, bearded man poring over dictionaries and volumes of poetry."

Well, okay, that's 49 years ago, it's Saturday today (though I'd have been doing this yesterday if it weren't for the Bank Holiday). And also the library's moved in those five decades. But still, I almost turned around in my seat to see if that was the fella currently occupying my favourite spot next to the Radio Times shelves.

The fella in 1949 was Edward J Mason, who's a novelist and playwright which I'd say was like me except he was considerably more successful, and he also devised the radio quiz My Word! which is what he would research on all those Fridays, all those years ago.

It's easy to say it was eerie reading that. But I also felt proud to be carrying on some kind of tradition. I felt certain, I feel certain, that I and On This Day will of course be as forgotten as My Word! in five decades. I'm proud of Birmingham's library system. I'm reminded how fleeting this work I love really is. That could make me think it's worthless and yet instead it makes me want to cherish it.

Anyway, the feature is in a dried and dusty old copy of Radio Times and it makes me feel alive.

William

Prose and cons

Writing's writing, right? Most days I'm doing pretty rudimentary journalism and last month, as you may have gathered because I haven't shut up about it yet, I wrote some near-endless number of scripts. April is the prose month, and I was quite uneasy about it.

You've spotted the past tense, you know I'm feelng better but I know tomorrow I'll be back to uneasy, so for this brief interlude, what's made me happier is that I wrote some straight prose tonight. I can only imagine your excitement.

Isn't it interesting, though, how writing can be so different? I lie that when I think of an idea I automatically know whether it's radio, theatre or novel: the truth is that I make it be radio. Maybe film. Theatre is scary, especially the night after seeing Chekhov, and prose daunts me. There are just too many words. Years ago, when I began in magazines, I was on a computer title where the typical article length was 5,000 words and after a few months of that, I could not conceive how anyone could need more than that to cover any topic. Later I joined the BBC and wrote untold thousands of pages of Ceefax, I think typically 70 words per page, and after a few months of that, I couldn't imagine how anyone would need more.

Even today, if you look at a typical BBC News Online story, the whole tale is in the top four pars and everything below it is strictly speaking unnecessary. NOL and Ceefax copy is now written simultaneously; when I was last there the content production system gave the journalist a box for the top paragraphs and another for the rest; both were then sent live on NOL, only the top box went live on Ceefax. And very often what's in that second box adds nothing to the story; even more often it's a straight lift from the last piece on the same topic.

So I naturally write concisely.

I know I'm taking an age to say I write concisely.

Maybe I mean I can.

You'll just have to trust me.

But here I am, a deluded concise writer, and one of my great passions is prose. I think of the novels that have reached within me and I want to do that; I want to do it to other people but I also want to do it to me, to dig out something, learn something, have a blast in fiction. Can't write long, yet I revel in novels. So what's a boy to do?

Cheat.

I wrote an epistolic novel. I can't remember the length now but it was several hundred short pieces, primarily emails but also faxes, scripts, captions, Radio Times billings, even NOL and Ceefax pages at one point. Anything that I could write concisely and yet load with as much as you have to when you're writing Ceefax.

Whatever else you might call it, it was a novel. That novel got me an agent, got me a really high-powered meeting at a very big publisher, did not get published. You're thinking it all fell down there and, well, it did, but it fell with enough of a splash that I would be as insane to not try again as I probably was to try in the first place. Consequently, I've been writing another novel. Only, I can't pull off the same cheat again.

So I've been writing proper, longform prose. Every trick I know about pacing a script, about structuring a magazine article, it's all simultaneously worthless and brilliantly useful. I'm simultaneously lost and, er, I suppose found. That sounds far too brightsiding, ignore me.

What I will say is that when you're writing prose fiction, it is a very, very bad idea to read Paul Auster. Or Carrie Fisher. Margery Allingham. Tommy Hardy. Alan Plater. (You thought he was a playwright? You've got to try his novel Misterioso some day. I may have read that ten times now.)

Any suggestions for rubbish novelists I could try while I'm working?

William

Anton that bombshell

I feel a prat saying this when you may just already know it, but Uncle Vanya is tremendous. Okay, if that's ever so slightly ancient news, how about this? The Birmingham Rep's production is fantastic.

You've got until April 14. I imagine it must tour but I don't know and I do hope you get to see it.

Something came up today that just narked me no end and though I took it out on my pampas grass, I was in a foul mood going out. So, I'm in a mood and Anton Chekhov is not the Jim Carrey of theatre, it wasn't looking like a promising evening. Frankly, all I knew about Chekhov is that he liked his four-act plays so, well, a mood, Russian four-act depressions, I didn't expect to be safe company.

But it instantly got me. And it really moves: er, I've just realised I mean that in pretty much every sense. It's two acts, interval, two acts but lightspeed. Brilliant sets, complete with live rain, and a strong cast I completely bought.

One thing, though. Check the Birmingham Rep website for special offers: I just went on that so I could tell you when the play is on until and discovered that tickets were only a tenner tonight. They weren't remotely a tenner when I booked a couple of months ago. I can't pretend it wasn't well worth the price I paid but I might pay more attention to that website in future.

Did you know the RSC's doing The Seagull soon? I think this Chekhov lad has a future.

William

Idles of March

And with the last 'un now submitted, my one-writing-pitch-a-day March is over.

I've still got eighteen to hear back from but otherwise the month went thisaway:

34 pitches
10 of this thing I don't want to say
8 contests
7 project proposals
6 writing samples
4 rewritten scripts
4 new internet radio scripts
2 newly written short scripts
2 bad mistakes
2 meetings
1 theatre workshop

But the headlines must be:

4 rejections

and

10 leads (basically yes, all 10 for further work or pitching invitations)

William

Backsides

As in getting up off one.

We're almost at the end of March and I now know enough of what I'm doing to reveal my secret plan: I intended to spend March pitching and prodding at my scripwriting career. Every day, I decided, every single day in March I would enter a writing contest, send a sample to a producer, post or email a query letter angling to get to send a script to a producer, I would target a couple of TV agents (my current agent is solely for novels), or anything like that.

And though, as it happens, today was looking like the bleakest day of the whole tough, bloodied month, I found someone to pitch to - and got a response from an earlier pitch saying I could send a particular piece of material in. So that was two, I've got one outstanding writing gig to get right and I've got Friday full to the brim with meetings and workshops so even though it's only March 28, I know I've succeeded in this month plan.

You know pitching and submissions take a time so my aim was to get something out each day, I wasn't really that fussed whether I heard back from anyone. That's part of the reason for doing this: not only are you getting off your backside but you get so each day is another pitch to get done and you can barely remember yesterday's, let alone be too fussed if yesterday's ended in a rejection.

As of this moment, having posted out today's one about twenty minutes ago, I'm now waiting on responses to 19 things, which seems pretty good to me.

And otherwise, by the end of this month, I, the laziest man you'll ever meet, will have done:

32 pitches*
7 contests
4 rewritten scripts
2 newly written short scripts
4 new internet radio scripts (not part of the month's gig but written and performed)
6 full script writing samples to producers
7 proposals to producers
10 something I don't want to say but they count, honest
2 stupid mistakes that I also don't want to reveal

*one day I was asked for a script when I'd already done the day's pitch

And in return I'll have got:

3 rejections
6 leads
1 meeting
1 workshop
0 sleep

I also hope to have something in the BBC Radio 4 pre-offers round, but that depends how well I write March 31's job.

Yes, I'm telling you all this because I think it's good, but I'm also telling me so that I might do it again. Around March 15 when it was all going swimmingly, I thought about extending this into April but, as feeble as this sounds, I need to quit for a bit.

I just know that my backside is my problem, and it's spreading. So things like this month's plan might help me and definitely feel as if they're doing me some good. Funny: I thought I'd had more rejections. I was just after telling someone that I had more rejections and that the good thing was with this one-a-day gig, I wasn't fussed: I be disappointed yet ten minutes later I'd have to consult my list to even tell you which one it was who'd rejected me.

And rejections or success, I'm still going to feel glorious when I've sent out March 31st's pitch.

So what do you think? Do you want to try this yourself? Or if you already do it, have you got any advice?

William

Turning to the weather

Hey,

So if you read my last, did you decide you would never look back at any old material of yours? Because I thought I wouldn't. Too painful.

But you know where this is going, don't you? I'm trying to get some material out there: I'm planning a pitch or a submission every day in March and so far I'm doing brilliantly. March 1, 2, 3, easy. March 4... I'm struggling already. But there are a couple of international screenwriting competitions coming up and I've done encouragingly well in those before yet then lapsed for years. So partly because I want to un-lapse, partly because it's a Sunday so there's no one I can phone to pitch to, I'm planning to spend today getting a submission ready and, well, submitted online or something.

Only, all the comps I can find are for feature-length scripts. Everything I've done lately is either rubbish or hour-long, quite often both, so I've just braved it and had a arms-length dig through my very own slush pile.

I didn't say this to you last time because I was too embarrassed but that first script of mine was dated 1996. Eleven years I've been at this lark, it's not very impressive. But eleven years ago I was unimaginably bad. And I've just found an old piece that doesn't have a date but must be at least eight years old and it's actually really good. It's a piece called Embers.

You know there are things I want to change, of course, but Embers has good characters and it works. Suddenly the dialogue is good: it's as if there's a Tuesday some time when I learnt how to write dialogue. And I've said this often: if you can do dialogue, it papers over practically everything else you get wrong.

I'm a bit chastened that I didn't do anything with this piece at the time. Well, I obviously did, the copy I found had a "for the attn. of" bit on the title page and the name of some long-forgotten BBC drama executive. But I abandoned it too easily and I'm an idiot. You know, naturally, that once you've finished writing a piece you should go straight on to the next and I think I was actually so caught up in the idea for the next one that I let this piece go. If I can face it, I've got that next one right beside me to read now. If I can face it.

I'm currently rewriting that 1996 script as part of a bet, to do a rewrite or develop an old, long-held idea in 15 days. (I take part in a regular script challenge, the idea to keep you working, to give you deadlines, to make sure you end up with at least something written down instead of months of prevarication. The current challenge - hang on, I've forgotten how to do links - is with Christine Patton and Piers Beckley. By all accounts they're having a fine time reworking their stuff, I'm staring blankly at mine for hours at a time, wishing I had a dentist appointment.

And yet if I'd elected to rewrite Embers instead, I'd be delivering the rewrite this afternoon.

I might just change the names and pretend Embers is the old, bad one that I've brilliantly improved. What do you think?

William