Criticism on toast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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