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

Manhattanhenge

I've only recently realised this so don't press me on the details, but when I leave a room, I just assume I'm forgotten. I'm not complaining. But imagine how it feels, then, to know that there's a cast and a director out there rehearsing my words.

Specifically, these words:

The golden sun hanging clearly in the sky, away from Manhattan island, high above the water. The sun in the distance over New York Harbour. Over Ellis Island. Striking the Statue of Liberty. The Brooklyn Bridge. And now imagine the view of the city from the East River, the sun still just barely above the buildings. It’s briefly blocked by the Empire State Building, then the Rockefeller Centre. And now it’s lower, nearer to the buildings, lower and lower, until you can see it. The city of New York looking like Stonehenge at solstice.

My short play, Manhattanhenge, is to be performed at the Carriageworks theatre in Leeds next month: it's a two-night festival of new writing and what I'm told is that my piece is to get a prime spot.

I'm even more pleased than you expect: Manhattanhenge is a tricky piece, it's taken a lot of work to get right and I hadn't expected it to fly. But you know how whenever you write, you try to write something new, something you've not reached for before: this time, I finished the tale and shivered at it. I've never done shiver before.

And though I've yet to meet the cast or the director, they're telling me they were moved by the piece. I can't wait to see them play it.

William

Anoraks in aisle 9

Years ago, I had lunch with people selling geographic information systems and to the terror of their PR agent, they showed me how to make their software go wrong. I think they were pleased I knew what they were talking about: they had been used to selling to corporations, now they were aiming at the PC market and few of the journalists they'd met were all that interested. Even fewer knew about projections, I was the only one who would defend Mercator's system.

(Rant. I still will. Don't you knock Geradus Mercator in front of me. His way of translating a globe into a flat map is a working one: he wasn't pratting about settling political scores, he was getting ships to go where they were pointed. /Rant.)

So these people saw a fellow cartography fan in me and we had a ball. Shortly afterwards, the feature I wrote about them and various other GIS manufacturers got me a nomination for Magazine Writer of the Year at the PPA Awards. (I lost to a dog columnist in Bitch monthly. Quite seriously.)

I just relish the artistry in maps: the choice of what you show, what you don't. The way a map tells you as much about its artist and his or her society as it does about the lands it depicts. The lands it depicts: the far-distant shores, the pin-sharp accuracy of Ordnance Survey and the wild imagination of mappa mundi. Actually, also the imagination of Ordnance Survey: the way acres of military property will be marked "lake" or something. Shouldn't the OS mark ordnance when it finds it? I'd think that was a contractual obligation.

Anyway, I bring this up now because I wish to complain and I promise that there is no one but you I can tell in all this land. Here's the thing. My local hypermarket, a very big Sainsbury's, has been remodelling for six months: every time I go, and I go an awful lot lately, they've moved things. Now it's finally finished, it's all very good, but it's big and different so they have maps up.

They have maps, I have an iPhone that lets me blog here live from the freezer section, can you see where this is going yet?

I photographed the map with my iPhone. I wasn't planning to show it to you, or to anybody really. But standing there in aisle 9, I had no problem with people staring as I tapped the screen to zoom in on Light Bulbs, aisle 27.

Only, the map lies.

I put my social standing on the line for that map, and it lies.

There are no light bulbs in aisle 27. And I may be a man, but still I can ask questions: the staff directed me back toward aisles 3 through 7.

Maps exaggerate the prominence of enemy territory in wartime. They suggest safe passage where no such thing exists. It's through mapping we get gerrymandering - how did Gerry Mander get both his names remembered? - and it's through maps that we can see society change over centuries.

But we can't find light bulbs in Sainsbury's.

All that J Sainsbury money, all that Sainsbury graphic design, all that Sainsbury lying.

Hang on. I'm in Asda.

William

How do you get 17 People into a bottle?

If a particular friend of mine is writing a script where it becomes vital that the protagonist knows the right time, she will introduce a blind watchmaker and his seven sons, sure an' they'll all have a tale to tell, in order to get someone to tell him or her it's eight o'clock. Myself, I'll write in a watch.

There's really no way to say which of is right in our approaches, except that obviously I am, because where I could muster arguments on practicality, your basic storytelling, and simple budget, she could argue that I have TV mentality. She's writing for a bigger canvas. I'm not saying that's what she argues, but she could and the next time we argue about this I've just given her some armament.

Besides, if you take my reluctance to introduce what I'd call superfluous characters to extreme, you know that any character you do see in my material is important. It's like when there's a gun to your head so you're watching Poirot: there is a limit to how many people can be the murderer because there's a finite group and the fine line between the importance of the roles is erased by looking at the cast list.

But I love, absolutely cherish working to very finite constraints. Each On This Day entry for Radio Times is between 89 and 94 words long, I wrote some 16,000 Ceefax pages that were extraordinarily constrained, Crossroads was so many minutes and so many cast, it goes on. And I also cherish it when someone else works to extreme constraints and does it well.

Hence 17 People. That's the title of a West Wing episode I'm particularly fond of. I re-read the script today while I was waiting for something and tonight I just re-watched the episode. I honestly don't think I realised this back in 2001 when it aired here, but it's what American TV calls a bottle show. I don't know what UK TV calls them. Probably "cheap". And in the intro to his published script, Aaron Sorkin says it was mandated: make this one cheap. No guest stars, no location filming, no new sets. "In other words, I got to write a play," he said.

If you know the series at all, this was the episode when Toby was told of the President's MS, but that doesn't matter. Well, not now, and not so much to me anymore: knowing what the story was and where it was going to go, this is still a glorious episode and the type of drama that makes me a drama nut. Usually I've said that drama is two people talking, but here it's two, three, seven people talking. Same principle, though: I read scripts about the end of the universe and I could care less, if I tried very hard. I read the script to 17 People and every scene is two or more people talking and I am transfixed.

By contrast, I switched on what I think I'll just call a Popular UK Drama the other night and it was exactly this, it was a scene with two people just talking. But every line was clichéd, it was quite remarkable how nobody need any new lines even to bridge between a couple of clichés. I was transfixed again, watching for their resolve to break and a fresh thought to come through but if they managed it, it wasn't before I'd switched to the news.

So maybe I'm just saying is that it's fine to have constraints, it doesn't mean you mustn't do anything with them.

And hiring Richard Schiff doesn't hurt.

William

It's about time.

A friend who was in a brutal traffic accident a few years ago told me once of his utter anger at Casualty: a character had a similar accident and because he wasn't fairly immediately sanguine about losing his legs, the doctors and nurses fretted that he was unusual. They'd been treating him for several minutes, he should cop on to himself, sort himself out. I'm told it recently had a side story, a B-story in which someone learned they had cancer, went through all the chemotherapy and died within the one episode.

I did explain to my friend that it's written into Casualty that all accident stories, all guest stories will be completely dealt with in a single episode and, moreover, that one episode will cover one shift at A&E. Maybe we'll see someone going into work first, maybe coming out after, but otherwise, it's in that eight-hour period. But of course really what I was saying was precisely the same as my friend: we were both saying Casualty is unrealistic and aggravating, I was just using more words.

We all know this one-shift approach is rubbish and we have all complained about TV characters, in many shows, miraculously getting over amnesia/nuclear war/dry cleaning within a single episode. But I think we've been trained to accept it anyway.

Follow.

I was just re-watching Noél, a particular favourite episode of The West Wing from December 2000. I remember it being criticised a lot at the time for how, it was said, Josh Lyman gets over his post-traumatic stress in an hour.

But he didn't. The episode concentrated on the ten or so hours of one day, the first day in which he is diagnosed and after which he will begin treatment. More, the episode was actually set over a two-week period as we saw Josh crumble. So, two weeks, ten hours, the start of longterm treatment, it was exactly right. More, the reason for doing the episode was directly because Josh had been shot at the start of the season, the makers didn't want to pretend that goes away easily.

So how does The West Wing get criticised when it seems you have to be ill or in an accident to get mad at Casualty?

I don't know. I thought I'd figure it out if I just talked it over with you but I have to say you're being very quiet so far. I don't doubt that you agree Cas is wrong, Wing is right, but why the difference in perception for most people? It can't be that we expect less of Casualty, though I believe we do, because that suggests we expect more of the Wing and that it let us down but I can't see how. Nor can it really be that The West Wing is more popular than Casualty because, again while that's patently true worldwide, it's utterly the reverse in the UK. And it cannot be acting,it surely cannot be acting because Bradley Whitford is superb as Josh and, er, there are probably people in Casualty too, presumably.

Perhaps it's to do with how Casualty is bone-numbingly sequential: it will only tell a story in one direction, will only ever do this happens and then that happens and then the other happens. That West Wing, quite typically for the series, was focused on one day but it jumped through it while simultaneously taking us through those two weeks beforehand.

But I don't know, I really do not know. And because you have no doubt which approach I favour, I'm troubled by it all.

William

Doctor Who: Live Blogging

Apparently there are sports blogs where the writer is not at the match, he or she is just plonked in front of a telly.

I mock these people.

Only...

I think I've just done the same. For the first time, my Radio Times Doctor Who blog has gone live the moment the show finished airing, and I know this because I put it live.

I have to be conscious that Helen Raynor writes a cracking hour's TV and I do - hang on, counts on fingers - 433 whole words, but I'm not comparing, I'm celebrating. When Doctor Who works now, it's a hurricane and I love it. The exuberance in it, there can't be a harder show to write.

Mind you, I learnt a lesson tonight: if you or I ever get to write one, we need to comb our hair and dress smartly: Helen is the first writer this series, besides Russell T Davies, to get interviewed on camera for Doctor Who Confidential.

William

Bloody hell

I'm going to be annoying now: I'm going to tell you half a story and refuse to reveal the rest. But it's only a small thing, and I'm just bursting to tell you how huge it is.

There's this writer, okay, someone whose work I've admired pretty much forever: he's cropped up in the Radio Times On This Day malarky more times than I can count, I can be fairly certain you rate him too. Mr Anonymous has just read a script of mine and so has his wife, who'll have to be Ms Anonymous, and I spoke to them both a second ago.

Their quick, overall summary: "Worthy of Patricia Highsmith."

If you don't know her work, I honestly think you're missing out: Strangers on a Train? The Ripley books?

And here's a thing. I've been re-reading a lot of Anthony Minghella's scripts lately and in his introduction to one, he recounts how this very same Mr Anonymous had once described a work of his as having shades of Patricia Highsmith. Minghella had never heard of her before, but thought he'd best check her out. And you see what that led to? The Talented Mr Ripley.

'Course, I'll get notes and all the buts/ands/howevers presently but just for tonight I'm rocked.

William

New Doctor Who blog is up

And you can reach it here at radiotimes.com/doctor-who-weekly.

If you're one of the people who commented on RT about the last one, under assorted suspicious names like Helena Handcart - surely a member of the Handbasket family who's been through Ellis Island - then thank you.

Page impressions are one thing, comments are disproportionately helpful. Especially disagreement: honestly, get in there and tell me what a daft prat I am, I'll love you for it. Though, please, no swearing: this is a family show.

But anyway, watching Doctor Who for money: what would my teenage self have thought of that?

William

PS. I don't know why this bothers me especially today, when it's always bothered me, but if you read that Who blog of mine you will see a certain police box spelt as Tardis. It's just wrong. It's the TARDIS, it always has been. But that's Radio Times style. I see the point, all-caps jolt out of the page: I once wrote a PC-DOS manual and sometimes the page would swim with those capitals, but still, this is the TARDIS!

Just wonderin'

Why are there birthday cards with lines like "What is a sister?" If anyone doesn't know, they're unlikely to be the buyer or the receiver.

Why is Microsoft Word so fantastic at recovering documents? Can't the team who did that move over to the one trying to stop Word losing documents in the first place?

A local protest group was filmed carrying banners that read "Save Are School". Was that a clever argument for their cause or the reason the school is giving up?

How can there be an Encyclopedia of the Unexplained?

Why was the first word my first girlfriend first said to me, "Security!"?

Why do Hollywood actresses always look extraordinarily bad in TV ads for beauty products?

Why will my iPhone, currently the greatest piece of industrial design imaginable, suddenly appear as rubbish as the rest of them when iPhone 2 comes out?

Is there anything else I can do to postpone thinking of what to write in this week's Doctor Who blog on Radio Times?

Support your local Who blogger

As I said to you, I'm not 100% sure the world really needs another Doctor Who blog right now, but RadioTimes.com does and it's got mine.

And they told me that so long as I was willing to bare my soul a bit, I could also have a whole paragraph analysing the script. To delve, to really think about television drama, so very important to me, and all for the price of admitting to my boyhood crush on Nyssa. It's a bargain.

I won't pretend this is anything more than one writer's thoughts, but I am proud I was hired and I think you'll like it too: it's an unqualified hymn of praise for Partners in Crime, and that's how it should be.

The blog's even got a more memorable address than I expected: Doctor Who Weekly.

Would you mind having a look? And checking back several hundred times? I need the ratings!

William

Becoming Who-man

Presuming that all goes well with various other plans for Doctor Who coverage on the RadioTimes.com website, next week sees me starting my very own Who blog on the site.

You're thinking that this is what the world needs, another Doctor Who blog. Ah, but is it in fact what RT needs? The idea is I'm to coo about what I like in each episode (presuming that I do, which is never guaranteed but looking at the form the series has, is a bit bleedin' likely) and then a conversation can hang off the end of it with RadioTimes.com readers saying yay/nay/exterminate* (*delete as applicable).

I'll put up a link here if it all goes ahead; I'd greatly appreciate your nipping off to read it and proving to RT that I am the Who-man that they appear to think.

I would actually say that I'm Drama-man, but you won't believe me, you'll think science fiction geek because: I've just heard BBC Radio 4's Journey into Space and really enjoyed it. It's the Saturday Play in a week or two. And it's written by Charles Chilton, the man who wrote the original ones starting 50-odd years ago. He's apparently 91, still working, and I'm told he still has a handshake that can crush a walnut.

William

Cyclical nature

Sounds like an ad for software piracy: Get Photoshop for Free.

But you can, to an extent, as Adobe's just launched a free beta of the image editor online called Photoshop Express. I've only piddled about with it but I use the real Photoshop a lot and can see that this is no replacement. However, it's easily the equal of your basic PC photo editing tools or even iPhoto on Macs: you can crop, alter exposure and saturation, fix red-eye, a great many things.

Only, it's online. If you don't have an internet connection, you can't use it. This may not seem a big issue since if you haven't got an internet connection, you aren't reading this.

But I have Sky Broadband: I know what it's like suddenly having no internet.

There's a strong argument that the future of applications is online: Google Docs is at least a fair replacement for Microsoft Office (apparently: I've never used the Google apps), for instance.

I think I sit on the opposite side; I'm willing to be proved wrong but I just feel I've seen this before. Most recently on iPhone: there are now thousands of web-based applications but I find them all too slow. And back in the day, working on computer magazines at Ziff Davis, everybody ran Microsoft Office but they did so across the network: the apps really belonged on the server and a fast connection let everybody work.

Until the server would go down.

Everybody would swear - and that's when I'd know. Because I ran those apps locally, I was always testing/reviewing the next Office release, and carried on working normally.

'Course, there was one time when everybody else in the office went home early because of this and I was left there until I managed to hook my foot around the mains plug...

I have no idea why I wanted to tell you that. But have a look at Photoshop Express, won't you?

William

Holbyier than thou

Radio Times, where I work a lot of the time, says this week that it was odd how sister series Holby Blue and Holby City had not seriously crossed paths before, that effectively it was about time. And it said so because this week a Holby City story was resolved in the first of the new Holby Blue series.

I completely disagree.

Now, I'd have watched this new run of Blue anyway, because I liked the last one, and I don't follow Holby City so I wasn't the target audience here. But what seems obvious to RT and what I totally agree was a necessary stunt to raise Holby Blue's profile was a chalice that maybe wasn't poisoned, but shouldn't become a regular tipple.

Follow. Holby City's palest registrar, Jac (Rosie Marcel) is accused of attempted murder in her own series and Holby Blue begins with her being taken into custody. Sold: what Holby City viewer wouldn't want to see what happened next? But then what Holby City viewer would not already know what would happen next? The only thing that could happen?

Jac is a popular character - or there wouldn't have been any point crossing her over - and she's introducing us to a Holby Blue that, it's hoped, we will like and continue to watch every week. So what's going to happen? Will the coppers of Holby Blue prove that Jac is guilty and be the bastards who get her put away? Not bleedin' likely. But if they don't, if they cannot have any chance of doing that, where exactly is the police drama?

The problem is that characters belong in their own series. Doctor Who pulled off a very rare, I'd even say perhaps uniquely successful trick with the Peter Davison/David Tennant crossover but that had to be in a ten-minute short, it wouldn't have lasted an episode. And we know that because we've seen it: The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors, The Two Doctors, none of them are anything but novelties. I suppose I'm saying there can only be one hero.

I do bridle at the idea of heroes: even Holby Blue whose creators directly stated its characters were heroes has allowed for the lead John Keenan (Cal Macaninch) to be a git savant. (Holby Blue's "dedicated heroes".)

But in straight dramatic terms, the protagonist is the protagonist: Keenan is the lead in Holby Blue, although Luke French (Richard Harrington) is strong and will be brought forward more if this show extends to Casualty-like 50-odd episode series. Everything services the protagonist, it's the way that Sherlock Holmes only ever finds clues that Sherlock Holmes can understand; it's why nobody ever has any problem whatsoever that doesn't need a $2m Bell helicopter and its pilot in Airwolf. "My council tax has gone up!" Whop-whop-whop, de-diddle-de-diddle-ee-dee... )

Taking a character out of his or her artificial surroundings is extraordinarily risky. Why does EastEnders struggle when it sends its characters to France or Brighton or anywhere outside the Square? Why do you know to groan when a US series has a special set in the UK? It's not because the characters are unbelievable or exaggerated, necessarily, it's because the character is so much a part of its constructed environment. It ought to be fantastic to see them in a new situation because situation is illuminating of character but as much as shows flounder when they do it, we fight them back when they try. There is a wonderful episode of ER called Day for Knight, one of the first shows I reviewed for BBC Ceefax, in which everything is still set in the hospital, all the regulars are there but the entire episode is from the point of view of a brand-new doctor, Lucy Knight. The regulars come out very mildly badly and ER's fans loathed it.)

You can see the problem most acutely in a crossover like the one that happened between Magnum pi and Murder She Wrote. Honest. "Magnum on Ice part 1" aired on Don Bellisario's Hawaiian detective show and part 2 was on Peter Fischer, Dick Levinson and Bill Link's series about crime writer Jessica Fletcher. You'll never guess where she went on holiday that year.

This aired recently on whatever UK digital channel is churning through Murder She Wrote. Part 1 is typical Magnum and in fact in syndication it isn't part 1 of anything, it's a standalone Magnum, pi episode with a pretty rushed ending. As originally aired and on DVD, part 1 has our hero Thomas Magnum (Tom Selleck) being our hero, and part 2 has him not being our hero at all. He cannot solve the crime, he cannot clear his name, it must all fall to Jessica (Angela Lansbury). The lead character of the series always wins: Peter Davison's Doctor is the one who does all the work in Doctor Who's The Five Doctors because he was the incumbent.

If that doesn't happen, the lead character in the host series is weakened, even denuded. If it does happen, the character from the other show is weakened, even denuded.

You don't have a choice which character is damaged: it is invariably the one from the other show or you're actually shooting your own entire series in the foot. And you cannot change the outcome of the story: Jessica couldn't fail to rescue Magnum, Keenan and French couldn't find Jac guilty.

So I argue that what appears to be a golden episode, a gift from Holby City to its new sibling, is actually murderously difficult. So much so that Holby Blue was gambling with the viewers it already had: I don't follow Holby City, I've no investment in its characters, I liked Blue and could have felt cheated with a substandard episode.

You've already guessed that I didn't feel cheated. I think I watched it more with my writer's hat on than my viewer's one but that was probably inevitable given how interesting I think the whole crossover concept is. And there are bits that didn't work for me: it's funny how UK series are not as able to use pop music as US ones are, or at least how we are more ready to accept it in American drama than British; similarly Homicide could've got away with its police officers impersonating a dog.

What Holby Blue did well, I think, is keep Jac and other characters from Holby City in a little bubble: we predominantly saw Jac in her cell or in the interrogation room. It was the most important story and we never felt it wasn't, yet minute-by-minute it didn't appear to get as much time as all the rest. In truth it did, we just didn't know that until we saw how the other story strands came together and affected Jac's, but it didn't seem to get the majority of the time. And yet it didn't feel cut back, I didn't feel robbed of the headline story: I don't know how writer Tony Jordan pulled that off but he did.

And Jac, stuck in her bubble, got to argue with the police and thereby be as strong as she apparently is in City while the police got to be persistent buggers. We were taught how interviews go, seeing them stone-faced asking the same questions of witnesses and not reacting to the wildly different answers, so we knew when they faced Jac that we were seeing a performance. Well, kind of: it was a character-revealing performance, but still not a face-on character study. And though it wasn't original, having Keenan and French decide which would be the good cop, which the bad, it did work when they seemed to fall naturally into the opposite roles.

Was that a requirement of protecting the show from crossover? French took the lead and was the bad cop, our primary Holby Blue guy was the good one even though we'd been told to expect it to be the other way around. So we like John Keenan but we know he can be tough when necessary. Even typing that sounds cliched, but signals are sent in drama and we receive them.

I don't know how much we saw in Holby City but within Blue the key detail of the case was held back to the last second that it could be and then tried to be hidden. But as soon as we knew Jac had seen a patient, we knew that patient was the murderer.

Similarly, equal weight was given to what I believe was a new Blue story involving a woman who had been beaten up. I think it should have been obvious she was the patient, but I didn't see that, I didn't make the connection. I would rather the reveal had been more than coincidence - Jac was being processed at the custody desk when she happened to see this patient leaving the station on a security monitor - but it was a surprise to me.

And that tied off the whole Holby City storyline: Blue just needed to do what it could to keep us. So we saw several police storylines, we were re-introduced to all the returning characters and most of the rivalries, there was sex and intrigue to set us up for coming back to see episode 2.

And, quite brilliantly, there was a birth, an overdue baby.

This must be just about the sole medical story Holby Blue could possibly come up with, and it came up with it for the episode that crossed over with medical drama Holby City.

You have to applaud and compared to any crossover episode I've ever seen, Holby Blue Meets Holby City got away with it.

But there are teeth and skin marks all over it.

I'll bet you money Tony Jordan did not work this all out on a graph before writing the script. He's too experienced to have not seen the pitfalls. But if he did write it by the numbers, solution-by-solution, then he's annoyingly good at hiding the scaffolding.

William

Arthur C Clarke

Rendezvous with Rama was great, 2001 wasn't remotely as confusing as advertised, I can't remember Childhood's End. But I couldn't bear Arthur C Clarke because of "2010 The Odyssey File".

It was a Making Of the film, and I've read a lot of these, I also liked the novel 2010 and at the time I bought all the hype about 2001 and the importance of its sequel. I also liked how this Making Of was predominantly an exchange of emails (very exciting back in the early 1980s) between Clarke and the 2010 film's writer/producer/director Peter Hyams.

Each person's messages were printed in a different typeface and after a few pages, I started skipping Clarke's and only reading Hyams's. Hyams was deep in production, the hugh machinery of making a big budget film, and Clarke was picking his nose in Sri Lanka. Hyams was fighting financial problems, juggling myriad production difficulties and managing to stay funny. Clarke was just back from the shops where he'd run into the President of NASA, hang on, there's the door, oh, another parcel from Queen Elizabeth, a request for an autograph from Jesus Christ, a party invitation from Anthony Minghella.

But he was easy enough to ignore and I had a good time with the other half of the conversation.

Except.

I can see this chapter clearly even now, 20-odd years later: the final chapter was a new piece of padding, written especially for the book by Clarke and was called "MITE for Morons". You don't even know what MITE is, do you? Clarke was an immensely patronising about this MITE and how all of us thickos that didn't use it would have learn how to do so eventually, we'd best take this opportunity to learn it from him right now.

MITE was some kind of email system and Clarke laboriously detailed precisely how to use it, down to which key to press when, what filenames you should use, which disk should go in which floppy drive.

He has this reputation for seeing the future but here he was blind about the present: I was already using email and my system bore no relation to his. I considered sending him instructions on how to use my particular toaster.

I think he always had this blindness. I remember years later a claim that he now said fax was better than email (sure, so long as you're not the poor sod at the publishers having to retype an entire book off one fuzzy roll) but I don't know, I don't want to believe that one.

Nor do I want to believe what I read directly in a novel of his. Um, can't remember which. But it was another with his far-sighted vision of the future, this time with him foreseeing that digital technology would let people remove cigarettes from old movies. Yes, he was right: it can be done, it is being done. But the ignorance in his example: he wrote about Bogart movies having it done. So, follow: picture Humphrey Bogart smoking, now picture the cigarette erased from the picture.

What are you left with?

Humphrey Bogart sticking two fingers up at us.

William

Anthony Minghella dies

I met him at a party a couple of years ago: if you never did, this may mean that the difference between you and me is that I admired his dress sense as well as his writing.

I remember being at the buffet, turning around and being immediately introduced to him. Did I have time to put the plate down? Can't remember. And I do know the conversation turned quickly to football, which meant therefore I was instantly bewildered, but he stopped me feeling lost. Funny thing: I talked to someone else there who I admire far less but who blanked me far more. It may have been how I was dressed, that affected how I was addressed.

So Anthony Minghella seemed a very good bloke, I liked him on the spot and I did not ask him a single question beyond "And which team is the Tigers again?" or the like.

I think I'd be shocked by his death regardless; his television work as much as his film, his writing and his directing. And he was just 54. But I'm reeling, and also feeling like a name-clanging prat for reeling at you like this: he was a friend of some friends of mine and the connection is enough to make me stagger even though I have no doubt he'd forgotten my first name by the end of my surname.

William

An Unnamed Magazine in Another Part of the Forest

Just read Jason's blog on how to write for magazines and Danny's on many things but in part memories of approaching Empire film magazine.

And I've got to tell you this, but I'm going to claim this is about An Unnamed Magazine.

Years ago, I pitched a feature idea to AUM and the response was pretty good; it was a not-now-but-maybe-later response. These days I'd take that as a straight no but I was young, I was new, I believed AUM and was encouraged. After a suitable interval, I tried again.

Same thing.

I was beginning to see the light but three months later or something, when I had no one else to pitch to, I figured, what the hell? I gave 'em a call, fully expecting to get an answering machine, rattle off some rubbish into it, and then never think of AUM ever again.

You're thinking they commissioned me, aren't you?

And you're right.

But not only did they commission me, they had already commissioned me. My copy was due in less than a week's time, they just hadn't ever mentioned it to me.

I took time off whatever else I was doing, did all the legwork, wrote the feature, filed the copy bang on time - and learnt that the issue was dropping a few pages. Happens all the time, though usually you know when in the year it's going to happen so you're not often caught out over-commissioning pages. But my feature was bumped back to the next issue and since AUM is a monthly, I could've had about five weeks to write this quite involved feature instead of five days.

The feature went down very well and actually did me some good outside AUM too. And for a little while I would call the editor, pitching further ideas. None of them ever sold.

Well, not so far as I know.

William

Shoestring budget

The last time Shoestring was repeated on TV, a few years ago now, it was screened in the Diagnosis: Murder slot on BBC1 weekday afternoons. If you're an anorak, you may be thinking that, hang on, Diagnosis: Murder is a US series so its hour probably only runs 42 minutes or something, but Shoestring was BBC 1979, it's a full fifty minutes and change.

You're perfectly correct and, may I say, remarkably well informed. Plainly, 50 into 42 doesn't go all that well, but the BBC wasted no time thinking about it, they just chopped eight minutes or so out of Shoestring. That's what, 16 percent? You can argue all you like about how that would be vandalism if they'd done it to someone else's show, it's astounding to do it to your own, but you wouldn't argue that it really made a difference to the series.

You wouldn't argue it at all because it there's no counter-argument: take nearly a fifth out of your story and it isn't going to survive. And, yes, the episodes that aired then were incoherent messes; I watched the first couple and walked away.

But BBC4's just been celebrating Shoestring with a repeat of one episode and a half-hour documentary. In between the last screening and this I've interviewed Trevor Eve and don't ever wish to do that again, so maybe my old fondness for the show had been a little bit scorched. I still expected to like it more than I did.

I did like the feel, I did like the characters, and I liked how it reminded me of so long ago in my life. (Just as an aside, I vividly remember listening to the last-ever episode of Shoestring. Listening. Not watching. The tube had blown in our TV set. Do you even remember tubes? And why did "the Tube" become a nickname for television in the States but not the UK? Was YouTube's name a mystery before you read this?)

But the actual mystery in this detective episode wasn't much cop. Trevor Eve was good, I'll give him that, and the steps, the process, the characters along the way, it all worked well. Only, you knew who the baddie was right from the start.

I dug out an ancient VHS copy I've got of the first episode, Private Ear by Robert Banks Stewart, and it was actually much the same. I'd like to have written it, there was a lot going on, but you were also just waiting for Eddie Shoestring to join enough dots that he could leap to the baddie we'd spotted at the top of the hour.

Is it inevitable on a TV budget? You've got your regular characters, the victims of whatever the crime is, the villain and - if you're lucky - enough money left over for a red herring, but that's it. If you believe plot is all that matters then you and I part company here, but I'm back with you if you're arguing that an hour of watching characters do nothing is enough to make you watch The Bill. I'm almost with you, anyway.

I never try to figure out the crime. I rarely need to guess the baddie. The tale is in the telling, and I don't know how it's done.

Sure, there's Columbo: the open book mystery is immensely refreshing both because that show was really about pitting two great characters at each other's throats for 90 minutes, and because it also meant the series completely erased the whole problem of hiding the baddie. And then there's Homicide, the wonderful Homicide: Life on the Street. That worked because the show was usually not about the murder being investigated and it was invariably never about the psychology of why someone murdered someone. Seriously: it was in the format, otherwise known as David Simon's original book. Forget the why, find out how and you find out who, case closed.

But in a straight police procedural, a precinct drama, how do they successfully juggle a mystery with a budget that's incapable of hiding the guest star baddie?

I can think of ways, I can think of misdirection, but they're not ways that seem to get used - and they're not ideas that could work week after week.

I'm looking at my shelves where without turning my head very far I can see DVDs of Campion, Magnum PI, The Rockford Files. I'd like to say that I'm seriously analysing a tremendously popular and often fantastically rewarding genre of television drama, but maybe all I'm really saying is that I fancy a Remington Steele marathon.

Wadday say? Want to join me?

William

Blog off

There's no easy way to tell you this, but I've been blogging with someone else.

I'm sorry. It didn't mean anything.

And it's over, it's all over, I promise.

Well... when I say over... For the past little while I've been blogging merrily away on a secret, closed site. I've been a bit more newsy than in our chats, I've been considerably more regular and organised. And I think you'd even enjoy some of the blogs, but that's a shame because you'll never see them. I imagine the project will go further ahead but even if it does, when it goes public it will need new blogs, not ones tied to the events of the last week or two.

Not sure yet whether I'll be continuing with it; I enjoyed doing the writing, but this has been a period of feeling each other out and it all depends fairly equally on what they think of my writing and what I think of the various future plans.

Whether I do it or not, though, it won't take me away again quite so completely. After all, where else do I talk to you? And what newsy blog would let me brag that I've just today had a great response from BBC writersroom about a script of mine?

Feeling very good, trust you are too,
William

Strictly go dancing

On a Saturday evening some years ago, my wife Angela mentioned that she really liked watching Strictly Come Dancing with me.

"Pardon?" I said, looking up from a book.

I felt beholden to at least try watching it instead of just being in the room and, as perhaps with most things bar football and Babylon 5, once you start watching, you do get into it. I now really like the show; I think its companion series It Takes Two is particularly well done; and I've a friend who's obsessed with it to a point that might even be frightening if she weren't also so funny about it. So that's grand; I'm sure you know the show, perhaps you like it, perhaps you don't. But just today, I've taken a Life Lesson from it.

Well, a Scriptwriting Life Lesson anyway.

If you're a writer, you'll understand me when I say that beginners think adaptation is easy. If you're not a writer, let me offer you my congratulations and say that, really, that's what they think. It's right up there with "I've got this great idea, this guy, right, he meets a woman, it's fantastic, and it really happened, I just need someone to write it up into a film".

I'm not exactly immune to this: I would like to adapt Margery Allingham's books for radio some day. But I know I'll never do that without some strong original material under my belt and on my CV first; nor do I remotely think it's easy. I never have, actually; it's like travel writing: everybody expects it to be a doddle but I've never tried it, never thought I could. I'm having a go right now pitching to write for a children's magazine and that's a tough market too. That's partly why I want to try it.

But still, Strictly, Scriptwriting Lessons, adaptation, today. I've just come back from the NEC Arena in Birmingham after seeing Strictly Come Dancing – the Live Tour. And it was fascinating to see how it was adapted for stage.

Follow. I'm sure you know the show but just in case and to point up the key elements I want to use, Strictly goes thisaway: celebrities pair up with professional ballroom dancers, over 12 weeks or more, they learn to dance, there's a phone vote, there are judges. It's a toss up whether the show is known best for its dances or for its judges: they veer from unbelievable to pretty unpleasant. And the judges are the same.

Now, all that is transferred to the live show along with the best dancers from all the years of Strictly Come Dancing.

Of course it is. What else would you expect? But while it's so inevitable as to be inconceivable that the stage show wouldn't be like the TV one and it's unimaginable that anyone would produce a stage version without the best dancers, those same factors are a huge problem. They're difficulties that whoever adapted this for stage had to fight against.

For instance, these celebrity dancers are the ones who've done really well: if they didn't win their year, they came close. So they are going to continue to do well, aren't they? When the first two couples came off and got great praise and the same near-perfect scores from the judges, I thought the entire show was going to be like that. It wasn't, though, primarily because the show was cast very well. You know that the TV series is cast in much the same way any drama is; BBC looks for people to fulfill certain types of roles such as the older-but-game sort (Jimmy Tarbuck, Gloria Hunniford), the young-hopeful type (Louisa Lytton). It's aiming to appeal across demographics, it's aiming to fashion the best potential for drama. Every reality show does precisely the same, you wouldn't do it any differently.

And while the stage show has a more limited range, it does allow for one single bad dancer: Christopher Parker from the first series of Strictly is in it. I didn't see that series, I was still doing silent reading in the corner, but everybody else in the auditorium had and they loved groaning at the sight of him. It seemed to me that everything he was apparently famous for getting wrong was repeated here quite deliberately and it was lapped up. He got a scalding from the judges: we got to see them give their famous torrent of insults.

You can argue that he's a very good sport for coming back to Strictly and reliving this torture each night, but I don't think that's it at all: I think he's playing his part exactly as he was hired to do. So are the judges.

And those judges... Len Goodman, Arlene Phillips and Craig Revel Horwood review every dance after its done. Is there any other musical stage show that criticises itself along the way? It feels so post-modern.

I'm sounding like I didn't enjoy the show and that's wrong, I did, but when the judges praised these top dancers I couldn't help but think that of course they would. And when dancers got mild criticism, I felt they had no reason to care: the performance I saw was the 34th live show they'd all done and each is its own whole competition. Where the show takes three months to build to a conclusion and you can lose your place at any week, here you're back for tomorrow's matinee no matter what.

I've realised that what I like about the TV show is the sense of learning, of progress. People who dance poorly or not at all at the start of a series, can become strong by the end. It's why I don't watch The X Factor: so you sing each week, so what?

Here on stage, the celebrity dancers were no different from the start when they walked onto the dancefloor to the end when one of them lifted today's trophy. It's not a competition, it's a story. It's a musical where the judges provide the dramatic dialogue scenes in between the numbers.

The judges are superb at appearing to adlib. Arlene always appears over-studied on TV but she's consistent and seems the same here. Len appears to be genial, Craig appears to be churlish. They're all what we expect them to be, in fact what we've paid to see them be. But I did look up a review of an earlier show in this run and the same adlibs were praised in Glasgow as were laughed at here in Birmingham today. Never believe an adlib is an adlib, not in any show.

As with the TV show, once the judges have done their judging, the audience gets to vote. Right there in the auditorium, you're encouraged to vote by phone. That feels a little sticky: this is not a BBC show but you forget that it isn't so a call to spend more money seems wrong. It's also much more expensive than on TV: in the television show the cost is 25p (or perhaps more depending on your service provider) of which 12.5p goes to Children in Need. Here Pudsey gets the same amount but the call charge is between 50p and 75p.

When that's all done, and we've had some show dances - Flavia Cacacea and Vincent Simone's Argentine tango stops the world turning - then the stage show recreates the Moment of Truth. On TV, that's where some dancers are saved to come back next week and two risk going home forever. There's no next week here, and there's no going home either, so this is inevitably tension-lite. Not tension free, but no breaths are held.

And then it's all over.

I am sure the winner is different each night - I really was sure but I checked anyway! - and I've no doubt that the judges are fair, I'm certain the phone vote is too. What I don't think is that this is Strictly Come Dancing: it's like it's really the Strictly Come Dancing Experience. See the Judges in their natural habitat. See the dancers, the dances, the frocks. Hear the very good live band.

Every thing you like about Strictly on TV is in Strictly on stage. It's like dramatising books for film: I believe it's precisely like that, that this isn't metaphor, it's straight description.

But adaptation, dramatisation, it's difficult. The recent Sally Lockhart dramatisations on BBC1 failed, I felt, because they hit all the plot points from the novel and didn't let the characters breath. And then when Alan Plater dramatised Olivia Manning's Fortunes of War, he created a new work of art. Recognisably Manning's, unmistakeably his own. It had to be. Television and novels, film and stage, they're all extremely different and it'd be boring if they weren't. Plus, I believe completely that if you want a perfect, faithful version of a novel, buy the paperback.

For anything else, any dramatisation, you have to keep the original's heartbeat but you can't forget that you're making something new. Strictly Come Dancing - The Live Tour is more like Sally Lockhart than Alan Plater so it's not satisfying. It isn't a show that stands on its own; if you didn't watch the TV show, you probably wouldn't enjoy the stage one.

Yet, if every single Strictly thing has become a box to be ticked or filled, the stage show does tick 'em and it does fill 'em. I am thinking about going to next year's tour, but it will depend on who's dancing.

How's this for proof that Strictly Live is adaptation by the numbers instead of a new animal, a new stage drama? The show's programme is a quite beautifully printed book - an expensive one, a tenner a copy - and it comes with large score numbers, 1 to 10, for you to vote with.

And you never get to.

They're just never used, not once.

I saw a matinee performance, by the way, and all the time I've been writing this to you, the 35th show has been underway. I know there's no question but that you think I'm critical of the stage show, but I'd like to see the dancing again. And maybe that's enough. The dancing would not carry a show on its own (no offense to dancers or dancing; I mean sixteen 90-second dances don't make a show) so the framework of the faux competition is crucial, it's a frame that both supports some gorgeous dancing and weakens the show. It's a necessary, contrived evil but the dancing does soar through. That's part of the heartbeat of Strictly Come Dancing, a huge part, and that has successfully transferred to stage.

William

The Day Before...

Have you seen this? A Cape Town newspaper has been running a series of ads on the theme of how much the world can change in a single day. This one is of September 10, 2001.

Click on my stolen copy to see a bigger stolen one or go to this site to see all four and read about them in more detail.

And FYI, I found this via Scott Kelby's Photoshop Insider blog.

William

Word don't come easy

There's no reason you should know this, but I used to be an expert on word processors. Every writer thinks they are, after all this is the machine they spend the best part of their day not using to write on. But I was paid for it: it was part of my patch when I worked on computer magazines.

And you know how it is, there are some jobs you can never quite shake so last year I had a really, really anorakful time following all of Microsoft's blogs about the new Word 2007. It was groundshaking, I thought, the work they were doing, the effort they were putting into the work. The way they were risking everything to get a better word processor / changing everything pointlessly to get everyone to upgrade when they didn't need to* (*delete as applicable), it was impressive.

As a writer, I particularly applauded how the core aim was to get out of your way. Having to go through five menus and a dialogue box to print something out crunches at me the same way heavy exposition does.

But in Word 2007, if you wanted something, it was to be there. No messing, no searching, absolutely and resolutely no confusion. Just writing? Off you go. Adding a chart? Wallop, every chart option is brought to your fingertips. Bit of the old page layout? Kaboom, Word 2007 is a page layout program. Sort of. Enough.

This went on for a year: inch by inch, detail by detail. I'm a Mac user, but I was still following all the Windows threads on this topic.

Until.

One day came the ta-daa, the final reveal when all this work came together in a finalised appearance. Microsoft put up screenshots for all us warmly-dressed people to admire. No messing, no searching, absolutely and resolutely no confusion.

But I stared and stared at that screenshot, utterly unable to see how to open a document.

Or start a new one.

Or save anything I did manage to open.

The reason is because all that kind of nonsense is now hidden behind a large and ugly Microsoft Office logo in the top corner. It looks like a tedious logo, it is actually a button.

That ended it for me. All that great work, totally wiped out because of last one per cent.

And I'm reminded of this today in part because I'm polishing a script but also because I'm working in an office where the staff have just had training to move over to Word 2007. And the first sentence I heard when I walked in came from a woman halfway down a hall, begging f'ing Microsoft Word to let her open a s'ing document.

And then a chorus of voices saying "It's under the c'ing Office logo".

The last one per cent is stopping people seeing the 99 per cent excellence underneath.

William.

PS. While I'm geeking out, Word 2007 is for PCs, Macs now have Word 2008. It lacks a lot of the new whizzy features of the PC side, it adds a tonne of utterly worthless pretty pictures, but it flies far faster than the last version. So now I've no excuse at all for writing slowly.

The History of Television

So Aaron Sorkin writes the history of TV and it goes to Broadway. I write it and it goes... nowhere.

Back in November 2006, I was commissioned to write a Radio Times article to go alongside BBC2's Imagine... series which was doing a special on TV's anniversary. That show got bumped around the schedules, my article had to be transformed into about 70 words and that was that. I hadn't actually thought about it since about December 2006 but just now, searching for something totally unrelated, I found that document on my hard disk.

I can't see any reason why I shouldn't show it to you, and I think you might like it too. So here it is: as not published in RT.

Hope you like it,
William

RT/RT AND TV HISTORY/GALLAGHER

Radio Times has behind the scenes access to television - and it always has. As BBC1's Imagine... goes back 70 years to the start of television, RT reveals how its coverage goes back even further to when John Logie Baird was young and anxious to show his new invention to us.


Summer, 1923: no TV, no Radio Times. But they were both a heartbeat away. John Logie Baird was talking up his new invention and Lord Reith was having it out with newspaper publishers who wanted money for printing BBC radio listings. By July, Baird had got a patent for television and by September, newspapers had seen their circulation rise because of listings, but Reith wasn't listening: he published his own paper, The Radio Times.

The 1920s were fast-moving: on April 4, 1924, the BBC's Organiser of Programmes, CA Lewis, wrote in RT: "Television is a long way off, and, as far as I can hear, the various inventions in regard to 'talking' films are not achieving success."

Yet before the end of the month, on April 25, RT's cover said: "Television - a Fact!". Baird had demonstrated his flickering, faltering system to RT writer William Le Queuex who enthused madly: "A Maltese cross was first transmitted, and was clearly visible. My fingers, moving up and down in front of the transmitting lens, were clearly seen moving up and down on the receiving disc. It remains now to transmit detailed images and a machine to do this has already been designed."

Sure. There's no question Baird was first but he was never good enough and though the BBC experimented with both his kit and a rival system from EMI/Marconi, by the end of 1936 everyone found it easy to see which was going to win. They just found it harder to say. So the official decision to drop Baird was delayed until February 1937 - three months after a Crystal Palace fire destroyed all his equipment.

So RT's very first behind-the-scenes feature of TV as we know it was in The Radio Times Televison Number (2d), published October 23, 1936. The first behind-the-scenes photo was of "The Baird control room" but the second was of the Marconi-EMI studio with "The Three Admirals rehearsing" at the first television studios at Alexandra Palace.

And it was a detailed yet so innocent time as RT took us around Ally Pally, mentioning: "The walls attract your attention. You touch them. An asbestos compound, of course. Just the stuff for absorbing sound."

Strangely, there were no actual television programmes in this special issue of RT. There was a radio play (October 29) dramatising how "from the first ideas of the early pioneers there has gradually developed the high definition television service which is to be opened from Alexandra Palace on Monday next."

And there were ads for HD TV sets, though HD then meant 405-line images on a narrow screen: today it means 1080 lines widescreen, not to mention colour. But some things don't change: the 1930s HD TVs were expensive. RT advertised a GEC High Definition Television Receiver (Cat. No. BT3701) for 95 guineas or over £800 in today's money.

"If you can afford a television set," wrote RT in this issue, "and you if you live near enough to Alexandra Palace, the next few months will be full of interest. You will be watching the beginnings of a new art. How does this affect people outside the London area? Wait and see."

It was quite a wait. In 1936 you had to live within 25 miles of Alexandra Palace in Muswell Hill, London, and only a couple of hundred people watched the first months. By February 1939 the price of TV was dropping radically but the BBC was still saying 25 miles and RT interviewed farmhand George Boar who lived twice that distance away. "He did not even trouble to see a demonstration. With astounding pluck he invested his whole fortune (and £126 is certainly a fortune to a farm-hand) in his set," said RT. Boar invited Radio Times to join him and his neighbours one night. "Reception is amazingly clear, causing the majority of the audience to express their wonder in strange Suffolkese."

Boar himself knew he'd spent wisely, telling RT: "Television's far more entertaining and much less trouble than a wife would be." The revealing word there is probably "would" but six months later his TV went dark: the BBC Television Service was suspended on Friday, September 1, 1939 at the start of the Second World War. By then, around 20,000 TV sets had been sold and its power was spreading in every sense: for the May 1937 Coronation of King George VI, 50,000 people had crowded around what sets there were and the signal now reached up to 63 miles from Ally Pally.

"Television Again" said the cover of RT for June 2-8, 1946 as we saw the Reopening of the BBC Television Service - in London. In 1948 Londoners saw the Olympics but coverage was also extending to the Midlands which it reached in 1949, then South Wales and Scotland in 1952. In 1953, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was seen by over 20m viewers and for the first time more people watched than listened on the radio.

By then Baird was dead but others were pressing ahead with the next big thing: colour. Unofficial tests ran even in the 1950s but it was July 1, 1967 when David Attenborough, then Controller of BBC2, could write in RT: "This week we launch colour. All BBC2's coverage of the Centre Court at Wimbledon will be transmitted in colour. So will The Virginian on Monday and Late Night Line-Up every night. Many viewers are no doubt waiting to make up their minds about colour until they see it with their own eyes. We offer the launching programmes, with confidence and excitement, as evidence."

BBC2 offered five hours of colour every week until December 2, 1967 when it officially began its full colour service and then BBC1 followed on November 13, 1969. But there was still a difference between the BBC broadcasting colour and our receiving it: James Redmond, BBC Director of Engineering, responded to RT readers by explaining: "Because about 500 transmitters are needed to cover the country, it will take right through the seventies to complete the project."

So you might have had to wait a bit, but you had colour television - and two weeks after BBC1 moved to colour, Radio Times looked at what could come next. The November 22-28, 1969 issue peered into the far, far distant future... of 2000 and "interplanetary man, as he could be."

Some predictions were startlingly good - "one paper-thin TV set on the wall will offer him news, information and entertainment" - and some weren't. "He sits on a column of air, his control panel gives him robot service on 5, a problem-solver on 11." Channels 1 to 3 were expected to be for Earth, Moon and Mars.

"The year 2000, you recall, is just thirty-one years away."

William Gallagher

ENDS

Shssh... Misterioso

I was going to ask if you were around tomorrow, whether I could call you and pitch an idea.

I'm still up for a lunch if you are about, but something's come up and I now I do have someone to pitch to in the morning. It was getting urgent because do you know what tomorrow is? It's the end of January, horrible January. I'd forgotten this because I've delivered Radio Times's On This Day feature up to February 22 so my head's really getting toward March. Plus, for the first time in my life, I've booked a holiday way in advance: December. Unthinkable.

But anyway, January 31. Last year I had some success with doing a pitch per day for a month so - you're ahead of me now, aren't you? - I figured I'd do a pitch a day for every month in 2008.

I need to qualify that. Previously it's been every day, really every day, Saturdays and Sundays included. This time, Pitch 2008 is every working day: it seemed to me that if I didn't give myself weekends and bank holidays and whatever else off, I'd run out of material to pitch. So while I pitch every working day, I also write for at least one hour every single day.

Tomorrow's the end of January, I've hit both targets.

And it's working. The pitching is for all sorts of things, all the different types of work I do, and I've got extra Radio Times feature out of it already.

Still, a pitch per day. Any chance you're around on Friday?

William

I'm happy / hope you're happy too

I was weighing up whether to claim this was a message from the action man. Or to find a pun on Major Tom, funky funk, you get the idea.

The new issue of Radio Times magazine, on sale today, comes with a set of four covers. Choose wisely. They're all about Ashes to Ashes, though, and I was at the photo shoot. You can see a sliver of that above but the behind-the-scenes video I shot is here.

Actually, that's a thought: the link takes you to the video clip on the Radio Times "Ashes to Ashes" Programme Guide. I forgot: I wrote that guide too.

William

This isn't true

But it's close enough that it makes me happy.

A few months ago I read a draft script of an ITV1 drama that's coming up at the end of February or start of March. (Can't say what it is, sorry.) Foolishly, the writer asked me what I thought.

Well, he's not dumb, he knew it was top class, but he did ask... and my plotting brain engaged before my politeness did. I asked some questions, I made a fairly substantial suggestion. And a couple of weeks later, he sent me the next draft. Yep, the suggestion was in. What's more, I've just tonight seen a preview DVD of the final, finished show and I was right, the suggestion was important to the piece, the piece is even better with it.

Now, this is a trivial thing. One suggestion atop a really fine piece of writing, and if he hadn't seen the suggestion from me, I'll bet good money he'd have seen it himself. So I'm not claiming brilliance, I'm not claiming anything really, but most new scripts I read don't seem to get made so it's easy to comment on them. Now ITV1's spent untold vast sums filming this one, and I feel I was right.

And right now, for just this minute, I feel like I know what I'm talking about. Despite all evidence to the contrary.

William

Garage banned

My car failed its MOT the other day; nothing serious, no big surprise: the driver's side mirror is broken. (Mine and another car were waiting at traffic lights. They were on red and it was a two-lane road but a third car drove between us, smashing my mirror and careering on up the road.)

The garage didn't have a replacement mirror so I've taken my car home and they were supposed to be ringing round to get me one.

I just phoned to see what was happening:

GARAGE: Ah, yes, he's just fitting it now.
ME: Unlikely. The car's here.
GARAGE: Oh.

William

Lark Rise to Candleford

You won't believe how many people have pointed out to me that the new BBC1 period drama Lark Rise to Candleford was dramatised by Bill Gallagher. (No relation.) You may believe more that every ten years or so, I get some documentation meant for him. This week it was a taxable benefits claim for some hospitality he'd given someone. If your name is Susan Hogg, let me assure you that BBC payroll is sorting it all out.

And, yes, he writes multi-part BBC1 dramas but I occasionally go to the photo shoot. Here's the current cover of Radio Times magazine and, next to it, a shot from my iPhone from the day.

Two reasons to show you this. The first is just that I think it's a great cover. How many other magazines would have spent an afternoon setting that up and shooting it with a period, antique camera? The image has been coloured by hand, too.

And the second is that I was there filming the filming, so to speak, for RadioTimes.com and the video of the Lark Rise shoot is now online. I need to tell you that I didn't edit it; RT's Matylda Dymek did a very good job on the footage and I can't take credit, although I long to. I have a habit, I've found, of ignoring the fact that someone else is going to cut the film: I shoot what I would want to edit with, I don't give her enough coverage to let her create much else. I'll try to be better. And perhaps it's not a great surprise, then, that the key moments in the video are precisely the ones I wanted, but they are good.

Can't wait to see what she does with my Ashes to Ashes footage.

William