Exit BBC, stage left

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes it works, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grief. Typing. Typewriters.

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

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

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

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

While there’s time.

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

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

It was closed.

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

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

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

But it will be different.

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

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

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

Jobs in computing

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

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

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

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

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

Five hours.

And I failed.

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

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

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

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

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

I did mention Macs.

Quite a bit.

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

His new PCs had the same problem.

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

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

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

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

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

For about a minute.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It goes through me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was 230.

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

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

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

Strictly between you and me

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

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

Angela and I have different emotions about that night.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, you couldn't. But I could.

Okay, I can't either.

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

Small moves, Ellie

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

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

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

So.

January the 1st was 196 days ago.

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

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

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

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

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

I don't know.

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

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

I think I'm saying quantity is key.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was horrible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I'll work them out.

Probably an hour at a time.

William

Sign here. And here.

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

Maybe you should get two biscuits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William

Last one down the pub buys the drinks

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

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

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

What're you having?
William

Signing autographs on Saturday

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

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

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

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

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

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

William

Writing Does Not Get Harder Than This - Live

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Welcome back. The epic Word journey has begun and -


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

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

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

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

- but there's a chair already there.

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

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

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

and he’s missed!

This is terrible!

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

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

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


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

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

Watching through my fingers: it's Stormhouse

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

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

Bossypants book review: it's alive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've been keeping something from you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DOCTOR: August, I think you’ll find.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I put him in prison.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was commissioned this morning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The strings take the melody

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

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

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

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

I adore this five minute slice of the film.

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

But this slice has the French track in it.

It has a substantial part of the track.

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

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

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

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

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

Wherein I deign to give you writing advice

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

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

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

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

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

So, now, the Secret.

Park your bum on the seat and write.

That's it. I accept PayPal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So I did.

All of them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then sit down to do some work.

Strictly: Best Final, Worst Show Dances

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

Wait.

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

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

Then we came back from the break and Pamela was out

And I was disappointed again.

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

The show dances.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, altogether now: keeeeeeeeep nattering.

William

Strictly: But first, the news...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s call her Sans.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strictly: Was It Recorded?

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

She has tremendous legs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harrumph.

Ann Widdecombe for President! Or something

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway.

Ann Widdecombe.

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

I think I’ve just called myself a fool.

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

You could disagree a little bit, you know.

I’m not saying you have to mean it.

Anyway.

Ann Widdecombe.

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

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

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

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

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

But it actually made me wonder about Scott.

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

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

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

Duncing with the stars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's time to meet the stars of our zzzzzz

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

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

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

I may be paraphrasing there.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strictly from Vegas – the real one

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Nor did Kara Tointon's dance.

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

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

Still.

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

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

It's okay.

I have a system.

William

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

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

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

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

Specifically, I can pitch.

At speed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It had rain instead.

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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