Strictly: Poor Anton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So that was a success all round.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So there's swings and roundabouts.

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

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

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

William

Alan Plater

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William

Making a math of it

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

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

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

Seriously, always.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William

Apple's iPad for writers

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

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

Disappointments with the iPad

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apps for writers

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

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

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

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

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

Once you've bought Pages

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

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

Reading

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

Damn right.

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

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

There are three.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prejudice is bad, if quick

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apple patents are plainly rubbish, but there you go.

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

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

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

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

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

That’s it, it’s just sayin’.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do women act?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William

In Treatment: the Movie and other (Red) stories

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

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

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

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

Yes.

Writing one.

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

William

A website in my hand and song in my heart

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

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

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

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

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

After All - Dar Williams

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

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

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

Backstreets - Bruce Springsteen

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

One and Only - Mary Black

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

Pornographer's Dream - Suzanne Vega

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

Outlaw Pete - Bruce Springsteen

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

Whenever You're Ready - Mary Chapin Carpenter

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

Since it's you.

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

William

Writing In Treatment and other stories

In Treatment writer Sarah Treem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's a little harsh.

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

Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William

In Treatment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

William

Red in tooth and claw

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

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

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

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

I'm one of them.

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

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

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

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

William

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

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

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

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

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

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

So maybe George Lucas has a point.

Nah.

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

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

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

William

I had nothing to do with it

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

Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And to give me a funny look about the sequel.

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

William

No news is great news

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

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

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

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

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

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

William

24 things about me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I'm fantastic at

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

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

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

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

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

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

William

Contains emotional intense scenes

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

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

So, see you in 2009?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's the reason I'm glad to be done with 2008. But I'm also looking forward to 2009 for all the work that's ahead of me - and because I'm going back to New York City in May.

Have a good new year,
William

PS I figured out Blogger's location-aware bits. And how to make it lie.

Location aware

I'm in a cottage that would suit Wuthering Heights - well, bar the wireless broadband, the Sky Freesat and a kitchen to dine for - but otherwise, Bronte territory. Well, I say her territory, it's actually the Lake District.

Okay, I'm in a place called Stone Cottage but whirling around outside is a storm the like of which Cathy would feel at home. The view out of the window is the same as the view inside: the night is so dark the windows are like mirrors. And they got that dark around 4pm this afternoon.

It's only December 15 but since I'm on a holiday that has been planned all year, that is something Angela has been looking forward to all year, and since it's been a chemotherapy-laden year, I'm now so relaxed that I feel 2008 is over. It helps that I just did an end-of-year edition of UK DVD Review.

For which I've got to thank all the listeners who came on: I've thanked them personally but they're so good on the show, they should be shouted about here. Have a listen to them all in the best edition I've done all year.

What's great for me is that while you only hear a minute or two of each person, I got to have a great blather with them all. In each case I could've played out twice as much as I did, it was difficult to slice in and out to keep the show flying.

In one such conversation, Richard Smith brought up the topic of how I apparently sound as if I'm talking just to you, not to some large group. I think that's the greatest compliment I can remember: it's how I believe radio should be done, it's how I think it's best and why radio is so great, and it's of course what I always aim for.

Can't bear the zoo format where a presenter has a posse and we're blessed to be listening in. Even when there is a pair of presenters, it's rarely good for me. In the eighties there was suddenly a fashion for TV shows to be fronted by two hosts who, basically, told each other what was going on. I could never watch that without thinking the other fella should've paid more attention in rehearsals.

Anyway, I slugged this entry Location Aware. Do you know the term? Obviously you understand it but it happens to be what iPhone applications are called when they do something that requires them to know where you are. The great Vicinity, for instance, uses GPS to check where you are and then offers you lists of the nearest banks, restaurants, hotels, endless other things.

And now Blogger is location aware. Hang on, I have to press a button.

Oh. I pressed it. Has anything happened? I'm in Patterdale, Cumbria, and you may or may not see a map of this. I'm not excited yet.

This relaxing lark is so complicated.

William