I would like you to tell me that this is normal and I think you’re kind enough to do it, but possibly not good enough a liar to be convincing. Still, I’d appreciate you having a go.

I think I’m programmable.

It’s always been the case that there is music in my head, there is never not music, and if it’s not always whatever I last heard, whatever I last heard can get in there and stay. It can also come out, actually: if I stub my toe, for instance, then rather than swearing I am at least as likely to burst out loud with whatever lyric I’d got to in the tune. People have looked at me for walking into, say, the side of a desk and bellowing out “Oh, Vienna.”

Only, this week, I think I’ve found that it’s also dialogue. Specific lines get in my head and keep coming out of my mouth, which is not uncommon, which I know is also called quoting, but this week it’s also the tone and the rhythm as well as the words.

For the other week I re-read some Sports Night scripts by Aaron Sorkin and this week I’ve been re-watching the show. The dialogue in that show is the fantastic thing about it, but the dialogue is also the problem because every single character speaks in exactly the same way. Every single character and now, at times, also me. I can only hope that my conversation has been as clever and with as much of an undertow of great humour plus shockingly moving emotion, but I’ve tried.

And then there’s this. Just now, right before we started to talk, I said aloud what is spelt out as (DUBIOUS MURMUR). If you don’t recognise that, you might when I tell you that as I realised I had just quoted Marge Simpson, I said (ANNOYED GRUNT).

You’re ahead of me here. Yes, I’ve been reading scripts to The Simpsons. Hang on. I’ve read 39 of them. Oh, why did it have to be 39 and not 40? That word you’re thinking now is never spelt out in any of the scripts, it is always HOMER: (ANNOYED GRUNT).

Fine. This is of no earthly use and I feel sure you’re starting to think this had better be going somewhere, to which I feel compelled to say d’accord.

Yes. I’ve also been watching Astrid: Murder in Paris, which is in French with subtitles. The other night two of us were leaving the living room and I automatically, unthinkingly said apres-vouz.

I’m telling you, it’s frightening and I am only now realising that I’m like this. I am programmable.

Like once I was pitching a radio thing about crosswords and I got so good at them, until the project collapsed and the entire subject left my head. Now I could no more do a cryptic crossword than I could find an ending to this sentence.

There is just one sole thing that is good about this. I thought I did well getting the voice of the Doctor when I was writing Big Finish Doctor Who dramas and if it weren’t the skill I thought it was, if it were just that I am programmable, still it worked out.

I just wish I’d paid more attention in school. Imagine if I’d read the classics or just had thought more about the French language instead of having a crush on the French teacher. I’d be so dangerous.

Whereas now you are. You now know that you can put ideas, dialogue and music in my head. It’s a good thing you’re so nice. You’d never manipulate me, other than to pretend that this all happens to you too.

There’s a show I like that isn’t called “Nobody Wants This”. Instead, it’s called “Nobody Wants This.” — with that full stop at the end. Or it is on posters and on screen, it isn’t in any reviews I’ve read or even just descriptions of it. Which may mean it’s not remotely important and I should have better things to do with my time than wonder about punctuation.

And yet, you know where this is going. Punctuation. As crucial as the words it punctuates. A comma in one place makes a line funny, an exclamation mark at the end ruins everything.

Although there is “Oklahoma!” and before that was this big, famous musical which I have yet to see and so can’t describe it to you in case you’re wondering which big famous musical it is, it was not big and it was not famous. But it was named after the state and it did have an exclamation mark. I seem to remember reading someone wondering how that went down with people at the time: did it get the same looks that, perhaps, “Nevada!” would today? Or “Mar-a-Lago!”

I don’t know if “Oklahoma!” writers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II ever explained why they had an exclamation mark. So far I’ve not found sign of “Nobody Wants This.” writer Erin Foster explaining her choice, either.

And for once, I don’t need to know a justification. The titles just feel right with punctuation. Oklahoma’s shriek conveys an innocent exuberance to me – I really should find out what it’s about — and the full stop at the end of “Nobody Wants This.” feels so definitive. Somehow the full stop adds weight to the “Nobody” part.

I don’t know what the asterisks added to M*A*S*H mean, except that I think the original novel or novels had no such punctuation in the title and it was the film that added them.

Then there’s Magnum, p.i., which uses both full stops and lowercase letters for private investigator. And Quincy, M.E. which uses full stops and capital letters for Medical Examiner. Except everyone called those shows Magnum and Quincy, which does suddenly sound like a title by itself. Magnum and Quincy: together they fight crime.

Speaking of crime, NYPD Blue had no truck with punctuation, while Sledge Hammer! did. Police Squad! In Colour.

Again, there’s no reason for any of this, no practical reason you can point at for why shows do or don’t use punctuation, and yet I seem to like it when they do. Maybe because somewhere I have a draft script called “Ophelia!”, which right there used up my entire allowance of exclamation marks for the year. (Yes, it’s a retelling of Hamlet from Ophelia’s point of view. I just cannot accept that she goes mad because her boyfriend is in a wet tizzy. It’s years since I wrote it and it went nowhere, but I still like a key line where Hammy has been going on a bit and Ophelia gets to say: “Get thee to a summary.”)

Anyway. The original Star Trek films used to have colons in the title. The Star Trek films from 2009 onwards didn’t, but should. “Star Trek: Into Darkness” is practically legible compared to its actual title of “Star Trek Into Darkness”. Although the film was such an uncredited remake of an earlier film that its title should really have had “(Repeat)” in it.

Next, The Concord: Airport ’79 is an interesting mix of a colon and an omission apostrophe. But then I’m more interested in the film’s original title. Believe it or not, it was going to be called Airport ’79: The Concord. Someone probably ran a risk/reward spreadsheet on those two alternatives.

But a real surprise to me thinking about all this and checking what I thought I remembered, was When Harry Met Sally. It’s actually called “When Harry Met Sally…”, with the ellipses. An AI app just told me that Woody Allen made a film called “Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)” which is an interesting use of parentheses and asterisks, except AI hallucinated.

It’s actually “Everything”, not “Every Thing”. Good thing we’re not using AI for anything important.

AI also answered my question about TV shows with punctuation by noting that every episode of Seinfeld apparently has a title beginning with the word “The”. It’s not true, incidentally, as the entire first season breaks this rule, but the thing to note is that “The” is now punctuation. Good thing we’re not using AI for anything important.

I feel I could go on. I feel you feel I have done. But in lieu of a final thought ending with the brilliant words “full stop”, since I can’t think of any such thought, let me propose something. You having read this means that this is now in your past.

I would like to offer, then, that this makes what you’ve been reading be really a kind of period piece.

True, I prefer words to emoji — though I’m not a Luddite, I will change my mind the moment you show me emoji that rhyme or play me a track sung in emoji. But everyone agrees that emoji are just a bit of fun, that they quickly convey tone, and that anyway, everyone knows what you mean by an emoji.

All of that is bollocks.

Follow.

I quite often get sent a reply that consists of that icon of a face laughing and with tears running down it. Really? Did I really leave you laughing so hard that you cried? No. The odds are that I either vaguely amused you, or you’re sure I was trying to be funny, even if I failed.

So nope, I don’t know exactly what you meant and I offer that the emoji literally isn’t what you meant. Plus I think people unconsciously assume that the emoji you send me is the emoji I received, and it is not. There is an emoji standards body, but the symbol you see is the one that your device has made to comply to that standard. And the one I see is the symbol the makers of my device have decided.

Now, most of the time, that just means on average one of us is seeing a better version of the smiley face than the other, one team of graphic designers might be better than the other.

But then last year if I were sending you an emoji from an iPhone, Android, PC or Mac, but you were reading it on Twitter, there could be quite the difference. Should I have some reason to send you an emoji about a water pistol — apparently people do this — then I see a cheery water pistol, but you see a handgun. Tell me what tone that was meant to convey.

So emojis look different on different machines and they do not say what you meant. That leaves just the bit about fun and where you may well now be sitting, thinking I’ve segued into being a grump bloke. But you know where this is going and, yes.

Because in 2021, a single and apparently unambiguous thumbs-up emoji ended up costing the sender over $60,000.

There’s a lot to this and the superb podcast 99% Invisible covers it in delicious detail, but the shortest version is that it was over a contract. The person who sent the thumbs up claims he meant to just acknowledge receipt of a message, but the person he sent it to took it to mean an agreement to the deal they were discussing.

That 99% Invisible podcast episode also gives examples of how in different cultures or even just different groups of people, one emoji can mean many different things. And those meanings change over time.

Now, excuse me, I have to go the shops. Checks list: I need aubergine, peach, banana…

And that was going to be the jokey finish. Except I just looked up at my TV set and it’s on the YouTube recommendations page. Of which the recommended video right in front of me is mine, the one I made this week and for which I confidently believe I have made my worst-ever poster image. Yes. It has an emoji. I’d explain, but I want to run away now before you see it.

Red pills, blue pills, whatever. I once made it through the first 20 minutes of The Matrix by turning the sound off and enjoying the visuals for a bit. I want to say that I remember being persuaded to watch because it had this incredible idea at its heart, but that can’t be true.

Because before whoever it was who was telling about this had finished hinting at the film’s incredible core idea, I was nodding, saying, oh, right, the world is an illusion, that old thing.

Then this week I read an article that said Ascension was one of the greatest science fiction series of all time, that it was on Amazon Prime, but also that it was leaving in two days’ time so you’d better hurry. This would’ve been Tuesday, I think, so it’s gone now, but I watched the first episode.

It’s another show where the whole worth seems to be in its core idea. The show follows a generation ship, a starship launched from Earth in the 1950s and heading out on a 100-year journey to Proxima Centauri. As we join the story, the ship has been travelling for 51 years — and suddenly there’s a murder. That murder, said the article, upends everything and ultimately has the characters and you questioning their very existence.

Nope.

In the episode I watched, it did have the characters starting to question each other, but I’d already answered it. I even said aloud at the end, “you had 51 years to figure this out and I did it in 44 minutes.”

When the idea is all you have, it has to be a damn good idea, and neither Ascension nor The Matrix — in my opinion — have good enough ideas.

Maybe it’s just because all of this has been done before. I don’t remember where I knew The Matrix style story from, but I knew it before the film. And I’m trying to avoid the Ascension spoiler, but the same thing happened in Doctor Who back in the 1970s.

I think I’m saying that the idea practically doesn’t matter. There’s a reason you can’t copyright ideas and it’s because it’s the execution that matters. For me, that means there have to be characters that keep you watching. I can be absorbed by a documentary or an article about some tiny nugget of information — for instance, this week I learned that Sainsbury’s self-service checkouts will never give you a 10p or a 50p coin in change, and that detail is delicious. And a book about an enormous topic — say, Taking Manhattan by Russell Shorto — can entirely occupy me.

But for drama, I need characters. I don’t think I’m alone in this: when I first knew him, Alan Plater once criticised my interest in plot over character, for instance. And among Isaac Asimov’s many faults, his total lack of interest in characters meant some deft footwork by the writers of the Foundation television series.

Clearly what works for me may not for you, I know. So if you’re going to argue that The Matrix has wonderful characters, I won’t disagree, but chiefly because it might end up with my having to watch the damn thing.

With Ascension, I felt the characters were slight enough that the cast had difficulty making them believable. Some did better than others, which probably also means that some characters were better written than others, but still it felt forced and I didn’t choose to binge-watch the lot before it disappeared from Amazon UK.

But then the writers of that got six hours of high-cost television drama made, and I have not. The Matrix writers got several movies done, and I have not. Even I would listen to those writers before I would myself.

That’s an idea.

Last week’s Doctor Who, if you don’t happen to know already, had an extensive scene you’d call meta: without spoiling anything, the Doctor and Belinda meet Doctor Who fans. In a way only this show can do, the show itself is fiction within itself and before this sentence gets convoluted, let me zoom to the end and just say that it was sweet. Self-aware, knowing, funny, but also warmly sweet and for me, no question, the highlight of the story.

But it’s got me thinking about how dangerous that is. I know that it’s very hard to get anyone into your story, any reader or any viewer, and once you’ve got them, I know it’s extremely easy to lose them again. Stopping a story, or seeming to stop it, in order to draw attention to how this is a TV show seems so risky that I doubt I’d ever do it if I were in that position.

And yet when it works, I think it can even draw audiences in more. It becomes a shared thing, the show and you the viewer, knowing this thing together, acknowledging what we both already know but put aside for the suspension of disbelief and the enjoyment of being carried away by the story. There’s also an element of time: even saying all of this to you now and so telling you that there was this moment in Doctor Who, that takes away something if you haven’t already seen it.

I think the clearest example of this is Newhart, the second sitcom starring comedian Bob Newhart. I get this one intellectually, I understand what the show did and I think I can feel some of why it worked, but I definitely don’t and now cannot ever get the punch that the show’s last punchline gave to its audience watching on its first transmission. Or apparently to the studio audience during the taping.

Follow. The clip is on YouTube so you can see it right now, but it’s meaningless. You need to at least know that there was an extremely successful sitcom called The Bob Newhart Show, and that later there was an at least very successful sitcom called Newhart. There was no connection between the two other than its star. No other characters were the same, no setting, no stories. And Bob Newhart played a different character. In the first show, he’s psychiatrist Dr Robert Hartley, and in the second he’s a self-help book author, Dick Loudon.

Fine. But come the 184th episode…

At the very ending of the whole eight seasons of Newhart, the studio has been set up to hide the last set, a bedroom. And the moment that set is revealed, before you even see the characters in the bed, you can hear a gasp from the studio audience because this is the bedroom from the first show, Newhart. They recognised the set.

And then you get to see the characters, of which one is played by Suzanne Pleshette — reprising her role from the first series, The Bob Newhart Show. The story claims that the entire run of this Newhart series was a dream by Dr Robert Hartley. And in the space of a few lines, Hartley manages to mock some of the recurring criticisms of the Newhart show, pointing out the absurdity of some running gags, and getting a few last laughs in.

As I say, you can see the last scene here on YouTube. I don’t know where you can catch the full 325 previous episodes of the two shows in order to fully get the gags, but.

If you’re going to do something, you do it: an apologetic dream sequence wouldn’t have worked, a half-hearted one-liner gag would’ve been rubbish. But still, Bob Newhart himself says how nervous they all were that the idea was right or not — and, nicely, properly credits whose idea it was. And then Suzanne Pleshette has said the same thing, plus how she skipped out of the wrap party afterwards because it was a wrap for their show, not hers.

But compare that to the last episode of Star Trek: Enterprise. That show had gone off the rails, if you ask me, and there as a self-awareness that just told it that only Trek fans were still watching. So it became a kind of fan-service series, and when it was cancelled early, I think it was a shame but I’d long stopped watching.

It was more than the end of one series, though. It must’ve been cancelled in 2005, which means there was an unbroken run of Star Trek shows from The Next Generation in 1987. An unbroken run, with overlaps, of four different series set in the same universe, for 18 years. The last episode of Enterprise is treated as the last episode of all of them, and it’s really written as an edition of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I think that just as with Newhart, you needed to know the Next Generation to understand the Enterprise episode, but I also think it didn’t work. Instead of capping a long run, it seemed to negate Enterprise. It relegated the Enterprise cast to guest characters.

Maybe that’s because the whole last episode was done like this instead of being a final moment’s capstone like Newhart. Maybe, though, it’s just the old thing that the Newhart one was better written.

Maybe it’s the old thing that you can write anything, so long as you do it brilliantly.

I’ll tell you this now: you will never get me to go to a sports game. You could beg. I don’t imagine you would, but you could, and it would make no difference. I am stone on this point, there is not one pixel of a chance you could manage to stir another smaller thing’s worth of interest out of me if sport is in any way involved.

Last night I read ten “Sports Night” scripts.

And that’s on top of the ten I read earlier in the week.

And that’s on top of the fact that I know I’ve read them all before, plus I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if I’ve read them five times. Especially since I know I watched the whole two seasons of this Aaron Sorkin comedy in a binge before there were binges. And I’ve binged at least a couple of times since.

I’ve thought about this a lot and previously taken some shade in the fact that one advertising line for the show ran: “Sports Night. It’s about sports. The way Charlie’s Angels is about law enforcement.” So the way a sports show had got me engaged was not really by being a sports show.

Only, reading all of the available scripts again, I think it was. At least in the details as it’s about the people making a sports TV show and there is constant references to statistics I don’t know, people I’ve not heard of, even sports I can’t imagine are actually sports but there you go.

What I want to know is what got me over that line into watching a series with sport in its very title. And I know that the answer is Aaron Sorkin. I have never once watched a series or a film because of the actors in it, nor because of who directed it. But I have often watched because of the writer and that’s what happened here, long back in the day when the show was new and DVDs weren’t old.

But what this means is that I what I think I really want to know is what else I am missing out on because of whatever blinkers I’m wearing today. I like that, as a man, I’m expected to diss romances when actually I like them enormously and will at a moment’s notice bore you into shrapnel over how identical I think romances and thrillers are.

Thrillers. That’s another thing a man of my age is expected to like, and this time I do. I understand that I’m expected to be riveted to whole channels devoted to the history of Nazis and the Knights Templar, but not so much, no.

I don’t care what other people expect me to like, but I am coming to care very much about what I expect myself to enjoy, and what I’m failing to appreciate because of it. I’ve not given opera a go, for instance. I mean, listening, not performing. I call myself multilingual because I speak English, American, Australian, and am learning Canadian. But I don’t try to learn anything else.

I don’t ever try manga or comic books. I don’t try video games. I have tried TikTok twice, when I needed to write something about it and of course had to at least have looked to see it, even if both times it chose to present me first with some rather disturbing videos. That was a case of an algorithm confidently predicting what I’d like, and I really, really didn’t.

But then no algorithm would tell you that I could be a fan of Francisca Valenzuela, whose chiefly pop music has not charted in the UK as far as I know, and as far as her Chilean lyrics would suggest.

I found her music on a rare exploration. I found Sports Night because the writer pulled me over the line.

I’ve got to look around more. There is so much to enjoy, and right now there’s so much to take refuge in.

But I’ve done enough sports now.

Earlier this week, I said aloud: “God, it’s only Tuesday.” You’ll never guess when I said it.

All this week I’ve been working from about 05:00 to around 19:00 or 20:00 and actually, as I write this to you now, it’s just before 07:00 and I’m on a break. Which is all fine and good, not worth your time talking about — I’ve also just had a biscuit, I can tell you’re enthralled — but this week it feels different, it feels special, working early and nattering with you while all is silent around me.

Except for this hard drive I put on a shelf and which occasionally makes that half of my office vibrate.

I used to do this all the time and it’s been on my mind, on my conscience really, that for months and months now, I’ve not been able to make myself get up. A couple of times the day has worked out just fine when I’ve slept in to 08:00 and that made me think a lot, but overall I’ve been behind with things and I’ve spent most days racing from the start. This week I’ve had to do the longer time, simply from necessity, and before I had that “God it’s Tuesday” moment, I more had a sense that I felt I was back.

It doesn’t matter what you didn’t do yesterday, it only matters what you do today and tomorrow. But on the one hand, I feel I’ve at least won one round against my unbelievable laziness, and on the other, the fact that I’ve had this long break means that I appreciate the stillness more.

When we’re done talking, I’ve got to get back into a job, one of — hang on, let me figure this out… one of something like seven projects that have to be done this week. They each have different deadlines and they’re not conveniently arranged in a row, so in a way, they all need to be pushed along at the same time.

But they also all have something in common. And this is why I realised I wanted to talk to you about this, just now as I was getting us some biscuits from my kitchen.

It’s that I love when a job entirely occupies you. When you have no thoughts whatsoever, except for what decision has to be made now, what work must be done this moment. To be so totally absorbed that you don’t see the time, don’t have your shopping list in the back of your mind, aren’t usually wondering about where the biscuits are, and when you are totally focused to the exclusion of everything else. It’s deeply refreshing and satisfying.

And while I first noticed this back when I worked in BBC local radio and you were so intensely concentrating even as you were surrounded by a loud newsroom, I think this morning I am noticing that you can get it when there is silence. Apart from that drive.

There is also a very, very distant sound of something, I can’t tell if it’s aircraft or cars, it’s that quiet and indistinct and far away. I think this must be half term, too, because there’s no sound of children or parents. I can see five gardens from my office window and there isn’t a pixel of movement – no, wait, a tree just twitched as a bird moved around inside its top branches. The sun is cutting across the gardens perpendicularly to my window and it’s like a stripe of summer.

The light is still on in my office, I should switch that off now. And also turn off the drive.

And I should get back to the work. But if in moments my head will again be entirely in what I’m working on, I suddenly appreciated the stillness and the focus and the time, and I just wanted to take this moment to enjoy it and I wanted you and I to share in it.

Although I’ve eaten your biscuit, sorry.

It’s not as if I do it a lot, but I do perform, I do workshops and I get interviewed, and you know how it is. You end being asked the same things and you end up doing a lot of the same things if they worked once. And of all of these, there is a line of mine that I like.

“Everything is interesting, everything is so interesting,” I’ll say before, after a really ridiculously calculated beat pause, adding: “Except football.”

I know it gets a laugh because as a British man I am expected to follow sport. I do also know that it annoys a significant proportion of the audience wherever I am, but I also know that while that isn’t the point, while that isn’t why I say it or what I hope it will do, it helps. Specifically, it helps in writing workshops because when you hear me say it, you have no doubt that it’s true. I’m saying something that you couldn’t truly call controversial, but it is at least a surprise and what I’m telling the audience is that this is a space where I am relaxed enough to be honest. It’s a space where, therefore, they can be the same, where if I’m ever going to judge them, it will be on whether their writing could convey something better. It won’t ever be about them or what they’re trying to say.

So the whole everything-is-interesting-except-football thing is true but because it’s become a tool as well, I’ve been forgetting just how true it is.

Right now I’m once more feeling like I’m not doing enough, I’m not writing well enough, and time is roaring by without my doing anything. What gets me out of this low part of my cycle, though, is the absolute truth that everything else is so interesting. It can’t matter that I’m not contributing anything, because there is so much else by so many other people that is so fantastic I want to gobble it up.

Even now, even here, in this world and after a week in which I’ve had to write about Trump more than I would want to, there is so much that is fantastic. I cannot get enough of the detail behind things you don’t think about. So while I might be burying my head to hide from some things I actually do not want to think about, just in the last week I have learned, for instance:

• Toothpaste factories fill 1,000 tubes per minute
• When you download an attachment in Apple Mail, the document is saved with an email icon that you can click to go straight back to the originating message
• You don’t see hitchhikers with car trade plates so much now because they’re paid better
• “Mission: Impossible II” in the year 2000 was going to be about AI and the Y2K bug, except it’s initially planned director Oliver Stone thought writer Christopher McQuarrie was making all that up.
• Channel 4 has a head of High Risk television
• I have strong feelings about prologues

Admit it. You’re interested in the toothpaste. So let me also tell you that I learned this week that approximately 20 billion toothpaste tubes are made worldwide every year.

Now you’re off thinking about how you can never get that last bit out of the tube and so how much toothpaste is wasted.

I tell you, we can sod Trump and AI and sod however you’re feeling about your work, because now we can just wonder about how can you recycle 20 billion tubes with bits in.