Okay, so, on Tuesday evening I was with a group of Ukraine writers and ended up recounting two or three times that I had felt so vulnerable in writing that I made poor decisions or I was led the wrong way.

That suddenly sounds so much more dramatic than it really was. Nobody has led me into a dark life of crime and scandal, although there may yet be hope. What I meant was, for example, the way that my school careers teacher laughed at me for wanting to write and how that sent me off down the wrong line for the next decade.

Or much later when you’d argue I was doing well in writing, but I was fired off Crossroads. In that case the vulnerability was in how I still went around pretending to be a writer and, to be fair, doing quite a lot of writing, but I’d lost hope and hadn’t told myself that I had. It took an incident four or five years later to show me that I’d actually almost absolutely everything right with Crossroads – er, bar writing a good script – and that I wasn’t necessarily the bad writer I secretly believed in my bones. I hadn’t been a good one, but I’d been a professional and my not getting to do more was much down to my little destroyed heart as to anything else.

There was a third one of these, it came in the middle chronologically, but you get the idea and so, of course, did these writers.

But.

One of them offered the idea that these were not three moments when I was vulnerable. Perhaps I’m actually vulnerable all the time.

And.

Maybe, she said, you have to be in order to write.

I don’t know that she was right. But I’ve spent much of the time since thinking about it and I suspect she was.

Admittedly, some of that time has been spent circling around how exposing it was to tell them all of this on Tuesday and to tell you today. I can see a case for saying that I am revealing my vulnerabilities by talking to you about vulnerabilities.

But whether it’s necessary or not, that’s the thing. I think she made a superb point and I think I might only be continuing to doubt it because I don’t know if I want to believe it.

I can tell you that I think I’m beyond being directed the wrong way by teachers. I can tell you that there’s a pretty fair chance that if I were fired from Crossroads today, I’d shrug a lot more.

But that would be less because I’m somehow now wise and instead more because I’m somehow now older. This is what I am and I’m stuck with me, yet she was right: even now in this moment I am again exposed and nervous.

Only, you’ve got a kind face and even if you didn’t, I can’t see you doing anything more than stopping reading. I also cannot accept that I am even remembered when I’ve left a room, so it can’t be that I fear you remembering me enough to reject me.

This time the vulnerability is going hand in hand with writing, even when I’m just writing you this note. Maybe that writer is on to something, maybe vulnerability is a constant and all that changes is whether we feel it or not.

I need tea. Can I get you one?

Hand on heart, I know for absolute certain that this is a quote: “it’s only a story, a story, a fanciful tale.” And I know for nearly absolute certain that it’s a line from an Alan Plater script. But which one, I do not know. I can even hear how it should be said, how it was said in whatever it was, I can read that line and hear the intended rhythms of it. But then you usually can with Alan because his writing is him and the only difference if you happened to know him was that you’d see the same patterns in real-life speech as across his hundreds of written work.

I think we all have these rhythms, I think it’s called a voice, and I know that none of this is what I set out to talk to you about. But a story, a story, a fanciful tale, that line has been in my head at times for about a month now. Because I was commissioned to go visit a book group, learn what they like and don’t like in a story, and then write one for them. I delivered that story at the end of last week and this week I’ve been praised for it by the company that did the commissioning. By the time you read this, the story may have been sent to the book group. And if not, it will be with them soon.

Since it’s their story, possibly in more ways that then expected, I can’t tell you anything. They have to read it first. And it’s due to be published some time early next year so I can’t pre-empt that either. Which leaves me with nothing to tell you of the story, the story, the fanciful tale, and instead of enjoying telling you, instead of having that great feeling after you think you’ve written something good, I can just fret at you.

I tell you, when I opened the email from the commissioning company and specifically the woman who hired me, I crossed my fingers as I read what she wrote. She praised my dialogue which means so much to me that I’d practically surrender the fee to hear that said. Practically.

But now the fret is not that she won’t like it or that she won’t accept it. The fret isn’t even really whether the book group will, as I’d classify that as less a fret, more a strong worry.

The fret is over this. I’ve done that thing of being hired to visit a book group before. I think it was a shockingly time ago as the calendar flies and no time at all in my head, but there were more similarities than the commission. Last time, something like 12 years ago now, I ended up writing a story about the book group or a thinly disguised version of it, and how they were at war with a rival book group in the same village. I made it up about the war, but there were true groups there.

Sudden memory. The only time my mother saw me performing was when I read the start of that story at an event.

Anyway.

Jump forward a dozen years and I hope I’m a better writer, but I have to question it because this new story is about this new book group. it’s honestly totally different, although I think the word “honestly” has been contaminated by how many times you see headlines such as “honest review” or “my honest opinion” or some such bollocks. This time the book group is the vehicle for a story that goes on around them. That’s different enough, surely.

But it’s also a story that ultimately you come to realise is about time. Because every bleedin’ thing I ever write is about time. I need to switch obsessions and write stories about chocolate.

Now I’m wondering if there’s a story about time and chocolate. Or at least one that isn’t about how confectionary companies shrink the size of their chocolate bars while raising the price and doing some fantastic work with the packaging to fool you into not noticing at least one of these two things. That is truly some remarkable packaging and it’s only a shame that you can be fooled by it a maximum of one time.

Anyway.

I think the thing is that I want to be back in a story instead of as much non-fiction as I’m doing these days. Writing something where I have a deadline facing me and a tale that is wriggling out of my fingers, I want to be back in that way I have been since I visited the group. Since I left them that evening and had the first little wisps of a tale joining me in the car.

I hope I can show you the story some time and I hope that you’ll like it. But I also hope that by that time, I’ll have written more.

So this week I was nominated for an award and on the one hand, I intend to milk this incredibly from now until December 2, which is when there’s a gala awards dinner and I’ll need to use my “oh, very well done, you deserved it” face talking to the winner.

But that’s one hand and this is the other. Alan Plater once said about awards for writers that if you buy enough tickets, eventually you win the raffle. Mind you, he also said “don’t let the BAFTAs get you down.” I realise with a truly enormous shock that I’ve now had a writing career about as long as his was, and in comparison my haul of wins is really tiny.

It’s still a haul, though, so I would like to present you with an inspiring history of prizes, and will settle for presenting you with this.

In 1980 something or other that I wrote won me a screening of “The Empire Strikes Back” and its soundtrack album. Unsurprisingly, the album was the UK version and surprisingly it was exactly half the length of the version everyone else got. I’m not saying there was a message there, but chiefly because what now pops right back into my head is that a friend who did not win and who did not even enter, talked his way into the screening by claiming to write about it for the school newspaper. I don’t believe he ever did.

He’s a producer now.

Somewhat later, my writing won a theatre contest where the prize was to have your work staged. Actually there were two winners and I remember how at the first readthrough, an actor came in, said he would only do the good one, and meant mine. I should not have felt entirely as great about that as I did, since it was a bit pants of the man to say it in front of both me and the other writer, but there you go. I am horrible.

I got my reward for being horrible by having my reward for winning the contest fall apart. Neither play was ever produced.

Somewhere around then I won a BBC Writersroom thing where they offered me a place on a scheme and then first said it was slightly delayed, then that I had lied about winning it and there was no such thing, then after I showed them their own email, said well, we’ll get back to you. I’m still waiting nearly two decades on.

Tony Jordan’s Red Planet Prize was rather better organised and I got into the shortlist, but never managed to leverage that into anything. That’s happened a couple of times now with different things, although I liked getting commended once by an international screenwriting contest.

I also very much like that a short — I mean, staggeringly short, perhaps 20 seconds — script that I wrote and filmed won my wife an iPad.

But then look at that, she married me.

Tell me I’m not a winner.

Look, if I passed you in the street this week, if I met you in a shop or if you were even one of the staggering number of spam callers I get these days, I will have told you at length about my stepping down as a deputy chair of the Writers’ Guild. If you managed to block your ears before, you’d best do that again because this is so on my mind and I think for a particular reason.

It’s that there’s a strong chance this was my last time working for the Guild. I’ll always be a member, I’m never leaving, but if you are ever an officer of the Writers’ Guild, you get a maximum four-year term and that’s it. Except the last time I did four years, I was back after about 12 months when I was again eligible for the role.

So there you go, right there, I’ve stepped down from this very same role before, it’s inconceivable that I should be so bothered this time. I mean, I could stand yet again after 12 months. No guarantee I’d get it, of course, but I could stand. I won an election to continue in the role last year, so it can be done, I could conceivably do it. Yet somehow this time, maybe only because it’s so fresh, I feel as if I’m done. Twice around the block.

Then it helps that I do know for an absolute fact that the officers and staff now are the strongest the union has ever had, and I also know that they have to be. The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain must field its best players right this minute because they’ve never been more needed.

Only, although the fight for writers’ rights has become bigger, harder, and more public because of AI, there has always been fighting. Which, intellectually, I always knew, because it’s always been the Writers’ Guild that negotiates pay and conditions across film, television, radio and more. They negotiate those and all writers benefit from their work, even if they aren’t members.

So I knew that, I got that, and as I was joining I also learnt about its contract vetting. I heard a horror story, too, of a production company who edited a PDF after it was signed, specifically to alter the fees due to the writer.

Anyway. There’s all of this negotiation, all of this contract vetting, and for me this business that Alan Plater and Rosemary Anne Sisson were members. Because of them, I aspired to become a member, especially Alan, and the day I had enough writing commissions to qualify was special. (Today there are more opportunities, you can join as a student or candidate member. I aspired to be a full member and making that grade was a personal triumph.)

Fast forward a couple of years and there was that thing where I didn’t step back quickly enough and so unexpectedly became regional representative of the Writers’ Guild in the West Midlands. Which I’ll never forget, chiefly because of the people, but also because it’s why I got to produce theatre events for the first time.

Keep doing that fast-forwarding thing, though, and something like nine years ago, I was representing the West Midlands at a Guild AGM and was tapped on the shoulder by Gail Renard, an extraordinary writer whose utterly ceaseless work for other writers means she’s held every role you’ve ever heard of. She took me aside, I thought I’d broken something or had been talking too loudly, and she asked me to consider trying for deputy chair.

Which is nice, of course, but the reason I’m telling you now is that it’s when you become an officer that you truly learn just what the Writers’ Guild is doing and how fantastically vital it is. I cannot tell you confidential details, of course, and I can tell you that I have not once been involved in any of the court cases or negotiations myself, but being an officer is like opening a door. You see what’s being done, what is constantly being done.

And I’ll tell you now, when I first took up the role, I actually went pale.

Before AI, before public broadcasting cuts, there were nice people mistakenly doing bad things, and there were bad people doing worse things very intentionally. Writers I admire were having rough times and people I’d heard of and even liked were doing it to them.

Now, I can and I do easily sit at my desk writing for 12 hours a day, very easily, and I think that’s a privilege. I’m not lucky, this does not happen by luck, but I am fortunate and I do appreciate that. But for all the great parts of it, writers do tend to be on their own doing this and we do also tend to be in our heads which might make for some great writing (I still live in hope), but it definitely makes us vulnerable.

I’ve had rows with directors and editors, I’ve even won some of them, but I cannot take on a studio, a broadcaster, a streamer. I can’t usefully take on a production company or a producer.

But the Writers’ Guild can.

But the Writers’ Guild does.

All the time. I mean, all the time.

Things are harder now for writers than they have ever been. But I shake at the thought of how much worse it would be and how much worse it would have been for such a long time, if it were not for the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain.

I got to be one of those small outer cogs in wheels that were fighting vital battles for us. I got to see up close what is being done for us, what must be done for us, and who is doing it. I am very proud to have been in that position and to have done even as little as I did.

The Writers’ Guild is still doing this, it will always be fighting battles for us, and I think it’s now stronger than ever.

But just personally, this week was a low point. The Guild AGMs are now on Zoom and I am so used to how officers stay on the call afterwards for a debrief, for some bits of business that need to be done, and for just a little decompression. This time the officers were asked to stay on as ever, but I’m no longer one of them.

Tomorrow I’ll think I’ve been melodramatic about that, although never about what the Guild must do. But for this week, for today, it’s hard to step away.

Absolutely everything and everyone is just incredibly, overwhelmingly, fantastically interesting. Except football.

I especially love — not remotely too strong a word — the detail behind things that you never normally think of. I just learned why door frames are the size they are, for instance. Unbelievable. Fantastic. My 58keys YouTube channel is named after the number of keys on one single computer and I could justify that to you, I could enthuse about why, but that was yesterday’s fact and today I have a new one.

Follow. I need to tell you upfront that there’s only so much of this I can tell you upfront. I found out something while researching a book I’m writing and not only will the detail be in that, but it’ll chiefly be in a footnote. So I’m not saying this is big, except to me it’s so huge it’s making me beam.

I was having trouble with the book, having a problem trying to move from one particular topic to another. I’ve always called that finding the bridge, which I only now realise is a term from music. I told you, everything is interesting. Anyway. The book is about the TV show “Lou Grant”, a newspaper drama, and I’d written this huge bit about the authenticity of the newsroom set design. I wanted to move on to the authenticity of the scriptwriting but it was a surprisingly big leap to make mid-paragraph.

I’m not going to say that I thought about this for days, because then you’d look at me like that. At some point, though, I remembered that this newsroom set, this city room set, had a poster in the background. In five years of the series, it was never referred to and it wasn’t ever really in shot, it was just back there, behind that, next to her, above him, a piece of nothing set dressing amongst perhaps a thousand other pieces of set dressing.

But it was a poster of a cliché. It was line art drawing of a typical reporter of years gone by. He’s wearing a felt hat with “PRESS” sticking out of it, he’s smoking, he’s holding one of those phones that were like candlesticks with a separate earpiece. And he’s on a story, he’s got breaking news, so he’s barking out “Hello, sweetheart, get me rewrite.”

I figured it was worth a sentence. And I figured that here was a bit of set dressing that mocked old-style reporter clichés. So it could be a bridge between two different forms of journalism authenticity. Sold.

Only, because that poster was never focused on, in any sense of the word, I wasn’t sure I’d got the caption right and if you’re going to quote something, you have to be sure. So I looked into it. I figured it was worth a Google and if I couldn’t find the right caption, I’d chuck the whole thing and find a different bridge.

But this tiny, insignificant, never-really-looked-at poster turns out to have the most enormous history and to be enormously significant in US journalism. It was made for a journal called “(MORE)” which had the stance that newspaper journalism of the day, the 1970s, was appalling bad. That newspapers were just printing whatever companies and politicians told them. I don’t believe they had the word churnalism then, but I also don’t believe the makers of (MORE) would be able to look at news coverage today without sobbing.

Anyway, they were doing this then and they were influential, they were doing the right thing and someone — probably art director Sydney Z. Litwack but I can’t yet prove it — put their poster on the “Lou Grant” city room wall. If you were a US journalist at that time, you’d spot it instantly, you’d know what it meant and you’d know that this was a drama whose creators did their research.

That’ll do me. That’ll make a bridge, that’s made me agog and just so happy.

Only…

I also love that there is always more to everything. Not a single thing in this world exists without something more behind it. So while this does definitely have to lurk in my book’s footnotes, I also found out that this (MORE) group held a series of annual conventions about journalism.

And that their first one was organised by Nora Ephron.

Once I was waiting outside a book store in California, actually doubled over in pain, I mean holding my stomach, because I was laughing at something she’d written. Behind me right now I have a newly-bought book collecting her journalism.

And if you remember the film “When Harry Met Sally”, you remember Meg Ryan in the diner, but you may not remember that Nora Ephron wrote it.

But then the making of that film… No, stop, you get the idea. Nothing just happens or just exists, everything has a story behind it, everything has people in it. I just cannot get enough of everything.

Okay, except football. There are limits, you know.

What’s on my mind to talk to you about today is so obvious as to be mansplaining, but it’s also happy and lately I think I’ve been so focused on writing issues and writing problems that I’ve been a bit grumpy. So let me say with a very cheery heart that watching “Yes, Minister” from the 1980s has shown me that everything comes around again and nothing changes.

Wait, no, that’s miserable. Let me try again.

Right now I really want to see “Coyote vs Acme”. I also want to see “Pressure” that I read the play script a few months ago. And I also really want to be able to tell a friend that okay, yes, I went to see “The Odyssey” on your insistence and it was good/bad/indifferent* *delete as applicable.

I haven’t seen any of these, but the point is that they are three films in cinemas that I want to see. Well, two. That friend says that seeing Odyssey is practically a cultural imperative these days and I’ve argued back that I have no culture, but she isn’t having any of it. I’ve promised to see it. I keep failing.

But it’s still in cinemas. Coyote vs Acme is newer but still there. And I’m not sure about Pressure’s release dates but it’s either now or soon.

And the thing is that it isn’t more than an hour ago that it was said cinema was dead, dying, or on life support. Even taking COVID out of the picture, cinema was dying. And admittedly studios glommed on to superhero films like they were going to save the world but glommed on so much that there was bugger-all else to see and that was fine, that was fine, they had all the money the remaining audience could give them, until they stopped going too.

Yet here we are. Maybe it’s a fluke and tomorrow there’ll be nothing to see but Disney’s latest live-action remake of a cartoon. I say live-action. I mean Disney’s latest CGI remake of a cartoon.

But I had a great time seeing The Invite the other month and Project Hail Mary before that. So at least this run of good movies has been going on for a little while. It gives me hope that it will continue.

And as pleased as I am, I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am. Because I mean it about everything coming around again. I suddenly feel old saying that, like the next thing I’m going to write to you will begin with “back in my day…” or “of course I’ve seen it all before…” but let me pretend to be even older than I am for a moment.

In 1922 when the BBC’s 2LO radio station started, it was the death of theatre. (I’ve seen 2LO: the entire station used to be in this glass museum-like display case in a BBC building where I worked.) When television came along, it was the death of radio. We’re still at the stage where television is dying, but it’s putting up a fight against YouTube shorts and in many ways TV has never been better.

Cinema looked like it was killed or being killed by streamers and yet, at least for today, it is looking stronger.

Mind you, as well as those two and a half cinema films I want to see, I’m also keen to watch Enola Holmes 3 and The Sheep Detectives on streaming.

But then I hear that “Star Trek: The Slow Motion Picture” is coming back to cinemas and I am actually tempted. A little.

I am sixty years old and I have never had a hobby before. Well, there was this one thing you’d call a hobby and I couldn’t disagree, but I never called it that because I realise now that I regard the word as pejorative.

That’s not in the way that I still remain convinced that “bucolic” is a serious illness. I believe I know what the word “hobby” means, but to me it is somehow bound up with not taking something seriously. With playing at something. Something that doesn’t matter. Writing is a hobby for many people, of course it is, but for me it’s a life. I don’t need you to think my writing is good, I need you to not see any writing as something trivial to fit in between the crossword and Sudoku.

There was that one time, true. It was back in the late 1980s or possibly early 1990s, when I took a couple of lessons flying helicopters. That remains a unrequited passion, but I simply could not afford the cost at the time. Nor now, really, as we’re talking so much that I cannot find a helicopter school that will tell me the price for a real flying course. They just want to sell you what they call trial lessons which they then describe instead as an experience that gets you a certificate. I don’t want a certificate. Why would I want a certificate? I was given one once for having visited the Grand Canyon and I felt it was possible that I’d remember being there without a piece of paper telling me, and I also felt it was just about possible that to get recognition you should do more than pay and turn up.

Anyway, purported trial lessons are now around £250 for half an hour and I know real lessons are less because for those you only pay for rotor time, the time that the helicopter’s rotors are turning. Much of the time at first is classroom-based which sounds boring but is at least cheaper.

Okay, there’s also the fact now that as well as having to up my bank balance in order to fly helicopters, I’d have to significantly lower my flying weight.

If I do that now, and when I did it back then, I don’t see how you could call this anything other than a hobby. I’m not planning to be a pilot for a living, I wasn’t especially planning to fly anyone anywhere, I wanted it for the utter joy of it. To fly is human, to hover is divine.

That, though, was the sole thing in my entire life where I had something I enjoyed doing and I was not able to make it part of my work. I’ve considered that fortunate — not lucky, never lucky, because it doesn’t happen by chance — but it does also mean that I have nothing, I do nothing, that isn’t work.

Except that since about March I’ve been learning to play piano.

It’s the same as helicopters in that there is no possibility I’ll play at Symphony Hall, plus I don’t actually have any interest in playing professionally. One of the first things my teacher asked me was why I wanted to learn, whether I was looking to play some favourite tunes by memory, or do the whole sight-reading thing. I do not comprehend why anyone would want to learn to play piano but not actually learn to play piano. Someone who would want to play at playing piano. I only want it because piano is the best instrument and I want the joy of playing it for myself, but I take it as seriously as if it were a job.

After a little while, incidentally, the second thing my piano teacher asked me was whether I might consider the triangle instead. So I’m not any good on piano — though compared to how I was at the start, I’m amazing — and I didn’t fly for long enough to become any good.

They are hobbies. No question.

I need to get over my problem with that word. And now I need to get over how I appear to have told you that I’m 60, boring and too fat for even military aircraft.

There are no rules in writing, but if you break them… Here’s a thing. There are certain ways of writing, certain ways of doing all sorts of things really, that are frankly naff and yet there are people who do them well. I would tell you, for instance, that the sole way I can stomach reading a narrator is if they are lying sods who are out to fool me and preferably along the way are also kidding themselves. Unreliable narrators, can’t get enough of them. Regular narrators, forget it. A regular narrator is just the writer unable to dramatise plot exposition.

But then you get Frank Darabont’s screenplay for “The Shawshank Redemption” and you might argue that the narrator isn’t fully in control of what he’s saying, but really, no, it is straight, ordinary, regular narration, yet it works. It is somehow human. Break it down sentence by sentence, consider the performance as well as the writing, and I don’t think you can reasonably conclude anything other than this should not work but it does.

This is on my mind because, while this may seem unrelated, I also cannot bear jump cuts in videos. Stick with me here. Jump cuts are that thing where sometimes someone has cut a bit out of a video and didn’t know how to join the ends properly, in which case I think they’re insulting me by not having bothered to look into that. It also sometimes when someone has deliberately put in jump cuts because they apparently believe it’s exciting and if they ever spend more time on actually making their material better instead, do let me know.

But.

I just watched a four-minute video that contains 223 jump cuts.

And I didn’t just watch it as in I saw it right now, I’ve watched it before, often, and I am sure I will watch it again, often, because it is superbly well done.

It’s OK Go performing a Tiny Desk Concert for NPR, but doing so when NPR was moving offices. The song follows the band as the original office is taken down, as they all travel across town, and as the new office is set up again. One song, with titles running four minutes and 47 seconds, so say an average of one severe jump cut every 1.3 seconds.

Joyous. That’s what it is.

Have a look. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm63LibDiFk

I think you can make a case that the cuts were integral to the whole idea, that it certainly wasn’t laziness and it was far from ignorance. There was a point and it worked, I think that much is certain.

But I also think that it’s talent. Indefinable but unmistakeable talent. Doing the wrong things so well that they are right.

If you happen to remember BBC Ceefax, you’ll know that it had pages of news that you selected and read on your TV set. What you will have no reason to know is there were two sets of these pages, and at midnight the system switched from one to the other. It was so that you could set up the pages for tomorrow and they would go live on time, unless you did something disastrously wrong.

Disaster was possible because switching to the new set meant switching away from the old. So one of the jobs on the late shift at BBC Television Centre was to copy over all the old pages to the new set in order for there to be uninterrupted coverage.

I don’t want to think about how many decades ago this was now, but on two different late shifts there, I forgot. From midnight until whenever the early team started, there were so very many blank pages in Ceefax’s entertainment section.

I write this to you and I can feel my legs giving way under me. I can picture the newsroom as I cheerily strode in the next day, briefly wondering why all of these people were looking at me, and then learning exactly and very precisely why from the editor. I can remember sinking, I mean actually sinking. Presumably there was a chair, I don’t remember that bit, I just so vividly and visually recall the editor’s face and how I felt.

It definitely was twice and even if it were over a reasonably long period of time, I mean certainly more than a year or two, my absolute pin-sharp visual memory is of just one of these times. I’m guessing it was the second, I’m guessing that how bad I felt was cumulative.

This week I had the same feeling. I want to say that it might not have been my fault, there is a small, small, tiny, tiny chance that earlier this week an online system let me down. It really, genuinely is a chance, but you don’t believe that, the people I was working with don’t, and neither of you should. In some ways I hope it was me because that means I can prevent it happening again, but in most other ways I wish it weren’t because I got that watery leg feeling again.

I can’t tell you what it was all about, maybe I will when another few decades have gone by, but it coloured my whole week. One incident and nothing was good. I mean, I had various funny chats with people and the current book project is going well, plus I wrote a couple of good things, but all of it was tainted, all of it was coloured by my cockup.

The line between good and bad is so small and it is so changed by the colour of the lens you look through.

I still haven’t seen The Odyssey but one of the writers who first made me want to write is insisting I should and that’s harder to resist than it is to find the time to see it. Nonetheless, if this film is more interesting in the discussion than the watching, it is interesting and a thing that keeps catching my mind is how it used mirrors in its production.

Stop me if you know this one, but I already knew that IMAX cameras are so loud that all dialogue is re-recorded later. Or it is for most films, Christopher Nolan has no problem with audiences not being able to hear his dialogue so I don’t know in this case. But usually, sound has to be re-recorded.

What I’ve never heard of before is that the IMAX cameras were also so big that the production used mirrors. When one actor is talking to another, on set or on location, they are actually talking to a mirror that is slightly offset to show the other actor. They’re not face to face, they’re roughly nearby and they are both emoting toward the mirror.

I’m fascinated by that because the cast have said that they no longer remember doing that, they’ve said that what they remember is facing each other. The mirror work became invisible to them and of course it’s invisible to us because this was a necessity of production, it wasn’t a part of the story intended to be seen.

So incredibly often, though, mirrors are meant to be seen. And maybe this is just me, but I’ve come to think of mirrors in dramas as oh-shit warnings. If you see a character artfully reflected in, say, their car mirror, it’s oh, shit, the director is straight out of school and it’s all going to be like this. Impossibly convenient angles, shots that at best mean the director is thinking of their showreel rather than the story, and at more commonly worse that the director has no interest in the script.

To be fair, often when I’ve seen this, the story and script have been a bit empty, I’ve come away thinking there was no reason for this show to exist. So if the director wants to fill his or her day with shots that try distracting you from there being nothing else going on, fine. They should go for it, but I am gone.

Unfortunately, I’ve also seen what I can reasonably expect to be good shows tainted by this crap. I’ve forgotten his name now, but there was one director who did a few Inspector Morse episodes and I’d definitely sink when his name came up on screen, and I’d definitely wonder about my life choices in committing the next 90 minutes to this. Even though most Morse episodes are well done, even though I liked the books at the time.

There is a fantastic mirror shot in the film Contact, really staggeringly well done, and I believe it was made for specific reasons and intending to convey specific emotion. But even then, you have the jolt when you realise what’s happened and it’s a jolt that takes you out of the film.

Someone driving along and we happen to see their face perfectly framed in the car mirror, no. Two people having a conversation beside a conveniently-placed car such that we see one face-on and one again perfectly framed in the car mirror, oh shit.