I need you to be with me on this one. Pretend if you have to. But at some point, you’ve had to think of a new password and you’ve thought and thought before coming up with a great one — and the computer says no. It says no because you’ve used that one before.

Or you need to save some important document somewhere that you’ll remember and the document needs to be saved with some really clear name. You think and think, you come up with a great system for naming the file and just the right place to save it, and yeah. Same thing. A file of that name is already there.

I’m not sure you’ve had that second one, it possibly requires you to spend 15 hours a day in front of a screen. But the first one, that’s surely you as well as me.

Only, I have a new video series starting shortly and at the same time, I have an existing one that gets filmed in blocks so that episodes can roll out weekly for a couple of months. Two series, I want to say both alike in dignity, but apart from them both being about writing, I think there is a large stretch of very clear water separating the two.

So I write the pilot for the new one and have to leave the edit for a bit in order to polish up one of the episodes from this other run.

And you know where this is going.

But I didn’t

That filmed-in-a-block series is unscripted, and everything else I do is very much written. A solid seven minute sequence I wrote for the new series is what I said some six weeks ago in the unscripted one.

It’s not the same, it’s not word for word, but actually, yes, it is. The sequence is slightly different, the structure isn’t the same, but the points are identical, and there are many moments where I see myself searching for the right phrase on the unscripted one — and that is word for word what I wrote six weeks later in this other series.

Now, there’s a practical thing that the new one is due to start going out very soon and so it’s within a fortnight of the same topic being discussed. If it had been a much longer gap, maybe I’d have got away with it, but I definitely cannot now, so I’ve had to scrap the pilot and write a different one.

Except, okay, I’m now behind schedule and I have to do a little more work, if you’re not thinking boo hoo then I am.

What shook me about this was how you think — or I think — that we are trying to do something new, but we are at least sometimes locked into the same ways of thinking. The same concerns, fine, but the same words.

I want to think that I’m up for anything and always looking for the new way to do things. I have so often had events change dramatically around me and I’ve had a ball adapting to it all on the hoof.

But this video collision makes me think that in fact I am stuck in one way of thinking.

I am fighting back, though. I’ve been trying out a nicely done AI tool called Cotypist, which is dedicated to predicting not just the next word you’re going to type, but the next several. It obviously learns from you, but even before it has time to get better and better, it is startlingly good at predicting what I’m going to type.

Consequently I use this app and I suppose it saves me typing time — although I like typing — but each time it proposes six or seven words that it thinks I’m going to type, I feel it’s telling me I am that predictable.

So I will do anything to rephrase my thought, to express whatever the idea is, in some different way. Any different way. One word different, I’ll take it.

I’m just not sure how to do that rebelling against one-track thinking in real life. But I’ve got to try.

It’s a funny thing, but these days we either get to the point incredibly quickly or incredibly slowly, if ever. So a 90-second film trailer will now start with a 10-second trailer, for instance. A trailer for a trailer, it’s insane. But equally any article you read will bury the lead as far down the text as it possibly can, just so you have to scroll past ads.

This week I made a video where I don’t know for sure that I got the timing right or wrong, but I know I spent more time thinking about than I should. I am very pleased with it because it’s a nice gag: I made an unboxing video where the joke was that I discard the product and instead go into crazed detail about the box. I think the fun is in how an expensive product is dismissed with a wave and in how I really researched the manufacture of cardboard boxes so I could talk with the kind of obsession that you see in regular unboxing videos.

(This just occurred me. Alan Plater once wrote a trilogy of television dramas called “To See How Far It Is”, and they were set in a cardboard box factory. A recurring line was something like “there’s more in boxes than you think.” Now I think he’d be proud.)

Anyway.

One question is how long you run the joke for and of course the answer is not long. I think it’s a two-minute video. But another question is how long do you take before you drop the hammer: the video has to look real before you reveal that it isn’t, and the amount of time you spend appearing to do a genuine unboxing is obviously crucial. And I do think I got this wrong: it takes 39 seconds before you twig.

Yet part of this is as much about when you are being obvious and when you are not: from 39 seconds on it is entirely obvious that this is a gag, and for up to 38 seconds I think it appears obvious that it’s a real unboxing video.

And I’ve also been thinking about this for days, though, because I watched John Sullivan’s 1980s BBC sitcom, “Dear John”, plus as its NBC remake in the States. The pilot episode of both versions has the same first big joke and it is incredibly obvious, so much so that you can see it coming right now, this moment, without knowing a thing about it. When you’re watching, there’s no question, I think, that you get the joke, that you fully expect the joke, that in fact what’s meant to be the first big laugh is practically pathetically obvious.

But that first big laugh turns out to not be the first big laugh at all, it is a setup for the real first big laugh that follows later.

Very briefly — so very briefly that you’ll get it, of course, but also what comedy there is will be erased — “Dear John” is about a recent divorcee joining a help group that meets in a local adult education centre. It’s one of many adult education sessions being run there and Sullivan makes it very obvious that John has at first joined the wrong group. He’s joined the Alcoholics Anonymous one.

We get that gag, then John crosses the corridor to the correct group, we get to meet some more characters in this “1-2-1 Group” and then one of them is asked to introduce himself. “My name is Clive,” he starts, “and I am an alcoholic.”

In retrospect, it is stunningly obvious that this would be the gag, but it comes as a genuine surprise. And then Clive leaves to join the AA group — and five other people follow with him. It’s a delicious and funny moment, especially when you of course immediately realise all of the really clear setups that should have told you it was coming.

Yet it seems such a gamble. I shouldn’t give you the impression, if you haven’t seen these two shows, that there isn’t anything funny before this point, but there isn’t much and in the UK version especially, there’s some bleak moments too. In the UK version, the joke about being in the wrong group comes 7’36” into the episode, and then Clive the alcoholic starts at 13’34”.

In the US remake, which you can watch on YouTube right here, the wrong group gag comes 4’02” into the episode. And then Frank the alcoholic — renamed for the US version, presumably because Clive is just too British — does his bit at 9’27”.

I do think it’s interesting that the US version is so much faster getting to these points than the UK one and actually I think it’s impressive. There are points that feel rushed, but there are also versions of the gag from the UK one that are paced better in the US version.

But either way, “Dear John” risked holding back its big laugh for between 4 and 8 minutes. And that joke is so obvious that you think the whole show is going to be that predictable. Yet they then wait a further five or six whole minutes before the real punchline.

It’s amazingly brave, I think. I mean, I know both shows were back in the 1980s and everything is faster now, but still I worried about keeping you waiting for the gag for 39 seconds.

Mind you, I’ve also kept you waiting from the first paragraph on to see what the real point of this is and now you’ve read the lot, I’ve got nothing. I feel this is letting you down — exactly the way those lead-burying articles always do.

Okay, so on the one hand we need – we absolutely require – drama from every conceivable source, and also my writing is unquestionably improved when an editor asks why I’ve not included something. Or actually when an editor just says “Eh?”

Writers, editors, publishers, producers, cast and crew, we’re all needed and a good idea from anywhere must be seized upon.

But.

Otherwise, drama and actually I think all writing, is not a democracy.

This is on my mind because of Doctor Who and the now weeks of commentary about it being cancelled and how the current Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, has already filmed his final scene, his regeneration ready for the next Doctor.

My reaction to the regeneration is easiest to say: it’s so? Doctor Who is now made incredibly far in advance — I mean there can be two years before writing and airing — that it could well be that Gatwa has done all he was planned to do. We’ll find out when we find out.

But the rest of it, about cancellation. That’s coming in a little trumpet of accusations that the show is too woke, that showrunner Russell T Davies is too smug to take criticism, that kind of thing.

I’ll say it now: I don’t believe you can be too woke. There aren’t many absolutes in the world, but woke is good and asleep is bad, that’s one of them.

I also don’t believe that Davies is smug and I can’t see any evidence. Speaking of seeing, you should see that man get an award: I can’t think of anyone else whose speech is not about themselves and instead has them pointing out a dozen people in the audience and enthusing about their writing. In detail.

But given that I don’t know where this smugness idea comes from and so I’m guessing in the dark, my impression is that it is based on the premise that he doesn’t do what the fans tell him to. However, anyone thinking the next season of Doctor Who will be different because of fan reaction to the last one is, well, let’s say uninformed.

Because that next run has already been made. Which you’d presume fans would know if anyone does.

I think it is unusual for a UK-based series to be made as far in advance as Doctor Who now is, but it is far from unusual for a show to be finished before the critics and fans get to pile on.

There used to be this thing that new shows got a lot of press when they were commissioned for a second series, like that was absolute proof of success and popularity. Presumably sometimes it is, but more often the show was originally commissioned for two runs and that fact just wasn’t announced. So when we hear that a show has been picked up, it already has, it is already under way, and may even have finished. I know of an Apple TV+ drama, for instance, whose makers were deep into development of series three, four and five before officially getting picked up for any of them.

So there’s a practical and actually I think bleedin’ obvious reason why fan reaction isn’t and cannot be listened to. But there is more and it’s not tied to how some fans also expect the show to change every week based on their response to the last episode.

Drama is not and cannot be a democracy.

Idiotic choose-your-own-ending dramas aside, we only and exclusively get to vote on a show’s future in one specific way. We get to decide to watch or not.

I have reviewed Doctor Who professionally, I’ve written about it for Radio Times magazine and had the peculiar experience of looking up the Wikipedia coverage of an article and finding myself quoted. But what I hope I’ve never done is say definitively that a show should do X or Y, that its failings are A or B.

I mean, I’ve been known to say that the dialogue in some show or other is shite altogether — Radio Times may not have printed that verbatim — but I don’t expect the writer to listen to me. I just expect to find something else to watch next time.

With Doctor Who, fans are telling the show makers what they’re doing wrong and what they must do about it. But that always seems to boil down to how the makers should make Doctor Who be as it used to be. And if that were even possible, we would be so bored.

I believe this is ultimately what happened to Star Trek: Enterprise and why I stopped watching that show. If you Google it now, you’ll learn that the last season was the best, but this is a history written by the victors kind of thing. The last run was a fan favourite because it just did what fans like. It repeated previous Star Trek type stories, it seemed to me to have decided to throw away what made it different from the other shows. I don’t know, clearly, but it seemed to me that the show was not moving forward and so I stopped watching.

If there is nothing else I can do except watch or not watch, if there is nothing specific I can usefully say a show must do even if I have an opinion, then there is still something more nebulous that I can be certain of. It is that if a show does not ever surprise us with something new, it is dead.

So while I didn’t especially adore every minute of the last run of Doctor Who, it did have “73 Yards” and “Dot and Bubble”. They each broke the show’s format but I believe in doing so they shored up that format and made the series feel alive.

That’s something Doctor Who is very good at, the way that its stories can have life and vigour and energy. That’s what I want and the show — any show — cannot deliver if it is somehow able to react to fan criticisms.

It’s not as if there’s a shortage of anything else to watch.

I have a new joke. It’s to do with how books are made into films and TV, and along the way can be changed anywhere from a little to unrecognisable. And the joke goes like this: if you want to see a perfect version of your favourite book on screen, buy the ebook.

It is no more possible to perfectly move a book onto film or TV than it is to make a flat map out of a globe. Projection distorts the map, and it must. The different media distorts the story, and it cannot fail to.

But I suppose you have some choice over just how much it fails. The subject heading above about pulling on a new Jersey is a reference to the revival of “Bergerac”, which is set on that island and from the little I’ve seen of it so far, does follow the spirit of the original show. Except sometimes shows have two spirits, and this time it’s that the new show has followed Jim Bergerac’s backstory of alcoholism rather than the somewhat lighter fare the original series was better known for.

Fine. Battlestar Galactica was turned from a fun but really rather shallow series into quite startlingly searing drama. Doctor Who came back with a life and verve it hadn’t had before. And the new Day of the Jackal came back with nothing but the title of the original versions.

I just seem to be surrounded by remakes at the moment. Even though I’m currently hooked on an original show, “Astrid et Raphaëlle”, I’ve come to it after seeing its English-language remake, “Patience”. Yesterday I read the screenplay to “Conclave” and that, of course, is based on a novel.

Then there’s the new run of “Reacher”, based on a novel I read long enough ago that I can’t remember any details but can see that it feels like it’s honouring the book.

That’s all I need, I think. The production of Battlestar Galactica began with a proposal that said it was aiming for “nothing less than a total reinvention of the space opera genre”, which sounds like it wanted to wreck the original show. But as different as it was, I think the remade, rebooted, reimagined Battlestar was simply done better than the original.

If a remake or a revivals solely takes the title of a previous show and nothing else, it’s doing it for IP. It’s doing it because 600-odd new series are launched every year and having a known title helps get attention.

But then as is so often the case, I think there aren’t any rules and there isn’t a sanity clause. The revival of “Frasier” had more than the old show’s title, it had every single thing about it except that it just wasn’t done as well.

Nothing is guaranteed. Everything is revivable. But good writers doing more than accepting an old show’s title as a vehicle for getting their own series made, that’s at least worth watching.

Now, excuse me while I go see what they’ve done to the Bergerac theme.

Last weekend I went to see Giovanni Pernice’s show, The Last Dance. Short version: there’s some good dancing. Shortest version: you need to fancy Gio to really enjoy the show.

There’s nothing wrong with that. For instance, I know full well that you’re reading this because I am roguishly handsome. (Look, there’s a reason there’s no photo on this blog.) But I keep thinking of something Pernice did that was entirely right and correct, yet to me was also entirely wrong and wrongerer.

Follow. He opened with a speech about us, his great audience. Basically it was about him and how much we loved him. He was right because in that room, he was right. Pretty much. I figure the attendance was 90% women and 10% plus-ones.

He knows who he attracts, he plays up to their expectations very well. Yet it seemed so wrong to me that it was annoying.

I mean, I suppose strictly speaking you are my audience now as you read this. But it isn’t like that. This is you and me having a chat, even if I do seem to be doing most of the talking. What can I say, I’m clearly a man.

For all the time that you’re reading this, I am in your head and I cannot, just cannot express how great that feels. All the things you’ve got to do, all the worries, all the pleasures, all the constant thinking, and for these moments, I’m in that mix. My mind to your mind. Staggering. I can’t conceive why I’d be remembered when I’ve left a room, so to occupy space in your brain, it’s exciting.

To me, though, you will never read something I’ve written just because I’ve written it, or at the very most you might give the start a go if you’ve liked something else of mine that you’ve read, but you’re not going to stick around if you’re bored. So even here when you’re being very quiet, this is you and me.

Actually, Gio spoke about this, in a way. He spoke quite often about how it is his audience’s support that lets him do this work he loves. He spoke more often about how good it was to see full houses. (This one wasn’t close to full. Actually, two people near me skipped town during the interval.) But somehow the effect was that he is a star deigning to talk to the little people.

Like I say, he knows his audience and he really does give them what they want. As we were leaving, people around me were swooning. (If you’re thinking they could have been swooning about me, you are in a sarcastic mood today.)

I didn’t swoon so much, and I don’t dance, so my only specific criticism of the show could be that it overtly displayed its structure. Rather than carrying us from moment to moment, beat to beat, we were repeatedly told the scaffolding. Pernice would say things like “This is the part of the show where we…” or “That was about X, this is Y”. Or at one point, he said “I thought a lot about what song to play at this point.” I would hope you did, I can’t see any earthly reason why you shouldn’t.

And of course toward the end he explained that “this is the finale”. Curiously, the only part that wasn’t signposted was the interval.

Mind you, saying this stuff aloud does save you having to think of a seamless structure that smoothly carries you and your audience to the end. As it is, I’ve got to find a finish now and all I can think of is what in the world did I mean by “wrongerer”?

I’m looking for a new word. Also a new TV show to watch, which is related.

For, okay, there’s this new television drama that I think is shockingly poor. I can’t tell you what it is. It turns out that I used to know the writer and I’m not a fan, but I promise that I didn’t know whose series it was. Before his or her credit came up on screen and told me, though, I had already had a moment’s thinking along the lines of “Christ, it’s not going to be all like this, is it?”

It was.

And so I want a word. The word needs to be something like exposition, but that one doesn’t seem to cover it. Because you know that exposition is when a writer tells the audience something they need to know — I think I’ve just written exposition, sorry — and actually what I need is close to being the opposite. I want a word for when a writer tells the audience something they don’t need to know.

Example. In this show, it is certain, certain without one single pixel of doubt, that Character A is going to do X. There is nothing else they can or would do. It is impossible not to know in every detail what it is they’re about to do. But still we had to have Character B ask — I’m paraphrasing in case you Google the script — what Character A is going to do. And then sodding Character A has to tell Character B while we wait.

I have this distant memory of a film writer talking about being forced to help out what he or she called the Dimwit Element. It was never entirely clear — and I think deliberately — whether they meant the audience or the studio executives giving notes.

Either way, the reasoning was that there will be some people who don’t see the stunningly obvious and will feel bad. Will feel stupid. Who might then decide to go watch something else.

The theory goes that if we just help them out, they’ll stay and nobody who already saw what must happen will even notice our brilliant solution.

But the practice goes a different way. It tells the viewer to prepare for an hour’s worth of being patronised. It tells the viewer that there isn’t much to the show. It tells us, I think, that there is going to be no life or verve or wit in any of the writing.

I can see an argument that this does fall under the term exposition, but after an hour of watching and half a week of thinking, the only word I can come up with is shite.

“Sleep is a fond childhood memory” is a line I somehow remember from the pilot episode of “St Elsewhere” by Mark Tinker, John Masius andJoshua Brand, back in the late 1980s, and it’s said by a doctor warning new interns how much their lives are going to change in their jobs. In both 1977 and 2017, the Doctor said “sleep is for tortoises” in “Doctor Who” and for some reason I remember that too.

I remember dialogue from years and decades ago, but then on Wednesday night, I forgot to set my alarm. I think it’s likely that this was the first time in very many years that I’d not then been woken by beeps or my watch tapping me on the wrist. And it turned out that waking up at 07:30 instead of being woken at 05:00 had absolutely no cataclysmic impact on my day. Maybe I chewed faster over breakfast, but I still shot a video, wrote a tricky book proposal, wrote news and features for something like seven hours, then spent two more producing a podcast, then attended some meetings into the evening.

The difference appears to be right now. As I write this to you, it’s a little after midnight, I am just into Friday and I don’t want to go to bed. I suppose I’m tired, but so much less so than usual. For the past couple of years in particular, I’ve tended to faint onto the bed instead of going to sleep.

Yet tonight I’m not thinking about alarms or the morning. I’m thinking about how I project the day onto the night. That made need explaining, if not to you then certainly to me.

Follow.

You’re not doing anything while you sleep. There are dreams and for a couple of decades I would have nightmares that seem to have mostly wandered away now, although I do want to tell you you of one where I kept dreaming a notification was popping up in the top right corner of my vision. And of when I dreamt a particularly scary nightmare, got up to the loo, came back to bed and immediately dreamt a kind of Making Of documentary about that previous nightmare.

Anyway.

Insomnia and dreams aside, when you go to bed you’re usually lying there, just being there, just being. Sleep doesn’t know or care that you’re happy or sad, glad or worried, you’re just asleep.

Yet I’ve usually seen sleep as the enemy. I’ve gone to bed angry at having wasted another day. Sometimes it’s a friend: I’ve instead gone to bed feeling relieved and that I’ve earned sleep.

And sometimes I’ve really gone to bed at night only in order to hide.

I don’t know where my mind is, maybe I’m more tired than I think. But all of this is in my head now and you just know that I’m going to sleep on it.

That’s it, really: “writing is a weapon.” I could say that to you, possibly nod a bit for emphasis, and then shut up.

But being a man…

About this time last week I was at an international school in Geneva, talking to around 300 students about writing non-fiction, news, and persuasive writing. I’ve realised that I dislike the term persuasive writing just as much as I do the phrase creative writing: all writing is creative, all writing is persuasive.

But definitely, writing is a weapon. Since I was in Europe, I pointed out that you can make a strong case that Brexit leavers won because of 13 words. Specifically, 13 words on the side of a bus: “We send the EU £350 million a week, let’s fund our NHS instead.”

When you write anything down, it is more powerful. And in the case of the Brexit slogan, more immediately deniable the second they won, but that’s another story.

I do want to tell you that I built up to saying this line to the students. I didn’t build up very much, but I did build and the way I did so was to start with how all writing is a tool.

It clearly is. I was in Switzerland, and I’ve been before, and I’ve been to the States, solely because of ideas in my head that I typed out in different places. Writing got me flown around. Writing got me a takeaway last night.

Writing is a weapon and it is a tool. Admittedly, I’m now thinking about that Brexit bus slogan and having to admit to you that some writers are tools, too.

There’s something about disconnected moments suddenly becoming connected. It’s like a memory abruptly becomes taut and won’t ever loosen again. So last week was my mother’s funerals (one in England, one in Ireland) and this week I’ve briefly been moving out her furniture. I’ve a cut on my hand from when wood scraped across it as I took down a decades-old wardrobe, and before then, for a minute my ear held an impression of the handle on my mom’s coffin from when I was carrying that.

Here’s the thing. You cannot carry a coffin by yourself, you really need six people to do it, the whole pallbearer business is not for show or ceremony, it is a practical necessity. And when the coffin is on your shoulder, the weight is shocking, and the thump of wood against your head feels like the only real thing that’s going on.

Yet when you all then lower the coffin to hand height, it’s easier to carry. I did stumble by the grave, we were negotiating such a narrow line toward it, and I did shove my knee onto the corner edge of some stone work, but still carrying it around waist level was substantially easier.

And then when we had wide, cloth-like ropes and were lowering it into the grave itself, it was easy. Okay, not emotionally, but physically, it was fully and simply straightforward.

The same burden is totally different depending on how you carry it.

And if that is a snap-shut obvious perspective, it was new to me and I kept coming back to the thought a lot lately.

Until last Tuesday.

Listen, one of the things I have carried around with me since I was a teenager is guilt over how badly I assembled a wardrobe for my mom. I have this memory of guilt generally circling around everyone at the time because was I was supposed to be studying for some exams or other. I don’t know which ones, I barely paid any more attention to exams then as I do looking back now. Which may be why I did them so badly.

But what I carry is that there’s no excuse for how badly I made up that wardrobe. Two wardrobes, really, with a third centre section of drawers and a mirror.

I swear to you that I have always known the truth that if two people happened to breathe out near it at the same time, the whole thing would shatter. There are few things I have done in my life that are as shoddy and shamefully bad as that, and the fact that my mother pretended to be happy with it always strained credulity.

But on Tuesday I had to take that wardrobe down and, god in heaven, it turned to be so well built. It took hammers and full-swing temper to take it apart, it took judicious kicks, and the whole thing fought back by scraping me wherever it could.

For decades I have felt that wardrobe threatening to crumble and reveal me to be as bad a furniture assembler as it had always told me I was. And for decades it has actually been as solid as if I spent my life standing there, holding it up.

The same burden is totally different depending on when you look at it.

Unless, of course, I’m just substantially weaker at swinging a hammer now than I was as a teenager. I’ve only just thought of that.