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.

At about 02:30 local time last night, says William reading to the court from his notes, I observed a suspicious milk delivery. Now, I need you to know that I am not yet so old that what happens outside my window is my entire world, but when you’ve finished three hours of studying your bedroom ceiling, you’ll take anything.

Plus it’s recycling day and our council has us using these large blue sack things that as yet have not blown away on a whim, but it didn’t half sound like that’s exactly what they were doing last night. I don’t know how I could confuse the sound of plastic sacks scraping across the ground with that of a pickup van scrunching to a halt and its five crates of glass milk bottles cuddling up together, but I do know that I have now had five more hours to consider it.

Which raises questions for me such as whether it’s still hot enough here that the milk bottle I saw the driver take to a house will pasteurise by the time that household wakes up and spots it. Or whether that was in fact precisely why this little van had been as loud as it could be, so that whoever had the milk was alerted to its delivery. Maybe it was an urgent one. Maybe it was an Amazon Prime same-day delivery and the milk had been ordered after midnight. Maybe the cows were on a night shift.

I don’t mean my neighbours.

Look, I couldn’t sleep, you’ve gathered that. All week, I’ve managed to get to bed just ahead of fainting with tiredness, then my head says hello to the pillow and that’s it, sleep is no more than a fond childhood memory. And in the entire eight hours since, all I’ve usefully thought about is who in the world still gets milk delivered. Not true: I’ve also thought about the history of the milk float, which I think now must have been among the earliest electric vehicles. Elon Musk’s fortune probably started with a milk round. Or this second, talking to you right now, I’ve flashed back to perhaps the 1990s when for absolutely no reason, a milk float driver glared at me like I was responsible for the decline of deliveries and the death of his tortoise. He deliberately drove his float slowly, possibly in tribute to the dead, so that I was stuck in my car, blocked for the longest possible time. There is of course no difference between an intentionally slow milk float and one racing at its top speed, but by god that driver was going to make whatever his point was.

That’s the most action-packed thought I’ve had all night and I think you’re probably glad I shared it with you.

Fridays are my busiest day of the week and sharing with you here is always the good start, the bit I look forward to, the bit where we’re just chatting and the mad-dash morning doesn’t have to begin quite yet. No, I’ve got, looks at watch, at least a minute now. Eight hours solid absence of sleep and now I’ve half a minute before I have to start rushing. I should’ve used these hours more productively, you’re quite right.

And I strongly suspect that you’re also right when you think that now it’s daytime again, now that I have to be working, I am going to fall asleep. I need tea.

But of course we’re out of milk.

I was criticised earlier this week for always watching films with a writer’s eye. The implication was that only non-writers can see movies correctly, and the inference I took away was that there are people who will sit through any old shit.

It is true that I get very bored, very quickly when all a film has is good-looking visuals. It’s also true that I have watched movies because of who wrote them where I have never once chosen a film because of its director or for that matter, actors. I need to be interested in the story and that is enough to get me through the cinema door, that is the only thing that gets me there. I can then be disappointed, of course, and there have also been times when I’ve seen a given film only because the one I wanted was full, so I’ve gone in knowing nothing.

Actually, there’s also Arrival. I didn’t know anything beyond the title when I saw that, but in this case I wasn’t going to see a film, I was going to have a nice afternoon out with a friend. Still, Arrival has become very important to me so clearly my decision-making process over what films to watch is flawed.

But even so, if you tell me the writing isn’t important, you’re telling me the film is crap. It might look fantastic, but then everything does. It might feature wonderful direction, but shit is shit no matter how well-wrapped it is.

And I just can’t do it. I can’t sit there watching only glorious cinematography when my mind keeps wandering back to my To Do list.

Which is why I’m torn over whether to bother seeing The Odyssey. It’s why I’m not at all torn over the forthcoming “The Piano Tuner” and “Coyote vs Acme”, because they’ve both hooked me from their trailers. It’s why I deeply enjoyed “The Invite”.

All of which is a long-winded way to say each to their own. But telling me that because I’m a writer, I am incapable of knowing whether I’ve enjoyed a film or not, that is some intense bollocks there.