Twice in the last week – once with you, once on BBC Radio Foyle – I got to natter about how my two current TV obsessions are preposterously different. They’re the current Only Murders in the Building and the fifty-year-old The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Only, Only Murders is only about a podcast, right? So it only took me six episodes of Only to realise that surely, surely there would be a podcast about the show. Lying in the bath last night, I listened to the first episode and its interview with Only Murder co-creator, co-writer and all-showrunner, John Hoffman.
Pretty much just as the motion-sensor lights in the bathroom switched off, I sat up, splashing water onto the iPhone and, as it happens, turning the lights back on.
Because Hoffman was describing the process of writing this Only Murders series and he said that every single night during it, he would watch two episodes of another show.
Yes.
It was The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
I suppose both are comedies, though the Mary show was straight sitcom and Only Murders is comedy drama. I suppose both are half hours, but Mary is 25 minutes and Only Murders can go up to 35 if it likes.
There’s no connection in the subject, the tone, the characters, and yet I get it. Hoffman watched all seven seasons of the Mary show, two episodes a night and it fed into writing Only Murders in the Building.
I am taken by this because of the odds that the two shows I look forward to are the same two for this man I don’t know, and especially since do you have the faintest clue how many sitcoms or comedy dramas or just television programmes there have been in the last half a century? Go pick your own, Hoffman, I’ve got this one.
But then there is also this. On Tuesday, I read a script I wrote about 20 years ago and let’s say it was shite altogether.
“It was shite.”
However, it was also unquestionably me. I could hear my voice, see my tone, recognise certain descriptions and actually also particular patterns and ways of describing things.
And I could also see what prompted most of the script. A character says “you’ve got my vote” and I know Grosse Pointe Blank was on my mind. A description of mine includes the phrase “certain-sure” and I like that, I like the rhythm of it, I like the amplification-by-tautology, but I don’t like how I believed I’d thought of it in a script earlier this year. It’s scary that I’ve just found it again in a Self Distract blog from 2015 where I appear to obsess over the word “bollocks.”
Everything you know, everything you feel, goes into writing and then it only bloody comes out again, too. I don’t think it should come out as baldly, overtly obvious as it is with my scripts, but I used to like how I believed I could adapt to any house style, fit in with any production or any publication’s writing and now I’m glad that I can’t. I found my voice and apparently can’t shut up.
A friend told me once that she could recognise my writing in a particular piece that didn’t have a byline, that wasn’t meant to be one person’s writing. I liked that very much.
Though I’m pretty sure that was the same friend who this week told me she never watches my 58keys YouTube channel and she never reads this Self Distract.
I told her I preferred you.