I got a bit excited recently, talking with the musician and film composer Isobel Waller-Bridge. It was just for a few moments at a event, seriously no more than moments, and yet I can’t stop thinking about her work.

Follow. As a writer, I like to believe that a script exists outside of the film or the play that’s made from it, that it is a distinct piece of work where acting, for instance, is obviously inseparable from the production.

So when you hear that a TV show, say, is dreadful but the acting skill of such-and-such a star saved it, that’s just bollocks. I’m not in any way knocking actors, I just know that a performance is the actor performing the script and if it is not on the page, it ain’t ever going to be on the stage.

Without the script, an actor just gets to stand there, so consequently acting cannot ever be separated from a production. I suppose costume design, locations, hair design, these are all things that can have a life away from the production. But they don’t tend to.

And in truth, reluctantly, nor do scripts. You can read them without seeing the show, I do read them, I frankly am incapable of stopping reading them, but I once gave a friend a book of Frasier scripts and she looked at me exactly the way you are right now.

Whereas.

The music lives on.

Music is astoundingly woven into a show, and yet it can fully exist outside it. I relished the 2009 film Coco avant Chanel by Anne Fontaine and Camille Fontaine, for example, but I’ve only seen it the once and yet I’ve listened to the soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat countless times.

I’m listening to it now.

That does bring the film back to me, but less as images or frames, more the feel of it and of how I felt at the time, too.

And this is what was on my mind as I quizzed this film composer at an event. Talking with someone who is actually doing this work was fascinating.

I asked her about how late in a production she can be brought in, for instance. Something so crucial as music, something that could be make or break for a show, I’ve heard that it is just about the last thing considered, and yes, apparently it’s true.

I wanted to ask her about the responsibility of writing to deadlines, of writing to other people’s words and images. But I didn’t get that long. I did get to ask about “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse”, which she did the music for.

“I can’t remember the running time,” I said. “What was it?”

“Thirty minutes.”

“And how much music did you have to compose?”

“Twenty-eight minutes.”

I laughed because, as she pointed out, there can be entire feature film scores with no more music than that.

Music is something crucial to me, and I know nothing of it. I wonder sometimes if that’s a good thing, as in the way I was looking at Chinese handwriting in a workshop recently and because I don’t understand it, I’m just seeing the sheer beauty of the letterforms.

Still, I want to write something that this composer then works on. I want to soak up how in the world she does it, I want to witness the process. And oh, do I want to sit in on the recording sessions.

Years ago I interviewed various people involved in The Beiderbecke Affair, Alan Plater’s drama, and several of them told me about Alan in the recording studio. Just being there, nothing to do, no requirement for him to be there, but he was and he was being happy.

And right this moment, I am choked up by Coco avant Chanel, track 4, Royallieu.