I know that in the very best scripts I’ve read, in the very best writing I’ve relished, there is always a confidence. There is never a hesitation, there is always a boldness. It doesn’t matter who the writer is, it doesn’t matter what the topic is or even whether I like it, if it’s well written, it’s always somehow declarative. Here it is, there you go.

Granted, hesitant writing tends not to get finished, so you just don’t get to see it. And then of course by the time you do see any writing, it has fought some battles to get to you. At the very least it’s had a skirmish or two in the writer’s head, but then it’s also had to defend itself with publishers and editors. I shouldn’t make that last sound like a fight, my writing has only ever been improved by conversations with editors and producers. But always, there’s a process and the writing gets toughened up along the way, as much as the writer does.

Again, that’s regardless of the writer or the topic. I imagine even the most delicate gauze of a poem faces some bruising between the first idea and the time you or I get to read or hear it.

But sometimes there is a conceit, too.

I’m not going to name the show I watched that put this in my head. Partly because I just cannot insult writers and especially not ones who were more successful than me in every way that I count. I don’t happen to like any of their work but they achieved what I have failed to achieve and what I want so much to achieve. They also did it in this case with a story about time, which is my obsession, so frankly that’s rubbing it in.

Still, if you compare them to me, they win, they must win. They were professionals.

Plus, if I told you what this show was, you might even watch it and I truly see no reason why your day should be spoiled.

To my mind, yes, it is that bad. It was a 1980s piece so like most things it has dated, but I did watch it at the time. According to Wolfram Alpha, I first watched it 13,073 days ago, and I felt the same then as I did last Tuesday when I watched it again. The whole production is risible and if you’ve just asked wolframalpha.com what the date was then, if you’re thinking of using the BBC Genome project to see what aired on BBC1 at 19:35 that day, that’s on you. I take no responsibility.

There is an argument, incidentally, that the writers of a bad show may not be responsible for its dreadfulness, either. Part of the bruising on the way from idea to finished production is that no one outside of it can really ever know how the journey went. Certainly this was a low point in a series that has had quite high peaks before and sheer towering mountains since, so, you know, context is everything.

Yet thirteen thousand days ago, I was half agog and half repelled by what I saw as risible dialogue, amdram writing and pantomime staging. On Tuesday, I was again. But I also saw what I think I missed back in the 1980s: I think I can see now that absurdly, there is an arrogance to the writing, there is a conceit.

The most specific things I can point to are ones where a plot hole is addressed with one character saying something they would never say, that no one would ever say, and sometimes to somebody who already knows. There’s a sense somehow of how that problem is sorted, then, the audience will buy this and we’ve been so clever they’ll never know it was a last-minute repair job.

But there’s also a more nebulous sense throughout that you’re watching the writer, not the show. All writing reveals its writer, but that writer should be focusing on their story, not themselves. So a sense of feeling clever, certainly of patronising the viewer because the writer thinks they know more than the fools who could’ve been watching Coronation Street over on ITV instead, it rankles. And since you are at no point caught up in the story, you have plenty of time to rankle.

This has been bouncing around my head since Tuesday and I haven’t really got anywhere. But I keep coming back to this business that the two writers of this were literally professionals. This was their job and, again, they were more successful than I am, so I can’t deny that they were professional television writers. And yet I’m going to try: I think — I think — to be confident is professional, and to be conceited is amateur.

By chance, incidentally, I read this week that the two writers of this show refused to listen to their script editor since he was young and so had none of their television writing experience.

You don’t have to know how to spell the word faeces in order to recognise shit.