I may not be the tidiest person in the world, but I appear to have reached a new low. I cleared up a corner of my office yesterday and found one script from 2006, and one letter from 2007.

The letter was from Verity Lambert. Wait, I sound like I hadn’t seen it until now and that would be a hell of a story. But no, I read it in 2007, it was a rejection, I don’t remember how I felt about that and it took me a few minutes to remember what it was she’d rejected, but Verity Lambert. An absolute hero of television drama wrote to me, having read an hour script of mine.

And she did so in 2007, just months before she died.

She’ll always, but especially this year, be known for Doctor Who, but it was her work at Euston Films that made me a fam. She’s the one who refused to make Lynda la Plant’s Widows unless the widows of the title got away with the crime in the story. She’s behind Jack Rosenthal’s The Knowledge.

When she wrote to me, Verity Lambert was making Jonathan Creek, which I liked enormously for such a long time, and also Love Soup, which I think was a misfire.

What she wasn’t making was whatever in the hell this script of mine was. Not enough comedy, she said, though there were good lines, and not enough drama. That’s all, and that’s everything, and even if I were still trying to remember which script it was, I’d know she was right because she’s Lambert. She was Lambert. Mind you, Love Soup was poor.

I said that I found a script from 2006, though. It wasn’t the script she read. It was a radio play that isn’t long enough, isn’t good enough, but yet which I enjoyed reading and I think the core idea has potential. Seventeen years later, I might give it another go.