I’ve got to change numbers to protect the guilty. So let me pretend that I recently read a script that included this line: “…and in 59 seconds the trap door will open and you will ALL DIE! Mwahaa ha ha hah!”

This is a case of redundancy in writing, and also just how much you can convey in so little. For instance, you didn’t need the maniacal laughter at the end, you already knew everything you needed to know about the character from the 59 seconds line. And that 59 seconds line is by itself enough to make you say oh, bollocks to this, what’s on the other channel?

I believe I did say something of that sort when I saw the show that was made from the script. But this week I pressed on reading the script because I am an idiot. It’s Occam’s razor: either I am looking to learn from why I don’t like a given script, or I’m an idiot.

Anyway. 59 seconds, or what the script actually said that I’ll never tell, but you get the idea, is just up there with Crap Numbers. There’s probably a Venn diagram to be made out of the set of numbers and the set of numbers that are crap. There should be a whole branch of mathematics on this — I mean, we’ve got Imaginary Numbers, there should be Crap Number Theory.

It would include the number of seconds before spaceships are in firing range, which is always an unnatural-sounding odd number, it’s always said by a character who prefers to say “Affirmative” instead of “Yeah, whatever”, and — this is law — the amount of time specified bears no relation to how much time it then takes for the weapons fire or the clever escape.

There would also be a subset for numbers in time travel films and TV series, because in trying to tell you what year the characters have travelled to, they actually tell you what year the show was made. If a character lands in 2079, the show was made in 1979. It is inviolate.

And then you get things like “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers” and while you ought to be wondering why it isn’t Seven Husbands for Seven Sisters, or maybe just The Brady Bunch, really your mind goes to how this is not going be a short film.

Nicholas Meyer’s novel and film about Sherlock Holmes and his chemical addiction does numbers well: it’s “The Seven Percent Solution”. Very clever. And “Quatermass II” can’t really be dissed because the title referred to the name of a ship in the story, but it will forever be dissed because it is a direct consequence of this that we now have The Fast and the Furious 19.

Then “24” was a good title, even if it’s really 24 minus ad breaks and loo stops. “Doctor Who” once had “42” which was a bit coloured by its overuse since Douglas Adams, but still you knew this was a nod to 24 and so therefore a thriller. “December, 1963” is a rubbish title for a song, but maybe that’s why we know it better as “Oh, What a Night”.

This is all on my mind chiefly because of this wretched script I read, but there is another reason. Earlier this week I admitted that consider myself a failure as a writer because I’ve only sort-of, just-about, kinda written television drama. I have written it, there is an episode of Crossroads that’s all mine, but doesn’t have my name on it. And the reason that television drama is so important to me is the number 60.

I know that it’s a long time since any hour drama was actually 60 minutes, and the man I was admitting all of this to had a very good point about how TV drama has changed radically since I first wanted to write it. But still, it’s the form. The hour.

The one-hour television drama slot is to me what I understand three-minute pop songs are to others.

I’m fascinated by how we got to it, how it was more common in the early days of television to have half hours. Or how during the early 2000s, networks experimented with going back to half hours. (For a time, in the week that an hour-long “Ally McBeal” episode would air, a thirty-minute edited version of the same episode would go out under the series title “Ally”. I did like that they even edited the title.)

At some point there was a similar thing done with Knight Rider, which is not a series known for its long dialogue scenes so is presumably easier to cut in half. Except it wasn’t. While I never saw either Ally or whatever they called the shorter Knight Rider, I know they were flops.

Television drama needs to be an hour, that is its natural slot and it is what I must, must continue to strive for.