If you don’t happen to read scripts and if the scripts you don’t read happen to be mostly television ones, let me tell you something, please. Absolute gold is when you can get and devour every script to a television series, from the pilot to the finale. Gold. Seeing how a show finds its feet, how it grows, how it manages change, and if it weren’t cancelled abruptly, how it pulled off its ending.

There are very, very few shows that you can get the full scripts for. Doctor Who and Knight Rider — are not among the list. (I can only think of three off the top of my head: “Only Fools and Horses”, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine“. I just looked to see if Only Fools were still available, so that I could warn you about how antagonistic the hosting site is with pop-up ads, but while the site is still there and still unbelievably wretched, the scripts appear to have gone. I feel you have dodged a bullet. But if you’re disappointed, I can tell you that a lot of scripts for that show have been published. Scripts in books are reformatted to squeeze more onto fewer pages and they tend to be heavily edited where online ones are the script as handed to the cast and crew, which is just infinitely better.)

Anyway. As I say, Doctor Who and Knight Rider are incomplete. But there were 84 episodes of Knight Rider and there are 82 scripts – plus multiple drafts of many of them – on the Knight Rider Archives site. So that’s pretty close to complete. I would like to understand how I’ve read 79 of the 82 available, yet still have 5 to go. It is a mystery of maths, or of how I’ve lost track.

But still, so far this year I’ve read 79 scripts to that 1980s show about a talking car called KITT, and as it happens, 189 scripts to Doctor Who, that show about the TARDIS.

I read them because I wanted to, because they were there, because I love reading scripts, and because it was mostly fun. (There is one script where my short note says just “Jesus.” And another where the short note says “Does no one on this bloody show know how to use a comma? This is close to unreadable.” I won’t say which scripts I’m talking about in those examples, but I will tell you that it’s one each from these two shows.)

Naturally, my opinions about the scripts are only my opinions — except the comma one, god in heaven, I had to track down episodes to watch and so find out what in the hell actors made of certain lines — and naturally the writers of every single one of these 268 scripts are more successful than I am. I’d obviously also say the giant majority are also better than I am. And consequently, despite all my efforts of keeping this script reading to solely being for fun, I did also learn some things along the way.

And that’s what I’d like to show you while I type with crossed fingers that this is any use to either of us.

10. Script format is the same

Both the 1980s Knight Rider series and the post-2005 Doctor Who episodes are physically written in the same script format. Older Doctor Who episode scripts are in the ancient BBC studio format that was designed to help camera operators rather than the reader.

Knight Rider makes more use of specific act breaks so it’s really a set of four or so short runs where Doctor Who can take its time over the whole hour or fifty minutes, or forty-five minutes, or whatever it becomes..

9. Show formats are hard

Knight Rider is about a talking car and immediately you know there’s a bit of a constraint there, since if KITT can’t drive itself up to where your story is taking place, there isn’t a story. I hadn’t appreciated, though, just how startlingly rigid the show’s format is. There is not one episode script I’ve read that did not include the lead character, Michael Knight, getting into a fistfight, for instance.

Nor one where KITT does not jump over another car or a wall or something. (I watched an episode and it is incredibly obvious that the show destroys cars with every one of these jumps. The one I saw cut away before KITT hit the ground, but it was clearly going to do so nose-first into the tarmac.)

Then there is also this, and I think it stretched the writers a lot. In every episode, Michael Knight parks KITT somewhere and there is an amusing side story where, say, a traffic warden is amazed by the car that drives itself to get out of a parking ticket. Or where KITT thwarts thieves. I’m having trouble thinking of examples and I’ve just read about eighty of them.

Oh, and there has to be a minimum of one extraordinarily beautiful woman who instantaneously falls hard for Michael Knight. This is a profoundly sexist series, but that’s a topic for another day and probably another “Jesus” note.

My point is that what seemed to be a pretty tightly formatted drama series turns out on closer examination to be practically rigid. It is fascinating to me to see which writers were able to make something that seemed to rise above the format even as their episode stuck completely to it.

I’d ask you to name a show with a harder format to write, but you know the answer. Doctor Who.

Where Knight Rider is formatted like a vice, Doctor Who can go anywhere, it can go anywhen, it can do anything. Knight Rider resets its story at the end of most episodes — I mean, you can read or watch them in any order because everything is always fine by the end — but Doctor Who keeps on moving.

I came away from all of this appreciating the efforts of the Knight Rider writers, but admiring the Doctor Who ones.

8. Starting stories

Knight Rider was also pretty rigid about how its episodes would begin with some dastardly deed being done to someone, then Michael Knight will be driving KITT when he gets a phone call from his sort-of boss, Devon Miles. (Side note: the pilot script — which is actually rather good, I think — lists Devon’s surname as Shire. Honestly.)

Doctor Who tends to drop the Doctor and companions in to the action faster and I suppose there aren’t many different ways it happens, but there are more than you see with Knight Rider.

Specifically, in Doctor Who, the TARDIS is a vehicle — in story terms as well as literally — for delivering the Doctor to the new adventure. In Knight Rider, KITT is there to get Michael Knight into the story, out of the story, back into the story after the ad break, and really be a constant presence.

Interestingly, though, both shows have the problem of getting rid of their vehicles at times. The TARDIS could solve anything because you could just use it to go back in time to yesterday and sort things out before they even start. KITT, at least initially, is presented as indestructible so it has to be somehow sidelined. (In two scripts, the baddies back KITT onto one of those things in garages that lift cars up to let mechanics get underneath it. You can feel the writers’ pleasure at having come up with that.)

7. Character change

It’s true to the point of tedium that in drama, characters have to change, or rather that they have to be changed by what they go through. I love how Alan Plater would pull this off in stories that as you watch or read, don’t appear to have anything happening, and yet by the end the whole world is different. I think often of his very low-key and quiet novel, “Misterioso”, where a woman’s entire life is completely changed and so subtly, yet so irrevocably, and so much for the good.)

The characters don’t change in Knight Rider. Michael Knight has one episode of self-doubt in the fourth season, but otherwise is the same square-jawed hunky hero throughout the run.

You’re thinking that I’m about to contrast that with how the Doctor changes fantastically in Doctor Who, and you’re not wrong. Except you’re wrong. I would argue that as different as each actor has made the part, the Doctor himself or herself is truly the same character throughout. But what I want to say is that the show actively works to develop him or her, and sometimes it’s more apparent than in others. I offer, for instance, that Peter Capaldi’s Doctor at the start of his run is a different character to his Doctor at the end of it.

In that case I don’t think it’s story that changed him, I think it was a decision to do it, but his Doctor was good at the start yet became superb. So well done to a show that was willing to mess around with its lead.

6. Companions

One of the great joys of drama writing is that you get to create a brilliant character. Then one of the worst parts is that you have to create other characters for them to talk to, or else nothing happens.

Doctor Who more famously gets through what the show calls companions, but Knight Rider had some of this. KITT’s engineer is named Dr. Bonnie Barstow (Patricia McPherson) for three of its four seasons, but was replaced in season two by April Curtis (Rebecca Holden) for no apparent reason. When Bonnie returns, several scripts make reference to her being back, but April is tossed aside without a mention.

In comparison, Doctor Who does have a format for its companions, but it works hard to explore different elements of it. A character is introduced who fits certain criteria — she or he has to think of others more than of themselves, for instance — and they get invited aboard the TARDIS where they say some form of the line “it’s bigger on the inside”.

Give Steven Moffat a lot of credit for finding a new way to do that when he introduced Clara. “It’s smaller on the outside,” she says, and we are so used to the normal line that we and the Doctor are both deliciously thrown for a moment.

Doctor Who has got rid of companions as unceremoniously as Knight Rider did when it bumped Barstow for Curtis. See Dodo Chaplet, who doesn’t get an actual exit because to give her that would have meant paying for the actor to be in a further episode.

5. Action is tiring

Doctor Who famously has its characters forever running up and down corridors, or in the old days up and down the same stretch of corridor. The actors must be knackered. Give them a break.

But then let’s take a moment to pity David Hasselhoff who presumably spent about 40 hours a week, every week, for 84 episodes, sitting that car. William Daniels, the uncredited voice of KITT was apparently booked for one hour per episode, and always in a nice studio instead of out on the road.

4. Vanity projects

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’ve read scripts before where it felt as if the show were throwing the lead actor a bone. Knight Rider has a couple of episodes where my little note next to the script says “Vanity project”. These are ones where the story is contrived to reveal that Michael Knight can sing, or that involve an actor who was his girlfriend at the time.

I’m a little hesitant about saying that last because this character, played by Catherine Hickland, first appears as the guest lead in what I think might be the show’s best episode. “White Bird” by Virginia Aldridge is maybe a little sentimental, and it is unquestionably right on the money in terms of following the format, but I felt it dug more into the character of Michael Knight than most others. Instead of the all-surface action hero, it at least had a good go at exploring what it would mean to be this type of character doing this type of thing.

Virginia Aldridge also wrote an episode of Fame called “A Tough Act to Follow” and it kills me that I can’t get the script. I seem to remember thinking that it, too, was spot-on with its show’s format, but went deeper than I believe that series tended to.

Incidentally, Doctor Who also used the fact that its star had other talents. Peter Capaldi’s Doctor played guitar but while it was clearly true that Capaldi himself did, the use in the show was not a nod to his having a pop career in Germany. Like David Hasselhoff.

3. Sexism

Both of these shows have their moments of sexism. It’s just that in Doctor Who, it tends to be back in the original show, dotted across episodes the 1960s to 1980s. With Knight Rider, it’s every week.

It’s easy to criticise something for being of its time, so let’s. Knight Rider is roaringly, eye-poppingly offensively sexist. KITT pinches Dr Barstow on the arse. Jesus.

I said that neither of these shows has all of the scripts online, but with Doctor Who there are gaps I truly miss. I swear with Knight Rider I could probably now reconstruct the missing two from all the ones I’ve read, but Doctor Who had a marvellous finale for Peter Capaldi — I truly did not expect to be referencing his time as the Doctor so much — in “Twice Upon a Time”. No script available.

But I understand more Doctor Who scripts are to be added to the BBC’s website soon, so I type with crossed fingers. And one reason is that this episode mocks itself and its history by having the Twelfth Doctor being mortified by the First Doctor’s 1960s-era sexism.

Acknowledging an issue isn’t the same as preventing it happening, but it’s a good start.

2. Bad comments

Okay, you’ve worked out which show got “Jesus” written next to an episode. (I keep a spreadsheet in part so I know what I’ve read and can re-read the great ones, partly to just keep me going.) And since I said it the way I did, you know that my upset over commas was Doctor Who.

I may not be being fair. There are several episode scripts during Chris Chibnall’s aegis where the script available online is a post-production one that’s more concerned with including timings and precisely matching what was on screen. I can see evidence of descriptions being changed, or at least moved about, so possibly dialogue was also altered by someone after production.

But I’m not kidding. There are some lines I just stared and stared at, unable to parse or fathom. Because the punctuation was missing or wrong.

1. The obvious number one lesson

I should write more scripts instead of reading quite so many. I want to say that I haven’t just been reading Knight Rider and Doctor Who — hang on, I have that spreadsheet, I can check. Okay, as of today I’ve read 446 scripts this year, so Knight is 17.71% and Who is 42.38%.

And I’ve written… it depends how generous you’re feeling. I’ve written one drama script this year, but also about 40 episodes of my 58keys YouTube series. So call that 41, go on, in which case my ratio of writing to reading is 1 to 10.9.

That’s both better than I expected and exactly as pointless as I feared.

You can say exactly that of reading scripts, but again, I do that for sheer pleasure. There are scripts and writers whose work right there on the page is so extraordinary that it feels as if that’s it, that’s the work, not that the script is a blueprint for the show to follow.