I’m not going to admit that I’m a bit confused this week, because you’d hear me. But something I have believed pretty stridently has been called into question — and it was called into question by me. I should never listen to me.

Here’s the belief. You cannot use a familiar idea, a trope, in drama and say that it’s fine because the audience doesn’t know it. That the audience is not as familiar with it as you are, that you are involved in drama so you know these things. I think that’s a bit grandiose on the part of the writer, and damn patronising about the audience.

I once refused to take a suggestion on a script because it was an idea I had seen something close to eleventy-billion times in other dramas. “Doesn’t matter,” said the suggester, “the audience hasn’t seen it before.”

I believe I managed to avoid saying “bullshit”, but the fella didn’t press the point so I suspect I at least oozed quiet anger.

And then there’s this week. I can’t tell you exactly what happened, partly because I’m not allowed to, mostly because I’m clearly an arse who wants to sound exciting and important. But during the course of this thing which did matter to me but otherwise isn’t worth your wondering about, I got into a discussion about a particular recent drama.

Actually, a couple of them. But one of the people I was talking with disliked a certain show because, as she said, it was all very familiar stuff with the same police tropes. I can’t disagree, she was factually correct, and yet I wanted to disagree because I really liked it.

Trying to vocalise this then, and trying to be clearer now, I think the issue was for me that this time I believed the tropes. In any police procedural drama there are going to be the same steps in an investigation and I’m accepting that as accuracy rather than repetition, I’m accepting it as authenticity.

Around those points, though, characters were reacting in the same ways that all characters do in these shows, and that was my colleague’s issue. Yet in this one case, I believed them. I felt the pain and the anxiety.

So I am demonstrably wrong. You can write what audiences are already familiar with and it can work.

I think this is just yet another case of how the answer is that you simply have to write it brilliantly.

In which case, sod it, I can’t tell you what I was doing this week, but I must tell you that the show is “Catch Me a Killer” and while the series main writer is Amy Jephta, the episode I wats talking about was by Oliver Frampton. In the UK, it airs on U&Alibi.