So just now, I was watching an interview with Warren Littlefield, a particularly well known US TV executive who was talking about the development of “Family Ties”. If you know it. it’s the 1980s sitcom starring Michael J Fox, and if you don’t know it, er, it’s still the 1980s sitcom starring Michael J Fox.

Anyway. Littlefield was praising writer Gary David Goldberg — and when a TV executive has even heard of the writer, they rise in my opinion — but specifically about how he was able to listen to what the audience wanted to see and where the audience wanted to go.

Television is a commercial enterprise, 1980s television was an extremely profitable one, and “Family Ties” is very good. So I can’t disagree.

And I don’t, really, except I realise that I want to. There is something about making a show to suit the audience that feels somehow wrong. It’s not like I’m against audiences, but I am against things like those choose-your-own-adventure books where the reader decides when to kill the monster. You can spin me as much bollocks about interactive storytelling as you want, there has to be a story to be told. And if you are expecting the audience to tell it, I see no reason why they should tell it in front of you.

Plus there is also the fan effect. The point where your show was so good and fresh that it got actual fans, but now things have tipped over an edge and all you want to do is please those fans.

With fans of any show, and really I think audiences of any show, what they will tell you they want will always boil down to more of the same. I’ve thought this before, we want to see something again but for the first time. We want to recapture how we were when we first saw it, and despite that being impossible, we can end up criticising a show for moving on.

No TV executive will ever agree with me, and I will never say they’re wrong, yet I think you have to write whatever it is that you want to write and hope that an audience comes along.

In other words, my Jane Austen week on 58keys was the most superb fun to make and though it didn’t do brilliantly in my viewing figures, I would do it again in an instant. I’d do it again for me and the fun, and I’d do it again for what great reactions I got.

It can’t always be about big numbers. Although maybe that’s just a failure of imagination on my part.