I admit to you that I’m finding getting older difficult. Well, really it’s easy because you just sort of hang about and it happens. But regardless of that, I am now and always will be grateful that I did the work that I’ve done at the precise time I did it.

This is not remotely going to be something about how the past was better. I don’t really care about the past and I actually resent the time I’m spending if I’m thinking of something I’ve done before when I could be doing something new.

Instead, this is about how things are different for the physical work in media. Things are better now, in fact, and pretty much infinitely so. For instance, just in the last hour before you and I started talking, I topped and tailed eight videos on my iPad. If you don’t happen to know the term, topping and tailing is putting something at the start and the end, and often removing something from there. All I’ve just now done is put the title sequences around some prepared footage. Very quick, very simple, and I’m doing it on an iPad, a thin sheet of glass, sitting on my couch.

I adore this stuff. Right now someone else is editing this week’s AppleInsider Podcast instead of me and I’m a bit jealous: being deep into an audio, nudging sentences around, prepping different versions, it’s mechanical but creative work and if I am good at it, I know that it is explicitly because I was taught on physical media.

The short version of that is to do with making decisions and making mistakes. When you’ve got five strips of tape around your neck and are using a razor blade to slice through a sixth while biting on a chinagraph pencil because you’ve nowhere else to put it, you have to keep track of this, you have to make the cut in the right place. And always you were doing it on deadline so it had to be right and it had to be now.

So being able to swipe my finger across an audio track on an iPad or to just undo every cut I’ve made in the whole session, it is ridiculously simple. But I also do fewer swipes, I undo much less than I might, because I’m used to being quick and decisive.

Only in this, I wouldn’t claim to be either in any other way.

But, look. Physical tape. An iPad. Nostalgia. Aging. These have all come to a point for me this week because of something that also is a point: I am the deputy chair of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and I will stand on tables shouting when writers are denied their dues, in every sense of that. (Apple is currently pissing me off, for instance, because they’re running a campaign celebrating creatives and they never, repeat never, name the poor sods who write this stuff for them. I have pressed.)

So all of this is going on in my head and yet here I am watching “Thin Air” on YouTube. It should not be there. It is a 1980s BBC drama serial and the writers are not being paid for this, no one on the show is. In every way, it is wrong and bad that it is available and so much so that I could well have to switch to past tense, it’s that likely to be removed.

But Thin Air has never been released commercially. It cannot be streamed. I don’t believe it has ever been repeated since its first airing in 1988. I do have a copy of it, but it’s on VHS and it must be twenty years since I’ve been able to play VHS.

Yet watching it now, I am just agog at it. Written by Sarah Dunant and Peter Busby, it’s set in a commercial radio station in London. It’s a thriller, I am once again into it, but I’m also riveted by how it’s a commercial radio station in the 1980s. All my work was in BBC local radio but here’s the lead character, Rachel (Kate Hardie) with five strips of tape around her neck. Here’s a standing reel to reel tape machine. Here’s the chinagraph pencil for making edit marks, here’s the blade for cutting it.

And here’s this lead character, holding a strip of tape and running it across that machine’s playhead to check what it is.

It is prehistoric. And quite wonderful.

I once told Sarah Dunant that I wanted to be Rachel Hamilton from this show. I watch this now and I wouldn’t want to be in the 1980s, I wouldn’t want to go back, and yet I do also want to be Rachel in that station at that time.

That character is at the beginning of her career and I’m trying not to think about mine because I simply haven’t started yet. But I look at this show, I look at the fact I am watching it on an iPad, this glass that would have been unimaginable in the 1980s and is barely imaginable now. It’s hard not to think about then and now, it’s very hard not think about how my career will be topped and tailed.

But I tell you, for the present, I am done with the past. There’s no future in it.