True, I prefer words to emoji — though I’m not a Luddite, I will change my mind the moment you show me emoji that rhyme or play me a track sung in emoji. But everyone agrees that emoji are just a bit of fun, that they quickly convey tone, and that anyway, everyone knows what you mean by an emoji.

All of that is bollocks.

Follow.

I quite often get sent a reply that consists of that icon of a face laughing and with tears running down it. Really? Did I really leave you laughing so hard that you cried? No. The odds are that I either vaguely amused you, or you’re sure I was trying to be funny, even if I failed.

So nope, I don’t know exactly what you meant and I offer that the emoji literally isn’t what you meant. Plus I think people unconsciously assume that the emoji you send me is the emoji I received, and it is not. There is an emoji standards body, but the symbol you see is the one that your device has made to comply to that standard. And the one I see is the symbol the makers of my device have decided.

Now, most of the time, that just means on average one of us is seeing a better version of the smiley face than the other, one team of graphic designers might be better than the other.

But then last year if I were sending you an emoji from an iPhone, Android, PC or Mac, but you were reading it on Twitter, there could be quite the difference. Should I have some reason to send you an emoji about a water pistol — apparently people do this — then I see a cheery water pistol, but you see a handgun. Tell me what tone that was meant to convey.

So emojis look different on different machines and they do not say what you meant. That leaves just the bit about fun and where you may well now be sitting, thinking I’ve segued into being a grump bloke. But you know where this is going and, yes.

Because in 2021, a single and apparently unambiguous thumbs-up emoji ended up costing the sender over $60,000.

There’s a lot to this and the superb podcast 99% Invisible covers it in delicious detail, but the shortest version is that it was over a contract. The person who sent the thumbs up claims he meant to just acknowledge receipt of a message, but the person he sent it to took it to mean an agreement to the deal they were discussing.

That 99% Invisible podcast episode also gives examples of how in different cultures or even just different groups of people, one emoji can mean many different things. And those meanings change over time.

Now, excuse me, I have to go the shops. Checks list: I need aubergine, peach, banana…

And that was going to be the jokey finish. Except I just looked up at my TV set and it’s on the YouTube recommendations page. Of which the recommended video right in front of me is mine, the one I made this week and for which I confidently believe I have made my worst-ever poster image. Yes. It has an emoji. I’d explain, but I want to run away now before you see it.

Red pills, blue pills, whatever. I once made it through the first 20 minutes of The Matrix by turning the sound off and enjoying the visuals for a bit. I want to say that I remember being persuaded to watch because it had this incredible idea at its heart, but that can’t be true.

Because before whoever it was who was telling about this had finished hinting at the film’s incredible core idea, I was nodding, saying, oh, right, the world is an illusion, that old thing.

Then this week I read an article that said Ascension was one of the greatest science fiction series of all time, that it was on Amazon Prime, but also that it was leaving in two days’ time so you’d better hurry. This would’ve been Tuesday, I think, so it’s gone now, but I watched the first episode.

It’s another show where the whole worth seems to be in its core idea. The show follows a generation ship, a starship launched from Earth in the 1950s and heading out on a 100-year journey to Proxima Centauri. As we join the story, the ship has been travelling for 51 years — and suddenly there’s a murder. That murder, said the article, upends everything and ultimately has the characters and you questioning their very existence.

Nope.

In the episode I watched, it did have the characters starting to question each other, but I’d already answered it. I even said aloud at the end, “you had 51 years to figure this out and I did it in 44 minutes.”

When the idea is all you have, it has to be a damn good idea, and neither Ascension nor The Matrix — in my opinion — have good enough ideas.

Maybe it’s just because all of this has been done before. I don’t remember where I knew The Matrix style story from, but I knew it before the film. And I’m trying to avoid the Ascension spoiler, but the same thing happened in Doctor Who back in the 1970s.

I think I’m saying that the idea practically doesn’t matter. There’s a reason you can’t copyright ideas and it’s because it’s the execution that matters. For me, that means there have to be characters that keep you watching. I can be absorbed by a documentary or an article about some tiny nugget of information — for instance, this week I learned that Sainsbury’s self-service checkouts will never give you a 10p or a 50p coin in change, and that detail is delicious. And a book about an enormous topic — say, Taking Manhattan by Russell Shorto — can entirely occupy me.

But for drama, I need characters. I don’t think I’m alone in this: when I first knew him, Alan Plater once criticised my interest in plot over character, for instance. And among Isaac Asimov’s many faults, his total lack of interest in characters meant some deft footwork by the writers of the Foundation television series.

Clearly what works for me may not for you, I know. So if you’re going to argue that The Matrix has wonderful characters, I won’t disagree, but chiefly because it might end up with my having to watch the damn thing.

With Ascension, I felt the characters were slight enough that the cast had difficulty making them believable. Some did better than others, which probably also means that some characters were better written than others, but still it felt forced and I didn’t choose to binge-watch the lot before it disappeared from Amazon UK.

But then the writers of that got six hours of high-cost television drama made, and I have not. The Matrix writers got several movies done, and I have not. Even I would listen to those writers before I would myself.

That’s an idea.

Last week’s Doctor Who, if you don’t happen to know already, had an extensive scene you’d call meta: without spoiling anything, the Doctor and Belinda meet Doctor Who fans. In a way only this show can do, the show itself is fiction within itself and before this sentence gets convoluted, let me zoom to the end and just say that it was sweet. Self-aware, knowing, funny, but also warmly sweet and for me, no question, the highlight of the story.

But it’s got me thinking about how dangerous that is. I know that it’s very hard to get anyone into your story, any reader or any viewer, and once you’ve got them, I know it’s extremely easy to lose them again. Stopping a story, or seeming to stop it, in order to draw attention to how this is a TV show seems so risky that I doubt I’d ever do it if I were in that position.

And yet when it works, I think it can even draw audiences in more. It becomes a shared thing, the show and you the viewer, knowing this thing together, acknowledging what we both already know but put aside for the suspension of disbelief and the enjoyment of being carried away by the story. There’s also an element of time: even saying all of this to you now and so telling you that there was this moment in Doctor Who, that takes away something if you haven’t already seen it.

I think the clearest example of this is Newhart, the second sitcom starring comedian Bob Newhart. I get this one intellectually, I understand what the show did and I think I can feel some of why it worked, but I definitely don’t and now cannot ever get the punch that the show’s last punchline gave to its audience watching on its first transmission. Or apparently to the studio audience during the taping.

Follow. The clip is on YouTube so you can see it right now, but it’s meaningless. You need to at least know that there was an extremely successful sitcom called The Bob Newhart Show, and that later there was an at least very successful sitcom called Newhart. There was no connection between the two other than its star. No other characters were the same, no setting, no stories. And Bob Newhart played a different character. In the first show, he’s psychiatrist Dr Robert Hartley, and in the second he’s a self-help book author, Dick Loudon.

Fine. But come the 184th episode…

At the very ending of the whole eight seasons of Newhart, the studio has been set up to hide the last set, a bedroom. And the moment that set is revealed, before you even see the characters in the bed, you can hear a gasp from the studio audience because this is the bedroom from the first show, Newhart. They recognised the set.

And then you get to see the characters, of which one is played by Suzanne Pleshette — reprising her role from the first series, The Bob Newhart Show. The story claims that the entire run of this Newhart series was a dream by Dr Robert Hartley. And in the space of a few lines, Hartley manages to mock some of the recurring criticisms of the Newhart show, pointing out the absurdity of some running gags, and getting a few last laughs in.

As I say, you can see the last scene here on YouTube. I don’t know where you can catch the full 325 previous episodes of the two shows in order to fully get the gags, but.

If you’re going to do something, you do it: an apologetic dream sequence wouldn’t have worked, a half-hearted one-liner gag would’ve been rubbish. But still, Bob Newhart himself says how nervous they all were that the idea was right or not — and, nicely, properly credits whose idea it was. And then Suzanne Pleshette has said the same thing, plus how she skipped out of the wrap party afterwards because it was a wrap for their show, not hers.

But compare that to the last episode of Star Trek: Enterprise. That show had gone off the rails, if you ask me, and there as a self-awareness that just told it that only Trek fans were still watching. So it became a kind of fan-service series, and when it was cancelled early, I think it was a shame but I’d long stopped watching.

It was more than the end of one series, though. It must’ve been cancelled in 2005, which means there was an unbroken run of Star Trek shows from The Next Generation in 1987. An unbroken run, with overlaps, of four different series set in the same universe, for 18 years. The last episode of Enterprise is treated as the last episode of all of them, and it’s really written as an edition of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I think that just as with Newhart, you needed to know the Next Generation to understand the Enterprise episode, but I also think it didn’t work. Instead of capping a long run, it seemed to negate Enterprise. It relegated the Enterprise cast to guest characters.

Maybe that’s because the whole last episode was done like this instead of being a final moment’s capstone like Newhart. Maybe, though, it’s just the old thing that the Newhart one was better written.

Maybe it’s the old thing that you can write anything, so long as you do it brilliantly.

I’ll tell you this now: you will never get me to go to a sports game. You could beg. I don’t imagine you would, but you could, and it would make no difference. I am stone on this point, there is not one pixel of a chance you could manage to stir another smaller thing’s worth of interest out of me if sport is in any way involved.

Last night I read ten “Sports Night” scripts.

And that’s on top of the ten I read earlier in the week.

And that’s on top of the fact that I know I’ve read them all before, plus I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if I’ve read them five times. Especially since I know I watched the whole two seasons of this Aaron Sorkin comedy in a binge before there were binges. And I’ve binged at least a couple of times since.

I’ve thought about this a lot and previously taken some shade in the fact that one advertising line for the show ran: “Sports Night. It’s about sports. The way Charlie’s Angels is about law enforcement.” So the way a sports show had got me engaged was not really by being a sports show.

Only, reading all of the available scripts again, I think it was. At least in the details as it’s about the people making a sports TV show and there is constant references to statistics I don’t know, people I’ve not heard of, even sports I can’t imagine are actually sports but there you go.

What I want to know is what got me over that line into watching a series with sport in its very title. And I know that the answer is Aaron Sorkin. I have never once watched a series or a film because of the actors in it, nor because of who directed it. But I have often watched because of the writer and that’s what happened here, long back in the day when the show was new and DVDs weren’t old.

But what this means is that I what I think I really want to know is what else I am missing out on because of whatever blinkers I’m wearing today. I like that, as a man, I’m expected to diss romances when actually I like them enormously and will at a moment’s notice bore you into shrapnel over how identical I think romances and thrillers are.

Thrillers. That’s another thing a man of my age is expected to like, and this time I do. I understand that I’m expected to be riveted to whole channels devoted to the history of Nazis and the Knights Templar, but not so much, no.

I don’t care what other people expect me to like, but I am coming to care very much about what I expect myself to enjoy, and what I’m failing to appreciate because of it. I’ve not given opera a go, for instance. I mean, listening, not performing. I call myself multilingual because I speak English, American, Australian, and am learning Canadian. But I don’t try to learn anything else.

I don’t ever try manga or comic books. I don’t try video games. I have tried TikTok twice, when I needed to write something about it and of course had to at least have looked to see it, even if both times it chose to present me first with some rather disturbing videos. That was a case of an algorithm confidently predicting what I’d like, and I really, really didn’t.

But then no algorithm would tell you that I could be a fan of Francisca Valenzuela, whose chiefly pop music has not charted in the UK as far as I know, and as far as her Chilean lyrics would suggest.

I found her music on a rare exploration. I found Sports Night because the writer pulled me over the line.

I’ve got to look around more. There is so much to enjoy, and right now there’s so much to take refuge in.

But I’ve done enough sports now.

Earlier this week, I said aloud: “God, it’s only Tuesday.” You’ll never guess when I said it.

All this week I’ve been working from about 05:00 to around 19:00 or 20:00 and actually, as I write this to you now, it’s just before 07:00 and I’m on a break. Which is all fine and good, not worth your time talking about — I’ve also just had a biscuit, I can tell you’re enthralled — but this week it feels different, it feels special, working early and nattering with you while all is silent around me.

Except for this hard drive I put on a shelf and which occasionally makes that half of my office vibrate.

I used to do this all the time and it’s been on my mind, on my conscience really, that for months and months now, I’ve not been able to make myself get up. A couple of times the day has worked out just fine when I’ve slept in to 08:00 and that made me think a lot, but overall I’ve been behind with things and I’ve spent most days racing from the start. This week I’ve had to do the longer time, simply from necessity, and before I had that “God it’s Tuesday” moment, I more had a sense that I felt I was back.

It doesn’t matter what you didn’t do yesterday, it only matters what you do today and tomorrow. But on the one hand, I feel I’ve at least won one round against my unbelievable laziness, and on the other, the fact that I’ve had this long break means that I appreciate the stillness more.

When we’re done talking, I’ve got to get back into a job, one of — hang on, let me figure this out… one of something like seven projects that have to be done this week. They each have different deadlines and they’re not conveniently arranged in a row, so in a way, they all need to be pushed along at the same time.

But they also all have something in common. And this is why I realised I wanted to talk to you about this, just now as I was getting us some biscuits from my kitchen.

It’s that I love when a job entirely occupies you. When you have no thoughts whatsoever, except for what decision has to be made now, what work must be done this moment. To be so totally absorbed that you don’t see the time, don’t have your shopping list in the back of your mind, aren’t usually wondering about where the biscuits are, and when you are totally focused to the exclusion of everything else. It’s deeply refreshing and satisfying.

And while I first noticed this back when I worked in BBC local radio and you were so intensely concentrating even as you were surrounded by a loud newsroom, I think this morning I am noticing that you can get it when there is silence. Apart from that drive.

There is also a very, very distant sound of something, I can’t tell if it’s aircraft or cars, it’s that quiet and indistinct and far away. I think this must be half term, too, because there’s no sound of children or parents. I can see five gardens from my office window and there isn’t a pixel of movement – no, wait, a tree just twitched as a bird moved around inside its top branches. The sun is cutting across the gardens perpendicularly to my window and it’s like a stripe of summer.

The light is still on in my office, I should switch that off now. And also turn off the drive.

And I should get back to the work. But if in moments my head will again be entirely in what I’m working on, I suddenly appreciated the stillness and the focus and the time, and I just wanted to take this moment to enjoy it and I wanted you and I to share in it.

Although I’ve eaten your biscuit, sorry.

It’s not as if I do it a lot, but I do perform, I do workshops and I get interviewed, and you know how it is. You end being asked the same things and you end up doing a lot of the same things if they worked once. And of all of these, there is a line of mine that I like.

“Everything is interesting, everything is so interesting,” I’ll say before, after a really ridiculously calculated beat pause, adding: “Except football.”

I know it gets a laugh because as a British man I am expected to follow sport. I do also know that it annoys a significant proportion of the audience wherever I am, but I also know that while that isn’t the point, while that isn’t why I say it or what I hope it will do, it helps. Specifically, it helps in writing workshops because when you hear me say it, you have no doubt that it’s true. I’m saying something that you couldn’t truly call controversial, but it is at least a surprise and what I’m telling the audience is that this is a space where I am relaxed enough to be honest. It’s a space where, therefore, they can be the same, where if I’m ever going to judge them, it will be on whether their writing could convey something better. It won’t ever be about them or what they’re trying to say.

So the whole everything-is-interesting-except-football thing is true but because it’s become a tool as well, I’ve been forgetting just how true it is.

Right now I’m once more feeling like I’m not doing enough, I’m not writing well enough, and time is roaring by without my doing anything. What gets me out of this low part of my cycle, though, is the absolute truth that everything else is so interesting. It can’t matter that I’m not contributing anything, because there is so much else by so many other people that is so fantastic I want to gobble it up.

Even now, even here, in this world and after a week in which I’ve had to write about Trump more than I would want to, there is so much that is fantastic. I cannot get enough of the detail behind things you don’t think about. So while I might be burying my head to hide from some things I actually do not want to think about, just in the last week I have learned, for instance:

• Toothpaste factories fill 1,000 tubes per minute
• When you download an attachment in Apple Mail, the document is saved with an email icon that you can click to go straight back to the originating message
• You don’t see hitchhikers with car trade plates so much now because they’re paid better
• “Mission: Impossible II” in the year 2000 was going to be about AI and the Y2K bug, except it’s initially planned director Oliver Stone thought writer Christopher McQuarrie was making all that up.
• Channel 4 has a head of High Risk television
• I have strong feelings about prologues

Admit it. You’re interested in the toothpaste. So let me also tell you that I learned this week that approximately 20 billion toothpaste tubes are made worldwide every year.

Now you’re off thinking about how you can never get that last bit out of the tube and so how much toothpaste is wasted.

I tell you, we can sod Trump and AI and sod however you’re feeling about your work, because now we can just wonder about how can you recycle 20 billion tubes with bits in.

I need you to be with me on this one. Pretend if you have to. But at some point, you’ve had to think of a new password and you’ve thought and thought before coming up with a great one — and the computer says no. It says no because you’ve used that one before.

Or you need to save some important document somewhere that you’ll remember and the document needs to be saved with some really clear name. You think and think, you come up with a great system for naming the file and just the right place to save it, and yeah. Same thing. A file of that name is already there.

I’m not sure you’ve had that second one, it possibly requires you to spend 15 hours a day in front of a screen. But the first one, that’s surely you as well as me.

Only, I have a new video series starting shortly and at the same time, I have an existing one that gets filmed in blocks so that episodes can roll out weekly for a couple of months. Two series, I want to say both alike in dignity, but apart from them both being about writing, I think there is a large stretch of very clear water separating the two.

So I write the pilot for the new one and have to leave the edit for a bit in order to polish up one of the episodes from this other run.

And you know where this is going.

But I didn’t

That filmed-in-a-block series is unscripted, and everything else I do is very much written. A solid seven minute sequence I wrote for the new series is what I said some six weeks ago in the unscripted one.

It’s not the same, it’s not word for word, but actually, yes, it is. The sequence is slightly different, the structure isn’t the same, but the points are identical, and there are many moments where I see myself searching for the right phrase on the unscripted one — and that is word for word what I wrote six weeks later in this other series.

Now, there’s a practical thing that the new one is due to start going out very soon and so it’s within a fortnight of the same topic being discussed. If it had been a much longer gap, maybe I’d have got away with it, but I definitely cannot now, so I’ve had to scrap the pilot and write a different one.

Except, okay, I’m now behind schedule and I have to do a little more work, if you’re not thinking boo hoo then I am.

What shook me about this was how you think — or I think — that we are trying to do something new, but we are at least sometimes locked into the same ways of thinking. The same concerns, fine, but the same words.

I want to think that I’m up for anything and always looking for the new way to do things. I have so often had events change dramatically around me and I’ve had a ball adapting to it all on the hoof.

But this video collision makes me think that in fact I am stuck in one way of thinking.

I am fighting back, though. I’ve been trying out a nicely done AI tool called Cotypist, which is dedicated to predicting not just the next word you’re going to type, but the next several. It obviously learns from you, but even before it has time to get better and better, it is startlingly good at predicting what I’m going to type.

Consequently I use this app and I suppose it saves me typing time — although I like typing — but each time it proposes six or seven words that it thinks I’m going to type, I feel it’s telling me I am that predictable.

So I will do anything to rephrase my thought, to express whatever the idea is, in some different way. Any different way. One word different, I’ll take it.

I’m just not sure how to do that rebelling against one-track thinking in real life. But I’ve got to try.

It’s a funny thing, but these days we either get to the point incredibly quickly or incredibly slowly, if ever. So a 90-second film trailer will now start with a 10-second trailer, for instance. A trailer for a trailer, it’s insane. But equally any article you read will bury the lead as far down the text as it possibly can, just so you have to scroll past ads.

This week I made a video where I don’t know for sure that I got the timing right or wrong, but I know I spent more time thinking about than I should. I am very pleased with it because it’s a nice gag: I made an unboxing video where the joke was that I discard the product and instead go into crazed detail about the box. I think the fun is in how an expensive product is dismissed with a wave and in how I really researched the manufacture of cardboard boxes so I could talk with the kind of obsession that you see in regular unboxing videos.

(This just occurred me. Alan Plater once wrote a trilogy of television dramas called “To See How Far It Is”, and they were set in a cardboard box factory. A recurring line was something like “there’s more in boxes than you think.” Now I think he’d be proud.)

Anyway.

One question is how long you run the joke for and of course the answer is not long. I think it’s a two-minute video. But another question is how long do you take before you drop the hammer: the video has to look real before you reveal that it isn’t, and the amount of time you spend appearing to do a genuine unboxing is obviously crucial. And I do think I got this wrong: it takes 39 seconds before you twig.

Yet part of this is as much about when you are being obvious and when you are not: from 39 seconds on it is entirely obvious that this is a gag, and for up to 38 seconds I think it appears obvious that it’s a real unboxing video.

And I’ve also been thinking about this for days, though, because I watched John Sullivan’s 1980s BBC sitcom, “Dear John”, plus as its NBC remake in the States. The pilot episode of both versions has the same first big joke and it is incredibly obvious, so much so that you can see it coming right now, this moment, without knowing a thing about it. When you’re watching, there’s no question, I think, that you get the joke, that you fully expect the joke, that in fact what’s meant to be the first big laugh is practically pathetically obvious.

But that first big laugh turns out to not be the first big laugh at all, it is a setup for the real first big laugh that follows later.

Very briefly — so very briefly that you’ll get it, of course, but also what comedy there is will be erased — “Dear John” is about a recent divorcee joining a help group that meets in a local adult education centre. It’s one of many adult education sessions being run there and Sullivan makes it very obvious that John has at first joined the wrong group. He’s joined the Alcoholics Anonymous one.

We get that gag, then John crosses the corridor to the correct group, we get to meet some more characters in this “1-2-1 Group” and then one of them is asked to introduce himself. “My name is Clive,” he starts, “and I am an alcoholic.”

In retrospect, it is stunningly obvious that this would be the gag, but it comes as a genuine surprise. And then Clive leaves to join the AA group — and five other people follow with him. It’s a delicious and funny moment, especially when you of course immediately realise all of the really clear setups that should have told you it was coming.

Yet it seems such a gamble. I shouldn’t give you the impression, if you haven’t seen these two shows, that there isn’t anything funny before this point, but there isn’t much and in the UK version especially, there’s some bleak moments too. In the UK version, the joke about being in the wrong group comes 7’36” into the episode, and then Clive the alcoholic starts at 13’34”.

In the US remake, which you can watch on YouTube right here, the wrong group gag comes 4’02” into the episode. And then Frank the alcoholic — renamed for the US version, presumably because Clive is just too British — does his bit at 9’27”.

I do think it’s interesting that the US version is so much faster getting to these points than the UK one and actually I think it’s impressive. There are points that feel rushed, but there are also versions of the gag from the UK one that are paced better in the US version.

But either way, “Dear John” risked holding back its big laugh for between 4 and 8 minutes. And that joke is so obvious that you think the whole show is going to be that predictable. Yet they then wait a further five or six whole minutes before the real punchline.

It’s amazingly brave, I think. I mean, I know both shows were back in the 1980s and everything is faster now, but still I worried about keeping you waiting for the gag for 39 seconds.

Mind you, I’ve also kept you waiting from the first paragraph on to see what the real point of this is and now you’ve read the lot, I’ve got nothing. I feel this is letting you down — exactly the way those lead-burying articles always do.

Okay, so on the one hand we need – we absolutely require – drama from every conceivable source, and also my writing is unquestionably improved when an editor asks why I’ve not included something. Or actually when an editor just says “Eh?”

Writers, editors, publishers, producers, cast and crew, we’re all needed and a good idea from anywhere must be seized upon.

But.

Otherwise, drama and actually I think all writing, is not a democracy.

This is on my mind because of Doctor Who and the now weeks of commentary about it being cancelled and how the current Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, has already filmed his final scene, his regeneration ready for the next Doctor.

My reaction to the regeneration is easiest to say: it’s so? Doctor Who is now made incredibly far in advance — I mean there can be two years before writing and airing — that it could well be that Gatwa has done all he was planned to do. We’ll find out when we find out.

But the rest of it, about cancellation. That’s coming in a little trumpet of accusations that the show is too woke, that showrunner Russell T Davies is too smug to take criticism, that kind of thing.

I’ll say it now: I don’t believe you can be too woke. There aren’t many absolutes in the world, but woke is good and asleep is bad, that’s one of them.

I also don’t believe that Davies is smug and I can’t see any evidence. Speaking of seeing, you should see that man get an award: I can’t think of anyone else whose speech is not about themselves and instead has them pointing out a dozen people in the audience and enthusing about their writing. In detail.

But given that I don’t know where this smugness idea comes from and so I’m guessing in the dark, my impression is that it is based on the premise that he doesn’t do what the fans tell him to. However, anyone thinking the next season of Doctor Who will be different because of fan reaction to the last one is, well, let’s say uninformed.

Because that next run has already been made. Which you’d presume fans would know if anyone does.

I think it is unusual for a UK-based series to be made as far in advance as Doctor Who now is, but it is far from unusual for a show to be finished before the critics and fans get to pile on.

There used to be this thing that new shows got a lot of press when they were commissioned for a second series, like that was absolute proof of success and popularity. Presumably sometimes it is, but more often the show was originally commissioned for two runs and that fact just wasn’t announced. So when we hear that a show has been picked up, it already has, it is already under way, and may even have finished. I know of an Apple TV+ drama, for instance, whose makers were deep into development of series three, four and five before officially getting picked up for any of them.

So there’s a practical and actually I think bleedin’ obvious reason why fan reaction isn’t and cannot be listened to. But there is more and it’s not tied to how some fans also expect the show to change every week based on their response to the last episode.

Drama is not and cannot be a democracy.

Idiotic choose-your-own-ending dramas aside, we only and exclusively get to vote on a show’s future in one specific way. We get to decide to watch or not.

I have reviewed Doctor Who professionally, I’ve written about it for Radio Times magazine and had the peculiar experience of looking up the Wikipedia coverage of an article and finding myself quoted. But what I hope I’ve never done is say definitively that a show should do X or Y, that its failings are A or B.

I mean, I’ve been known to say that the dialogue in some show or other is shite altogether — Radio Times may not have printed that verbatim — but I don’t expect the writer to listen to me. I just expect to find something else to watch next time.

With Doctor Who, fans are telling the show makers what they’re doing wrong and what they must do about it. But that always seems to boil down to how the makers should make Doctor Who be as it used to be. And if that were even possible, we would be so bored.

I believe this is ultimately what happened to Star Trek: Enterprise and why I stopped watching that show. If you Google it now, you’ll learn that the last season was the best, but this is a history written by the victors kind of thing. The last run was a fan favourite because it just did what fans like. It repeated previous Star Trek type stories, it seemed to me to have decided to throw away what made it different from the other shows. I don’t know, clearly, but it seemed to me that the show was not moving forward and so I stopped watching.

If there is nothing else I can do except watch or not watch, if there is nothing specific I can usefully say a show must do even if I have an opinion, then there is still something more nebulous that I can be certain of. It is that if a show does not ever surprise us with something new, it is dead.

So while I didn’t especially adore every minute of the last run of Doctor Who, it did have “73 Yards” and “Dot and Bubble”. They each broke the show’s format but I believe in doing so they shored up that format and made the series feel alive.

That’s something Doctor Who is very good at, the way that its stories can have life and vigour and energy. That’s what I want and the show — any show — cannot deliver if it is somehow able to react to fan criticisms.

It’s not as if there’s a shortage of anything else to watch.

I have a new joke. It’s to do with how books are made into films and TV, and along the way can be changed anywhere from a little to unrecognisable. And the joke goes like this: if you want to see a perfect version of your favourite book on screen, buy the ebook.

It is no more possible to perfectly move a book onto film or TV than it is to make a flat map out of a globe. Projection distorts the map, and it must. The different media distorts the story, and it cannot fail to.

But I suppose you have some choice over just how much it fails. The subject heading above about pulling on a new Jersey is a reference to the revival of “Bergerac”, which is set on that island and from the little I’ve seen of it so far, does follow the spirit of the original show. Except sometimes shows have two spirits, and this time it’s that the new show has followed Jim Bergerac’s backstory of alcoholism rather than the somewhat lighter fare the original series was better known for.

Fine. Battlestar Galactica was turned from a fun but really rather shallow series into quite startlingly searing drama. Doctor Who came back with a life and verve it hadn’t had before. And the new Day of the Jackal came back with nothing but the title of the original versions.

I just seem to be surrounded by remakes at the moment. Even though I’m currently hooked on an original show, “Astrid et Raphaëlle”, I’ve come to it after seeing its English-language remake, “Patience”. Yesterday I read the screenplay to “Conclave” and that, of course, is based on a novel.

Then there’s the new run of “Reacher”, based on a novel I read long enough ago that I can’t remember any details but can see that it feels like it’s honouring the book.

That’s all I need, I think. The production of Battlestar Galactica began with a proposal that said it was aiming for “nothing less than a total reinvention of the space opera genre”, which sounds like it wanted to wreck the original show. But as different as it was, I think the remade, rebooted, reimagined Battlestar was simply done better than the original.

If a remake or a revivals solely takes the title of a previous show and nothing else, it’s doing it for IP. It’s doing it because 600-odd new series are launched every year and having a known title helps get attention.

But then as is so often the case, I think there aren’t any rules and there isn’t a sanity clause. The revival of “Frasier” had more than the old show’s title, it had every single thing about it except that it just wasn’t done as well.

Nothing is guaranteed. Everything is revivable. But good writers doing more than accepting an old show’s title as a vehicle for getting their own series made, that’s at least worth watching.

Now, excuse me while I go see what they’ve done to the Bergerac theme.