Previously… I’ve always read scripts but since late 2017, I’ve made sure to read at least one every day. I can argue it’s for work, I can make an exceptional case for how my writing is better for my doing this, but it is also just the single most fantastic fun.

So far in 2024 I’ve read 552 scripts ranging from ones made this year to some that are decades old, and while five earned a note from me along the lines of “the depths of shit”, 300 were Good or Very Good. But then very handily for a man wanting a countdown, just 10 were “Superb, so well done, or so perfect.”

Very unusually, though, the 10 came chiefly from just a couple of sources. One is the BBC Writers website where this year they uploaded countless Doctor Who and Doctor Who-related scripts. I say countless, but that’s only because a lot were already uploaded and I’d read them before. This year 233 of my reads came from this brilliant supply, though.

And then in mid-October, my absolute favourite online source for TV scripts, suddenly added a huge number of them, including ones that actually made me gasp. TV Writing put online many scripts from the unmade 1970s TV series “Star Trek: Phase II,” for instance. It’s a famous show considering it was never made, but to see on the page what it would be like, it was astonishing.

It also wasn’t great, as it turns out, but it was great to see these scripts.

Just as it was to see the pilot script of Mad About You by Danny Jacobson and Paul Reiser. Or Tenspeed and Brownshoe by Stephen J Cannell, a superb pilot script I have waited decades to read. About 35 scripts to Moonlighting, a dozen Columbos — although only 8 from the original and best run.

That TV Writing site has been a gift this year and so far I’ve read 98 scripts from it. Really, 2024 has a been an impossibly rich year for this reading lark and yet somehow here you go, here are just 10 of what I believe are the very best. If you’ve not read them yet, I so much envy you having them to look forward to that I might just read them again myself.

10. Veronica Mars: Drinking the Kool-Aid by Rob Thomas

9. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Trials and Tribble-ations by Ronald D. Moore & Rene Echevarria

8. Ready When You Are, Mr McGill by Jack Rosenthal (Book)

7. Misery by William Goldman (Book)

6. Doctor Who: Heaven Sent by Steven Moffat

5. The Mary Tyler Moore Show: Love is All Around (Pilot) by James I. Brooks and Allan Burns

4. Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day 1 by Russell T Davies [special mention for the following four parts]

3. Barbie by Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach

2. Doctor Who: Dot and Bubble by Russell T Davies

1. Doctor Who: 73 Yards by Russell T Davies

One curious thing, though. Those last two and at least one more from Ncuti Gatwa’s first run as the Doctor — I want to say Boom by Steven Moffat — feel like they are made for Disney. Not in some bad way, but rather a practical one: these scripts feel as if they are written to be read by people including Disney executives. They are doubtlessly drama people, but they’re US drama people and don’t have Doctor Who in their bones.

I can’t pin that down. There’s just an accommodation for new people that I never noticed in previous Who scripts and that believe I sometimes see in these latest ones.

But then if I’m unable to point to a line or a word that made me think this, that’s practically notarised evidence compared to this next thing. Sometimes Doctor Who has felt as if it were written falling down, like it was in a headlong rush to the ground and that each passing deadline was giving it more verve. I wonder if there are no passing deadlines now, that to be part of the Disney-backed production schedule means scripts are finished at a far less last-minute stage than maybe they were before.

Still, even if I’m right about that, the best Doctor Who scripts continue to be read as if they are written by someone standing up and moving, instead of sitting for the tenth straight hour of their day.

Favourite scripts of 2023

2022

2021

2020

2019: An 11th Top Ten Writing Lesson

2018: My 10 lessons from reading 620 scripts

I dug out my old iMac yesterday, the Mac I bought when I left Radio Times in 2012, the device I wrote my first book on. And the device that — unusually for a Mac — went very badly wrong around 2019. Give it some credit, I hammered that machine: I seem to write at least half a million words each year so, er, something more than three million went through that keyboard.

No wonder some of the keys are fading away. I don’t mean the lettering on top of the keyboard, I mean the plastic of the keys themselves.

This old iMac has not been switched on since I replaced it back then, and I only got it out today, I only found the power cable, because it truly belongs in a tip but I wanted to check I hadn’t left any important documents on it. Given the state of the machine at the end, it wasn’t 50/50 whether I’d even get it started enough to check for documents, it was 10/90 against.

For some reason, though, everything worked and suddenly I had 27 inches of 2019 in my face. Plans, some of which I’ve achieved. Swathes of details about jobs I’ve now done so long ago that I’ve forgotten them. So forgotten them that you wonder why they had seemed so important, and then inescapably wonder if what you’re doing right now is important either.

It’s only five years since 2019, but this felt like a snapshot from the before times. Before COVID, of course, but longer ago than that.

There are a few audio recordings of me, too, my local recordings done during production of podcasts that no longer exist. That was quite the shock, although I don’t understand why. I even hesitated over tapping the space bar to hear the impossibly young me of a whole five years ago, and when I made myself do it, I heard what did sound like an impossibly younger me.

As it happens, yesterday I produced the AppleInsider podcast and so I’ve been listening to my 2024 voice. I sound tired now. I think I even sound a little defeated in today’s audios.

I don’t recognise the me of 2019. I’m on those recordings talking about subjects that aren’t exactly unknown to me now, but I have to think hard to recall. And what I recall are some of the facts, I’m not getting the reasons I cared back then, I’m not connecting to this stranger.

Intellectually, I can point to things I’ve done since then that I am proud of and that I think are good. That I think are worth doing, that have been worth doing. And at times as I go through the old folders of documents and I’m feeling the width of five years, there is a bit of me that even thinks I’ve put a lot into that half decade.

Not enough, of course. Never enough, I’m afraid.

But what I see as I look at this iMac screen is that regardless of what I do or don’t achieve, time passes anyway. I need to do more, I need to get things done because it’s ticking by like I’m a stranger to it.

I also need to get more sleep.

It’s quite possible that I have now spent more time in primary schools as a visiting author than I did as a pupil. I think it’s a privilege to be invited into a school, and so it’s also quite certain that I put more effort into it now than I did back then. This may, admittedly, also speak to how my own school was rather poor and it definitely speaks to how I was a rubbish pupil.

But you’re just wondering whether this means that my putting “taut” into the title was because I didn’t learn to spell. The tautness is actually a reference to the tension in my stomach and how I felt last Tuesday at about 11:58 when I had to keep 30-odd pupils fully engaged for another 17 minutes before their lunch break. And when, in all truthfulness, I was dead in the water.

It was wonderful. You’ve got to let me tell you about this.

Well, that precise moment when I was feeling sick with worry, maybe that wasn’t exactly wonderful. But the reason I was in that position definitely was.

While I don’t get to do these often, when I do, I am in a school to run a writing day for maybe half a dozen pupils from that school plus the same number again from each of three or four other places nearby. Each school sends its best writers to one host site and I work with them all together.

This Tuesday, though, there was sudden and heavy snow that was sudden enough and heavy enough that I wondered whether the day would be cancelled — and so did the staff at the host school, so did some of the parents I passed on the way in. Obviously the staff knew their own school was open, but they didn’t know about the others, and you try phoning a school first thing in the morning when they are dealing with hundreds of children squeezing in.

So I’m there with six pupils from the host primary school looking at me, and no sign of any others with no sign of whether there were going to be any others.

I have this thing I always start with, an exercise that is sufficiently fast that it gets us going. It also has us all talking, it has people sharing work, and I load it up with things like the fact I don’t care how slow or fast anyone writes. That bit helps pupils who aren’t quick or are nervous and it’s a great idea, I believe I thought of it, and I know that I’ve used it very many times — just not this time.

Plus I have practically the opposite, I have a tiny exercise, the kind of thing you keep in your back pocket for emergencies. It was in fact exquisitely right for those 17 minutes, but I’d had to spend it already. I done it with those half dozen pupils from the host school to fill time while we waited for the others. It worked, to the extent that they were occupied and just about as they were finishing, another school came in. Then another. Then a – no, that’s not a school, that’s a hassled-looking parent: the school was also running an open day.

I did get everyone, I did get all the pupils from all of the schools plus one or two adults from each. There was, though, a mix up over the address of the school, which turns out to have two buildings that are sufficiently far apart that it was a problem. Snow, distance, time, pressure, the pupils from some of the schools finally got to me sodden with damp coats.

When all but one school was there, I tried this great opening idea that I’m so proud of. But I got to run about a quarter of it, I got to start it more than an hour late, and it was working for the four out of five schools who had made it there — and then partway through, the last school arrived.

The host school let me move a break back a few minutes so that I could get a decent head of steam up with the great opening idea and scoop up the late arrivals into it, but then when the break was over, I abandoned the rest of that exercise. Instead, I launched into another one that’s also usually long. It gets the pupils from different schools mixed together — and it’s brilliant when you see two of them making fast friends — but to get it done, there’s pairing up people, there’s telling them what to do, I was halving the time I usually spend just to get it all done.

And then that exercise was done, I had run this as far as it would go and the feel of the piece, the feel of the day, it meant slashing away at the end of that piece while keeping the bits that I needed to set up the afternoon. Somehow instead of the morning’s writing exercises running 90 minutes long, I was left 17 minutes short.

Nothing.

I had nothing.

Except because of the various delays, the teachers and teaching assistants from the other schools had been only quickly signed in that morning. Five of them were asked to leave the room and, I learned later, fill out whatever extra forms they were supposed to.

But in that moment, we knew none of that and all we saw was five adults being marched out of the room. You know where this is going: I asked the pupils to just write me a story about why these adults had been taken out. I expect you also know that the pupils’ stories concluded that the adults had been very naughty and were now being told off.

And I could have applauded those adults: without being told what I’d done, they got it and all of them put on guilty faces for me when they came back.

I hope you’re okay with me bubbling away at you like this. In a quite tough week, this was sunshine and exhilarating and besides, there’s a scary bit left.

The afternoon session in a school, at least the ones I’ve visited, is a single unbroken run of about two hours. That’s a tough one to fill, I find, but again I have an exercise and it always works, always takes the whole two hours, always results in some great stories being written. I believe so, anyway, I believe it works well.

What I know for sure is that it takes two hours. On Tuesday, not so much. Lunch was longer than I thought — I’d just written the wrong times I think — but also the pupils from other schools who’d travelled to this one will of course have to get back. This is always the case, my two-hour plan always fully recognises this, but it was more so this time because of the weather. Much more so.

So with a longer lunch and an earlier finish to accommodate these other schools, I didn’t get two hours. I got one.

Knowing this was happening, I walked into that room after lunch still not knowing whether I could swap out this exercise for something else, or try to run it faster.

But I couldn’t think of a decent alternative. So, wow, did I run it faster. I chopped the whole first hour down to twenty minutes and then sped up the ending too.

I think it worked. As I stood there with pupils wanting me to read their stories and even pose with them for photos, I felt that it had worked. I never know. But I thought it worked.

I thought so enough that look at me: days later I am still full of myself. That’s a little foolish of me because of course no adult from outside the school is ever left unsupervised, is ever left alone to run a class. While I was prattling away and thinking I’m clever for not doing exactly the same show I do every other time, the staff of the school were run ragged. In the middle of juggling what for them was chaos, in the middle of not being able to get on with all they were usually supposed to, they still made it fantastically easy for me.

It’s like I told them. I show up, cause a ruckus, and then get to spend the next day recovering — while they go right back in again and again.

And like I told you, it is a privilege.

Surely the plural of belief should be believes. Anyway. It is not worth your time clicking to check this out, but in Self Distract two weeks ago, I mentioned how I have no religion, no faith, and not one pixel of me is spiritual, yet I have certain beliefs. Believes.

It came up because one of them is the, to me, irrefutable, idea that any writing, any communication, is one to one. One writer talking to one reader. Regardless of how many others are in the room, this is me writing specifically to you.

But since it came up, I’d like to tell you the rest of these fortunately few intractable beliefs. Believes.

And they are just these:

• We are better together.

• The show comes first.

That’s it. Those two and the one above about writing to you are the things I hold intractable, unassailable. I also find them self-evident, like all the best beliefs, but maybe that last one needs a bit of evidence.

So here’s the thing. Whether it’s an actual show or it’s some event, some project, if I commit to it, that show comes first. Whatever it needs to work is what I will do, and I say that with a noble square jaw, but there are also times when it’s been inconvenient to me and others, when it’s been a problem. And when it’s annoyed people, including me.

I believe in this to the extent — and this has happened, I’ve done this — that if I come to think that the show will be better without me then I fire myself. If it’s better without you, I fire you — although admittedly that’s harder.

It’s also easier when it’s my show, my project, because then I just commission whoever I know is better. I’m surprised how easy I find that, but my focus is on the whole show rather than any particular bit that’s visibly down to me. But I have also fired myself out of other people’s shows, and one time it angered them.

I’ve forgotten all of the details that I shouldn’t tell you anyway, but this show was an actual show, it was an extra at the Birmingham Rep. It was a series of readings of stories and poems that was vaguely aligned to whatever the main show was, but it was also scheduled to run in the theatre’s lobby.

It was only going to be something like thirty minutes, maybe twenty, but the lobby is important and the main show is crucial. Because the audience for this extra was to be whoever was there for the main show.

And I stood there on the night with the producer of this extra show, and I think now something like seven or eight writers who she’d asked to read. We’re coming up to the start, she’s giving us last-minute directions like what the order is going to be. And maybe I’m bothered that the running order hasn’t been thought of sooner, I’m worrying about the overall shape of the show and whether it builds to something or just stutters along.

But then I’m thinking of how long my piece is, how long it sounds like some of the others are.

There is not one pixel of a chance that we can all read.

The audience isn’t there for us, they are there for the main show and that main show is not going to wait because we overrun. I can’t remember the maths now after many years, but just based on what I was learning in the moment, I figured there was a small chance that this extra show could work in the time available — if something like a six-minute reading were dropped.

My reading was something like six minutes.

You know what happened next, both because of how I’m telling you but also because it’s so obvious. I pulled out. Of course I did.

But the producer was pissed at me for it. I wasn’t even theoretically ruining a careful running order and there was no place that my name had been listed as being in the show.

I got a bit pissed back, I’m afraid. I realise it looked like I was taking over, and I suppose I was to an extent, but I told her I was puling out, I told her why, and I solely told her. I wanted to drop someone else too, to be certain the show would be done, but she was the producer, I wasn’t, and all I could do was what I did.

I was the one losing out on a show I’d written and rehearsed a piece for, my action was the sole thing being done by anyone to get that show done before its audience walked away, but she was pissed at me for it. If she ever ran another show, she never found out that I’d have refused to be in it.

I’m afraid I can’t remember now whether her extra show came in on time. But possibly because I had tickets for the main show.

Anyway. That all just came back to me now, writing to you.

I’ve always been like this, but over the years there has been a change. It’s only this, though: I’m now much more careful about what I commit to. I have to think it’s worth it, of course, but also I’ve no interest in starting things that I suspect for any reason won’t finish or won’t work. I wouldn’t now commit to that producer for anything after what happened at the Rep, for instance.

I don’t mind things going wrong or new information changing things, but if I suspect that the project isn’t serious or people aren’t interested in completing it, I’ll thank them and lament how I’m just too gosh-darn busy.

I’m not saying they should be bothered, but these are the things that drive me and I wanted to share that with you.

I’ll keep a fourth belief to myself, but I’ll tell you it concerns chocolate.

If you want to skip this, I’ll understand. There’s a lot of me that wants to just move past this week, even though I’m only going to dance around the edges of it.

But at least I can start with this. Just now I was cooking in our kitchen and I decided to listen to music simply to stop me thinking. Let me be lost for a moment, with the only things in my head being songs and piecing the lid in several places.

If you have an Apple Music subscription, you can say simply “Siri, play something I’ll like,” so I did that.

The first thing, the very first thing, it decided to play was Kim Wilde and “Kids in America.”

Honestly, it was triggering. I couldn’t take it and I stabbed at the skip button.

So instead it jumped to Captain Sensible and “Glad It’s All Over”.

Stab.

Culture Club. “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?”

Apparently yes.

Anyway.

Before all of this, I wanted to write to you about what I thought — and still think — was a particularly fine piece of writing. As it turns out, as well done as it was, it achieved fuck all. But solely as a piece of writing, it was smart and I admired it and if I were wrong that I thought it would help, well, two out of three.

It was in “Saturday Night Live” last weekend. It was to do with the insanity, the absolute insanity that there are men — and now apparently also women — who believe that husbands can, should, must, do, dictate how their wives vote.

Of all the things. So many things. That fact was just a bowling ball in my head, blocking out anything else and leaving me walking down the street raging in silent conversation with the men of America. Sorry, I misspoke: the tossers of America.

I routinely have dialogue in my head and I often write it down to get it out of me, and in this case all that stopped me was that I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how to write the ferocious anger in any way that was useful. In any way that was healthy. Sod healthy, I’d just want to be useful, I just needed to do something. And I failed at that.

But SNL didn’t. Or so I thought.

There I was realising that everything I could do, every single thing I could even try to write, would be as crap as mansplaining. It was all such surface-level obvious, it was so obvious that it was impossible I would say anything that everyone didn’t already know. Certainly every single American I’ve ever met would know. Every woman, everywhere. Okay, so as it turns out, a profoundly terrifying number of other Americans don’t. But then I could’ve written brilliantly and those people would not listen.

It’s not like I really thought I could do anything, even as I was so sure that I didn’t need to, that we would get the right result. But the amount of energy I expended on this would power a village.

And yet SNL conveyed it all, I thought, with one single word. The right word, which I would never have thought of.

It was during the sketch where the real Kamela Harris made what now seems to be her last public appearance, but don’t let me think about that. Let me think about how with everything I thought about this topic and of women putting up with it, SNL just said this:

“Girl.”

Maya Rudolph, in character as Harris, just looked at the camera and said “Girl.”

And you got it. You got it all. What are you doing being with this tosser, girl? Are you going to let men do this to you? Everything. In a single word. Single syllable, although dragged out a little for emphasis.

The right word by SNL’s writers, delivered right by Rudolph, it was all just right.

And then that’s the direction America went in.

So on Monday, the new expansion to my 58keys YouTube channel starts with the first of at least six weekly writing workshop videos. I say at least six because I made half a dozen of them and will remake the ones I’ve thrown away.

And based on previous evidence, like four unbroken years of scripted videos every Wednesday, I’m going to continue much further than six weeks. Especially since I lost track of possible topics after existing viewers had suggested more than 100 of them.

But.

I’ve had to write these workshops in such a way as to make it possible for me to make them without feeling like a fraud. Not to mention a prat. I can point to thirty years — thirty years — of being a full-time, freelance writer but I can’t point to a good reason why you should listen to me rather than anyone else. It’s chiefly imposter syndrome, which I believed I’d surmounted by accepting that I am an imposter, let’s just ditch any doubt, but also my certainty that if I know something, I know you know it too. I know you know it already.

So I can entirely truthfully say that it never occurred to me to do these new 58keys Writing Workshop videos. It occurred to Steve Donoghue instead. We’ve talked a couple of times on his YouTube books channel — oh, get us, YouTubers talking to YouTubers, it’s either a cliché or meta — and he kept telling me off for not doing it.

I believe you have to hear something three times before it really registers and we went way behind that. But there was Steve in my ear and the reasonable certainty a few weeks ago that my 58keys channel would hit 10,000 subscribers. It has now, but even a few weeks ago I was confident that it eventually would, so I started this whole new project.

And fine, I am excited by it, I do like what I’ve made so far, but you’re here for the way I say I wrote around imposter syndrome. Please know that this took me a ludicrous number of weeks. But every workshop video has begun, will begin, will always have to begin with my saying a line that includes this:

“I’ll tell you how I write something, and then I need you to disagree with me in the comments.”

There. I may be talking my mouth off about writing, but in my head, I’ve just canceled that out and made this about you and me instead of about me and my deigning to dispense wisdom.

You and me. Maybe there is really is something I’ve learned about writing, because while I have no religion and no faith, I have certain intractable beliefs. One is that while my highest readership ever was a reach of three million people a week in Radio Times, writing is only and always one writer talking to one reader.

Hello.

I’ve kept thinking that AI will not replace writers, but I was forgetting that the people who buy AI might. This week, for instance, ITV advertised for an executive who will be in charge of using generative AI to create content for film and TV.

If you’re thinking of applying, go for it. You’ll need to be able to type a line into ChatGPT every few weeks and probably ask it to also do you a PowerPoint presentation. I’m guessing at that last, but for the money they’re offering, you’ve surely got to do something.

Or possibly not.

The way AI works is that the last eleventy-billion people who have written the word “Merry” have followed it with the word “Christmas”. So if you write “Merry,” prepare to be shell-shocked over what exciting, original and profoundly artistic thing it proposes you do next. And yes, actually, my Mac did just suggest the word “Christmas” as I typed.

Apple, though. That’s another thing. It’s a thing which might have made me feel vindicated in my belief that AI will just become another tool we use. A thing that might have reassured me that no one would hire a typist and pay OpenAI a fee instead of a writer and a production company.

It’s that next week Apple is finally launching its Apple Intelligence, albeit only in the States. And what is great about it is that it is going to be totally boring. By design.

Where every other company is telling ITV, and anyone else willing to listen, that their AI will create hit dramas with the click of a button, Apple isn’t. Apple is very specifically placing this AI stuff inside its regular tools instead of flogging you a separate wondrous app.

I mean, it’s still trying to flog you iPhones, but.

In Apple’s case, you have to have written something before you can get AI to help in some way. Some way such as having AI make your text more friendly, more professional, or more concise. (The moment I heard that, I asked if you could push a button and make the text more threatening. And apparently now, yes, you can.)

I’ll never use any of that, I possibly won’t even use its AI grammar tools any more than I already pay attention to wavy red underlines, but the point is to have AI assist what you’re, not pretend to replace you.

Next week, Apple Intelligence will come out and it will be slammed. Does nothing. Ditchwater dull. But while ITV is off trying to tell OpenAI in court that no, the artificial intelligence software that created a hit TV show does not in fact have any ownership in it, Apple users will get on with writing.

If Apple can really provide us with tools that help, that will be nice. If other firms like Microsoft and Google copy Apple yet again, that will be fine.

But if Apple can make us bored of AI, that’s a result.

Now excuse me, please, I’m off to apply for a job at ITV.

Which pays £95,000 per annum.

My 58keys YouTube series is expanding from November to have a second weekly episode, this time purely about writing. And as it’s going to begin with a piece about writing news stories, I’ve been particularly self-conscious about headlines I’ve been wring recently. So as I write this to you, my most recent news headline was supposed to read:

“UK reconsiders USB-C mandate like anyone gives a shit”

AppleInsider.com rejected that and I think you can see why.

It’s too long.

But quite separately, I was writing that when it struck me how revealing technology is of people. In this case, the people in government, but maybe others. Maybe also Russell Brand, but I’ll get to him.

That USB-C story is that the new Labour government is reconsidering whether to follow Europe and require smartphone manufacturers to all use this particular charging standard. Just over a year ago, the previous Tory government said no, Britain will not do this.

Now, that was a small example of what the Tories were doing for at least the last few years: they were trying to look as if they were taking action on something, but they were choosing things that didn’t matter so that they wouldn’t actually have to do anything. In this case, I think they went too small because you just unthinkingly charge your phone with the cable that came with it, but it was definitely safe.

It was safe because Europe had already forced the change on manufacturers and as a result of that, they all use USB-C and they all already use it everywhere. Including the UK.

So even as technology nonsense goes, that was small fry for the Tories, that was a casual, throwaway, whatever instead of a Britain Standing Tall kind of thing. It wasn’t like the lies over how no country could make the Google/Apple COVID app technology work, for instance, when at the time Britain could have had the complete source code for that app for the price of clicking a link.

No, this was so small that if you knew or cared what USB-C was, you knew the heads of Samsung, Apple and Google were not punching the air with excitement that they could carry on using their old charging cables in the UK. And it was so small that if you didn’t know or care, you didn’t know and you didn’t care, plus you were never going to be bothered to check.

That was then. That was the Tories. Flash forward to this week and Labour has announced that it is consulting with manufacturers over whether the UK should follow the EU’s move. Nothing has changed, Britain still has no possibility of affecting anything, and there is no question but that if it doesn’t follow Europe, it will only be because all of the manufacturers already have.

But.

I’ve not been particularly on board with the criticisms of Labour since it got into power. I figure that the UK will not be fixed like a light switch, it is going to take time and at least some of that time is going to be rough.

Only, here Labour is putting time and effort into something so completely pointless. The very best, the very most generous thing I can think of is that it’s part of stitching back together the UK and the EU. If so, it’s a fantastically small part.

And consequently, the technology nonsense finally made me dispirited over Labour. It’s not like I want to go back, though.

Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed the UK doing this, maybe I wouldn’t have thought of any of this if it hadn’t happened in the same week that Russell Brand also did some technology bollocks. But it did. Brand has started selling amulets that protect you from Wi-Fi signals.

You’ve perhaps seen this, but whether you have or not, you certainly know instantaneously that this pendant-sized amulet does not protect anything. To actually be shielded from Wi-Fi, if you believe you need to be, you’d basically have to wear a space suit. An amulet is like wearing a badge saying I Buy Crap.

I’m reminded of how you used to see rubber strips hanging off the back of cars, the ones with a lightning symbol on them. It was bollocks that this protected cars and passengers from actual lightning bolts, but surely they can’t have cost more than a couple of pounds at the absolute outside.

Brand’s amulet is £188.

I’m not a fan of Russell Brand, which is not the most surprising thing I’ve ever said, but it was the amulet that made it impossible to conceive of imagining of even the concept of a plan that he has been misrepresented. There is no more possibility that he believes this amulet works than the UK has the slightest influence over USB-C chargers.

So in both cases, technology uncovers pretence. Something that we just use every day — or Brand would hope we would — is revealing of the people talking about it. Technology is a tool that shows us something of its users.

Quite possibly including me.