I worked in a school yesterday as a visiting author. I do this a few times a year and it is of course an utter privilege to be asked. But this one was unusual.

Instead of meeting writers from half a dozen schools, I was working only with pupils from one. Instead of a whole day with the same group, I had three separate sessions, and instead of a primary school, it was a secondary one. Plus the three sessions had to be like a greatest hits of the kinds of workshops I’ve done before. One was to be about scriptwriting, one about journalism, and then the last one, that was the most unusual.

While it’s easily ten years since I’ve done this one, I was booked for that last session expressly to do a workshop about writing a Doctor Who play in an hour.

But of the twenty pupils, one knew the show well, one didn’t like it, and the rest had not one thin clue what this was about. One of them thought it was to do with Doctor Doolittle.

Now, okay, scratch that idea, do something else, and we ended up spending 90 minutes writing an absurd play about either killer clowns or killer cows, depending on your preference. The Doctor wasn’t even in it.

It went well and I like when I have to change things, but the fact that Doctor Who is totally absent from this audience mostly shocked me. I can’t say it totally did because I had a concern going in, even if I didn’t know why. But still, here is this massive show, this beacon of British television, here is this series that at its best I think is unequalled, and they didn’t know it.

You’re thinking that’s because school-age pupils don’t watch television any more, and you’re right of course, but there were quoting films like Ratatouille.

Doctor Who has run for sixty-odd years yet it can be as if it never existed.

I think everything we do is fleeting, which is not a reason to give up on it all, but sometimes the sheer scope of what fleets away gives me pause.

I’m sure you can’t be interested in how I have a dispute with Deliveroo, but I think there’s actually a writing aspect to this.

Follow. All that’s happened is that Deliveroo failed to, well, deliver back in January. After plenty of promises of responses within 48 hours, here we are six or seven weeks later with the firm still refusing to refund our money. It’s a legal requirement that they refund us: the company is already in breach of the Consumer Rights Act 2015, and this is another example of that.

Okay, so naturally I’m not going to let it go. But if Deliveroo’s PR team has any kind of decent web crawler and picks this up, let me look them straight in the eye. Alongside the fact that what you’re doing is illegal, Deliveroo, the total guarantee that I will never drop this is also down to how you wrote some of your responses. Many times now, you’ve ended the refusal to return our money with variations on the line “We hope we can look forward to your custom again in future.”

I feel this is unlikely. But you will certainly be speaking to me, again, and quite soon, quite often. Until you refund our money.

Are they gone?

Good, let’s back to you and me here. Because I’ve got to tell you this. At one point, presumably stuck for something new to say, they also claimed to have escalated my whole £16.53 case to their global team. They wanted us to know they had taken this very seriously, that it had all been fed back to their teams, and while they regrettably cannot return the money that belongs to us, that they would use this to improve their service going forward.

I know you’re thinking that they should improve their service going backwards a few weeks, but it suddenly sounds to me like they’re going to spend my money on a pizza for the team.

Hope they don’t use Deliveroo.

Something I’ve realised that I’m good at — I think, anyway — is getting characters’ voices. When I wrote Big Finish Doctor Who stories for instance, the Doctor is always the Doctor, but Peter Davison’s Fifth speaks and acts very differently to Colin Baker’s Sixth. I found it very easy to do the two.

After reading hundreds of Deep Space Nine scripts, I can talk to you like I’m a Klingon. I do not expect this to come up often.

Nor, really, is any of it useful outside of writing. It can actually be embarrassing: in the last year I have picked up and simply cannot shake a verbal tic from “Astrid: Murder in Paris”. The title character keeps saying “ah” in a tight, truncated way and now, apparently, so do I. She also gesticulates with her fingers and while I’ve always been a gesticulator, I’ve seen me doing it too. Mind you, it also exercises fingers that have just spent 12 hours typing, so maybe that one is okay.

But I can’t get ex-Prince Andrew. I also can’t hold in my head his new name, so ex-P will have to do and I will revise this if he ever becomes Prisoner 4642 at his brother’s pleasure. Yesterday when he was arrested was easily the first time I’ve ever followed any royal news other than his interview with Emily Maitlis back in 2019. Michael Sheen got him in “A Very Royal Scandal” by Jeremy Brock from the book by Maitlis, and so did Rufus Sewell in “Scoop” by Peter Moffat from the book by Sam McAlister, both in 2024.

It’s not that I want to be able to talk like ex-P and no one, including me, wants to do an impression. Yet how someone speaks says a lot about how they think. And I’d like to understand how ex-P thinks, I’d like to think about what it was like for him being arrested and held all day yesterday.

Unless your characters are all really yourself — you can argue that Aaron Sorkin’s are and he seems to have done okay — then you need to be able to write ones who see the world in a different way. You have to be able to write ones you don’t like. And if they’re not to be straw men or women, you have to inhabit that mindset, you have to at least briefly, or possibly hopefully briefly, believe that these characters are right. Because they believe they are.

I don’t get the impression that ex-P is big on introspection but he will unquestionably believe he is in the right. I want to know how it feels to be arrested and held when you are certain you’re right. I want to know if there comes a point when you crack and start thinking maybe you were wrong. I want to know what that moment feels like.

And with this guy, I can’t think myself into his position. It is a failing in me as a writer, I realise.

But then even as I’ve been saying this to you and my mind has been so into the dramatic responsibility to write characters, I am of course also acutely aware that I’m talking absolute shite altogether. Here I am, thinking about dialogue, thinking about ex-P, and therefore not thinking of the victims.

That appalls me because it means I’m like so many other people. So much attention on ex-P, on Mandelson, on Epstein. So little thought for the women. Actually, so little thought that Department of Justice is only concentrating on protecting the rich men involved, or at least protecting one of them.

I can’t get ex-P. But apparently in this focusing away from the women involved, I can too easily get the same mindset as every other man.

I need tea.

ER is now on Netflix in the UK and like anyone else, I ran first to watch season 5, episode 1, “Day for Knight” by Lydia Woodward.

The thing is, until I saw that smash to titles and heard that theme there on episode 92 of the show, I had forgotten that ER is absurdly linked to my own career. Not that Woodward or any other writer on the series would know this, but I do, except that I’d forgotten.

There’s a decent argument that I owe my work on Radio Times to ER. Or at least to my work on the Radio Times website. Because either at the application stage or possibly during the interview, I was required to critique any other online TV guide and it was so easy. For, as I pointed out to Radio Times, Sky’s website let you search for shows but, for some unfathomable reason, at the time required you to type in at least three letters. I said this was a problem, since Sky’s most popular and so presumably most searched-for series then was ER.

I got the job.

But as is the way of what any chronology would call messy, if it could be bothered to call it anything, this was happening when I was also pursuing work at BBC Ceefax. I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying just typing “BBC Ceefax” and “Radio Times” like this. Well, I can, but you’d be bored at my gushing. Instead, let me just say “anyway” and get on to “Day for Knight”.

Anyway.

I’m doing all these things I do at RadioTimes.com but at the same time I was writing TV reviews for BBC Ceefax in BBC Television Centre. And I think you see where this is going. Yes, “Day for Knight” was one of the very first reviews I wrote.

Now, I’m minded of how the sports team at BBC Radio WM were very proud of the row of tape reels they had that featured their radio commentary on famous sporting events. I’m afraid I looked at it as a set of recordings of someone watching something. It was like saying something was a show because you had a Gogglebox recording of someone watching it.

In the same way, I see that my having reviewed a show is of course meaningless next to the show itself. The job, as I saw and still see it, is to help people find something good to watch. That’s a reviewer’s sole purpose and their sole reason for getting to do it is that they have seen the show first. Screenings, preview tapes, whatever. They’ve seen it so you can get an idea of whether it might be worth your time.

“Day for Knight” was absolutely worth your time, according to me, but a reason for remembering it so vividly — after forgetting it for decades — is that the received opinion at the time disagreed with me.

Nobody complained that I was wrong, I wasn’t remotely significant enough for anyone to bother or really even notice. But at the time, the overall consensus about the episode was that it was less than the tremendous thing I thought then, and think now, it is.

But that criticism was for a really specific reason that has only become more prevalent in television drama. It was that the vocal fans didn’t like the episode. This is like the way you read online that Star TreK: Enterprise only got good in its later seasons, when the truth is that the only people writing about it are fans and by the end the show had given up trying to appeal to anyone else. It became a show that served its fans and that’s nice for them, I suppose, but to me it meant Enterprise stepped off a cliff.

And if the reason for criticism of “Day for Knight” was only that the ER fans didn’t like it, they didn’t like it for one specific reason. It happens to be the reason I most enjoyed the episode, so of course I remember it. “Day for Knight” is the introduction of Lucy Knight (Kellie Martin) and after 91 episodes, this one is seen from her point of view instead of the regular cast. The regulars are all there, but the episode is from Knight’s perspective and what I adore is that from that view, the regulars don’t look quite as great as usual. It’s fantastic: you’re seeing familiar characters from a different angle and I loved it.

I’d rather love something than hate it, so what I’ve taken from that moment is that your enjoyment of anything includes the baggage you bring to it. Sometimes there’s more baggage on you than there is anything in the show.

And I did not realise until this moment that what I’m actually talking to you about is Bad Bunny and all the bollocks around his half-time Super Bowl show. There isn’t any — not any — criticism of his performance that doesn’t tell you more about the critic than the show. I suppose you can argue that the praise for his show also reveals something of the critic, but that one I’m okay with because they’re celebrating something well done and also they are not talking bullshit.

Later today I’m going to be on BBC Radio Berkshire recommending some TV shows to binge on. It’s from my background at Radio Times and writing TV history pieces, and I’ve now done it quite often. It means I have the radio on most of the afternoon, it’s a good station, everything’s great, except sometimes finding a show to recommend is surprisingly hard.

This week, not to oversell this at all, I’m recommending a drama that more than 30 years ago tried teaching me a lesson that I didn’t learn until right now. It’s “Northern Exposure”, a 1990s series that has recently come to Amazon Prime. (Just an aside: I would not know this if it weren’t for Catherine Fowles, who I don’t know. But Lydia Parker was on Facebook asking for recommendations and as I rushed to say “Nobody Wants This.” — the full stop is important — Fowles said about “Northern Exposure” now being on streaming. Thank you very much.)

Last night I watched some of it again, and if you know the series at all, you might even guess which episode I went for. That’s right, it was “Burning Down the House” by Robin Green, otherwise known as season 3, episode 14.

You don’t look like you’re quite certain yet. So let me tell you that it’s the cow flinging episode. It’s the episode where artist and local radio DJ “Chris in the Morning” sets out to build an enormous catapult and fling a cow through the air.

Now, if you don’t know, I will not tell you what happens. I realise I’m not really telling you anything — I may have been specific about an episode title, but I haven’t told you what the show is about and I’ve only named one character out of the reasonably large ensemble.

Because I want to focus on the cow flinging. There is such a lot in this 50-minute episode and while it’s all related, it’s a subtle relation. Each part, it seems to me, is about change and moving on, and it’s about the art of the moment, and very definitely about the reaching for something being more than the getting.

“It’s not the thing you fling, it’s the fling itself,” says Chris in the Morning.

Thirty-odd years ago, I was moved by that episode. Last night, I was moved again. Yet there was a difference that comes from the gap in between. I resent looking back, I rarely think of the current moment, and I’ve always been afraid of the future and specifically of not achieving what I so want to.

That’s all still true for me, but also, listening to that line, feeling the themes of the episode, something changed. Maybe I’ll forget this tomorrow, but god I’ve had a great journey. Just because I feel as if I’m still only starting out, just because I hope there is so much ahead of me, it doesn’t mean I should forget the route to here. The route from a little boy wanting so much to write, and the route to this moment, right now, talking to you.

Swear to god, my arms are hurting this morning from clapping last night. I can’t count how often I’ve been to Symphony Hall in Birmingham, but I can count how many times I’ve clapped this long and this loud. Because it would be one. I can count to one.

Funny thing: usually after a few moments of clapping, I can’t hold the beat. I like to think I jazz it up, clapping on the harmonics, but really it’s just that I get knackered. And did last night, but carried on clapping, perfectly in time, clapping like were out to hurt each other. My arms were collateral damage.

I should say: I was clapping after Kazuki Yamada conducted the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Mahler’s first symphony.

Which means I feel I should also say that it’s startlingly rare for me to go to a classical concert and where everyone who listens to classical seems to be a passionate expert, I know I am missing out.

But I realised on the way home that like absolutely every single thing in my life, this is about time. I am a Mahler fan because of time.

Follow. There’s this amazing novel by Richard Matheson, Bid Time Return. Forget the plot, it sticks with me because it’s one that makes you feel as delirious as its main character is. One of those you have to read fast because it’s written as first-person narration, literally narration as the main character is talking into a tape recorder.

And you know the plot, at least vaguely: Bid Time Return was made into a film called Somewhere in Time. Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve star, while Matheson himself wrote the screenplay. The film is an extraordinary cult favourite: decades on, there is an annual convention at the hotel where it was filmed. Sometimes I completely get that, other times I find the film too saccharine: artificially sugary. You have to catch it on the right day.

Anyway. In the book — though not the film — the main character listens to Mahler. A lot. Simply because of that, I tried to do the same, and I liked it.

But rather than enthusing at you about this music, or at least as well as enthusing at you about it, let me also tell you this. The sole reason I remember my very first day as a freelancer, is Gustav Mahler and specifically his first and fifth symphonies. They remain my favourites, probably because I haven’t listened enough to the rest, but there are times when I find the music subtly depressing.

Such as January 1994 when I’m in my home office and now it’s up to me. I’ve been given a CD of Mahler’s first as a leaving present by the magazine I had been features editor on, and it seemed quite right to play it. Popped it on, and immediately the phone rang. I could have stopped the CD and I think now that I definitely should have done, but instead I turned it down and took the call.

And forgot the music was playing. I turned it down so much that I know it was audible but I wasn’t conscious of it playing. On a loop. For about ten hours. It took about eleven hours for me to realise why I was feeling so depressed.

So it was great music, a great leaving present, but a bad way to start freelancing. January 1994. I”m still a freelance writer. I think I’ll give it all a little longer, see how I like freelancing.

Maybe it’s just the time of year, maybe it’s the times we’re in now, but over the last few days, a couple of people have told me that they are quitting writing.

It’s never been easier to get your writing out to people, but it’s never been harder to get paid for it. So I understand and while it makes me ever more glad that the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain is fighting the fights it can, I can’t disagree with anyone who gives up.

Look, since it’s you, I will tell you straight: I regard myself as a pretty complete failure in writing because while I’ve achieved a lot that I’m proud of, not to mention startled by, but I have not managed certain things I set out to do. And not only am I aware that the clock is ticking, but also that in today’s market, they are now a lot less likely.

Yet I can’t stop. 

There’s a line in a “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” episode — I think by series creator Aaron Sorkin but I can’t find it to check — where a writer character says he has to work in Los Angeles, because “in any other part of the country I’m unemployable.”

I can edit video and I’ve been paid to do so, but if you’re a video editor then I guarantee that you’re better than I am. Same with audio. I suppose I’ve produced events. I seem to go down well on radio lately.

But I’m always a writer, even in video editing I am using the same mental muscles as writing. I’m hired as a writer and even if I’m booked as a producer, really I am a writer because really, I’m a writer. Can’t do anything else.

I appreciate that I’m fortunate — not lucky, never lucky, but definitely fortunate – to be able to keep earning enough from writing. You and I are not going to get into a discussion about whether my writing is any good, so stop that right now.

And I’m discussing anything with either of the people who’ve told me they’re quitting because it’s their decision. I know for me that what I need to do is write a day at a time and see what happens.

This is a more sombre start to the year than I was expecting. But I’m still glad to have shaken off 2025 and there’s always the midterms to look forward to.

You and I could have a quite dull debate about whether my writing is any good or not. It would definitely be dull because you’ve got your own writing to be thinking about and anyway mine is definitely getting better one pixel a year.

But what we couldn’t debate, I think, is the fact that for good or bad, I believe I can write anywhere. Certainly in newsrooms, back when those were the noisy places they should be, and certainly on trains, tapping away onto a phone.

I think I’d have said to you that I like how I can be divorced from my surroundings and concentrate on the work. I think that’s true, but that I do also enjoy the kind of environment that is not conducive to concentration or writing.

Only, I’ve been spending the last few days in a cottage. This morning, while everyone else was out exploring, I did a short radio appearance and then didn’t take my backside off a kitchen chair for a couple of hours. Total concentration.

In total silence.

It was the picture-perfect idealised version of what it means to write for a living, and damn if it wasn’t good. Previously I’ve opened windows and stuck my head out just to hear some traffic noises, but this time, this was peaceful.

Seems wrong, somehow. But in that cottage and a few months back in the already forgotten 2025, I wrote in Paris. I can’t say I wrote any better or worse in either place than back in my own office, but I think I may have written differently.

I have to go back.