There’s that thing in computing where you’re not multitasking, you’re actually task-switching. You’re just doing it so fast that it looks like you are doing two things at the same time. I am task-switching over the US Presidential election. I had a very good time this week with the debate, but I cannot shake that I had a very bad time with the last one, so I know as well as you that things can change radically and also radically quickly. Plus when there is anyone in the US, anyone at all, who will vote for Donald Trump, there isn’t any sense in the world and there is no certainty.

You’re expecting a “But” now, because you’re a reader, you’ve easily worked out where this is all canted, and I’m not about to fail you, yet I am wary, I am so very wary, of casually saying “but” and following it with something I appear to say is of equal weight.

That’s where the BBC, otherwise somewhere I am profoundly proud to have worked, gives me the odd stab in the heart. False equivalency, where the truth on one side is treated as equally as bollocks on the right is.

So let me say “But”, but let me also say that I know full well that what is on my mind is trivial.

But it is on my mind.

If you can put aside the stakes, I am shocked by how dramatic the US Presidential race is now. I don’t necessarily mean good dramatic, either, I’m thinking more bad US TV of the 1970s and 1980s.

Let me also say that there are US TV shows of the 1970s and 1980s that are extraordinary — I owe my entire career as a writer to the inspiration of “Lou Grant” (CBS 1977-1982). But I think you know the type of show I mean when I say bad US TV of the era.

It’s where there is a hero and he is a shining god. (It is always a man, too. Watch “Police Woman” now [NBC 1974-1978] and it is shocking how much of the stories are carried by all the male characters ostensibly there as support for Sergeant Pepper Anderson.)

It’s where there is a villain, too, and today we know that villains believe they are good, that they are right, but screw that, here they’re just the baddies. It’s not that they have no redeeming qualities, although they don’t. It isn’t that they lack depth and layers, although they do. They are just out and out villains. Practically cartoon bad guys.

Tell me that Donald Trump isn’t exactly that. Precisely that.

And then tell me that Kamala Harris isn’t a hero. When she was made Vice President, I assumed she’d become President but then she seemed to vanish for four years. She’s come out so strongly now, but as a UK resident I’m not someone who will be affected by her policies so I don’t really care what those are. I should care more that I know quite little about Kamala Harris, but at this remove, at this distance across the Atlantic, I can look at her and just want a hero to beat the bad guy.

I do especially cherish that a racist misogynist is being hammered by a black woman. I do think that is wonderful. I do think that is what I would want to write if I were writing the downfall of such a foul man. And I did feel absurdly proud when Harris strode over to Trump on the debate stage and introduced herself by name. How she strode into his space, how she threw him off balance immediately, and how by telling him her name she did a dozen different things including mocking his childish mispronouncing of it.

I’m not wavering from how much I liked what she did there, but if it had been the other way around, it wouldn’t have felt so good. We know this because stepping into the other person’s space is what Trump did in his debate with Hilary Clinton and it was abhorrent. In bad 1970s and 1980s US TV we are expected to be on the hero’s side and so often when you look back now, the hero isn’t just wrong, he’s offensive. (I am still thinking of KITT, the talking car in “Knight Rider”, pinching a woman’s backside.)

Context is everything, true, and in this situation with Harris, in this situation with Trump, she walks into his space and I like her for it. I wouldn’t have written that moment, because I’m not clever enough to have thought of it.

Proud, though. That’s a weird one. Enjoyed, fine. Delighted in, sure. But proud. I think I felt in that moment that Harris was representing all of us and representing us well.

But maybe it was that she representing me and us as an audience. It felt like we were watching a performance, which we were. It felt like we were watching something — in that opening moment at least — that was written and rehearsed, and we were.

It felt as if the debate and the whole Presidential was a show.

And it isn’t.

The stakes are too high for me to enjoy anything for more than an instant before I task-switch into worrying about November 5. The stakes are so very high that intellectually I can see how this all functions as a piece of drama, but I can’t allow myself to relish it the way I would in a film or a book.

But, oh, this week was a sweet moment to be on the left.

I did a webinar earlier this week and I was a bit shit. Can’t pretend I wasn’t prepared, can’t pretend I didn’t know my subject, certainly can’t fault the audience because they were as great a group as they ever are. But nonetheless, shit.

There was one specific thing, but I don’t say that to mean it was the reason I was crap, I mean it as the only thing I can point to as definitely wrong. Well, no, okay, I also had a technical problem but I’ve never cared about those before, I don’t believe it especially threw me this time or ever. I even like problems because I enjoy coming in fully prepared yet totally, even keenly willing to throw all of the preparation away and do something else.

The specific thing was that I opened by going straight into the subject, no introduction. I don’t believe I need an introduction about me since it’s the topic that matters and if I’m talking bollocks then the fact I’ve told you that I’ve been doing it for years is not exactly a help. Plus I knew all of these people, I like all of them, and besides, I was given a gloriously funny introduction by one of them.

But still, I said hello, I think I said a funny thing, and then we were deep into it. The subject was Scrivener, a word processor — and I’ve just given you a clearer introduction to the topic than I did that night. Unquestionably, I assumed everyone knew what it was and that wasn’t an entirely awful assumption, since they’d each elected to join the webinar knowing only what the topic was. Nevertheless, some people had only heard the name and were curious. Others knew it better than me — which was a true boon and I think they were the reason the webinar worked at all.

Clearly there’s nothing I can do now to fix that webinar, and it kills me that a video of it was made for people in the group who couldn’t attend and so may even now being wondering what I’m going on about.

But if I think it’s right to admit I was shit, and if I also think it’s absolutely right to be thinking about it in the detail I am, I have also realised that there might be something here that speaks to who I am as a person.

Deep down, I assume that if I know something, so do you. If I’ve just found it out, you knew it years ago. And yet at exactly the same time, I am incapable of stopping myself rushing up to you like a puppy to tell you what I’ve just found, what I’ve just learned.

I can’t reconcile those two sides and if I like the presumption that you know already and yet I also like how tail-waggingly keen I get, still I think the two together mean I’m a bit of an eejit.

That isn’t a problem. I’m used to that. But being a shit eejit, that’s hard.

I went in to this last week thinking very practically and actually literally about hardware — about what I needed bring with me to write while I was away looking after a family member. But I’m coming out of the week thinking instead about software, about mental software, and how these past days are making me reassess how I do anything.

I’m not going to say that lessons have been learned, but I’m at least looking at the new curriculum.

All that happened, all that I was expecting, was that instead of being in my office, I would be in this other place. With certain exceptions that were just physically not possible, I was to be doing exactly the same work as normal.

Hence all the hardware. I spent time thinking about microphones, for instance, and a peculiar two-factor authentication issue that means remembering to bring some gear that I’d only need for about one minute. In the end, I decided there was no possibility of recording anything, and I forgot one key part of that one-minute gear.

I also forgot how slow the internet was going to be here. Every week I produce two versions of a new “58keys” YouTube video and it takes me, well, I’m going to guess 10 minutes to upload. I don’t really know because it’s quick, I don’t have to know, I just push the buttons and get on with something else.

It took me more than 15 hours to upload this week’s videos. Since YouTube has this thing where it might simply stall and never finish uploading — you just have to start a new upload and hope — it was a tense half a day watching that percentage upload struggle up hill.

So in that case, the new location and the new situation meant having to radically change my schedule for those videos. I’m glad that I could, I am deeply relieved that I happened to finish the edit and begin uploading when I did, but if I were to continue here, I’d have to revise when I produce the videos at all. I don’t know how I’d record them, though. And live videos would be impossible.

But I think it’s the different schedule in other senses that has me pondering more. While I do most of our cooking, for example, here I’ve been doing it all and — weirdly for me — doing it at pretty regular times. Usually eating takes second place to whatever else we’re doing, but here it was a thing by itself.

Then I admit that in my own place, sometimes I am so tired that I don’t even notice going to bed, it’s just suddenly the next morning and I am fractionally less exhausted. Most of the time, though, going to bed feels like another failure, another day ticking by without my getting enough done.

Here the bedtime was rigid and far too early for me. But then lately I’ve been getting lazy at home and a consequence of a required early night has been a consistent getting up to work at 06:00. I’ve got quite a lot done in those first hours before other commitments kick in.

Intellectually I knew that everyone’s schedule is different, but perhaps I didn’t intellectually realise that we all think our routines are the normal ones. The moment I’m back home, I’m going immediately into my own, old schedule — possibly literally, since as I write this there’s a problem that means I may need to produce a podcast at midnight.

I will embrace my “right” schedule and be so glad to be back in it, but I’m also going to re-examine it all. I think I’ll try to do evening meals at a set time instead of anywhere in a two- or even three-hour window, for instance. I’m going to prepare more work in advance, as if I’m going to hit the ludicrously slow internet problem, but also to see if that frees me up from the day to day rushing. A bit of planning, I can see it helping a lot.

What I’ve learned is that I lurch from week to week, and actually what I’ve learnt is that I haven’t been appreciating that enough in any sense. My world has been a lot smaller for a week and I wonder if it isn’t always smaller than it could be, that it should be.

So about three years ago now, I had COVID and while I’m sure others had it far worse than I did, I had it bad enough. For about ten days I couldn’t really move, couldn’t fully think, I felt like I was this tiny little presence in a body that didn’t want me moving around. And in a more practical side, I was also necessarily turning down work because there was no possibility that I was capable of doing it. Given that if I’m not working I am entirely clueless what to do with myself, it was not the happiest of times.

During which, the Alexandra Theatre here in Birmingham emailed, asking me to write a couple of articles for a programme. I think the total word count was under 1,500 words and the deadline was a good two weeks away at least, but, as I say, being able to put whole sentences together was a childhood memory and for now, I seriously doubted my ability to complete entire words.

Only.

The programme was for Fame. Finally, I could write down what I’ve always thought and quite often bored people with: the fact that Fame is really about failure, or at least it the original film is. I mean, there was also that I knew and liked the woman asking me to do it, I would ordinarily have been delighted and I still was, I just couldn’t spell the word. I think a strong factor in my saying yes was that I wasn’t able to put the letters o and n beside each other in the right order.

I wrote that article about the history of Fame on film, tv, stage, tv again, film again, and then stage again. And I also wrote one about this specific production. It was the Alex’s annual Stage Experience, where the whole cast and as many of the crew as possible are amateur and entirely new to theatre. It’s a thing where you learn to be part of something and to jointly make something bigger than all of you. It’s a deeply impressive production and they do it every year.

I don’t know how they do it, but then I also don’t know how I wrote 1,500 words.

But last night I was back at the Alex for the Stage Experience gala performance of its newest production, The Sound of Music. I wrote the programme again, or at least a lot of it. And I’m very pleased to have done that, I’m actually pleased with what I wrote — hang on, I imagine I can show you a bit of it. Here’s how my feature on the history and legacy of The Sound of Music begins:

You’re thinking of Julie Andrews on a hill, some cute kids saying hello and goodbye, and maybe that some day you should Google what “edelweiss” means. “The Sound of Music” is such a familiar show — and yet if every one of us knows it well, very few are aware of just what a complex, layered and sometimes even controversial musical it really is.

I like the edelweiss gag.

But I particularly like this. Right there in this year’s programme is a reprint of the same article I wrote for Fame back in COVIDland.

And it works.

Normally I don’t like something I’ve written twenty minutes ago — don’t even ask me about this, about my writing to you right now or I’ll ask for the chance to write it better.

But I liked rereading that article. True, I think it’s that Stage Experience is so good rather than my article about it being so, but nonetheless, there were words of mine on the page and I liked them.

Then later on there was someone sitting near me in the theatre, reading those words of mine in the programme, and that felt pretty special.

She didn’t have to drip ice cream over it, though.

For as long as you’ve known me, I’ve been obsessed to the point of, well, obsession, about time. Separately, I have also taken every opportunity to insist that thrillers and romances are exactly the same genre.

That’s not an opportunity that comes up very often, not unless you contort conversations in that direction. And I have.

But here I am, with a love of thrillers, a love of romances, an obsession with time, and all of this for all of my life — and it was only last night that I realised these are not three different things. They’re not even two different things.

I was re-watching “The Bourne Identity” by Tony Gilroy, rebelliously loosely based on Robert Ludlum’s novel. Hopefully without spoiling a very good film, I want to say that there is a moment where you are supposed to believe a certain character is in a certain place. It isn’t overblown, isn’t a gigantic deal, but effort is made to make you think it is this particular character.

It works. I mean, I believe you’re fooled — I’ve now seen this film so many times that I can’t remember what I first thought — but I also mean that if it had been the character you thought, it works. That character, at that point, with this about to happen to him, the whole film has correctly delivered him to this essential point.

Even the time it’s just taken you to read this is far longer than the moment in the film. But you’ve gathered that it’s not the character you’re supposed to believe, it’s a different one — yet it still works.

It works in a different way, but again it’s ultimately that this character at this point, about to have this thing happen to him, he has been delivered here and we have been delivered to this point right alongside him.

Seriously, he’s walking down the street and I’m thinking buggersticks, another reason that thrillers and romances are the same is that they are both about time.

There’s the time in the sense of the two hours of the movie, what it does to get characters where they go. There’s time in the sense of the storytelling and pace.

But there’s also the intricacy that I think you associate with time stories. I don’t care about time machines, I’ve no interest in a TARDIS, but I am besotted with characters being caught up in events and situations that are different depending on when you look. That depend on which direction you’re facing, or the temporal equivalent of that.

The temporal equivalent of that. There’s a phrase. There’s an overblown phrase.

All stories move their characters through situations, all of them are paced by the writer as well as having pace in the story.

So I started by merely believing for my entire life that romances and thrillers are the same thing — look, short version, they share tension and they tend to revolve around one key moment of will they, won’t they. In a thriller, it’s will they or won’t they survive, whereas in a romance, it’s exactly the same.

But now my profound realisation is that all stories are really all about time.

I’d rather my profound realisations be less than so fantastically obvious, but otherwise I have no problem with this.

Except that the battery on my iPad is about to die any second now and somehow this seems to me to be rather approp

I’m tempted to start this thought at the end, partly because it fits the topic that’s on my mind, but also because I just generally get irritated by people telling me to begin at the beginning. So let’s do it.

I just re-watched “Marathon Man” and first-time-watched the opening episode to a serial called “Perpetual Grace, Ltd,” by Steven Conrad & Bruce Terris. What matters for what follows is that the show opens with a man being persuaded to con two old people out of their money. We see how he’s talked into it — the old couple stole that money anyway — and we learn how he’s going to work his way into their home to pull off the con.

And then away off we go, into the con, into the story. There’s much more to come, there are many twists, but here’s the thing. The laying out of the con is at the start of the filmed and aired version of the pilot, it is not in the start of the script.

I think it’s rare to prefer the second version of something you like. For instance, The Princess Bride — by William Goldman, who also wrote Marathon Man and I re-read both scripts this week — is a marvel of a novel to me because I read it before seeing the film, and consequently the film is fine. Whereas film-first friends think the movie is a marvel and the book is fine. You can’t help some people.

But what I’m saying is there is maybe I preferred the script just because that’s what I knew first. I hadn’t heard of the show, I came in totally cold, I just read the next script I could find online. And I’ll tell you that it was late at night when I was reading it, I found it all a bit slow but then by perhaps 20 pages in, grief, I was hooked. I was hooked by how well it turned on a moment, how we went from utterly believing the con man’s story to realising something is wrong.

All of that is on the page, is in the script. None of it is in the aired version where, instead, we know it’s a con from the start.

I’m not going to tell you that I’ve been thinking about this for a week, because you’d hear me. But among the many things I keep coming back to is that bit I just said of finding it slow at the start. Maybe there wasn’t enough to keep people watching if it took a considerable time to get to the reveal of the con, or at least to the reveal of a suspicion that there is one. Maybe this story needed to have its core pulled forward, I don’t know.

But then — hopefully not to spoil anything — Marathon Man, the film, also pushed something back, it delayed something, and this time I think both versions work. There’s a character who turns out to be bad. In the script, we learn this very quickly and the tension is over when will the good guy lead figure it out.

In the finished film, the scene revealing this is gone. I think the decision was that there is enough left to make you doubt, but not to be so sure, and therefore the moment when the good guy lead learns it can be bigger. We can feel something more of the betrayal, so it feels like a character moment as much as a spy film plot reversal.

Marathon Man is paced better than Perpetual Grace, Ltd, I think. Later in the Perpetual pilot, someone is killed and we’re supposed to think we know who it is, but it isn’t. On the page, that was a big moment, but on screen, it felt as if we barely registered there’d been a death before we learned the truth of who had died. Plus there is a peculiar thing in the aired pilot where a character’s face is quite elaborately hidden for several minutes, and it’s the reveal that the actor is Ben Kingsley that takes us smashing into the title sequence.

Over and over, I think about that. I think initial shots showing that character only obscured, in shadow, or backlit, do all ultimately give us an idea that he’s stronger than we are otherwise led to believe. But other than that, the punch out into titles seems like it solely works if you know Ben Kingsley.

So maybe this show’s timing just didn’t work all round.

But it’s left me circling the issue. I think the core idea at the heart of this show so far, the business of the con, is extremely well done on the page. I wonder if when it came to later drafts and the aired version, the makers were just so keen on it that they wanted to get to the idea faster. I know that temptation, I know from having a moment or a character that I’m obsessed with and want to get you to meet them as fast as I can. I know, too, that I have a habit of racing on to the next idea and the next.

There’s that thing Douglas Adams said about how to make a great script, you just a single really good idea — followed by a thousand other really good ideas.

I’m too keen on racing ahead and it means that I fail to milk all of the drama out of an idea. I think the Perpetual Grace, Ltd, script may have been slow and so the aired version may have been done this way to fix that.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid I also know this. By the end of the script, I wanted to know more. By the end of the aired episode, I’m not so fussed.

So there’s a drama series I enjoyed recently, but when I got to read the script of the first episode, it was profoundly irritating. The only time I’ve had that before was with the script to Jodie Whittaker’s first Doctor Who, and there I’m convinced the problem was that the version available was one edited after broadcast. It was more concerned with timings than text, so sometimes punctuation was a fond childhood memory and lines that worked when spoken by the cast, read instead like puzzles.

In this case, the script to this other recent show was instead an early draft. It had a different title and many of the scenes were different. It’s tempting to say that they were rougher in the script and more polished on screen, because they probably were, but also scripted scenes that weren’t filmed always seem weaker if you saw the show first.

By the way, this isn’t one of those articles where the headline says something dramatic about a show and then makes you wait five paragraphs before naming it. I’m not naming it. As irritating a read as it was, it still got made and therefore is better than I would’ve written it.

But, grief, it was irritating. So irritating that after it, I re-read the pilot script to Poker Face because that’s very good and I wanted something to enjoy, but also because there is one specific thing it does that this other show did. I wanted to see how it was done in Poker Face because I didn’t remember, it was somehow right.

I re-read the sequence. And it was right.

Both shows play about with time in that they, broadly, show us something and then go back to a point before it. In this Other Show, it was for effect. In Poker Face, it’s like Columbo+. On the first go through, we see the murder and the events leading up to it. Then we’re back toward the start but following the story of our lead character as she becomes involved with perhaps the victim, perhaps the murderer. It’s a way of adding another layer of context and often tragedy.

Plus it means although we don’t see her any sooner than we see Lt Columbo (Peter Falk) n his series, Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) is not an impartial outsider coming in after the fact. She’s embroiled in it.

The key thing is this bit of going back in time and it’s about how you tell the audience that this has happened. Given that the first audience is the people who read the script, it becomes how do you say on the page that this has happened.

In the Other Series, the script sets a scene and actually asks us “When?” Before saying “Well, we’ll be wondering exactly that as we…” And it cuts to another scene.

Later: “And just like that — WE ARE CAUGHT UP TO THE TOP OF OUR STORY.”

Here’s how it’s written in the script to Poker Face by Ryan Johnson.

We’ll have plenty of time and cues over the next few scenes to
recognize her and realize we’ve flashed back in time, no need to get it immediately.

That’s it. Just telling us straight, no fuss, no capital letters.

Like I said, both shows got made. And surely this is all personal taste since the two writers of the Other Show just really, really like peppering the script with what I’d call unnecessary detail and I imagine they’d call setting a tone. (“Oh, that’s interesting,” goes one stage direction. Not particularly.)

A script is not meant to be read by the audience, it is a blueprint for the final show. But Poker Face is a better read on the page, I feel, because it gets on with things. The tone is in the story and the dialogue, the life is in the characters rather than the stage directions.

It’s only as I wrote that last paragraph that I realise this, for me, ties me back to when Alan Plater told me that my stage directions made him laugh, but now I need to get that into the dialogue instead.

I think we can say, then, that whether or not I’m able to implement it, I did learn the lesson.

I do not expect to be remembered when I’ve left a room and I cannot conceive that you would read something just because it had my name on it. But earlier this week, an ad agency used that name of mine to boost its Google SEO ratings because I am apparently that much of a draw.

Well, okay, this much of a draw: the company stole the names of maybe two dozen writers better known than I am. It put them against articles that were nicked from other websites but given a once-over by AI to make them sound worse. Each of us got a bio and a photograph, again seemingly both generated by AI.

I’m a little twitchy that the bio for me made me sound the single most boring man in the land and so AI can be uncannily accurate sometimes. But the face it gave me. Gormless. Bewildered.

Okay, yes, very funny, stop that. But the man in the photo was also young. You’ve run out of smart remarks now, haven’t you?

So have I, really. I was a bit shaken by it all. I thought about asking the Writers’ Guild for advice, but I said I was only this much of a draw: everyone else was far more significant in their field, and seemingly far louder. I think it might have been a timezone thing, too, as they were yelling legals about this before I even woke up.

But at some point quite quickly, “William Gallagher” was renamed to something generic and the problem, or at least that problem, was gone.

I get why it bothered me so much but I also don’t get why it bothered me so much. I have that whole thing about not being remembered, so I don’t see why an alternative version of me would matter.

I rather like not mattering. I’ve produced an event that’s running this Monday night and I was trying to explain to one of the people fronting it that I enjoy both having made it happen and not being seen to have made it happen. She knows, the rest of the gang knows, the star of the event knows, but I’ll be at the back of the room along with attendees who have no reason to imagine I had anything to do with it.

Someone once described me as wanting to be an invisible writer, that I wanted the work to be centre stage and anything about me just is just a blockage in the way. I relished and cherished that.

So please explain. I believe I am an invisible writer who doesn’t make any impact in a room and quite happily does not matter at events — yet I’m telling you about the event, I’m shaking at being impersonated online, I have an entire bloody YouTube channel with my face on it, and I write to you every week while never once asking how you are.