Author: William Gallagher

Top Ten favourite scripts of 2022

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Previously on Self Distract… I’ve read scripts all my life and I love it, but since late December 2017, I’ve read at least one per day. Once a year I do a personal top ten for no very clear reason, although oddly it wasn’t until I wrote 2021’s list that I realised how thematically connected all ten were.

Anyway. Now, read on.

There’s obviously a week or two left of 2022 and I will continue to read a script every day, but up to this moment, I’ve read 515 during the year. That’s about typical, especially if I’ve been involved in any awards judging and I have again this year.

But otherwise, this has been an unusual year because – so far – 238 of the scripts I read were from the same show. Doctor Who. Chiefly the 1963-1989 version, though I’m only up to 1981, and some scattered reading of the revived series, scattered because I’ve already read those and usually was just going back to re-read good ones.

Speaking of good, as well as counting the scripts I read because that’s obviously vitally important to me for some reason, I do also make an extremely brief note next to each. Good. That word comes up a lot. Of the 238 Doctor Who scripts, a near majority were “good”, though there were some that were “a bit tedious”, others that were “fine” or “okay”.

Then there were five that I noted as being “very good” — and by coincidence, also five that I’ve listed as being “utter shite altogether”. Details on application.

None of the Doctor Who scripts made my personal top ten for the year, although Blink by Steven Moffat might’ve got in if it hadn’t been the fourth time I’d read it.

It’s not like my top 10 is significant, but then for completeness, it’s also definitely not in any way statistically valid. My top 10 for 2022, just for starters, contains only a single script that was actually written in 2022. The rest range across all of recorded history, making the list this year only because I happened to read them in 2022.

So don’t see this as judgement or pontification or anything remotely about me, other than how this is a way I can show you ten pieces of writing I think are brilliant – and include links out to nearly all of them. If you don’t happen to have read them already, I envy you having them ahead of you.

10. Justified: The I of the Storm by Dave Andron (read online on January 16)
9. Battlestar Galactica: Mini-Series by Ronald D. Moore (read part one, part two online on November 20 and 21)
8. Motherland: Pilot by Holly Walsh, Sharon Horgan, Graham Linehan, and Helen Linehan read online March 28)
7. My So-Called Life: Dancing in the Dark by Winnie Holzman (read online April 23)
6. Slow Horses: Failure’s Contagious by Will Smith (read December 6)
5. Lou Grant: Nazi by Robert Schlitt (read April 22)
4. Peggy for You by Alan Plater (read January 24, buy from Amazon)
3. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard (read July 10, buy from Amazon)
2. CODA by Sian Heder, based on La Famille Bélier by Victoria Bedos, Thomas Bidegain, Stanislas Carré de Malberg and Éric Lartigau (read online February 12)
1. Derry Girls: Season 3 Special: The Agreement by Lisa McGee (read September 29)

Peggy for You and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead are stage plays, CODA is a film, and the rest are TV. Thank you to Hat Trick for the Derry Girls script, and Apple TV+ for Slow Horses.

Thanks too, to Charles Martin who got me a lot of 1970s and 1980s Doctor Who scripts. .

And most especially to possibly my favourite site on the internet, TV Writing. Only 20 of this year’s scripts came from there, and I am astonished because it’s usually so many more.

I expect it will be in 2023.

Mental health, stat

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I’ve stopped counting something as of today, in fact as of just about when you’re reading this. Let me be clear, I count a lot of things and I’m unlikely to ever stop, except for this one.

Look, I’ve been told all this counting and measuring is quite a male thing to do, and I do definitely recognise that it’s easier to count things you’ve done than to do anything more. But usually it helps me, it helps when I don’t have any other sense of progress. I’d like a sense of improvement, but I settle for a count of progress, and usually I like it.

Even when I don’t, though, normally that’s not some great difficult problem for me. Such as this week, for instance, when I could count the number of failed holidays and it would be 1. (I’m supposed to be away this week, but between check-in and security at the airport, the flight was cancelled and consequently the ability to join a few days’ river cruise was ended.)

So that count of 1 isn’t great. But then since I’ve been supposed to be away, I’ve tried to be away and another number has actually taught me something. Since last Saturday morning, I have accrued 387 emails that I haven’t replied to. Also something like 30 that I have, just because I saw them come in and also they needed replies right away.

But even adding those in, that’s just 417 and what I’ve learned is that this is a lot fewer than I’d have expected. Which means that what I’ve really learned is that I generate a lot of emails in my regular work.

So counting is educational, sometimes, and sometimes it’s not very happy, like Failed Holiday: 1.

Normally, though, I like it a lot. I like that I can tell you I’ve read 505 scripts this year and written 7, not counting the 38 YouTube videos in my 58keys series that I’ve also scripted. I like that I can tell you I’ve read 33 books, watched 293 episodes of Doctor Who, done 1,455 jobs, sent 63 invoices, and been made 1 of the Writers’ Guild’s 2 Deputy Chairs. Plus 9 school visits, 7 BBC Radio appearances, 50 Self Distract blogs, 19 podcast or webinar guest appearances, and 25 workshops.

I like all that despite the fact that it’s meaningless. Now I’ve looked it up, I think that 1,455 jobs sounds scarily low, but otherwise there’s no target I’m aiming for with any of this and, most especially, I’m not trying to compare myself to anyone or anything.

But there is one thing I count that hurts. Today was the 1,307th day of my learning French through Duoloingo – and it is the last.

That’s no slight against Duolingo and obviously not against French. What it is, is a recognition that the number stabs me. Duolingo relentlessly tells you the number of days you’ve been using it, and it is a knife. It’s got so I either do Duolingo realy early in the morning to get it out of the way, or very, very late at night when I’ve run out of ways to postpone it.

Follow. I had what – to me – was a severe writing and career blow earlier this year. It was to do with a project that I began while in a hotel in Hull, the same night that I started Duolingo. I can still see me there in that room, downloading the app. And by chance the project was destroyed on precisely day 1,000 of my using Duolingo.

If it had been any other day, maybe I wouldn’t be quitting Duolingo now. But today that damn app was telling me that it’s been 307 days since it happened. And yesterday it told me it was 306. 305. 304. Every fucking day.

You can argue that I should get over myself and I cannot disagree. The project that died was a single 45-minute radio drama and you can argue that there are few smaller things in this world. Okay, there I might disagree a bit, I might throw in phrases like deathbed promise and lifetime writing ambition, but yes, I should long ago have forgotten it and moved on like an adult.

But I haven’t got over it and I am not an adult and if it’s no longer as paralysing as it was for the first few months, say days 1,000 to 1,175, then it is still colouring everything and I have got to shake this off.

Starting with killing this daily reminder of failure. I don’t know that it will help, but I am, naturally, counting on it.

Everywhere

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I was as startled as you by the death of Christine McVie, but I also didn’t notice that she left Fleetwood Mac for – hang on, checking again – about 15 years. Simply did not notice.

That’s pretty bad, even for a man. But she was with the band, then later she was with the band, and in between it seems they did bugger-all. I’m going to let myself off.

And instead remember that McVie grew up about six pixels away from where I am right now in Birmingham. And instead also remember that I only recently got into her 2017 album with Lindsey Buckingham, the imaginatively titled “Lindsey Buckingham Christine McVie” album. But I really got into it.

Plus there is this. It might be a running joke for anyone who has ever worked in a radio station, but I used to call out “they’re playing our song” whenever any one of about 11,000 tracks were played. Something like 11,000, or however many singles there were in the BHBN Hospital Radio library where I met my wife.

There were actually special ones in that library, though. I will forever remember having to carry a show on past time because the next presenter was running around the library trying to gather up their singles while I was playing out “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”.

I’ll also remember who faded out John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane” before the end and so wrecked the entire narrative structure of that song.

But maybe mostly, I’ll remember “Everywhere“. By Christine McVie.

It was released in November 1987 when I was 22 and initially it was in heavy rotation on every station because it was new and because it was good. Later it became a favourite for a reason I’m half proud of, half not.

There is a skill in talking up to the vocals on a song, to knowing just by sense and feel when the lyrics will start and so being able to speak up to that instant while making it sound like that’s just when you would’ve finished and shut up anyway.

It’s just not a skill that has any use outside of a radio station. Since I’d rather listen to the music than to a presenter, I’m not 100% convinced it has any use inside of a radio station either.

Nonetheless, you could either do it or not, and the fact that every single record in the library had a note of how many seconds the intro lasts, was no help.

Except in Everywhere, it got a little trickier and therefore — by some measure, anyway — more satisfying.

For although Everywhere has a 22-second intro, its then first lyric — the very soft “Calling out your name” — lasts for exactly 1 second and is followed by another 6 seconds before the vocals really get going. So you can talk up to the 22-second mark, you can say a huge amount up to there, take a one-second breath, then drop in a 6-second station ident.

Make even a one-second mistake and you crash the lyrics, it sounds awful. Granted, get it perfectly right and you’re still talking over an excellent song and so you sound awful.

But it was irresistible. The average speaking speed of a presenter is 3 words per second, so you could say 66 words up to the first lyric — even if you didn’t begin until you started the track. And you could then say 18 words in the gap, if you didn’t have a cart with a pre-recorded ident to hand.

Of all her accomplishments in writing, I suspect Christine McVie didn’t even know about this one.

Plus while I remembered all of this about the radio station, I did just have to go listen to Everywhere to check those timings. The memory of the radio work is faded, the music remains clear.

It is astounding to me that I can just listen to it now, to call up pretty much anything I want, certainly anything I’ve heard of, and listen immediately.

And listen without some prat like me firing off a jingle at 23 seconds into the track.

Balls

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Dear Diary, I am 57 years old and I have just watched a football match for the first time. “Dear William,” replies Diary, “you were eating chocolate cake at a Royal Television Society awards dinner while they played some match on screens that you didn’t look at. It doesn’t count.”

So it remains that my only experience of football is the first bit of a game at some ground where a team played another team and as I walked in, the entire crowd sensed my expertise and turned to me like a wall. As soon as I was done with whatever radio work I was doing, I turned away from them and escaped.

I do wonder if I’m missing out by having this total absence of sport. During that RTS dinner, a waitress standing behind me yelped – actually yelped – with excitement at whatever was happening on the screen. I asked her what I’d missed, she explained and I understood, I just didn’t feel it. I was excited meeting Ellie Simmonds at the dinner, but while I wouldn’t say this to her, I was thinking yeah, yeah, sport, amazing, now what about Strictly Come Dancing?

It’s possible I did say that.

It was not the longest conversation I’ve ever had, but it was work. My wife Angela Gallagher and I were tasked with briefing each of the presenters at the awards, which took six to ten seconds per person, then fetching them from their tables when they were needed to get ready. It was probably a total of twenty minutes spread out over the evening, but it was work and so it was bliss. A really gorgeous dinner, a really great crowd, and instead of sitting there at a table all evening, I got to run around the whole place in a tuxedo. Since I believe fervently that it is better to be crew than passenger, it was wonderful.

And I got to see Angela at work. I can’t explain this, but given a task, Angela switched from dinner guest to a kind of producer-mode. It was like a light switch had been thrown and seeing her in action, even on the same task I was doing right there with her, even in this smallest part we were of the event, it was fantastic.

It also wasn’t sport and when you and I started today, I’d intended to tell you a sports story in which I sound like an idiot. Let me see if I can turn that around at all.

Follow. It’s some time in the 1980s or 1990s, it’s a Saturday or possibly a Sunday, and I’m working at BBC Radio WM for a man who actually scared me but I can’t remember his name. It’s possible that I am not as scarred by this event as I thought. But at the time, as much as I love radio work, I would head for BBC Pebble Mill with a stone in my stomach, I was so afraid of all I had to do. Looking back, I think that’s close to laughable because I was as ever the smallest cog in something, but radio requires constant concentration, minute by minute and sometimes second by second focus, for hours.

Quick side story. At this time I was spending my week writing manuals for some corporation or other. And I remember the contrast used to tickle me. In their office, there would be discussions about how tight some deadline was, and that deadline would be four months away. At BBC Pebble Mill, the deadline would more typically be the length of time it takes to open a fader, to slide a control up and take a microphone live. Both deadlines were real, both entirely valid, but the contrast delighted me. Plus I remember standing with a woman who mentioned how it had been raining when we left the office the previous evening and to me, having then done a shift on an evening newspaper, then a breakfast show spell on a radio station and then a day writing manuals, the previous evening felt like a century ago.

Anyway. I’m just putting things off now.

On this particularly memorable Saturday or Sunday in the 1980s or 1990s, I was driving the desk for a sports show and for the first time, I was on my own. There was a lot of this sports stuff going on and so much so, all of it apparently so crucial that the presenter who scared me was out at one of the games or matches or whatever they’re called in whichever sport it was. Tell me I’m not detail-orientated.

That presenter was the producer and via talkback from whatever ground – that’s the word, ground – he was at, he was still producing, but I was the central small cog. My job was primarily to switch between that presenter here and this reporter there, to switch over to the news, I don’t know, lots of different sources and I was the one putting them to air. I love this work and I still think an old Mark III BBC Local Radio desk is a thing of wooden beauty.

All is going well. But then even though every possible presenter was out reporting live from every possible venue — maybe that’s the word — there was also other sport going on around the world and some of it was apparently significant. So another job I had was to tell this scary presenter what the latest results from them all were. This was before anything useful like the internet or mobile phones existed, there was then no way for this presenter to know any of these other results if I didn’t tell him over talkback.

And there was no way for me to know the results either, except that like every station and every newspaper, we had a TV with Ceefax on. I would later write for Ceefax and relish it, but right then it was just this thing that showed me sports results.

Including what turned out to be a world-record-breaking cricket score.

I must’ve read out more than a dozen scores down the line to the scary presenter and he would then casually slip them in to his on-air commentary as if he were hardwired into sport everywhere. He was scary, but I think he was very good, too. Until the time came when I read out this world-record-breaking score and he did not know what to do.

It was such a big score, I mean, it broke a world record. And he was hearing it from me. Only from me. You’re on his side now, or you certainly should be, because even I wouldn’t trust that I was reading a score correctly. On that day, whenever it was, BBC Radio WM became the very last place to report on a world record in cricket, and BBC Radio WM was the only place to say live on air that they didn’t trust the eejit back at the studio.

I was that eejit. And as it turned out, I was completely accurate and correct: I could not explain to you what the score meant, but I was reading it entirely correctly.

Yeah, no, even I was and still am on the side of that scary presenter in this one.

Next yearn

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I’d like some credit here for speed: I think there’s a decent chance that this is the first conversation you’ve had about 2023. Except it is more about 2022 and how, for me, that feels like it’s already over.

This is partly because I’m writing an episode of my little 58keys YouTube series that can only run in Christmas week, but also I’m doing a thing in December. It’s called a holiday and I’m sure you’ve read about these too, but for such a long time now, I’ve spoiled the first couple of days of a break, even or especially if that break is just a couple of days. I’ll have been working up to the last conceivable second, quite often beyond that, too, and the moment I’m clear of all the work, I get sick.

You know about this, too, though I hope not from experience. The adrenaline is spent, the momentum is gone, you’re clutching your stomach and examining porcelain close up, knowing you’re going to have to clean that next and that lasagne is not always the great idea it seemed.

So the plan is to not do that.

This seems like a plan.

But it entails scheduling the work better and, frankly, dropping a lot of it. I’ve got a little while yet but two weeks before this break, I will stop getting up at 05:00. I won’t take on any evening work that I haven’t already committed to. I will take time off in order to then take some time off.

Which could be okay, except for this. It means the year is over.

That’s a huge exaggeration, obviously, but it’s not very long until this Great Two Week Pause before the holiday, then there’s the couple of days away, and when I’m back it will be full-on late December. I am not going to get any new projects off the ground before the end of 2022.

It’s just hard to see another year go when I haven’t achieved anything. I did double the subscribers to that YouTube channel, and actually I write it each week so I have just been paid for something like 45 scripts this year. I did run a newsroom for a spell, did get to judge on a couple of awards, have become Deputy Chair of the Writers’ Guild once more, have read exactly ten times more scripts than I’ve written. And yesterday I unblocked a sink. So, you know, there’s that. I also saw The Pensioners from Fame in concert.

But I cannot seem to shake how this was the year I should have had a BBC Radio 4 play on. That one small thing, just 45 minutes, would have defined 2022 for me and instead the fact that legal problems destroyed it, that appears to have defined 2022 for me.

I have met a lot of people this year, surprisingly often through that 58keys series, and I cherish that. But I’ll be glad to step over into 2023 and do that year properly.

But first I’ll spend a ridiculous amount of time thinking about how the word “year” is so close to “yearn”.

Finding your real calling

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The moment I’ve hit Send on this to you, I am out the door and driving to a school. I go in to schools sometimes as a visiting author and the conceit is that I am there to talk about being a writer, sure, where the truth is I instead make ’em write. I have no intention of telling school pupils about me, chiefly because I already know all about me, I was there, I saw me do it, let’s write something brilliant together.

Only, there’s a small difference today in that the school I’m visiting is a secondary one and although it’s still a writing day, when you’re with people who are soon going to have to pick subjects and choose career paths, there is the question of whether you recommend writing as a career. I won’t discourage anyone wanting to write, but I won’t insist that it is anything other than the greatest job you can possibly have — if it’s right for you. And I will insist, on the slightest excuse, that being able to write is enormously useful regardless of the career you go into.

Be the footballer who also writes and you’ll be able to convey whatever it is that’s apparently so interesting about kicking a ball about. Plus that communication skill – look, you know this already, being able to communicate and convey helps anyone.

Only, I have this week discovered that I’m not supposed to be a writer.

To be fair, I’ve suspected it often and occasionally been told so by a reader.

But this week I got the email from LinkedIn. If you don’t happen to use LinkedIn or if you do happen to ignore its emails, what you may not be aware of is that it will tell you if someone has been searching for you on the service. It tells you specifically so that you will spend money to find out more, but even without doing that, you get some details. Plus it’s rather nice, to think someone out there you’ve probably never heard of, is looking for you.

I write that and it sounds ominous.

But you get the LinkedIn email and it has a subject heading like “You appeared in eight searches this week.” It is quite possible that I even preened.

Only, among the detail that you get, there is this. How they found you. Apparently in my case, none of the eight people sought me out by name, which is obviously fine, and not one of them considered me to be a writer or anything even vaguely approaching that. Instead, all eight found me by a keyword search, which is illuminating.

Because – truly – the words these people used to find me were: “food source”.

Funny, again it’s only when I write that down that it seems deeply ominous.

750

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Possibly I’m wrong here because you do seem more organised than I do, but I am pretty sure you have never counted how many conversations you’ve had with someone. And apparently I have, because it turns out that this is the 750th Self Distract blog I’ve written.

If you’re going to count something, I feel you may as well do it thoroughly so after some poking around, I can tell you something. Over the 749 Self Distract posts up to this one, I’ve written 587,160 words, including several good ones. I mean, I’ve written the word “myriad” and used it correctly 24 times.

Self Distract in any recognisable form started in February 2006, which is frankly another country. It didn’t become a weekly natter with you until after I left Radio Times in 2012 or so.

I’d like to say it’s been an unbroken weekly blather every Friday, but that’s not quite true. The result of the Brexit vote was announced on Friday, June 24, 2016, for instance, and I was too paralysed to move.

Then there was pretty much the whole of December 2017 when my website was broken. But apart from two total failures, then, it’s been every week for a decade, so an otherwise unbroken run of 521 Self Distracts.

Some 500 posts ago, I told myself I was writing this because I missed having the deadlines I did of a TV history column in Radio Times and a DVD review one in BBC Ceefax and BBC News Online. They all seemed to end at the same time and I do miss them, but really I was writing Self Distract to write to you and that’s done me a lot of good over the years.

Often it’s been the one quiet, still moment in my week. In bad weeks it’s been the one quiet refuge. It’s continually been a lagrange point, which is something I apparently first mentioned as being on my mind back in 2013.

Other times what I’ve written here has been indirectly responsible for my being commissioned to write various things. And once it was directly responsible for my being flown to California, where I got to meet a couple of my writing heroes.

But looking back over half a million words, I keep seeing times when I was trying to describe something that I didn’t understand. And the action of trying to describe it to you visibly helped me see what I meant, helped me see why I felt the way I did about something.

Self Distract is about writing, about what we write about, and what we write with when we get around to writing. It is inescapably a journal of what is on my mind, yet it’s not a diary. I am not writing it to me, I’m writing it to you, specifically you, and whether I’ve done that well or poorly, the focus has helped me. Thank you.

There is nothing good but remembering makes it so

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I think about this a lot. Maybe there isn’t any art that is good or bad by itself, it is made one or the other by whether we remember it. So for instance, YouTube just chucked a “20 Famous TV Themes” video at me and every single one was shite altogether, except for the five I remembered, which were were all masterpieces of musical construction.

And then I went to see a reunion concert from a group that with infinite regret must now be called the Pensioners from Fame. They put on a good show, they put on a good night, but last weekend I watched the recording and now it felt like they were constrained by the past. Songs written very quickly on a 1980s TV show’s schedule felt thinner than the 2022 concert treated them. Putting it back on a screen should have worked, but they became tunes to remind you of what they used to sound like, or what you were like when you first listened to them. They weren’t songs that stirred much more than memory.

Though to be fair, there were songs I didn’t know and they weren’t bad.

I stopped watching Fame when it went into first-run syndication. You’re looking at me now. For its first two seasons, it was on NBC network TV and was shot on film. Then NBC dropped it, but everywhere outside the US loved this show so much that they paid for it to continue, they just didn’t pay enough. So the last four seasons were shot on video and even all that time ago, the drop in image quality was too much for me. So there were songs at the reunion concert that I’d not heard before, and the cast included actors I hadn’t seen before.

So with them, I was freed from the memory and the associations that are forever locked to the songs I did know. Yet it still felt as if what was being celebrated at the reunion was a memory seen from so very far away.

Still, by chance I also recently got to write about Fame for the Birmingham Hippodrome’s theatre programme as they put on the stage version. I got to say that bit about NBC cancelling it and the BBC putting up some cash. I also got to say, which I so strongly believe, that the original film by Christopher Gore was far more about failure than fame and, incidentally, I still rate the movie’s music highly.

What I didn’t get to say because there wasn’t room, it wasn’t relevant to the piece and because I’m not entirely sure anyone would have believed, is what a writer of the TV show went on to do next. Ira Steven Behr went from the bright and cheery Fame to the bleakest but also the best of the Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine.

I have no idea why that pleases me so much.

The best writer in our price range

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This is exactly how I was introduced at an event last Saturday: “William Gallagher, the best writer who was available today and is in our price range.” It is a tremendous line, it got a laugh from the audience and from everybody I’ve told it to since, including you right now. And I think the reason it works, the reason it is funny is because of course it’s true.

If you’re producing an event, you want the best person you can get. And then inevitably, you have to settle for the best person you can get.

When that’s me, then I don’t care how many better people you asked first, I call it a win.

Normally, though, you don’t get people saying anything even remotely like “we wanted Phoebe Waller-Bridge but managed to find this guy in a bar ten minutes ago and figured he’ll do in a pinch.” No, typically you make me, or whoever, sound great because then at least your show doesn’t immediately seem like it settled for rubbish. Better to be seen to make a poor choice of guest than to admit you only had a poor choice.

So usually, I don’t get announced as being cheap and available. But even as that introduction last weekend said I was both of these things, it was also saying that I was I was welcome and that I was with friends. It said that they knew I’d be delighted by the line. That line and the laugh it gave me knocked the pre-event nerves out of my system, too. And at the same time, it completely conveyed to the audience the warm tone of the entire event.

By being frank, even as a joke, it was saying we’re all in this together and we all get it, we are all friends there. And in every sense, that set the stage.

That is a remarkable feat for one opening line.

I’d tell you now that it was said by poet Jonathan Davidson, except he was worried later that I’d not been okay with it, so I won’t tell you his name until I’m sure I’ve reassured him sufficiently. And until he’s far enough away to not hear when I tell you I am stealing that line for every event I can manage.

Ten seconds and one hundred years of the BBC

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Some time in the 1980s, I was working on the BBC Radio WM breakfast show and there must’ve been some news thing going on about Doctor Who. I can’t remember what it was, but I can very clearly picture me in what was called Area 3 at BBC Pebble Mill, working the phones – and at about 07:00 phoning Doctor Who writer Johnny Byrne to get his reaction.

His reaction was that he had been asleep and was extremely unhappy at me for waking him. And I think that actually ended the conversation we’d been slowly having through letters after I’d written to him enthusing about his script for The Keeper of Traken.

(Just as an aside, I finally got to read that Doctor Who script of his in August. This year. Specifically August 26, 2022, where episode 1 was the 335th script I’d read this year. And August 26 is 41 years, 6 months and 26 days after the show aired. It took me 15,182 days to get to read the script whose finished show I’d so enjoyed. And I have got to stop using WolframAlpha to tell me these things.)

Anyway.

On Tuesday this week, I was called up by BBC Radio Leicester and BBC CWR to talk about the 100 years of the BBC. I was better on the Leicester one, but what strikes me is that this BBC phone interview was at about 07:30. It was arranged in advance, plus I’d been up working for hours anyway, yet still I had this moment of quantum-entanglement-like connection with distant me phoning Johnny Bryne all those years ago.

And to me, the real answer about the best moments of the BBC’s 100 years, was in the moments before I went on air. I’m prepared, I believe I’m professional, and I like how I will have been listening to the show for an hour beforehand and so can pick up on related points. But when I’m on the line waiting, I can also feel the atmosphere that’s in the studio and in whatever their equivalent of Area 3 is.

You know when you work in local radio that it’s not national, it’s not global, and it is transitory. Yet you also feel that it is important, even if it’s only that it’s important to you. I got my lifetime belief that the show comes first from working in local radio, I got my whole sense of time as something to fill and use with pace and rhythm from it, to this day I think about the top and the bottom of the hour because of radio. I cared about that work so overwhelmingly much that there could be no other thought about no other thing while you were doing it.

In the seconds talking with a producer before she put me to air, in those ten seconds, I could hear the exact same care in her voice. I recognise what she’s asking me about is really her checking sound levels, listening for the line quality and being sure I’m not a nutter, I recognise the procedure but more than that, I recognise the atmosphere of the entire studio.

I can point out that today the BBC bows to political pressure like its being bullied in a schoolyard. I can despair at how it always reports strikes by focusing on disruption instead of the desperation that strikers have been driven to. And I could cry about the whole thing of artificial balance, where the BBC won’t have an economics expert say Brexit is going to be bad without then giving equal time and weight to a tosser lying that it will be great.

But those few seconds before I was on air talking about how great the BBC truly has been over the last century, those few seconds reminded me of exactly why the BBC truly has been great.

My contribution to the BBC is barely a single pixel in that century, but the BBC’s contribution to me is life changing.

It’s sobering to now be someone being phoned by BBC Local Radio instead of being one of the people doing the phoning. It’s sobering because I don’t know how that happened, it feels like I was just there making those calls a few days ago, and I think that maybe I miss the me from those years ago. Not sure. I don’t want to go back, but for a brief instant to be handed a slice of what used to be, and to somehow get to represent the whole BBC for one moment, was special.