Author: William Gallagher

Don’t tell

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There is a moment in the 2002 film Kissing Jessica Stein that I think is all the more exquisitely well done because it doesn’t happen.

Helen has placed a lonely hearts kind of ad in the newspaper — this was 2002, there were still newspapers — and has had a couple of phone calls in response to it. So we’ve got how it works, what’s supposed to happen, and we’ve also been set up for half a dozen other issues that will play out over the course of the film, but the kicker is how perfect the setup is that takes us to the point where Jessica phones Helen.

Except she doesn’t.

Or rather, she must do, but we never see it. We are delivered to this moment when the call is certain and then we’re with them on their date. Despite the eleventy billion people telling you that showing something is better than telling it, this film is better because it does not do that.

I wouldn’t know from watching the film, but apparently the budget was very low and very tight. So it’s possible that there just wasn’t time in the schedule to shoot that phone call. But I think it was the decision of writers Jennifer Westfeldt and Heather Juergensen. They also star as Jessica and Helen respectively.

I do have a thing against characters asking questions in drama, but I’ve not had a problem with showing things instead of telling them. But don’t tell. Don’t show, don’t tell, don’t ask. Not all the time, not when it isn’t necessary.

All of which seems obvious now I’ve written it down, I mean I can see you nodding, wondering when I’m going to get to a point you don’t already know or can’t already see.

But maybe what I’m thinking is that this phone call that we don’t see really works because of everything that leads up to it not happening, and everything that results from it. Much as I just singled out one tiny moment in a film, maybe you just cannot do that.

All of this is on my mind because I’ve just rewatched the film, and I’ve just rewatched it because I read that this year is its twentieth anniversary. There’s a lot being written and said about it, and I can’t decide whether I’m more startled that it’s two decades or that anyone but me knows it.

Kissing Jessica Stein is one of those films – or books, TV, radio, theatre – that intellectually you know has been seen by millions, but it feels like it’s only yours. I’ve never been in a gay relationship, never had the string of bad dates Jessica does, never lived in New York, yet a chiefly lesbian romcom set in Manhattan is mine.

I can see that I am drawn to yearning, I’ve spotted that in other favourites like Hearts & Bones, and I am definitely a romance fan. Even in a comedy, the stakes in a romance are so tall that I think all romances are secretly thrillers.

And some of them have great titles. I just don’t know why I think Kissing Jessica Stein is such a good title, I don’t know why that is what made me watch it on TV close to two decades ago, but I love that I did.

No show

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I have a thing for words and phrases that mean two things and preferably opposite ones. The famous example is the word “cleave”, which can mean to pull apart — and can mean to push together. Another is “sanction”, which can mean approve or can mean disapprove, as in the military action is sanctioned by the UN, but a country’s unsupported army attacks will see it facing sanctions.

Apparently there’s also personne, which in French means either a person, or nobody.

But my personal favourite is the word “through” and I think of it during every results show in Strictly Come Dancing. Following the dance-off part of the contest, the better couple is through to the next week. And the other is out of the competition. They are through.

There is one such term I don’t like, however, and it came up this week. No show.

Someone was a no show at a workshop I was running a few days ago, and because of that, I came within a pixel of being required to cancel the event.

I can’t detail the reasons why it came so close to cancellation, nor can I tell you why it was down to this person’s absence. But I can tell you that if the audience hadn’t already started to arrive, I have no doubt that we would have cancelled.

As it was, the decision was taken to carry on and I know that was better than cancelling, but I also know I didn’t do a great job. I was distracted by a problem that this person’s absence meant continued through the session and I don’t offer that as my excuse, I offer it as my fault.

You’re nice, so you’re now wondering if something stopped this person coming, if there were a problem. I am not wondering this because I wondered it the month before when she also was a no show but for various reasons it wasn’t remotely as much of a problem. You’re clever so you’re now wondering why I relied on her this month then, and I did have a fear going in that she might not show, the organisers and I did have that fear and we did have some possible solutions.

But the solutions were workarounds that in the end couldn’t work around it, and this person who didn’t show up and didn’t send a hint of an excuse, had insistently said beforehand that she’d be coming this time.

It’s not like I can imagine working for me is some great writing opportunity for anyone, but working on this particular series of workshops is. For me, too. It’s privilege to get to do it and while I know I won’t be asked forever, I also know that it will all have to be torn from my fingers when I do have to stop.

Maybe I’m projecting here, but I have a suspicion that both you and I let opportunities go. I suggest that in our case it’s because we don’t see them, or we don’t believe them, and I am adamant that in your case and mine, it won’t ever be because we commit to something and are then no shows.

Relax, don’t do it

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I have no clue what you do to relax but that’s fair enough, I don’t have the faintest notion what I do either. Yet for some reason, and who knows why, just lately I’ve been worrying about it. I’ve been conscious that I don’t know how to do this relaxing thing. What with one thing and another, it could be 5am when I start work, then 8pm before I sit down to dinner and I spend the rest of the evening wondering what to do.

I did fall asleep in the bath the other day.

I’m not interested in work/life balance, I don’t see them as two different things because everything I’ve been able to take everything I’ve ever enjoyed and make it be part of my work. Hmm. I am interested in how saying that 5am to 8pm bit sounds simultaneously like a boast and a whinge. Either way, it’s not good, so let me reassure you that the real problem is that I’m getting so little done in that time.

Although this is relaxing me, actually, writing to you right now. You’ve got a look in your eye and I’m warily wondering where you’re going to go with that, but talking like this is definitely relaxing.

Also reading, that’s good. I read a script every day and yesterday’s one was utter bliss. I can’t tell you what it was because I got it through a job I’m doing but it was an 45-minute TV script so, being a fast reader, for about half an hour I wasn’t in my office, I was in Derry in the 1990s.

Just thinking it through, that was also about the 11th hour I’d been in front of a screen yesterday. It’s startling how you can physically be in one place, physically using one Mac, and yet it feels like every hour is completely different. Scriptwriting, video editing, article writing, project management, watching a snippet of TV over a very fast lunch, audio editing, research, and countless conversations over email.

I say countless, the truth is that there isn’t that much, I just don’t count it.

Somehow I also don’t count it as work, nor as relaxation. Maybe I’ve got the wrong idea of what the word means. I might ponder that, although some fifteen years ago now, my therapist told me that I overthink things. To this day I wonder what she really meant.

Maybe I should just relax.

What I swear by

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If you’re going to swear in a drama, I think you should do it really early on in the episode. This is just a thought, obviously, but the only time I ever notice swearing is when it is in a drama and specifically when comes in late.

Well, there’s the famous scene in The Wire which has two detectives saying “fuck” in every possible connotation, expression and meaning, but after the first five or ten fucks you’re no longer watching detectives, you’re hearing the writer having a good time. And you do have to be a little conscious that Veronica Mars would’ve figured out the crime scene and be off again around an hour faster than these two.

I don’t tend to swear in real life and my problem with The Wire is not that it had swearing, it’s how the swearing in this specific scene broke the delicate little bubble that a drama lives in. There’s a moment in Star Trek: Picard where someone describes Jean-Luc Picard has having a fucking cheek, and it’s perfect. First swearing in 700-odd hours of Star Trek, and it’s perfect because she would say that, he did have a fucking cheek, it was actually a pinprick bursting a different kind of bubble and it’s possible that I may even have cheered. Certainly it helped me get into the story.

But although I remember that coming quite a bit into the episode, I also remember that it was one of the first things this particular character said. And I think that matters. To me, anyway.

There’s no special reason for why I don’t tend to swear, it’s not that I think I’m a family show or that I fear you’ll be shocked. I just don’t care about swearing and you wouldn’t, except it has caused problems. Countless times – okay, not very many but I definitely didn’t count them – a friend will, it seems to me, suddenly stop talking and apologise. It’s always because they’ve just sworn and they’ve somehow recognised that I don’t, but it’s also always, invariably, inescapably a mystery to me why they’re stopping.

If I had noticed the swearing, I wouldn’t care, but the reality is that I haven’t noticed. Now I sound like I don’t listen. But most of the time when people swear, it’s like small punctuation rather than some raging use of strong language. I am all for strong language, language should be strong, language is strong. So “Where did I leave my sodding keys,” just isn’t up there for strength.

Fine. That’s true in drama as well as real life, and my noticing Star Trek: Picard was less because it was the first swearword in – hang on, I can check this – yes, in 56 years of that show. It was more because it was right.

Only, I was watching a drama for work this week when, I think, about 15 minutes in, the lead character said “fuck”.

And it was not right. It jarred.

Apparently I can take it when an admiral curses at Starfleet Command in the 24th Century, but I can’t when a contemporary inner-city UK police officer does.

But it was wrong because, I think, it was said more for effect than anything else. There’s no way to know these things really, but I had such a strong sense that it was said explicitly to tell us that this was proper, grown-up drama.

And if you need to tell us that you’re proper, grown-up drama, well, you aren’t. Maybe that was really my problem here: this show that I am not naming felt like it was daytime drama. It didn’t seem as cheap as those have to be, but there was something, there was a patina that shouted daytime TV to me. It had this added patina of being contrived and somehow constrained, and it was also missing something.

It was missing the intangible something that makes you forget you’re watching a show and instead get into it.

Maybe if the show had been better I wouldn’t have been stopped and made to think all of this. As it was, more characters then swore at what felt like carefully negotiated intervals after that, and it was all too late. I had the sense every time from there to the end of the episode that when a character swore, what they really said was something like “Fuck that, look at me, I’m swearing, this isn’t daytime TV you know, this is great, be impressed”.

Children swear as they try to sound adult and you have the sense that they know the sound of the words, but not the meaning. That’s what I got here.

It’s not as if there can or should be a rule about anything, but I just wonder if I’d not have been so annoyingly knocked out of the story if the character had sworn at the start of the episode. I wonder if it would’ve helped us know her. And I’m quite sure that doing it this much later rather detached the swearing from the character and made it sound like an editorial decision, debated over by the writer and producer and director.

Obviously I can’t swear to that.

B-E-I-D…

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“You’re part of it now.”

The now late Shirley Rubinstein, wife of writer Alan Plater, said that to me ten years ago. My book with the long title, “BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair” was just coming out and Beiderbecke meant more to her than it did even to me. “The Beiderbecke Affair” is a 1980s ITV drama by Alan Plater and both he and Shirley have told me that it, plus its sequels, is really “Alan and Shirley having adventures”.

This is a case of maybe you’ve heard of “The Beiderbecke Affair” and maybe you haven’t. But it’s also a case where if you have heard of it, if you do know it, it’s something personal to you, you don’t think anyone else has heard of it. It isn’t six one-hour episodes that were a hit watched by millions, it is two characters, Trevor Chaplin and Average-Sized Mrs Swinburne, it is two friends of yours.

More than two, there’s Big Al and Little Norm as well. Later on there is the character with my favourite name in the entirety of television drama: “Peterson – the Man with No Name”.

Even this week, someone said that they thought they were the only person who knew this show. And for some years after the book came out, I would be contacted by Beiderbecke fans who thought exactly the same thing. One of them sent me a Google map with all of the show’s filming locations marked out and he seemed so pleased that I’d be as interested as he was in it.

Right from the first showing in 1985, “The Beiderbecke Affair” had this way of gluing you to it like a fan, but also cocooning you in the story, in the Beiderbecke world, like it was just you, Jill and Trevor, not millions of others.

Watch it now – a peculiarly edited version is on BritBox and they won’t tell me why they’ve cut the bits they have – and I think it’s still seductive. It’s a drama series in which nothing seems to happen, yet not because it’s a piece of Sunday night light fluff. I suppose it’s gentle, but again that’s now a pejorative word for me and brings to mind empty dramas where the baddies always get their comeuppance. Alan Plater wrote once that he preferred dramas to be about people being, living, not thrown into melodramatic situations. Beiderbecke is a slice of Jill and Trevor’s life, and it’s only by the end of six episodes that you really register just how very much has happened.

Six episodes. With ad breaks, that’s considerably less than six hours of television drama and I’m still writing about it 37 years later. Quite right too.

Shirley was obviously aware of the impact of the show, she’d had the fans and the letters. I’m proud of the fact that – although I’ve forgotten how this could possibly have come about – I am the reason Alan Plater got a fan letter from Chris Beiderbecke, grandson or later of the musician, Bix Beiderbecke.

When Shirley said I was part of it now, I felt so proud. I can see her saying it to me, holding a copy of the book.

“You’re part of it now,” she said. “Whenever anyone looks for The Beiderbecke Affair, whenever anyone even just Googles the word ‘Beiderbecke’, your book will come up.”

“If they can spell Beiderbecke,” I said.

The long and the short of it

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A friend is talking about giving up on a script because it’s telling a true story and there is just too much detail to get into it. Easy, I said.

It’s always easy when it’s someone else’s script.

But still, a story isn’t a document and if you want to convey truth, it’s better to make the audience feel than to brief them on every detail. I have believed this all my life: journalism is about the facts, drama is about the truth. The first half of that belief has taken a bit of denting lately, but I’m as sure about the latter as I am that I can’t stand those dramatic reenactment scenes that pad out some of the poorer documentaries.

I need more from dramatised true stories. I don’t mean I need added sensation and, this is a separate issue, I do mean that it’s amazing how bad the acting is in those documentary scenes. I’ve got to let that go.

Anyway.

The problem with a script that’s too long is that you cut it down. Sorted. Rather than just deleting every second page or something, just find the key part of the tale. Find the one part of the story that captures what you want, that conveys and communicates and connects with whatever jt is that made you so keen to tell this tale. That makes you want to tell this tale and not that one, that made you keen to spend at least hundreds of hours working on it.

It’s up to you to find that one line and I can’t help you because it’s your story, your connection. And besides, my current script is running too short.

In my case, I have this piece that I just look forward to writing each morning, to spend an hour in this world that is forming around me. It’s what I’ll be going to the moment you and I are done. Only, this script should come out to be an hour long and instead I’m eating up story like it’s chocolate. At the moment, I’m on 23 pages and I think it’s going to wrap up in about another 10.

Plus unfortunately the 10 includes two to three pages of necessary stuff that I require, that is fun, but the only place it can go is after the best point to end the script. I don’t know what to do about that, except that I do.

The friend with the script that’s too long and me with the one that’s too short, we still both have things we have to drop.

I won’t underestimate the difficulty my friend is having. I will underestimate the difficult I’m having. But still, even if neither of us is having it easy, even if actually neither of us has a producer waiting for this yet, even if both of us are writing for ourselves at the moment, this is all a nice problem to have.

As with any script, what I’m going back to writing in a moment and the other side of a mug of tea, may never get made. But I’m enjoying being in this world instead of our real one, and I can actually see how a previous script that was commissioned has taught me something I need for this one.

We get better by doing. I can’t see an alternative to that and I can see that it’s something I should apply to everything.

Critical analysis

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I got trolled a little bit this week and the only important point is to stress just how astoundingly tiny that little bit was. I mean, come on, I’m a middle-aged white man, I will never know from actual trolling. Not even when I’m English but just used that American construction, “never know from”.

This is entirely off the point, but there’s just something I like about that phrasing. Also the way Americans might say something “most every day.” Can’t figure out why that pleases me so. I do know, for instance, that I like the word “gotten” because there’s such rage about it in England over what’s seen as the bastardisation of the language — yet in truth the word is British English through and through. It’s just that America held on to it, kept using it, protected it, and somehow we in the UK forgot it ever existed.

Anyway.

I’m obviously thinking about this trolling since I’m here talking to you two days – no, wait, um, nope, can’t be sure: it’s either two or three days since it happened. Might be four: it’s been a long week.

I am perturbed that someone could use my personal email address, the one that I’ll give you if I haven’t already, yet which I never share publicly. But the actual insulting bit, no. Neither now when I am struggling to remember what he said nor in the very moment when I read it, at no point could I manage an entire shrug.

All that happened is that some fella decided to email me to say I am a terrible writer. Finally, I thought, someone who agrees with me.

Yet it was a shitty email in all sorts of senses and I didn’t keep it around to study, but I don’t think a team of linguistic experts would have been able to determine what precisely he didn’t like. I’m saying it was a man although I didn’t register the name, but you know it was a man.

He did specifically mention my blog, but that’s just screwy. This is my only blog, right here, and he definitely cannot have meant this because whether it’s written well or terribly, it’s not written to him, it’s written to you.

So I had a little bump in the road as I read it, trying to fathom what it was about. But if I cannot overstress how little this little bit of trolling was, I also cannot find the words to describe how briefly it was in front of me. I am a fast reader, it was a short email, I took it all in with one glance, registering that there was nothing useful there and blocking the sender before I could even finish thinking the word “tosser”.

Only…

This man decided to write to fill me in on my being a bad writer and it’s that act, that decision, that’s had me wondering. I’ve wondered before of course, whenever you hear of the foul things so many people get sent over social media, but this act of flinging out a quite petulant email put it all back in my head again.

There is not one single pixel of a chance that I would ever email a writer to say they are crap – note, not to say that I think they are, that I don’t happen to like their work, but that they actually are crap.

I wouldn’t do it because I’m pragmatic, I might need to work with them some day. I wouldn’t do it because I’m a professional writer and I know very well what you see on screen or read on paper goes through a hell of a journey to get there and we can never know what has happened on someone else’s journey. And I wouldn’t do it because, I hope, I’m a nice guy.

Yet even though I believe all of this to be true, in all practical honesty, these reasons may not be why I wouldn’t do it.

The real reason might be this: who has the time?

Look closer

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It’s just about forty years since I was a student living in Agard Street in Derby and for some reason this week, I went back there — in Google Maps. I want to say that Google Maps and Google Earth are a metaphor for our modern world, with their unimaginable brilliance in photographing every street in the world being marred only by Google’s unimaginably awful design.

But anyway, for some reason I looked up Agard Street this week and it turns out to be just about the perfect time to have done so. Take a look at what I saw first, please.

Agard Street, Derby

Actually what I really saw initially was way up the other end of the street but this was the point where I first recognised my old place. That building in the middle, it’s three small houses glued together and looking at it, I can picture maybe half the rooms inside. I can remember the party where I watched two men I’d never heard of standing in the back yard, drinking lager at the same time they were pissing into the drains. There was something about the flow of liquid in and out, much the same colour at either end, that made me fine with not knowing them.

But memory is faulty and so here’s Google Maps, showing me exactly how it really is. Until you look closer. Now, this is subtle, I don’t know that you’ll be able to spot the tiny difference that you get when you take one single click nearer to those buildings.

Agard Street, Derby

Told you, it’s a fine difference.

I’ve cropped in the images to just show you the house — or where the house used to be — but if you looked at this on Google Maps, you’d see that the two images were both taken in July 2022. House is there, house is gone. Same month. You’d have imagined the two shots would be taken seconds apart: this one spot in the whole city is not an obvious place for the map photographers to have packed it in for the day. And it’s not as if there’s a lot on Agard Street to distract them while my old house is demolished.

It’s also not as if I miss it. I can picture maybe five of the people I lived with, but I could name only two.

It is the startling surprise of destroying the place with a single click on Google Maps. It’s also the surprise of realising that this has just happened, that I have by chance chosen to look back only a couple of weeks after this part of my past was erased.

The entire world is just a click away, just a scroll away and at most just a desperate search for the right Google button away, too. The entire world is on the screen yet I choose to go where one photo has right now become a Before shot, while the very next is suddenly an After image.

You can imagine how I went wide-eyed as I made that last click to look closer at the house that isn’t there anymore. But I also felt it in my legs. I felt it the way you might when you’re standing on a building, the way there’s a sudden drop in front of you.

It was a house of no importance, no particularly special design, and not even what I’d say was all that significant to me. But still, I wish I could go touch its walls just once more.

Wrap up

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God help me, I’m about to make a metaphor. Anyway, earlier this month playwright Ken Armstrong wrote a blog about Yorkie bars, the UK chocolate that comes in what is meant to look really big and chunky. It isn’t, but compared to some other chocolate bars, okay. Part of his point was about the bar’s original TV adverts in the 1970s and how now it seems casually misogynistic, but also back then it was a big, fat lie about just how big and fat the purportedly chunky bar was.

I remember the ad, I remember how it hadn’t seemed as overtly misogynistic then, but also that the makers went on to label the bars childishly. I can’t remember the wording now, but it was something like a strapline saying the bar wasn’t for girls. Some bollocks like that.

But.

His blog has put me in mind of all the Yorkie bar’s rivals, and it’s this that I want to twist into an analogy for our present times.

All UK chocolate bars that have been continuously made since at least the 1970s, except the Yorkie, now come in really clever wrapping. Rather than tight around the chocolate, they are very loose and there has got to have been some serious thought put into how it doesn’t all just collapse in transit.

But that serious thought didn’t go into, I don’t know, the best practices for preventing chocolate going off in some way. The serious thought went solely into lying.

The job was to produce a wrapper that made the bar seem to be the size it used to be, until you’ve bought it, opened it, and found it’s shrunk. All chocolate bars are now smaller than they were, and probably more expensive even adjusting for inflation, and it’s a shame, but I’m okay with that.

I’m not okay with the wrapping. I can admire the process, it’s engineering and doubtlessly true effort went into consistently achieving the effect as you make literally millions of the things. But it’s the lying.

Whoever started this off knows what a chocolate bar is supposed to look like, so they go to all this effort to make it appear to be that even as it no longer is. The image, the perception, the lie.

These things are not chocolate bars any more, they are present-day politics. Recently, I had a Conservative MP come to my door saying she planned to unseat the local Labour candidate because there was no place in politics for all the corruption that was allegedly going on. I couldn’t help it, I laughed: a Tory saying she’d fight corruption is like a Republican saying guns are bad — and then also doing something about that.

But this MP at my door knew corruption was a bad thing. I’m not going to accuse her personally of any corruption, she may be a fine and upstanding human being. Although if she is, she ain’t going to get far in today’s Conservative party.

Every politician knows the truth and talks about the real issues, then either doesn’t do anything about them, or visibly profits from doing the opposite. The UK has this asinine thing where you can lie your teeth off to Parliament, but if you’re called a liar, I mean if that correct word is said, then that’s what’s seen as shocking and the person saying it is ejected from the room.

Tories and Republicans both have this history of being about business and standing on your own feet, and they both shout about it. Labour in the UK has this thing about being for the workers and it shouts about it. But Tories and Republicans can no longer actually do any business, in the UK they repeatedly do things like awarding shipping contracts to firms that have no ships. Labour should be cleaning up and riding on all the anti-Brexit sentiment here, but instead it’s just talking about how the government should do Brexit better.

Politics has always been short-term and that has always been an enormous failing of every political system. But right now we universally see politicians knowing what should be done, what is true and what is needed, and wrapping up their speeches and their bills in terms that suggest they’ll do it, yet never will.

And we have to swallow it.

Couched in the past

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I don’t know why I’m uncomfortable admitting any of this, but I am and yet I’m going to tell you anyway. Maybe it would help me if you keep in mind that this was thirty years ago and that like most people working for the BBC, I was less than well off at the time.

So far, so common, but while there was a long time when I lived in London, for a longer patch I was living in Birmingham and commuting. I’d go once or twice a week to London, I’d stay overnight there. Also keep in mind that the job meant working until about 11pm at BBC Ceefax and BBC News Online, then from 9am the next morning at Radio Times and BBC Worldwide.

I think you’re seeing where this is going. Or perhaps where it is staying.

There were hotels, although I’d get there around midnight having started out about 4am or 5am, so it was a case of two or three blinks before I’d have to get up again for work. London hotels are expensive, but they seem ever more so when you are in them for only a fraction longer than it takes to boil a kettle.

There was a BBC hotel, incidentally. The BBC World Service used to maintain a house where staff visiting London could stay. It was cheaper than paying for accommodation for producers and other staff from around the world, but there are fewer headlines to be made about fiscal responsibility than there are about private hotels, so it was closed down.

I can’t remember when it ended, but I do recall that at least a dozen times in the 1990s I would stay there. I’ve barely ever worked for the World Service but if there were a spare room, I definitely could book it at a greatly subsidised rate, I definitely was eligible because of being on staff at the BBC. Definitely. Sometimes it would take a bit of work persuading the reception desk security guard that this was true, which led to some wearily heart-stopping moments.

But wearily heart-stopping moments that were cheap. I can’t remember how cheap, I just remember what it felt like climbing seven flights of stairs at around midnight after a 4am start. It felt like bliss. Picture the cheapest place you’ve ever stayed and then downgrade it a few steps, except in cleanliness. The BBC’s hotel, and I just wish I could remember its name, was clean and bright and cheap and if the building creaked, I slept there too well to notice.

Even if the timings meant I’d turn on the room’s TV set and have to go back to work before the screen lit up.

And then there were the times that this hotel was full.

Or things were even tighter.

Then it’s time I started suggesting to you that this is enough, that I’ve shared enough.

Except, okay, there were many nights when I did absolutely and completely definitely stay at the BBC’s hotel, it’s just that the BBC didn’t know about it — and it was less a hotel, more BBC Television Centre. Or BBC Woodlands, where Radio Times and BBC Worldwide used to be based. Or BBC White City where BBC News Online was.

I remember working late at Woodlands, to sometime around 2am, and meeting one of the cleaners. It wasn’t as if she were a doctor in another country and now worked three cleaning jobs in London to support her family, but it was damn close. I can see me there, eyes like pinpricks I’m so tired, listening to this woman who is surely always infinitely more exhausted than I am.

I think that’s the night I found that there was a massage table in another office and that it was pretty good, if very narrow. Not sure why I didn’t use that more often. Conceivably I fell off.

If it were BBC News Online where I’d do all of this, then there was a particular server room I would go into. Grab some cushions off the office couch, line them up on the floor, and get into that room and lock the door before 10:45pm or you’d be caught by the security patrol. With dog.

Just once, I did get caught. Not in Woodlands or White City, but in BBC Television Centre.

There your best option was to find a disabled toilet — because those were much bigger, you could lie down — and probably on the fifth or sixth floors because the fewest people worked there late. Certainly it was the best option for when you would need the loo. Also TVC had a place called the Filling Station, where you could get food remarkably late into the evening.

Anyway, one night I was caught and I remember being escorted out of TVC by security, still half asleep. I’m guessing it was around 5am because I know I spent the rest of the night sleeping sitting up on the Circle Line, just going around and around until it was time to go to work.

As I say, I’m uncomfortable telling you this but actually its discomfort that has brought it all back. This week I’ve been so worn out from COVID that there have been moments I’ll grab ten minutes sleep on the couch and wake up sore and stiff. And for just one moment, I’d be back on the couch cushions at BBC White City, wondering if the canteen was open for breakfast yet.