Author: William Gallagher

So anyway…

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Previously on Self Distract… my BBC Radio 4 play died. I didn’t tell you much more than that, partly because I was trying to be brave – I know it didn’t look like it, but you should’ve seen me when the news broke – but also because I just can’t tell you very much at all.

Nonetheless, I’ve been emailed and messaged a lot about what I did say, which just convinces me all the more that you talk about you and me to everyone. As it turns out, too, what everyone wanted to ask was the same:

1) Did I have a commission?

2) Can I use the play in some other way?

Yes, no,

I had the commission, we were in fact due to be recording the play next Thursday and it was going to be on BBC Radio 4 on June 7th. I had a small but all-star cast, an astounding cast, a really amazing cast.

But it died before we could get to record it. +

Anyway.

I have also had three pieces of good advice that I want to tell you in case they’re of use to you as well.

The very first good advice I got was when I was asked “so what are you writing today?” As in yep, the play is deep-friend toast and it ain’t ever coming back, but what are you writing now? That was pretty good.

Second, strip the play for parts. That’s not as possible as you’d think and yet actually, I’m frustratingly pleased with that. I believe the play would have sounded light and relaxed on the radio, but the more you poke at it, the more tightly wrapped it all is. Unstitch this bit at the start and that bit at the end falls apart.

I think that’s great writing, I can’t believe I pulled it off. But it does also mean that for the moment, I think there may be just one single exchange of dialogue that can be lifted out and that can just about work on its own.

But yes, damn right, I’m having that. Not one single clue where, but I’m having that.

And the last thing, which is possibly my favourite. Writer Gail Renard told me to subtly alter the names of people who killed the play, and then put them in a bloody murder story.

As I say this to you, I realise I’m not sure if bloody meant gory or just, you know, very. And I presume she meant a murder story, as in fiction, not a murder as in a newspaper story.

Probably best to check that.

Broken

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My BBC Radio 4 play is dead. Not my fault, not the BBC’s fault, and I can’t ever tell you why. It’s dead and by chance it died on precisely the 1,000th day since I began researching it.

There is no upside, there is no bright side. It is devastating to me and I see no chance of anything positive coming from the situation.

The same reasons that mean I can’t tell you why mean I also can’t ever explain this: it was the best thing I have written to date. Writers are supposed to dig deep and I went archaeological on this one, but I also had to go sideways. Nothing, not one single thing, about this play is remotely like anything I’ve written or tried to write before.

I mean the bones of it, the structure. I wouldn’t have even guessed that you could tell a story in this way, which is very likely a failure of my imagination. The story dictated it, the story drove it in this direction and in this form. I’m minded of Gromit laying track as the train races on, and so many times it all felt as frantic as that.

There were mornings when I’d wake up either sweating or shaking because the play was in me and it was that important. The chief reason I wrote it was to see whether it was physically possible to write it, and whether I was capable of doing it.

It was and I was, and I am proud of it. I’m conscious that my pride is just rather pointless.

I’ve said and thought before that nothing you write is wasted. That idea is being rather tested now, but still I do see that I’m a better writer for having written this. That isn’t enough. But it’s something.

Belonging

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Here’s a thing I did not expect, wrapped up in a lot of things that I did. The lots of things I expected are all to do with how this week, last Monday in fact, there was an awards night. The 29th Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Awards.

I was expecting these lots of things because, in a small way, I’ve been working on the event for close to a year. There were no Guild awards in 2021 because of the pandemic, and this year’s took more planning and more continually changing around than usual, also because of the pandemic.

There was one part I can say was me. I just told you it was the 29th Writers’ Guild Awards. Up until this one, each annual event had been titled with the year in the name. So the last one I did anything for was the Writers’ Guild Awards 2020. Or it could’ve been called the Writers’ Guild Awards 2019 because the ceremony was in January 2020 but it was celebrating writing done chiefly in 2019, and anyway, it was pre-COVID so there’s no chance of remembering.

It was definitely a confusing name, though. It got even more confusing in the planning of this one: the first question was whether these latest awards should honour writing over the last two years, or just sod 2020 and move on. We decided to celebrate both years, to not be beaten by having had to take a year off.

But then the question was whether to call it the Writers’ Guild Awards 2020-2021 or something like that. It was me who said we should drop the years and call it the 29th Writers’ Guild Awards. Okay, I had to find out from Nick Yapp, who wrote the history of the Guild, what number it was, but I am the one who said it should be the XXth Writers’ Guild Awards.

So that’s four words, if you count the number as a word. And all through the night when those four words were on screen, I got a bit ridiculously pleased with myself. At most three other people knew I’d thought of that, and if any of the three remember all this time later, I’ll be ridiculously surprised.

Anyway. Proud of four words.

Imagine if I’d been up for any of the awards.

Other than that, though, it was just fun and a privilege being a little part of the organising group. Seeing clever people at the top of their game, it is brilliant.

So is the night. I tell you, the best evenings I’ve ever had have been at Writers’ Guild Awards and so of course I now expect them to be fantastic. Last time, I wrote dialogue for Hartley Hare. This time, I met Paul Chuckle.

What I also expect, though, is to feel flat afterwards.

Only afterwards. Never during the event itself. The sheer volumetric pressure in that room is so happy that you cannot feel flat. Well, maybe if you don’t win an award you’re nominated for. But the sense of support and even happiness from the whole room for each writer who wins, it is joyous.

I just expect now to feel flattened around a fifth of a second after I leave. There have been some years where I’ve made it an entire second, but only when I’ve walked out with someone.

Because usually I come away with a sense of how all these superb writers, every one of these people you’d like to be just as much as you’d enjoy calling friends, each one is outclassing me as a writer. I would come away with that sense of them being better than me and it is in no way helpful to know that yep, I’m right, they are.

Come on. I just met Emerald Fennell, who wrote Promising Young Woman. I haven’t even seen her film, but I’ve read the script and right there on the page, her words left me shaking. Fantastic. She won for best screenplay this year incidentally, and I was embarrassed to realise she was sitting right behind me because I punched the air and yelled “YES!” when the result was read out.

So I am in a room of the finest writers in the land, I am completely conscious of that throughout, and it does not dent the joy – until between a fifth of a second and a full second after I’ve left.

It has got so that I expect this.

But not this time.

That’s the real unexpected thing. This time, for the first time, I did not leave there thinking I was the weakest, poorest writer. If you want to make a case that I am, I will not only nod in agreement, I will add my name to your petition.

I just didn’t feel it this time.

I felt good.

I felt I’d been where I belonged.

True, I need to write better, and also write more, and I would prefer it if I were able to write something good enough to get me nominated in the XX+1 Writers’ Guild Awards.

But I’ve found a place I think I belong.

Reading the boards

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I may have made a mistake. I’ve been reading scripts my entire adult life and since bothering to count from Christmas 2017, it’s been 2,289 of them. It’s not as if I’ve ever been unaware or unappreciative of how much producers, directors and cast do, yet very often if I’ve read the script, I don’t bother watching.

But then this week I watched the first episode of Guilt by Neil Forsyth. (It’s on the BBC iPlayer.)

I’d read the scripts as taut and frighteningly tense, and the transmitted version was exactly that – but it was also a lot funnier. It was played funny at points and played very well, barely any of which I got from the scripts. Same words, same meanings, just funnier when handled by a talented cast instead of me.

Similarly, while I was thinking about this, Britbox added Steven Moffat’s Coupling. I watched it and then the American remake too. If I had read the script, I wonder whether I would’ve got how funny it is. The US cast didn’t seem to.

While I’m on this line, I’m minded how in the early 2000s I read Ronald D Moore’s script for the reimagined Battlestar Galactica and shrugged. But I defy anyone to watch that mini-series and not be utterly arrested by it all.

I’m not saying that any one can make a bad script good. I’m saying that there are an enormous number of people who can read scripts better than I can, and a lot of them are currently treading the boards.

I’d best get back to practicing.

One word at a time.

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One word at a time. That’s the answer. I suspect you might want more, and this is one of the times when I imagine me on a couch while you encourage me to open up, at least until the end of your 50-minute hour.

Plus you’re calming me down. I just now, I mean just right now, had an email purportedly asking my writing advice but really giving me some. It was chiefly about how brilliant a writer the sender is. He’s so brilliant that it doesn’t matter he’s telling the wrong person and he’s so brilliant that he didn’t get the message I sent him last time.

And if I think he’s over-selling his writing ability, he is at least talented at writing emails that truly piss you off. What this gets him other than blocked, I don’t know.

So he’s as antagonising as if he set out to be, but as it happens, he’s also about the sixth person to approach me in the last month. Five of them I liked. Either I already knew and liked them, or they were just likeable when they asked what they asked.

Maybe it’s a new year kind of thing, though it already feels like we’ve been in 2022 forever. Whatever reason so many asked my advice out of the blue like this, and whyever they asked me, their different issues were startlingly similar. So startlingly similar that I’ve slowly realised I’ve got the same issues and should listen to myself.

For instance, they and I both know we should be writing more. They and I feel guilty about not having written enough. They all told me how they are now determined to write more, and I want to tell you the same thing about me.

Two of them, by the way, have a lot of ideas and don’t know which to do. Two or three are planning to write for a certain amount of time on certain days. One wanted to know how to write a story that readers are interested in. And all of them guiltily referred to how they haven’t been writing.

I presume they’re asking everyone about this, not just me, but I believe I have some answers. For a start, there is nothing you can do about how you didn’t write yesterday, not a single thing you can do now about how you didn’t write last week.

But you can write today. And really, that’s all you can do.

That schedule idea isn’t bad. Isn’t necessarily good, but it isn’t bad. There’s an element of how if you set up your school exam revision timetable, you feel you’ve accomplished something even if what you’re really doing is postponing the moment you have to work.

And I know this for certain. If you plan to write for two hours every Tuesday and then when Tuesday comes and, for any reason, you don’t, you feel worse than you did before.

If you must feel worse at all, feel it about how if there were some other demand on your time that Tuesday, there is a bit of you that’s relieved. There’s a bit of you that agreed to help or to do something or to be somewhere, just a little bit more easily because it means you can’t write that day.

Sometimes, though, you simply aren’t capable of writing that day and it isn’t for want of trying. You cleared the time, you sat at the desk, and still nothing. Coming up with nothing or coming up only with writing that you immediately loathe, it’s very easily enough to turn these Tuesdays into a weekly demonstration that you’re right, you can’t write, it was stupid to think you could, everybody knows you’re wasting your time, that you’re a constant failure and disappointment who is just embarrassing yourself.

Doesn’t exactly make you rush to next Tuesday’s writing session.

Sometimes you have to walk away and write another day.

So yes, I am arguing that you need to get on with it, you need to be disciplined, I’m really arguing that you should write like this is a job, not a hobby. And at the same time, I am saying you need to be able to walk away – I’m saying you should not write like it’s a job.

I have no problem saying either, and not one single hesitation saying both.

I also have not the slightest little qualm about saying both that it’s great to have lots of ideas, and it isn’t. Ideas are easy, or at least the shiny idea you haven’t started writing yet is always infinitely easier than the one you’re currently tarnishing on the page or the screen.

If you do bounce between your different ideas, leaping off because the current one has reached a hard bit, you are writing, you are working, and you are wasting your time. Write bits of things and you have written nothing. You feel like you’ve put a lot of effort in, because you have, but the result is nothing.

And yet writing bits of your different ideas is practically ideal compared to the other problem when you have lots of ideas. That’s when you don’t write anything at all because you cannot decide which idea to do now, which idea you should be working on.

This is a case where if you have eight ideas, there is no right one, I believe that there are just seven wrong ones. Pick one idea, any one idea, pick it any way you like, then do that one.

Schedule your writing time, while not scheduling your writing time. Instead of vowing you will write for two hours every Tuesday evening, just write for an hour now.

Forget long term plans, ignore them as much as you forget the past where you weren’t writing. For the next one hour, write that one idea.

It’s always one word after another, one hour after another.

I don’t have the answers, but those are the answers.

Key on a keyboard

116keys

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Tomorrow is the second anniversary of 58keys, a YouTube series I do for writers like me who use and write on Macs, iPhones and iPads. If you don’t happen to write on those, 58keys is of no earthly use to you. But still, I want to share a general writing lesson I think I’ve learned from doing it.

And that’s just this: you can change what normal is.

I first thought of a YouTube channel in 2012 and even shot a couple of minutes of footage. I’m going to let myself off a little here by explaining that all I really had was an idea for one gag. Didn’t know what a channel of mine could be about, didn’t know what I’d be interested in, didn’t and really still don’t know what anyone watching could be interested in.

Nonetheless, for seven years I did bugger-all.

And even in mid- to late-2019, I did bugger-little. Shot a title sequence. Figured out what I could do. Chose the name 58keys. Now I write it down, that seems more than I thought, but really it was all held back by me being me. Until January 2020 when, little knowing what could possibly be ahead of us all, I was determined to launch the channel before the end of the month.

Today I am making some little money from it, but if that’s not the reason I do it now, it definitely wasn’t the reason I launched it on January 29, 2020. The sole and specific and exclusive reason I launched it was sheer frustration with myself for not doing it, for constantly putting off a writing job I wanted to do. I can be very unhappy with me, but this time I was angry.

So I launched it. Just to shut me up.

Somehow I got 7 subscribers in the first week. I’m now on 2,400 or so. In that same week, the watch time, the total time anyone played any video of mine, was 584 minutes, which would amaze me just as much if it were this week. Except I record the statistics at the end of each Friday and last week the total for the preceding seven days was 218.2.

Hours.

So that’s 13,092 minutes of me watched last week. Since I’ve got all of my statistics plus a pocket calculator, hang on one sec.

God in heaven. Since I began, the total watch time is 6,514,500 minutes. Six million minutes of watching me, that’s insane. I have a sudden urge to comb my hair.

And still it’s not what I learned, it’s not what I want to talk to you about. Nor is the money: YouTube pays less than you think. I’m getting between £20 and £40 per month, but then I also separately got a lot of funding about 17 months in, so the real per-month figure is considerably higher. There are also book sales that have come from it, and various courses I run. Plus I’ve just been booked to make a lot of videos for other companies.

No, truly, what I learned is this thing about the new normal.

There have been no breaks in the two years, no gaps, just at least one video every week. I’ve done extra editions in short runs so the total is 117 videos in 104 weeks. And now I know that there will be a 118th next week, 119th the week after. It’s still the same amount of work, it’s still the same amount of effort, but the doubt is gone. I don’t doubt that I’ll do another video, because I no longer think about whether I should doubt, or at least not as much.

For better or worse, for as small as my channel is compared to others, for as little as it pays directly compared to the time it takes me, 58keys is now a normal part of my working life.

And since I’ve scripted at least 90 of those episodes, writing non-fiction YouTube scripts is also a normal part of my working life now. That’s been startling: I can see my scriptwriting is better than it was, which had been an aim but I hadn’t guessed how very much I would feel it would help me.

You can very easily argue that there are other things I could put the effort in to, but I don’t think you can argue that writing effort is not being made. Or that things are happening because of it.

Which all gives me encouragement just where I need some.

It encourages me because there are other things I have put off, there are other things that I want to write, other areas I want to write in, other failings that make me angry at myself on the hour and the half-hour. There are areas where I feel both that I am starting from scratch and that I should have started a long, long time ago.

Can’t do anything about what I haven’t done, but I can pull my bloody finger out and make these new areas be part of my normal working life.

We can make it to the Mexican border by nightfall

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So very long ago now, I used to write sometimes for an entertainment website – I’ve done this a lot and for more sites and magazines than I can reliably remember – and I was there when this one decided to launch TV episode guides. Even then, there were a fair few of these online, but they did tend to be either barebones TV Guide-style listings, or gushing fan tributes. This site wanted to become known for having the best episode guides, ones that were genuinely useful to someone looking up a detail, were totally accurate in that detail, and were also just a good read.

Really, they wanted readers to know the staff knew their stuff: the site wanted to be seen as an authority. So it had to be obvious that the guide wasn’t just rephrasing listing or PR copy, this all had to clearly be written by people who watched these episodes.

That’s a pretty ambitious, er, ambition. Not from the writing: the entire staff and all the freelancers like me had been writing about television drama for years on this and other publications. But it was dauntingly ambitious to start off on what was planned to become this enormous, comprehensive guide to just about everything.

I can’t remember all of the shows that something like five or six people were assigned first. But here’s how long ago this was: I got the then-new “Brothers and Sisters” season 1. I’ve just had to check and it apparently aired in 2006, which is a lot more recently than I’d remembered. I also had not remembered that there were 23 episodes in that first season.

Plus I can’t recall how long I got to watch them. I do remember a faintly feverish sense about it, I remember thinking I could just fit in one more episode if I did this or that, if so-and-so was as late as they usually are. I want to say I watched the season in a week, I am certain it was well under a month. Let’s call it ten days.

Ten days, one season, done, written about, filed, and I waited for what the next assignment would be.

It never came. Not on episode guides.

Instead, when my copy finally got read, I was told off. Taken to one side and told off.

At this distance, I can’t possibly remember the criticism, the specific words they used. But actually even right then, on the day, sitting in front of an unhappy editor, I believe my mind translated the words into “you wrote it too well”.

Because no one else watched any of their assigned shows.

Not one episode.

Everyone else had just rephrased and padded out listings and whatever they found online from the TV company’s PR people.

If you read mine, you knew I’d watched. If you read any of theirs, you knew they hadn’t. I’m not claiming that I wrote well and they did not, but I did and they didn’t.

I was told that I had to cut my piece back, strip out as much as possible, and make it look like everybody else’s. I truly can’t remember and strongly suspect I didn’t say fuck that, but I know for certain that I didn’t do it. Just as I know for certain that the site never became known for any episode guides at all. Tellingly, to find out for you when this was and how many episodes there were in Brothers and Sisters, I looked up epguides.com, not this entertainment site.

God in heaven.

I’ve just checked on a whim and this site I’m not naming still exists, albeit in a radically different form. I couldn’t possibly resist: I’ve done a search on it for Brothers and Sisters season 1.

The site says it aired in 1998, which it didn’t. It lists this 2006 drama as drama, which is true, but also incorrectly says that it’s children’s TV.

I’m surprised to say that there is a guide, though it’s just 50 words or so per episode. I hope it’s not based on my writing: it reads like a short, flat PR/TV Guide listing. I suspect the actual listings whenever this show airs are automatically pulled from the guide: the format has that kind of feel to it.

Anyway.

The argument for cutting mine down to match everyone else’s was that the site had to look consistent. Fine, I definitely thought and I hope I said, be consistent by having them do their assignment, watch the bloody shows and write better.

To my mind, the argument against cutting down to match everyone else’s was what’s the point? For the sake of a consistent look, they were throwing away all of this ambition, every single bit of their aim for the entire project.

I didn’t know they were also throwing away accuracy and I’m quite shaken by that. Partly from how you’ve just got to get facts right, but also because the first transmission date of a TV drama is not exactly a grey area.

Here’s the thing, though. I do understand that desire for consistency. And have even shared it.

I used to believe that there was a need for this on the other end of this TV episode guide issue, that there was a need for it in actual TV episodes too. I love television drama series and for all the myriad issues and possibilities in them, one thing seems a bit obviously true.

They’re series.

You hope for some great progression between episode 1 and episode 23, but episode 23 has to be the same show that episode 1 was. You can’t have episode 1 be serious, bone-crunching drama and episode 23 be a musical. Well, you can, and there are shows that pull off incredible ranges of episodes.

Only Doctor Who really manages that, though. Imagine if Line of Duty was piercing contemporary drama one week and stilted historical renactment the next. Or more possibly, imagine if one week Line of Duty felt authentic and in the next it didn’t.

There has to be a consistency and I remember adding that criticism to the very many others I had about ITV’s police soap, The Bill. Whenever JC Wilsher would write an episode, the characters sounded and felt and seemed like real police. When other people wrote episodes, not so much.

I felt this was wrong and that the series was doing a bad job.

But.

I was wrong.

And this is why I wanted to talk to you about this today, why it’s on my mind and –– I can’t say I expected this –– why an argument on an entertainment site from prehistory came back into my mind for the first time in decades.

Last night, I watched Look to the Lady, the first story in the BBC’s 1989/1990 dramatisation of Margery Allingham’s Campion novels. Some time last week I’d seen a later story in the short run and enjoyed it enough to want to watch more.

The story later in the run was fine. Look to the Lady was excellent. Much funnier, every character much more witty and just alive, and plot-heavy exposition conveyed with a twinkle in the eye. Loved it.

And knew I would.

Because this first story was dramatised from Allingham’s book by Alan Plater. Knowing he’d written it, my wife Angela asked beforehand whether it was going to be wittier than the last one. Because, she pointed out, whenever he wrote Lewis episodes, Inspector Lewis and didn’t-he-used-to-be-good Sergeant Hathaway were always smarter, faster, better than in other episodes.

It’s also true that the episode included this line about making it to the Mexican border that Alan seemed to enjoy fitting in to every show he could.

But if that was an unmistakeable signpost that he’d written the episode, it was never the case that he went so far as to make a show unrecognisable. It was never the case that Lewis and Hathaway were different characters in Plater’s episodes compared to other ones. It was just that you were more interested in them when he was the writer.

This is a case where I suspect I could have argued for more consistency right up until very recently, ie last night. But if my head sees the need for a series to be a series, my heart knows I’m wrong and it’s known that for a lot longer than 12 hours.

You want any series to be uniformly excellent, but it isn’t going to happen. Some episodes will be better than others, visibly and markedly so, but it is not the series getting it wrong for allowing that difference. It’s the series being damn lucky to have a great episode.

Born in the 1900s

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I just heard this expression last night. In exchange for telling a guy of the old “never mind the quality, feel the width” line that you don’t even remember, he told me that the new insult is to refer to someone has having been born in the 1900s.

Of course, if you were born in 1999 then you would be 23 now but you also wouldn’t be insulted by the phrase, wouldn’t take it as a dig at your age, and quite possibly wouldn’t be reading this. The unstated cut is that you’re not actually aged between 23 and a maximum 121, it’s that you are indeed 121 and that you look every pixel of your age.

There is so much I wish I’d done sooner, been able, been capable of doing sooner. And there are a handful of things I’d rather I hadn’t done yet or, indeed, at all. On balance, I should’ve done more of both.

But otherwise I’m okay with my age, okay with where I am, quite a bit more than okay, sometimes, with what I’m doing. I can cope with 2022.

I just don’t seem to be able to cope with January.

This time I’m somehow still in a fuzzy cloud post-Christmas and at exactly the same time I estimate that we are already coming up on six million days into the year.

This week, I had a Zoom chat with a friend who, when pressed, admitted that she’d had to get up early to talk to me. I am profoundly flattered that anyone would, but in that moment the idea of being able to lie in on a morning was damn appealing. I’m just not sure how I can square that with how the fact that all month I’ve been struggling to get up before 7am.

I’ve had to today, fortunately. When I send this to you, I have to drive off to a school and spend the day there as a visiting author. I did a journalism day in a school last October, but otherwise it’s been over two years since I did this and the only real surprise so far is that I’m exactly as nervous as I was last time and the time before and the time before.

There is a difference. Schools often offer me a lunch but then most of the time I forget that they have, spend the entire lunch hour gassing away with pupils and teachers, and then wonder why I’m so exceptionally hungry.

Not today. Today I’ve learned a lesson and have made sandwiches.

And then there’s also that I took a lateral flow test last night and while it was negative, while it was fine, I learned in that pregnancy-test-style wait just how there is something that makes me more nervous than going into a school. It’s the prospect of not going in when you’ve promised to.

I’m nervous enough that as much as I know I’ll enjoy it, as much as I think it’s a privilege to be asked into a school, right now I would rather make you a mug of tea and ask how you’re doing.

Let me put the kettle on.

Why I left Radio Times

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I left Radio Times because they threw me out. Er, the end.

Okay, no, I say this to you and even one entire decade after I was chucked out of the Radio Times website and magazine, I want to explain that it was a budget thing. Some number of people had to go and it was so obvious that I was expendable at this particular point that I’d packed my bags at the start of the entire interview-for-your-own-job process.

That was the only bit I disliked and I’d actually forgotten it until I said that to you. Much as I loved Radio Times, that was telling me to take a typing test and that bit did piss me off. Even so, I’m not kidding: I knew immediately who would be kept on and who wouldn’t, and that was not from some fatalistic brilliance of mine, it was because it was that obvious.

Again you remind me of something. I say all of this to you and abruptly I can picture the room I was in when they told me. Mind you, this is also no startling feat on my part because the room was in the BBC Media Village and was one of the ones that had been decorated in the style of a BBC show. I was fired from Radio Times in the Doctor Who room. In fact, I’m a tiny bit unclear right now who the two people in front of me were, possibly three, but I am rock-solid clear about how I was sitting with my back to the TARDIS.

Which, if you discount the little detail that I was chucked out, is really why I left.

The actual ten-year anniversary is sometime in the middle of 2022, I’d have to figure it out to know when exactly, but it’s on my mind now because this week a colleague mentioned “The Writer’s Tale”, a book about the making of Doctor Who which I’d read before the aforementioned chucking out.

It is a very, very good book and was the idea of a Radio Times writer I don’t think I even ever met. Benjamin Cook. He asked Russell T Davies to email him about making Doctor Who and the result is – wait, let me check Amazon UK – 704 pages of immense detail. I expect it’s the same length on Amazon US.

Immense detail doesn’t cover it, oddly enough. This book is an oppressive whirlwind of pressures, even as it somehow manages to be joyous at exactly the same time. I remember reading it at night, unable to stop hours after my body was ordering me to sleep, and feeling this same intensity you get from nightmares.

God, it’s a great book.

But this Writers’ Guild colleague mentions it and that’s what put me back ten years or so, put me back in the Radio Times newsroom office like it was, well, not yesterday but no further back than Tuesday at the absolute most.

I can close my eyes and take you around that entire huge, open-plan space. I can point out where I usually sat. I can see in slow motion the moment when I once stood up and saw two identically-dressed people at opposite ends of the newsroom. And consequently realised at last that this is why I’d sometimes have a great chat with her and sometimes she’d blank me like a stranger.

Less embarrassingly and far more fascinatingly, to me anyway, is how I can also picture the precise angle from my usual seat where the office segued into the kitchen. Happy, cheery people would walk by on their way to get tea and at the same exact spot, once or twice they’d turn blood-angry. Like they’d been asked to take a typing test. Real anger, contained only by a desire to keep their job, and then at this moment no longer contained at all.

Always that same spot, always as they passed by me at this same angle.

I suddenly wonder if they just didn’t like me.

Anyway.

Last one. I can also picture-remember the different spot I happened to be sitting in when I was sneaking a few minutes to carry on reading “The Writer’s Tale”.

Again, sorry, fuzzy on the detail. This was some time before 2012, could even have been as far back as 2008 when the first edition of the book came out.

Whenever it was, the moment is vivid for me, the very feel of the paperback in my hand and the pages under my fingers, right here in my head like there’d been a flashbulb. All because of one moment in one of the email exchanges I was reading. Benjamin Cook had asked Russell T Davies about some particular decision in the making of Doctor Who and he’d replied with the answer. I want to say it was to do with casting, but forgive me, my flashbulb memory clearly has some limits.

The key thing, though, is that this was an email conversation. You’ve had a few of those yourself. So you know that every single one, every single exchange in the entire book comes with a date and time stamp. The day, the hour, the minute, that the email was sent.

And that’s why I left.

Because I was fascinated to read about this decision chiefly since I vividly remembered writing a news story for the Radio Times website about precisely that.

Only, I wrote the news story pretty much exactly one year after that email exchange.

I looked up from that page and for the first time, I was no longer where I wanted to be.

I now wanted to be making the decision, not writing about it a year later.

The end.

Okay, no. It should be the end. That would be the right dramatic ending: I look up, realise I don’t belong there anymore, and I get out. Instead, I take a couple of years to leave and I’m very much afraid that I might still be there if they hadn’t shown me a door and which exact side of it they wanted me on.

But really I was gone that day back reading the Doctor Who book. Maybe that was why it seemed so clear to me that it was right to chuck me out. I wish now that I’d left years before, but then I also wouldn’t wish away any of the time I spent there. So I wish instead that those years had been more compressed, exactly the way the decade since has.

I would hope for a great abduction story or something

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I’m not sure what 2021 was, other than not the year we expected after 2020. So I’m thinking of preparing myself for 2022 by only expecting it to be the 25th anniversary of the film “Grosse Pointe Blank” by Tom Jankiewicz, D. V. DeVincentis, Steve Pink and John Cusack.

Which makes it a quarter of a century that I’ve remembered and wished I’d written the film’s strapline: “Even a hitman deserves a second shot.”

And that I’ve also remembered this scene when Martin Blank (John Cusack) meets Debi Newberry (Minnie Driver) a decade after standing her up at their school’s prom night and vanishing.

DEBI: You tell me about yourself.
MARTIN: In California, travel around a lot on business.
DEBI: That’s it?
MARTIN: Yeah.
DEBI: That’s ten years?
MARTIN: Yeah.
DEBI: I would hope for a great abduction story or something.
MARTIN: I’ve had a few thrilling moments here and there.

It turns out I’ve had what I’d call a few thrilling moments in the last year and in the last ten years, too. Back in 2012, quite a lot happened to me. Radio Times chucked me out, for one thing, and BBC Ceefax closed down forever. I still think that was an overreaction. But, God, earlier this year we had some builders in and they accidentally took away my BBC Ceefax mug. The stun to my stomach when I realised was matched only by the relief when they brought it back the next day. A mug. I’m talking about a mug. I think you’re looking at one, too.

Anyway. Ten years on, sitting here writing to you, I realise I can’t entirely remember what happened with me and BBC News Online. That was always wrapped up around Ceefax and I’d long before lost regular work with that, so I think it just dribbled away.

Still, BBC News Online continues uninterrupted to this day and so does Radio Times. I can’t imagine how they’re managing without me. They must be being very brave. And BBC Breakfast could’ve interviewed many of them about Ceefax in 2012, but they interviewed me.

Those different teams –– RT, Ceefax, News Online – remain some of the best people I’ve worked with but the pleasure of that, the enjoyment of creative people at their peak, it was pretty much replaced for me in 2012 by Writing West Midlands. I can picture the first coffee meeting with that organisation’s Jonathan Davidson, and at this distance I can even feel my nerves as he wondered aloud about whether I’d be good at going into schools as a visiting author.

I officially became a full and proper author in 2012, too, as my first book came out. “BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair” (Amazon UK, Amazon US). It was important to me for a hundred reasons, it turns out that it was important to quite a few readers over the years too, and some day I hope to make back the advance.

It must’ve been such a strange year for me. Losing my biggest clients, effectively losing all of the work that had seen me living on the motorway between home and London. And at the same time sitting here, actually right where I am now, when the author’s copies of my book arrived. Sitting here holding that book in my hand and realising that no one could ever take it away from me. Good or bad, right or wrong, no one can un-publish that book. I’d done something I longed for and it was real.

Curiously enough, ten years on in 2022, I’m going to do something else I’ve longed for. I’ll have a play on BBC Radio 4 at last.

But that’s enough now, you’ve indulged my nostalgia far too much, you are far too kind. I recommend that you take my best wishes for your 2022 and go be you. I don’t recommend that you read on.

Because if I can’t really describe the last ten years beyond a few thrilling moments, I can detail 2021 and I’m afraid it looks very much like I’m going to. For whatever reason that deep therapy might uncover, I do tend to count things as I go and I also now appear to need to show you how many jobs I’ve done, how many scripts I’ve written, that kind of thing. I can’t pretend that it is in any sensible way useful to me so, frankly, there’s no chance it’ll be of use to you.

Yet I keep doing it and in dark moments, there’s something about the routine of logging this stuff, there’s something about how I can feel stuck and failed but, look, at least I did this, this and that number of those. It seems even more flimsy as I tell you about it, but we both know I’ll continue, so let me get this off my chest and, for once, hope you’re looking the other way.

In 2021, I did 1,853 jobs. I need to explain what constitutes a job. If you commission me for an article, that article gets listed in my Job Book. If that article requires me to interview someone, as happened a lot this year, then the interview is a job too. So it’s a lot less than, say, submitting 1,853 CVs to companies, but it’s also more than, say, just a task in my To Do app.

And I know that because my To Do app is the superb OmniFocus – which, incidentally, I apparently began using ten years and maybe six months ago –– and OmniFocus tells me I completed 7,722 To Do tasks in 2021.

Those jobs and tasks include writing Self Distract to you, of which this is the 52nd of the year and, counting on my fingers, totals something around 39,000 words. It also includes 31 workshops, 1 school visit, 12 Writers’ Guild regional newsletters, 7 appearances on BBC Radio, 242 newswriting shifts, and apparently 14 podcast appearances. That seems a bit low to me, enough so that I wish I counted better.

I doubt I’ll do it, I am reaching my level of anoraksia, but looking at the figures today, I also wonder about making more of a distinction between different types of job. Because I am close to having to guess this next: I appear to have written 1,221 articles for 4 companies in 2021.

I definitely chaired 3 panels, worked as a judge on 2 awards ceremonies, and read 523 scripts. I’m relieved to say that I wrote a few scripts too. Throughout 2021 I had various meetings that meant at least twiddling with an existing drama script, at most doing a small redraft. But I also wrote 5 drama scripts from scratch, which is possibly not overwhelming, but makes me feel okay.

Then there were non-fiction scripts. I write almost every edition of my 58keys YouTube series, of which I produced 60 in 2021 (a few aren’t going out until early 2022), plus this year I made videos for other companies, too. I think I made 6, of which 2 were scripted. Call it 66 videos produced, and 60 non-fiction scripts written.

There’s also a book, “The Blank Screen: Interviewing for Authors and Writers” (Amazon UK, Amazon US). That originated with about five hours of script I wrote in 2020 for a Udemy online course, but I’m still going to count it as 2021 since a book is a bit different and I appear to be more than a bit needy.

Maybe the thing I think I did best, certainly the thing I’m proudest of, is that I created a six-week-long Tuesday Night Writing Club and then later a six-week-long Wednesday Night Writing Club. That’s a total of 12 weeks and I adore that it is a total which is vanishingly small compared to the fact that both clubs have continued without me. Just before Christmas I was invited to join a meeting of the old Tuesday Night gang, and it is inexpressibly wonderful to see a group that were strangers before me are now deep friends after me.

On the less fantastic side, 2021 is also when term limits meant I had to step down as deputy chair of the Writers’ Guild. And workload limits meant I had to step down as chair of Cucumber Playwrights. And funding cuts meant the closure of the workshops from the Federation of Entertainment Unions.

But if you’ve read this far, let me finally shut up by admitting that in the entire year, I wrote just one short piece of fiction.

I would hope for a great abduction story, but no.