Author: William Gallagher

Pronouncing sentence

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I’m hoping it’s the way you tell ’em, but I suspect it’s the way you read it. Please take a look at the following sentence, which is the sole thing I remember from an entire night of nightmares.

“I’m tired of boring people.”

Now, maybe it also depends how nice you are. I would like to think that you read that as meaning I, me, this fella right here in front of you, is weary of some other people who have in some way been continuously boring.

Except I read it as I, me, this guy, is weary of how much he bores everyone.

I did tell you it was a nightmare. I didn’t tell you it was five nights ago and I won’t tell you that I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time since thinking about it. But you can possibly guess.

As a result of spending a ridiculous amount of time thinking about it, though, I can definitively say that I’ve now thought back through everybody I’ve ever met. And there was only one man, a councillor I interviewed in Redditch, who was boring. Give him credit, he was clearly practicing to become boring professionally and I am certain he will have made it to the top.

Everybody is interesting. Everything is interesting, absolutely everything.

(Except football.)

But everything else, absolutely everything else is so interesting that I can’t get enough of it.

Apparently I also can’t shut up about it either. For it turns out that this is the 702nd Self Distract I’ve written to you.

I’m not sure how I missed that I’d got to 700, but then I’m equally unsure how in the world I got to 700. I will say, mind, that for the first while, Self Distract was less a letter to you and more some plugging of whatever work I’d just done on Radio Times or BBC Ceefax or BBC News Online or UK DVD Review.

Let’s rule out those few dull ones, then, and call this the 3rd Self Distract.

Or perhaps you and I can think of it as the first since BBC Radio 4 commissioned a play of mine. It’s less a play, more a sacred trust, and I’ve only wanted it for so many years that if they found out, they’d conclude I was a rubbish scriptwriter and take it back.

But while I can’t yet tell you, not even you, what the play is truly about, I can say that it’s based on an archive of letters. Even more letters than there have been Self Distracts, which appears to be saying something.

I think that’s interesting.

Write what you – no.

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This is doing the rounds again and maybe I’m not helping by grumbling about it. But this week I’ve been overhearing the phrase that writers should write what they know and I would like to offer that I know something about this.

I know it’s bollocks.

“Write what you know” is usually either said by people who aren’t writers, or by writers who are talking to people who aren’t and who they just want to get rid of. I don’t think I’ve ever done that, but I do know people who will ask what my current project is and then interrupt part way through the second syllable of the answer. I do tend to then wrap it up with “and, you know” while they say something about how I never tell them what I’m doing.

That’s just irritating me, that doesn’t matter. This “write what you know” idea does matter because it is damaging. There are writers who will believe it and you and I can only hope they recover.

I sound harsh, but then I intend to. If you know a time when you’ve heard it said with the best of intentions, I think it’s like it was interrupted part way through the second syllable. There is a crucial, crucial part that follows and which I’m going to have to make up since it’s never actually been said in the history of writing.

It should go thisaway:

“Write what you know, not as in writing about how it was raining when you put the bins out this morning, but rather how old that made you feel, how the knowledge that you’ve put them out a thousand times and if you’re lucky may get to do it a thousand times more, about how the repetition of a simple chore seems to you to be a metaphor for the pointlessness of life itself, for your failure to achieve anything, and how it feels like a klaxon or a Cloister Bell sounding out how little time you’ve got left before you die.”

Granted, that’s a bit specific.

It also told you more about me than I wanted to –– and that is the point of writing. Diving deeper, revealing more, reaching out. Connecting. Not describing how I forgot the council isn’t collecting garden waste this week and had to go out in the rain again to drag that bin back.

I’ve been working on a play that’s about two friends of mine. Clearly, then, I know them, I am writing what I know. Except I’m not, I’m not at all because in writing it I have learned more about them both and I’ve churned over what I thought I knew, what I’ve discovered, what I feel about them. If they were still alive, I would’ve been round their house a hundred times asking questions.

Then just technically, it’s a difficult play to write and it mustn’t ever seem like it is to the audience. When I started it, I did not know whether I was actually capable of writing what I needed, both because of these startlingly difficult technical issues, and because it’s about friends. Three or four times, I woke up in the morning not only thinking about it, but shaking. Sweating.

You don’t need to know that, the audience for the play mustn’t ever know it, but it is the best thing I’ve ever written and that is specifically because it stretched me far, far and three times far away from anything I knew how to do. Seriously, the very structure of this thing is alien to how I would say I tend to write, but it’s the correct way to tell this story. I now know that it’s the only way to tell it, too.

Sorry I can’t tell you what it is yet. You will be the first.

But for now, I have to write what you don’t know.

Rose Ayling-Ellis and Giovanni Pernice

Silent right

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Straight to it: the moment of silence during last week’s Strictly Come Dancing was profoundly moving. It came in the same weekend as Remembrance Day and the one-minute silence there, but maybe silence is stronger for being a surprise.

Well, I say a surprise. The Strictly show did go to some lengths to belabour how the dance by Rose Ayling-Ellis and Giovanni Pernice would include something for the deaf community. They did it enough that I thought about how odd it was that they were electing to spoil some moment.

But then little is done without a reason.

Ayling-Ellis and Pernice dance and it is remarkable, it’s peculiar how one pair moving to music works and another doesn’t, but this is a particularly strong performance –– and then that dance continued even as the music stopped for a time. Dances on this show are only 90 seconds long so I don’t really have the faintest idea how short this gap was, but it was a strong gap and I actually gasped.

Strictly is a shiny-floor show, and I am as unlikely to be moved by an air-once celebrity programme as I am a football match. So maybe silence is strongest when it’s a surprise and when it’s in a surprising place.

The reason for spoiling how there would be some moment for the deaf community, though, was for the community of people whose first thought is to complain. Like the audiences for Contact who left their cinema seats to go ask the projectionist what the hell they thought they were doing, losing the sound half a minute into the movie.

So maybe silence is strongest when it’s a surprise that you’ve been warned about. No, sod that. Those Contact audience people were just thick and there are always going to be thick people. The only thing I can’t be sure of is whether I’m one of them.

Strictly’s silence made me gasp. Contact’s opening sequence made me hold my breath. Both completely unconsciously.

Mind you, I think I may have held my breath a little during the first Mission: Impossible film when your man is hanging from a rope in that noise-detecting room thing.

And actually, now I think of it, it was the few frames of silence at the very start of Trainspotting that grabbed me.

Clearly, I like silence and must use it more in my writing. Starting with

Left wanting

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I’m not sure of the road that I went down to get to what I want to talk to you about today. But I know it began with writer Ken Armstrong and a piece he wrote about writing and not writing. It’s his story and therefore it’s mine, it’s yours, it’s everyone’s, but to disregard everything else he said and just pull out a bit that burrowed into me, there was a bit about fair weather writing.

Rather than writing only when the muse strikes –– if I’ve ever had a muse, he or she has been on strike for a very long time –– or when you fancy it, writers write. I write every day and I suppose that takes effort but it’s as normal and ordinary as breathing or wanting chocolate. I write unthinkingly, which may account for the standard of it.

But I do write and if I really do fail to think about whether it’s an effort or not, I at least recognise enough to know that I should simply nod encouragingly when someone says they’ve always meant to write a book. Mind you, it’s fantastic when they then do write one. Love that, can’t get enough of that.

Only, somehow I went from thinking about all that to thinking about all this. You do rather have to want to write. You’ve met people who talk about being published and earning riches beyond the dreams of JK Rowling, but that also means you’ve probably met people who don’t want to write. If someone wants to skip to the end bit, and a pretty unlikely end bit, they don’t want to write.

Two or maybe three times now, I’ve worked with groups of writers and we either got an opportunity or, much better, we made one. And these writers complained. They’d got what they said they wanted, they just now preferred to complain about some invisible element of it instead of writing.

They wanted to write but they don’t want to write.

I think now that even though a group I’m thinking of from five or six years ago were all writers and actually did all write every day, or near enough, they still somehow retained a portion of this same thing where they were happier sticking around the wanting instead of the doing.

And I also think now that I’m sounding as if I feel superior. I admit in that one group, I was irritated and said if they didn’t want this opportunity they’d been given, I’d take it. Next thing I knew, they’d gone ahead and done it –– without me. Not going to lie, that stung.

Yet if I should’ve waited a bit more with that group and probably said a bit less, I painfully admit that I did feel superior in that first moment. I tend to want to get on with things, many other people don’t, not so much.

Except.

I’m obviously nowhere close to superior anyway, but in particular I think this is a case of disliking in others what you dislike in yourself. I’ve wanted to write television since I saw “Lou Grant” in the 1970s. I can point to this last year or 18 months where my scriptwriting has been getting me TV meetings, I can point to how there’s an extraordinarily important –– to me –– radio play progressing pixel by pixel toward commission.

But it does all feel a bit late and I do feel as if just wanted it for such a long time. I should listen to myself and get on with it.

You know I want to.

Remember, remember, words can punch

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I am occasionally quite critical of my old school and that’s completely unfair. For one thing, it is entirely because of its teaching that I remember, remember the 5th of November and if that is less of a political education than it could have been, sometimes it can be all the politics I can take.

Then, of course, I can count the number of times I’ve needed to know that September hath thirty days. I can count because I presume I lean on this fact at most annually, but I won’t count because then I’d have to think about how many years it’s been since I was a schoolboy.

Apparently someone I was at school with is now in charge of the place. I want to assume he’s made it better, I keep wondering instead if he’s actually always been stuck there in some kind of purgatory.

Anyway. Something that would surprise my teenage self about what became of me is that I once had a request on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please. I presume my school taught us some poetry but not well enough to remember and certainly not enough to mean that with a combination of their teaching and whatever writing skill I have, that I can write any poetry at all.

I cannot, cannot write poetry and all of this is partly on my mind because tomorrow I’m running a workshop that is all about it. It occurs to me that you might well think now that I am keeping up the high standards of my school, but I promise you, no. I’ve got a poet helping me in the workshop. I say helping me, I’m going to throw the ball to her and then soak up every syllable she says.

I think a lot about syllables, I think even more about words, and it’s an enjoyable kind of thinking which it rather needs to be since I’ve yet to actually get anywhere with the thoughts. Especially not when the words and the syllables are poetry. I can do it with prose, if you give me some prose I can express why I do or don’t like it, and I can vocalise why I do or don’t like a script.

Not poetry.

I am incapable of assessing a poem, just physically unable to have any kind of coherent opinion. What I can have from poetry, though, is a slap to the face.

Last night I re-read “Sweet Sorrow”, a stage play by Alan Plater. A group of people are having their annual party celebrating the life of poet Philip Larkin when an unexpected guest comes to the door. It’s the late Philip Larkin. And the play reeks of being Alan’s tribute to his friend, but it’s also very simply – in every sense of that phrase – moving.

It features many of Larkin’s poems and you also realise in the last moments that the entire play really comes straight from one of them. Like the script says, I only know the famous one about what your parents do to you, but across two acts, I am shown very many more and shown so well that these could now be favourite poems of mine.

That’s not why I wanted to talk to you about this today.

No, the reason is that the play has a brief nod to another poet, Christina Rossetti. It features a few lines from her “When I am dead, my dearest” and, for me, specifically these:

And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

That’s it. That’s the poem I asked to be read on Poetry Please. I was at the live recording in the Birmingham Literature Festival and practically first met poet Jo Bell there because she was sitting next to me in the audience. I remember she knew to put a sympathetic, empathetic hand on my knee. I want to say she knew to hold my hand. Those two lines make me weep and I was sitting there, shaking.

Last night I was in my office, reading an old stage play by a friend I miss, and those lines are the ones that slap me.

I am actually crying right now, writing them to you.

This is what my school should have taught about poetry. I have a sense that they would’ve said, and surely my teenage self would have thought, that crying over a poem means you’re weak. Now I know that it means the words are strong.

And that’s what I really needed to learn. Not poetic structure, not the fact that Rossetti died 127 years ago, I’ll take all of that and know it’s interesting, but fuck explanations, the point is that words are so strong.

Radio one

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I’d just like your company for a while, can we do that? Normally when I write to you it’s first thing on a Friday morning and actually it’s not that different now: wait one second… there, it’s just gone midnight on Thursday night. Midnight when it’s raining heavily outside, I’m by a fire, I’ve got tea and toast, and I’ve just finished a 15-hour working day.

Look, I’m actually getting a bit weary of remembering things, I’d rather be doing something new. And lately it’s been all memory. The other day I drove to London on my own but accompanied by about thirty events I remembered from previous drives to the BBC. Plus I’ve been watching a lot of archive television and shuddering at the thought it’s an archive now.

Sometimes the two collide, such as how I’ve just finished rewatching the first season of Mad About You from 1992/93 and it is inextricably tied to my time on BBC Ceefax and then on Radio Times. I remember an editor on RT who didn’t like the show and I remember watching an episode on a newsroom’s tiny monitor.

Today though, or tonight rather, I’m remembering a sensation and that’s what I want to enjoy with you.

I can’t define it, I can just describe the circumstances, which go thisaway. It’s late, obviously, that’s crucial, and the day has been long but you’ve achieved something, you’ve created something. It might be something no one else thinks is worth doing, but you do and you’ve done it. What’s more, you’ve done it with other people who are on that blurry line between colleague and friend.

And then you’re all at someone’s kitchen table. Big table, half a dozen people, all talking together, all splitting off briefly into this smaller group or that larger conversation, and all drinking tea. Maybe I just mix with the wrong crowd there, but the tea is important, more important and more useful, more needed, that alcohol would have been.

It’s the sense that you all did something together and that you played your part. That you lived up to what everyone in this group did, what they all needed.

And, I now think, it could also be that there has to be radio involved somewhere. I think I associate this feeling and that circumstance with BBC Radio WM, I know it definitely started for me earlier with BHBN hospital radio.

I spent tonight editing a podcast for a client.

Hosted it, recorded it, now edited it. That’s as close to radio as I can get, yet it’s also got to be just about as far away from the radio I knew as you can be. Two people speaking on the show, and then just me and my Mac pulling it together. Plenty of editing, no sign of the old tape and chinagraph pencils and razor blades, just a point and a click.

But the same muscles in shaping audio. The same way you know when this cut is right and that one isn’t.

I don’t really miss the way radio used to be edited, although somewhere in my office I have a tape block that you used to use for this and which nobody now can fathom what it’s for. I definitely didn’t miss stringing tape around my neck to remember which bit was which, although I do have several reels of tape in my office.

What I miss is sitting around the table with you afterwards. Thanks for giving me that through this.

Now, you’re looking tired. I’ll drive you home.

Helen Hunt and Paul Reiser in Mad About You: Togetherness by Steve Paymer

The actors did not make it up

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There’s a pizza restaurant in London, I forget the name but it’s right in the Leicester Square theatre area. Its walls are covered with quotes, not one of which is from theatre, every one of which is from films –– and every one of which is wrong.

That’s because each famous line from a movie is attributed on these wall plaques to the actor who said it. Who said it. Didn’t write it, didn’t think it up, just said it. I have pointed out to the restaurant that I’ve said all of these quotes too, they should give me plaque.

They’re going to get back to me.

I’d understand it if they credited the line to the character and the movie, but they don’t do either. It is solely the quote and then the actor’s name.

And I think it’s tied to how you’ve seen a bizarrely frantic need for people to believe actors make up everything themselves. That can be clear in how often people or the media ask, I don’t know, Peter Mayhew just how much he’s really like Chewbacca. Or it can be more specific: actors are regularly asked if they came up with this or that superb line.

No, they didn’t.

Drama is collaboration and an excellent actor can certainly, in the moment, in the character, come up with a great line. They can’t come up with two, they can’t come up with entire scenes and dramas, and they can well come up with a line that’s brilliant in this scene but entirely screws up the ending of the movie.

I don’t actually say that to criticise, either. I know of actors who are practically proud that they only read their lines in a script and to hell with what every other character has to say, and I know of actors who are extremely successful while being like that. They’re just crap, though, what can you do?

A tremendous actor will work that script, will understand everything in it and – this is quite hard to say as a writer, but it’s true – by the end, they will indeed know their character better than you do. I still don’t trust anyone who claims “my character wouldn’t say that”, and I still do suspect they really mean “I can’t pronounce that word”. Which has happened to me.

But if you and I both accept the practicality that drama is collaboration and that everyone is working to the same goal, let me zero in on why this is really all bothering me today.

It’s partly because it bothers me all the time. The desire on the part of audiences for the actor to have made up their lines, the need for them to have done it. Two or three times now, I’ve been told of a stage show where the cast go madly off script and ad lib like crazy. Each time the person who told me this said that it made their night, that it made the show come alive so very much more than if it had been written.

And then six months later, I catch the same show further on in its tour and every single ad lib is precisely the same.

Because they were written.

Of course they were.

Which means I could be wrong here, but I just saw something I think was ad libbed – and I liked it.

I’m rewatching Mad About You, the quite bizarrely underrated 1990s sitcom by Paul Reiser and Danny Jacobson. In “Togetherness”, an episode by Steve Paymer, there’s an end titles sequence that appears to be ad libbed. It’s nothing to do with the episode, it is a callback to an equally unrelated pre-titles gag, but the studio audience roars extra hard and co-star Helen Hunt appears to break character over it.

Let me just say here that this is Helen Hunt. She’s an Oscar-winning actor, she’s a director, a producer, and a writer. If she wants to make you think she’s genuinely laughing about something, she can do it.

So I could be wrong here. Or, to use a famous line written for the show, this may not be the most right I’ve ever been.

Plus, I’ve skipped over telling you what the gag was because a) it doesn’t matter and 2) I didn’t understand it. Truly, there’s this moment, everyone loves it, I haven’t the faintest idea what it means or why it’s funny. You just know that it was something topical and perhaps that’s why I think it was ad libbed.

I’ve now looked it up and yes, it was a reference to a separate role Hunt had just played in the month that episode was recorded.

So, okay, it was a topical reference that the studio audience would get and I, thirty years later, could not. And which actually the TV viewing audience some weeks or months after the recording might not have been able to get either. That’s definitely why it was in the end titles and not a gag in the actual episode, that’s possibly why I think it was ad libbed.

But what surprises me is that I enjoyed it. I don’t understand it, and yet I enjoyed it.

Not to reveal that I have been thinking about this for four days now, but I’ve been thinking about it for four days now. The best I’ve got, the furthest I’ve got, is that I enjoyed the momentary sense of looking behind the curtain, of seeing more than the show’s writers and cast and crew presented to us.

I think when we like a show, we form a relationship with it. It’s a peculiar one since the show has never heard of us, but it’s also a quite intimate one and seeing something behind the curtain, seeing something from the wings, it’s like we’re being allowed in more than other people. It’s like our special relationship with the show is somehow affirmed.

I don’t get how we can respond like this, how we can take a real or imagined ad lib, see that it’s revealing a show is constructed, contrived, and then ignore the constructors and the contrivers and think the actors make it up. I don’t get how we can correctly know characters and yet so many people take that to mean they know the actors.

But, okay, maybe I do now understand the appeal of ad libs.

Time’s table

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I did not realise how a table can soak up the people who sat at it, can eat up all of the events that surrounded it, and then release them all again like a battery. I was going to say I hadn’t realised this happens until just about now, a couple of days ago.

But what I really realised this week was that every time I think of Shirley Rubinstein and Alan Plater, I think of them at a particular table. It was a dinner table, longer than it was wide, and I ate with them at it many times, but we also just talked there a lot.

Alan died in 2010 and when Shirley died in 2017 and I was at the funeral, I was standing by that table when I asked to go see Alan’s office one last time. That was a tremendous space, you’d love it: just saying that makes it sound large and I don’t mean that, I mean it was perfect. Somehow a split-level office, with Alan writing in the lower part, Shirley working in the upper. You had to go through Shirley’s bit to step down into Alan’s and even visiting it, it felt like climbing down into a nest.

Just stepping down into it, you felt ready to write.

That split level office must surely still be there, though I’ve no idea who lives in that house now or what they may have done with the office. But the split-level part, that has to still be there.

Whereas I thought the table was gone forever.

Earlier this week, though, I was at a school and by more chance and social media algorithms than I’d have thought possible, an old friend found out I was going. And that I would therefore be about 15 minutes away from this woman I hadn’t seen in so long. Hadn’t seen since Shirley’s funeral in 2017.

I might even forgive Facebook’s machinations for how it meant I ended up having a great time with her. But throughout the afternoon, as deep into conversation and tea as I was, there was also this.

She now has Alan and Shirley’s table.

I choked when she told me.

I stroked it, actually stroked it. And absolutely had to sit at the same spot I used to.

Days later, telling you, I’m actually teary.

My favourite football team*

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*I have no favourite football team. I would struggle to name a football team. Not true: if invited, I would very quickly name a team something like “Overpaid”.

But next week I am spending a day in a school for the first time since before the pandemic, and the subject is non-fiction. At some point before lunch I am going to point out to approximately 30 pupils from something 5 schools, that they have never heard of me before. That they are unlikely to ever hear of me again.

Yet they also now know how to find out something about me.

The thing I will ask them to find out about me over lunch is what my favourite football team is. I can think of two ways for them to find out and this is one of them. The other is to ask me. I am so hoping that someone will just ask me.

Being invited into a school is a privilege that I take extremely seriously. It’s on my mind a lot and if I’m saying much of this in order to have something the pupils can find online with a little effort, I’m also saying it to you because I am an idiot.

There I will be, next Tuesday, telling writers that you can always ask anyone, anything. That it is supremely easy to just ask them. And here I was last Tuesday, maybe Wednesday, telling someone else that since they wanted a particular thing from someone, they should ask.

I hope it was last Tuesday because that’s a nice balance of Tuesdays and because yesterday comes between them. And yes.

Yesterday, I had to ask someone for something. And I found it very hard.

Fair broke my arms trying to type when the stakes were so unnaturally high. I say unnatural because whatever the reason it was all so charged for me, it isn’t for them.

Maybe that’s what I should really be telling people next week. Whoever you’re asking is far less concerned, far less bothered, far less interested in the fact you’re asking, than you think. For good or bad reasons, for whatever reason, your mountain is not theirs.

So, I know this again and again, ask.

There’s a producer I want to contact and I’ve only got a US postal address for his company. I’m wondering whether I should just write a letter.

And now, talking to you, I realise there is nothing to stop my doing it but me, no one to say I can’t but me.

Also, it occurs to me that with my handwriting, I should probably type.

Diddy Do It

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I am not trying to distract you or me from what’s going on in the UK and the relief that the Opposition party announced that they’d do the same crap as the government, just presumably crappier, though they were a little light on the details.

No, it’s actually vital that I talk with you about a failed project of mine. I urgently need to tell you about a radio project that went nowhere so long ago that I can’t remember. I want to say 1996, so I’m going to, but it could be earlier. Details are crucial, you see.

This is going to sound more than it was, but sometime around then I and a BBC Radio producer had a project we wanted Ken Dodd to do. It was a series, I think maybe five short episodes, that would’ve had Ken Dodd as a detective. A detective walking the mean streets of somewhere, Ken Dodd and his Diddymen, Ken Dodd with a revolver and a tickling stick.

It was a murder mystery comedy and if you remember Ken Dodd’s act and you have forgotten the title up above, you may enjoy being surprised that I called the show “Diddy Do It.”

I did write it, my writing was atrocious, but I can only guess that was why Ken Dodd turned us down. I never knew why, I’m not actually sure now that he even saw a script, but I do know when. Kind of. If it were 1996 when we did this, it was at least 1997 and maybe 1998 before he said no.

Dodd was famous for his comedy, of course, and also how his stage shows were brilliant, but would run so uncontrollably long that people would miss the last bus home. What was less known, because few needed to, was that he was also his own agent.

I want to say I was warned going in that this meant everything took a long time, but I could be guessing.

The one thing I can be certain of is what I called the first two episodes. You may not remember his act, you may pretend you’re too young to, but I am certain that no one else has ever done this.

Episode 1 was called “What a Beautiful Day It Is”. And episode 2 was also called “What a Beautiful Day It Is”.

Such a shame the episodes weren’t as good as their titles.