Twice in the last week – once with you, once on BBC Radio Foyle – I got to natter about how my two current TV obsessions are preposterously different. They’re the current Only Murders in the Building and the fifty-year-old The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Only, Only Murders is only about a podcast, right? So it only took me six episodes of Only to realise that surely, surely there would be a podcast about the show. Lying in the bath last night, I listened to the first episode and its interview with Only Murder co-creator, co-writer and all-showrunner, John Hoffman.
Pretty much just as the motion-sensor lights in the bathroom switched off, I sat up, splashing water onto the iPhone and, as it happens, turning the lights back on.
Because Hoffman was describing the process of writing this Only Murders series and he said that every single night during it, he would watch two episodes of another show.
Yes.
It was The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
I suppose both are comedies, though the Mary show was straight sitcom and Only Murders is comedy drama. I suppose both are half hours, but Mary is 25 minutes and Only Murders can go up to 35 if it likes.
There’s no connection in the subject, the tone, the characters, and yet I get it. Hoffman watched all seven seasons of the Mary show, two episodes a night and it fed into writing Only Murders in the Building.
I am taken by this because of the odds that the two shows I look forward to are the same two for this man I don’t know, and especially since do you have the faintest clue how many sitcoms or comedy dramas or just television programmes there have been in the last half a century? Go pick your own, Hoffman, I’ve got this one.
But then there is also this. On Tuesday, I read a script I wrote about 20 years ago and let’s say it was shite altogether.
“It was shite.”
However, it was also unquestionably me. I could hear my voice, see my tone, recognise certain descriptions and actually also particular patterns and ways of describing things.
And I could also see what prompted most of the script. A character says “you’ve got my vote” and I know Grosse Pointe Blank was on my mind. A description of mine includes the phrase “certain-sure” and I like that, I like the rhythm of it, I like the amplification-by-tautology, but I don’t like how I believed I’d thought of it in a script earlier this year. It’s scary that I’ve just found it again in a Self Distract blog from 2015 where I appear to obsess over the word “bollocks.”
Everything you know, everything you feel, goes into writing and then it only bloody comes out again, too. I don’t think it should come out as baldly, overtly obvious as it is with my scripts, but I used to like how I believed I could adapt to any house style, fit in with any production or any publication’s writing and now I’m glad that I can’t. I found my voice and apparently can’t shut up.
A friend told me once that she could recognise my writing in a particular piece that didn’t have a byline, that wasn’t meant to be one person’s writing. I liked that very much.
Though I’m pretty sure that was the same friend who this week told me she never watches my 58keys YouTube channel and she never reads this Self Distract.
This week, the UK government is telling television producers that they must only make terribly British shows. O-kay…
You think of all the things going on and going wrong in the world, you think of all of them just going wrong in the UK, and this is what the government focuses on. You could presume that it’s a front, a distraction, something they think we will go for while they get on with the serious business of running the country, and I’d be okay with that. I’d even be happy enough if I thought they were just insulting our intelligence. Insult me, fine, just run the country for the benefit of the people in it instead of solely, exclusively for the benefit of the people in the Cabinet.
Anyway. Deep breath.
The government did also fire the person who, presumably, was going to implement all of this terribly British crap. They fired him one hour before he was due to give a Royal Television Society speech about it.
His identikit replacement stood up at the RTS and read his speech. I’m not entirely sure she put any more effort into the project than he had.
We’ve been here before and it has scared me before.
David Cameron, when he was Prime Minister and had a spare moment between a bacon sandwich and destroying the union, told UK filmmakers to only make hits.
If you just said something along the lines of oh, for god’s sake, hang on, there’s a little more. He may have been shockingly stupid, but he did think to give us all an example. The King’s Speech. Make hits like The King’s Speech, he said, easy.
The King’s Speech is a very good film by David Seidler. It concerns a man most of the audience hasn’t heard of, who spends 90 minutes or so struggling to make one speech. I liked it very much, but it doesn’t really have Marvel Cinematic Universe written all over it.
Today anyone making The King’s Speech 9: Chelsea Drift would presumably be told to make it more terribly British.
That totality of stupidity, the stupidity without a sliver of daylight between the stupid bits, is here coupled to a totality of arrogance. I hear this and I think of international relations, the economy, the million things I do not understand about running a country and I have to conclude that neither does the government. If they’re this stupid about something I do know, I mean stupid to this degree and to a depth so deep only their arrogance is still visible, it’s hard not to conclude that they’re the same about everything.
So the UK government is laughable and in as far as anyone listens to the UK anymore, we are being laughed at.
Look, I would be ashamed to compare television production to Britain’s history of rather more gigantically regrettable moments, but stupidity and arrogance are always the ingredients.
And that is what we British do terribly.
Okay, no, I was going to stop there because that reversal of “terribly British” into “British do terribly” is an ending. Screw endings, though, I need something to lift me back up. I only get to talk you once a week, let’s not leave it like this.
Instead, let me tell you this. Lately television is the chief thing that have been getting me through the week. Specifically “Only Murders in the Building” and, while I wait the impossibly long seven days between episodes of that, I have at last been getting into “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” too.
One of those shows is so new it isn’t over yet. The other is fifty years old. Fifty. Half a century.
You can’t ever make something deliberately to last half a hundred years and counting. But you can try. And that would be damn sight better than setting out to make shows featuring red buses, village greens, or fucking afternoon tea.
I was booked to do a quick thing on a local BBC radio station yesterday and obviously whenever you do this, if you can, you listen to the show. Tune in a bit early, which is now amazingly easy because of live streaming over the internet, hear how your bit is being promoted, hear what else is going on.
It’s not always possible, you can be bouncing from station to station with no time in between. But I love it when I can do this because I think it makes my bit better. I can more engage with the show and the presenter and the listeners because I can do a callback to something they’ve just heard or said.
Fine. So far, so obvious. Only, this time as I’m listening away, it felt like I short-circuited. There was a fella on before me doing a review thing and it was abruptly like I’m simultaneously at my desk now and I’m sitting in a radio studio years ago. I used to do that, I said aloud.
There must’ve been at least a pixel of regret that I wasn’t still doing it, surely, but after the jolt of remembering, the main feeling was relief that I didn’t have to do it any more. It was something that took a hell of a lot of time and effort, time and effort that today I’m not that interested in. Not for that job, that role.
I am a lot older than the keen little William Gallagher who used to do those things, but I wonder if the difference is more than age. I wonder if it’s that I’m more selective. Back in the day, you say yes to everything or you do everything until someone says no.
Now I have a better idea of how much time and effort something is likely to take, and I suppose I can triage. You would hope so after a lot of years working, but sometimes I think things that are obvious still need saying, still need being brought to your own attention.
Such as this. I work early mornings, I would work late night except I crash out asleep, and I typically work through weekends. I’ve known for a long time that I need to give something up.
But it was listening to this fella that reminded me that I have given things up, that I can give them up, that we can move on.
I’m conscious that I think I’m juggling a lot and then I look at you and all you’re doing. I feel a bit feeble. But I am feeble, then, and I should own it. I need to focus more, stop spreading the effort and concentrate it better.
My first book was about the television drama “The Beiderbecke Affair” and it was for the British Film Institute. It was in their range of TV Classics and naturally, when you’ve done one, the only thing more likely than the publisher asking if you’d like to do another, is you asking the publisher if you can.
Even more than Beiderbecke, I wanted to write about “Lou Grant”. It didn’t fly and it didn’t fly for a dozen reasons from how the range almost never did US shows, to how the range wasn’t making money. But to make a pitch, I had to do a little bit of research.
That’s chiefly because if you are a publisher and you go to check whether there’s already a book on the proposed subject, you very quickly find that there is. My job was not only to convince the BFI that the topic was of value and that the chance of anyone buying a copy was good, but also that there was a reason for anyone else to do another book about this show.
To my mind, that was damn easy. This 1990s book about the making of “Lou Grant” is really an academic treatise. It sets out to explore whether the show and its “Los Angeles Tribune” newspaper setting was an accurate representation of real journalism at the time. The answer is: more than most. I’ve just saved you reading the book, although I’m denying you some fantastic access the writer had to key people involved.
As part of my own little initial stab at research, though, I created a few Google alerts. Any time something came up about “Lou Grant”, it would be added to the newsreader app I use constantly on my iPhone.
I think I originally created some alerts specifically for certain writers, but I would’ve abandoned that quite quickly. One of my favourite writers on the show is April Smith and if I remember getting alerts about her new novels, I know I got more news stories that contained lines like this: “In April, Smith said…”.
Forget setting an alert for Michelle Gallery. For a brief time I knew more about the opening hours of US art auction houses than is sensible.
But if I dropped those off after the book project failed to go, I somehow left the “Lou Grant” alert in place.
Consequently, over the years since, I have been alerted to the odd thing that some of the writers are doing now, and sometimes various television executives. There’s an excellent series of interviews with Grant Tinker about the show, for instance, and I’d not have found it otherwise.
Mostly I hear about cast, though. It’s through a Google alert that I got to watch Linda Kelsey performing a drama reading somewhere. Apparently it’s through a lack of Google alert that I can’t find that again now I want to show you. Bugger.
But if I found that a couple of years ago and if the Tinker interview is further back than that, there was one thing I could regularly count on my “Lou Grant” Google alert to keep turning up.
Ed Asner.
It seemed like very other week, it cannot be more than every other month, but I would get an alert of a news story about him performing a one-man show on stage somewhere. Or going to perform somewhere. Or maybe campaigning, or doing voiceovers, or just being interviewed an awful lot about the sheer volume of work he had done and the seemingly even greater volume of work he was now doing.
So it was a more of a jolt than I would have imagined to find out this week that he’s just died.
Just died. That’s like yeah, yeah, he just had to go do that dying thing, he’ll back in a minute. And there is a bit of me that would entirely believe that.
When I think about “Lou Grant” it’s usually about the writing, which I loved so much then that it made me want to become a writer. And which I admire so much more now that I am one. But back in the day, watching this series in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was of course the whole I was enjoying. The writing, the acting, the directing, the production, all of it.
Now I look back at it, I’ve a new appreciation for the set design. But I most definitely have a greater appreciation for the acting. It is all so naturalistic that I forgot then and I can still forget now that it is acting at all.
Tell a lie, it isn’t all so naturalistic. Ed Asner is far from that in the first episode. He’s so far from it that you feel he’s in a different series to everyone else. But then for that first edition and perhaps a few after it, he was.
Never before –– and significantly, never since –– has a half-hour sitcom spawned a one-hour drama. But that is what happened. Ed Asner played grumpy Lou Grant for seven years on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and then he played the more layered version of him on his own show for five.
So if Asner thinks he’s still in a comedy in episode one, you can understand it. Or you can now. Back then, I may not have consciously registered the different tone between him and the rest of the cast, but I felt it and wondered what was going on.
Oddly, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” never really played in the UK. Even more oddly, one of its sitcom spin-offs did: “Rhoda” was a hit here. So when this “Lou Grant” show started, I hadn’t the faintest idea that this character had any history.
I sound like I’m criticising Asner for how he performed in those early episodes and I suppose I am, but really I’m appreciating what a giant and unprecedented job he was in the middle of pulling off.
There’s a lot else to admire about the acting in the show, but that’s the element that sticks out at me. I thought that this and those constant alerts about new shows was the specific reason that I was so startled by Asner’s death even at age 91.
Here’s the thing, though. I’ve been thinking about this for days and the reason I’m jolted by his death is bigger than I thought. Any time anyone you’ve even heard of dies, of course you’re sad about it. When that someone is a direct connection back to your childhood, it’s of course more, even when that person has never heard of you.
But beyond that, there’s this. There are actors I like, actors I don’t. Certainly there are performances I relish and ones where I’m glad they didn’t do that to my script. I would not have said that there is any actor who has inspired me. I would not have said Ed Asner has. This show’s writers, certainly. I’m so single-minded-focused on writing that it’s writers or maybe certain producers I know enable certain writers who I credit.
“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was beyond a hit in the US. It was such a success that – cutting a story at least in half – CBS gave an on-air commitment to a spin-off for the Lou Grant character. You could dream of such a deal now, but such was the popularity of the comedy that CBS bought 13 episodes of “Lou Grant” straight off.
It was called an on-air commitment, but it was really pay or play. If CBS had aired the first couple of episodes to disastrous ratings, I’m sure they’d have pulled it and just eaten the enormous cost. Whatever their thinking was, the drama that made me a writer got on air and had 13 episodes in which to shake out things like that naturalistic versus more comedic acting.
I owe a debt, then, to the writers of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” a series I’ve barely seen and certainly hadn’t the slightest notion of back when I was starting to mount up this bill. Creator/writers Allan Burns and James L. Brooks became familiar names to me on screen through creating “Lou Grant”, along with Gene Reynolds. But CBS had such faith in writers that it had tried to fire Burns and Brooks when they were developing the Mary Tyler Moore series and it was only Grant Tinker’s intervention that prevented them being out on their ears.
Which means score one to Grant Tinker, but this also tells me that really CBS gave an on-air commitment to Ed Asner.
So a show that meant this much to me exists because of an actor’s performance in a series I didn’t know.
I struggle to bring myself to say that therefore I am a writer because of Ed Asner, but it isn’t half looking like that. I thought it was unusual enough to be able to pin one’s career down to a single moment like a TV show, but to pin it to a performance I hadn’t seen, that’s just eye-widening.
I’ve been having trouble with a script I’m writing. It is partly because I appear to be in it and while my cold writer’s head can see that’s necessary to tell this particular story, even I wouldn’t watch something about me.
But then there is also this. The script is about real people. I am a real person, I’m a real person who hasn’t had breakfast yet and is having difficulty remembering whether he’s shaved this fuzzy morning, but I don’t interest me. Beyond wondering why I’m writing my own dialogue, and then why I’m reading it back, I don’t concern me. Instead, it’s everyone else I’m worried about.
I have more research about the two other real people in the story than is even really feasible. Plus above all the facts and the documentation, they were my friends. No question, I’m armed and ready in that sense, but I’m a writer who’s also a journalist: I would give up an eye faster than I would make up a quote for a real person.
And now I’m going to have to make up entire speeches. Ouch, that’s revealing: I’m hiding in tenses and presumably because I am tense. The truth is that I already have made up entire speeches. I’ve written a two-page argument between me and one of these people. And that fight cuts into me, it hurts me, yet still I look at the page thinking he didn’t say that and nobody cares what I didn’t say back.
Except I had a dream the other night in which the late Alan Plater told me, in these precise words, “as long as it’s true, make it up”.
Then it’s like I planned what happened next. The reason I’m telling you this today, apart from how it’s pressing on my mind and I tell you everything, is that a play of Alan’s is to be re-staged at the Hampstead Theatre in London later this year. “Peggy for You” is about Alan’s first agent, Peggy Ramsay, and I read the script last night. Re-read: my copy of the published script turns out to be 21 years old.
It also turns out to be the true story of this eye-poppingly wild and wonderful woman, except it isn’t true at all. Except it is. It is an account of one day of her working life in the 1960s, completely made up, and therefore completely true.
I know because Alan’s introduction to the script says so.
“When I started writing the play, I heard her voice saying: ‘Just make sure it’s a pack of lies, dear.’ And it is. I did no research, but relied totally on a blend of memory, anecdote, myth and legend. The few elements that can be clearly identified could not possibly have happened on the day in question.”
Since Alan is one of the real people in my script, I think I should keep listening to him.
If there is one thing I wish I’d written, then I’m a rubbish writer who pays no attention to how much fantastic writing there is in the world. But definitely one of the things would be this line of “Brevity. Soul. Wit.” which used to be on my favourite mug, which made that mug my favourite, until I lost it somewhere.
It was a mug from the Royal Shakespeare Company and maybe you need that context to recognise what it’s after saying, but I think you get it. This is the six-word quote “brevity is the soul of wit” reduced to three words.
You can always reduce anything. I once read a commissioning document that, by way of an example, cut the whole of Hamlet down to about 100 words. Small problem: if you read those 100, you would never take a single look at Hamlet again. You can edit text and make it more effective, you can edit text and make it crap.
I was in a discussion this week about whether one should edit one’s writing at all. Ever. That if you edited it, maybe you could ruin it.
Intellectually, I get the argument, and I could even make a decent fist of arguing that uninhibited stream-of-conscious writing needs protection.
Except it’s bollocks. People who don’t want to edit for fear of ruining their work really just don’t want to edit. Editing is hard. It’s heavy lifting, it’s deep examination instead of just merry typing.
There’s an older, if similar argument that asks whether writing is an art or a skill. I’m just not sure how this can count as an argument when the answer is yes.
Not quite true, or not quite the full answer. I was once in a pub discussion where the answer was actually “Yes, and it’s your round.”
Of course, if I really wanted to edit this down to its core, I’d just point out that the mug concerned is not the RSC one.
It’s the Baader Meinhof Effect again. This week I heard a term for the first time, a term that you may already know because you’re smart, but I didn’t because I’d not noticed it before. And then it took me hearing it for the first time twice for it to get in my head.
Stop-Time.
Des Tong mentions this musical term in the deeply interesting interview he did for my 58keys series on YouTube last Wednesday. Then Kirk Hamilton’s Strong Songs podcast spent a sliver under an hour examining Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”, and dwelt on it. (Do listen to the whole thing, but stop-time segment comes in from 26’40”.)
You’d think, then, I’d know what it was, at least enough to not ask you to check out Wikipedia’s definition. Well.
So it’s a beat, a particular rhythm that’s different to the rest of a piece of music and it feels as if it’s made that music stop, as if it’s made time stop. I don’t know how a regular beat can do that when it’s a beat, it’s literally a series of sounds that come one after another in time, but it does. In “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”, it comes between one of that song’s many dramatic changes in tempo, even in form, and it’s like it holds you in the air for a moment, just before you drop back down into the time of the song.
There’s a moment in WG Snuffy Walden’s thirtysomething soundtrack where the music pauses for the smallest breath that feels like a chasm. It’s a pause, an ending, yet you know it hasn’t ended, you know you’re falling to the next note and when that comes, it’s like it’s caught you and is bringing you along to something else.
It’s also like I wish I knew any musical terms whatsoever.
Well, I do now, I know stop-time.
And somehow I’m going to use it in my writing. Er. I mean, other than this, writing to you about it.
Last night, YouTube offered me up Cyndi Lauper’s “Change of Heart“, a song that comes from – and instantaneously took me back to – about 1986. The music did and I can see your face, you’re not exactly looking surprised. Music does this, of course it does. I don’t know how, but of course it does.
Only, the video didn’t take me back one inch.
That song, and the True Colours album it comes from, are part of my skin but I had never seen the video before last night. I don’t think it’s an especially brilliant one, it’s not that I’m urging you to see it, but I can’t stop thinking about the disconnection of music and video, skin and surface. Each note, each syllable, as familiar as if they were my very own, and the video completely alien.
It was riveting, somehow like suddenly seeing the back of your head and realising you’ve always had a bald spot.
Presumably the video was filmed in 1986 and these people were doing that filming, were performing, no more than shortly before I was first listening to the album. So that video shows reality – I mean, okay, people don’t tend to run over London tourist spots singing, but those spots looked like that then, those crowds were there, this was reality.
And from the perspective of 35 years later, that reality seems so innocent.
It makes me feel old, not least after I just worked out that 35 figure on my fingers, but I can’t decide whether I miss that time or not. Knowing all that was to come after it, I don’t know if would like to be able to step back to then.
I just know that I cannot avoid stepping back when I listen to the music. And that this – to me – brand new video for it has thrown me.
Maybe I’m wondering what the next 35 years will bring and, time being what it is, also thinking of just how soon it will be 2056. I’m definitely thinking about whether we like or dislike music, we assess it now, in the moment we hear it, and we entirely miss that is forever welded to that same moment.
Sometimes I’m wondering whether we can actually assess whether something is good or not, assess it at all, because nothing is entire of itself, everything is bonded to its time. Except screw assessing anything, it works for you or it doesn’t.
Maybe I’m just saying that it would good if everything old were new again.
There must be something awkward about me because last time I fair raged at you about how writers shouldn’t ever ask questions in articles and now I want to at least enthuse about not writing answers.
It’s a different rant. Questions in articles and features tell me the writer couldn’t do their job whereas answers in a script tell me the writer isn’t great at dialogue.
This is very specifically something I feel about scriptwriting, but I feel it so strongly that I apply it in fiction, I apply it anywhere I remotely can. And it’s this: I will eat glass before I allow any of my characters to answer a question.
Respond, yes. React, absolutely. But actually answer what they been asked, as close to never as humanly possible.
Here’s an exchange of dialogue from a script. I need you to play the first part, I’ll play the second.
FIRST PERSON: What were you doing in Tesco this morning?
SECOND PERSON: Um, buying bacon.
You read that very well, thank you. I need you to do it once more, maybe with just a tiny bit more anger.
FIRST PERSON: What were you doing in Tesco this morning?
SECOND PERSON: Were you following me?
You see the difference immediately. The initial exchange about bacon was domestic at best, flat at worst. In the second one, these two characters feel like they’re on their feet, that there is some life and verve and history here, that they’re going to fight.
I grant you, we’ve lost the information that I was buying bacon. It’s possible that bacon plays an important part in the story, but you suspect not. So what the bacon line really accomplishes is confirmation that I was in Tesco. We already knew that from the question, so that answer was in all possible ways worthless. It was a dead line of dialogue. Dead and therefore deadening.
When you see an answer like that in a script, it is alway deadening, and it always means the writer is trying to write naturalistically. In a real conversation, it’s more likely that I’d say bacon than I would get in your face about it all, but this isn’t a real conversation. Drama does not have natural, real-life dialogue, it has dialogue that sounds as if it’s natural.
That’s a gigantic difference and it’s how dialogue carries infinitely more than the information in the words. You delivered your line about why I was in Tesco with some gusto there, but I could’ve asked about your following me in a light, jokey way. I didn’t, though, and you knew I didn’t, even without my writing it like this:
SECOND PERSON: (Angrily) Were you following me?
Last week I said that to me, a question in an article is a brick wall that stops me reading on unless I have to. An answer in a script can be a stumble, to my mind, and it breaks the flow, it takes me a little out of the story, because an answer is usually a bit of dead air.
If I feel strongly about this, though, it’s not that I’m against writers having their characters answer. It’s that doing so without being this dead pause, without reminding me that this isn’t naturalistic dialogue, is beyond me.
Whereas the reason I’m a writer at all is a show called Lou Grant which basically had an ensemble of journalist characters constantly asking each other things, and then spending half the episode interviewing people. Back when I was a teenager, I watched five years of that show without once realising that it was all question and answer, it is done that well.
It’s not very often that something you used to adore stands up a couple of decades later, but in this case I now admire that show even more. I just don’t seem to have learned from it how to ask questions without answers being rubbish.
An editor told me this week to not write questions in a feature and I overreacted. Not at all because I disagree, but because I was appalled at the idea I would ever do this dreadful thing. I explained that questions in feature articles were a pet peeve of mine and then decided no, that’s not strong enough, it’s a pet peeve, a hobby horse and a religious tract.
I feel so strongly about this that it is honestly difficult for me to write you an example. Honestly. But here goes.
So what is a question in a feature?
God, the willpower required to not delete that before you saw it.
A question like that in an article comes loaded with a lot of information and all of it is bad. When you read a question, you know the feature is moving on to a new point, which is fine –– but you also know the writer didn’t know how to do the move. You can suspect that the writer is lazy and you can know for a fact that the writer isn’t very good.
If an article isn’t one of those bullet-point lists, a listicle in which number 6 will blow your mind, then it’s known as a read-through. You’re meant to read it through from the start to the end. That means the text starts somewhere and the writer takes you through to the end.
Each point has to follow on from the one before. The piece has a whole has a lot to say and the job is to say it all in such a way that the article flows, that it carries the reader along without any bumps in the stream. The job is finding the right sequence of points and making it seem inevitable, obvious, easy that they go in this order.
You also have to write well enough that someone bothers to read on, but that’s another story. The reason poor writers include questions in their text is because they can’t take you to the next point in a way that feels inevitable, obvious, easy.
When I read a question, it feels to me as if the article has stopped in a panic. I can see the writer, I can feel the writer, realising they don’t know how to keep the text going. I can feel the weight of the word count on their backs, the pressure of the deadline. I can feel that they don’t read much. And I can sense that they don’t give very much of a damn, either.
A question in an article is a brick wall and if I ever read on after one, it’s because I have to for some reason. I then resent having to, because I already know the writer isn’t any good and so the chance I’ll find what I need is suddenly dramatically lower.
Don’t get me started on questions in headlines, either. Actually, no, do get me started on that because it’s quick. So quick that there’s even Betteridge’s law which states that any headline that’s a question will be followed by an article that answers no.
“Can you declutter in one hour?”
“Is Elvis really teaching PE in Cardiff?”
It’s possible, just about barely possible, that you’ve picked up on how questions in articles and headlines make me a teeny bit unhappy. I told you I overreacted. But I can’t help it: when I see a question in a feature, I am affronted that I’ve been wasting my time reading this crap. So to be told not to do it, and by implication have it suggested that I ever do, it was pet peeve hobby horse religious effigy burning time. And then some.
