I have this thing that a story should be like a piece of wood that you run your hand over: go one way, go forward in the story, and its shards should cut into you. Go the other way, go looking back over the story, and it should seem completely smooth. It should be that there are shocks and surprises but in retrospect, they worked, they were necessary, and there were not in any way contorted or conjured up.

I like this idea of mine, I just hadn’t thought until this week that I’m missing a little detail. Specifically, that it exactly matters where the cuts and the shards and the surprises are.

Well, of course it does. I haven’t thought about that because it doesn’t need thinking about, except maybe it is.

Because a surprise only works with a setup, you have to know what to be surprised about. Depending on you, for instance, The Sixth Sense either surprises you at the end or somewhere near the beginning. It doesn’t surprise anyone in the opening shot.

But where you place the surprise, I think about this a lot. Chiefly this week because I read Jennie Snyder Urman’s pilot script to Matlock, the new Kathy Bates-starring series, and you have time to back away before I spoil things.

There’s still time.

Not much.

But.

Okay, we are supposed to think that the new Matlock is a remake, a reboot of the old one. I’ve never seen the old one, starring Andy Griffith, but it’s famous enough that I know of it and that I could readily believe a studio today would leap on it as a known property.

I suppose it is what it seems, in that it is trading on the old show’s name. I suppose it’s also what you expect, in that it really has bugger-all to do with that old show, except the name and the vague premise of an older lawyer showing the youngsters the wisdom of his or her age.

But it’s not that. Or rather, it is that for about 4/5ths of the pilot’s running time. Then you get the big surprise. Just telling you there’s a surprise rather spoils the surprise, I realise, but I’m less interested in what happens than I am in when.

This is a specific and deliberate choice to put a surprise toward the end of the pilot, where it really sets up the series after 30 minutes or so of what appeared to be setting up the series. It’s meant to ensure we keep watching, it’s meant to give us what all pilots do and that’s the desire to come back for the next episode.

The surprise is fine. I think in this particular case that what it sets up for the rest of the run is a bit shaky, but it’s a set up and it sets up, so.

In this particular case, I think it’s the build up to the surprise that’s less effective. Reading it, I felt like yes, yes, old style lawyer procedural with a modern twist, and I did feel like it was old style Matlock rebooted. But I didn’t care. The surprise changes the show, yet for me I’m not sure I’d have necessarily stayed with it for long enough to reach the surprise if I weren’t reading the script.

Yet there’s an old BBC six-part drama, I can’t remember the title, where the lead character appears to be this cringingly put-upon weakling and it’s around episode three where he switches that persona off and reveals it to be a years-long plan. That one’s a huge jolt and it works.

Or around the middle of A Canticle for Leibowitz, the novel by Walter M. Miller, where there is the most enormous surprise — but the rest of the book feels a little flat.

Or Tenet, where it is so profoundly obvious who a certain character is that you can’t even pretend to be surprised if you try and are being offered cash.

But then there are shows like Leverage which routinely show you a story and then flash back to show you a slightly different element that reveals a surprise. I don’t know how that one works, but it works.

Or Marathon Man, which has quite a surprise in the film but a gigantic one in William Goldman’s novel. Or speaking of Goldman, his book Magic is a first-person narrative and when you realise who the narrator is, it goes beyond surprise into full-on shock.

I want to say that twist comes around 80 pages in. The Leverage reveals are in the last minutes of the 50-minute show. The Shawshank Redemption hides what Andy is really doing until around a fifth of the way from the end.

I’m reading Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry which I already knew had a shock quite early on because I’ve seen the TV version. Garmus cannot surprise me because of that, but she does it so well anyway that my reading speed slowed down as I knew the moment was surely coming.

Maybe the closest to Matlock, in a sense, is The Runaway Jury. There is a surprise in that which is designed to keep you watching, but somehow there’s enough before the surprise too. Everything before it is strictly speaking a set up, but it feels more than that. I don’t know that if the book or film didn’t have the surprise that I’d remember it now, or even have necessarily stayed to the end. But it was enough.

So a surprise in the opening shot is out — wait, Barbie opens with that great 2001: A Space Odyssey pastiche and it’s at least unexpected. Okay, I can’t think of many stories that actually open with a surprise, but from there on in is a potentially great spot for a shock.

Of course, if I were clever I’d now have a big surprise for you, like suddenly saying “Boo!”. But it would be cliché, and that rather goes against the grain.

If you don’t happen to read scripts and if the scripts you don’t read happen to be mostly television ones, let me tell you something, please. Absolute gold is when you can get and devour every script to a television series, from the pilot to the finale. Gold. Seeing how a show finds its feet, how it grows, how it manages change, and if it weren’t cancelled abruptly, how it pulled off its ending.

There are very, very few shows that you can get the full scripts for. Doctor Who and Knight Rider — are not among the list. (I can only think of three off the top of my head: “Only Fools and Horses”, “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine“. I just looked to see if Only Fools were still available, so that I could warn you about how antagonistic the hosting site is with pop-up ads, but while the site is still there and still unbelievably wretched, the scripts appear to have gone. I feel you have dodged a bullet. But if you’re disappointed, I can tell you that a lot of scripts for that show have been published. Scripts in books are reformatted to squeeze more onto fewer pages and they tend to be heavily edited where online ones are the script as handed to the cast and crew, which is just infinitely better.)

Anyway. As I say, Doctor Who and Knight Rider are incomplete. But there were 84 episodes of Knight Rider and there are 82 scripts – plus multiple drafts of many of them – on the Knight Rider Archives site. So that’s pretty close to complete. I would like to understand how I’ve read 79 of the 82 available, yet still have 5 to go. It is a mystery of maths, or of how I’ve lost track.

But still, so far this year I’ve read 79 scripts to that 1980s show about a talking car called KITT, and as it happens, 189 scripts to Doctor Who, that show about the TARDIS.

I read them because I wanted to, because they were there, because I love reading scripts, and because it was mostly fun. (There is one script where my short note says just “Jesus.” And another where the short note says “Does no one on this bloody show know how to use a comma? This is close to unreadable.” I won’t say which scripts I’m talking about in those examples, but I will tell you that it’s one each from these two shows.)

Naturally, my opinions about the scripts are only my opinions — except the comma one, god in heaven, I had to track down episodes to watch and so find out what in the hell actors made of certain lines — and naturally the writers of every single one of these 268 scripts are more successful than I am. I’d obviously also say the giant majority are also better than I am. And consequently, despite all my efforts of keeping this script reading to solely being for fun, I did also learn some things along the way.

And that’s what I’d like to show you while I type with crossed fingers that this is any use to either of us.

10. Script format is the same

Both the 1980s Knight Rider series and the post-2005 Doctor Who episodes are physically written in the same script format. Older Doctor Who episode scripts are in the ancient BBC studio format that was designed to help camera operators rather than the reader.

Knight Rider makes more use of specific act breaks so it’s really a set of four or so short runs where Doctor Who can take its time over the whole hour or fifty minutes, or forty-five minutes, or whatever it becomes..

9. Show formats are hard

Knight Rider is about a talking car and immediately you know there’s a bit of a constraint there, since if KITT can’t drive itself up to where your story is taking place, there isn’t a story. I hadn’t appreciated, though, just how startlingly rigid the show’s format is. There is not one episode script I’ve read that did not include the lead character, Michael Knight, getting into a fistfight, for instance.

Nor one where KITT does not jump over another car or a wall or something. (I watched an episode and it is incredibly obvious that the show destroys cars with every one of these jumps. The one I saw cut away before KITT hit the ground, but it was clearly going to do so nose-first into the tarmac.)

Then there is also this, and I think it stretched the writers a lot. In every episode, Michael Knight parks KITT somewhere and there is an amusing side story where, say, a traffic warden is amazed by the car that drives itself to get out of a parking ticket. Or where KITT thwarts thieves. I’m having trouble thinking of examples and I’ve just read about eighty of them.

Oh, and there has to be a minimum of one extraordinarily beautiful woman who instantaneously falls hard for Michael Knight. This is a profoundly sexist series, but that’s a topic for another day and probably another “Jesus” note.

My point is that what seemed to be a pretty tightly formatted drama series turns out on closer examination to be practically rigid. It is fascinating to me to see which writers were able to make something that seemed to rise above the format even as their episode stuck completely to it.

I’d ask you to name a show with a harder format to write, but you know the answer. Doctor Who.

Where Knight Rider is formatted like a vice, Doctor Who can go anywhere, it can go anywhen, it can do anything. Knight Rider resets its story at the end of most episodes — I mean, you can read or watch them in any order because everything is always fine by the end — but Doctor Who keeps on moving.

I came away from all of this appreciating the efforts of the Knight Rider writers, but admiring the Doctor Who ones.

8. Starting stories

Knight Rider was also pretty rigid about how its episodes would begin with some dastardly deed being done to someone, then Michael Knight will be driving KITT when he gets a phone call from his sort-of boss, Devon Miles. (Side note: the pilot script — which is actually rather good, I think — lists Devon’s surname as Shire. Honestly.)

Doctor Who tends to drop the Doctor and companions in to the action faster and I suppose there aren’t many different ways it happens, but there are more than you see with Knight Rider.

Specifically, in Doctor Who, the TARDIS is a vehicle — in story terms as well as literally — for delivering the Doctor to the new adventure. In Knight Rider, KITT is there to get Michael Knight into the story, out of the story, back into the story after the ad break, and really be a constant presence.

Interestingly, though, both shows have the problem of getting rid of their vehicles at times. The TARDIS could solve anything because you could just use it to go back in time to yesterday and sort things out before they even start. KITT, at least initially, is presented as indestructible so it has to be somehow sidelined. (In two scripts, the baddies back KITT onto one of those things in garages that lift cars up to let mechanics get underneath it. You can feel the writers’ pleasure at having come up with that.)

7. Character change

It’s true to the point of tedium that in drama, characters have to change, or rather that they have to be changed by what they go through. I love how Alan Plater would pull this off in stories that as you watch or read, don’t appear to have anything happening, and yet by the end the whole world is different. I think often of his very low-key and quiet novel, “Misterioso”, where a woman’s entire life is completely changed and so subtly, yet so irrevocably, and so much for the good.)

The characters don’t change in Knight Rider. Michael Knight has one episode of self-doubt in the fourth season, but otherwise is the same square-jawed hunky hero throughout the run.

You’re thinking that I’m about to contrast that with how the Doctor changes fantastically in Doctor Who, and you’re not wrong. Except you’re wrong. I would argue that as different as each actor has made the part, the Doctor himself or herself is truly the same character throughout. But what I want to say is that the show actively works to develop him or her, and sometimes it’s more apparent than in others. I offer, for instance, that Peter Capaldi’s Doctor at the start of his run is a different character to his Doctor at the end of it.

In that case I don’t think it’s story that changed him, I think it was a decision to do it, but his Doctor was good at the start yet became superb. So well done to a show that was willing to mess around with its lead.

6. Companions

One of the great joys of drama writing is that you get to create a brilliant character. Then one of the worst parts is that you have to create other characters for them to talk to, or else nothing happens.

Doctor Who more famously gets through what the show calls companions, but Knight Rider had some of this. KITT’s engineer is named Dr. Bonnie Barstow (Patricia McPherson) for three of its four seasons, but was replaced in season two by April Curtis (Rebecca Holden) for no apparent reason. When Bonnie returns, several scripts make reference to her being back, but April is tossed aside without a mention.

In comparison, Doctor Who does have a format for its companions, but it works hard to explore different elements of it. A character is introduced who fits certain criteria — she or he has to think of others more than of themselves, for instance — and they get invited aboard the TARDIS where they say some form of the line “it’s bigger on the inside”.

Give Steven Moffat a lot of credit for finding a new way to do that when he introduced Clara. “It’s smaller on the outside,” she says, and we are so used to the normal line that we and the Doctor are both deliciously thrown for a moment.

Doctor Who has got rid of companions as unceremoniously as Knight Rider did when it bumped Barstow for Curtis. See Dodo Chaplet, who doesn’t get an actual exit because to give her that would have meant paying for the actor to be in a further episode.

5. Action is tiring

Doctor Who famously has its characters forever running up and down corridors, or in the old days up and down the same stretch of corridor. The actors must be knackered. Give them a break.

But then let’s take a moment to pity David Hasselhoff who presumably spent about 40 hours a week, every week, for 84 episodes, sitting that car. William Daniels, the uncredited voice of KITT was apparently booked for one hour per episode, and always in a nice studio instead of out on the road.

4. Vanity projects

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I’ve read scripts before where it felt as if the show were throwing the lead actor a bone. Knight Rider has a couple of episodes where my little note next to the script says “Vanity project”. These are ones where the story is contrived to reveal that Michael Knight can sing, or that involve an actor who was his girlfriend at the time.

I’m a little hesitant about saying that last because this character, played by Catherine Hickland, first appears as the guest lead in what I think might be the show’s best episode. “White Bird” by Virginia Aldridge is maybe a little sentimental, and it is unquestionably right on the money in terms of following the format, but I felt it dug more into the character of Michael Knight than most others. Instead of the all-surface action hero, it at least had a good go at exploring what it would mean to be this type of character doing this type of thing.

Virginia Aldridge also wrote an episode of Fame called “A Tough Act to Follow” and it kills me that I can’t get the script. I seem to remember thinking that it, too, was spot-on with its show’s format, but went deeper than I believe that series tended to.

Incidentally, Doctor Who also used the fact that its star had other talents. Peter Capaldi’s Doctor played guitar but while it was clearly true that Capaldi himself did, the use in the show was not a nod to his having a pop career in Germany. Like David Hasselhoff.

3. Sexism

Both of these shows have their moments of sexism. It’s just that in Doctor Who, it tends to be back in the original show, dotted across episodes the 1960s to 1980s. With Knight Rider, it’s every week.

It’s easy to criticise something for being of its time, so let’s. Knight Rider is roaringly, eye-poppingly offensively sexist. KITT pinches Dr Barstow on the arse. Jesus.

I said that neither of these shows has all of the scripts online, but with Doctor Who there are gaps I truly miss. I swear with Knight Rider I could probably now reconstruct the missing two from all the ones I’ve read, but Doctor Who had a marvellous finale for Peter Capaldi — I truly did not expect to be referencing his time as the Doctor so much — in “Twice Upon a Time”. No script available.

But I understand more Doctor Who scripts are to be added to the BBC’s website soon, so I type with crossed fingers. And one reason is that this episode mocks itself and its history by having the Twelfth Doctor being mortified by the First Doctor’s 1960s-era sexism.

Acknowledging an issue isn’t the same as preventing it happening, but it’s a good start.

2. Bad comments

Okay, you’ve worked out which show got “Jesus” written next to an episode. (I keep a spreadsheet in part so I know what I’ve read and can re-read the great ones, partly to just keep me going.) And since I said it the way I did, you know that my upset over commas was Doctor Who.

I may not be being fair. There are several episode scripts during Chris Chibnall’s aegis where the script available online is a post-production one that’s more concerned with including timings and precisely matching what was on screen. I can see evidence of descriptions being changed, or at least moved about, so possibly dialogue was also altered by someone after production.

But I’m not kidding. There are some lines I just stared and stared at, unable to parse or fathom. Because the punctuation was missing or wrong.

1. The obvious number one lesson

I should write more scripts instead of reading quite so many. I want to say that I haven’t just been reading Knight Rider and Doctor Who — hang on, I have that spreadsheet, I can check. Okay, as of today I’ve read 446 scripts this year, so Knight is 17.71% and Who is 42.38%.

And I’ve written… it depends how generous you’re feeling. I’ve written one drama script this year, but also about 40 episodes of my 58keys YouTube series. So call that 41, go on, in which case my ratio of writing to reading is 1 to 10.9.

That’s both better than I expected and exactly as pointless as I feared.

You can say exactly that of reading scripts, but again, I do that for sheer pleasure. There are scripts and writers whose work right there on the page is so extraordinary that it feels as if that’s it, that’s the work, not that the script is a blueprint for the show to follow.

There’s that thing in computing where you’re not multitasking, you’re actually task-switching. You’re just doing it so fast that it looks like you are doing two things at the same time. I am task-switching over the US Presidential election. I had a very good time this week with the debate, but I cannot shake that I had a very bad time with the last one, so I know as well as you that things can change radically and also radically quickly. Plus when there is anyone in the US, anyone at all, who will vote for Donald Trump, there isn’t any sense in the world and there is no certainty.

You’re expecting a “But” now, because you’re a reader, you’ve easily worked out where this is all canted, and I’m not about to fail you, yet I am wary, I am so very wary, of casually saying “but” and following it with something I appear to say is of equal weight.

That’s where the BBC, otherwise somewhere I am profoundly proud to have worked, gives me the odd stab in the heart. False equivalency, where the truth on one side is treated as equally as bollocks on the right is.

So let me say “But”, but let me also say that I know full well that what is on my mind is trivial.

But it is on my mind.

If you can put aside the stakes, I am shocked by how dramatic the US Presidential race is now. I don’t necessarily mean good dramatic, either, I’m thinking more bad US TV of the 1970s and 1980s.

Let me also say that there are US TV shows of the 1970s and 1980s that are extraordinary — I owe my entire career as a writer to the inspiration of “Lou Grant” (CBS 1977-1982). But I think you know the type of show I mean when I say bad US TV of the era.

It’s where there is a hero and he is a shining god. (It is always a man, too. Watch “Police Woman” now [NBC 1974-1978] and it is shocking how much of the stories are carried by all the male characters ostensibly there as support for Sergeant Pepper Anderson.)

It’s where there is a villain, too, and today we know that villains believe they are good, that they are right, but screw that, here they’re just the baddies. It’s not that they have no redeeming qualities, although they don’t. It isn’t that they lack depth and layers, although they do. They are just out and out villains. Practically cartoon bad guys.

Tell me that Donald Trump isn’t exactly that. Precisely that.

And then tell me that Kamala Harris isn’t a hero. When she was made Vice President, I assumed she’d become President but then she seemed to vanish for four years. She’s come out so strongly now, but as a UK resident I’m not someone who will be affected by her policies so I don’t really care what those are. I should care more that I know quite little about Kamala Harris, but at this remove, at this distance across the Atlantic, I can look at her and just want a hero to beat the bad guy.

I do especially cherish that a racist misogynist is being hammered by a black woman. I do think that is wonderful. I do think that is what I would want to write if I were writing the downfall of such a foul man. And I did feel absurdly proud when Harris strode over to Trump on the debate stage and introduced herself by name. How she strode into his space, how she threw him off balance immediately, and how by telling him her name she did a dozen different things including mocking his childish mispronouncing of it.

I’m not wavering from how much I liked what she did there, but if it had been the other way around, it wouldn’t have felt so good. We know this because stepping into the other person’s space is what Trump did in his debate with Hilary Clinton and it was abhorrent. In bad 1970s and 1980s US TV we are expected to be on the hero’s side and so often when you look back now, the hero isn’t just wrong, he’s offensive. (I am still thinking of KITT, the talking car in “Knight Rider”, pinching a woman’s backside.)

Context is everything, true, and in this situation with Harris, in this situation with Trump, she walks into his space and I like her for it. I wouldn’t have written that moment, because I’m not clever enough to have thought of it.

Proud, though. That’s a weird one. Enjoyed, fine. Delighted in, sure. But proud. I think I felt in that moment that Harris was representing all of us and representing us well.

But maybe it was that she representing me and us as an audience. It felt like we were watching a performance, which we were. It felt like we were watching something — in that opening moment at least — that was written and rehearsed, and we were.

It felt as if the debate and the whole Presidential was a show.

And it isn’t.

The stakes are too high for me to enjoy anything for more than an instant before I task-switch into worrying about November 5. The stakes are so very high that intellectually I can see how this all functions as a piece of drama, but I can’t allow myself to relish it the way I would in a film or a book.

But, oh, this week was a sweet moment to be on the left.

I did a webinar earlier this week and I was a bit shit. Can’t pretend I wasn’t prepared, can’t pretend I didn’t know my subject, certainly can’t fault the audience because they were as great a group as they ever are. But nonetheless, shit.

There was one specific thing, but I don’t say that to mean it was the reason I was crap, I mean it as the only thing I can point to as definitely wrong. Well, no, okay, I also had a technical problem but I’ve never cared about those before, I don’t believe it especially threw me this time or ever. I even like problems because I enjoy coming in fully prepared yet totally, even keenly willing to throw all of the preparation away and do something else.

The specific thing was that I opened by going straight into the subject, no introduction. I don’t believe I need an introduction about me since it’s the topic that matters and if I’m talking bollocks then the fact I’ve told you that I’ve been doing it for years is not exactly a help. Plus I knew all of these people, I like all of them, and besides, I was given a gloriously funny introduction by one of them.

But still, I said hello, I think I said a funny thing, and then we were deep into it. The subject was Scrivener, a word processor — and I’ve just given you a clearer introduction to the topic than I did that night. Unquestionably, I assumed everyone knew what it was and that wasn’t an entirely awful assumption, since they’d each elected to join the webinar knowing only what the topic was. Nevertheless, some people had only heard the name and were curious. Others knew it better than me — which was a true boon and I think they were the reason the webinar worked at all.

Clearly there’s nothing I can do now to fix that webinar, and it kills me that a video of it was made for people in the group who couldn’t attend and so may even now being wondering what I’m going on about.

But if I think it’s right to admit I was shit, and if I also think it’s absolutely right to be thinking about it in the detail I am, I have also realised that there might be something here that speaks to who I am as a person.

Deep down, I assume that if I know something, so do you. If I’ve just found it out, you knew it years ago. And yet at exactly the same time, I am incapable of stopping myself rushing up to you like a puppy to tell you what I’ve just found, what I’ve just learned.

I can’t reconcile those two sides and if I like the presumption that you know already and yet I also like how tail-waggingly keen I get, still I think the two together mean I’m a bit of an eejit.

That isn’t a problem. I’m used to that. But being a shit eejit, that’s hard.

I went in to this last week thinking very practically and actually literally about hardware — about what I needed bring with me to write while I was away looking after a family member. But I’m coming out of the week thinking instead about software, about mental software, and how these past days are making me reassess how I do anything.

I’m not going to say that lessons have been learned, but I’m at least looking at the new curriculum.

All that happened, all that I was expecting, was that instead of being in my office, I would be in this other place. With certain exceptions that were just physically not possible, I was to be doing exactly the same work as normal.

Hence all the hardware. I spent time thinking about microphones, for instance, and a peculiar two-factor authentication issue that means remembering to bring some gear that I’d only need for about one minute. In the end, I decided there was no possibility of recording anything, and I forgot one key part of that one-minute gear.

I also forgot how slow the internet was going to be here. Every week I produce two versions of a new “58keys” YouTube video and it takes me, well, I’m going to guess 10 minutes to upload. I don’t really know because it’s quick, I don’t have to know, I just push the buttons and get on with something else.

It took me more than 15 hours to upload this week’s videos. Since YouTube has this thing where it might simply stall and never finish uploading — you just have to start a new upload and hope — it was a tense half a day watching that percentage upload struggle up hill.

So in that case, the new location and the new situation meant having to radically change my schedule for those videos. I’m glad that I could, I am deeply relieved that I happened to finish the edit and begin uploading when I did, but if I were to continue here, I’d have to revise when I produce the videos at all. I don’t know how I’d record them, though. And live videos would be impossible.

But I think it’s the different schedule in other senses that has me pondering more. While I do most of our cooking, for example, here I’ve been doing it all and — weirdly for me — doing it at pretty regular times. Usually eating takes second place to whatever else we’re doing, but here it was a thing by itself.

Then I admit that in my own place, sometimes I am so tired that I don’t even notice going to bed, it’s just suddenly the next morning and I am fractionally less exhausted. Most of the time, though, going to bed feels like another failure, another day ticking by without my getting enough done.

Here the bedtime was rigid and far too early for me. But then lately I’ve been getting lazy at home and a consequence of a required early night has been a consistent getting up to work at 06:00. I’ve got quite a lot done in those first hours before other commitments kick in.

Intellectually I knew that everyone’s schedule is different, but perhaps I didn’t intellectually realise that we all think our routines are the normal ones. The moment I’m back home, I’m going immediately into my own, old schedule — possibly literally, since as I write this there’s a problem that means I may need to produce a podcast at midnight.

I will embrace my “right” schedule and be so glad to be back in it, but I’m also going to re-examine it all. I think I’ll try to do evening meals at a set time instead of anywhere in a two- or even three-hour window, for instance. I’m going to prepare more work in advance, as if I’m going to hit the ludicrously slow internet problem, but also to see if that frees me up from the day to day rushing. A bit of planning, I can see it helping a lot.

What I’ve learned is that I lurch from week to week, and actually what I’ve learnt is that I haven’t been appreciating that enough in any sense. My world has been a lot smaller for a week and I wonder if it isn’t always smaller than it could be, that it should be.

So about three years ago now, I had COVID and while I’m sure others had it far worse than I did, I had it bad enough. For about ten days I couldn’t really move, couldn’t fully think, I felt like I was this tiny little presence in a body that didn’t want me moving around. And in a more practical side, I was also necessarily turning down work because there was no possibility that I was capable of doing it. Given that if I’m not working I am entirely clueless what to do with myself, it was not the happiest of times.

During which, the Alexandra Theatre here in Birmingham emailed, asking me to write a couple of articles for a programme. I think the total word count was under 1,500 words and the deadline was a good two weeks away at least, but, as I say, being able to put whole sentences together was a childhood memory and for now, I seriously doubted my ability to complete entire words.

Only.

The programme was for Fame. Finally, I could write down what I’ve always thought and quite often bored people with: the fact that Fame is really about failure, or at least it the original film is. I mean, there was also that I knew and liked the woman asking me to do it, I would ordinarily have been delighted and I still was, I just couldn’t spell the word. I think a strong factor in my saying yes was that I wasn’t able to put the letters o and n beside each other in the right order.

I wrote that article about the history of Fame on film, tv, stage, tv again, film again, and then stage again. And I also wrote one about this specific production. It was the Alex’s annual Stage Experience, where the whole cast and as many of the crew as possible are amateur and entirely new to theatre. It’s a thing where you learn to be part of something and to jointly make something bigger than all of you. It’s a deeply impressive production and they do it every year.

I don’t know how they do it, but then I also don’t know how I wrote 1,500 words.

But last night I was back at the Alex for the Stage Experience gala performance of its newest production, The Sound of Music. I wrote the programme again, or at least a lot of it. And I’m very pleased to have done that, I’m actually pleased with what I wrote — hang on, I imagine I can show you a bit of it. Here’s how my feature on the history and legacy of The Sound of Music begins:

You’re thinking of Julie Andrews on a hill, some cute kids saying hello and goodbye, and maybe that some day you should Google what “edelweiss” means. “The Sound of Music” is such a familiar show — and yet if every one of us knows it well, very few are aware of just what a complex, layered and sometimes even controversial musical it really is.

I like the edelweiss gag.

But I particularly like this. Right there in this year’s programme is a reprint of the same article I wrote for Fame back in COVIDland.

And it works.

Normally I don’t like something I’ve written twenty minutes ago — don’t even ask me about this, about my writing to you right now or I’ll ask for the chance to write it better.

But I liked rereading that article. True, I think it’s that Stage Experience is so good rather than my article about it being so, but nonetheless, there were words of mine on the page and I liked them.

Then later on there was someone sitting near me in the theatre, reading those words of mine in the programme, and that felt pretty special.

She didn’t have to drip ice cream over it, though.

For as long as you’ve known me, I’ve been obsessed to the point of, well, obsession, about time. Separately, I have also taken every opportunity to insist that thrillers and romances are exactly the same genre.

That’s not an opportunity that comes up very often, not unless you contort conversations in that direction. And I have.

But here I am, with a love of thrillers, a love of romances, an obsession with time, and all of this for all of my life — and it was only last night that I realised these are not three different things. They’re not even two different things.

I was re-watching “The Bourne Identity” by Tony Gilroy, rebelliously loosely based on Robert Ludlum’s novel. Hopefully without spoiling a very good film, I want to say that there is a moment where you are supposed to believe a certain character is in a certain place. It isn’t overblown, isn’t a gigantic deal, but effort is made to make you think it is this particular character.

It works. I mean, I believe you’re fooled — I’ve now seen this film so many times that I can’t remember what I first thought — but I also mean that if it had been the character you thought, it works. That character, at that point, with this about to happen to him, the whole film has correctly delivered him to this essential point.

Even the time it’s just taken you to read this is far longer than the moment in the film. But you’ve gathered that it’s not the character you’re supposed to believe, it’s a different one — yet it still works.

It works in a different way, but again it’s ultimately that this character at this point, about to have this thing happen to him, he has been delivered here and we have been delivered to this point right alongside him.

Seriously, he’s walking down the street and I’m thinking buggersticks, another reason that thrillers and romances are the same is that they are both about time.

There’s the time in the sense of the two hours of the movie, what it does to get characters where they go. There’s time in the sense of the storytelling and pace.

But there’s also the intricacy that I think you associate with time stories. I don’t care about time machines, I’ve no interest in a TARDIS, but I am besotted with characters being caught up in events and situations that are different depending on when you look. That depend on which direction you’re facing, or the temporal equivalent of that.

The temporal equivalent of that. There’s a phrase. There’s an overblown phrase.

All stories move their characters through situations, all of them are paced by the writer as well as having pace in the story.

So I started by merely believing for my entire life that romances and thrillers are the same thing — look, short version, they share tension and they tend to revolve around one key moment of will they, won’t they. In a thriller, it’s will they or won’t they survive, whereas in a romance, it’s exactly the same.

But now my profound realisation is that all stories are really all about time.

I’d rather my profound realisations be less than so fantastically obvious, but otherwise I have no problem with this.

Except that the battery on my iPad is about to die any second now and somehow this seems to me to be rather approp