At the end of Before Sunset – I don’t believe I’m giving anything away – there are shots of all the locations we’ve seen during the film. Except we saw them at night, we saw them with people, and now they’re empty and it’s morning daylight. I don’t know why, but I gasped at that. Maybe it was like seeing the empty canvas. It was definitely like coming home after a long time away so that everything was the same and everything was different.

And I felt the same thing earlier this week when I made a short appearance on BBC Breakfast. I’ve been to that show before — I was on it ten years ago so clearly I’m now a regular — and while the studio has changed in that time, the building hasn’t. I don’t know BBC Salford remotely well enough to recognise it all or even find my way around, but I remembered little details and most of all I recognised the feel of the place.

Only, I recognised the BBC’s Salford studios from all the other BBC buildings I’ve been in. Television Centre, Pebble Mill, Bush House, Broadcasting House, White City, Woodlands, East Tower, Threshold House, Centre House, BBC Cardiff, BBC New York, I recognised them all there. With the exception of BBC Cardiff which so clearly must have been designed by the same architect who did Pebble Mill that I stumbled at the doorway, I was that overcome with nostalgia, I know the recognition is not specific to a building type. It’s specific to what is being done there.

To say I was a cog on BBC Breakfast last Tuesday is overstating it, but even the bits on the end of cogs move and they move against other cogs, and for a delicious short time I felt part of a BBC News show again. The job is to be there when needed, do what you’re there for and then get out of the way, but even that felt good and right.

I don’t think I saw more than a dozen people in the hour or so I was there, but they were a dozen people all working to the same aim. There is something special about a studio, something special about a show, definitely something special about the BBC.

Just before BBC Woodlands was demolished, I walked around the whole building very early one day, taking photographs of what was then such a familiar place and now is only a bit of a memory. If I can find those shots, I might take a wander around them again, looking at the empty canvas in the morning light.

It depends on the school I’m being a visiting author at, and it depends very much on the pupils, but when I’ve got a whole day with the same group, I like to have them change what we’re going to do in the afternoon. I’ve always got a plan, I wouldn’t waste their time turning up without one, but by around the end of the morning, they’re hopefully into it and I definitely have a sense of what they can do.

So while I’ll keep some of the same skeleton structure of the afternoon, I run an exercise that results in them having named broad genres like horror, comedy, romance, thriller, fantasy, you get the idea.

The last couple of times I’ve done this, we’ve then had a vote on which of these we will use for the afternoon and it is shocking to me how often they go for horror. That’s actually quite a tricky one because I’ve had some gruesome tales come out of these writers. But I also get to amuse myself by getting them to vote by raising their hand. I’ll count the two who vote for romance, then I’ll count the overwhelming majority who’ve voted for horror, and I will pretend it’s really close. Or I’ll express surprise because I thought they were going to choose horror and yet here they are, every single pupil mad-keen to write romance.

“Well, if you’re sure you want to write romance…” I say, to roars of laughter. It’s really a treat to be laughed at sometimes.

Anyway, we seem to always end up writing horror.

But as we go around the votes, I have sometimes told them honestly that my favourites are romance and thrillers — and that I don’t really distinguish between them. I don’t go into detail, nobody there is interested in what I like to write, but if I were to ponder aloud, I’d would be thinking something like this. You’re not likely to die in a romcom, but in real life you can want the ground to open up and chew on you if she or he says no.

In a thriller, everything changes, everything turns, on the moment you are or are not caught. In a romance, everything changes, everything turns, on the moment you ask the question. In that moment, you are wide-open vulnerable, the real you is exposed and there is no circumstance in which everything will ever be the same again. Good or bad, what you had before is over.

I find that electrifying and I have believed entirely that this is why I am arrested by romances and romcoms.

Only…

Last Wednesday night, I watched “Met Someone”, an episode of the 1990s US romance sitcom “Mad About You”, written by Danny Jacobson. There was tension, but this was a flashback episode to where two characters met, two characters who we’ve already been following as a married couple for ten episodes. I imagine if it were the first episode you saw, things would be different, but after ten weeks with this couple, it is impossible to doubt the outcome when they meet.

And yet you do.

You find yourself rooting for the two to get together, fully aware that yes, of course they do. In a 22-minute running time, complete with such jokes that I remember them 30 years after first seeing this episode, Jacobson writes what I think is a perfect romance. The speed of it, somehow you know it is all hyper-fast but it doesn’t feel like it. I just had to go check the running time to be sure, it uses its time so exquisitely well.

You can see the importance of this moment for these characters, you can see every beat on their faces. What you can’t do, though, is see the episode. To my knowledge, it’s not streaming anywhere, or at least not in the UK, and I got to see it only because I have the DVDs.

I don’t have a DVD player anymore, or not one I can find, but I long ago ripped my DVDs onto my Mac and use Plex to stream the video from there to my living room TV.

Which you might argue is too much detail, is something you don’t need to know, but at least you can get Plex, I’m not being entirely useless. Not entirely, no.

A television drama producer told me once that I should watch the first two episodes of any series, rather than judging it solely on the opening pilot. She was right. I watched the first of Lessons in Chemistry the other day and it was fine, I liked it, but now I’ve seen the second I’m really into it.

That producer’s point, though, was that so much can happen, so much can change, between the making of the first and second episodes that you only get a sense of the series when it’s properly underway. With Lessons in Chemistry, a mini-series, I’ve seen no difference between the episodes, I’ve just got into the characters more.

I think that producer’s advice applies best to series instead of mini-series. A series is different because even if it ultimately is one story told over seven seasons, any one episode has to stand entirely on its own. Making a good “Previously on…” is an art, but even with that, a series has to keepre-establishing its characters and its format, even if it also gets to change and develop both of those along the way.

All of which is on my mind not because of Lessons in Chemistry from 2023, but from Reginald Hill’s Dalziel and Pascoe novels 1970-2009. I’m currently reading the 2009 one, the last before Hill died, and it’s fine. There are 22 novels in the series but by a fortunate chance, I began reading them with the fourth one, An April Shroud.

I can still see me, practically thirty years ago, coming across that novel at some car book sale or something. I bought it solely because as it happens, the TV version had just aired. Retitled An Autumn Shroud to fit the conditions at the time of year it was filmed, Hill’s book had been dramatised by Alan Plater and I wanted to see how he’d done it. The BBC Dalziel and Pascoe series would eventually turn out to run for six years too long, the worth of it dropping like a stone once it had adapted all of the novels to date in 1999, but back around March 1996, it was excellent.

The book was good, too, and so much so that even as I realised it wasn’t the first in the series, I began reading in both directions. I read the book before it and the book after, then the book before that and the book after that.

What I found was that, in my opinion, if I’d started with the first novel I would not have read on. If the one I’m reading now, Midnight Fugue, was the first I’d read, I don’t think I’d read on. For it seems to me that the Dalziel and Pascoe novels are on a bell curve, with the first couple and the last few being okay.

It’s the ones in the middle that are great. Bones and Silence, Recalled to Life, Pictures of Perfection and The Wood Beyond are each deeply absorbing.

So much so that Alan Plater agreed to work on the TV series on condition that when it got that far, he would be the one to dramatise Bones and Silence. He did, too.

Except there was a bit of a bell curve here, too. For some reason, and he either never knew or just never told me, Alan was not the first choice to dramatise Bones and Silence. The producers commissioned someone else and it seemingly went badly, because they then came back to Alan. Watch the episode now on ITVX and you’ll see the screenplay is credited solely to Alan, there’s no trace of whoever else did any previous version.

Only, I don’t actually recommend watching the TV version of Bones and Silence because — this is a technical term — it is utter shite altogether.

Here’s a really tremendous novel dramatised by one of Britain’s finest screenwriters of his day, and it’s unwatchable. Obviously that’s just my opinion, except it isn’t: Alan Plater refused to write for the series after this. I presume whatever the treatment he got was less than happy, I mean there has to have been something going on when he wasn’t the first choice to write it, but this is also a clear case of a director screwing up great material.

I don’t tend to notice directors. I’ve never watched anything because of who directed it, just as I have not once tuned in because of who was acting in a show. But I think directing is similar to writing in that if you notice it, it’s bad. And in this case, it’s truly appalling.

Bones and Silence on TV is not a story, it is a collection of arty shots that make you want to sit the director down and explain that you didn’t want a student’s showreel, you wanted a primetime BBC1 drama. What I remember from the one time I watched it back on its original airing was that it had flashbacks and flashforwards, that when someone mentioned a knife you would get an artistic shot of a knife from some other point in the story.

I just set it running again now to check that bit about the screenplay credit and found myself thinking this isn’t awful, it’s not very good but it isn’t awful, and then there was the murder. A woman is shot in a bedroom and for reasons passing understanding, the one overhead light in the room has somehow been knocked and it is flailing back and forth. Think Callan, if you remember that. Back and forth. Back and forth. With each back and forth it lights up the victim, the apparent murderer, some unknown other character, and the lead, Andy Dalziel, each one in turn.

For one minute and 15 seconds. That damn light, apparently the only illumination despite all the moonlight we’ve just seen outside, that damn light swings back and forth for 75 very tedious seconds. Its swing never shortens by a pixel, and the only reason it isn’t hypnotic is that the editing is so poor that the timing is out and that some swings take longer than others.

So if you came to the TV series and saw this episode first, I’m not 100% convinced you’d stay to the end of even the murder scene, but I am quite sure you’d be unlikely to try another one. Here’s the 10th episode of the show, based on the 11th book in the series, and its pants.

I think I might be on the verge of arguing that you should watch every episode of every thing, which is impossible and would also definitely mean watching a lot of tripe. I know I’m trying to argue that it’s worth giving things a chance, that good drama is so hard to make that any one sample of it isn’t a fair example of a show.

Yet there is so much we can watch now, so much that is so very good. We are definitely in a golden age of television drama, but it’s an age with so many riches that I’m not sure how any one series manages to rise up above the rest.

I want to enthuse at you about something and all you want to know is what’s this thing with love kittens and where they are. Let’s do a deal: I’ll explain a thing I feel this need to explain – while you just skip all of that and jump down to where it says It’s Safe Here and Also There are Love Kittens.

So, previously… I’ve read film, TV, radio and theatre scripts all my life but since December 2017, I’ve made sure to read at least one every day. I know I’ve learned from it all, but that wasn’t the point, the point was to have a good time. As I write this to you, I haven’t read one today but I will shortly and that will be my 570th of this year. Given that there are substantially fewer days in the year than 570, you can have a pretty good guess as to how this enjoyment thing is going for me.

Only, this has been an unusual year because of how many scripts I’ve re-read. I’ll often re-read scripts I like, but this time there were so many of them and it’s King Charles’s fault. I skipped watching his coronation and flicked channels instead, until I came in half way through an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It was “…Nor the Battle to the Strong” by René Echevarria and as I tuned in, a series regular, a hero, is faced with a dangerous situation — and he runs away.

He gets chances to make the “right” decision, as defined in paragraph one of the Series Hero Rulebook, and he doesn’t do it. I’d already seen it, a very long time ago, and read the script quite a long time ago, but I was hooked to the end. Which yes, did feature this character getting some redemption (Series Hero Rulebook chapters 7 through 19) but he didn’t deserve it – and he knew he didn’t. The redemption became part of everything terrible and I was enraptured all over again.

As I say, though, I came in half way. Where I was, there was no chance to rewind or stream the episode, but I could get the script so I did. (Note that this link downloads a text version. All other links here take you to a PDF online.) Then I read it and then I read the next one. And the next. “…Nor the Battle” is a fifth season episode and I went back to the beginning to read the pilot script. And then the next one. And the next. So yes, I re-read all Deep Space Nine scripts this year — and it wasn’t the only series I reread, it was just the only one where I could get all seven seasons of the scripts.

There is also Star Trek: The Next Generation and I have read all of those, but I tried a couple this year and they are surprisingly empty on the page.

So before I babble on at you about a top ten, I want to confess that of the 570 scripts I’ll have read by the end of today, an astounding — to me — 275 were repeats. Deep Space Nine accounted for 174, while I also re-read 13 Doctor Who, 21 The West Wing, 17 Frasier and 9 Cheers. Other substantial chunks of new reading for the year were 20 episodes of Inside No 9 and 41 of Fame.

For no very good reason, I’ve decided this time to have a top ten that excludes repeats like Deep Space Nine, even though the original pilot to Frasier, “The Good Son”, is as fine a piece of writing as the revived 2023 Frasier’s pilot “The Good Father” is ordinary. Plus there was one script I read for a book project and even though the script was never made, it’s also never been released in any way so all I am probably allowed to do is tease you about it.

I think we’re ready. Wait, it’s time for the It’s Safe Here bit.

It’s Safe Here and Also There are Love Kittens

“Love Kittens Go to High School” is the title of an episode of Fame by Susan Goldberg and it is without question my title of the year. It was sixth-season Fame and I’ve never seen it, but I enjoyed the script too. Not enough to make my 2023 top ten, but there was no possibility that it wouldn’t get a shout out for that title.

So now, the top ten, including links for you to read them — where possible — and entirely for me, the date I read them.

10. Community: Basic Rocket Science (aka The Fundamentals of Flight)
By Andy Bobrow. Episode aired 14/10/10, script read 12/8/23. The Community characters get stuck in a space simulator simulator (not a mistake, it’s a simulator of a simulator) and go nowhere, do nothing, but when they return, you feel like they’ve come from the moon. Read the script.

9. Paddington 2
By Simon Farnaby and Paul King. Film released 5/11/17, script read 28/10/23. If it were any more perfect, it would be higher up this list. Read the script.

8. Z Cars: A Quiet Night
By Alan Plater. Episode aired 2/10/1963, script read 14/2/23. Famously, nothing happens in this episode of the one-hour police procedural, but you come away realising that really the most enormous things have happened. Episode is lost and the script is only in this book.

7. Collateral
By Stuart Beattie, revised by Frank Darabont, Michael Mann. Film released 6/8/04, script read 25/7/23. A hitman hires a taxi to take him to each of his targets. One clear, simple idea, milked perfectly for drama. Read the script.

6. Dickinson: Split the Lark
By Alena Smith. Episode aired 29/1/21, script read 13/9/23. The show is billed as a comedy, on account of it being very funny, but the pain in it is a knife. Read the script.

5. The Cider House Rules
By John Irving. Film released 7/9/1999, script read 2/5/23. Irving dramatises his own 560-page novel into a 125-minute script — and it took years. The script is only available in this book, US edition, UK edition.

4. Poker Face: Dead Man’s Hand (Pilot)
By Rian Johnson. Episode aired 26/1/23, script read 2/9/23. Even the font and title design lovingly reminds you of the NBC Mystery Movie wheel that brought us Columbo, which is a clear enough inspiration for this otherwise very modern, very tense, very funny series. Read the script.

3. My So-Called Life: Strangers in the House
By Jill Gordon. Episode aired 20/10/94, script read 24/2/23. Finely wrought family and school drama, where over and over, the quietest moments are the loudest. This one made me teary. Read the script.

2. Silo: Freedom Day (Pilot)
By Graham Yost. Episode aired 5/5/23, script read 16/7/23. Utterly compelling drama in a claustrophobic space. Episode 3, “Machines” by
Ingrid Escajeda is unquestionably the most tense hour of television I can recall. That script isn’t available, but the pilot is. Read the pilot and note that the script is titled “Wool” rather than “Silo”. That’s the title of the book it’s based on.

1. She Said
By Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Film released 13/10/22, script read 1/5/23. The plot is the uncovering of Harvey Weinstein, but the story is of the scalding abuse of women and its acceptance by society. You think you know this already, but then you read this harrowing tale in one sitting where your eyes just never stop getting wider — except when you want to cover your face. Read the script.

It’s weird. I keep a list of this stuff so that I can quickly find a good one to reread — and because it somehow keeps me doing this thing I want to do, it somehow prevents me skipping a day and so falling off the wagon — and in a few days time it will be the new year, I’ll be back down to a count of zero. That’s rather cleansing, somehow.

Though it’s surprising how fast that count rises again.

Which reminds me, I need to go read today’s script. I wonder what it will be.

Benjamin Zephaniah died, Norman Lear died, and yet the thing that made me stand still for a moment this week was the news that Kelsey Grammer supports Trump.

It’s not like I thought Grammer really was Dr Frasier Crane. I would bow toward Glen and Les Charles, who created “Cheers” where the character of Frasier first appeared, and I would bow to David Angell, Peter Casey and David Lee, the creators of “Frasier”. I have read their scripts, I have ceaselessly admired their work, but surely I cannot really have thought that an actor was the character he played.

I think it’s interesting that this came out in a BBC Radio interview that was then cut short not by Grammer, not by the BBC, but by the PR people from Paramount+. They must have known that cutting the interview short would be a problem, but they presumably calculated — as far as anyone could in the moment — that the best they could do was damage limitation.

I don’t think it worked. I also don’t think that I am being fair — I didn’t hear the interview, I am commenting on something I don’t know. In just about every way I think important, I am wrong to be judging something I have no direct knowledge of, I am wrong to be disappointed in someone without giving him any opportunity to speak. I imagine that being unable to talk to me is keeping Kelsey Grammer up at nights but, hey, it’s not like I’m a Trump supporter.

I keep wondering whether Grammer watches Trump’s rallies. I can understand being Republican, I can understand disliking the Democrats, but I can’t grasp how someone can watch a Trump performance and think that the man is for anything but himself.

Honestly, I’m just staring at you now, perplexed. I also somehow resent how much time I’ve spent thinking about why I’ve already wandered away from the 2023 revival of “Frasier”. The short version is that this sitcom is just ordinary, where the original “Cheers” and “Frasier” were extraordinary.

That’s taken me weeks.

Hour for hour, I may even have thought more about that than about Grammer backing Trump.

I cannot have believed Kelsey Grammer is Frasier Crane, I cannot have even believed that he need be anything like the character he played.

And yet, the only thing stopping me from admitting to myself that I must have thought he was like Frasier, is that he also played the evil Sideshow Bob in “The Simpsons” and I don’t think Kelsey Grammer is psychotic.

Well.