Author: William Gallagher

Stupid count redux

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I’ve read 2,000 scripts. Well, yeah, no, I’ve read an awful lot more than that but in my current reading of at least one script per day, I’ve just read my 2,000th and this was both later than expected and then sooner than calculated.

Not sure there’s much you can say to this other than big deal. I’m curious why I clearly have to tell you this trivial thing, but if I can salvage something useful, let me also tell you this. Of the 2,000, some 361 were on the excellent TV Writing site, which is simply a favourite corner of the whole internet for me. And 117 were from the script library at the BBC Writersroom, although note that their collection includes some post-production scripts that are cut-down documents, made less to read and more for some admin purposes.

The rest, by the way, were predominantly plucked from countless other sites and links, were sent to me directly, or were in the couple of hundred script books I own. Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to recommend a couple of books to you.

Five Screenplays by William Goldman and Four Screenplays by William Goldman.

I’m a little torn over Goldman. I was a fan until his profoundly, aggravatingly awful non-fiction book Hype & Glory. (Goldman is famous for huge, huge surprises in his novels, really eye-popping revelations that make you want to go back to read the book again. Something like 90 pages into this tripe, he tries to pull off the same thing by suddenly announcing that his wife has left him. Rather than surprise, rather than eye-popping, it’s a moment that leaves you eye-rolling and realising that’s why this is all so bad.)

Then he regularly described critics as failures, which is harsh but I’ve been a critic, I could see his point, and allegedly called one woman critic a whore, which just pissed me off against him forever. Or nearly forever, I think it was a few years after this that I read his two books of screenplays and enjoyed them as much as I have again in the last couple of weeks.

Except, as well as superb screenplays, each book has thousands of words of background detail about the writing and production of these films. Fascinating, illuminating, compelling, it is like having a friend sitting there telling you these things. These essays of his were so good that a few more years on, I was actually eager to read his non-fiction book, “Which Lie Did I Tell?”

Unfortunately, I already had.

The majority of that book is a reprint of the essays from the screenplay books. I know few people read script books, but you could be pretty certain that everyone who did would read this. I remember flicking through and through and through thinking I bought the hardback of this.

Anyway.

Five Screenplays has All the President’s Men, Magic, Harper, Maverick and The Great Waldo Pepper. Four Screenplays has Marathon Man, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride and Misery.

They are two tremendous collections and on the page, Goldman’s scripts fly. Some day I must actually see Waldo Pepper; I’ve read it a couple of times and yet never got around to watching.

Howay. That’s nine of the 2,000 scripts I’ve read in this run and if I don’t shut up now, I’ll be telling you about 1,991 more. Well, yeah, no, there have been some incredible stinkers that make you feel a) great that you can probably write better than that and 2) regret the time you spent turning those pages.

Although then there are others that are so good that 3) I want to give up writing.

Also, though, a fascinating number where either the script was a huge slog to read yet the show was great, or the script was incredible and the film was boring. I keep thinking about that.

It might be that a script is just the first, if biggest, if most crucial, part of a production. Might be.

Time series

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Tell me you do this too, look serious and say it isn’t just me. I measure the passage of time by TV series. I don’t mean to say that you and I should meet for a coffee at a quarter past “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” or on July “24”.

I mean Buffy lasted for seven years. Thriller “24” ran for eight years in its original run. The remake of “Hawaii Five-O” has just ended after a decade. It’s not even as if I followed these shows –– I like Buffy and 24 a lot but didn’t stick with either, I didn’t like Hawaii but the remade theme was fantastic –– yet I am conscious that they came and they went. I talked about “Hawaii Five-O” in my 2005-2010 podcast UK DVD Review and since then, I’ve talked more and they made 240 episodes.

Then “Doctor Who” is heading very close to its 60th anniversary and I remember vividly running across Birmingham because I’d booked the wrong cinema to see its 50th special. Realising that there were two Odeon cinemas and I was not in the most right one, feeling the skin on my lungs as I ran across the city, that was ten minutes ago, not most of a decade.

And speaking of most of a decade, the reason I am thinking of all this yet again now is that “Leverage” ended in 2012 after five years. It’s back today, after what WolframAlpha.com tells me is 3,118 days. What in the world have I done in the last 8 years, 6 months and 14 days? Well, I’ve watched “Leverage” again, I can tell you that.

Otherwise, television drama comes and goes, time ticks on. I think of the immense effort that goes into creating a series and keeping it going for years, and then I think about how quickly that is gone. One moment “Leverage” is a series on US television, the next it was a series on US television.

And now it’s again a series on US television, albeit now called “Leverage: Redemption”. I don’t know when I’ll get to see it here in the UK, but I do know that however successful it is, however many years it runs, it is going to be over astonishingly fast, before I get around to doing anything.

Now we’ve moved from broadcast television to streaming, I don’t get the same thing of seeing a pilot episode one day and hearing the series finale is on ten minutes later. But I do get the discovery that while I was looking away, entire series have come and gone. The other week I came across the script to the pilot episode of “The Last Ship”, for instance. I’d not heard one syllable about this show but it turns out to have run very successfully for five years.

Five years of work and I missed it. But can now watch it anyway, which is what I’m doing while I wait for “Leverage: Redemption” to come to the UK.

We get so little time. I think people who funnel that time into television drama pull off a gigantic feat and I think they make something that lives and lasts beyond its time. In this case, so much so that demand brings it back for another go.

I think you and I should make some television. Waddya say?

Owed to a fallen iPad

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You’re looking different today. Brighter, sharper, somehow higher resolution – it suits you.

And that is you, all you, it is not anything to do with how we’re talking over my 2021 iPhone instead of our usual 2015 iPad Pro.

Ah, I remember those days as if they were just last Friday. Before a long and sometimes extremely long day at the keyboard in my office, I’d sit right here, just here, with a mug of tea, my faithful old iPad and you. I thought we’d last forever. I mean the iPad.

Instead, we lasted 2,007 days. Two thousand days in which I doubt more than five or maybe at the very most ten went by without my entirely draining the battery from so much use. Two thousand days since I bought it despite not wanting to.

I don’t want to think about the cost of iPads just now, though inescapably I know that my one worked out to 40p per day and I’m suddenly harking back further to when we just used pencils that cost so little we can’t remember.

I’d rather think about how we met, my iPad and I, even if the start was a little unhappy. I hadn’t wanted it, I didn’t have the money to casually spend on something that I didn’t realise I would use so much. That I would both spend so much and depend on so much. But it was directly tied to work and a client that I needed. Plus, I paid for it in monthly instalments and if I did the work at just the right time, invoiced at just the right time, and the client paid at just the last possible minute, I was covered.

I can still remember how incredibly nervous I was carrying a 12.9-inch iPad Pro around for the first few weeks. What I can’t remember is quite how quickly it became indispensable. I keep saying 12.9 inches because that was in the name, it’s not like I measured it. The slightly longer-winded way to describe it is to say that it was exactly like having two regular iPad screens side by side. You’d be working that screen with both hands and it would feel like you were inside it, that you were kneading bread, that you were really getting work done.

I remember the day when it first went wrong. It was certainly after more than four years of very heavy use and travelling a lot around the UK with it in different bags, but one day I touched it and it didn’t respond. It was like a partner who has already decided to break up with you and just hasn’t said it yet.

Over time, whole sections of that 12.9-inch touch screen stopped responding to touch. It got so I would very often have to rotate the whole iPad in order to get an online button under an area I could tap.

But if it were awkward and peculiar, well, so am I and this is how you and I have talked on Fridays. Actually, on every weekday morning, I got into the habit of being on it in my living room, writing ahead of the day’s writing, getting things done, talking with you, reading, working. And then in recent months stopping after two hours because a) it is important to take breaks and 2) the iPad Pro’s battery died.

On Tuesday this week, the whole thing died too.

I sat down right here, had an idea for a title for something, and never got to tell it to my iPad.

You’d have liked my iPad, I just know it. And when we can all get out to travel as freely as once we did, I will take it to Apple and look at them with puppy-dog eyes. From all I can find out, though, when they’ve gone the way mine has, they’ve gone.

So.

Here’s to 2,007 days, here’s to something of the order of 20,000 hours, and here’s to my old iPad.

I don’t remember being this sad about a typewriter. I don’t remember noticing a pen or a pencil running out. But there was something so good about that huge screen and then there was something so charming about how the screen wouldn’t always work.

Anyway.

As I say, you’re looking brighter, sharper and in higher resolution on my phone. Specifically 460 pixels per inch instead of 264 ppi. And 900 nits of brightness compared to something like 500.

It suits you. But I miss rotating the screen in order to push your buttons

Unguilded truth

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Let me say something that’s really for me, then some things I think are for you, too.

The thing for me is partly that as of next week, I will no longer be Deputy Chair of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. But its mostly that I’m not going far. (For my entire writing career, people have told me I won’t go far.) I’ll still be involved with the Guild, I mean I’ll obviously always be a member but every possible way I can continue doing anything for and with them, I will.

I haven’t broken that news to them yet.

But here’s the thing for both you and me, here’s the thing I think is more important. Four years working with the Guild has been a lot of things I thought it would be, it’s certainly been everything  I hoped, but it’s also been one thing I don’t think I could have expected.

Frightening.

You may know that the Writers’ Guild is our union and that it is because of the Guild that writers have the rates of pay and the working conditions we do. I never tire of marvelling that the Guild has done this for all writers, whether or not they’re members.

The frightening thing I didn’t know and I don’t think many of us can see from outside is just how constant the fight is. I’ve never been in any of the rooms where negotiations take place, but I now doubt there’s been a day where there hasn’t been such a meeting, where there haven’t been battles being fought for us

I don’t want to make it sound as if studios and networks and producers are the enemy, they’re hardly that. Yet I now know that if it were not for the Writers’ Guild, studios and networks and producers would be able to pay us fantastically less. Up to you whether you think any of them would.

I feel I’ve spent my time holding the coats of the Guild’s tremendous team as they’ve ceaselessly done this. I’ll obviously know much less of what’s going on when I leave, but I will leave deeply glad the Guild is there. And actually, profoundly relieved that it’s being run by the current team. The Writers’ Guild has a long history of excellent people –– I aspired to become a member in part because at one time Alan Plater was President –– but the current team is special.

They’re the right people at the right time and having had this glimpse of our industry, I leave the Deputy Chair role reassured at who we’ve got.

If you’re a member of the Writers’ Guild, you’ll have had all the Annual General Meeting details so come see for yourself. I’m leaving solely because I have to: four years is the maximum term for a Deputy Chair and my time is up at the AGM next week. You won’t especially notice me going since the meeting is on Zoom so there’ll just be some point when my little video face will sink, but you will get to meet the officers who are working for you, for me, for all of us.

More cents than money

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Yesterday my YouTube series 58keys qualified to earn money. You need over 1,000 subscribers and overall people must have watched more than 4,000 hours of your videos in the last 365 days. It’s been quite tense this week as I’d near the magic total one day, then the next it would drop back because another 24-hour period had ticked by.

But now it’s over the 4,000, the bells have rung, the lights have flashed and I am in the start of a long process that will see me registered to rake in cash. As best I can calculate it, I can look forward to 55% of $3 for every thousand views I get in the future.

My most popular 58keys video has had something like 8,000 views. In nine months.

Tellin’ you, raking it in.

Just to be clear, I don’t understand at all what really constitutes a view in terms of whether YouTube will hand over money. I think you skip as many YouTube ads as I do, but I’ve no idea when that still counts and when it doesn’t.

Doesn’t matter, not really. It’s not like I’m expecting to run a media empire.

The difference it will actually make, I believe anyway, is that YouTube will promote the series more. That’s always an aim, to reach a bigger audience, and I’m doing it through writing. I present the videos, yes, but I script almost all of them. So since the end of January 2020, I have written about 70 short scripts and they’ve all been produced and they’ve all been watched by someone. Strangers have watched.

Actually, I can tell you this even as it entirely confuses me. It’s true that my most successful video has had 8,000 views, and it’s also true that most range from 200 to about 1,500. But still, YouTube tells me that in the last 365 days my videos have been watched by 49,669 people.

I have to assume 45,000 took one look and switched off, but let’s not go there.

Fifty thousand viewers, however briefly, is simultaneously big to me and I realise also small too. But I’ve profoundly slowly come to realise that what satisfies me is thinking of something and making it happen. Seventy episodes, an unbroken weekly run with some extra specials, fifty thousand viewers.

And my writing is better because of them.

That’s the thing, that’s the difference. Writing does not have to be read or seen, but when it is, I think writers write better. Certainly I do. It’s partly from direct things like comments from viewers, which have seen me doing more visual gags than I realised I was capable of.

But chiefly it’s just the focus. Each week, one video, thought of, written, made, and then seen.

So as small time a YouTuber as I now am, please raise a mug of tea with me to mark the occasion.

Possibly as well to commiserate that yesterday was also the first year anniversary of my finishing the hardest drama script I’ve ever done and it is not one pixel closer to production. And to mark that thanks to BT, I am without internet and I’ll be writing on a website today using the same tin can and piece of string tethering connection I’m using to talk to you.

Unequal pay for writers

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I was once asked to write something overnight, someone had let somebody down, something had changed, I don’t remember. But I do remember being asked to name my price and I doubled what this company usually paid me.

That’s very nice and I felt very good for about a pixel of a second because while they said yes, they said it with such obvious relief that it was clear they’d have gone far, far higher. For the sake of any claim I make of being a professional writer, I need to tell you that I then billed for that emergency rate for every single project I did for them.

Here’s the thing, though. The writer in me can go into paralysed circles over what I should be paid. The human being in me can go into a rage when, for instance, women writers are being paid less than men.

There’s no but in that one, incidentally and obviously. Women, men, equal pay, not one but, not one question, not one ever.

But.

That’s about minimums. And I’ve been in conversations this week where I think there was a belief that it should apply to maximums, too. There was definitely a moment where an idea of capping writers’ pay so no one could get more than some amount came up and wasn’t shot down instantly. These were writers suggesting this and there were circumstances, it didn’t come out of nowhere, but I said to them and I’ll say to you, no.

No caps. Every other bugger wants to limit our pay, we can’t enable them to do it.

There’s something British about this. I’ve been thinking about it all week and it reminds me of how in the UK, you don’t tend to haggle. The price is the price, you pay it or you don’t, it’s not that common to negotiate. I’m the same, I tried it once over a fridge or something and got nowhere.

Anyway. I think the logic was that if you are writing a one-hour drama for primetime television then it’s the same job for everyone. Takes the same time, is physically the same amount of words and pages, of course it should earn the same money.

I’m too polite to say this aloud myself, so please take the rudest word you can think of and prefix it with the phrase fucking bollocks.

Men and women, yes, of course, you must not, you cannot be paid more or less just because of which genitals you happen to have. Age, too, I’d definitely agree that a writer’s age is no more an important factor in fee negotiations than their shoe size.

I hesitate over experience, a bit. There is an increased rate for writers when they are experienced and there are good reasons for it, good and practical reasons, but I’ve also known writers who’ve written for years and just aren’t all that great at it. Still, experience, if I don’t back that as vehemently as I do the men/women equal pay issue, I’m not against experienced writers being paid more.

Where I will stand and if necessary fall is over this presumption that writing a one-hour drama is the same regardless of who you are.

Let’s say that you are not a writer, you’re a producer and you are now producing a series. You commission me to write one episode and you commission Phoebe Waller-Bridge to write another. There are immediately, instantly two very clear things you and I know both about these two episodes.

First, with deep and miserable regret, we both know that her episode is going to be better than mine. She’s a better writer than I will ever be, although I’ll be damned if I’m not going to try.

Second, you also know that she’ll be paid more than I will.

Of course she will be and of course she should be. She’s better than I am. I can’t comprehend an argument where I should be paid the same as her. She’s better, her script will be better, the show will be better, it is worth it to you as a series producer to pay more for her work.

That’s where people get this wrong, I think, and it’s where writers get it wrong, I’m afraid. We talk a lot about how important we are to drama because, well, there ain’t any drama without writers. But at the same time we deeply undervalue ourselves and where minimum rates are fair, maximums are not. It is worth a show paying more for certain writers, just as on a pretty infinitely smaller scale, it was worth it to that company to pay me more when they needed something written overnight.

Writers do feel undervalued and we are, certainly. There are actors who claim to have invented your characters, for instance. Even good actors are more likely to thank a director than a writer, although actually I get that: by the time the cast is on board, writers can be gone to the next project. Of course you’re going to bond more with the people you actually work with.

I just think writers undervalue themselves too. And in making a case for fees that assumes all writers are the same, are of the same talent and worth, is not standing up for our rights. It’s more like being colonised.

I think this is the killer argument and apparently I’m wrong as writers I talked with this week were not even injured by it. Still, it’s this and it convinces me at least: if you don’t pay a great writer more, some other show will and you’ll lose her.

Missing Holby City

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I already miss the BBC’s now-cancelled Holby City show, but chiefly in the way I’ve been missing this hospital series each week for two decades. It’s a soap and those just don’t hold me, so I’m not a viewer, I’ve no concern about it being ended so abruptly. I have a lot of concern for its writers, and all its cast and crew, but – sorry – I’m not going to notice when it’s over.

Except I do feel I owe it something.

Holby City is not the cause of my realising it’s better to write television drama than it ever is to write about television drama, but it was one key pixel in that realisation because of what happened at its launch, some 22 years ago now.

I don’t know if this is still the case, but back then the BBC had gutted one floor of its office building in Elstree and turned it into this Holby City hospital. It was slightly surreal, I was used to going up in that lift and stepping out to see various people in their various offices, now you step out into a ward. I remember being very impressed with the thoroughness of it all, with how it was immediately obvious you could shoot from any angle you needed and there would be little or no time lost setting up anything.

What I don’t remember is how it was lit. I’m sitting here, talking to you, fully able to walk around that set in my head but not able to make myself look up to its ceiling. I don’t remember noticing a ceiling full of lights, but I may just have not noticed.

I will have been impressed by the set and to this day I remain impressed by set designers and dressers. I will also have been impressed by the ten or so other media journalists I was with, though in that case I’m not still impressed. Inside of twenty minutes, I felt I’d gone native: I was rooting for these television drama people and I was embarrassed by the journalists.

Sometimes you pick sides, sometimes the sides pick you.

So there I was – nuts, I can’t remember if I were there on behalf of BBC Ceefax, BBC News Online, or Radio Times. It was one of them, anyway, and we were shown around the ward, then seated for the group interviews.

Ten journalists or so, seated in a semi-circle on the ward, with each main actor being popped down in front of us in turn.

What I most clearly recall is George Irving, who played a grumpy surgeon on the show when it started. First journalist asks: “Did you ever want to be a surgeon in real life?” He gives them a nice quote, saying no, but talking about how inspiring surgeons are.

Next journalist: “when you were a child, did you dream of being a surgeon?” He found some different way to answer.

Third journalist: “Would you have liked to be a surgeon?”

Then it was me and I do remain proud of this. I asked him whether he felt it was going to be hard sustaining his curmudgeonly character over a long series and without it becoming repetitive. Of course he said no, but what I can picture now is how he uncrossed his legs, sat forward, visibly thought about his answer, and told me something of his process and a hint of how they had plans for the character.

Fifth journalist: “When a child you were, a surgeon did you want to be?”

He sits back, re-crosses his legs, gives a quote about how inspiring surgeons are. I’m sure it was hard for each actor to sit there in their turn, facing all these faces, but I’m equally sure that they didn’t need to think hard about their answers, most of the time.

For I want to tell you that nine of the ten of us asked about bloody surgeons and I’m pretty sure I’m right. But I can’t come up with another five variations on that question.

There was another actor who got nine identikit questions from everyone and I know that’s everyone except me, but I can’t remember what I asked her. What I know is that because she was a woman, her questions were all about her relationship with someone. Apparently everyone knew she’d just broken up with somebody or other and that was crucial to the coverage of this new soap.

For some reason, and truly who knows why, I got to do a separate interview with her afterwards. That might be why I don’t remember my question in the semi-circle, I may not have got to ask anything there because it had been arranged that I would get ten minutes with her afterwards. Cannot remember why. Completely blanked. Come on, it’s near as dammit a quarter of a century ago.

But I can still see her to my left as we walked away from that semi-circle and over to a quiet part of the set. I’m not sure how I phrased it, but on the way I know I basically said that I hoped she was okay after this apparently incredible break up but –– I don’t think I said this rudely –– I wasn’t interested. I was interested in the show, in the character, in the drama. Wasn’t sure why the others were so obsessed.

“I know, right?” she exploded. It was deeply flattering, like what I’d said was a pinprick that burst a balloon and she now knew she could say what she really thought. “Who the fuck cares about my break up?” she said. I couldn’t now tell you anything else she said in the actual interview, I haven’t a clue what I wrote, but I liked her hugely and you would too.

You’ve noticed that I haven’t said her name, though. I’ve just got an odd sense that saying it would be bringing up the relationship, whatever it was, or that she might not appreciate my quoting an off the record remark. All these years later, I cannot tell you an off the record remark and who said it. I’m clearly being professional and it is not that for some reason today I’ve I’ve entirely forgotten her name.

I could look it up, I know I’d find her quickly. But then I could probably look up what I wrote and I don’t want to go there. I may still do a lot of feature writing on different topics, and I may even still do some media writing, but I’m not who I was back in, er, 1999 or whenever.

And that day on the Holby City sets was part of changing me, of making me choose a side. Which is why, if I weren’t already, I was then often on the wrong side of moods at places like Radio Times. Much as I loved RT, there would so often be times at RT and at BBC News Online when people there were frustrated that they weren’t being told something key about a new drama.

Whereas I would be right there in the same spot saying no, don’t tell me anything, hide things, lie to me, do whatever you can to make the drama surprising and compelling. I did then and do now despise soap magazines that splash headlines like “Shock Pregnancy” or “I killed him!” before those things happen in their shows. The magazines are told this stuff in advance, knowing it will be featured, because it’s believed that it builds excitement for the show and I think it does the opposite. You don’t have to watch anymore, so you don’t.

I said soaps can’t seem to hold me but there was a trial in Coronation Street once. Big thing, national interest, I want to say Deirdre Barlow. Not sure. But even though I don’t follow that soap, like millions of other people, I was drawn in to watching it because of this story of an innocent woman on trial over some false accusation. Until the producers said publicly that they would never let an innocent character go to prison.

Oh.

Screw that, then, what’s on the other channel?

That was another pixel in the picture, I realise now. It wasn’t one where I was on the side of the show, but was where I knew very clearly what drama meant to me and how revealing something early destroys it. It was one where I had very clear and strong drama opinions. It was also where I found again that there is this difference between soap and drama, plus which side of that I wanted to be on.

But at risk of going further away from Holby City, I’ve also realised that I can vividly see the real moment when I knew where my heart lives. Again, I should be able to work out the date really easily and I daren’t, but what I see when I close my eyes is where I was sitting in a BBC newsroom, this time definitely working for Radio Times.

I can see all the people around me, all the equipment, I can hear the sound of that huge room and feel that chair I was sitting in. And I can see the book I’m reading. The Writer’s Tale by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook – who was a Radio Times writer too – which was about the making of Doctor Who.

The book is a quite an incredibly intense read which, in its first edition, included scripts and drafts of scripts from the series. (Which reminds me: I’ve now read 1,928 scripts in my at-least-one-per-day lark. I should re-read some Doctor Who ones.)

But the majority of the book is an email conversation between its two authors. Which means every few paragraphs, you get a typical email heading with the subject –– plus the date and time.

I’m reading the book and there’s a bit I recognise. Some big decision being made about a particular character in the show and I was actually pleased in that moment, because I remembered writing about that decision for RadioTimes.com.

And then I noticed the date on the email.

Whatever it was, I knew immediately that it was pretty much precisely one year before I’d written my breaking news story about it on Radio Times.

And that’s when I knew. I’m not there yet, not even all these years later, but in that moment I knew I wanted to be making the drama decisions instead of writing about them an entire year after the fact.

Of course it helps that Radio Times, BBC Ceefax and BBC News Online later chucked me out but even if they hadn’t, I’d started down a road that would’ve seen me leave anyway.

And yes, it’s chiefly because of Doctor Who and that one single email.

But it’s also because of Holby City and my one single day on that show’s sets. I won’t miss the show as a viewer because I simply never got into watching it, but I do owe it something.

Stupid count

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For six weeks now, I’ve been counting the days until today when I could say to you that I’ve read 2,000 scripts –– and I’ve blown it. I’m not sure why I was proud enough of this trivial fact that I wanted to boast at you about, but seemingly I did and seemingly I was going to preen for some reason. Instead, on slightly closer examination, I have to tell you that I’ve miscounted and today’s script was only the 1,899th.

Yes, I have just filed my tax return. No, I’m not now terrified at all.

Look, I’ve read a lot more than 2,000 scripts in my life. I love reading them, I always have, it’s just that on December 23, 2017, I read a piece by Lorenzo Colonna on Hayley McKenzie’s Script Angel site which suggested reading a script every day. I can see me now, at this keyboard, thinking yep, good idea, I’ll do that. Since then I’ve read at least one script every single day and after the first year of it I wrote about the ten lessons I felt I’d learned from what I believed was 620 but who knows now, could’ve been 12.

I keep a list of what I’ve read and after the first while, also a link to where I read it if it’s online. It’s from examining that list that I discovered the miscount, but I was examining the list in order to hopefully be useful and I can still do a bit of that. I can recommend scripts and moreover, I can recommend sources for scripts. Let me do two sources and two specific scripts from those sources.

So while I see no reason you should ever trust me again about numbers, I believe that of my 1,899 in-a-row script reading, 318 were from my favourite site, TVwriting. I’m honestly a bit surprised it wasn’t many, many more because that is my go-to site when I just want something good to read.

Another 105 were from the BBC Writersroom script library. I can’t say I’ve cleaned the BBC out since if I disliked a script to a show’s first episode, I skipped the rest. But still, I open that library page and it’s sometimes hard to find something I haven’t read. Certainly I’ve vacuumed up the entire radio drama, radio comedy and television comedy scripts.

I will press on, though, even beyond 2,000 when I finally get there in at most another 100 days. And let me offer this as another lesson from reading scripts: I may have read some stinkers, but there amazing pieces of writing just waiting for us all online.

The internet’s faults are legion, but there are gems, too. Including these two. It is completely unfair to pick out two scripts but no one said writing has to be fair, or at least nobody any good.

If you fancy reading a film screenplay, relish Man Up by Tess Morris, which I read on the BBC Writersroom on both January 5, 2018 and August 28, 2019.

Or if, like me, you’re more of a television drama nut, go for the pilot episode of Veronica Mars, by Rob Thomas, which I read on TVwriting on May 31, 2018.

I suppose you can call this educational reading and when I started this lark there was certainly an aim of improving my own scriptwriting. No question, it worked. But also no question, I read scripts for immense pleasure and if you don’t already do that too, I hope you will.

Just don’t bother counting them, it’s too difficult.

Pitch and yawn

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Oh, look, all that happened was that someone emailed pitching to write for me and they managed to be so annoying that I still can’t be certain it wasn’t spam. They were so annoying that I’ve already written to you twice today, venting. At length. It may say something that I’m fine with that writer seeing me this aggravated, but not you. I don’t want you seeing me like that, I don’t want you feeling you have to calm me down.

Honestly, I sound ridiculous. But pitching is obviously important: it isn’t a game, I have to constantly pitch because it’s how I keep a roof over my head and a Mac on my desk. There is no possible way to count how many pitches I’ve done that failed, nor how many got silence in return. Nor, to be fair, how many succeeded.

Oh! I do remember calculating once that on average, I succeeded in 10% of my pitches. So naturally, I moved to pitching in far greater volumes. It’s worked out well for me, but seeing these aggravating emails reminds me that years of doing this mean I think I’ve learned some things. Plus I’ve so often now been on both sides of pitching that I could tell this fella a thing or two.

Eventually, I did.

And yet he kept emailing.

I only had three before I blocked him but a quick lesson anyone could take is that you’re not going to endear yourself by sending a “so what’s happening?” email two days after the first approach. Waiting is hard, but get used to it. I just mostly waited through ten months for a project that then died away, so 48 hours is a blink.

Without picking on this man, though, let me offer a countdown of key things that pitching writers can do that hopefully avoid pissing off editors.

5) Tell me who you are

I don’t mean that I’ll necessarily listen to you more if you’re a famous writer, but I probably would. Or that I’d pay attention because you’re a surgeon pitching me a piece about surgery, but I would. All I mean is that you should tell me your name so I know who I’m talking to.

This fella wrote commendably concise emails but in that short space he called himself by two different names and – this is hard to explain – also referred to himself by a company name. I’m still not sure this wasn’t spam, I’m not really even certain that it was a man since one of the names could be a woman’s. It did all read like it was written by a man, mind.

4) Tell me your great idea

In truth, when you’re pitching to an editor, what you’re really pitching is yourself. You want this to be the start of a long working relationship –– and so does the editor. Finding a writer who knows their stuff, who can write, who has good ideas and also delivers them, that is gold.

There have been times when I’ve pitched an idea pretty blindly, pretty sure that it couldn’t land, but knowing that it was opening a dialogue.

Nonetheless, if you’re going to pitch, you need to pitch an idea. This fella told me he had oodles of them, but he didn’t describe a single one. Rather, he said that he could write me articles that would organically grow my SEO engagement. You see why I thought this could be spam from a company.

Search Engine Optimisation will get you higher up the Google rankings when someone searches on a topic – today. Tomorrow, Google changes the rules and you need a whole different set of SEO tricks. The answer to doing well in Google searches is not to write clickbait conforming to today’s keywords, it’s to have bloody great ideas and write them extraordinarily well.

You do also have to be doing that consistently and over a long time for it to work, but it’s the one way that does mean you keep succeeding. Google is trying to surface useful, interesting pieces and its SEO changes are to try combating people who rig the system by presenting quick crap with clever keywords.

As far as I can decode, by the way, what this fella really wanted was for me to give him ideas that he could then give back to me. Yeah, no, let me get right on that.

3) Read the publication, watch the show

I did have a meeting the other day where the producer was visibly surprised that I’d watched her show first. But if she were surprised that I’d prepared, she had no doubt that I really had. And she had no question that when I said I really liked this particular thing about it, I meant it.

There never is any doubt. If you’re lying that you’ve read something, or if you’re lying that you liked a thing you haven’t watched, it is extremely obvious. I know, for instance, that this annoying writer hasn’t read the publication he was aiming to write for –– sorry, aiming to organically grow whatever –– and that he claimed to love. There were specifics like the way he mentioned a word count that has no relation to what that publication does, but mostly it was just the undertow. The total certainty that the words about loving the publication were bollocks.

A bigger, more overt clue was how he then said that of course we’re getting it all wrong and need him to fix it. What he actually said was that he’s done a research audit on the publication and identified a content gap.

If you don’t know the aims of a publication, all the research in the world –– er, bar asking what the aims are –– will not identify a content gap. I can only think of two publications I’ve written for or edited which ever mentioned football, for instance, but apparently football is popular so they should’ve done more of it and the editors of all the rest are fools for not identifying this content gap.

2) Don’t use personal email addresses

All credit to the fella for finding my personal email address, but there’s a reason it’s personal. That address is the one I’d give you because I know you. It is one I do give editors and I have often given to writers I’ve hired, because it’s the one that gets straight to me immediately and I want you to be able to do that.

You know this, you wouldn’t ever use someone’s personal address, but this fella doesn’t. This is yet another reason why I cannot decide whether the emailer was a new writer or an old company spamming me with SEO offers.

If it is an individual, a new writer, then you could argue that finding this address fits in with his claims of researching the publication. Except that publication quite prominently displays their business email address for me. And if you don’t know that because you don’t read this publication you claim to love, there is a general email address for me everywhere else. LinkedIn, my website, I don’t know: I have a general-purpose email address I give out anywhere in order to keep my personal one for friends like you.

Incidentally, he ended his email with that phrase “if you don’t want to receive any more emails, reply with the word unsubscribe”. I’m going to be generous and assume that he has seen this on other emails and thinks it’s professional. And to be fair, my reply to him did not actually use the word “unsubscribe” as such, but then it also didn’t say a lot of rude words that I felt were quite adequately implied.

1) Do the easy research

Most of this has really been variations on how a pitch should be polite and should have something it is actually pitching. It’s been about how a pitch intended to get work has instead guaranteed someone won’t be hired. Truly, it’s all been about me, about what I thought on receiving this series of emails.

So let me look at it from this writer’s perspective. He wants me to commission him to write for this particular publication and if he lacked any ideas, if he found ways to spam me, he was probably not doing it deliberately. Genuinely, I can’t be sure, but let’s say it wasn’t deliberate, that this wasn’t an attempt to get a reply at any cost so that I can be added to some spam company’s mailing list.

It was still never going to work.

Because while yep, I am an editor, I am a producer and I couldn’t quickly count how many publications, sites or services I’ve commissioned writers for, there is one very easy fact to find out about me. I do not edit the publication he wants to write for.

That publication does not hide who the editor is. None of them do. If you want to know who to pitch to, it is supremely easy to find out.

You could just ask me.

There. I’ve got all of this off my chest and, even if it doesn’t seem like it, in a much calmer way than the two previous attempts to talk to you. I’ve deleted those two now, but to give you a flavour of them, I think they both used the phrase “flying fuck” a lot.

Scene and not seen

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This was hard for me. I ran a workshop about scriptwriting last weekend and I was required to teach a group of teenage writers how to format scripts. I did try telling them to just get it right, but for some reason they wanted more detail.

Look, you know and I know that scripts are laid out in certain formats and they are different to prose fiction, you would never accidentally write in these layouts. What you would do is read scripts. Read enough scripts, you get it. Film scripts are pretty rigidly formatted, television comes in a couple of different forms, radio is bit more relaxed and theatre is a Wild West.

But read scripts, you get it.

I don’t expect any writer to happen to know the millimetre dimensions of every indent, but I will not accept a writer who thinks it doesn’t matter. Who thinks script formats are solely done because there’s some secret club that has agreed it all.

Instead, scripts are laid out in their various ways for very specific reasons, all of which are long-won over decades of you writing and other people making the show out of that script. Some poor sod will count your INT for interior scenes and your EXT for exterior, for instance, as they try to balance the budget between days of location filming versus building studio sets.

There are reasons, they’re practical, none of this is hard. So what I told the group was that if you send me a script and it isn’t laid out correctly, really you are telling me to stop reading. Rather than showing me you’re a free spirit who won’t be confined by arbitrary layouts, you’re shouting that you don’t read scripts.

There’s no reason you should read scripts, unless you want to write them. If you do and yet still can’t be arsed to read any, I struggle to see why I should read yours. You could be a natural, brilliant talent, but you’re not. Get it right, I said to this group, because it’s not as if it’s hard, and read scripts because you’re a scriptwriter, you’re surely interested in your own field.

However.

I also explicitly told them that I know instantly when you’ve got a format wrong. I know from the first glance, before I’ve read a word, I know it’s wrong. I said it was that obvious.

It turns out that I lied.

I still believe what I said and I obviously didn’t set out to lie to them, but something happened shortly before the workshop and something happened shortly afterwards. What makes it worse is that it was the same something.

It was that I read the script to the pilot episode of “The Last Ship” by Hank Steinberg and Steven Kane, distantly based on the book by William Brinkley. I enjoyed it very much, I bought the episode off iTunes to watch, and then I bought the next episode, then I bought the season. By the time of the workshop, I think I’d seen six episodes and the day after, I re-read the script.

So there I am, barrelling along, enjoying it again, seeing the differences between the draft and the final production, having a fine time.

Until I noticed that it has no scenes.

There isn’t a single scene heading and I hadn’t noticed. I’d got so caught up in the reading that despite all the rest of the format being full-on script, I completely failed to notice that there wasn’t one single INT or EXT in 54 pages. When I did notice, around 30 pages into the re-read, I went back to the start and checked it out in case I were mad or the copy of the script I got was peculiarly incomplete.

It wasn’t. Rather than say what you’d expect, such as:

EXT. FLIGHT DECK – DAY

the script instead says:

CUT TO
XO MIKE SLATTERY (40’s) walking on the FLIGHT DECK, crossing with NAVY SEALS DANNY GREEN and FRANKIE BENZ (both 20’s). He shakes Danny’s hand.

I do feel for the poor sod working out the budget, but then the great majority of the script is set on a ship which appears to clearly be a real one shot on location. So I suppose that one big EXT is somewhat implied.

There’s no lesson here, certainly not for you because you didn’t sit down to get lectured at, but also not for me. I was wrong about seeing deviations from the format instantly. I lied to those teenage writers. But I’ll lie in the same way again, I’ll always write INT and EXT. But I was wrong.

It’s just that instead of instantaneously recognising something was off, it took me one and a half reads of the entire script to notice. Instead of seeing it on page one, then, it effectively took me 84 pages.

I’m suddenly reminded of when novelist Paul Auster stopped writing chapters. I can’t remember which novel it was now – I want to say Oracle Night – but the entire book is a single chapter, just as this script is a single scene. With the novel, it was oddly compelling. I don’t understand how, except that late at night, figuring I’ll just read to the end of this chapter, I was a bit tense.

“The Last Ship” script is an exciting, absorbing read. My concern for the poor budgeting sod is too great for me to ever try abandoning scenes, but it is true that ditching them makes this feel like a faster read, that it pulls you through instead of pausing to plant an INT or EXT flag.