I dug out my old iMac yesterday, the Mac I bought when I left Radio Times in 2012, the device I wrote my first book on. And the device that — unusually for a Mac — went very badly wrong around 2019. Give it some credit, I hammered that machine: I seem to write at least half a million words each year so, er, something more than three million went through that keyboard.

No wonder some of the keys are fading away. I don’t mean the lettering on top of the keyboard, I mean the plastic of the keys themselves.

This old iMac has not been switched on since I replaced it back then, and I only got it out today, I only found the power cable, because it truly belongs in a tip but I wanted to check I hadn’t left any important documents on it. Given the state of the machine at the end, it wasn’t 50/50 whether I’d even get it started enough to check for documents, it was 10/90 against.

For some reason, though, everything worked and suddenly I had 27 inches of 2019 in my face. Plans, some of which I’ve achieved. Swathes of details about jobs I’ve now done so long ago that I’ve forgotten them. So forgotten them that you wonder why they had seemed so important, and then inescapably wonder if what you’re doing right now is important either.

It’s only five years since 2019, but this felt like a snapshot from the before times. Before COVID, of course, but longer ago than that.

There are a few audio recordings of me, too, my local recordings done during production of podcasts that no longer exist. That was quite the shock, although I don’t understand why. I even hesitated over tapping the space bar to hear the impossibly young me of a whole five years ago, and when I made myself do it, I heard what did sound like an impossibly younger me.

As it happens, yesterday I produced the AppleInsider podcast and so I’ve been listening to my 2024 voice. I sound tired now. I think I even sound a little defeated in today’s audios.

I don’t recognise the me of 2019. I’m on those recordings talking about subjects that aren’t exactly unknown to me now, but I have to think hard to recall. And what I recall are some of the facts, I’m not getting the reasons I cared back then, I’m not connecting to this stranger.

Intellectually, I can point to things I’ve done since then that I am proud of and that I think are good. That I think are worth doing, that have been worth doing. And at times as I go through the old folders of documents and I’m feeling the width of five years, there is a bit of me that even thinks I’ve put a lot into that half decade.

Not enough, of course. Never enough, I’m afraid.

But what I see as I look at this iMac screen is that regardless of what I do or don’t achieve, time passes anyway. I need to do more, I need to get things done because it’s ticking by like I’m a stranger to it.

I also need to get more sleep.

It’s quite possible that I have now spent more time in primary schools as a visiting author than I did as a pupil. I think it’s a privilege to be invited into a school, and so it’s also quite certain that I put more effort into it now than I did back then. This may, admittedly, also speak to how my own school was rather poor and it definitely speaks to how I was a rubbish pupil.

But you’re just wondering whether this means that my putting “taut” into the title was because I didn’t learn to spell. The tautness is actually a reference to the tension in my stomach and how I felt last Tuesday at about 11:58 when I had to keep 30-odd pupils fully engaged for another 17 minutes before their lunch break. And when, in all truthfulness, I was dead in the water.

It was wonderful. You’ve got to let me tell you about this.

Well, that precise moment when I was feeling sick with worry, maybe that wasn’t exactly wonderful. But the reason I was in that position definitely was.

While I don’t get to do these often, when I do, I am in a school to run a writing day for maybe half a dozen pupils from that school plus the same number again from each of three or four other places nearby. Each school sends its best writers to one host site and I work with them all together.

This Tuesday, though, there was sudden and heavy snow that was sudden enough and heavy enough that I wondered whether the day would be cancelled — and so did the staff at the host school, so did some of the parents I passed on the way in. Obviously the staff knew their own school was open, but they didn’t know about the others, and you try phoning a school first thing in the morning when they are dealing with hundreds of children squeezing in.

So I’m there with six pupils from the host primary school looking at me, and no sign of any others with no sign of whether there were going to be any others.

I have this thing I always start with, an exercise that is sufficiently fast that it gets us going. It also has us all talking, it has people sharing work, and I load it up with things like the fact I don’t care how slow or fast anyone writes. That bit helps pupils who aren’t quick or are nervous and it’s a great idea, I believe I thought of it, and I know that I’ve used it very many times — just not this time.

Plus I have practically the opposite, I have a tiny exercise, the kind of thing you keep in your back pocket for emergencies. It was in fact exquisitely right for those 17 minutes, but I’d had to spend it already. I done it with those half dozen pupils from the host school to fill time while we waited for the others. It worked, to the extent that they were occupied and just about as they were finishing, another school came in. Then another. Then a – no, that’s not a school, that’s a hassled-looking parent: the school was also running an open day.

I did get everyone, I did get all the pupils from all of the schools plus one or two adults from each. There was, though, a mix up over the address of the school, which turns out to have two buildings that are sufficiently far apart that it was a problem. Snow, distance, time, pressure, the pupils from some of the schools finally got to me sodden with damp coats.

When all but one school was there, I tried this great opening idea that I’m so proud of. But I got to run about a quarter of it, I got to start it more than an hour late, and it was working for the four out of five schools who had made it there — and then partway through, the last school arrived.

The host school let me move a break back a few minutes so that I could get a decent head of steam up with the great opening idea and scoop up the late arrivals into it, but then when the break was over, I abandoned the rest of that exercise. Instead, I launched into another one that’s also usually long. It gets the pupils from different schools mixed together — and it’s brilliant when you see two of them making fast friends — but to get it done, there’s pairing up people, there’s telling them what to do, I was halving the time I usually spend just to get it all done.

And then that exercise was done, I had run this as far as it would go and the feel of the piece, the feel of the day, it meant slashing away at the end of that piece while keeping the bits that I needed to set up the afternoon. Somehow instead of the morning’s writing exercises running 90 minutes long, I was left 17 minutes short.

Nothing.

I had nothing.

Except because of the various delays, the teachers and teaching assistants from the other schools had been only quickly signed in that morning. Five of them were asked to leave the room and, I learned later, fill out whatever extra forms they were supposed to.

But in that moment, we knew none of that and all we saw was five adults being marched out of the room. You know where this is going: I asked the pupils to just write me a story about why these adults had been taken out. I expect you also know that the pupils’ stories concluded that the adults had been very naughty and were now being told off.

And I could have applauded those adults: without being told what I’d done, they got it and all of them put on guilty faces for me when they came back.

I hope you’re okay with me bubbling away at you like this. In a quite tough week, this was sunshine and exhilarating and besides, there’s a scary bit left.

The afternoon session in a school, at least the ones I’ve visited, is a single unbroken run of about two hours. That’s a tough one to fill, I find, but again I have an exercise and it always works, always takes the whole two hours, always results in some great stories being written. I believe so, anyway, I believe it works well.

What I know for sure is that it takes two hours. On Tuesday, not so much. Lunch was longer than I thought — I’d just written the wrong times I think — but also the pupils from other schools who’d travelled to this one will of course have to get back. This is always the case, my two-hour plan always fully recognises this, but it was more so this time because of the weather. Much more so.

So with a longer lunch and an earlier finish to accommodate these other schools, I didn’t get two hours. I got one.

Knowing this was happening, I walked into that room after lunch still not knowing whether I could swap out this exercise for something else, or try to run it faster.

But I couldn’t think of a decent alternative. So, wow, did I run it faster. I chopped the whole first hour down to twenty minutes and then sped up the ending too.

I think it worked. As I stood there with pupils wanting me to read their stories and even pose with them for photos, I felt that it had worked. I never know. But I thought it worked.

I thought so enough that look at me: days later I am still full of myself. That’s a little foolish of me because of course no adult from outside the school is ever left unsupervised, is ever left alone to run a class. While I was prattling away and thinking I’m clever for not doing exactly the same show I do every other time, the staff of the school were run ragged. In the middle of juggling what for them was chaos, in the middle of not being able to get on with all they were usually supposed to, they still made it fantastically easy for me.

It’s like I told them. I show up, cause a ruckus, and then get to spend the next day recovering — while they go right back in again and again.

And like I told you, it is a privilege.

Surely the plural of belief should be believes. Anyway. It is not worth your time clicking to check this out, but in Self Distract two weeks ago, I mentioned how I have no religion, no faith, and not one pixel of me is spiritual, yet I have certain beliefs. Believes.

It came up because one of them is the, to me, irrefutable, idea that any writing, any communication, is one to one. One writer talking to one reader. Regardless of how many others are in the room, this is me writing specifically to you.

But since it came up, I’d like to tell you the rest of these fortunately few intractable beliefs. Believes.

And they are just these:

• We are better together.

• The show comes first.

That’s it. Those two and the one above about writing to you are the things I hold intractable, unassailable. I also find them self-evident, like all the best beliefs, but maybe that last one needs a bit of evidence.

So here’s the thing. Whether it’s an actual show or it’s some event, some project, if I commit to it, that show comes first. Whatever it needs to work is what I will do, and I say that with a noble square jaw, but there are also times when it’s been inconvenient to me and others, when it’s been a problem. And when it’s annoyed people, including me.

I believe in this to the extent — and this has happened, I’ve done this — that if I come to think that the show will be better without me then I fire myself. If it’s better without you, I fire you — although admittedly that’s harder.

It’s also easier when it’s my show, my project, because then I just commission whoever I know is better. I’m surprised how easy I find that, but my focus is on the whole show rather than any particular bit that’s visibly down to me. But I have also fired myself out of other people’s shows, and one time it angered them.

I’ve forgotten all of the details that I shouldn’t tell you anyway, but this show was an actual show, it was an extra at the Birmingham Rep. It was a series of readings of stories and poems that was vaguely aligned to whatever the main show was, but it was also scheduled to run in the theatre’s lobby.

It was only going to be something like thirty minutes, maybe twenty, but the lobby is important and the main show is crucial. Because the audience for this extra was to be whoever was there for the main show.

And I stood there on the night with the producer of this extra show, and I think now something like seven or eight writers who she’d asked to read. We’re coming up to the start, she’s giving us last-minute directions like what the order is going to be. And maybe I’m bothered that the running order hasn’t been thought of sooner, I’m worrying about the overall shape of the show and whether it builds to something or just stutters along.

But then I’m thinking of how long my piece is, how long it sounds like some of the others are.

There is not one pixel of a chance that we can all read.

The audience isn’t there for us, they are there for the main show and that main show is not going to wait because we overrun. I can’t remember the maths now after many years, but just based on what I was learning in the moment, I figured there was a small chance that this extra show could work in the time available — if something like a six-minute reading were dropped.

My reading was something like six minutes.

You know what happened next, both because of how I’m telling you but also because it’s so obvious. I pulled out. Of course I did.

But the producer was pissed at me for it. I wasn’t even theoretically ruining a careful running order and there was no place that my name had been listed as being in the show.

I got a bit pissed back, I’m afraid. I realise it looked like I was taking over, and I suppose I was to an extent, but I told her I was puling out, I told her why, and I solely told her. I wanted to drop someone else too, to be certain the show would be done, but she was the producer, I wasn’t, and all I could do was what I did.

I was the one losing out on a show I’d written and rehearsed a piece for, my action was the sole thing being done by anyone to get that show done before its audience walked away, but she was pissed at me for it. If she ever ran another show, she never found out that I’d have refused to be in it.

I’m afraid I can’t remember now whether her extra show came in on time. But possibly because I had tickets for the main show.

Anyway. That all just came back to me now, writing to you.

I’ve always been like this, but over the years there has been a change. It’s only this, though: I’m now much more careful about what I commit to. I have to think it’s worth it, of course, but also I’ve no interest in starting things that I suspect for any reason won’t finish or won’t work. I wouldn’t now commit to that producer for anything after what happened at the Rep, for instance.

I don’t mind things going wrong or new information changing things, but if I suspect that the project isn’t serious or people aren’t interested in completing it, I’ll thank them and lament how I’m just too gosh-darn busy.

I’m not saying they should be bothered, but these are the things that drive me and I wanted to share that with you.

I’ll keep a fourth belief to myself, but I’ll tell you it concerns chocolate.

If you want to skip this, I’ll understand. There’s a lot of me that wants to just move past this week, even though I’m only going to dance around the edges of it.

But at least I can start with this. Just now I was cooking in our kitchen and I decided to listen to music simply to stop me thinking. Let me be lost for a moment, with the only things in my head being songs and piecing the lid in several places.

If you have an Apple Music subscription, you can say simply “Siri, play something I’ll like,” so I did that.

The first thing, the very first thing, it decided to play was Kim Wilde and “Kids in America.”

Honestly, it was triggering. I couldn’t take it and I stabbed at the skip button.

So instead it jumped to Captain Sensible and “Glad It’s All Over”.

Stab.

Culture Club. “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?”

Apparently yes.

Anyway.

Before all of this, I wanted to write to you about what I thought — and still think — was a particularly fine piece of writing. As it turns out, as well done as it was, it achieved fuck all. But solely as a piece of writing, it was smart and I admired it and if I were wrong that I thought it would help, well, two out of three.

It was in “Saturday Night Live” last weekend. It was to do with the insanity, the absolute insanity that there are men — and now apparently also women — who believe that husbands can, should, must, do, dictate how their wives vote.

Of all the things. So many things. That fact was just a bowling ball in my head, blocking out anything else and leaving me walking down the street raging in silent conversation with the men of America. Sorry, I misspoke: the tossers of America.

I routinely have dialogue in my head and I often write it down to get it out of me, and in this case all that stopped me was that I didn’t know how. I didn’t know how to write the ferocious anger in any way that was useful. In any way that was healthy. Sod healthy, I’d just want to be useful, I just needed to do something. And I failed at that.

But SNL didn’t. Or so I thought.

There I was realising that everything I could do, every single thing I could even try to write, would be as crap as mansplaining. It was all such surface-level obvious, it was so obvious that it was impossible I would say anything that everyone didn’t already know. Certainly every single American I’ve ever met would know. Every woman, everywhere. Okay, so as it turns out, a profoundly terrifying number of other Americans don’t. But then I could’ve written brilliantly and those people would not listen.

It’s not like I really thought I could do anything, even as I was so sure that I didn’t need to, that we would get the right result. But the amount of energy I expended on this would power a village.

And yet SNL conveyed it all, I thought, with one single word. The right word, which I would never have thought of.

It was during the sketch where the real Kamela Harris made what now seems to be her last public appearance, but don’t let me think about that. Let me think about how with everything I thought about this topic and of women putting up with it, SNL just said this:

“Girl.”

Maya Rudolph, in character as Harris, just looked at the camera and said “Girl.”

And you got it. You got it all. What are you doing being with this tosser, girl? Are you going to let men do this to you? Everything. In a single word. Single syllable, although dragged out a little for emphasis.

The right word by SNL’s writers, delivered right by Rudolph, it was all just right.

And then that’s the direction America went in.

So on Monday, the new expansion to my 58keys YouTube channel starts with the first of at least six weekly writing workshop videos. I say at least six because I made half a dozen of them and will remake the ones I’ve thrown away.

And based on previous evidence, like four unbroken years of scripted videos every Wednesday, I’m going to continue much further than six weeks. Especially since I lost track of possible topics after existing viewers had suggested more than 100 of them.

But.

I’ve had to write these workshops in such a way as to make it possible for me to make them without feeling like a fraud. Not to mention a prat. I can point to thirty years — thirty years — of being a full-time, freelance writer but I can’t point to a good reason why you should listen to me rather than anyone else. It’s chiefly imposter syndrome, which I believed I’d surmounted by accepting that I am an imposter, let’s just ditch any doubt, but also my certainty that if I know something, I know you know it too. I know you know it already.

So I can entirely truthfully say that it never occurred to me to do these new 58keys Writing Workshop videos. It occurred to Steve Donoghue instead. We’ve talked a couple of times on his YouTube books channel — oh, get us, YouTubers talking to YouTubers, it’s either a cliché or meta — and he kept telling me off for not doing it.

I believe you have to hear something three times before it really registers and we went way behind that. But there was Steve in my ear and the reasonable certainty a few weeks ago that my 58keys channel would hit 10,000 subscribers. It has now, but even a few weeks ago I was confident that it eventually would, so I started this whole new project.

And fine, I am excited by it, I do like what I’ve made so far, but you’re here for the way I say I wrote around imposter syndrome. Please know that this took me a ludicrous number of weeks. But every workshop video has begun, will begin, will always have to begin with my saying a line that includes this:

“I’ll tell you how I write something, and then I need you to disagree with me in the comments.”

There. I may be talking my mouth off about writing, but in my head, I’ve just canceled that out and made this about you and me instead of about me and my deigning to dispense wisdom.

You and me. Maybe there is really is something I’ve learned about writing, because while I have no religion and no faith, I have certain intractable beliefs. One is that while my highest readership ever was a reach of three million people a week in Radio Times, writing is only and always one writer talking to one reader.

Hello.

I’ve kept thinking that AI will not replace writers, but I was forgetting that the people who buy AI might. This week, for instance, ITV advertised for an executive who will be in charge of using generative AI to create content for film and TV.

If you’re thinking of applying, go for it. You’ll need to be able to type a line into ChatGPT every few weeks and probably ask it to also do you a PowerPoint presentation. I’m guessing at that last, but for the money they’re offering, you’ve surely got to do something.

Or possibly not.

The way AI works is that the last eleventy-billion people who have written the word “Merry” have followed it with the word “Christmas”. So if you write “Merry,” prepare to be shell-shocked over what exciting, original and profoundly artistic thing it proposes you do next. And yes, actually, my Mac did just suggest the word “Christmas” as I typed.

Apple, though. That’s another thing. It’s a thing which might have made me feel vindicated in my belief that AI will just become another tool we use. A thing that might have reassured me that no one would hire a typist and pay OpenAI a fee instead of a writer and a production company.

It’s that next week Apple is finally launching its Apple Intelligence, albeit only in the States. And what is great about it is that it is going to be totally boring. By design.

Where every other company is telling ITV, and anyone else willing to listen, that their AI will create hit dramas with the click of a button, Apple isn’t. Apple is very specifically placing this AI stuff inside its regular tools instead of flogging you a separate wondrous app.

I mean, it’s still trying to flog you iPhones, but.

In Apple’s case, you have to have written something before you can get AI to help in some way. Some way such as having AI make your text more friendly, more professional, or more concise. (The moment I heard that, I asked if you could push a button and make the text more threatening. And apparently now, yes, you can.)

I’ll never use any of that, I possibly won’t even use its AI grammar tools any more than I already pay attention to wavy red underlines, but the point is to have AI assist what you’re, not pretend to replace you.

Next week, Apple Intelligence will come out and it will be slammed. Does nothing. Ditchwater dull. But while ITV is off trying to tell OpenAI in court that no, the artificial intelligence software that created a hit TV show does not in fact have any ownership in it, Apple users will get on with writing.

If Apple can really provide us with tools that help, that will be nice. If other firms like Microsoft and Google copy Apple yet again, that will be fine.

But if Apple can make us bored of AI, that’s a result.

Now excuse me, please, I’m off to apply for a job at ITV.

Which pays £95,000 per annum.

My 58keys YouTube series is expanding from November to have a second weekly episode, this time purely about writing. And as it’s going to begin with a piece about writing news stories, I’ve been particularly self-conscious about headlines I’ve been wring recently. So as I write this to you, my most recent news headline was supposed to read:

“UK reconsiders USB-C mandate like anyone gives a shit”

AppleInsider.com rejected that and I think you can see why.

It’s too long.

But quite separately, I was writing that when it struck me how revealing technology is of people. In this case, the people in government, but maybe others. Maybe also Russell Brand, but I’ll get to him.

That USB-C story is that the new Labour government is reconsidering whether to follow Europe and require smartphone manufacturers to all use this particular charging standard. Just over a year ago, the previous Tory government said no, Britain will not do this.

Now, that was a small example of what the Tories were doing for at least the last few years: they were trying to look as if they were taking action on something, but they were choosing things that didn’t matter so that they wouldn’t actually have to do anything. In this case, I think they went too small because you just unthinkingly charge your phone with the cable that came with it, but it was definitely safe.

It was safe because Europe had already forced the change on manufacturers and as a result of that, they all use USB-C and they all already use it everywhere. Including the UK.

So even as technology nonsense goes, that was small fry for the Tories, that was a casual, throwaway, whatever instead of a Britain Standing Tall kind of thing. It wasn’t like the lies over how no country could make the Google/Apple COVID app technology work, for instance, when at the time Britain could have had the complete source code for that app for the price of clicking a link.

No, this was so small that if you knew or cared what USB-C was, you knew the heads of Samsung, Apple and Google were not punching the air with excitement that they could carry on using their old charging cables in the UK. And it was so small that if you didn’t know or care, you didn’t know and you didn’t care, plus you were never going to be bothered to check.

That was then. That was the Tories. Flash forward to this week and Labour has announced that it is consulting with manufacturers over whether the UK should follow the EU’s move. Nothing has changed, Britain still has no possibility of affecting anything, and there is no question but that if it doesn’t follow Europe, it will only be because all of the manufacturers already have.

But.

I’ve not been particularly on board with the criticisms of Labour since it got into power. I figure that the UK will not be fixed like a light switch, it is going to take time and at least some of that time is going to be rough.

Only, here Labour is putting time and effort into something so completely pointless. The very best, the very most generous thing I can think of is that it’s part of stitching back together the UK and the EU. If so, it’s a fantastically small part.

And consequently, the technology nonsense finally made me dispirited over Labour. It’s not like I want to go back, though.

Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed the UK doing this, maybe I wouldn’t have thought of any of this if it hadn’t happened in the same week that Russell Brand also did some technology bollocks. But it did. Brand has started selling amulets that protect you from Wi-Fi signals.

You’ve perhaps seen this, but whether you have or not, you certainly know instantaneously that this pendant-sized amulet does not protect anything. To actually be shielded from Wi-Fi, if you believe you need to be, you’d basically have to wear a space suit. An amulet is like wearing a badge saying I Buy Crap.

I’m reminded of how you used to see rubber strips hanging off the back of cars, the ones with a lightning symbol on them. It was bollocks that this protected cars and passengers from actual lightning bolts, but surely they can’t have cost more than a couple of pounds at the absolute outside.

Brand’s amulet is £188.

I’m not a fan of Russell Brand, which is not the most surprising thing I’ve ever said, but it was the amulet that made it impossible to conceive of imagining of even the concept of a plan that he has been misrepresented. There is no more possibility that he believes this amulet works than the UK has the slightest influence over USB-C chargers.

So in both cases, technology uncovers pretence. Something that we just use every day — or Brand would hope we would — is revealing of the people talking about it. Technology is a tool that shows us something of its users.

Quite possibly including me.

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.