Author: William Gallagher

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine seemingly being shown at the Melania Trump film screening.

Self distracting with trivia and wondering about series formats

Posted by

0

I find I have a need to be trivial today. Because otherwise I’m going to be thinking about how truths we hold self-evident, may not be.

Such as — because this is far more important than anything actually happening in the world — I hold it sacrosanct that you cannot review a film without having seen it. Consequently the news this week that one particular film is being horribly review-bombed by people before it has even been released, this is unquestionably a bad, bad thing.

And yet I question that attitude of mine. Because the film is “Melania.”

It is as certain as can be that this film is shite altogether. But I could be wrong, but I’m not.

I’m minded, too, of how it is obviously wrong, unquestionably wrong, it is a wrong darker than death or night, to ever thinking anyone’s death is anything other than an appalling loss.

Yet out of 8.3 billion people on Earth right now, there are one or two politicians I find I’d be okay about. I’d get over it somehow. Probably quite quickly.

Trivia. Give me trivia. I noticed just then that I wrote about wrongs darker than death or night and you gave me a funny look. Quite right too. But it’s the title of an episode of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and I’ve just read 880 scripts from that show.

This is mathematically interesting since there are only 176. But I read them all over Christmas, I read the lot back in 2023, definitely also in 2019, and unquestionably some time in the late 1990s too. I may have slipped in one more reading of the whole set, I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t bet my own money against my reading them all again, either.

I read them because they are good. It is that simple. Where “Star Trek: The Next Generation” is oddly a chore on the page, DS9 is like reading a novel. I get to the end and I am sad to leave it all behind me. Every time.

But there is also possibly a writing lesson or ten thousand of them in that set of scripts. Good and bad. (There’s one episode of which the writers have said publicly “What were we thinking?”)

And there are episodes I dislike. It’s still fascinating to read a complete set of scripts, for any show, as you see it find its feet, build and conclude.

Only, since I finished re-re-reading Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the new Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has come out. It’s exciting, it looks fantastic, and Holly Hunter makes a great captain. I defy anyone not to applaud just how she sits in the captain’s chair.

But I think the show has a couple of systemic problems that I’m longing to see them overcome them.

One is a little related to Deep Space Nine. It’s rather forgotten now, but when the show started, there was a character that the fans hated. Dr Julian Bashir was deeply disliked and I believe the actor was warned that was going to be the case. But the show took its time, let this character develop, and by the end Dr Bashir was up there in fans’ minds with all the other doctors on these treks.

Whereas Starfleet Academy’s first episode featured a dislikable character, but they made him brave and willing to risk his life by the end of the pilot. They made a woman character clearly fall for the bad boy and rescue him in every sense.

It seemed they couldn’t leave him as dislikable, he had to be redeemed immediately. Only, in Starfleet Academy’s second episode, he was right back to what he had been. The character had a reset switch by the end of the pilot.

Now, you should always watch more than the first episode of anything because the second one can be radically different. The show is bedding in, the writers are finding what’s working, all of the launch pressures are gone, the difficulties of telling a great one-off story that also sets us off on a whole series, that’s done.

So maybe this character won’t flip/flop so blatantly every time, maybe they’ve set on a course for him for the season.

I’m not trying to be coy hiding the names of these characters. I am blanking on just about every character’s name, though doubtlessly that says more about me than the show.

But then there is this, which I struggle to see how they will work on.

Follow: Starfleet Academy is focused on young, roughly university-age kids, going to this place to learn how to be your Captains Kirk, Janeway, Picard and the like. They’re going there to learn how to be heroes.

They are being taught by heroes. Their teachers are Starfleet officers, they are exactly the people these young students want to be. They are precisely the people these young students are learning to be, who they are aspiring to be.

But because the show is about the younger characters, the younger characters have to win. In any crisis, they must be the ones to save the day. It is contractual to the format.

So these kids act like they are already full-on adult Starfleet officers, they take charge and they constantly outshine the characters they are learning from.

So you watch this and inescapably wonder what in the hell they are doing still at Starfleet Academy? True, we get the odd very forced teenage throwing-glance-at-the-ceiling or giving each other the finger, and there you do think they are children.

But I don’t know why they are there, I don’t know what they are expected to learn. I don’t understand why any of the adult characters don’t have better things to do than stand around this academy pretty pointlessly.

I am certain this will be fixed. No question, the writers on this show are better than I’ll ever be. But until it is, I am constantly being thrown out of the story.

And that is one sacrosanct thing I will never let go of. It is so hard to get anyone into your story that electing to thrown them out is a heinous mistake.

I’m not the audience for Starfleet Academy and I am more than fine with that. It is brilliant that the franchise is trying new things, exploring new directions. Deep Space Nine was slammed for being different to the prior Star Trek series, but that difference made all the difference.

I love Deep Space Nine. The fictional space station in it feels like home. Equally, there will be those who love Starfleet Academy and it is nothing short of fantastic when a show gets into people.

Yet in every other example I can think of where there are strata of younger and older characters, the very first thing that happens is that the two are separated. The children are always left alone to solve whatever the drama is, because otherwise the adults should fix everything.

The adults don’t get to do that here. But hopefully Starfleet Academy will have a long run in which to sort it out.

It’s not the thing you fling, it’s the fling itself

Posted by

0

Later today I’m going to be on BBC Radio Berkshire recommending some TV shows to binge on. It’s from my background at Radio Times and writing TV history pieces, and I’ve now done it quite often. It means I have the radio on most of the afternoon, it’s a good station, everything’s great, except sometimes finding a show to recommend is surprisingly hard.

This week, not to oversell this at all, I’m recommending a drama that more than 30 years ago tried teaching me a lesson that I didn’t learn until right now. It’s “Northern Exposure”, a 1990s series that has recently come to Amazon Prime. (Just an aside: I would not know this if it weren’t for Catherine Fowles, who I don’t know. But Lydia Parker was on Facebook asking for recommendations and as I rushed to say “Nobody Wants This.” — the full stop is important — Fowles said about “Northern Exposure” now being on streaming. Thank you very much.)

Last night I watched some of it again, and if you know the series at all, you might even guess which episode I went for. That’s right, it was “Burning Down the House” by Robin Green, otherwise known as season 3, episode 14.

You don’t look like you’re quite certain yet. So let me tell you that it’s the cow flinging episode. It’s the episode where artist and local radio DJ “Chris in the Morning” sets out to build an enormous catapult and fling a cow through the air.

Now, if you don’t know, I will not tell you what happens. I realise I’m not really telling you anything — I may have been specific about an episode title, but I haven’t told you what the show is about and I’ve only named one character out of the reasonably large ensemble.

Because I want to focus on the cow flinging. There is such a lot in this 50-minute episode and while it’s all related, it’s a subtle relation. Each part, it seems to me, is about change and moving on, and it’s about the art of the moment, and very definitely about the reaching for something being more than the getting.

“It’s not the thing you fling, it’s the fling itself,” says Chris in the Morning.

Thirty-odd years ago, I was moved by that episode. Last night, I was moved again. Yet there was a difference that comes from the gap in between. I resent looking back, I rarely think of the current moment, and I’ve always been afraid of the future and specifically of not achieving what I so want to.

That’s all still true for me, but also, listening to that line, feeling the themes of the episode, something changed. Maybe I’ll forget this tomorrow, but god I’ve had a great journey. Just because I feel as if I’m still only starting out, just because I hope there is so much ahead of me, it doesn’t mean I should forget the route to here. The route from a little boy wanting so much to write, and the route to this moment, right now, talking to you.

Time signature

Posted by

0

Swear to god, my arms are hurting this morning from clapping last night. I can’t count how often I’ve been to Symphony Hall in Birmingham, but I can count how many times I’ve clapped this long and this loud. Because it would be one. I can count to one.

Funny thing: usually after a few moments of clapping, I can’t hold the beat. I like to think I jazz it up, clapping on the harmonics, but really it’s just that I get knackered. And did last night, but carried on clapping, perfectly in time, clapping like were out to hurt each other. My arms were collateral damage.

I should say: I was clapping after Kazuki Yamada conducted the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Mahler’s first symphony.

Which means I feel I should also say that it’s startlingly rare for me to go to a classical concert and where everyone who listens to classical seems to be a passionate expert, I know I am missing out.

But I realised on the way home that like absolutely every single thing in my life, this is about time. I am a Mahler fan because of time.

Follow. There’s this amazing novel by Richard Matheson, Bid Time Return. Forget the plot, it sticks with me because it’s one that makes you feel as delirious as its main character is. One of those you have to read fast because it’s written as first-person narration, literally narration as the main character is talking into a tape recorder.

And you know the plot, at least vaguely: Bid Time Return was made into a film called Somewhere in Time. Jane Seymour and Christopher Reeve star, while Matheson himself wrote the screenplay. The film is an extraordinary cult favourite: decades on, there is an annual convention at the hotel where it was filmed. Sometimes I completely get that, other times I find the film too saccharine: artificially sugary. You have to catch it on the right day.

Anyway. In the book — though not the film — the main character listens to Mahler. A lot. Simply because of that, I tried to do the same, and I liked it.

But rather than enthusing at you about this music, or at least as well as enthusing at you about it, let me also tell you this. The sole reason I remember my very first day as a freelancer, is Gustav Mahler and specifically his first and fifth symphonies. They remain my favourites, probably because I haven’t listened enough to the rest, but there are times when I find the music subtly depressing.

Such as January 1994 when I’m in my home office and now it’s up to me. I’ve been given a CD of Mahler’s first as a leaving present by the magazine I had been features editor on, and it seemed quite right to play it. Popped it on, and immediately the phone rang. I could have stopped the CD and I think now that I definitely should have done, but instead I turned it down and took the call.

And forgot the music was playing. I turned it down so much that I know it was audible but I wasn’t conscious of it playing. On a loop. For about ten hours. It took about eleven hours for me to realise why I was feeling so depressed.

So it was great music, a great leaving present, but a bad way to start freelancing. January 1994. I”m still a freelance writer. I think I’ll give it all a little longer, see how I like freelancing.

Write off

Posted by

0

Maybe it’s just the time of year, maybe it’s the times we’re in now, but over the last few days, a couple of people have told me that they are quitting writing.

It’s never been easier to get your writing out to people, but it’s never been harder to get paid for it. So I understand and while it makes me ever more glad that the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain is fighting the fights it can, I can’t disagree with anyone who gives up.

Look, since it’s you, I will tell you straight: I regard myself as a pretty complete failure in writing because while I’ve achieved a lot that I’m proud of, not to mention startled by, but I have not managed certain things I set out to do. And not only am I aware that the clock is ticking, but also that in today’s market, they are now a lot less likely.

Yet I can’t stop. 

There’s a line in a “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” episode — I think by series creator Aaron Sorkin but I can’t find it to check — where a writer character says he has to work in Los Angeles, because “in any other part of the country I’m unemployable.”

I can edit video and I’ve been paid to do so, but if you’re a video editor then I guarantee that you’re better than I am. Same with audio. I suppose I’ve produced events. I seem to go down well on radio lately.

But I’m always a writer, even in video editing I am using the same mental muscles as writing. I’m hired as a writer and even if I’m booked as a producer, really I am a writer because really, I’m a writer. Can’t do anything else.

I appreciate that I’m fortunate — not lucky, never lucky, but definitely fortunate – to be able to keep earning enough from writing. You and I are not going to get into a discussion about whether my writing is any good, so stop that right now.

And I’m discussing anything with either of the people who’ve told me they’re quitting because it’s their decision. I know for me that what I need to do is write a day at a time and see what happens.

This is a more sombre start to the year than I was expecting. But I’m still glad to have shaken off 2025 and there’s always the midterms to look forward to.

Place Setting

Posted by

0

You and I could have a quite dull debate about whether my writing is any good or not. It would definitely be dull because you’ve got your own writing to be thinking about and anyway mine is definitely getting better one pixel a year.

But what we couldn’t debate, I think, is the fact that for good or bad, I believe I can write anywhere. Certainly in newsrooms, back when those were the noisy places they should be, and certainly on trains, tapping away onto a phone.

I think I’d have said to you that I like how I can be divorced from my surroundings and concentrate on the work. I think that’s true, but that I do also enjoy the kind of environment that is not conducive to concentration or writing.

Only, I’ve been spending the last few days in a cottage. This morning, while everyone else was out exploring, I did a short radio appearance and then didn’t take my backside off a kitchen chair for a couple of hours. Total concentration.

In total silence.

It was the picture-perfect idealised version of what it means to write for a living, and damn if it wasn’t good. Previously I’ve opened windows and stuck my head out just to hear some traffic noises, but this time, this was peaceful.

Seems wrong, somehow. But in that cottage and a few months back in the already forgotten 2025, I wrote in Paris. I can’t say I wrote any better or worse in either place than back in my own office, but I think I may have written differently.

I have to go back.

Place setting

Posted by

0

You and I could have a quite dull debate about whether my writing is any good or not. It would definitely be dull because you’ve got your own writing to be thinking about and anyway mine is definitely getting better one pixel a year.
 
But what we couldn’t debate, I think, is the fact that for good or bad, I believe I can write anywhere. Certainly in newsrooms, back when those were the noisy places they should be, and certainly on trains, tapping away onto a phone.
 
I think I’d have said to you that I like how I can be divorced from my surroundings and concentrate on the work. I think that’s true, but that I do also enjoy the kind of environment that is not conducive to concentration or writing.
 
Only, I’ve been spending the last few days in a cottage. This morning, while everyone else was out exploring, I did a short radio appearance and then didn’t take my backside off a kitchen chair for a couple of hours. Total concentration.
 
In total silence.
 
It was the picture-perfect idealised version of what it means to write for a living, and damn if it wasn’t good. Previously I’ve opened windows and stuck my head out just to hear some traffic noises, but this time, this was peaceful.
 
Seems wrong, somehow. But in that cottage and a few months back in the already forgotten 2025, I wrote in Paris. I can’t say I wrote any better or worse in either place than back in my own office, but I think I may have written differently.
 
I have to go back.

A few thrilling moments… 2025 edition

Posted by

0

Skip this, please. Normally I just write here because I like talking with you, although admittedly it’s been a while since you got a word in. But this time, I’m simply noodling about the last year and yet once more, if I cannot count quality, I can’t half measure numbers, and I appear to need to.

So this is what I did in 2025 and I do not for one pixel of an instant think it could be interesting. But some bits did surprise me as I looked back so if you don’t mind seeing this as a note to myself and popping off to read something more useful, I’d be grateful.

2025

Elections won: 1
I was re-elected to the role of Deputy Chair of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. You can imagine how much that means to me, except you should double that. This was in fact the first time I have ever been in an election. That’s despite being re-elected: this was the first time the post I was going for contested.

Words written: 800,876 plus whatever this is

Videos produced: 137
Podcasts produced: approximately 100
Interviewed on podcasts: 1
Interviewed on TV: 1
Interviewed on radio: approximately 25

Workshops run: 14
Webinars/online sessions: 3
Writing Sprint Zoom sessions: approximately 45

Books written: 1
Theatre programme articles written: 2
Self Distract blogs written: 50
Patreon tip articles written: 52

Writing retreats in Paris: 1
Countries visited: 5
UK schools visited: 1
Overseas schools visited: 1

TV awards judged: 2

Magazines and publications produced: 6

Scripts read: 481
Books read: 82

A reason for concentrating on numbers might be that it’s now 1 year since my mom died. I’m not handling it well, but then I don’t suppose anyone does.

On the anniversary, I drove over to her old flat. I don’t know why. I don’t even know what I did when I was there. But there is a lot of construction work going on around the block where she lived and I was amused at how I’m sure it would have been the major topic of conversation for a long time.

Anyway, since I appear to hide in numbers like this a lot, I do note that this year I wrote 95,438 more words than in 2024. It’d be good to hit the million in 2026, although that’s good in no earthly useful sense.

Or maybe 2026 will finally be the year when focus on what I write instead of how much I type.

It does seem unlikely.

Top 10 scripts of 2025

Posted by

0

Short Version: I read at least one script every day and have done since late 2017. Once a year I go back through and pick out my favourites to enthuse at you about.

But.

They are always scripts I’ve read in this year, yet that almost never means they were actually made or written in the preceding 12 months. I read them as I find them, or as they’re sent to me, and I read them usually because I just fancy it. Sometimes I’m involved in awards reading, though not this year.

All of which means a) my short version is turning out pretty long and 2) there is absolutely not one single statistical or other calculable benefit you can conceivably get from reading my list. 

What you may get — what I hope you’ll get — is a list of ten scripts that are just glorious reads. I’d say I envy you if you haven’t read these yet, but that brings me to the Slightly Longer Version.

Slightly Longer Version: for some reason this year, I have been re-reading an enormous number of old favourites. I do this all the time, I have no qualms about re-reading something great, but this did somehow overwhelm 2025. And I know why. I know whose fault it is.

Well, mine, clearly, but also very specifically Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I tell you, do not ever recommend one script from this show and then foolishly re-read it. Because twice — once now in 2025 but also back in 2023 — I have proven incapable of reading only one of the scripts. I keep reading the entire seven years of the show. As I write this, that’s yet again what I’m reading and today’s script, my 473rd of the year, is my 88th DS9 of 2025.

It is such a good series on the page, maybe even more so than it is on the screen. But since DS9 now represents some 18.6% of all the scripts I’ve read this year, I’m allowing myself only one in my top ten.

Although I would fully understand by here you’d forgotten that this was about a top ten. Let me get on with it.

10. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: In the Pale Moonlight

One thing to note about this and several other scripts that you can read on the TV Writing website. There’s something up with the site that means you may get a “you have been blocked” message if you try to follow a link directly a particular script. If that happens, go to the front page of tvwriting.co.uk and do a search.

“In the Pale Moonlight” (story by Peter Allan Fields, teleplay by Michael Taylor), takes that idea you have of Star Trek really being about American boy scouts in space and smashes it up. Good people do bad things. This is actually a recurring thing in Deep Space Nine, the idea that the paradise all the other Star Trek shows seem to live in comes at a price.

I now do a weekly script club on YouTube – it’s a book club, but it’s about scripts — and I recommended this on an edition of that a few weeks ago. Hence my subsequent reading of 80 more, and the certainty that I will now read up to the end of the 176th and final script. 

9. Edge of Darkness: Compassionate Leave

The link in the title takes you to a copy of the published scripts on the Internet Archive, which is where I read the whole series because I cannot find my copy. But do search out the paperback on Amazon UK or Amazon US. 

Back in the 1980s, I took a day off revising for my exams in order to watch all six episodes of this in a cinema — with writer Troy Kennedy Martin there to talk about it.

If you’re a writer, this is a fascinating tale because exactly the same story was told in this BBC television series and then a 2010 film. Both were directed by the same man, too. But where the film is a simple, even simplistic thriller, the series throbs with an undertow about grief, world politics, nuclear terror — and the Knights Templar.

Let me tell you, if you didn’t already know, that the film version starred Mel Gibson. Now, take a guess whether it’s the TV or the movie that was originally intended to see its star character end up by becoming a tree.

8. Sense and Sensibility (Emma Thompson)

I’ve admired Emma Thompson since she starred in “Fortunes of War” and, practically simultaneously, “Tutti Frutti” and it was impossible to accept that this was the same woman. Then she went and wrote this, which is a perfect dramatisation of Jane Austen’s novel.

This is another case where you could click the link in the title to read the script online, but there’s a published version that — if you can find the one with Emma Thompson’s diaries in it — is better. Amazon UK. Amazon US

7. The Simpsons: So It’s Come to This: A Simpsons Clip Show

There are now something like 40 scripts from The Simpsons available online, and the majority appeared this year. I’ve read them all, and practically every one of them is superb, but I particularly enjoyed this by Jon Vitti.

Just to pick one joke, Lisa Simpson begins telling a story and we cut to the events she’s describing. Then we come out of that story, but it’s Homer telling it. Simply mucking about with your expectations of television storytelling, it’s a treat.

6. Before (aka Winston): Pilot

I’ve really got to watch this Apple TV series because I keep hearing criticisms of it, yet this pilot script by Sarah Thorp is an excellent read. Billy Crystal stars in a serious role as a child psychiatrist who is recently widowed and now faces a mysterious new patient.

5. Rev: Series 1, episode 6

Really any episode of this series by James Wood is good. It’s a comedy about a vicar, but instead of the 1970s-style of whoops-where’s-my-trousers kind of sitcom, in its small way, this is actually dramatic. Very funny, and considering that I am entirely without faith, I found it surprisingly moving.

4. Before Sunset

This by Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke (based on characters by Linklater and Kim Krizan) may always have been among my top one films. It’s one of those where you start watching or you start reading, you cannot stop.

It’s also the second in a trilogy, following on from Before Sunrise, and I defy you to find a better “previously on…” recap of a preceding film.

Follow. The three movies are about a couple, Celine (Delpy) and Jesse (Hawke), and the second and third are each set — and made — nine years apart. As Before Sunset opens, Jesse has written a book about the events we saw in Before Sunrise and it’s perfect. He’s being interviewed on a book tour, so he’s naturally recounting certain key points, and we are not remotely surprised that as he talks, we see flashbacks to the first film.

Only, as well as being short and deftly written, the sequence lulls you into a rhythm so that you just know when we’ll see the next clip from Before Sunrise. Until there’s a moment when instead of a clip like we expect, there isn’t one. There is a cutaway from Jesse, but it isn’t another clip, isn’t another flashback, it’s a cut to another part of the room he’s in now — and Celine is there.

I tell you, on the page and on the screen, it’s a little gasp. Fantastic.

3. Back to Life: series 1, episode 1

Written by series star Daisy Haggard and the superb Laura Solon, this is another one where I’d recommend all of the scripts. There were two series with a total of 12 episodes and my only criticism is that the finale script of series 1 offers alternative endings — none of which are then how season 2 starts.

It’s about Miri Matteson, who has served 18 years in prison for a crime the show takes its sweet time telling us about. Miri was a teenager when she was jailed and now she’s returned to her home village. She’s there because she has nowhere else to go, but that entire village hates her for what she’s done.

And she did do it. There’s no cop out, no happy misunderstanding. There is much more to it than we or the village first know, but she did it.

All of which sounds very serious, and this is very serious, but it’s actually a comedy and if it had continued past its two series, I’d still be reading it.

2. Clare in the Community: Name Calling

There are twelve series of this BBC Radio 4 comedy and it is both brilliant that two of its scripts are online — but criminal that none of the rest are. I’ve listened to this show a lot over the years, but a few weeks ago I bought the lot through Apple Books. (It’s a radio comedy, not an audiobook, but Apple sells it the same way as if it were just one person reading. I can’t complain, plenty of places list my Doctor Who radio dramas as audiobooks for some reason.)

Every episode is by Harry Venning and David Ramsden, and I suppose its 72 episodes all follow a pretty tight format. Claire Barker (Sally Phillips) is a social worker who is profoundly, shockingly, staggeringly self-centred and self-righteous. It’s amazing how many different ways the show can convey her total self-interest, and as it happens, this particular script includes one of my favourites.

By this stage in the show, Claire and her downtrodden wimp of a husband, Brian (Alex Lowe), have a child. And along with baby Thomas Paine Barker, they have a nanny called Nali (Nina Conti). Cue my favourite line in the series:

NALI: Come along Thomas Paine Barker, bedtime. Say goodnight to Mummy. Mummy is the lady on the left.

1. Nobody Wants This. Pilot

Considering that this romantic comedy script by series creator Erin Foster is my favourite of the year, I am still compelled to tell you that I think the final aired version is better than this draft. Just in small ways, tighter lines, a couple of smarter jokes, but better.

Still, the core is the same: Joanne (Kristen Bell) is an outspoken extrovert podcaster and Noah (Adam Brody) is a rabbi. Since this is a romcom, you know that they get together, and they do — plus you immediately, just immediately want them to.

That is damn hard to write. 

I suppose any one element of the show is familiar, maybe even so much so as be borderline cliché: their families and friends are against this match, for instance. They have good reasons as well as bad, though, and the mix makes the whole thing have an air of realism even as it’s all heightened romance.

Absolutely brilliantly, you can easily make yourself believe this isn’t going to work out — and toward the very end of the first season, you can genuinely believe it hasn’t. No suspension of disbelief, you believe it and you care.

Maybe even more impressively, though, those family and friends, everyone in the entire story feels real. No one is there to set up punchlines, though they all do, and none of them are there to create obstacles for the drama, though they all do. 

It takes more than this first script, but not much more, and so very soon into the run you are also rooting for another couple in the run, and feeling for just about everyone.

I wish more of the ten episode first season scripts were available, but there are two. Once you’ve read this, go straight to the other one — which is episode ten, Bat Mitzvah Crashers, by Craig DiGregorio.

 

And if this isn’t enough to give you a delicious time reading, or if there’s still anything left in that mug of tea you’re holding, do take a look at the previous years of this utterly pointless annual list I relish bringing to you.

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

And the blog post that started all of this, 2018’s My 10 Lessons from Reading 620 Scripts.

Keys to success

Posted by

0

Don’t ask me why – well, you can ask, but I haven’t a clue why I’ve done it, or at least why I’ve done it now — but I’ve this minute taken a bunch of keys off my keyring.

And it was a tiny but shocking.

Presumably I’ve always thought of my keyring as a single object instead of a collection of them. I remember adding an AirTag once. I remember very proudly adding a Ceefax keyring thing to my keyring, a little thing that was given out at a BBC reunion. And I added a rechargable Apple Watch charger, which has proved very useful. Plus I remember taking my car keys off because with that key in the ignition, this jailer-like mass of keys would keep slapping against my knee.

But otherwise, and for who knows how long, it’s been the one bunch of keys and I grab them in the morning, I put them away at night.

There were keys on here that I have not one single thin clue what they could ever have been more.

And I just said I couldn’t conceive how long I’ve had this set, but I found a very big clue.

I was actually carrying around the keys to the flat I lived in 25 years ago. I hope they haven’t been robbed in the last quarter century because if they have, I urgently need an alibi.

I wonder what the code is for the block’s outer door is…

Anyway. Those keys are now gone and put beyond use, officer.

Whereas I’ve left on a small metal sign labelled “Concord Ignition Key. If found, please return to British Airways.” I think it was funny when I bought it or was given it or possibly found it, this was an extraordinarily long time ago. I think it’s fair to say it’s no longer funny, but I keep it around because it’s familiar. 

Look, I’m talking about that part of the keyring, I’m not describing myself. Sheesh.

I’m 60. On the outside.

Posted by

0

As I write this to you, I’ve now been knocking around for six decades and you’d think it was about time I actually got on and did anything. But I’m always thinking that, so instead I want to try something else today. I figure that after all this time, I am stuck with me and anything I don’t like is never going to change now. So I want to talk to you of the other stuff, I want to talk about the things about me that I like.

Chocolate.

Wait. I may have misunderstood the brief.

Okay, no, things about me that I like, got it.

Um.

Er.

Give me a minute.

Quick thinking. That’s it, I’m quick thinking.

That’s actually a joke of mine that I like very much but have yet to get into a script. It doesn’t work so much in straight text — I mean, you got it, but it wasn’t hysterical — yet in the right circumstances it would be a good line. Say someone asks you what you like about yourself, or they ask you to describe yourself, something like that. You then give them the wide-eyed, panicked, not-one-single-clue look and then if you can time it absolutely precisely, you come in with that quick-thinking line a pixel before they try moving to the next question.

Timing is crucial, but if you get it spot on, it’s a good gag. Plus it’s a bit meta: in order to slowly come to the answer that you’re quick thinking, you have to have thought of it right at the start so that you could time everything well. So you are quick thinking, it’s true.

You also over-analyse lines.

Which reminds me that I have one more line of mine which I really like and I remember it now both because I just said “over-analyse” to you, and because the other day I had to read a podcast advert for an online therapy firm.”Years and years ago now, my therapist told me that I overthink things,” I say. Er, to you, I say it to you, not in the advert. Anyway. I say that, then wait for exactly the right length beat pause before continuing: “To this day I wonder what she really meant.”

I think that works, I think it works in part because you know it’s true, you somehow know that there really was a she and that I do really wonder about this. But it’s also a fairly tight, short line, which is very important in writing because it means you don’t have to type much.

Actually, that is something I do like about me. I type well. I know I used to be 120 words per minute and I’ve slowed down a huge amount. But still, typing speed tests measure only copy typing, how fast you can enter a given series of words. They’re not about writing. So you might well beat me on how fast you press the keys, but for writing and typing combined, I think I could take you.

Oh! I have another one, I’d forgotten this. Someone once told me that they were lesbian.

“Oh, yes?” I said. “I think I’m Sagittarius.”

I think that’s funny, and of course you can easily disagree, but it was also a line that was accepting. Even welcoming.

There you go. Three written jokes in sixty years.

I’ll take that.

Funny. I’m thinking back over sixty years and usually I abhor that, but today it’s like the sixty years have been telling me to pay some attention. Just in the smallest, most unimportant ways. Like right now, this moment, I’m officially in the Commodore Lounge of the Queen Victoria cruise ship, docked in Tromso, Norway, and listening to a singer and pianist. But that singer has just finished a Diane Warren song and I’ve long deeply admired her writing. And I said I was officially in the Commodore Lounge, but I am certain that it’s only called that because of copyright reasons.

For the Commodore Lounge is on deck ten. It’s at the front of the ship. Every deck plan calls this the forward section. So I’m really sitting in Ten Forward and even the design of the windows is like those in this same bar on the starship Enterprise.

Mind you, the Enterprise has better WiFi. I’ve been without internet for the giant majority of the week and will be again in just a couple of hours. I can’t decide what I think about that, but I have now read ten novels and a non-fiction book this week so I grant you that maybe being without WiFi has its benefits.