Author: William Gallagher

Now and Then

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I’d like to know when things stop. The moment when something is done. I’m struggling to explain this but it’s on my mind a lot and I want to try. Let me have a go with an example.

If you write a book then at some point the manuscript is with the publisher and you’re done. You don’t know which point that is, though, or at least you don’t at the time because there’s always a chance you’ll have to do something more to it before it finally comes out.

Maybe publication is the moment. I’ve commissioned writers who wouldn’t respond to any request after they’d been paid and it happened enough that now I tell each new editor who hires me that I ain’t done until the piece is online or on the newsstand. Don’t wait to pay me, but I’m not leaving until we both know you don’t need me any more.

Except a piece of mine was published this week and I think it’s a good sample for another thing I’m pitching for. So as soon as it was out, I was pointing people to my new article.

Perhaps what I’m wondering is when new becomes old.

For instance, someone like Dar Williams releases a new album and at some point it stops being the new one. Long before her next is announced, you stop saying Emerald is new, you start calling it her latest. Then some day, somehow, you and I imagine she just thinks of it as one of her many releases.

It’s still a superb album but the heat of creation is over for her and the energy of discovering each track is over for me. I’m picking on her album because I like it so, because I’m listening to it again but also because I just went to check and it came out in 2015. What have I done since 2015?

Whether it’s an album or it’s the book she’s written since, there is still this furnace when everything is being made and anything can change and every pixel of it all is in your head. And then all of it is encased in the plastic of a shiny disc or the digits of a digital download, and it’s over. Except the singing of your song or the reading of your book until then that’s over too.

There must be a day, there must be a moment, when this happens.

In thinking about saying all this to you, wondering what you thought, I had the flippant idea that maybe the only absolute definite end to anything is death. But no, apparently not.

As ever, I don’t expect you or anyone to remember me past the end of this sentence but even when I die, my books will survive. I remember thinking this of the very first one, how BFI Television Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair will outlive me. At the very least, if some other author ever wants to write about Beiderbecke, their first job is prove to a publisher why their book is needed when someone has already covered the topic.

My name will at most live on in a muttered curse by that future author but the book itself will persist. Who knows, one day it might even start earning back the advance I got.

I framed the cover of that book and it’s on my wall with the date racing further into the past every second. It was published in 2012 and I think my second book would’ve been 2013 so clearly by then, Beiderbecke was no longer either new or my latest. But there is a day, an hour, an instant when it ceased to be either and I wish I knew when.

I wish I could work it out but I also wish I could’ve been conscious of the moment as it happened.

Manor House Station to Gibson Square

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Perhaps ten or twelve years ago now, there was a comment on the internet that was wrong. I know. But this one stuck with me because it was so wrong that I took it as a personal affront even though it wasn’t directed at me, wasn’t about me, wasn’t about anything or anyone that had the slightest connection to me.

Except it did. It was a comment about drama and specifically about Jack Rosenthal’s 1979 television play The Knowledge. If you saw it, you remember it. This is the one following a group of people learning to become London cab drivers. The Knowledge is the name for the real-life process cabbies go through, a stunning test of human memory.

From Rosenthal’s script:

INT. WAITING ROOM, CARRIAGE OFFICE. DAY
BURGESS at the wall map

BURGESS: As laid down by the London Hackney Carriage Act of 1843, all the Knowledge means is that you commit to memory every street within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. Every street – and what’s on every street. Every hotel, every club, every hospital, every department store, every shop, government building, theatre, cinema, restaurant, art gallery, park, church, synagogue, mosque etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And etcetera. You name it, you’ve got to know it.

This is all true and it still is today but here’s Rosenthal talking about turning the Knowledge into a drama:

“…it sounded a fascinating idea. Or – as usual – half a fascinating idea. I took a cab back home to sit and worry about it in comfort, and a few weeks later, the second half shyly suggested itself. It was simply to people the story with characters who, in doing the Knowledge, would achieve some glimmering of self-knowledge.”

That quote is from his book, The Chain with The Knowledge and Ready When You Are, Mr McGill. It’s a trio of scripts in a book I’ve had for thirty years and have re-read so often that it’s dog-eared. It’s a favourite book and I’m minded of it now, talking to you, because I’ve been trying to read a script a day this year.

You can argue that this resolution hasn’t gone well. Today is the 130th day of 2018 – sorry to break that to you – and I just finished reading my 299th script. It’s a failure of discipline but I can live with it.

Script number 289, last Saturday, was The Knowledge. I’ve got the broadcast show somewhere but I think on VHS so I had a look for some clips on YouTube. I only found the entire play there. When I play this now the video leaps to about 24 minutes in. I didn’t ask it to. Scroll back to the start and get yourself some tea.

I’m uncomfortable that someone’s work is just chucked on YouTube for free but I did buy the script, I did buy the VHS, I don’t believe The Knowledge is commercially available and, besides, there was no possible way I could stop myself watching.

You can over-praise something but, on consideration, The Knowledge is perfect. Well, I’m not certain about the theme song, I feel that’s dated a bit, but otherwise it’s perfect in the way that I think television drama should be. You’re just entirely and completely with these characters in that story, you’re not conscious how well constructed it all is.

By god, though, it’s a masterclass in writing. Every beat, every syllable is precisely placed and then I think also precisely acted. Nigel Hawthorne played Mr Burgess and that speech of his about what the Knowledge is ought to be death for any actor.

It’s exposition and if you think that’s a long speech, it is only a fraction of the full thing. Hang on, let me check. Burgess enters on page 86 of the paperback and with flashbacks to how various characters got to be there, he finishes his speech on page 94.

No current television drama would allow that and they’d say because it’s too long, too boring. I’m afraid I think Rosenthal is evidence that the reason is few people can write that well. The flashbacks are substantial but still, the sheer tonnage of information Mr Burgess gives out is overwhelming yet beat after beat, line after line, pause after pause, it is mesmerising.

Then just to demonstrate his skill in dialogue, Rosenthal will next have a scene with maybe one exchange between two characters. Just one exchange but it tells you a bit of plot if necessary plus you get the entire character of both people, you understand their world view, you see how they’re actually diametrically opposed and yet also how they don’t realise that.

And then the lead character of the play, Chris (Mick Ford), will set off on his scooter to learn the first route that London cabbies have to know. Manor House Station to Gibson Square.

CHRIS: One down. Only four hundred and fifty-nine to go.

Here’s the internet comment that so rankled me that it came back to mind the moment I knew I wanted to talk to you about The Knowledge. Someone somewhere said that to enjoy The Knowledge at all, you have to be a London cabbie.

For the first and I believe last time, I replied to an internet eejit. I wrote a sentence giving the letter F a three-star rating.

When I pitch a drama idea or even when I’m just thinking about one, the first thing I’m likely to say is what it’s about. But then I say that as fast as I can because what I really want to get onto is the next part: what it’s really about.

Thirty-nine years after it aired and after I first saw it, I’m still trying to write as well as The Knowledge. And I’m also still intending to go from Manor House Station to Gibson Square one day.

The joys of YouTube being what they are, though, someone has already done it for me.

Some day your prints will come

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I’m reasonably sure this is true, I think I’ve got this figured out. Johannes Gutenberg was a wuss. He’s done the sales talk, he’s got the investors, he’s got really impressive and quite smelly equipment and he’s standing there when someone asks if this is the printing press that will revolutionise the world.

And he goes uh-huh. Nods. Gives every impression that the answer is yes, that the answer is definitely yes, this is it, we’re done, I am fantastic and don’t you ever doubt it.

But the printing press doesn’t work.

It never worked.

It did always look like it should if only you had the right toner cartridge. And certainly paper goes in here and comes out there unless you’re doing something very stupid. You. Not it. You.

From 1450 until his death in 1468, Gutenberg covered it up by hand-writing every book in existence. Many, many times. You’ve got to give the guy some credit for patience, diligence and exceptionally clear handwriting, but you can’t give him credit for the printing press because it never bloody worked.

If he were alive today, he’d be so relieved that it was all over. For here’s my printer. I had to search the house for it and I’m only surprised that I didn’t find yours at the same time.

For one brief moment this week, I thought I needed to print out something official. I didn’t, I was able to open the PDF I was sent, add a signature to it and send it back as PDF without taking my hands off my Mac’s keyboard, but for a moment there, I thought I did. So began Day One of the hunt for the printer and later this week on Day 417, I found it up there on a high shelf.

There is a part of me that wants to get it down, to plug it in to the mains and to not plug it into my Mac because it’s supposed to be a wireless printer.

But then the rest of me remembers that the wireless bit was a joke and that anyway, this is a printer.

Printers never work because they never have.

If Gutenberg were alive today, he’d be busted. I’m just saying.

Two minutes back

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Please stop me. If Angela asks me when dinner will be ready and it’s almost done, I will call out something like “Two minutes back”. It’s a quote. I’m quoting. While I’m cooking.

I say cooking, it’s usually more heating and stirring and microwaving, but that’s not the point. The point is that my everyday conversation is riddled with quotes that nobody knows, at least until Angela happens upon some film or TV show that I got it from.

For it all comes from TV, radio and film. Imagine if I’d read the classics when I was younger. I might’ve become a weather bore every time the wind was in the east but at least that allusion could sometimes make sense. “Two minutes back” never does. Back to what?

It’s from Sports Night. I have no measurable interest, knowledge, experience or even really awareness of sport, but this show that first aired 20 years ago is a favourite. Imagine Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing done as a half-hour comedy and set behind the scenes of a TV sports show. This should be easy to imagine because that’s exactly what this is.

Take a look at this example. It’s the opening few minutes of an episode and I guarantee that you’ll wish it were the whole thing.

https://youtu.be/oWFWdUl2te8

 

I should say right now that you can see a lot on YouTube but the only place to get the show itself is on DVD. Well, if you’re in the US you can stream it on Netflix or buy it on iTunes.

Or come round to my place.

I do relish its moments when characters will be in a heated argument and then, because the TV show’s cameras are now live, will be smiling, happy hosts until the commercial break and wallop, right back at it. I don’t know why I relish that so much, except that it’s a heightened dramatic situation that’s also real. I’ve done that, to a vastly smaller extent, in radio, and that turn-on-a-second move from personal to professional, that mental juggling of conflicting demands on your head, it’s gorgeous.

It also forces arguments into bite-sized chunks which is fantastic because drama does that anyway and here the need to stop and start is imposed, it’s an external pressure and you can feel the frustration. You can feel how when it’s released, when they’ve gone to commercial and can speak freely, that the next part of the row burns out of them. Plus even as they’ve been professional and talking on air about some sports thing I’ll never comprehend, you know the real drama has been continuing in their heads so when they can speak freely, the argument has moved on.

That’s an amazing thing to me. It means the Sports Night scripts pummel through arguments and issues at an incredibly artificial rate yet specifically because of the context, it feels natural and uncontrived. It feels real.

This is a comedy I’m talking about and I actually hesitated calling it that because for me, it’s drama. There is a very quiet laugh track in the early episodes, the result of the producers not wanting one and the network insisting and presumably some editor accidentally leaning on the volume control to minimise it. And it is also very, very, very funny.

Yet it’s the drama that keeps me coming back to this show – and I do keep coming back. I can visibly see me putting the DVD boxset in my car boot after having had to pay a gigantic import duty to the post office and saying aloud “I hope you’re worth it”. That must’ve been around 2001 or 2002 and it was. It is.

This show about the making of a sports show runs for 45 episodes of around 22 minutes apiece. What’s that? Something like 16 and a half hours of television. I watched the first one that weekend I got the DVD – and then I watched the following 44 before Monday.

I’ve done that binge about four times since.

And I’m in the middle of another one now. It’s been years since my DVD player was even connected to my TV set but I found a way to stream any video from my Mac to my TV set so I was looking through my shiny discs for what I’d want to see. I only meant to watch one episode of Sports Night. That was Tuesday. It’s now Friday and I’ve seen 15 episodes. Again.

This is a series about the making of a show and much of it takes place during the time that fictitious sports programme is on air. It has an awful lot of commercials. And every time this show-within-a-show cuts to a commercial, a character in its gallery will announce how long they’ve got before they come back from commercial.

Ask me how long before I watch the next episode.

Simply the best, ish, sort of, a bit

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There is something wrong with us. All of us. Even you. Don’t look at me like that. The internet has enabled people to mistype vitriol over what they don’t like and while you’re not like that, there is something of the opposite in you: if you like something, I think you can be loudly enthusiastic about it.

That’s surely no bad thing, except there is something in all of us that makes it easy to go too far. You can see it the most clearly with haters who will declare something on television to be the Worst. Episode. Ever.

There are people who stopped watching certain shows and regularly and proudly remind the world of this fact. The world could give a damn.

The world doesn’t give much of one when we like something either but I, for instance, cannot stop myself running up to you like an excited puppy when I see or read or hear something I think is wonderful.

I just think that there is a tendency for people who like things to need to further. It’s not enough that they enjoyed it, it has to be the Best Thing Ever. And there is a problem with that. It can affect the very thing you like.

I’m thinking of what happened after the original Star Trek series was cancelled in the 1960s. There was a lot to like about that show, there was enough to dislike, but really it was a lively action/adventure one-hour television drama. It engendered fans, though, and perhaps was the first example of really passionate and large-scale fandom, for most of whom it wasn’t enough to just enjoy the show.

I’m all for engagement and apparently there are scientists who went into their careers specifically because of Star Trek and I can’t comprehend how wonderful that is.

But the short version is that fans regarded Trek as important and by the time the first film based on the show was made, this attitude had infested the crew. Star Trek: The Motion Picture is pompous. Self-important. Boring. It’s also visually exquisite at times but there’s only so long you can stare at a painting.

Trek may be vulnerable to being pompous, though. I just read the screenplays for the first six of the movies and the worst of them, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, has a note on the title page. It’s a little lecture about the cosmos and how “the incredible beauty of this latest Star Trek voyage” is based in scientific reality. There should be an afterword explaining what the dialogue is based in.

Still, watch the last episode of the original TV show and then the first movie. I think the incredible difference is down to years of fans talking up the importance of Trek and its makers coming to believe them.

That’s one thing, but here’s another. The film flopped but it was so earthshakingly expensive that Paramount gambled on earning back some of the money by getting their TV division to make a sequel for six bucks.

They did and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is cheaper. (Based on the official budgets, this was made for a third of the price of the first one. ) Grab a Trek fan, ask him or her, and there’s a fair chance they’ll still say Star Trek II is the best of the films. There is definitely a vocal contingent that would say Best Film Ever.

Compared to the first movie, it is very good. It has life and action and smaller-scale yet higher stakes. And it has Ricardo Montalban.

But it’s a cartoon. The makers swung far the other way, doing everything to make a crowd-pleaser instead of an important statement about the future of humanity. And because it was a such a success, every Star Trek film until the 2009 JJ Abrams-led ones has had a certain similar tone. A bit flat. A bit empty.

I know I’m reducing the creative contribution of hundreds and maybe thousands of people down to generalities but, still, fans talked up Trek into a pompous misfire and then the course-correction resulted in a whole series of films that are popcorn.

I like popcorn. I’m just never going to say to you that it or anything else is the greatest thing ever.

Although I admit this all popped into my head because I’ve also just read Rose, the new Doctor Who novel by Russell T Davies and it is tremendous. Just the Best Thing Ever.

Speaking and not speaking

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Earlier this week I was working on a friend’s book: part proofreading, part commenting, part editing. It was a joy because the book is just so very, very good. But it’s also a joy because it’s her first one and yet it’s got none of the stilted caution of a new writer. It’s got none of the hesitancy.

It does have some of the padding, but you can fix that.

What this writer has is the benefit of knowing her subject extremely well and having run workshops on it. At her best, this isn’t text on a page, it’s her talking to you, working with you, just as I presume she does in workshops.

Actually it’s a business non-fiction title and I first met her because she was advising me on aspects of my work. So sometimes I’ll be reading a section and I can see her as she was a couple of years ago, sitting opposite me across a coffee shop table and telling me these same things.

When you and I are done talking today, I’m off to have a coffee with her again and to enthuse about her book.

But there is something else I’ll do. There’s something else I’ve realised. This skill of writing like you’re talking is superb but it also has to be a con. You must look like you’re doing it, you must look like this is all flowing naturally and conversationally, when really it isn’t.

Really it needs to be structured. It can’t actually be like speech because when we talk to someone, our sentences run on for hours. Those sentences make complete sense but when they’re written down, they lose that and become long or confusing.

I’m telling you what I think you already know and I’m telling myself what I think I’ve long realised but working on this book brought it back to me very strongly. This writer has more verve and skill than I did in my first writings and I hope I’ll convey that to her. Because the next step of moving from conversational to only apparently conversational is going to take a lot of work.

She can do it or I wouldn’t be saying this to you before going to meet her.

Plus I’ve already told her the truth by text. “You know how people give you criticism in shit sandwiches?” I texted her. “This book is two slices of excellent with a filling of superb.”

I utterly relished doing this work and I am so looking forward to talking to her about it. I’m just also conscious that I’ve made about seven hundred comments on the manuscript. I think I’ll talk a lot before I show her that bit.

Three iPhones

Appy days are here again

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Okay, I’m not sure where I’m going with this but bear with me for a sec.

So far this morning I’ve pitched for some work and got rejected. I read a Modern Family script. Experimented again with microwaving poached eggs. Checked all my appointments for the day, got train tickets, got bus tickets. Advised my sister-in-law about her smartphone. Read the news. Checked the weather for London where I’m going now.

On the train I’ll re-read all the documents for a meeting, I’ll write some notes. I need to do some banking bits so I’ll fit that in somewhere. I really need to write at least some of a theatre programme. I want to write part of a play.

And on my way home tonight I want to outline a non-fiction book but I’ll be knackered and I expect I’ll watch an episode or two of Frasier instead.

Here’s the thing, though. I expect I’ll take meeting notes on my iPad but everything else, I got from my phone.

That’s including the poached egg recipe which I’ve saved in an iPhone cookery app called Paprika. It doesn’t just include buying the train and bus tickets, it includes waving the phone at barriers and inspectors. I forgot to say that I figured out which bus to take by using Citymapper.

I like that I forgot. I am startled by how much our phones can do and how they are tightly knitted into our lives.

But what I like most is that I forgot I’d used my phone for that route planning and that I didn’t really notice I was using my phone for any of this until I stopped to think about you. Yes, I’m writing to you on my phone.

That we can have one teeny device that will do all these things is stunning. But the fact that we can do it, that I can think of you and immediately be talking with you, that I can need a ticket and get one, that’s wonderful.

Usually it’s nature that people tell me I am failing to appreciate. Just today, I’m choosing to appreciate our phones.

Except it’s 09:30 and my bloody battery is dying.

Tom’s Midnight Garden title card from BBC 1974

Time No Longer

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Okay, I think this is pretty rare. Not only can I tell you to the year when I decided I wanted to be a writer, but I can tell you to the minute when I got obsessed with the thing that has affected all of my writing ever since. And there’s an irony to that because what I’m obsessed with is time.

The year would’ve been 1978 when ITV started airing Lou Grant. That was this groundbreaking drama about newspapers and I suppose it is responsible for my becoming a journalist but I know it’s the reason I’m a writer. To this day I am still striving to write as well as that show. To do what it did and as well as it did it.

But in its five-year run, I can only think of maybe a single episode that had anything even distantly to do with time and that’s been my obsession since even before that show. I’m working on a collection of short stories on the theme of time right now and part of me thinks it’s the best thing I’ve ever written while another part of me hopes this means I’ll finally be done with it.

For time is just riddled through everything I write. I mean, yes, Doctor Who radio dramas, it’d be odd if those didn’t touch on the subject.

But I can see it in plays I write. I got fired off the TV soap Crossroads once, have I mentioned that? In retrospect I can see that one of my gags in the show was about time. (That wasn’t why I was fired. I was ditched because I was rubbish.) One of my rather more successful pieces of writing and actually one of my favourite short stories of mine is Time Gentlemen Please and each time I’ve performed it, someone in the audience has been convinced I’m as ill as the character. Perhaps I am.

Even regular conversations turn to this damn topic. Last Saturday I had a workshop that we all paused while we talked about the Grandfather Paradox. (You might not know the name but you definitely know the idea: it’s the thing that says you can’t go back in time and kill your grandfather because then you wouldn’t be born and so wouldn’t go back in time to kill him.)

Two days before that I was at an art and poetry event. After the main readings, the artist Sue Challis showed me a painting of hers and poet Nadia Kingsley stood by it giving me personal performance of a poem inspired by that painting. They made me cry. Because to my mind, both poem and painting are about time.

And this is on my mind now, other than because it always is, because I just today learned that this year is the 60th anniversary of Phillipa Pearce’s book, Tom’s Midnight Garden.

That book about time is as dear to me as an old friend. But it’s the BBC dramatisation that ignited a lifelong friendship and this lifelong compulsion.

At 17:15 on Monday 7 January, 1974, BBC1 aired a dramatisation by John Tully and produced by Dorothea Brooking. (Quick story? A friend mentioned in an email that she had some of Brooking’s archive and I wrote back instantaneously saying just DOROTHEA BROOKING? We were working on a project together and stuff that, I wanted to see Brooking’s archive.)Tom’s Midnight Garden billing in Radio Times 1974

You can watch a lot of this version of Tom’s Midnight Garden on YouTube, though unfortunately not all of it. There’s no commercial release. And if Tom’s Midnight Garden were ever to come out on shiny disc or streaming on demand, my 1974 version wouldn’t be it. Because there was a better one in 1989. And my one was a remake of a 1968 one. I’ve never been able to see that and I don’t even know if it still exists, but if you wanted quality you’d release 1989 and if you wanted history, you’d release 1968.

I’m not even going to disagree with that: I think the 1974 version is perfunctory, it’s squeezed down into too few episodes and it is particularly cheaply done.

But it’s mine.

I don’t know that every writer has one strong obsession or actually that they necessarily recognise it in themselves if they do. But surely it’s got to be rare for one to be able to pinpoint to the very minute when it started.

I’m only relieved it didn’t also get me into gardening.

Doing and not doing

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Don’t laugh now, but journalists are meant to be unbiased and impartial. They’re definitely not meant to get involved and do things.

It’s different with the kinds of feature articles I usually write but if I’ve written a news story and you can tell it’s me, I’ve failed. News is news.

Except of course it isn’t and while total disconnected impartiality is the goal, you know that’s not possible. It’s not possible in part because the very act of choosing what to cover is coloured by your own opinion of what’s important.

I’ve always also believed that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies to writing. That’s the quantum mechanics claim that you can’t measure something’s speed without affecting its direction and you can’t measure its direction without affecting its speed. Our act of looking at an event affects it.

It’s the old line: if you write about a terrorist attack, you are giving it the oxygen of publicity.

Nonetheless, the aim is detachment, the goal is impartiality, and I believe to this minute that this is right, that this is how it should be.

Except for three things that happened this week. One was simply that I listened to an interesting interview with a guy who has spent his entire career as a journalist covering a particular subject. The man is entertaining, he’s informative, but I came away feeling a little sorry for him. That’s all he’s ever done. Write about other people’s work.

Then I was recently asked to join Cucumber Writers, a producing writing group in the West Midlands and I’ve been talking with them this week about their future plans. But look what I did there: the first word describing this writing group was not writing, it was producing. This is a bunch of writers who have the same ambition of being produced that we all do, but they went ahead and produced themselves.

I swear they don’t see how great and rare that is. But it’s remarkable. I’ve shaken at writers who have huge dreams but won’t take small steps. And here’s this group that’s been producing new writing for five years now.

Strictly speaking, all of Cucumber Writers and this fella I heard interviewed spend their days writing. They’re observing events or human nature and communicating it to audiences through various forms of writing.

Yet it feels to me like Cucumber is actually doing something. It’s not a passive recitation of other people’s work, it is an act of creation.

Work that is created is surely work that is worth being described: I’m not going to knock the idea of coverage, of journalistic examination of a piece of work. I think about this far too much as I must’ve written 20,000 or more reviews of various things yet also my favourite films tend to be ones where I went in cold. Where I went in to the cinema having not read reviews.

I’ve also been reviewed a fair few times and that’s fascinating: you also learn how rare it is for a review to be worth reading, regardless of whether it’s a good or a bad one. The lack of meat, the lack of point in the majority of reviews is depressing. The – what’s the opposite of lack? Abundance? Thanks. The abundance of times a reviewer has said what I should’ve done with a piece is educational. Not because they’re right, but because regularly they don’t care about being wrong: they’re not examining a piece, they’re often advertising how much better they would’ve been. Yet they don’t go do anything, they just carry on advertising.

I believe that making is better than describing, though. I believe that it’s better to be crew than passenger. And in my most optimistic moments I believe that being both a writer and a journalist makes me better at both.

Mind you, the third thing that happened this week was that I read a quote saying “It’s better to walk ten thousand miles than to read ten thousand books”. And I just thought, bollocks.

Star Julianna Margolies holding a script for The Good Wife

Since records began

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I’m running a workshop for children at the Bournville BookFest tomorrow and it will be my 510th public speaking gig since records began in late 2012.

I think a lot about that phrase, “since records began”. Usually it’s used to describe something incredibly serious like climate change or utterly trivial like, er, how Mars Bars have been shrinking since records began.

Was there one day when everybody thought we should be making records? Or did they start with the big stuff and add in the trivial to seem busy and keep their jobs?

I’d say that my 510 is pretty trivial, if not to me, except I can beat it with something else I appear to be counting which even I find daft. I’ve read thousands of scripts since records began but late last year I read a blog on Script Angel that recommended reading one a day. And I was persuaded.

Like most new year’s resolutions, though, I did fall off the wagon. Just not in the usual direction. If I’d stuck to reading one script per day then right now I should be on my 75th.

After we’ve spoken today, I’m going to get a mug of tea and read my 203rd.

I would like to share with you some lessons I’ve learned from 509 performances (remember, tomorrow’s is the 510th) and 202 scripts (remember, today’s is the 203rd).

But the only thing pressing on my mind is this small piece of advice. If you start watching a drama series on Netflix, finish it.

I got deeply into The Good Wife on Netflix about two years ago but for some reason stopped. Something came up. Work. I went away. I don’t know. But for some reason I didn’t rush back to the next episode and now I’m a little unclear how far through I got. I’m pretty sure I had this break in the show’s second season but it might be the third.

Either way, in my 202 scripts so far this year, 7 of them were from this show. To be specific, I’ve read the first 7 episodes of the series and each one has been superb. I’ll carry on reading – the entire first season’s scripts are online – but I really wanted to watch the filmed and broadcast version of one of them.

And I can’t.

Netflix UK has taken the whole show off.

We live in a time when we have myriad choices of dramas to watch and it feels like everything that has ever existed is available on demand or even just on a whim, but it isn’t. And you know that Netflix’s decision is to do with rights, is to do with their license to broadcast it, but nobody outside those deals can predict what will be added and when it will be taken away.

At least, nobody’s figured out how to predict it. Since records began, anyway.