Author: William Gallagher

Tragedy plus time equals success

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I loathe looking back at whatever tiny things I’ve done in my life: I want to be doing new tiny things. But this week I was — I want to say forced but that’s too much. I was enabled. Encouraged. Actually, I was just asked.

And the thing is, recounting a certain thing in a new context has somehow changed my memory of it. Not really, not completely, but some of the wiring in my head has been nudged into a better place.

Follow. This is the true version: I wrote on the 2001 television revival of Crossroads and it was a profoundly bad experience. I was fired from it.

Okay, I didn’t do it well enough, I didn’t write well enough. And actually I was so damaged by this apparent proof that I was a failure as a writer that for five years afterwards, I was doing all the usual things of pursuing writing work, even getting a lot of it in some fields, but it was like I was pretending. I knew I couldn’t write: it had been proven.

I remember that this period was five years because then I somehow earned a place on a writing masterclass kind of thing. We had workshops on radio, theatre, something else I’ve forgotten, and television. I only went to the TV one because otherwise I’d be wasting a space someone else, an actual writer, could have used. And it was like that anvil was lifted because it was there that I learned everyone got fired from that show. And it was there that I learned I had done close to everything the way I should have done. Not the writing, clearly, but how I took it, what I did, I was pretty close to good.

Truly, I felt lighter leaving that room. But if it helped me simply gigantically, that day didn’t change that I had been fired, it didn’t change how bad an experience it had all been.

Fast forward to this week when Crossroads star Tony Adams died. I was asked to talk about Crossroads on BBC CWR who somehow remembered that I’d written for the show. BBC Radio WM didn’t know that and were audibly delighted when I explained why, yes, I did know something about it.

Naturally, the point of talking on these two stations was Tony Adams, it was hardly going to be me, and of course neither show I was on had time to be a therapy session.

So I’m on there, talking enthusiastically about the series and — true — how impressed I was when I was given the original brief about what was going to be done with Adams’s character. I had a good time on the radio, I think I did it well, I enjoyed myself hugely.

I enjoyed talking about Crossroads.

For twenty years it’s been a pain point. For about six minutes this week, it was fun.

And I swear to you those few minutes have changed me. I can now look back — well, not happily, but I can look back.

Romancing the stony-faced

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Last Saturday, I was running a Spark Young Writers’ workshop for Writing West Midlands and blathering on about genre, as you might. The trick of it was ultimately that I was going to get these teenagers to write half a story in a particular genre, pretending that we were taking it halfway just because we — truthfully — don’t get much time together.

And then of course I had them finish the story — in a different genre.

But to get this all set up nicely, I needed to have them vote on which genres they liked. Whenever possible, make it so that something is their fault rather than yours. Plausible deniability, it’s a skill.

For no very good reason whatsoever, though, I counted the votes in front of them and declared that there had been seven for horror and — quite remarkably given that there were eight people in the room — exactly 403 for romance.

Their faces. Their groans.

I didn’t put them through writing romance, but we did briefly talk about it. And as I did with them, I will maintain with you that romance is the hardest genre to write.

But this is again and again on my mind, and especially so this week, regardless of that workshop. For one thing, I’ve just ludicrously over-spent on a particular new iPad whose screen is so fantastic that it’s making me re-watch all of my favourite films because they look incredible. And first on the list were ones like Man Up, Kissing Jessica Stein and The Bourne Identity. Okay, the last is a thriller but I will stand on a high hill and say forever that thrillers and romances are the same thing. Or they can be, anyway.

But then there’s also this. On Wednesday, I read a review of the new, second season of the romantic comedy “Nobody Wants This.” on Netflix. (The full stop is important.) Without spoiling the show or, I suppose, spoiling the whole review, it rather criticised the second season for being like the first. This was meant as a criticism. My fully worked out, carefully considered response as someone who has been a professional TV critic — professional as in paid to do it, I’m not claiming anything more than that — and as someone who has both seen the first season and read the couple of scripts available online, was oh, for fuck’s sake.

If the reviewer is really just telling me that they didn’t like the first season, then I’m surprised at them but each to their own — and I don’t know why I should read their review of the second. If they said it has improved, that can really only mean that it has changed to suit their tastes. If they say it’s worse, I don’t know whether to think that means I’ll find it even better than the first.

Since I believe that the function of a critic — at least when I do it — is to alert you to shows you may like yet miss in the flood of them all, I’m not interested in someone’s opinion of what a show should or should not do in order to improve. You see a lot of this with online criticism, unprofessional criticism in every sense, where someone will declare how a series should not do X and absolutely must do Y. And it’s usually that the reviewer has been thinking about this for the 30-minute running time of an episode, where the writer, producer and all others involved in the show have been spending 70 hours a week for a year on it and may just possibly have thought of that same brilliant thing — and then of why it couldn’t be done.

Ah, let me be a TV critic again. Just for a moment. “Nobody Wants This.” by Erin Foster on Netflix has a superb first season. When I got to my desk at 5am yesterday, I checked whether the second season had dropped. I was that keen. (It hadn’t. Looks like Netflix launches shows at 08:00 BST or then 09:00 GMT depending. I did not know this.)

By the time the episodes were available, I was deep into the day’s work and couldn’t watch. I’ve now seen just the first of the new ten episodes. And I am immediately back in that world, with these characters, and completely, instantly invested in them all.

Obviously I don’t know if I’ll like the remaining nine. But I’ll tell you, I was a little worried going in. For the first season is a pretty complete romance story, if there hadn’t been anymore I’d have actually been upset but it would still have worked as it was. That means coming in to a second season, Foster and her writing team have to pick up the story anew and launch us into something that will last over ten episodes.

I think she’s done it. I know for certain that it is INCREDIBLY HARD not to WATCH THE ENTIRE THING RIGHT NOW.

Inciting references

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There’s a very good gag in Mick Herron’s new “Slough House” novel, an actual laugh-aloud moment — but only if you’ve watched The Great British Bake Off and, more specifically, the sponsor adverts that used to surround it. If you haven’t, I think it comes across as a moment of silliness.

You can’t unknow what you know, so I’ll never be sure, but I think that silliness works. You have no doubt, given the context, that it is a joke, but it’s also delivered in a moment that is otherwise acutely serious.

That’s always so difficult. A tense moment can be the perfect point for a joke and I do believe that you need serious and humorous, that you need light and shade. But so often a tense moment can be punctured because of a funny line. Or more often, a line that is intended to be funny but fails. You know the kind of thing: the hero is faced with a firing squad and says with a raised eyebrow, “Ten soldiers? I thought there was a manpower crisis.”

Jokes like that are not there to be funny, they are there to impress us with the hero’s bravery and I think it’s fair to say that without one single exception, they do not work. They cheapen the drama, they lower the stakes.

So here’s Herron and if you get the joke, he is running a gag dead centre of a serious point. And if you don’t get it, you see there’s some silliness — dead centre of a serious point.

That, I think, is some marvellous writing. Let me point you at it: “Clown Town” by Mick Herron, the latest in the series better known as “Slow Horses”.

Only, I’m surprised I like it so much since, as I say, more often the joke is this cheapening type. As it happens, this one is a reference, and I’ve wondered whether reference jokes are dangerous. I’ve thought before that referring to something outside of the fiction breaks the story. It tells us that the story is just a story, that it is one tale amongst many others.

In the same book, Herron makes it clear that a character is listening to the theme song from the “Slow Horses” TV show and that one feels contrived. It isn’t the type of music you’d imagine that character listening to, for one thing, and overall it seems like the writer nudging you in the ribs.

It does take you out of the story and to me that’s unforgivable. It’s so hard to get someone into your story, but it’s harder still to get them back in after you’ve chosen to thrown them out.

Yet here’s this reference to a TV show that I didn’t think worked, and there’s that reference to the adverts around the Bake Off, which I think does.

Let me go check my Rules of Writing book, I’ll get back to you.

Time zoned out

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There’s a small but remarkably significant moment in one of my favourite novels, “Misterioso” by Alan Plater. One day, Rachel travels from Hull to London, and when she gets to her hotel that afternoon, she has a nap.

That’s it.

But she wakes up in the evening and I think you eventually realise that this is the moment her life changes. For what she’s actually done is flip day for night: she spends that night at a jazz club, being driven back to her hotel only the next morning. In Alan’s television dramatisation of his novel, there’s this exchange I’ve always liked a lot:

RACHEL: That pink stuff in the sky. Is that dawn?
PAUL: Yes. You’ve never seen one before?
RACHEL: Not in living memory.
PAUL: I’ll drive a bit closer to it.

For the rest of the week she spends in London, Rachel is now a night person. Instantly changed from a daytime travel agent worker into a nighttime jazz club attendee and then waitress. It’s also who she is meant to be. You come to think that this is the real Rachel.

Last Saturday, I went to Paris and having done my usual thing of working every second possible up to then, I was knackered. Mid-afternoon, I get to my hotel, kick off my shoes, and I sleep deeply and soundly, interrupted only by thoughts of this novel.

It’s not like I woke up having become a Parisian. (I first wrote “It’s not like I woke up a Parisan”, but that sounds like there was someone else there from Paris.) But I did wake up with a series of things to do and no requirement to do any of them, no requirement to do anything at any time. This was meant to be a working trip, it was a self-assembly writing retreat, in which I intended to get a particular project written and also obviously see some more of Paris.

I did all of that. Wrote a lot, finished the project, had dinner at Le Pure Café from “Before Sunset”, which is one of my top-one films. Had a great time and felt changed by it.

Only, there is something else in “Misterioso”. It took me a long time to register just how fast that day/night flip goes for Rachel, but ever since I first read the book back in the 1980s, there’s been an element that has stuck with me. And stuck with me quite worriedly.

Rachel goes back to Hull. She goes back to her life there and it’s like the life is the wrong size now. What particularly sticks with me is how she is treated by her boyfriend Will and while he’s welcoming her home, he’s cooked her favourite meal, he’s interested in what she has to tell him, it’s all also just wrong. It rankles and we know it immediately. From the novel:

Will was at the barrier to meet her. He took her case, and the flowers, then contrived a kiss and a hampered hug. “I’ve missed you,” he said. According to all the scripts, she should have said: “I missed you, too” but what she said was: “Thank you.”

The problem is that he thinks he knows her and Rachel has come to realise that she didn’t know herself. So much has changed for her, and here he is, “certain that he knew her”. For all that he is a sweet guy and a very dear friend, she is no longer who he is so certain she is and what he thinks is a great welcome home is totally wrong because to her this doesn’t even seem like home anymore.

The short version for me is that his certainty makes the situation, and him, boring.

While I was away in Paris, my wife Angela was away with her sister. As I write this, she’s coming back later today and I so badly don’t want coming home to be boring for her.

Getting butter down pat

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I appear to have reached that age where I object to companies cutting the size of products. It was only a day ago that I would shrug at how Mars Bars are a fraction of the size they once were, but now I’m Mr Grump.

Because butter has been hit by it. I can no longer stand idly by and, you know, get over it while I get on with my life, now that a pat of butter is the same width and height as it was, but getting on for a third less depth. The height and width fool you on supermarket shelves, but once you’ve picked it up, you know. You know it’s less. You know the company was trying to trick you.

And you know damn well that the price has not been cut to match.

Funny story. In 1990, the Hershey chocolate bar was introduced in America and priced at a nickel, five cents, or about 4p in the UK — and it stayed at a nickel until November 1969. They kept the price but, as I learned recently from the Acquired podcast, they coped with inflation and rising costs by shrinking the bar. By November 1969, that Hershey bar was just about exactly half the weight it originally was.

Now, the company caved and doubled the price to 10 cents. That’s not enough to cover the cost of the bar, and especially not since to mollify buyers, the accompanied the price rise with a return to the original size of the bar. So now people are not thinking, well, it’s more expensive but they held on for 70 years, they’re thinking they’ve been progressively more duped for seven decades.

Whereas I’m thinking, this means we have always had this kind of shrinking and I should just live with it. I am mollified by the Hershey story because I love the detail behind things you don’t usually think of. I am mollified by the fact that I’ve noticed the shrinking so the global corporate conspiracy has failed to fool me.

But then I’m also mollified over shrinkage because if I ever had a Hershey bar craving, I dare say I could stretch to buying two of them.

What I can’t do, I learned this week, was buy a deep pan pizza from Pizza Hut ever again. The sole reason I liked those pizzas was this deep pan style and I thought the chain had made a mistake, but they haven’t. Deep pan is gone.

And I realise now that it was in an excellent episode of “Press Gang” — “The Week and Pizza” by Steven Moffat — that I first saw such a thing as a deep pan Pizza Hut pizza. I presume that was excessive product placement, but it was also effective because for thirty years now I’ve been buying it.

So I’m perusable by advertising, but not fooled by shrinkage, and I can’t get a decent pizza any more. I just do not know how I’m going to keep my overweight up.

Invisible Man

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So I’ve been walking through Solihull’s Mell Square and abruptly notice that I’m on a street where my mom once worked in a pub. I’m trying to work out where the pub was, since everything’s changed and what I think is the right place is now a tea and cake shop.

There’s also a McDonald’s where I once sat with an extremely nervous stomach because I was an hour early for my first day writing for McDonnell Douglas. That hasn’t changed, but it doesn’t have the stopping power that the memory of my mother does.

But still, the whole street was familiar enough that I really did come to an actual stop. I like to think that I’m aware enough of my surroundings that I never just halt, I never make people behind me have to dodge around to the side. This time I did, this time the realisation of where I was halted me.

Only, I also then realised that nobody noticed. It’s not like I think anyone should, but you know if you stand still in a shopping area you’re going to get approached by sales people or fundraisers. And there were plenty of them around, they just entirely ignored me.

When you’re even ignored by religious groups with megaphones in their hand and no possible chance of luck in their day, something has happened. You’ve crossed a line somewhere.

You’ve become a woman over 30.

Speaking of women, a teenage one just tried to walk straight through me. Now it was my turn to dodge but she didn’t notice and somehow that seemed even stranger. I truly do not expect to be noticed but I’m a man, she’s a woman and while this should not be true, it is: women have to have built-in threat assessment skills. Hopefully she does, and of course it’s good that she recognised I’m not a problem, but out of the 1 to 5 DEFCON ratings available, she put me somewhere around the same level as a glass door.

I can’t be unhappy about that, but I am. I can’t be unhappy that sales assistants ignore me when I walk into stores now. I don’t know whether I am.

Although maybe I exude something, maybe the religious groups can detect an atheist at a hundred paces. And maybe Apple Store staff eyeballed me instantaneously because they could smell a potential sale.

But, actually, give them credit twice over. Not only did they not ignore me, but the staff member I asked about keyboards for iPads, got out her phone and showed me the Amazon listing for the non-Apple one she’d bought herself.

On and off, I may have spent an hour with her as I tried out some things and she got different experts over to help me. In the two main cases, those experts eventually figured out that the reason I couldn’t do something was that the iPad didn’t do it.

I’d feel good about that. I like a tiny, tiny reputation I have in very, very small circles about being able to find the limits of things being tested. And here I was, immediately pushing at the edges of what the Final Cut Pro video editing app and the Logic Pro audio editing app can do.

Except it really was about an hour I spent there. I found out every detail about the main woman’s university course that it was conversationally polite to find out. I asked her technical questions that I think she enjoyed answering — and seemed to clearly enjoy that I genuinely didn’t know and so was paying full attention.

Only, at the end of the hour, I shook her hand and I vow to you she had not thin clue who in the hell I was.

I should’ve nicked an iPad and seen what happened.

Presenter tense

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I’m just wondering when TV presenters became more interesting than what they’re presenting — or rather, when they think they did. And when producers encourage them.

I think there is an incredible, just incredible fear that people won’t watch anything. We have to be told that this is interesting, by a bloke — it’s usually a bloke — who stands in the way of whatever it is. There’s the turn to camera that says gosh, this is exciting and I’m wonderful. Here’s the dialogue to camera saying what’s next is really interesting, immediately followed by the dialogue to camera saying what you just briefly glimpsed was really interesting, and I’m wonderful.

Or you’ll recognise this. “It’s morning now, but in ten hours the whole day is meant to turn into night. Can the day make it in time?” Entirely, derisibly false pressure — “it’s hotting up now” — over something that would actually be pressured, that would actually be really interesting, if we could just please see it.

Some presenters are worse than others, true. Some have gone to that school where they are trained / to speak only / three words at / a time in / case we can’t / follow what they / are saying now. To which I have to tell you / I have screamed./

Then Giles Coren used to make me wish for the TV set to be divided into two. He co-presented “Amazing Hotels” with chef Monica Galetti who actually knew what she was talking about. If you ever had the smallest doubt that Coren was clueless, you only had to wait a few minutes before he would tell you that he was and seem to think this is something we should be really interested in watching for an hour.

Or Gregg Wallace. Now persona no grata for his behaviour, I can count the number of tiimes I saw a listing for a documentary that sounded really – oh, it’s him. Never mind. It was twice, actually.

There’s definitely an argument that I present too much in my 58keys YouTube channel, but I’m only on that because I’m cheap and available. I’ve been introduced at events as the finest writer we could find in our price range and I want that as a poster quote.

This is all on my mind because the other day I heard Kirsty Wark presenting on BBC Radio 4 and I couldn’t help thinking yes, that’s how it should be done. Or recently the podcast 99% Invisible celebrated its 15th anniversary by interviewing the show’s presenter, Roman Mars. He was literally the subject of the episode, and yet without dodging questions, he made it be about the topics the series has covered.

I’m minded of the seven pilot episodes I made of 58keys as I tried to concisely convey why anyone should listen to me on whatever the topic is. Every one of those was thrown away and I have never since tried to justify the series, I just get on with it and trust that either you’ll find the subject interesting or you’ll find something better to watch.

Next week’s 58keys is about Shortcuts on the Mac, iPhone and iPad, and you’re already thinking of watching a dozen Philomena Funk short clips instead. But I promise you, if you were to watch, you wouldn’t hear me saying this is really interesting and I’m wonderful.

Writer economics

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I was going to build to this but it’s you, I’ll just go there. Recently I went to Paris, bought a pack of ten metro tickets online, and I’ve still got six left. Consequently I have decided it would be a terrible waste of about 12 euros if I don’t go back to use them up.

In a few weeks’ time, I will. I’m going to Paris on my first-ever writing retreat, the first despite a very long time now of being a writer. 

For reasons passing understanding, I mentioned that I was considering doing something like this, I mentioned it in an online chat and I think I even said it on 58keys, my YouTube channel. Wherever I said it, two things happened. One was that I got a Buy Me a Coffee donation expressly to be spent making the retreat happen, which was startlingly fantastic. And the other was that I was told by a friend that he’d been on a writing retreat where he was the sole person who wrote while every single other person — and every other married person too — spent the entire time in what he described as a hurricane of sex.

So I’ve decided I need a writing retreat. 

But rather than go on some organised one and, you know, maybe learn anything, instead I really have booked a hotel in Paris. First I’d thought I’d just stay at home, switch my phone to stun, and write away in my office. Then I figured no, I’d go to Bath instead and have a fanboy’s great time going around places Jane Austen has written about. Then I considered London, too.

And there’s a writer I so nearly ended up working with that on emailing to say it was a shame that project didn’t turn out, I offered to buy him lunch some time. I’ve nothing to tell you, I said, and nothing to ask, which turned out to be handy because he hasn’t replied.

Possibly I shouldn’t have told him about the hurricane of sex.

Anyway. I considered Edinburgh. It’s a fine city. Cardiff is great. I mean, Cardiff Bay and that beautiful Millennium Centre, fantastic.

But I spotted a connection here and realised that I was looking at cities because I need cities. I realised I was looking for anywhere other than the city I live in, because this much is certain: if I stayed in or even near Birmingham, then the smallest breeze would send me right back to my office.

Instead, I’m going to be alone in the 19th Arrondissement of Paris and I’m going to visit the cafe from “Before Sunset”, but otherwise I will be writing and writing and writing.

It’s an indulgence, and spending a lot of money to not waste 12 euros is possibly questionable. But when this comes up in a few weeks’ time, it will be after an extra-busy time, and it will be right before another extra-busy time.

I’d ask if you want to come with me, but that suddenly seems awkward.

Trying to write wrongs

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So I’m reading the script to the pilot of Supergirl, the 2015 US live-action series, with this episode written by show co-creator Ali Adler, from a story by Greg Berlanti, Ali Adler and Andrew Kreisberg, based on the character from the comics. This is my 311th script of the year and I’m enjoying it until page 42.

Up to then, there are a couple of lines that I think clunk, there’s more narration than I tend not to like and my only actual problem with it all is the name Supergirl. But just as I remember thinking when the show was airing, Shirley Conran probably trademarked SuperWoman, and I have some distant, distant cloister bell of a memory of there being a Superboy some time. I think.

But it’s on page 42 of the 61-page pilot script that the lead character gets named Supergirl. She objects, as well she might. She’s been dubbed this by Cat Grant, the ruthless editor of a newspaper – a kind of Devil Wears Prada figure – and now it’s a toss up. I don’t know whether to feel bad for the actor who has to deliver the excuse for calling her Supergirl, or the actor who has to pretend to be chastised/mollified by the excuse.

That excuse goes thisaway:

CAT: And what do you think is so bad about “girl?” I’m a girl. And your boss and powerful and rich and hot and smart. If you perceive “Supergirl” as anything but excellence, isn’t the real problem you?

Good try.

This is one of the times in the pilot where the writer’s voice comes through like a radio playing too loudly for you to hear the character’s speaking. Another example is on page 30 when a character literally says: “Can you believe it…? A female hero. Nice for my daughter to have someone like that to look up to.”

The character saying that is a waitress talking to a customer who isn’t listening, but I think she was quoting the pitch deck for the show. The words were just too on the nose to belong on a character’s lips.

In the same way, the defence of the name Supergirl does not come across as the character saying what she believes, it is the writer telling us to stop going on and on about this, William. It’s a writer taking a problem name that dates the show, even trivialises it, and trying to write their way out of that. Which is no bad thing, but Adler is not just excusing the name, she is throwing the whole issue back in our faces like it’s you and I who are at fault.

So good try, but nope, it is not my real fault that you were stuck with a name created by two blokes in the 1950s.

Given that Adler is just about infinitely more successful a writer than I am, I’m sure she needs my advice. But if I had been doing this — and if I couldn’t change the name to Superwoman for IP reasons — I think I would’ve simply ignore the issue. Not questioned it, not highlighted it, just got on with it.

Which I offer is what probably was done for each of the show’s 125 episodes after this pilot. Nobody questioned it in those, no further writers tried to distract us from it with a slap to our faces.

You can use writing to get around problems. You can use writing to set a stage and guide people to what you need them to believe. This dialogue about the patronising name tried to do this and instead I think drew more attention to it.

That’s an example of the Barbra Streisand effect. But then it’s also a bad compared to — trust me on this one — how Steve Jobs wrote the story of the first iPhone. This is more relevant than you think, since there is yet another iPhone launch next week, but you’re just looking at me now, I’ll shut up.

Coming back to the UK today

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I think that this is a time when we most need to be fully aware of the news, and also that this is a time when that is simultaneously easier than ever, and harder. Since Trump got in, I’ve shied away from news more than I should: haven’t seen a full news bulletin, haven’t watched more than a few YouTube videos, have unfortunately read quite a lot.

But not as much as I would have before, and not as much as I should, and I’ve told myself that watching drama and comedy is better for me. Watching some writing, filmed and performed. Only, last weekend I was in Paris and before I went, I re-watched Before Sunset.

It’s an absolute top-one favourite film of mine, but in it, main character Celine despairs at one point about how bad the world is and how we need to do something about it. Before Sunset was released in 2004. I couldn’t help myself. I said aloud, oh, bless.

That was my sole time thinking about news. The only other news I learnt during the entire trip was that Monica and Chandler have got engaged. I may be a bit behind on that.

And then I came home. 

This Paris trip was for a special occasion, not that you need a special occasion to go to Paris. But because it was what it was, I bought first-class train tickets for the run back from Eurostar in London to home. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before and it was so good to get free food that only costs you a fortune. Plus the train ride was more comfortable than any I used to have when coming back from the BBC.

But as part of such a ticket, you get access to a first class lounge at Euston. I have spent so many hours standing in crowds, waiting for the departure board to get to my train, waiting in the heat and the cold and always in the very most tired way. So nice seats — actually, just any seat — was a boon, and the air conditioning was almost good enough to stop me thinking about the impact on the environment. And they had two different sizes of Pepsi Max cans. 

The trouble is, they also had TV sets. And each one was tuned to GB News.

My welcome back to the UK was this foul channel. The sound was off, which was one blessing, so I don’t know what the show was. But watching it for a moment, I think it should’ve been called The Three Arseholes.

That’s what is being presented to people coming into the UK, and it is what is being presented to us. It sank me. I’m glad I got this view and could see how sickening things are outside my own bubble.

But I’m sorry, Celine. I have to go back to Friends.