If you buy a PC, you’ve just bought a PC. If you buy a Mac, somehow you’re a Machead, a cultist, an Apple fanboy or girl, you’ve joined a religion, you worship Steve Jobs and Jonny Ive, you’ve been fooled by the hype, you’re trying to be cool, you think shiny is good, the list goes on.

You hear much the same degree of jeering between football fans but at least with that there are fans on both sides. Who’s actually fan of Windows PCs? But okay, if Apple is a religion, it’s the Church of the One That Works.

If Microsoft comes out with something, I’ll probably hear about it at some point. I don’t follow many of the techie news sites I used to when I worked in computers but I’ll hear eventually. Mostly because it takes so long: a pretty standard spiel from Microsoft is that our new product will kill Apple/Google/Everybody as soon as it’s launched in three to four years. And it’s cheaper too, so there. Will be cheaper.

There was a nice-looking tablet computer they did this about: if you saw the articles, you quite fancied this. It was a wee way off, they said, and now the other day they cancelled it entirely.

In comparison, Apple loves making big announcements about fancy technology and ending with the words “Available today”. I’m not sure whether you’d call that smug or gleeful, but I think they earn whichever it is. The famous Apple secrecy up to the launch of a product has some unpleasant sides but ultimately where so many firms talk about what they’re going to do, Apple tends to just do it first.

Seriously first, too. They nicked the idea for a graphical computer back when there used to be any other sort. Microsoft nicked it from the same place an hour later. But where Apple took Xerox PARC’s idea and made it commercially practical, commercially available, Microsoft Windows has been copying the Mac for nearly thirty years and it’s still not there.

You have a mouse. You wouldn’t have if Apple hadn’t done it first, or at least if someone hadn’t, because Microsoft came late to mice. If you’ve got a laptop, it has the keyboard pushed to the back so you can type comfortably and it’s got a slick touchpad. Because of Apple. I was at the UK launch of their first PowerBook with that touchpad and they crowed about how they had patented it.

Apple patents are plainly rubbish, but there you go.

When Apple does come out with something new, I hear about it much, much faster because these days I’m looking. I’ve got a couple of Mac sites on my iPhone’s newsreader and I’ll read them not through fervour, not because they happen to update while I’m bowing toward Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino.

I read them because of Apple’s track record and how the firm thinks things through.

One example. I hope this has changed in Windows 7 but it lasted for the first twenty years of Windows so it’s a fair illustration of how the technology doesn’t matter, it’s the people behind it. Copy some documents to a floppy disk, if you can find a floppy disk.

Windows gives you a nice, pretty graphic of paper airplanes flying between an icon of your hard disk and an icon of your floppy one. Until suddenly the floppy is full and it panics. “Error!” it screams. I can’t remember the unmemorably techie error message but its meaning is very clear: it’s your fault. You’ve got it wrong, not Windows.

Do the same thing on a Mac and it looks first. Tells you there’s not going to be enough room on the floppy.

That’s it, it’s just sayin’.

Microsoft did the pretty icon fine, it just thinks that pretty is enough. Well, sort of. Windows XP has a very Fisher Price kind of look but Windows 7 is prettier. It’s just that pretty is as pretty does, I think: Apple products have a shine to them at least in very great part because they work and work so well. Before the iPhone, no phone looked anything like it. Since the iPhone, no phone has been released that hasn’t tried to copy it. That’s design, that’s thinking brilliantly.

That’s not trying to make a long list of features, that’s trying to make the things useful.

Not long ago I recommended that a friend did not switch to Macs because I felt he was so wedded to Windows and had so many applications that changing was a giant deal. He changed anyway. I’m very persuasive. And for weeks afterwards he’d phone me up laughing. Because he’d buy some new software, new hardware, something, and he’d read out the six pages of instructions for how you install them under Windows before delivering the punchline. For Mac, the instructions were always “Plug it in.” The End.

I used to actually like computers. I enjoyed fiddling, I even had a fair enough career in computer magazines though I always felt I was a magazine guy more than I was a computing one. And all the friends I still have from there are nodding now. Possibly also nodding off, but.

Today all I want is to work on a machine that works. Someone asked me recently how I could possibly enjoy computers so much. I had just repaired a ridiculous problem with his Windows Vista laptop but I swear we stared at each other as if across a gulf. I don’t like computers, I like that I can talk to you like this, I love that I can do my work wherever I am in the world, I adore that right now I’ve got music playing, that in a short while my Mac will record the Afternoon Play so I can listen in the car later. That BBC News channel is open on my right. That Twitter is updating in front of me. That the film I’m buying off iTunes will be ready to watch in a second or two.

And obviously I write. But for every advantage this Mac gives me for writing, it does offer a thousand distractions.

It’s just that I’m not distracted struggling to find a DLL, whatever in the hell that is, I’m not interrupted by WARNING! VIRUS! YOUR FAULT! messages. And when my disk is full, I know I’ve just been talking too much.

Easy one first: name a great woman actor. Got one? Got a hundred? It’s a doddle. Straight off the top of my head, I immensely admire Jodie Foster, Judi Dench, Emily Watson, Barbara Flynn, Emily Mortimer, Allison Janney, Helen Hunt, Alison Pill, if I say any more I’ll itch to sort them into alphabetical order. And anyway, you’ve got your own list.

But now name a great role for a woman. You can do it, each of these women has had a least one tremendous role or I wouldn’t know to admire them, wouldn’t know they are as talented as they are.

Yet most of the time the woman’s role is as nothing more than being the unattainable object for the hero, who attains her by the end anyway. For instance, I just watched Se7en for a thriller-writing course run by Script in the West Midlands and, watching it as a writer, I kept wondering why Gwyneth Paltrow took the part she did. It’s a great film and the parts for the leads, Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman are tremendous, but Paltrow is a big name and it’s a tiny part.

How did Kim Basinger get an Oscar for LA Confidential? I’m not saying she was poor, but what did she actually have to do in the film? How did Judi Dench get an Oscar for thirty seconds of screen time in Shakespeare in Love?

Those two films are exceptions for me because both parts were fine, they just didn’t have much to them. Whereas the majority of time, I find that as a viewer, I am prone to slapping my forehead. Particularly when the hero says he’s going “to get the girl”. I can’t help it: I immediately hear him saying that today he’s got to pick up the laundry, wash the car, get to the post office before 3pm and, oh, yes, collect the girl. Whoever she is in the story, she’s not a person, she’s not a character, she’s a UPS parcel.

Yes, I’m pro-feminist. I think it’s embarrassing that there’s only one woman in the new British Government cabinet. It’s bad that I can’t bear her, but embarrassing too. But I don’t slap my forehead from some ideological idea, I do it because this accepted norm of the woman as “the girl” to get is crippling to drama.

Follow. The hero falls for a “perfect” woman. Already she’s boring me, but still, let’s go with it. The hero is someone this woman would never look at and yet without him actually changing into someone worth being glanced over, she is required to change her mind by the end of the story. Usually this involves the hero doing something for 90 minutes when she isn’t even in the room. We know nothing about her, we care nothing about her, she isn’t actually anything: certainly not a character of any low number of dimensions. There’s a good chance she’s blonde. I wouldn’t count on her wearing much in the way of a costume.

But if you don’t care about this unattainable object that the hero is striving to attain, it’s hard to keep your mind on the hero’s striving. Hard to get behind a hero who’s so shallow that this empty life-size poster of a woman is his ultimate goal.

So a will-they/won’t-they tale rapidly becomes, for me, a will-he/why-would-she story. Then it’s a who-is-she story, penultimately a who-is-he tale, then a what’s-on-the-other-side-kind-of-drama.

There’s always something on the other side. I’m just grumbling at you today because so much of it appears to be like this and I can’t understand how all drama, all writers, all producers aren’t grabbing talent. I actually can’t understand why there are so many talented women actors when this is what’s on offer for them.

Except, of course, when everything works. I only recently saw Emily Mortimer and Gerard Butler in Dear Frankie: a beautiful gem of a film by Andrea Gibb with real women, real men, real characters.

I can well see why women would want to act in drama like that. Because I want to write drama like that.

William

Nuts to me, my writing, even to the brilliance of Red Planet and the single most energising, invigorating, exhilarating day in my scribbling career to date (I may be underselling that). Instead, look at this gorgeous, glorious thing.

So, first off, I have a new website. It’s very like the old one in that it’s plainly an expression of my wanton ego – I have a website, a blog, I’m on Facebook, Twitter and occasionally the phone – that I’m trying to come to terms with. And it’s also at the same address, www.williamgallagher.com.

“Writing In Treatment” is a bit of a come-on title, it’s as if I’ve found some news for you and will be linking like crazy to insightful interviewers. And it is a little like that.

Here’s the Los Angeles Times reviewing the new second season of In Treatment and saying “the stories are even better than they were last season and that’s saying something”. And The Boston Globe has a good piece about both the original Israeli series and the American adaptation.

But what that Boston Globe piece does that I’m trying to do today and really rather failed to do last time is talk about the writers. Perhaps chiefly because I want to enthuse about them but also because I think there are signs for the future here, both good and bad signs.

Last time I spoke of the writing, I didn’t speak of the writers. I think I was a bit awash with writers at the time: I’d just seen 43 episodes over 14 days, most of which had individual writers but some were team-written, and 42 of them were direct translation/adaptations of the Israeli originals by more writers.

Then there was a showrunner on the US version who wrote the first five episodes to set the style and doubtlessly worked at least in part on all the other episodes. That was Rodrigo Garcia but there was also a showrunner/writer on the Israeli show, Be’Tipul and he created the whole thing: Hagai Levi.

I watched the show for the same reason you watch anything: it sounded good, I thought I’d like it. Then I really, really liked it and it was a can’t-stuff-your-face-fast-enough race to the end of the season.

Now I’m watching it again. But as a writer. And I’m slicing it a different way. Rather than one episode of Laura’s therapy sessions, then Alex’s, then Sophie’s, then Jake and Amy, then Paul’s, rinse, repeat, I’m watching all of Sophie’s. And by focusing on the one, and I’ll admit aided by a handy writer list on the DVD box that I hadn’t noticed before, I’m seeing that Sarah Treem wrote the last eight of the nine Sophie episodes. (Garcia did the first of this one as well.) That link is to her IMDb list, as are most of the links here, but in her case don’t bother: it just lists In Treatment. Instead, try the New York Times which has a review of A Feminine Ending, a stage play of hers. But it also has audio of Treem herself talking about that play. Then The Village Voice talks about how Treem and other new writers made up the whole of the 2007/8 season for the Playwrights Horizons company. That company claims to always champion new writing but for that year, it did nothing else and – this is not directly stated but it’s only barely hidden – it was because its regular writers were rubbish.

That’s a little harsh.

I don’t know much yet about any of the other writers on In Treatment but even if Sarah Treem is the only newcomer, isn’t that marvellous? In Treatment was a fairly chancy commission for HBO and it wasn’t like they dabbled in it. There was apparently a five-part pilot made, which presumably makes up week 1 of the series, but still you can’t imagine ITV1 commissioning 40-odd episodes of anything new. If they ever did, if any major British television company did risk commissioning that many episodes of a non-soap drama, can you imagine them ever trying new writers on it?

Yes.

Life on Mars did. One episode of that was to be written by a new writer to television, I don’t know who, I only know it was a man. Something happened, again I don’t know what, and his script was not used but there was that willingness to take a chance. Similarly, Ashes to Ashes was the first producing job for Beth Willis and look at her now: she’s the new co-exec producer on Doctor Who.

It’s called taking a chance for a reason, though. You chance your arm, you try your hand, you sometimes burn your fingers. If a brand new writer fails to deliver a filmable script of The Bill – um, bad example, sorry. If a brand new writer fails to deliver a filmable episode of Hustle, that’s a gigantic production machine derailed. You’ve got to believe they’ll deliver the goods, they’ve got to be as much of a safe pair of hands as you can manage. I’ve felt precisely this when I’ve commissioned new writers on magazines and I’ve had bad experiences from that. Also some good, actually, and that keeps you doing it, but a lot of bad. And a bad experience for me means having to write an emergency article in a couple of hours, that’s substantially easier than writing an hour’s television over a weekend.

This is the reason we’re all guided to soaps: they can be derailed too but they’re hardy little buggers and they can cope better. And it’s fair enough: if you’ve written 100 episodes of a soap, you’re someone who delivers. When you cannot have a blank screen, that’s a very tempting and very practical thing to look for in a new writer.

I think it’s a calamitous side-effect that soaps have become seen as the only route through and moreover that because such a proportion of new writers and producers come through the soap route that it’s seen as the right way to do drama. People who don’t write soaps are very dismissive of the genre, but fortunately people who do write soaps believe they’re already writing every type of drama so the general wrongness just balances out. Funnily enough, there is huge, rich drama in the gap between: when drama writers try soap and soap writers try drama.

Anyway, In Treatment, just to yank this back to the topic, is not a soap. It’s far more painful than that and if a story is about someone fancying someone, it cuts truer than the soap version would. It’s willing to go down areas that might end the story early. It does end the story early. More than one patient does not last the whole nine weeks of the series. And then it sees what happens next, what’s underlying everything, what’s deeper. Rather like therapy, actually. Apparently the original Israeli series had a therapist advising the writers and he or she did complain a lot: not about inaccuracy but about how the scripts didn’t dig deep enough. So then they did.

There’s a lot of hyperbole about the original show, about how it’s the greatest drama Israeli television has ever produced. It’s certainly the only one I’ve heard of, so maybe that’s true. But there is also the harsh, practical fact that it may well be the cheapest.

It’s certainly, surely, HBO’s cheapest-ever drama. Some sources say each episode took two days to film, others say it was only one. It is only half an hour per episode, but compare that to a ten-day shoot for a typical one-hour US drama and it’s probably cheaper than even reality TV.

I don’t want to see British television drama budgets cut. But they’re being cut. I think it’s a preposterously short-sighted notion: notice how ITV1 is in trouble but ITV3 is doing very well – because it’s showing all the dramas ITV used to make. You can’t repeat Britain’s Got Talent, you can and they do repeat successfully repeat Thunderbirds over and over.

If there’s any good to come from lower budgets, it’s that we may see things like In Treatment. BBC4 is already making cheap dramas that are punching well above their weight: think of the dramatisations of the lives of people like Hughie Green. Trevor Eve received the greatest share of the praise for that, and his performance was superb, he managed to convey not only a tremendous impression of Hughie Green but all the nuances and the strengths of the script. It’s just that it was the writer, Tony Basgallop who put those nuances and those strengths in there.

Fast-cutting scenes, action and stupendous locations cost money: tight, tense, intimate writing, not so much. Unfortunately, the type of writing that keeps you compelled without any eye candy, that involves you in characters without melodrama, that’s cripplingly hard to do. The rewards are richer, for the viewer, but the gamble is higher for the writer. And it’s a harsh and unpalatable fact that being given the chance to write this type of work is not even a remote guarantee that you’re capable of it.

If drama budgets are cut, we’re going to see an awful lot of crap. But we might see things like In Treatment and they might bring us new writers, new voices.

I’m obviously arguing with my writing hat on: I said as much at the top. But I’m a drama nut and as a viewer I just want to be in the story, whatever it is and however much it cost. As a writer, mind, I should tell you I’m available. I’m here through Thursday, two-drink minimum, see your waitress for details.

William

I’m so tired. It’s 2am, but I’ve got to talk to you. I’ve got to Talk Things Through.

Previously… the Red Planet Prize could’ve been made for me – but it wasn’t. Not this year, anyway. I got to the finals, which was without question the single most affirming thing that’s happened in my writing career. I mean, stage plays, yes, Radio Times, no doubt. But Red Planet wanted one-hour TV drama and that’s my bag. That is the reason I am a writer at all. (qv Lou Grant.)

“The way I work generally is I figure a code, a general measuring stick parameter. A thirty scene thing means that each scene is going to be around four pages long… I have a tendency to work rather mathematically about all this stuff. As I build this up, you’ll see it’s done vaguely by the numbers.”

Aren’t you rushing to see the movie this fella is planning?  I think you knew it was a man. But it’s George Lucas and he’s speaking privately in the first of five story conferences, five nine-hour story conferences about Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1978. He’s spitballing away with Steven Spielberg, briefing  screenwriter Laurence Kasdan.

Fancy reading the whole thing? A transcript of the entire thing is available right here in PDF.

I think I’ve said before that a reason the latest Indiana Jones film was so poor was that it was just a series of stunts with some bits to string them together. There were other reasons too, but that was one and it’s a failing of a lot of films. But as I’d thought I’d heard and now know for sure, it’s precisely how Raiders of the Lost Ark was done.

More, the stunt scenes they couldn’t fit in went on to become the next couple of films.

So maybe George Lucas has a point.

Nah.

Mathematical screenwriting? What’s that line of Aaron Sorkin’s? I can’t find my copy of his book but it was a crack about network TV executives saying you can’t have politics on TV, can’t have people with moustaches… Sorking said something along the lines of: “People make up rules  because it’s considerably easier than learning the real ones.”

Blimey. From Lucas to Sorkin in one blog. There is actually a chance these two fellas have never been talked about in the same breath.

But anyway, I was fascinated by the Raiders documents: the torrent of ideas, for one thing, but more how we know so very well how Kasdan absorbed all this and wrote something so very good.

William

I’ve had some wonderful nights in theatre and I’m going to admit to you that up to now the best have really been when it’s been my own material on stage. Sitting in an audience, feeling them laugh and choke, knowing that an idea you had in your head is now working. Does it honestly get better?

Yes.

On Saturday night I was at the Carriageworks Theatre in Leeds where my wife Angela Gallagher’s first-ever play, Rainwatching was performed.

You can’t imagine how good it was. It went down a hurricane. Rainwatching closed out the whole festival of new writing and when the lights came up, the audience was in tears. There was a writer/actor/audience discussion panel right after it and most of the other plays were skipped over in seconds but Angela’s was all anyone wanted to discuss. I may be biased there, but still.

The piece is a very raw, apparently simple but truly rich and very powerful monologue about a cancer patient with a right git of a husband. And during the panel discussion, the theatre announced to the audience that Rainwatching was to be restaged over the summer – in a trilogy including a monologue for the git husband.

I’ve written that. And I’ve written the final part of the trilogy, a piece about another character in both the first two monologues. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written.

It’s funny but one of the strongest reactions on Saturday night was about this husband character, Len, who we only hear about, we never see in Angela’s Rainwatching. And another strong reaction was to the idea of seeing him in mine: everybody wants to see him, everybody wants to hear his side. But women who had been cheery with me until this point, positively turned on me: challenging me, I mean really threateningly challenging me, to try justifying this git. The look in their eyes!

I’ve never had such a good night – and nothing of mine was actually performed. But the power of Angela’s piece, it was wonderfully affirming to see an audience reacting the way I believed they would.

What I didn’t expect was the reaction after the show. Because of the panel, the audience knew what Angela looked like so they kept seeking her out in the bar. When we were leaving, people abandoned their conversations in mid-word to come over to her: not just to congratulate her, but to actually thank her for writing it.

And to give me a funny look about the sequel.

Wish you could’ve been there. I’ll let you know when dates for the trilogy are announced – and in the meantime, fancy seeing what the fabulous writer Angela Gallagher looks like? Stop by her Breast Cancer Walk donations page and say Mr Angela sent you.

William

Listen, sorry in advance: I’m about to not tell you something. But it’s fantastic.