They were going to be online here but now, not so much. I first got into Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night because I’d got into his The West Wing but I did also read some scripts that were unofficially released online. That’s happy for me. And every once in a while when I’m back in a Sports Night mood, I’ll rewatch the episodes and invariably head for the Sports Night script site.

Until the new DVD came out. Well, no, I headed for the site alright but the site was gone. For weeks now, it’s been gone. But today, right now, this second in fact, and of course after I’d found a cunning way to salvage most of the scripts off there, that site is back.

The scripts on it range from early to late or shooting drafts and, especially if you know the series, it’s fascinating to see the progress of the stories and the characters. And from a production perspective, to see how huge chunks of story moved around the series before ending up in the episodes they did. The clearest example, and done for the most obvious reason, is the second half of How are Things in Glocca Morra? This is the first-season episode that was being filmed when Robert Guillaume had a stroke in real life. The entire final half of the script moved to a second-season episode instead.

If you’re less familiar with the show, I obviously think the scripts stand up as stories on their own but I do recognise that they’re harder to read than the average. In every episode there are scenes where two characters, Dan and Casey, are presenting a TV show and are in front of cameras while up to eight other speaking parts are in the control room and any or all can be going between the two. Plus anything the control room people say can be heard by the Dan and Casey if a mic is switched on; anything Dan and Casey ever say can always be heard in the control room. So conversations roam across the two rooms, some dialogue is for broadcast, some is not, it flows gloriously on screen.

And the way Aaron Sorkin and his many co-writers get this on the page is… by ignoring it. You’ll see long unbroken scenes where who is talking to whom and who can or can’t hear is only rarely covered.

It doesn’t help that this script site’s formatting of the screenplays is confusing when you’re used to real ones. So, what the hell? I managed to get one of the scripts, I spent some time making the formatting readable, lemme show you one anyway.

This is from the second season of Sports Night, it’s The Cut Man Cometh by Bill Wrubel and Aaron Sorkin. There are hardly any differences between this draft and the aired version but who cares? It’s one of the funniest and also one where I felt the most because it took me right back to disastrous nights in radio.

William

This month there were 800 new book titles published. One of them was Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook: it’s a truly beautiful edition, a world class idea and a superb read but I choose to leave everyone else to rave about it because I’m not in it.

Whereas I am going to be in Metal Clay Beads: Techniques, Projects, Inspiration.

You’re going to have to look quite closely because the truth is that I will get one teeny byline. But it’s a photography byline. And this is a US book so I am again published internationally and for my photography.

You don’t get to do this kind of thing without help. In front of every great jewellery photographer there is a great piece of jewellery. And I feel like walk-on extra telling you The Crucible is about the guy who brings in a glass of water for the judge because of course this isn’t about me, it’s about Angela Gallagher. The book is by Barbara Becker Simon but it contains a gallery of the finest jewellery (and photography, come on, throw me a bone here) and Angela’s Heath Robinson piece is included.

Fancy a peek? This is how good you have to be to get international recognition in jewellery-making.

Click for a larger image. And to keep you going before the book’s published early next year, you could, go on then, do no better in all this land than buy Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale.

William

You’ve missed this now but Grand Designs Live was at the NEC. And Sony had a presentation there on The House of the Future: all of the exciting technologies we can all look forward to. Obviously all Sony-based. And presumably all after the credit crunch.

For example, in the bright Sony world, you can have all your music in one place. Never dig out a CD again, just scroll through the cover artwork on a screen and choose what you want. When you put in a CD to copy it into this wonder system, said system will look out across the internet, will cast its eye far and retrieve for you all the track names and details.

If you don’t already do this routinely, you’re at least expecting me to say that I do. Yes, of course. For years now. And it’s because I’ve got a Mac. Got to tell you, my two-year-old Mac does this stuff vastly more smoothly, easily and without as much bloody fuss than this peek into the distant future of Sony.

I’ve always recognised that it’s very hard, perhaps impossible really, to write about the future. Sony’s solved this by being years behind and looking from there, which you have to agree is a cute way around the issue if ultimately unlikely to convince me to buy anything. But otherwise, nothing is ever what you expect in the future, you can’t predict successfully, so give up now. This might be a problem for science fiction writers, of which I’m just not one, but I don’t think so: SF is only costume drama that’s (typically) in the future. Just as Jane Austen isn’t dependent on crinoline for drama, Zonk Conquers The Galaxy is so much more than tin foil.

But somewhere along the way, television drama has screwed up the present too.

It used to be that characters on TV were glamorous, that they were in some or many ways aspirational idols. Jonathan and Jennifer Hart seemed so fabulously wealthy in the 1970s. The men and women from UNCLE were chic and sleek, they had their pen-based communicators. The Tomorrow People had their lava lamps.

Then we got computers.

TV characters, and really their writers, were faced with our knowing more than they did, of having more experience with this technology than they did. Drama is drama, I don’t care whether Ena Sharples has an iPhone or a BlackBerry, but power changed, attitudes changed. And we began getting these slick characters still acting slick, still now seeming to act superior – possibly not Ena – yet they were using ZX81s to take over the world. It became embarrassing. Countless 1980s and 90s dramas had hacker characters visibly pretending to type, just banging keys at random or sometimes not even actually hitting the keys, while impossible data magically appeared on screen. My beloved Sports Night, as late as 1998, mentioned a website address that couldn’t possibly work.

Old Doctor Who rested a plot turn on bubble memory: fine, I suppose, for about an hour in 1981 but there was a smugness that this was cutting-edge, that this was the latest thing. The Doctor even recognising what bubble memory was? I seem to remember knowing what it was at the time but I couldn’t recognise it now, let alone see how to use it to save the universe. And there was a 1986 Doctor Who episode where Mel (Bonnie Langford) gasped at the dangerous weapon, a “megabyte modem”.

I don’t see how you can write that and still be employed.

It’s not arrogant when it’s true, when you do know something the rest of us don’t. When the pilot of The West Wing introduced us to the term Potus, that felt genuinely new. Aaron Sorkin wrote somewhere about being worried about it, whether it was just a new term to him, and that he was talking a chance using it the way he did. (LAURIE: “Tell your friend Potus he has a stupid name.” SAM: “I would but he isn’t my friend, he’s my boss. And it isn’t his name, it’s his title. President of the United States.” Smash into the first episode’s titles.)

Knowing something we don’t and bringing to us, that’s fabulous. But it is is arrogance and so very much more when you don’t know what we do yet you carry on patronising anyway.

It’s not a pretty thing. TV is still trying to be as aspirational but because it’s failing, and failing stupidly, that’s what it can look like: it can look and feel and be extremely patronising. It doesn’t like looking stupid either, so it wants to tell technical stories – but because it’s patronising and superior, it believes we can’t understand these same stories. New writers on Casualty and the like will always jump up and down about their great idea for a Tourettes story, for instance. It’s great, they say in the certainty that we’ve never heard of it before, because it’s a disease that makes you swear all the time! Then they, sometimes amazingly slowly, put it together that primetime BBC1 is not going to allow a torrent of Tourettes language. So they water it down: he goes around saying Ooops all the time! That’s drama!

There’s an argument, too, that because we’re all so very plainly stupid, our TV heroes mustn’t be clever. You can see this in the US Presidential elections too: Sorkin wrote in the New York Times last month about how “The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it”.

Consequently, if you’re smart in a TV drama, you’re inevitably a geek. If you’re the one who knows that using Windows will ultimately bring down the entire global financial network, you cannot be the one who can do anything about it. You have to be the one who tells the hero – and the hero must always give you a little put-down for being so nerdy.

So all you have to do is switch over from Bugs, walk away from Bonekickers – that’s a different argument but sound advice nonetheless – and don’t question Knight Rider very closely, and then all’s well. But just as technology has pervaded our lives for a very long time – I got my first email address 25 years ago – so it’s invading all dramas. So it should. But then you get things like Casualty.

Last year a little girl held the entire NHS to ransom with a USB stick in Casualty. She was eventually persuaded to plug this 1Gb drive into a USB slot and instantly – instantly – the whole Holby network boomed back into life. Phew. Richard Curtis co-wrote that episode.

The argument, I believe, is that most people won’t know what a USB stick is so I should get a life. But if you’re going to rest your drama on something you believe most people don’t know, how do you expect to involve them? Where are the stakes? What’s the human connection if you don’t know why these characters are so fussed? Isn’t that just as bad as when you know what a USB stick is and therefore know all these characters are utter idiots who have no right to be treating the public?

I love television drama because it involves you. I have a difficulty when it just sits there and tells me I’m an idiot.

William
there

I’m just after being told off for not blogging at you so much lately, and here I am back in seconds with a, well, second.

I may have mentioned this before but if I did, it was to say that there’s a type of dialogue I love that I’ve never been able to write. And I just have. By accident.

It’s the line that makes no sense but in doing so, makes vastly more sense than a logical, rational version would. The example I would’ve given you is Billy Bragg’s line about waiting for phone call, “when at last it didn’t ring / I knew it wasn’t you”. What I’ve just written is a text to a friend. There’s something up that she doesn’t want to go into, but I wanted her to know we could natter about anything, this problem or just about anything to take her mind off it.

So what I wrote was: “Call if you don’t want to talk.”

If you think dialogue is just grand oratory or just something to slip in after you’re tenth draft of a script, you’re wasting your time. Consider directing. Real people talk absolute rubbish to each other, we hardly ever listen and we certainly don’t wait our turn in the conversation politely, but in our selfish rubbish we understand each other and we give away so much.

And we also misunderstand, both other people and even especially ourselves and our own motives, plus of course we lie with abandon.

Drama is dialogue, and isn’t that wonderful?

Consequently my entry to this year’s Red Planet competition consists of very little talkin’ and a lot more helicopter action than any reasonable TV company could ever afford.

William

Some months ago, my car’s driver-side wing mirror had to be replaced on account of it being smashed off. Yesterday I took the car back for a service and waited for the phone call.

GARAGE: You know that wing mirror we fixed?
ME: Ye-ess.
GARAGE: It’s fine.
ME: Er, good.
GARAGE: But the rest of the car…

William

The Guardian says Jane Tranter is leaving. There doesn’t seem to have been a confirmation yet so this may just be yet another in the long chain of rumours about her going that we’ve seen this year. Yet the Guardian is confident enough that it talks about who’s likely to replace her as Controller, BBC Fiction.

I interviewed her once for something at BBC News, haven’t the faintest idea what it was about now, but I came out of her office very impressed. And as a drama nut, really quite happy. So she’s going to be tough to replace and the Guardian’s list is interesting: all very strong candidates, most of them women as it happens. I feel that’s a good thing but I do notice that I noticed: if the majority had been men, would I have thought to mention it?

But, anyway, I am so certain about this. So certain. Nobody’s even hinted at it, and I have asked some of the people involved but they all deny it, yet I will bet you money that Jane Tranter will be replaced by Julie Gardner.

I think this will be good news too, though I also think it’s great that there are so many genuinely strong candidates. Isn’t British TV drama in good shape?

But it will be Julie Gardner.

Please place your bets and come back when I am made a fool of or I start typing very smugly.

William

Previously: my one-act thriller, Innocence, was to be staged at the Rose Theatre in Kidderminster 25-27 September. You’ve already seen the past tense, now read on.

The whole thing’s been cancelled: both plays in the double bill, the entire thing. I don’t know all the details and some of those I do I’m not really able to tell you here, but it’s gone and I’m inappropriately fine about it. A production is a production, I wanted it on my CV, but I’m sure the organisers will understand my telling you that I wasn’t at all happy about how it was going.

In the end, neither was the theatre. Innocence and another thriller were being produced by a group that works with the Rose Theatre but isn’t entirely part of it. And I’m told it was the theatre management who pulled the plug.

I do have one regret. I had to write a bio of myself for the programme and that’ll now never be printed. (The posters were, including the mistake with my name. You have to feel for the organisers: money spent like this. And I don’t know what’s happening with tickets. If you bought any, let me know: I’ll refund you and get the money from them.)

But it occurs to me that the bio was fun to write and here’s a platform for it. So, I don’t know if it’s possible for a blog to get any more egotistical, but let’s have a good go: here’s my bio from the Theatre Programme That Never Was.

William

WILLIAM GALLAGHER is a writer and journalist from the Midlands. He writes the daily TV history column On This Day plus radio and TV reviews and drama features for Radio Times magazine. He’s freelanced for newspapers such as The Independent, the Birmingham Post and The Los Angeles Times and magazines from Doctor Who Adventures to Sewing Today.

He’s been a journalist and columnist for BBC News and BBC Ceefax, editor for education and computing magazines, interviewed people from Stephen Fry to Maureen Lipman and spent one crazy day having afternoon tea in the mess room on a Russian nuclear submarine. He’d tell you more about that but he’s not honestly sure how it happened and regrets calling the place a dive.

He’s produced for BBC Radio 4, researched for the BBC World Service and reported for BBC 5 Live, BBC Radio WM and BBC Hereford & Worcester.

Scriptwriting includes ITV1’s Crossroads, the UK DVD Review podcast and radio adverts. Theatre writing includes Manhattanhenge at the Carriageworks Theatre’s new writing festival in Leeds earlier this year and Time and the Conway Twitty Appreciation Society at the Patrick Centre in the Birmingham Hippodrome in 2007.

William’s portrait and jewellery photography has been published in magazines and books in the UK and America and he’s filmed “Making Of” videos for BBC Worldwide. He’s now doing voiceover work for DVD documentaries, developing radio drama projects with BBC Birmingham and independent production companies. His literary agent is currently pitching William’s first novel to publishers.

It’s quite a moment. As I’ve told you often enough now – you’re very patient with me, thank you – my Innocence play is being staged 25-27 September at the Rose Theatre, Kidderminster. But now, for the very first time in my career, here’s the poster:

Click it for a larger version. The theatre’s website has details of both plays in this double bill and, go on, you know you’re wondering about the other one. “Married to the Moby” by Martin Drury. Details of both are right here where you can also buy tickets.

I really enjoyed writing that last bit. Buy early, buy often!

William

I’ve just filed my last On This Day copy with Radio Times magazine. I couldn’t have left on better terms, I couldn’t be handing over to better people, but it’s a sad time for me.

But I’ll tell you one shock: the amount of time it’s freeing up. I used to spend over the odds on it each week simply because I enjoyed it so much. When you add it all up, though, it’s startling: I can actually afford to pitch for a book project I’ve been wanting to do.

Still, it’s been a favourite gig. Hopefully On This Day will go from strength to strength and readers will no more remember me than they do the fella before.

Last entry will be on the Radio Times listings pages for Friday 26 September.

William

How’s this for a thought? The Salem Witch Trials were not about religion or fear or superstition, they were about soil.

Seriously. If you didn’t already think this, and it hadn’t ever occurred to me in my most geo-cynical mood*, then you are forever going to think it now because you just know it’s true. Burn a widow as a witch and there’s nobody left to stop you taking her land.

I love this kind of thing: the one starkly simple idea that’s new yet feels so right that you must always have known it. And I didn’t get this information – notice how it’s already changed from a thought to information – from a documentary or a script or a novel. I also, despite the title of this piece, didn’t get it from a song lyric. Not yet.

For Dar Williams has a new album coming, Promised Land, due September 9 in the US and hopefully the same day or sooner here. And there’s an interview with Dar about it on YouTube. In it, she talks about having this same Damascus moment when a friend suggested this Witch Trial point to her. Now I believe she’s done a song about it.

Funny: saying that feels trivial. Cor, there’s this powerful notion, let’s sing a song, let’s put the show on right here. But I tell you, as I have told many before you, that while I wouldn’t kill to write like Dar Williams, I would consider maiming.

If you don’t know her work, I envy the fun of what’s ahead of you, but if you do then you’ll know that she has this huge range of material but generally it’s always immensely memorable and catchy musically, and the lyrics are pounding with more thought than you might see in a novel.

Now, I’m a scriptwriter and in a script you have to carry an awful lot of information in dialogue. You’re only doing it right when everyone still sounds natural. (“Whisky, eh? That’s a strange drink for an attractive auburn-haired girl of twenty-nine.”**) In a song it doesn’t really seem to matter: if it did, if people listened to lyrics, how could anyone think Born in the USA was pro-American?

Yet here’s Dar Williams, packing every song out with really pin-sharp puncturing ideas but doing it in such a way that you just unconsciously end up humming entire paragraphs as easily as you do the main chorus line of any chart song. She’ll make you smile, she will make you laugh, and there are songs of hers that make me weep, I think they’re so perfectly done.

She finds these truths, she conveys them with such intelligence and concise precision: Dar Williams doesn’t write scripts, so far as I know, but she’d still be on my list if you were foolish enough to ask me to list my favourite scriptwriters.

William

*Honest, I get geo-cynical. Can you tell me how Gerry Mander managed to get *both* of his names immortalised? These are the things that keep me awake.

**That’s from Timothy West’s deliberately bad radio play. This Gun That I Have In My Right Hand Is Loaded. I told a friend I’d look out my copy for him, but that’d mean loaning a book so I’m compromising and releasing one sentence per blog entry.