I do like internet memes, even if I don’t know how to pronounce that and am not 100% sure that it’s the correct plural of meme. You couldn’t put me straight, could you?

But of all these interest-of-the-moment ideas that float around blogs and to which everyone contributes their version, I’ve rarely been bothered – or at least, I’ve rarely been bothered in time. Bits about writing, bits about TV drama, I’ve had my opinions and I’ve kept my counsel primarily because I’ve just not been quick enough to slip into the zeitgeisty feel of it all.

I’m not any faster today.

But what I admit I’ve lost in speed, by God I’m going to make up for in enthusiasm. I am so enthusiastic about this one that I positively begged Piers Beckley to tag me in this meme lark so I could gush at you. It’s the now probably long-forgotten meme about where we all work; the spaces we make for ourselves and our writing. You’ve got one, everyone’s got one, I’ve probably seen yours on your blog too, but now it’s me.

And I’d like to tell you for why.

I’m arrested by this whole meme because a simple desk in a corner becomes so important. Very, very good days flow through this – and so do very, very bad ones. When I’m up against deadlines so much that it’s fraught and if I don’t take five minutes out I will fry, the place I escape to from my keyboard is my keyboard. I lean back from Word or Photoshop and watch a bit of the news, or play some music, maybe flick through some of the hundreds of hours of TV drama I’ve got on my Mac.

It’s like the way I am fascinated by keyboards. Partly it’s a technical thing and an overhang from my computer magazine days when I’d use so many of them that I was very aware of the differences. I’m on my third keyboard for this Mac not because I needed to or that I’d worn out the earlier ones (though it is true, I have bled over my keyboards) but because I wanted to try new ones. Right now I’m using Apple’s latest slimline thing, which observant people usually described with more pejorative words than “observant” will have seen used a lot in the Doctor Who story Silence in the Library. (Honest: I bought mine a year before that. Honest.)

But as well as the technical aspect, there’s also the fact that writing feels right to me on a keyboard, much more so than with pen and paper. This is undoubtedly because my handwriting is shudderingly bad. But Aaron Sorkin had a Sports Night character say once that “writing is a tactile experience” for him and he meant using the keyboard. I really recognise that.

And what goes through our minds while we type? As I wrote that last paragraph, an email came through: my fingers never left the keys and my mind never really left the thought but I went from typing text to pressing Apple-tab to skip to my Mail programme, I hit Apple-R to do a Reply, wrote text in that message, clicked Send then right back to this. Practically uninterrupted, certainly very smoothly, and yet I’m treating the keyboard in such different ways throughout. I’d even forgotten this: I also tapped a key that set iTunes playing a new Dar Williams track.

I get similarly anoraksic about offices and workspaces. So much so that the real reason I’m a month behind everyone else on this meme is that I thought, right, I’m going to tidy this bloody place up for once. For years I’ve had bookshelves around me with everything wedged on wherever it would fit. So, as if you were about to pop by, I tidied it up. I mean, I really worked on this. And all the way through I had this notion of precisely the photograph I could take that would show you how this office is a kind of nest, how it really does echo my personality as I believe all offices do of their creators.

But I took that photo just now and it’s appallingly bad. Instead, and I would underline that I’ve spent a month tidying this place, this is the photo that best shows where I work. And you can’t see a bloody shelf in it. I even hoovered.

The toast is gone. The tea is a bit cold. But while you can’t see it, there’s a fox outside that window now. (Er, in the garden. I don’t mean he’s pawing at my first-floor window like a thing possessed and craving toast.) That is a BBC2 metal logo originally from a BBC press launch but given to me by a favourite friend. That is a Blake’s 7 teleport bracelet behind it but I feel no urge to discuss that any further. And there’s that keyboard. It’s very good. In between the keyboard and the BBC2 logo is a cutting block: from back in the day when you used to cut tape to edit it, when anyone did that, you used a block like this. There’s a central channel where you lay the tape, marked up with chinagraph pencil, and there are three slits for running your razor blade through. It always surprised me that colleagues didn’t know why there were three of them: they’re at progressively sharper angles and it changes how the edit sounds.

The image on the two monitors is mine: it’s a closeup photograph I took of a discarded piece of glass at a glass factory.

But, ah, go on, if you’ve read this far, you want to see the naff photograph, don’t you? And I appear to burn to show you. So:

There aren’t usually cars outside the window: that’s my neighbours’ garden and they’re repairing both of those. From where I sit I can see five gardens, though I’ve never yet figured out how to get out to my own. It’s for want of trying.

I’ve also never once been able to straighten out that blind. But the clock the right side of it is managing to hide from me is a Rugby one: a clock tuned in to the Rugby transmitters. You should see it when the clocks change: it’s almost worth being up working that late to see the hands suddenly whiz around by themselves.

And just for completeness, if you sit in that great Captain’s Chair (that’s its name, I promise you) and look back to where I took the photo, this is what you see:

What you can’t see is that the bookshelves extend quite far either side: apart from the window and a small patch of wall where my Rugby clock is, this room is floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Some of those shelves are of my own cunning design: look at the rows of folders on the very top: I’ve extended the bookshelves out with those planks of MDF in order to fit them all on. They’re still very disorganised but they amount to around 20 years of Radio Times issues that I use for my On This Day research. They’re broadly the 1980s and 1990s, which is the period Birmingham Central Library’s collection has the most gaps so it is a very great thing that I’ve got these.

Up in the corner there, where you can see two of my precarious new MDF shelves sticking out, there’s a BBC Newsroom Entrance sign. I like the idea that the rest of the world outside my office is a newsroom. But I also nicked the sign from BBC Pebble Mill when it was being redecorated. I don’t know why they bothered, really, since they’ve demolished the entire building since then.

One more picture? Just saying that about Radio Times reminds me. On the wall directly behind me there’s a gorgeously-bound set of RT issues from 1999 onwards for a couple of years.

The curving on the left side of the shot is just because of the lens I happened to have on. But the curving under that shelf of the RT volumes is real and entirely down to the weight.

We’ll see who breaks first – the shelf, my resolve to keep this place as tidy as it is today, or you and whether you managed to get this far.

Love this stuff,
William

Angela’s just had the all-clear from the hospital: her hundred years of chemotherapy have worked, the bastard cancer is no more.

Been a bit preoccupied with this lately, since about last September. Thanks for your emails, they’ve been a help.

William “Off to celebrate” Gallagher

If you’re keeping track – presumably only so you can divine between the different William Gallaghers I mentioned – then I should say I’m in the new issue of MacFormat magazine.

I decided to get on top of my email usage; looking into rules and folders and whatever the other thing is, and I did it in part by writing about the same thing for MacFormat. It’s a fun, good magazine and I learnt something doing the article, I hope if you read it you will to. Got to tell you now, best to let you down gentle like, if you’re a PC user then my feature will teach you bugger all.

But, hey, I’m in so many magazines at the moment… Okay, that was boastful. But it was nice doing the shopping today and meandering past the shelves of magazines thinking I’m in that one, I’m in that one, I’m working for that one – and, ooh, Doctor Who Monthly’s covermount is an old Who novel. I bought the Marco Polo one. It’s not very good.

But the magazine is. I just am not 100% sure how I started off boasting at you that I was in all these magazines and end up recommending you read one I’m not.

William

A friend is just after saying that he avoids writing blog entries about rejections, he chooses instead to focus on the successes he has. I couldn’t fault that in the slightest, I’ve no doubt you see his point entirely: whatever else a blog is, or whatever else you claim it is when you’re excusing the time you spend on it, a blog is an advert for you.

That may be a bit harsh: call it a promotion. I’m a professional writer so maybe it’s more apparent with folks of my ilk (I sell my writing, here’s some writing I do, I’m available through Thursday, rates on request, that kind of thing). But anyone’s blog paints a picture of them for us all to see, just as all writing is terribly revealing of the writer.

So, successes.

Trouble is, you get me talking and I feel more comfortable talking about rejections. I’ve got more practice. Plus, I should say that there are successes I cannot tell you about: projects that have gone well financially, for instance, but otherwise don’t have a lot of material to show for themselves. I’m sure I’ll tell you about them some time, you’re certain I’ll never spill the beans about the beans they pay me.

(Just as an aside. There’s a William Gallagher who used to edit Doctor Who fanzines. It isn’t me. But once I stumbled across an internet discussion about him/me, lambasting my writing and being jealous of his incredible earnings. Even being one of the William Gallaghers involved, it was hard to unpick their confusion except that I’m guessing the incredible earnings are his. That would mean the lambasting was mine, but if I can’t tell from your writing who you’re talking about or what he’s done, I think there’s it’s a fair bet it’s not my writing you should be focusing on first.)

(Another aside. There is another William Gallagher. There are loads of him. But there’s a new one, a new William Gallagher has started a blog. I can’t read it, I don’t even recognise the language for sure, but somehow Google’s references to it are in English and he appears to be greatly concerned about internet dating. If you’re here looking for advice on New Zealand dating practices, I thank you for your patience in reading this far and direct you please to this fella.

Now after all that, I’ve run out of time. Okay. Can’t tell you about cash, can’t tell you about contracts, can tell you I’ve had a great, great week. Three days on RadioTimes.com, two days on Doctor Who Adventures, five mornings and five evenings on Doctor Who Adventures, one day on Radio Times magazine. I realise this adds up to more than five days but that’s because it did. It has. Er, it was. It’s continuing to be.

Doctor Who Adventures is a delight: instantly liked everybody, instantly relished the work. Can’t get enough of it.

Then that short play of mine has been kicking up some dust for me. If you’d asked, I’d say you were mad to write a piece that short but it is doing surprisingly well for me. And right now it’s doing well on its own: I don’t even have to tend it, I just hear positive noises every now and again.

Speaking of plays and scripts, I’m doing a thing in the gaps this week that is definitely one of the best ideas I’ve ever had. Not 100% sure I’m getting it down as well as I could but it’s getting down and it’s working.

And speaking of working, you’d be surprised how many people ask me to read their scripts. Hardly any. It used to come up a lot and I’ve even been a professional script reader for real money but a few months ago I had someone’s piece in front of me and I just had enough. I truly believe it when producers say there are very few good scripts around because I don’t see any either.

So I’ve stopped agreeing to read things. But I agreed last night and read something through that was a treat. Bit scary for my wimpy tastes, but dialogue that was alive on the page. Sounds so simple, but it’s so rare.

As is my gushing. Sorry, I went off on one: it’s really been a bouncy, great week and I just had to bubble at you for a time.

Did I mention how good Doctor Who Adventures is?

William

I’m a freelance writer but my most reliable gig is a part-time staff writer position at BBC Worldwide where I currently work three days a week on RadioTimes.com. My freelance work includes a lot for Radio Times magazine, so things get a bit confusing but that’s another story. Today’s story is the Return of Wednesday.

Those three days for RT.com vary enormously; I’m forever telling friends that I will always and only be in London on Thursdays but then they point out I’m standing there in a London pub saying this on a Tuesday. And I say it’s three days, it can be four, it’s been five.

When my wife Angela began having chemotherapy a thousand years ago, I decided to just simplify things as much as I could: I told Radio Times I wouldn’t ever work for them on Wednesdays. Angela’s clinic days were always Wednesdays, usually about three weeks apart, so I could’ve worked at least two Wednesdays out of every three, but it was messy. Just because Radio Times was being fantastic about my taking time out to look after Angela, there was no need to make it impossible for them to work out when I’d be where.

And as it happens, all those Wednesdays that weren’t clinic days did get filled very quickly. Sometimes I’d go to the clinic for prescriptions, oftentimes I’d just help Angela. Once in a long while, she’d be well enough that we could take the day off and go out for lunch.

All that’s over, and for the best of reasons: last Wednesday was the last Wednesday. Twelve sessions of devil drugs done and gone.

One odd thing. Many, many people assume that’s it. Apparently even chemotherapy patients have been known to assume this: you’ve had your last chemo session, shouldn’t you be feeling better? Well, er, no. Chemotherapy is such a variable beast that it’s impossible to generalise but nonetheless, I’m going to generalise: chemo sessions take place every three weeks. And it’s not because of NHS resources, it’s for the very practical purpose that your body can only take so much. Remember white cells? Forget ’em. Every cell you own is smashed, pummelled, hung, drawn and quartered in every chemo session and you cannot have any more until the good cells have recovered sufficiently.

Have a guess how long that takes.

So you’re not getting chemo sessions when it suits the hospital, you’re getting them as fast on each other’s heels as it is physically possible for you to have. And countless things can prolong the problems: in fact, you don’t recover between sessions, you just recover enough. Angela was apparently unusual in how she made it through all 12 in exactly the time hoped for, without any reason to abandon the treatment at any stage. Though she did discover that she’s allergic to yew trees. Seriously: the strongest, foulest, devil’s brew drug, taxotere, is based in part on the bark of a yew tree (aren’t you picturing three witches stirring a cauldron right now?) and Angela, like so many others, had an allergic reaction to it. That wasn’t what you’d rank as a highlight in the treatment: me grabbing staff, crash-cart teams racing over to Angela.

Your mileage may vary, by the way. Got to say that. Even if you had precisely the same breast cancer as Angela, I mean precisely the same – frankly, if you were even Angela herself, you’d best not bet on needing or getting the same treatment. It’s that variable, that different from person to person. And each person reacts all but immeasurably differently. So if you ever need taxotere, you may fly through it. I hope so, obviously.

Anyway, Angela’s had her final session. But where so many people assume that’s it, that on Thursday she’ll be skipping, the truth is that of course she has at least three weeks in which she’ll be recovering from the final session. We don’t know how long it will take: every previous session has been capped by the next one coming through, so the odds are it won’t be three weeks to the day. I have to tell you that some patients, a significant number, report feeling bone-tired for another year. And bone-tired is the right description: this stuff knackers your bone marrow.

Pleasant stuff, isn’t it? But there are good things. All this violent medication gets rid of the cancer, so I do think of taxotere as the devil drug from heaven.

And right now Angela has booked a holiday in the Lake District. We’ve just come back from one, one we had during a lull in the cycle, and she’s going again next month. The month after that, we’re off for a short break to the Lake District. And I’m buying her a birthday present of an iPhone 3G and a Christmas break in the Lake District.

Did I mention she likes the Lake District? I’ve a feeling that’s come up.

But for all I’ve just told you quite straight about the effects of chemotherapy, the truth is that it is over, so things are getting better. And I’m working Wednesdays again.

Next week it gets very complicated as I juggle days in order to work half the week on Radio Times, half on Doctor Who Adventures magazine. But the return of Wednesdays, it’s a peculiar notion. I am stunningly lucky to have the job I do; I’ve always known this and I am reminded of it by getting a short gig on Doctor Who Adventures: I’m so looking forward to that work. It’s been a sobering boon to be able to drop all Wednesdays for the last eight months or so; I know many or even most people cannot do it, but that and the ability to work at home 80% of the week, I’m very grateful for it.

So. I’ve got working Wednesdays now. If only I could get sleep back next.

John Davison and Therase Neve in Manhattanhenge by William Gallagher, directed by Joanna Egan

Do you know how long I’ve had this open with a photo and no text? Since Wednesday, actually Thursday if you want to be picky: maybe around 2am. The instant I got back from the Carriageworks Theatre in Leeds where a short play of mine was performed: a short play, a small theatre, but a bit of a milestone for me.

You had to pay to see it. Last time, I had a larger audience and a longer piece but that audience was made up of producers, theatre agents, publishers, a fella from the National Theatre. It was a showcase, it was wonderful, but this week’s one involved an audience paying cash.

And they loved it. I think it’s fair to say that: one woman told me in an audience discussion afterwards that she’d had goosebumps at the ending. Another said she’d cried. And the cast told me they were proud to have been in it.

Now, okay, I’m always likely to think someone’s just being nice but when they say things like that and you have to know that it was in the heat of the night, everyone pumped up from being in a success, all these things. But that’s a good reason to be pumped and I choose to believe my cast.

I’ve been so lucky with cast that I’m starting to suspect all of them, all actors everywhere, are good. Mind you, I wrote a short sentence in Crossroads that had five meanings and the actor chose to deliver… none of them. Still not entirely sure how she was able to strip it of all five without actually dropping the line but I will tell you that mumbling was involved.

She also probably had no more than thirty seconds rehearsal time: it was a busy show.

I’d have liked to have been in rehearsals on Manhattanhenge. I’m not saying I’d have done things differently, but the process is great and I miss that. And I might have been able to fix a thing that bothers me: I’ve got a nice joke in it which is good but it’s necessarily so close on the heels of something else that it gets a little lost. Let me show you.

You need to know that these two people have just met, they’re strangers and they’re really going to stay that way, it’s just that for these few minutes, they’re brought together by this mysterious thing called Manhattanhenge that I seem to shy away from explaining to you. He’s 40s, fretful, American, a restaurant manager. She’s 19, back-packing, gap-year British.

MICHAEL: They do say it makes you stop. It’s a cleansing, spiritual breath that runs right through the city. That New York trick of being completely private and alone in a crowd, that loosens, dissipates. Connections are made. People just talk.

JOANNE: Look at us. Would we have talked?

MICHAEL: Probably. I’d have said “Hello, my name’s Michael, our specials today are…”

JOANNE: And I’d have said “Hi, Michael, I’m Joanne, and what do you got for five dollars?”

MICHAEL: “The exit, madam.”

It’s that last line that felt on the night that it came in too close. Can’t see what to do about it yet, the rhythm’s right but the punch isn’t there. Still, I think actually I may leave it precisely the way it is: the piece is not a comedy, that excerpt is not building to that joke and it’s not that gigantic a gag anyway. And what does most definitely work, what was just a treat to see on the night, is that talking about the way they would normally be separate, would normally not really talk, heightens the fact that now they are.

Manhattanhenge very successfully sounds like a really, truly casual chat, a conversation that you could completely believe spontaneously happens between these people. It’s unforced, bouncy and it hides how I’ve telescoped the scene down into its most economic form.

And I think that’s part of the reason it worked. Now I’ve told you that people cried, you’d be looking for the punch or the tragedy and I think you might even be disappointed: you look for what I’ve done on the page and it’s a tiny thing. But when you aren’t looking for it, when you don’t know something is coming, the fact is that you provide the tragedy: nothing bad happens here at all, not the slightest, tiniest thing.

It’s the gap between what these characters know and what you do that makes the piece just a little shivery.

And I love that: I love fiction where it’s taking place in your head as well as in front of you. I wrote a thriller thing once where you provided a character with an alibi, your assumptions provided her with it, and then I spent weeks making the reveal the smallest yet most unmistakeable moment I could. Something that would’ve passed you by, maybe even bored you, if it were one character giving another an alibi, becomes an almighty gasp because you knew the answers and you’d fooled yourself.

That piece got me a literary agent. I should go back to it.

Nothing’s happening next with Manhattanhenge. A few people I rate highly are reading it, I’m toying with the rest of it: I have five Manhattanhenge stories, this was just the one that was right for stage. I suspect as good as the others are, I may throw them away and leave this one on its own. I don’t mind a short, it’s much better than a padded piece: a sketch is better than a stretch.

But I tell you, upsetting people is even better than seeing them shake with laughter. And that was pretty good.

I’ve just spent 12 hours driving over the last ten days or so, I swear since 2am on Thursday morning I’ve had my chin on the desk, I’ve been wondering what all these buttons are with letters on them.

William

I’ve only recently realised this so don’t press me on the details, but when I leave a room, I just assume I’m forgotten. I’m not complaining. But imagine how it feels, then, to know that there’s a cast and a director out there rehearsing my words.

Specifically, these words:

The golden sun hanging clearly in the sky, away from Manhattan island, high above the water. The sun in the distance over New York Harbour. Over Ellis Island. Striking the Statue of Liberty. The Brooklyn Bridge. And now imagine the view of the city from the East River, the sun still just barely above the buildings. It’s briefly blocked by the Empire State Building, then the Rockefeller Centre. And now it’s lower, nearer to the buildings, lower and lower, until you can see it. The city of New York looking like Stonehenge at solstice.

My short play, Manhattanhenge, is to be performed at the Carriageworks theatre in Leeds next month: it’s a two-night festival of new writing and what I’m told is that my piece is to get a prime spot.

I’m even more pleased than you expect: Manhattanhenge is a tricky piece, it’s taken a lot of work to get right and I hadn’t expected it to fly. But you know how whenever you write, you try to write something new, something you’ve not reached for before: this time, I finished the tale and shivered at it. I’ve never done shiver before.

And though I’ve yet to meet the cast or the director, they’re telling me they were moved by the piece. I can’t wait to see them play it.

William

Years ago, I had lunch with people selling geographic information systems and to the terror of their PR agent, they showed me how to make their software go wrong. I think they were pleased I knew what they were talking about: they had been used to selling to corporations, now they were aiming at the PC market and few of the journalists they’d met were all that interested. Even fewer knew about projections, I was the only one who would defend Mercator’s system.

(Rant. I still will. Don’t you knock Geradus Mercator in front of me. His way of translating a globe into a flat map is a working one: he wasn’t pratting about settling political scores, he was getting ships to go where they were pointed. /Rant.)

So these people saw a fellow cartography fan in me and we had a ball. Shortly afterwards, the feature I wrote about them and various other GIS manufacturers got me a nomination for Magazine Writer of the Year at the PPA Awards. (I lost to a dog columnist in Bitch monthly. Quite seriously.)

I just relish the artistry in maps: the choice of what you show, what you don’t. The way a map tells you as much about its artist and his or her society as it does about the lands it depicts. The lands it depicts: the far-distant shores, the pin-sharp accuracy of Ordnance Survey and the wild imagination of mappa mundi. Actually, also the imagination of Ordnance Survey: the way acres of military property will be marked “lake” or something. Shouldn’t the OS mark ordnance when it finds it? I’d think that was a contractual obligation.

Anyway, I bring this up now because I wish to complain and I promise that there is no one but you I can tell in all this land. Here’s the thing. My local hypermarket, a very big Sainsbury’s, has been remodelling for six months: every time I go, and I go an awful lot lately, they’ve moved things. Now it’s finally finished, it’s all very good, but it’s big and different so they have maps up.

They have maps, I have an iPhone that lets me blog here live from the freezer section, can you see where this is going yet?

I photographed the map with my iPhone. I wasn’t planning to show it to you, or to anybody really. But standing there in aisle 9, I had no problem with people staring as I tapped the screen to zoom in on Light Bulbs, aisle 27.

Only, the map lies.

I put my social standing on the line for that map, and it lies.

There are no light bulbs in aisle 27. And I may be a man, but still I can ask questions: the staff directed me back toward aisles 3 through 7.

Maps exaggerate the prominence of enemy territory in wartime. They suggest safe passage where no such thing exists. It’s through mapping we get gerrymandering – how did Gerry Mander get both his names remembered? – and it’s through maps that we can see society change over centuries.

But we can’t find light bulbs in Sainsbury’s.

All that J Sainsbury money, all that Sainsbury graphic design, all that Sainsbury lying.

Hang on. I’m in Asda.

William

If a particular friend of mine is writing a script where it becomes vital that the protagonist knows the right time, she will introduce a blind watchmaker and his seven sons, sure an’ they’ll all have a tale to tell, in order to get someone to tell him or her it’s eight o’clock. Myself, I’ll write in a watch.

There’s really no way to say which of is right in our approaches, except that obviously I am, because where I could muster arguments on practicality, your basic storytelling, and simple budget, she could argue that I have TV mentality. She’s writing for a bigger canvas. I’m not saying that’s what she argues, but she could and the next time we argue about this I’ve just given her some armament.

Besides, if you take my reluctance to introduce what I’d call superfluous characters to extreme, you know that any character you do see in my material is important. It’s like when there’s a gun to your head so you’re watching Poirot: there is a limit to how many people can be the murderer because there’s a finite group and the fine line between the importance of the roles is erased by looking at the cast list.

But I love, absolutely cherish working to very finite constraints. Each On This Day entry for Radio Times is between 89 and 94 words long, I wrote some 16,000 Ceefax pages that were extraordinarily constrained, Crossroads was so many minutes and so many cast, it goes on. And I also cherish it when someone else works to extreme constraints and does it well.

Hence 17 People. That’s the title of a West Wing episode I’m particularly fond of. I re-read the script today while I was waiting for something and tonight I just re-watched the episode. I honestly don’t think I realised this back in 2001 when it aired here, but it’s what American TV calls a bottle show. I don’t know what UK TV calls them. Probably “cheap”. And in the intro to his published script, Aaron Sorkin says it was mandated: make this one cheap. No guest stars, no location filming, no new sets. “In other words, I got to write a play,” he said.

If you know the series at all, this was the episode when Toby was told of the President’s MS, but that doesn’t matter. Well, not now, and not so much to me anymore: knowing what the story was and where it was going to go, this is still a glorious episode and the type of drama that makes me a drama nut. Usually I’ve said that drama is two people talking, but here it’s two, three, seven people talking. Same principle, though: I read scripts about the end of the universe and I could care less, if I tried very hard. I read the script to 17 People and every scene is two or more people talking and I am transfixed.

By contrast, I switched on what I think I’ll just call a Popular UK Drama the other night and it was exactly this, it was a scene with two people just talking. But every line was clichéd, it was quite remarkable how nobody need any new lines even to bridge between a couple of clichés. I was transfixed again, watching for their resolve to break and a fresh thought to come through but if they managed it, it wasn’t before I’d switched to the news.

So maybe I’m just saying is that it’s fine to have constraints, it doesn’t mean you mustn’t do anything with them.

And hiring Richard Schiff doesn’t hurt.

William

A friend who was in a brutal traffic accident a few years ago told me once of his utter anger at Casualty: a character had a similar accident and because he wasn’t fairly immediately sanguine about losing his legs, the doctors and nurses fretted that he was unusual. They’d been treating him for several minutes, he should cop on to himself, sort himself out. I’m told it recently had a side story, a B-story in which someone learned they had cancer, went through all the chemotherapy and died within the one episode.

I did explain to my friend that it’s written into Casualty that all accident stories, all guest stories will be completely dealt with in a single episode and, moreover, that one episode will cover one shift at A&E. Maybe we’ll see someone going into work first, maybe coming out after, but otherwise, it’s in that eight-hour period. But of course really what I was saying was precisely the same as my friend: we were both saying Casualty is unrealistic and aggravating, I was just using more words.

We all know this one-shift approach is rubbish and we have all complained about TV characters, in many shows, miraculously getting over amnesia/nuclear war/dry cleaning within a single episode. But I think we’ve been trained to accept it anyway.

Follow.

I was just re-watching Noél, a particular favourite episode of The West Wing from December 2000. I remember it being criticised a lot at the time for how, it was said, Josh Lyman gets over his post-traumatic stress in an hour.

But he didn’t. The episode concentrated on the ten or so hours of one day, the first day in which he is diagnosed and after which he will begin treatment. More, the episode was actually set over a two-week period as we saw Josh crumble. So, two weeks, ten hours, the start of longterm treatment, it was exactly right. More, the reason for doing the episode was directly because Josh had been shot at the start of the season, the makers didn’t want to pretend that goes away easily.

So how does The West Wing get criticised when it seems you have to be ill or in an accident to get mad at Casualty?

I don’t know. I thought I’d figure it out if I just talked it over with you but I have to say you’re being very quiet so far. I don’t doubt that you agree Cas is wrong, Wing is right, but why the difference in perception for most people? It can’t be that we expect less of Casualty, though I believe we do, because that suggests we expect more of the Wing and that it let us down but I can’t see how. Nor can it really be that The West Wing is more popular than Casualty because, again while that’s patently true worldwide, it’s utterly the reverse in the UK. And it cannot be acting,it surely cannot be acting because Bradley Whitford is superb as Josh and, er, there are probably people in Casualty too, presumably.

Perhaps it’s to do with how Casualty is bone-numbingly sequential: it will only tell a story in one direction, will only ever do this happens and then that happens and then the other happens. That West Wing, quite typically for the series, was focused on one day but it jumped through it while simultaneously taking us through those two weeks beforehand.

But I don’t know, I really do not know. And because you have no doubt which approach I favour, I’m troubled by it all.

William