Apparently there are sports blogs where the writer is not at the match, he or she is just plonked in front of a telly.

I mock these people.

Only…

I think I’ve just done the same. For the first time, my Radio Times Doctor Who blog has gone live the moment the show finished airing, and I know this because I put it live.

I have to be conscious that Helen Raynor writes a cracking hour’s TV and I do – hang on, counts on fingers – 433 whole words, but I’m not comparing, I’m celebrating. When Doctor Who works now, it’s a hurricane and I love it. The exuberance in it, there can’t be a harder show to write.

Mind you, I learnt a lesson tonight: if you or I ever get to write one, we need to comb our hair and dress smartly: Helen is the first writer this series, besides Russell T Davies, to get interviewed on camera for Doctor Who Confidential.

William

I’m going to be annoying now: I’m going to tell you half a story and refuse to reveal the rest. But it’s only a small thing, and I’m just bursting to tell you how huge it is.

There’s this writer, okay, someone whose work I’ve admired pretty much forever: he’s cropped up in the Radio Times On This Day malarky more times than I can count, I can be fairly certain you rate him too. Mr Anonymous has just read a script of mine and so has his wife, who’ll have to be Ms Anonymous, and I spoke to them both a second ago.

Their quick, overall summary: “Worthy of Patricia Highsmith.”

If you don’t know her work, I honestly think you’re missing out: Strangers on a Train? The Ripley books?

And here’s a thing. I’ve been re-reading a lot of Anthony Minghella’s scripts lately and in his introduction to one, he recounts how this very same Mr Anonymous had once described a work of his as having shades of Patricia Highsmith. Minghella had never heard of her before, but thought he’d best check her out. And you see what that led to? The Talented Mr Ripley.

‘Course, I’ll get notes and all the buts/ands/howevers presently but just for tonight I’m rocked.

William

And you can reach it here at radiotimes.com/doctor-who-weekly.

If you’re one of the people who commented on RT about the last one, under assorted suspicious names like Helena Handcart – surely a member of the Handbasket family who’s been through Ellis Island – then thank you.

Page impressions are one thing, comments are disproportionately helpful. Especially disagreement: honestly, get in there and tell me what a daft prat I am, I’ll love you for it. Though, please, no swearing: this is a family show.

But anyway, watching Doctor Who for money: what would my teenage self have thought of that?

William

PS. I don’t know why this bothers me especially today, when it’s always bothered me, but if you read that Who blog of mine you will see a certain police box spelt as Tardis. It’s just wrong. It’s the TARDIS, it always has been. But that’s Radio Times style. I see the point, all-caps jolt out of the page: I once wrote a PC-DOS manual and sometimes the page would swim with those capitals, but still, this is the TARDIS!

As I said to you, I’m not 100% sure the world really needs another Doctor Who blog right now, but RadioTimes.com does and it’s got mine.

And they told me that so long as I was willing to bare my soul a bit, I could also have a whole paragraph analysing the script. To delve, to really think about television drama, so very important to me, and all for the price of admitting to my boyhood crush on Nyssa. It’s a bargain.

I won’t pretend this is anything more than one writer’s thoughts, but I am proud I was hired and I think you’ll like it too: it’s an unqualified hymn of praise for Partners in Crime, and that’s how it should be.

The blog’s even got a more memorable address than I expected: Doctor Who Weekly.

Would you mind having a look? And checking back several hundred times? I need the ratings!

William

Presuming that all goes well with various other plans for Doctor Who coverage on the RadioTimes.com website, next week sees me starting my very own Who blog on the site.

You’re thinking that this is what the world needs, another Doctor Who blog. Ah, but is it in fact what RT needs? The idea is I’m to coo about what I like in each episode (presuming that I do, which is never guaranteed but looking at the form the series has, is a bit bleedin’ likely) and then a conversation can hang off the end of it with RadioTimes.com readers saying yay/nay/exterminate* (*delete as applicable).

I’ll put up a link here if it all goes ahead; I’d greatly appreciate your nipping off to read it and proving to RT that I am the Who-man that they appear to think.

I would actually say that I’m Drama-man, but you won’t believe me, you’ll think science fiction geek because: I’ve just heard BBC Radio 4’s Journey into Space and really enjoyed it. It’s the Saturday Play in a week or two. And it’s written by Charles Chilton, the man who wrote the original ones starting 50-odd years ago. He’s apparently 91, still working, and I’m told he still has a handshake that can crush a walnut.

William

Sounds like an ad for software piracy: Get Photoshop for Free.

But you can, to an extent, as Adobe’s just launched a free beta of the image editor online called Photoshop Express. I’ve only piddled about with it but I use the real Photoshop a lot and can see that this is no replacement. However, it’s easily the equal of your basic PC photo editing tools or even iPhoto on Macs: you can crop, alter exposure and saturation, fix red-eye, a great many things.

Only, it’s online. If you don’t have an internet connection, you can’t use it. This may not seem a big issue since if you haven’t got an internet connection, you aren’t reading this.

But I have Sky Broadband: I know what it’s like suddenly having no internet.

There’s a strong argument that the future of applications is online: Google Docs is at least a fair replacement for Microsoft Office (apparently: I’ve never used the Google apps), for instance.

I think I sit on the opposite side; I’m willing to be proved wrong but I just feel I’ve seen this before. Most recently on iPhone: there are now thousands of web-based applications but I find them all too slow. And back in the day, working on computer magazines at Ziff Davis, everybody ran Microsoft Office but they did so across the network: the apps really belonged on the server and a fast connection let everybody work.

Until the server would go down.

Everybody would swear – and that’s when I’d know. Because I ran those apps locally, I was always testing/reviewing the next Office release, and carried on working normally.

‘Course, there was one time when everybody else in the office went home early because of this and I was left there until I managed to hook my foot around the mains plug…

I have no idea why I wanted to tell you that. But have a look at Photoshop Express, won’t you?

William

Radio Times, where I work a lot of the time, says this week that it was odd how sister series Holby Blue and Holby City had not seriously crossed paths before, that effectively it was about time. And it said so because this week a Holby City story was resolved in the first of the new Holby Blue series.

I completely disagree.

Now, I’d have watched this new run of Blue anyway, because I liked the last one, and I don’t follow Holby City so I wasn’t the target audience here. But what seems obvious to RT and what I totally agree was a necessary stunt to raise Holby Blue’s profile was a chalice that maybe wasn’t poisoned, but shouldn’t become a regular tipple.

Follow. Holby City’s palest registrar, Jac (Rosie Marcel) is accused of attempted murder in her own series and Holby Blue begins with her being taken into custody. Sold: what Holby City viewer wouldn’t want to see what happened next? But then what Holby City viewer would not already know what would happen next? The only thing that could happen?

Jac is a popular character – or there wouldn’t have been any point crossing her over – and she’s introducing us to a Holby Blue that, it’s hoped, we will like and continue to watch every week. So what’s going to happen? Will the coppers of Holby Blue prove that Jac is guilty and be the bastards who get her put away? Not bleedin’ likely. But if they don’t, if they cannot have any chance of doing that, where exactly is the police drama?

The problem is that characters belong in their own series. Doctor Who pulled off a very rare, I’d even say perhaps uniquely successful trick with the Peter Davison/David Tennant crossover but that had to be in a ten-minute short, it wouldn’t have lasted an episode. And we know that because we’ve seen it: The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors, The Two Doctors, none of them are anything but novelties. I suppose I’m saying there can only be one hero.

I do bridle at the idea of heroes: even Holby Blue whose creators directly stated its characters were heroes has allowed for the lead John Keenan (Cal Macaninch) to be a git savant. (Holby Blue’s “dedicated heroes”.)

But in straight dramatic terms, the protagonist is the protagonist: Keenan is the lead in Holby Blue, although Luke French (Richard Harrington) is strong and will be brought forward more if this show extends to Casualty-like 50-odd episode series. Everything services the protagonist, it’s the way that Sherlock Holmes only ever finds clues that Sherlock Holmes can understand; it’s why nobody ever has any problem whatsoever that doesn’t need a $2m Bell helicopter and its pilot in Airwolf. “My council tax has gone up!” Whop-whop-whop, de-diddle-de-diddle-ee-dee… )

Taking a character out of his or her artificial surroundings is extraordinarily risky. Why does EastEnders struggle when it sends its characters to France or Brighton or anywhere outside the Square? Why do you know to groan when a US series has a special set in the UK? It’s not because the characters are unbelievable or exaggerated, necessarily, it’s because the character is so much a part of its constructed environment. It ought to be fantastic to see them in a new situation because situation is illuminating of character but as much as shows flounder when they do it, we fight them back when they try. There is a wonderful episode of ER called Day for Knight, one of the first shows I reviewed for BBC Ceefax, in which everything is still set in the hospital, all the regulars are there but the entire episode is from the point of view of a brand-new doctor, Lucy Knight. The regulars come out very mildly badly and ER’s fans loathed it.)

You can see the problem most acutely in a crossover like the one that happened between Magnum pi and Murder She Wrote. Honest. “Magnum on Ice part 1” aired on Don Bellisario’s Hawaiian detective show and part 2 was on Peter Fischer, Dick Levinson and Bill Link’s series about crime writer Jessica Fletcher. You’ll never guess where she went on holiday that year.

This aired recently on whatever UK digital channel is churning through Murder She Wrote. Part 1 is typical Magnum and in fact in syndication it isn’t part 1 of anything, it’s a standalone Magnum, pi episode with a pretty rushed ending. As originally aired and on DVD, part 1 has our hero Thomas Magnum (Tom Selleck) being our hero, and part 2 has him not being our hero at all. He cannot solve the crime, he cannot clear his name, it must all fall to Jessica (Angela Lansbury). The lead character of the series always wins: Peter Davison’s Doctor is the one who does all the work in Doctor Who’s The Five Doctors because he was the incumbent.

If that doesn’t happen, the lead character in the host series is weakened, even denuded. If it does happen, the character from the other show is weakened, even denuded.

You don’t have a choice which character is damaged: it is invariably the one from the other show or you’re actually shooting your own entire series in the foot. And you cannot change the outcome of the story: Jessica couldn’t fail to rescue Magnum, Keenan and French couldn’t find Jac guilty.

So I argue that what appears to be a golden episode, a gift from Holby City to its new sibling, is actually murderously difficult. So much so that Holby Blue was gambling with the viewers it already had: I don’t follow Holby City, I’ve no investment in its characters, I liked Blue and could have felt cheated with a substandard episode.

You’ve already guessed that I didn’t feel cheated. I think I watched it more with my writer’s hat on than my viewer’s one but that was probably inevitable given how interesting I think the whole crossover concept is. And there are bits that didn’t work for me: it’s funny how UK series are not as able to use pop music as US ones are, or at least how we are more ready to accept it in American drama than British; similarly Homicide could’ve got away with its police officers impersonating a dog.

What Holby Blue did well, I think, is keep Jac and other characters from Holby City in a little bubble: we predominantly saw Jac in her cell or in the interrogation room. It was the most important story and we never felt it wasn’t, yet minute-by-minute it didn’t appear to get as much time as all the rest. In truth it did, we just didn’t know that until we saw how the other story strands came together and affected Jac’s, but it didn’t seem to get the majority of the time. And yet it didn’t feel cut back, I didn’t feel robbed of the headline story: I don’t know how writer Tony Jordan pulled that off but he did.

And Jac, stuck in her bubble, got to argue with the police and thereby be as strong as she apparently is in City while the police got to be persistent buggers. We were taught how interviews go, seeing them stone-faced asking the same questions of witnesses and not reacting to the wildly different answers, so we knew when they faced Jac that we were seeing a performance. Well, kind of: it was a character-revealing performance, but still not a face-on character study. And though it wasn’t original, having Keenan and French decide which would be the good cop, which the bad, it did work when they seemed to fall naturally into the opposite roles.

Was that a requirement of protecting the show from crossover? French took the lead and was the bad cop, our primary Holby Blue guy was the good one even though we’d been told to expect it to be the other way around. So we like John Keenan but we know he can be tough when necessary. Even typing that sounds cliched, but signals are sent in drama and we receive them.

I don’t know how much we saw in Holby City but within Blue the key detail of the case was held back to the last second that it could be and then tried to be hidden. But as soon as we knew Jac had seen a patient, we knew that patient was the murderer.

Similarly, equal weight was given to what I believe was a new Blue story involving a woman who had been beaten up. I think it should have been obvious she was the patient, but I didn’t see that, I didn’t make the connection. I would rather the reveal had been more than coincidence – Jac was being processed at the custody desk when she happened to see this patient leaving the station on a security monitor – but it was a surprise to me.

And that tied off the whole Holby City storyline: Blue just needed to do what it could to keep us. So we saw several police storylines, we were re-introduced to all the returning characters and most of the rivalries, there was sex and intrigue to set us up for coming back to see episode 2.

And, quite brilliantly, there was a birth, an overdue baby.

This must be just about the sole medical story Holby Blue could possibly come up with, and it came up with it for the episode that crossed over with medical drama Holby City.

You have to applaud and compared to any crossover episode I’ve ever seen, Holby Blue Meets Holby City got away with it.

But there are teeth and skin marks all over it.

I’ll bet you money Tony Jordan did not work this all out on a graph before writing the script. He’s too experienced to have not seen the pitfalls. But if he did write it by the numbers, solution-by-solution, then he’s annoyingly good at hiding the scaffolding.

William

Rendezvous with Rama was great, 2001 wasn’t remotely as confusing as advertised, I can’t remember Childhood’s End. But I couldn’t bear Arthur C Clarke because of “2010 The Odyssey File”.

It was a Making Of the film, and I’ve read a lot of these, I also liked the novel 2010 and at the time I bought all the hype about 2001 and the importance of its sequel. I also liked how this Making Of was predominantly an exchange of emails (very exciting back in the early 1980s) between Clarke and the 2010 film’s writer/producer/director Peter Hyams.

Each person’s messages were printed in a different typeface and after a few pages, I started skipping Clarke’s and only reading Hyams’s. Hyams was deep in production, the hugh machinery of making a big budget film, and Clarke was picking his nose in Sri Lanka. Hyams was fighting financial problems, juggling myriad production difficulties and managing to stay funny. Clarke was just back from the shops where he’d run into the President of NASA, hang on, there’s the door, oh, another parcel from Queen Elizabeth, a request for an autograph from Jesus Christ, a party invitation from Anthony Minghella.

But he was easy enough to ignore and I had a good time with the other half of the conversation.

Except.

I can see this chapter clearly even now, 20-odd years later: the final chapter was a new piece of padding, written especially for the book by Clarke and was called “MITE for Morons”. You don’t even know what MITE is, do you? Clarke was an immensely patronising about this MITE and how all of us thickos that didn’t use it would have learn how to do so eventually, we’d best take this opportunity to learn it from him right now.

MITE was some kind of email system and Clarke laboriously detailed precisely how to use it, down to which key to press when, what filenames you should use, which disk should go in which floppy drive.

He has this reputation for seeing the future but here he was blind about the present: I was already using email and my system bore no relation to his. I considered sending him instructions on how to use my particular toaster.

I think he always had this blindness. I remember years later a claim that he now said fax was better than email (sure, so long as you’re not the poor sod at the publishers having to retype an entire book off one fuzzy roll) but I don’t know, I don’t want to believe that one.

Nor do I want to believe what I read directly in a novel of his. Um, can’t remember which. But it was another with his far-sighted vision of the future, this time with him foreseeing that digital technology would let people remove cigarettes from old movies. Yes, he was right: it can be done, it is being done. But the ignorance in his example: he wrote about Bogart movies having it done. So, follow: picture Humphrey Bogart smoking, now picture the cigarette erased from the picture.

What are you left with?

Humphrey Bogart sticking two fingers up at us.

William

I met him at a party a couple of years ago: if you never did, this may mean that the difference between you and me is that I admired his dress sense as well as his writing.

I remember being at the buffet, turning around and being immediately introduced to him. Did I have time to put the plate down? Can’t remember. And I do know the conversation turned quickly to football, which meant therefore I was instantly bewildered, but he stopped me feeling lost. Funny thing: I talked to someone else there who I admire far less but who blanked me far more. It may have been how I was dressed, that affected how I was addressed.

So Anthony Minghella seemed a very good bloke, I liked him on the spot and I did not ask him a single question beyond “And which team is the Tigers again?” or the like.

I think I’d be shocked by his death regardless; his television work as much as his film, his writing and his directing. And he was just 54. But I’m reeling, and also feeling like a name-clanging prat for reeling at you like this: he was a friend of some friends of mine and the connection is enough to make me stagger even though I have no doubt he’d forgotten my first name by the end of my surname.

William

Just read Jason’s blog on how to write for magazines and Danny’s on many things but in part memories of approaching Empire film magazine.

And I’ve got to tell you this, but I’m going to claim this is about An Unnamed Magazine.

Years ago, I pitched a feature idea to AUM and the response was pretty good; it was a not-now-but-maybe-later response. These days I’d take that as a straight no but I was young, I was new, I believed AUM and was encouraged. After a suitable interval, I tried again.

Same thing.

I was beginning to see the light but three months later or something, when I had no one else to pitch to, I figured, what the hell? I gave ’em a call, fully expecting to get an answering machine, rattle off some rubbish into it, and then never think of AUM ever again.

You’re thinking they commissioned me, aren’t you?

And you’re right.

But not only did they commission me, they had already commissioned me. My copy was due in less than a week’s time, they just hadn’t ever mentioned it to me.

I took time off whatever else I was doing, did all the legwork, wrote the feature, filed the copy bang on time – and learnt that the issue was dropping a few pages. Happens all the time, though usually you know when in the year it’s going to happen so you’re not often caught out over-commissioning pages. But my feature was bumped back to the next issue and since AUM is a monthly, I could’ve had about five weeks to write this quite involved feature instead of five days.

The feature went down very well and actually did me some good outside AUM too. And for a little while I would call the editor, pitching further ideas. None of them ever sold.

Well, not so far as I know.

William