I want to enthuse at you about something and all you want to know is what’s this thing with love kittens and where they are. Let’s do a deal: I’ll explain a thing I feel this need to explain – while you just skip all of that and jump down to where it says It’s Safe Here and Also There are Love Kittens.

So, previously… I’ve read film, TV, radio and theatre scripts all my life but since December 2017, I’ve made sure to read at least one every day. I know I’ve learned from it all, but that wasn’t the point, the point was to have a good time. As I write this to you, I haven’t read one today but I will shortly and that will be my 570th of this year. Given that there are substantially fewer days in the year than 570, you can have a pretty good guess as to how this enjoyment thing is going for me.

Only, this has been an unusual year because of how many scripts I’ve re-read. I’ll often re-read scripts I like, but this time there were so many of them and it’s King Charles’s fault. I skipped watching his coronation and flicked channels instead, until I came in half way through an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It was “…Nor the Battle to the Strong” by René Echevarria and as I tuned in, a series regular, a hero, is faced with a dangerous situation — and he runs away.

He gets chances to make the “right” decision, as defined in paragraph one of the Series Hero Rulebook, and he doesn’t do it. I’d already seen it, a very long time ago, and read the script quite a long time ago, but I was hooked to the end. Which yes, did feature this character getting some redemption (Series Hero Rulebook chapters 7 through 19) but he didn’t deserve it – and he knew he didn’t. The redemption became part of everything terrible and I was enraptured all over again.

As I say, though, I came in half way. Where I was, there was no chance to rewind or stream the episode, but I could get the script so I did. (Note that this link downloads a text version. All other links here take you to a PDF online.) Then I read it and then I read the next one. And the next. “…Nor the Battle” is a fifth season episode and I went back to the beginning to read the pilot script. And then the next one. And the next. So yes, I re-read all Deep Space Nine scripts this year — and it wasn’t the only series I reread, it was just the only one where I could get all seven seasons of the scripts.

There is also Star Trek: The Next Generation and I have read all of those, but I tried a couple this year and they are surprisingly empty on the page.

So before I babble on at you about a top ten, I want to confess that of the 570 scripts I’ll have read by the end of today, an astounding — to me — 275 were repeats. Deep Space Nine accounted for 174, while I also re-read 13 Doctor Who, 21 The West Wing, 17 Frasier and 9 Cheers. Other substantial chunks of new reading for the year were 20 episodes of Inside No 9 and 41 of Fame.

For no very good reason, I’ve decided this time to have a top ten that excludes repeats like Deep Space Nine, even though the original pilot to Frasier, “The Good Son”, is as fine a piece of writing as the revived 2023 Frasier’s pilot “The Good Father” is ordinary. Plus there was one script I read for a book project and even though the script was never made, it’s also never been released in any way so all I am probably allowed to do is tease you about it.

I think we’re ready. Wait, it’s time for the It’s Safe Here bit.

It’s Safe Here and Also There are Love Kittens

“Love Kittens Go to High School” is the title of an episode of Fame by Susan Goldberg and it is without question my title of the year. It was sixth-season Fame and I’ve never seen it, but I enjoyed the script too. Not enough to make my 2023 top ten, but there was no possibility that it wouldn’t get a shout out for that title.

So now, the top ten, including links for you to read them — where possible — and entirely for me, the date I read them.

10. Community: Basic Rocket Science (aka The Fundamentals of Flight)
By Andy Bobrow. Episode aired 14/10/10, script read 12/8/23. The Community characters get stuck in a space simulator simulator (not a mistake, it’s a simulator of a simulator) and go nowhere, do nothing, but when they return, you feel like they’ve come from the moon. Read the script.

9. Paddington 2
By Simon Farnaby and Paul King. Film released 5/11/17, script read 28/10/23. If it were any more perfect, it would be higher up this list. Read the script.

8. Z Cars: A Quiet Night
By Alan Plater. Episode aired 2/10/1963, script read 14/2/23. Famously, nothing happens in this episode of the one-hour police procedural, but you come away realising that really the most enormous things have happened. Episode is lost and the script is only in this book.

7. Collateral
By Stuart Beattie, revised by Frank Darabont, Michael Mann. Film released 6/8/04, script read 25/7/23. A hitman hires a taxi to take him to each of his targets. One clear, simple idea, milked perfectly for drama. Read the script.

6. Dickinson: Split the Lark
By Alena Smith. Episode aired 29/1/21, script read 13/9/23. The show is billed as a comedy, on account of it being very funny, but the pain in it is a knife. Read the script.

5. The Cider House Rules
By John Irving. Film released 7/9/1999, script read 2/5/23. Irving dramatises his own 560-page novel into a 125-minute script — and it took years. The script is only available in this book, US edition, UK edition.

4. Poker Face: Dead Man’s Hand (Pilot)
By Rian Johnson. Episode aired 26/1/23, script read 2/9/23. Even the font and title design lovingly reminds you of the NBC Mystery Movie wheel that brought us Columbo, which is a clear enough inspiration for this otherwise very modern, very tense, very funny series. Read the script.

3. My So-Called Life: Strangers in the House
By Jill Gordon. Episode aired 20/10/94, script read 24/2/23. Finely wrought family and school drama, where over and over, the quietest moments are the loudest. This one made me teary. Read the script.

2. Silo: Freedom Day (Pilot)
By Graham Yost. Episode aired 5/5/23, script read 16/7/23. Utterly compelling drama in a claustrophobic space. Episode 3, “Machines” by
Ingrid Escajeda is unquestionably the most tense hour of television I can recall. That script isn’t available, but the pilot is. Read the pilot and note that the script is titled “Wool” rather than “Silo”. That’s the title of the book it’s based on.

1. She Said
By Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Film released 13/10/22, script read 1/5/23. The plot is the uncovering of Harvey Weinstein, but the story is of the scalding abuse of women and its acceptance by society. You think you know this already, but then you read this harrowing tale in one sitting where your eyes just never stop getting wider — except when you want to cover your face. Read the script.

It’s weird. I keep a list of this stuff so that I can quickly find a good one to reread — and because it somehow keeps me doing this thing I want to do, it somehow prevents me skipping a day and so falling off the wagon — and in a few days time it will be the new year, I’ll be back down to a count of zero. That’s rather cleansing, somehow.

Though it’s surprising how fast that count rises again.

Which reminds me, I need to go read today’s script. I wonder what it will be.

Benjamin Zephaniah died, Norman Lear died, and yet the thing that made me stand still for a moment this week was the news that Kelsey Grammer supports Trump.

It’s not like I thought Grammer really was Dr Frasier Crane. I would bow toward Glen and Les Charles, who created “Cheers” where the character of Frasier first appeared, and I would bow to David Angell, Peter Casey and David Lee, the creators of “Frasier”. I have read their scripts, I have ceaselessly admired their work, but surely I cannot really have thought that an actor was the character he played.

I think it’s interesting that this came out in a BBC Radio interview that was then cut short not by Grammer, not by the BBC, but by the PR people from Paramount+. They must have known that cutting the interview short would be a problem, but they presumably calculated — as far as anyone could in the moment — that the best they could do was damage limitation.

I don’t think it worked. I also don’t think that I am being fair — I didn’t hear the interview, I am commenting on something I don’t know. In just about every way I think important, I am wrong to be judging something I have no direct knowledge of, I am wrong to be disappointed in someone without giving him any opportunity to speak. I imagine that being unable to talk to me is keeping Kelsey Grammer up at nights but, hey, it’s not like I’m a Trump supporter.

I keep wondering whether Grammer watches Trump’s rallies. I can understand being Republican, I can understand disliking the Democrats, but I can’t grasp how someone can watch a Trump performance and think that the man is for anything but himself.

Honestly, I’m just staring at you now, perplexed. I also somehow resent how much time I’ve spent thinking about why I’ve already wandered away from the 2023 revival of “Frasier”. The short version is that this sitcom is just ordinary, where the original “Cheers” and “Frasier” were extraordinary.

That’s taken me weeks.

Hour for hour, I may even have thought more about that than about Grammer backing Trump.

I cannot have believed Kelsey Grammer is Frasier Crane, I cannot have even believed that he need be anything like the character he played.

And yet, the only thing stopping me from admitting to myself that I must have thought he was like Frasier, is that he also played the evil Sideshow Bob in “The Simpsons” and I don’t think Kelsey Grammer is psychotic.

Well.

Last night BBC Four aired a combination of so many of my interests — passions, really — that it was startling. “Doctor Who: The Daleks in Colour” even managed, with those last two words, to put “Police Squad!” back in my head.

But intentionally, it was Doctor Who from the 1960s reworked for the 2020s. The most talked about and promoted aspect was that this black and white show has been colourised but for me the interest, even the excitement, was that it was edited. Instead of about 175 minutes over 7 episodes, it was 75 minutes in 1.

Losing up to 100 minutes from a story goes beyond the technical side of editing, the production side, and instead heads deep into editorial rewriting. So I’m fascinated by editing, I relish times when I’ve had to remove, say, one syllable from an actor’s line. Or how many times in making 58keys on YouTube — truly rather small scale compared to even 1960s Doctor Who production — I will include a note to “Cover Bad Edit”. I can’t get enough of how you spend so long writing things and then when they’re made, you realise you can lose eight minutes and improve everything, as long as you cover the edit.

Then I’ve written a lot about television history so just the change in sensibilities about how long it will take an audience to get a point, I am absurdly riveted by that. And here was a production that I suppose you have to say butchered the original show, I mean it took out more than half of it, but did so with absolute obsessive care for that 1960s story.

I watched all of the surviving episodes of Doctor Who over the last 18 months or so and consequently it doesn’t feel that long since I watched the original of this story. Which may be why I believe I caught every cut and every redone shot.

For the most part, for the greater part, a cut would take me out of the story but only to applaud how clever it was. We did get scenes where someone’s body and particularly their head would move too much between shots, but then I’ve seen that on modern shows when two different takes of a scene are used.

And the show must’ve had its equivalent of my “Cover Bad Edit” because so very many times it did precisely what I, again in my smaller way, do. I will cover a bad edit by finding something, anything, to put on the screen for you to see instead of the ugly edit behind it. In the case of Doctor Who last night, they many times did this by showing another part of the story. Sometimes that was so good, so well done. The dialogue from one scene would continue over the start of the next, like a pre-lap in reverse. So on the one hand, we were moving faster, we were into the next scene, but also it meant only the minimum dialogue needed to get the plot across was included.

It didn’t fix some of the odder points in the original show, though. In both versions, a Dalek is disabled by being shoved onto a rubber cloak. Then a few moments later, the characters pull the cloak out from under it to use for something else and it’s impossible to understand why the Dalek wasn’t recalled to life.

Then it did unfortunately add another odd moment because a whole sequence was replaced by two Daleks plotting. Presumably it was original footage format the show but their conversation was different and it was again a moment to applaud the cleverness of it all. Except it meant later on that Susan (Carole Ann Ford) knew something significant that she clearly did in the original but clearly could not in this new one.

Plus while the ending of the original is a bit rushed, at least in 1960s terms, this new version felt more rushed still. It felt like oh, okay, so that’s sorted, is it?

“Doctor Who: The Daleks in Colour” is a deeply impressive and simply remarkable piece of work. Except, as well as covering an edit by moving to the next scene early, it did also very many times it would show us a flashback to earlier on in the story. The first time it did this, I thought it was profoundly brilliant and as satisfying as the addition of the 1980s Doctor Who Cloister Bell sound effect.

The second time it did it, I thought it was brilliant too. By the third time…

There were points where this flashback and possibly flashforward lark was tedious. Watching the characters examine anti-radiation drugs left for them outside TARDIS, seeing it over and over again, painfully slowed down a story that was being sped up.

That was also noticeable in the parade of Thals, the goodies on this story’s planet — it wasn’t just the picture that was done in black and white in the 1960s — because they would come, go and die before you knew even their names. Quite often, we’d only hear their name after they’d been killed off. I think I caught the names Alydon, Ganatus and Antodus, but the lead Thal was definitely Anodyne.

I also think I saw the original too recently to be able to watch this version and just get into the story. I can’t judge it. But I can think a lot about how editing the original doesn’t remove its 1960s origins and replace them with 2020s sensibilities. If it were written again, it would be 2020s in pacing and style and the whole undertow of a drama reflecting its own times.

So now I’m off thinking about the differences between shaping a story when it’s being written and then reshaping it later when being edited.

I tell you, if “Doctor Who: The Daleks in Colour” had featured a big scene with chocolate, it would’ve been my perfect television drama.

I may not be the tidiest person in the world, but I appear to have reached a new low. I cleared up a corner of my office yesterday and found one script from 2006, and one letter from 2007.

The letter was from Verity Lambert. Wait, I sound like I hadn’t seen it until now and that would be a hell of a story. But no, I read it in 2007, it was a rejection, I don’t remember how I felt about that and it took me a few minutes to remember what it was she’d rejected, but Verity Lambert. An absolute hero of television drama wrote to me, having read an hour script of mine.

And she did so in 2007, just months before she died.

She’ll always, but especially this year, be known for Doctor Who, but it was her work at Euston Films that made me a fam. She’s the one who refused to make Lynda la Plant’s Widows unless the widows of the title got away with the crime in the story. She’s behind Jack Rosenthal’s The Knowledge.

When she wrote to me, Verity Lambert was making Jonathan Creek, which I liked enormously for such a long time, and also Love Soup, which I think was a misfire.

What she wasn’t making was whatever in the hell this script of mine was. Not enough comedy, she said, though there were good lines, and not enough drama. That’s all, and that’s everything, and even if I were still trying to remember which script it was, I’d know she was right because she’s Lambert. She was Lambert. Mind you, Love Soup was poor.

I said that I found a script from 2006, though. It wasn’t the script she read. It was a radio play that isn’t long enough, isn’t good enough, but yet which I enjoyed reading and I think the core idea has potential. Seventeen years later, I might give it another go.

About ten years ago, maybe a little more, I was writing a mammoth 150,000-word book about Blake’s 7 and while I relished the conversations I had with practically everyone, while I’m still friends with one in particular, the interviewee who was the most deliciously open and downright acerbic was writer Chris Boucher. And while I can’t find the quote now, I know he said something to me along the lines of how you should never give an actor a pencil.

We were talking about an unproduced Blake’s 7 script that actor Paul Darrow had written. I’ve read that script and it was poor, it also just didn’t seem finished, but I don’t remember it having precisely the actor/pencil problem Chris meant.

The problem he said — and he is far from the only writer/producer I’ve heard this from — is that an actor will write a brilliant part for themselves and the rest of the script won’t work. I’m not sure how I feel about that: I believe that the show comes first, to the extent that if the best thing for the project is for me to be chucked out, I’ll find the door. But then on the other hand, if I were able to act, I don’t know that I could resist writing myself a lot to act.

Plus I can’t count how many actors have told me that they had to turn to writing because it was the only way to get the acting parts they wanted.

And I’ve friends who are both actors and writers, and I would trust them all with pencils.

Funnily enough, those same actor/writers have mentioned feeling as narked as I was over actors like Lisa Kudrow who seem to truly believe they created the character they play. There’s an interview with her in which you finally hear the exasperated interviewer asking “wasn’t that in the script?” And she looks shocked, like she’d never thought to read that.

Actually, Gareth Thomas seemed a bit like that to me about his character Roj Blake. I feel I can tell you that now since he’s died, but then so has Paul Darrow, so has Chris Boucher.

And you know this is all on my mind this week because so has Matthew Perry.

I seem to remember there being some criticism of him when his book, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir” was released. But since he died, of course all you hear is the good stuff about the man.

Why I rated Matthew Perry, though, was a story I heard during production of Friends. Reportedly, he would spend a lot of time in the writers’ room. Specifically, he did that and none of the rest of the cast did. I seem to remember, but I’m not sure all these years later, that the writers asked him in.

I hope so. I mean, otherwise, he’s an actor barging his way into a script session.

I just liked the completeness of it. I liked how he saw the writing as vital. And amongst all of the tributes to him this week, I saw one that mentioned this business with the writing staff. The story claims that Perry would pitch ten jokes for each episode of Friends and would consistently get two in.

There’s no way to know now whether he gave himself those two jokes, but then that’s the thing. If you can’t tell that an actor is destroying the entire fabric of a show by giving themselves the best lines, then they aren’t.

I’m obviously pro-writer. I mean, unlike Lisa Kudrow, I read that pilot script to Friends and right there on the page it’s very good. I just see that television is better when everyone is working together and it always seemed that this is what Matthew Perry thought too.

Ten years ago, possibly even fifteen, I was asked to find a book for someone. You’re in the business, they said, it should be easy. I don’t remember now what the title was or the author’s name, or even remotely what it was about, but I know it had been written by some reasonably distant relative of theirs and they were very curious to read it.

So curious, so intently interested, that to this very day I am blamed for not being able to find it for them.

Except, I did.

More than that, I found it in the first half an hour of searching, at absolute most.

Only, this book was self-published by whoever it was, so it wasn’t in any bookstores, wasn’t on Amazon, and since they weren’t selling it on their own website either, you had to think it was going to struggle to become a bestseller. But this someone wanted to read it, so I gave them the sole and single and unarguable solution: they’d have to ask their relative for a copy.

For whatever reason, though, they didn’t want to do that. Okay, it’s hardly my problem, I did the job, let them do what they will, or what they won’t.

It is a long time ago now so you’d hoped that maybe they caved and asked, or that surely they had forgotten it as thoroughly as I had. But I suspect not because the last time it was mentioned, I was again criticised for not finding this book. I had let them down, apparently. I failed them and I am a continuing disappointment.

Sometimes the only winning move is to walk away.

Totally unrelated, this is the 800th Self Distract blog post. Writing to you is part of my Friday mornings, you are part of my Friday mornings, and you have been for such a long time: thank you.

The BBC has cancelled its daytime soap series “Doctors” after 23 years. I actually remember orbiting some executive 24 years ago, when it was being planned and I was told off the record that the BBC was going to do a new soap that was either about a medical practice or, I think, lawyers.

It was a quarter of a century ago so I let myself off being unsure whether the alternative had been lawyers, but I can’t let myself off for not remembering who the exec was. It could have been Mal Young, who I interviewed for Radio Times when he was head of drama, but while he seemed a nice guy, he was really steeped in soaps to the exclusion, I felt at the time, of other drama.

Sometime around then, I wrote for a UK soap called Crossroads but was fired for the flimsy reason that I was crap at it. What they needed, I couldn’t write and what I both could write and loved to write, they didn’t want. I got them to reverse the order of two scenes in the mandatory story breakdown I was given, but I think that was my sole contribution to the show.

Doctors was different, though. While technically a soap, it also had a story of the day. Every episode would be some mixture of the continuing drama of these doctors and other medical staff, and one complete story. As a writer, you’d be told the usual huge amount of what you had to do with the continuing storylines, but the story of the day was all yours. I mean, it had to be approved, there were constraints, but you were creating characters, you were creating story, it was a lot freer and therefore, to me, more interesting.

Interesting enough that this executive recommended I try out for the show back whenever it was. I truly do not remember how I blew it, but I did.

And I also cannot, cannot recall how I blew it again a few years later when I got another go. This time I have a memory of being in the Doctors offices, I want to say that I was taking a typing test, but whatever it was, whatever I did, I failed.

I’m not doing very well for recollection today, and unfortunately that was a problem on the third time I tried to get to write for Doctors.

This time I’m shaky on when it happened – it was at least ten years after the second go – but I do remember everything else, I just can’t tell you it all. What happened was that I met a new producer on the show, I obviously said all the right things, he got me writing up ideas for the story of the day, and the wham, it all stopped.

What I presume happened was that he’d pitched me to the show’s executive producers somewhat later than he’d implied, they had someone look up their “Blew It” database and said no, not again. That does not sound remotely likely, except that officially Doctors was a training show for new writers. It wasn’t, it unfortunately never was, but this was the official line and it does seem likely that there would be things the show could point to as proof that it was really hot on new writers.

If it’s true that there is such a database or something like it, I’d have appreciated this producer checking it before I wrote him twenty detailed plots. (I’ve used two in plays since.) But then equally this producer would have really, really liked me to have told him that I’d tried before. I didn’t mention it because it never occurred to me: one failed pitch at least a decade before, another failed pitch back around the year 2000, it did not enter my head.

I felt very bad about that and I even had the impression that I’d caused this new producer some problems.

A few months ago, incidentally, he and I were both judges on a Royal Television Society Awards panel and we met on a Zoom call. He mentioned being very fond of his time on Doctors, I didn’t mention my blowing it.

For all its story of the day, Doctors was a soap and I’m just not a soap writer. I shouldn’t have even tried out for it, they were right not to use me. I think the obvious reason to pitch was that at times it’s been the chief route in to TV for writers, but there’s also that the show is made in Birmingham, in the West Midlands, where I live. It’s our soap.

When the news that it was cancelled broke this week, my first and continuing thought is for friends who are writers on the show, for people I don’t know who are writers on it, and for all that crew and cast who are abruptly out of work. The BBC says that the cancellation is for budget reasons but that it’s okay, all of the money will be still be spent on shows in the West Midlands, so that’s fine. Except that it isn’t. Even if the money stays in drama — the BBC keeps worryingly mentioning that the cooking show MasterChef is moving to the Midlands — then it will always cost less to make one more episode of an existing show than to create a new one. So there will be fewer hours of drama, there will be fewer opportunities for writers, actors, directors and all.

Oh. Grief. I really thought my memory was astoundingly poor today, but I have recalled something. That fact about it costing less to make one more episode of an existing show, I know it was Mal Young who told me that. It’s called the slot cost: how much does it cost to fill a particular hour in the schedule, or half hour, with a show. Whatever the figure is, it’s less when you extend an existing series instead of a new one because there are no startup costs, no extended development time.

Anyway, if my first thought was for the writers, my second with this. I’ve decided I’m never going to try pitching to write for Doctors again.