Wouldn’t you put that on a theatre poster immediately? “Feel-good nihilism – Faber & Faber”.

Actually, I think it was this nice man from Faber but it could’ve been the National Theatre. Ah, who doesn’t get those mixed up? After my play, I got to talk to a sea of faces in an interview, people I’ve admired, people I’m daunted by and most of all people who were nine people, a sea of nine people. When you walk in expecting three, and when you’re nervous of three, facing nine in a circle doesn’t help.

But they were great. I was so disappointed when my time was up and we had to stop talking.

Though I think now I should stop typing. I’m not being the clearest man in the world, am I? But I wanted to tell you that this day was spectacular. I wish you could’ve been there, I’m rocked that I was. I’ve just been sitting in a theatre with an audience laughing at my jokes.

Be careful what you wish for, because it’s fantastic.

Thanks for all the encouragement,
William

Have a look at this, would you? It’s one line from my play that we rehearsed yesterday. The characters are Graham and Samantha, I’m not fussed about their ages but they’re probably mid-forties.

GRAHAM: It’s just, well, I know who you are, obviously I know who you are, and it’s an occasion.

Nothing unusual there. And when the actor read it for the first time about 10am on Monday, he read it just the same way I imagine you did and precisely the way I heard it in my head when I wrote the line in the first place. When he read it for the last time that day, I don’t know, 5pm or something, he read it… in 100% the same way.

But between those two readings was everything.

Graham is an incredibly successful engineer, so successful that he’s being interviewed by Sam, until very recently an incredibly successful actress. (Think Nicole Kidman, though maybe not quite so talented.) It’s a star interviewer, a star interviewee. Only, while they talk there is a party going on in another room: was that the occasion or did I mean this star actress coming to the house? The answer was the actress.

And then the truth is that Graham and Sam worked together twenty years ago: is that what he means when he says he knows her or is it just because she’s so famous an actress now? And, handily, the answer is Yes.

You get the idea, I’m sure: there were actually a fair few more iterations around that one line because there’s a lot going on in this play and while as an audience you’re supposed to be bounced through it, the cast need to know where they are in the story: what they’re going to reveal later, so they know what they’re hiding now, all that.

This was how Monday’s rehearsal’s went. On the great, great side, it was glorious to hear my dialogue fly. And nothing short of tremendous that we would strip a line down and then build it back up again, the director Caroline Jester would add emphasis, would ask for the actors to be thinking of this or that when saying the other – and the final result was in practically every case precisely what I wanted. More, it was precisely what I’d heard in my noggin’ as I was writing.

And I expect we did all of this work directly on this one line in about 40 seconds: I remember the practical business about the occasion was instant, but equally the issues of where people are affected the lines before and the scenes afterwards so they were constantly referred to throughout the day. So that’s 40 seconds on the specific line, eight hours on the issues.

A lot has been cut from the play, almost every bit of which I’m happy about, all of which I can wear. They’re primarily cuts because of the staging: this is strictly speaking a rehearsed reading. Have you seen these before? I’ve only ever been to one, a chokingly-good rehearsed reading of Alan Plater’s Sweet Sorrow at the Royal Court Theatre in London. It was a star cast – I want to say Barbara Flynn was in it, but maybe she was just in the audience – but anyway, you get the idea, this wasn’t messin’ about, and the way that one worked was that half a dozen cast sat on stools in a row on the stage.

That’s not what’s happening with mine. It won’t be a full-dress piece, it will be a script-in-hand performance and there’ll be plenty of sitting in a row, but also it booms out into the audience and my cast will roam the theatre. Still, there are limitations and two of them meant cuts were necessary: I don’t have enough cast to do all the parts and I’ve got no props at all. Consequently even a reference to getting a drink has to be cut and as much as I’m quite happy about that kind of business, I loved it when one actor stopped later on in a scene to say he felt he really needed to be doing this or standing there or something. And that’s what he would’ve been doing, that’s where he would have been standing if we hadn’t cut the lines.

I sound like I feel vindicated over objecting to cuts but no, seriously, 98% of the cuts are absolutely fine and I even made many of them myself. But what I feel great about is my stagecraft: writing on my little PowerBook, locked away in my office, I got the staging right – I mean, the staging physically and also emotionally, where people must go and what they must do in order to get across the point.

The staging and the dialogue. That’s not too bad, is it?

You’re wondering what is bad, aren’t you? And that 2% is niggling at you. Okay, there’s a moment toward the end of the play where rather than another line of dialogue (I have a habit of writing ping-pong dialogue, unceasingly back-and-forth and I try to throw that rhythm out when I can) I’ve written a gesture instead. Caroline simply doesn’t like it. I’ve let it be cut, and also asked for the next couple of lines to go as well so that they don’t seem nonsensical, but they’re not going far. Many, many cuts and trims I agreed with or even suggested to cope with the lack of props or cast are ones that I’m going to keep for future versions of the play but this one is on an elastic band.

More seriously, there is a thing that lets me be a typical writer: I’m ecstatic about how well the rehearsals went, I know this is the best thing I’ve ever written, I know it is a joyous and clever piece, I know I’ve actually hit some things that are surprisingly profound, and I also cannot bear a word of the play. When I did a Crossroads script I was an amateur and I felt it in every nerve I own; with this, I was totally in command of my material yet unable to convey one key issue and at times I felt amateur again.

It’s this. The characters were both actors once and I’ve got them being actors again; their most pompous speeches get interrupted by the “director”, they each lose their lines at times, and they are heckled most enthusiastically from the audience.

The point of all these is to really strongly emphasise that most of the play is set right now, right this very second while you’re watching it. It’s this business that theatre is live and you shouldn’t know what’s coming next, so I make sure you don’t and when I’ve set up something I hope you do expect, I cut it off at the knees.

It all reads fine, the actors are playing it well, but when you’re doing that kind of analysis I said about the “occasion” line, you hit huge problems. Who are these people? The engineer and ex-actress of the future, the actor and actress of today? And then both characters are lying merrily away so there’s a further layer to untangle. And the final moments of the play tell you something moderately unpleasant about one of the characters and why he or she is even here. So that’s a, what, fourth level? You count, I can’t.

You should be able to explain your play to your cast and your director, I should be able to explain my play to them. For this one element, I couldn’t convey it. Part of it is the surprise (to me) that I write very instinctively and I can post-rationalise almost everything, but not everything.

Sometimes yesterday I wanted to strip back these elements, make it all simpler. And when I think that, I really don’t like the idea that I can’t: I can’t change anything now for the Thursday performance.

Fortunately, most of the time I don’t want to strip them back. I don’t think it’s any more complex than any other play about time and though I’m disappointed in my lack of eloquence with the cast, I’m not disappointed with these elements in the play.

But just as I said I’m a writer, I can hold these conflictingly arrogant and self-deprecating points equally dearly, I can also fully know that the purpose of this showcase is to teach me and yet be disappointed that I need more teaching. The play’s not clear enough to the cast, though they’re so good I swear they’re selling it precisely correctly, and that means it isn’t clear to my director either. So she’s being very nice to me and I’m being very nice back, but I still feel some of that same old Crossroads amatuerishness.

Mind you, there’s no question I was bad on Crossroads and, I think, quite equally no question that I’m much better here: my play’s one of those pieces that just has life in it.

Stagecraft, dialogue, life, how can I be mithered about this?

Oh! One last thing. Usually rehearsed readings have someone reading out the stage directions. I’ve managed to make this unnecessary except for at the very, very start. And my cast read out that initial stage description really well. Even my stage directions are good, shouldn’t I be the most smug man in the world?

William

So, yes, of course it’s very frustrating being a writer knocking on doors and part of the annoyance is when you see something you know you could’ve done better. But it’s also very easy to say that and there’s a lot less pressure on your writing when the only things involved are you and a subsequent rejection slip.

This is on my mind now because I’m in rehearsal tomorrow.

It’s the real deal, eight hours solid rehearsal with a professional company. Performance on Thursday.

And there are five plays being done on this showcase day for agents and producers, but four of them are getting half-hour excerpts. I’m being done in full.

It’s obviously because mine is a one-act that only takes about 45 minutes to do where presumably everyone else’s is much longer. I’ve read one of them, Mari’s Wake by Debbie McAndrew but the script just flew by, I have no idea what its running time is. I do know it’s a very good piece, I’m a bit daunted by coming after it in the running order.

But, grief, running orders. Text messages from my director. Printing out rehearsal scripts. The sense that this is my play but as of tomorrow morning – well, actually as of when the director came on board – it’s our play instead.

This is what I want, this is what I’ve worked for. I’m spinning.

Obviously I’m more excited than I can say, plainly I’m also nervous. Part of me thinks I’ll enjoy all this more on Friday when it’s done and gone, but another, much stronger part of me is regretting that I’m not in rehearsal next week for something else, too.

William

I’d like to suggest to you that like all misunderstood groups, writers do plenty of misunderstanding too. And it seems somehow worse because our business is in communicating.

So, for example, I once had a deeply involved argument about the role of writers in film and I had it with the editor of an entertainment news website who specifically covered movies. Neither of us won, we might yet be at it if there hadn’t been a deadline, but toward the end of the time we spent on it, I finally saw that she really did not know what a writer does. She did believe that the actors make up the words.

Now, you can argue that this is a little startling for a film editor, and I hope that it is unusual, but it took me so long to see it. Every argument I’d done up to that realisation was a complete waste, and all her arguments back were too, because it was as if she were talking about writers and I was talking about the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

A similiar thing happened to me last night. I’m trying to persuade a fella that dialogue in scripts is not just the decoration at the end of the writing process, the nice bit you add on your tenth draft, that in fact if you can’t write dialogue, you just can’t write scripts. His considered counter-argument was that this is bollocks. Plot is all.

I’m in a didactic mood this afternoon so let me say: if he doesn’t change this, he will never write a good script.

I can feel him cracking his knuckles, ready to write a comment here that if I don’t stop trading on my dialogue and my unexpected ability to write at lightspeed, if I don’t buckle down to doing treatments and cork-board step-outlines, I’ll never write a good script.

But where I battled it out with that editor because this was my life’s goal in question, with this man I argued in the pub for hours because I want him to write that great script. If I thought he just couldn’t write dialogue and it was never going to happen, I’d have suggested darts for the evening.

As it is, one small issue in the middle of the hours later seemed to me to be key. We talked about whether you come out of a film thinking about the dialogue. His position was that you never come out going “cor, that was a fantastic metaphor” and mine was that you might come out of a Bond film thinking that was a great explosion but you never come out saying “what about that 3lb explosive pack, and the way they supplemented that practical with the CGI in post was just amazing”. Come out having been in the story, that’s the aim, and I couldn’t see why this fella didn’t agree that atrocious dialogue prevents this.

Mark you, he also doesn’t rate Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue so I should’ve twigged this was another movies vs Mormon Tabernacle kind of discussion.

And I think I know where the kernel of this argument was now. It’s that he thinks dialogue is speeches and I know it’s speech.

Follow: here are two different pieces of dialogue, the first of which being one we both remembered last night:

RENTON: Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life. But why would I want to do a thing like that?

and

TOM: It’s right what you say about remembering things. Our kid, he can tell you the teams that played at Wembley, the year Hull and Hull Kingston Rovers met in the Rugby League Final. He can also tell you the names of most of the people in the crowd. But I tell you the funny part. The only thing our kid can’t remember is the score.

CHRISTINA: Why’s that?

TOM: His team lost. Ten four.

The first is from John Hodges’ screenplay for Trainspotting (and you may notice the filmed version is a little different) based on Irvine Welsh’s novel, and the second is from Sweet Sorrow, a stage play by Alan Plater.

If I ask you what the difference is and you say one’s film, one’s stage, I’m amazed you’ve read this far. If you say there’s no difference whatsoever, well, I’ve a lot more time for that argument.

I would say that there is a difference, that the choose life one is a definite speech, I want to say an iconic moment in Trainspotting but I’m probably misusing the word, whereas the second one is a conversation. But they’re both doing the same job: both of them are telling us something and they’re really telling us something else.

So with the Trainspotting one, most especially when Ewan McGregor delivers it so well but certainly even as you read it here, you know instantly that the speaker is against this whole choose life idea. How can you know that from the script? McGregor could’ve said it sarcastically and you’d have got it, but he was much more subtle and the script had no tricks, no “(caustic)” direction. It was there in the dialogue, on the page, right in your face and though you can’t point to the one syllable that gave it away in that very first sentence, that’s because it’s only with really crap dialogue that you can.

In the second case, the punchline is a delicously creaking old gag, but stuff the rugby, forget the kid, what is Tom telling you about Tom? He’s telling a story. Even a simple thing, he’s fashioned it into a tale and what you get is that he is a storyteller, that maybe he’s also just a little bit of a dreamer. I’ve actually compressed a longer sequence into those lines so you can see this but if I’d done the lot or you know the play, you’d also have got that he’s a poetry fan.

That’s what I call good dialogue. This is what I call bad:

TOM: I like poetry, it’s really great.

RENTON: Drugs are better, man.

I think that dialogue is intensely hard to do, though unusually for me I believe I do it, but also that only half the fight is writing speech that sounds like a real person talking and conveys all these layers that we all do convey in our every conversation. And that the other half is in hiding the fact that it’s so hard. When the dialogue feels constructed, as I’m afraid I agree Aaron Sorkin can do on his off days, then it’s artifice and prangs out at you, it takes you out of the story and fights you getting back in. It’s bad enough in films, it’s even worse on the page because what else is there on the page but dialogue?

One last thought, if I may. When Dialogue Goes Bad. There’s a line or three in the film Martha Meet Frank, Daniel and Lawrence (or somesuch title, I might be mixing up the order of names there) in which a character does indeed do Bad Dialogue. I can’t remember it, I’ve blocked the film from my mind but he says something that it’s very unlikely the character knows, it’s absolutely rock certain that the character would never say it in that situation (“Oh, before you ring off, don’t you think nuclear submarines are a pretty colour?”). And there isn’t one single possible chance that the line is anything but the writer feeding us information. This is in all ways very, very crap.

But I cheered.

Right there in the cinema, I went Yes!

Because I knew without that stupid plotting dialogue, it would take the film a minimum of twenty more minutes to get us to the stage in the story that the line brought us to. If you’re arguing that’s actually good dialogue, ah, come on: go see the film, I refuse to take the blame when you don’t like it, and you will see the line I mean. Prangs out at you.

So it was very poor, it would have thrown me out of the movie. But I was long, long thrown and that fudged rubbish meant the film must be nearly over.

That’s why I cheered. Mind you, I don’t know why I didn’t just walk out an hour beforehand.

William

Sorry, I’ve had to take this entry off. So that the comments make sense – er, the comments remain, right? – then you need to know that this was about watching a whole season of this show, Brothers & Sisters, and whether it’s an interesting writing exercise.

I’ll put it back if I can.

w

Er, that’s about it. But while this is my fourth or fifth time here, it’s the first one I’ve been like a tour guide: I’m showing my mother the place.

And I must be doing okay because she’s said this holiday is the greatest experience of her life. She said it in the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, so maybe she just meant she’d had a Damascus moment there and joined the faith, I’m not sure.

But may I offer you a sample of the kind of indepth local knowledge I’ve been displaying?

New York City is the best place in the world.

There you go; I’ve often thought it, I’ve always thought it really, but I haven’t said it to you.

William “Wearing his new NYC Sweatshirt and Only a Little Bit Embarrassed About It” Gallagher

Rumours have lurched to the good and the bad for months but as of this afternoon, it’s official: the US drama Veronica Mars is over.

Did you know? Did you spend the day checking all the US TV news feeds waiting for word? Because I did. And I would say that it’s hard to remember the last time a show had me checking like this but it isn’t: I was exactly the same at exactly this point last year. And it was exactly waiting to hear if Veronica Mars was to get a third season.

It did and, I’ll tell you straight, the news improved the holiday I was having at the time.

I have to think that its time was up and that if it had gone on longer it would perhaps have weakened. But I have to think that because there’s no other solace available.

There was about half a second of hope when the network, The CW, announced it was talking the Mars creator about some kind of related new series, but then they said words to the effect of “not that it’ll come to anything”. A lesson to us all: if you’re going to dangle hope, don’t destroy it in the second half of the same sentence.

w

Have you seen Totally Doctor Who? It’s a children’s companion series to the drama, runs five o’clock on Fridays on BBC1 and at various times on CBBC as well. This week the guest was Helen Raynor, the writer of the current Dalek two-parter.

The writer.

I’m just not used to this: you see Russell T Davies everywhere but there’s somehow a sense that he is Mr Who rather than a writer, at least in the minds of interviewers, so to get an actual episode writer front and centre seems unusual. This is the first time I’ve seen Totally, I was coughing away at home with man-flu, so perhaps they do it all the time but I hadn’t thought so.

I’ve met Helen, I like her and I like her writing – she did a grand Torchwood and I envy that she got a Friday Play on BBC Radio 4 – but more importantly, she’s a writer and she was being interviewed as one on a high-rating children’s show. Can’t you just imagine millions of kids with their faces too close to the screen, now being shown that such strange creatures as writers exist? I keep imagining some of them dreaming about become writers themselves.

Mark you, at the rate I’m going, they’ll overtake me, the little bastards.

I realise we’re in a more media-aware time than when I would’ve been their age, it’s probably not as a big a deal as it seems to me, but when I was a young lad, writing was not something a young lad like me could aspire to doing. That sounds ridiculous, even to me as I type it, but I feel it was true. I do have a certain relative who repeatedly told me then to “keep your feet on the ground” if I ever ventured a plan about writing. This person now claims responsibility for my success, such as it is, and did tell me the other day that it’d be okay if I didn’t thank her when I win some award. “That’s all right,” I said. “I won’t.”

I honestly think I became a writer because of Lou Grant, a newspaper drama from the company that would rapidly become more famous for Hill Street Blues. It was the first time I was aware of an hour drama as something crafted by people but I didn’t think I could be one of them. So I went into computers by mistake, journalism by accident, scriptwriting by, er, let me come back to that one.

Would it have helped me if there’d been a writer interviewed on Magpie? I don’t know, but I watched this Totally Doctor Who yesterday and it was invigorating. Okay, some of the show has a forced-jollity I find hard to endure, but dead centre in its everything-Who-is-fantastic approach was a writer. And, let’s face a cold fact, there are plenty of writers who should not be allowed out in public, but Helen Raynor isn’t one of them.

So a smart writer is championed on a hugely popular children’s show. I think that’s marvellous.

William

I’ve just got an acknowledgement in a book – and can’t imagine what I did to deserve it. Now, this could be yet another embarrassing mixup between me and the various other William Gallaghers (there’s a WG who’s a Doctor Who fanzine editor and everybody asks if he’s me). But in case I’m right and it’s me getting acknowledged, I feel the need to earn it more. So can I tel you about the book?

It’s actually books, plural: a truly exceptional five-volume set of reference books called The Kaleidoscope BBC Television Drama Research Guide 1936-2006. I can only think of one other title that’s in the same league for depth of research and that’s the same group’s The Kaleidoscope British Independent Television Drama Research Guide 1955-2005 which covers all non-BBC drama in UK television.

Every programme, every episode, every cast, every crew, every thing. Details of those troubling problems (for me writing Radio Times’s On This Day) when programmes were scheduled but pulled at the last second. Everything. The base research is from Radio Times but it’s then supplemented with official information direct from the broadcasters and, increasingly, the Kaliedoscope group’s own records.

You look at these ten volumes and cannot imagine what it would be like to be on day one of a research project like that. Then you look at the people who do it and they appear quite sane and normal, they appear to have social lives. I’m told that’s a front, but at least they don’t have the pale skin of people who never leave libraries.

And I do know the people in this group. I’ve bought their books for years, never knowing quite how close to my home they are, until one day I walked into Birmingham Central Library with my PowerBook, ready to do On This Day research from the Radio Times issues and found five people doing exactly the same thing. Given how much they do and how random my time in the library can be, it’s surprising I hadn’t seen them before.

But, grief, it was so handy. I realised who they must be just from the quiet, whispered fact-checking they were doing, and it was great. I could say to them: “Excuse me, but you wouldn’t happen to know when the last episode of Warship aired, would you?”

Can’t tell you the number of times I’ve asked people questions like that when I’m at the library but this was the first time the people didn’t back away quietly. And instead told me instantly “March 29, 1977”.

I was going to rabbit on at you about these books anyhow but I’m a very chuffed man this afternoon. I might go read the acknowledgements again.

William

I didn’t talk about any DVDs on this week’s UK DVD Review podcast, except that I also somehow managed to slip in more than I could reasonably hope to mention prices for as well.

Here are the prices, then, bar any postage and packing. So that I can give you links, I’m pointing you here to the Amazon.co.uk site. The prices are all pretty much the best you can get but nonetheless, shop around, okay?

And note that prices may vary from those below: these are correct as of writing.

Thanks,
William

Battlestar Galactica – The Mini Series [2004] £4.98

Groundhog Day (Collector’s Edition) [1993] £4.98

Trainspotting: The Definitive Edition [DTS] [1996] price varies; see New & Used listing

Stranger Than Fiction [2006] £11.98

Shakespeare In Love [1999] £6.98

Sense And Sensibility [1996 £6.98]

Grosse Pointe Blank [1997] £6.97

The Mad About You Collection (REGION 1) (NTSC) note this is a US release and that the price varies