“Time and the Conway Twitty Appreciation Society” by William Gallagher will be performed in Birmingham on June 14.

I’m afraid you’re not invited, but you are the first I’m telling and it’s also my first professional stage production. Details, some requiring my signature (!), are to follow and I don’t even know the venue yet, but it will be directed by Caroline Jester from the Birmingham Rep.

William

There’s a thing I’ve just written for the On This Day column in Radio Times that I want to tell you about: I’m really in two minds whether to submit it to the mag so you may only see it here. Because On This Day is meant to always be about television history and of course never about me but this one entry, April 30, is about radio and sort of about me.

But before I tell you that, thank you very, very much: I’m in Birmingham Central Library and just nipped back to my On This Day database to check I was telling you the right date and I was. But I’d entered it into the wrong date on the database. I’m not sure I’d have caught that mistake if it weren’t for you so I appreciate that.

Anyway, I’m in that library and I’m a bit rattled because I’ve just come across a feature in the 27 April to 3 May 1958 edition of Radio Times which begins: “Drop in at Birmingham Reference Library almost any Friday and you will see a thick-set, bearded man poring over dictionaries and volumes of poetry.”

Well, okay, that’s 49 years ago, it’s Saturday today (though I’d have been doing this yesterday if it weren’t for the Bank Holiday). And also the library’s moved in those five decades. But still, I almost turned around in my seat to see if that was the fella currently occupying my favourite spot next to the Radio Times shelves.

The fella in 1949 was Edward J Mason, who’s a novelist and playwright which I’d say was like me except he was considerably more successful, and he also devised the radio quiz My Word! which is what he would research on all those Fridays, all those years ago.

It’s easy to say it was eerie reading that. But I also felt proud to be carrying on some kind of tradition. I felt certain, I feel certain, that I and On This Day will of course be as forgotten as My Word! in five decades. I’m proud of Birmingham’s library system. I’m reminded how fleeting this work I love really is. That could make me think it’s worthless and yet instead it makes me want to cherish it.

Anyway, the feature is in a dried and dusty old copy of Radio Times and it makes me feel alive.

William

Writing’s writing, right? Most days I’m doing pretty rudimentary journalism and last month, as you may have gathered because I haven’t shut up about it yet, I wrote some near-endless number of scripts. April is the prose month, and I was quite uneasy about it.

You’ve spotted the past tense, you know I’m feelng better but I know tomorrow I’ll be back to uneasy, so for this brief interlude, what’s made me happier is that I wrote some straight prose tonight. I can only imagine your excitement.

Isn’t it interesting, though, how writing can be so different? I lie that when I think of an idea I automatically know whether it’s radio, theatre or novel: the truth is that I make it be radio. Maybe film. Theatre is scary, especially the night after seeing Chekhov, and prose daunts me. There are just too many words. Years ago, when I began in magazines, I was on a computer title where the typical article length was 5,000 words and after a few months of that, I could not conceive how anyone could need more than that to cover any topic. Later I joined the BBC and wrote untold thousands of pages of Ceefax, I think typically 70 words per page, and after a few months of that, I couldn’t imagine how anyone would need more.

Even today, if you look at a typical BBC News Online story, the whole tale is in the top four pars and everything below it is strictly speaking unnecessary. NOL and Ceefax copy is now written simultaneously; when I was last there the content production system gave the journalist a box for the top paragraphs and another for the rest; both were then sent live on NOL, only the top box went live on Ceefax. And very often what’s in that second box adds nothing to the story; even more often it’s a straight lift from the last piece on the same topic.

So I naturally write concisely.

I know I’m taking an age to say I write concisely.

Maybe I mean I can.

You’ll just have to trust me.

But here I am, a deluded concise writer, and one of my great passions is prose. I think of the novels that have reached within me and I want to do that; I want to do it to other people but I also want to do it to me, to dig out something, learn something, have a blast in fiction. Can’t write long, yet I revel in novels. So what’s a boy to do?

Cheat.

I wrote an epistolic novel. I can’t remember the length now but it was several hundred short pieces, primarily emails but also faxes, scripts, captions, Radio Times billings, even NOL and Ceefax pages at one point. Anything that I could write concisely and yet load with as much as you have to when you’re writing Ceefax.

Whatever else you might call it, it was a novel. That novel got me an agent, got me a really high-powered meeting at a very big publisher, did not get published. You’re thinking it all fell down there and, well, it did, but it fell with enough of a splash that I would be as insane to not try again as I probably was to try in the first place. Consequently, I’ve been writing another novel. Only, I can’t pull off the same cheat again.

So I’ve been writing proper, longform prose. Every trick I know about pacing a script, about structuring a magazine article, it’s all simultaneously worthless and brilliantly useful. I’m simultaneously lost and, er, I suppose found. That sounds far too brightsiding, ignore me.

What I will say is that when you’re writing prose fiction, it is a very, very bad idea to read Paul Auster. Or Carrie Fisher. Margery Allingham. Tommy Hardy. Alan Plater. (You thought he was a playwright? You’ve got to try his novel Misterioso some day. I may have read that ten times now.)

Any suggestions for rubbish novelists I could try while I’m working?

William

I feel a prat saying this when you may just already know it, but Uncle Vanya is tremendous. Okay, if that’s ever so slightly ancient news, how about this? The Birmingham Rep’s production is fantastic.

You’ve got until April 14. I imagine it must tour but I don’t know and I do hope you get to see it.

Something came up today that just narked me no end and though I took it out on my pampas grass, I was in a foul mood going out. So, I’m in a mood and Anton Chekhov is not the Jim Carrey of theatre, it wasn’t looking like a promising evening. Frankly, all I knew about Chekhov is that he liked his four-act plays so, well, a mood, Russian four-act depressions, I didn’t expect to be safe company.

But it instantly got me. And it really moves: er, I’ve just realised I mean that in pretty much every sense. It’s two acts, interval, two acts but lightspeed. Brilliant sets, complete with live rain, and a strong cast I completely bought.

One thing, though. Check the Birmingham Rep website for special offers: I just went on that so I could tell you when the play is on until and discovered that tickets were only a tenner tonight. They weren’t remotely a tenner when I booked a couple of months ago. I can’t pretend it wasn’t well worth the price I paid but I might pay more attention to that website in future.

Did you know the RSC’s doing The Seagull soon? I think this Chekhov lad has a future.

William

And with the last ‘un now submitted, my one-writing-pitch-a-day March is over.

I’ve still got eighteen to hear back from but otherwise the month went thisaway:

34 pitches
10 of this thing I don’t want to say
8 contests
7 project proposals
6 writing samples
4 rewritten scripts
4 new internet radio scripts
2 newly written short scripts
2 bad mistakes
2 meetings
1 theatre workshop

But the headlines must be:

4 rejections

and

10 leads (basically yes, all 10 for further work or pitching invitations)

William

As in getting up off one.

We’re almost at the end of March and I now know enough of what I’m doing to reveal my secret plan: I intended to spend March pitching and prodding at my scripwriting career. Every day, I decided, every single day in March I would enter a writing contest, send a sample to a producer, post or email a query letter angling to get to send a script to a producer, I would target a couple of TV agents (my current agent is solely for novels), or anything like that.

And though, as it happens, today was looking like the bleakest day of the whole tough, bloodied month, I found someone to pitch to – and got a response from an earlier pitch saying I could send a particular piece of material in. So that was two, I’ve got one outstanding writing gig to get right and I’ve got Friday full to the brim with meetings and workshops so even though it’s only March 28, I know I’ve succeeded in this month plan.

You know pitching and submissions take a time so my aim was to get something out each day, I wasn’t really that fussed whether I heard back from anyone. That’s part of the reason for doing this: not only are you getting off your backside but you get so each day is another pitch to get done and you can barely remember yesterday’s, let alone be too fussed if yesterday’s ended in a rejection.

As of this moment, having posted out today’s one about twenty minutes ago, I’m now waiting on responses to 19 things, which seems pretty good to me.

And otherwise, by the end of this month, I, the laziest man you’ll ever meet, will have done:

32 pitches*
7 contests
4 rewritten scripts
2 newly written short scripts
4 new internet radio scripts (not part of the month’s gig but written and performed)
6 full script writing samples to producers
7 proposals to producers
10 something I don’t want to say but they count, honest
2 stupid mistakes that I also don’t want to reveal

*one day I was asked for a script when I’d already done the day’s pitch

And in return I’ll have got:

3 rejections
6 leads
1 meeting
1 workshop
0 sleep

I also hope to have something in the BBC Radio 4 pre-offers round, but that depends how well I write March 31’s job.

Yes, I’m telling you all this because I think it’s good, but I’m also telling me so that I might do it again. Around March 15 when it was all going swimmingly, I thought about extending this into April but, as feeble as this sounds, I need to quit for a bit.

I just know that my backside is my problem, and it’s spreading. So things like this month’s plan might help me and definitely feel as if they’re doing me some good. Funny: I thought I’d had more rejections. I was just after telling someone that I had more rejections and that the good thing was with this one-a-day gig, I wasn’t fussed: I be disappointed yet ten minutes later I’d have to consult my list to even tell you which one it was who’d rejected me.

And rejections or success, I’m still going to feel glorious when I’ve sent out March 31st’s pitch.

So what do you think? Do you want to try this yourself? Or if you already do it, have you got any advice?

William

Hey,

So if you read my last, did you decide you would never look back at any old material of yours? Because I thought I wouldn’t. Too painful.

But you know where this is going, don’t you? I’m trying to get some material out there: I’m planning a pitch or a submission every day in March and so far I’m doing brilliantly. March 1, 2, 3, easy. March 4… I’m struggling already. But there are a couple of international screenwriting competitions coming up and I’ve done encouragingly well in those before yet then lapsed for years. So partly because I want to un-lapse, partly because it’s a Sunday so there’s no one I can phone to pitch to, I’m planning to spend today getting a submission ready and, well, submitted online or something.

Only, all the comps I can find are for feature-length scripts. Everything I’ve done lately is either rubbish or hour-long, quite often both, so I’ve just braved it and had a arms-length dig through my very own slush pile.

I didn’t say this to you last time because I was too embarrassed but that first script of mine was dated 1996. Eleven years I’ve been at this lark, it’s not very impressive. But eleven years ago I was unimaginably bad. And I’ve just found an old piece that doesn’t have a date but must be at least eight years old and it’s actually really good. It’s a piece called Embers.

You know there are things I want to change, of course, but Embers has good characters and it works. Suddenly the dialogue is good: it’s as if there’s a Tuesday some time when I learnt how to write dialogue. And I’ve said this often: if you can do dialogue, it papers over practically everything else you get wrong.

I’m a bit chastened that I didn’t do anything with this piece at the time. Well, I obviously did, the copy I found had a “for the attn. of” bit on the title page and the name of some long-forgotten BBC drama executive. But I abandoned it too easily and I’m an idiot. You know, naturally, that once you’ve finished writing a piece you should go straight on to the next and I think I was actually so caught up in the idea for the next one that I let this piece go. If I can face it, I’ve got that next one right beside me to read now. If I can face it.

I’m currently rewriting that 1996 script as part of a bet, to do a rewrite or develop an old, long-held idea in 15 days. (I take part in a regular script challenge, the idea to keep you working, to give you deadlines, to make sure you end up with at least something written down instead of months of prevarication. The current challenge – hang on, I’ve forgotten how to do links – is with Christine Patton and Piers Beckley. By all accounts they’re having a fine time reworking their stuff, I’m staring blankly at mine for hours at a time, wishing I had a dentist appointment.

And yet if I’d elected to rewrite Embers instead, I’d be delivering the rewrite this afternoon.

I might just change the names and pretend Embers is the old, bad one that I’ve brilliantly improved. What do you think?

William

Thanks to Laura for telling me that I’m rubbish at maintaining this blog and that spammers are proving to be rather better. I’ve now removed their, um, incisive observations about life and the need for medication.

But while I’m here… I was sitting in the pub the other night, as you do, talking with some folks who said how hilarious they’d found reading their old scripts again. You know the sort, you’ve maybe even got the sort, the scripts you forgot you wrote and are in various dusty drawers. Hilarious, they said, just really, really funny. How bad you can be when you start. They also implied that you feel great reading them because, no matter what, you’re better now than you were then.

I think I am. I’m cocky here, I’m a better writer than I was, I could do with a laugh.

So I dug out my very first completed screenplay, a piece called The Strawberry Thief. I still like the title, I thought as I opened it up. And 45 minutes later (I’m a fast reader), I closed it again, and thought: “Well, I still like the title.”

Can you laugh at your old work? Because I couldn’t. Not with this one, anyway. Untold agony.

So, in summary, thank you Laura and thanks a bunch you lot from the pub.

William

Wasn’t it actually, genuinely, thoroughly exciting about Michael Grade going to ITV? Ask anyone to name a British TV executive and they’d name him, he’s that well known inside and outside the industry. Okay, they might also name Greg Dyke. Doctor Who fans might name Julie Gardner. Drama nuts like me would point to Jane Tranter.

But even I used to haver if asked who was running ITV these days and I’m a dyed-in-the-polyester anorak.

I read Grade’s autobiography a few years ago and was a fan before but admired still him more afterwards. And I just looked on my shelves to tell you the title of the book and I can’t find it. Have you borrowed my book?

Anyway, I have worked for ITV but not really so much that it or I noticed, yet it’s been despairing watching it become like a cheap digital cast-off and Michael Grade’s move is the best news in many years. And speaking of years, he’s committed to staying at ITV for three, which means he’ll be 66 when he goes. Not sure I see that man ever retiring, but if he does, this could be a pretty good end to an astonishingly interesting career. Or a pretty bad one, depending.

And speaking of the future, the history is back: I don’t know the dates but Imagine has been re-scheduled for before Christmas and my feature has been ever-so-slightly cut down from two pages to about 40 words. It’ll be the TV Insider piece on whichever day Imagine airs. Please read slowly: it’s an expensive 40 words!

William

I was just after telling you this: “Currently it looks like Imagine… TV Pioneers will be on BBC2 at 22:35 on Tuesday 12 December but it’s still subject to change.”

It’s changed. The show’s been pulled from that evening and as yet has not been rescheduled. Consequently, and I suspect you won’t be surprised here, that Radio Times feature won’t run either.

Doubtlessly Imagine… will be rescheduled but I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts it won’t be this year. I almost hope it isn’t because I wouldn’t rate my chances of there being space in RT for the feature. Then even if it pops up next year, there’s always a strong chance there won’t be room because of bigger programmes in the same week.

And, um, yes, I do know why Imagine… has been taken out of the schedule but I can’t say.

w