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

The episode of Imagine… about the history of television is now due in week 50.

There you go, that tells you everything. Waddya mean, you don’t know from BBC week numbers? Have you got a second for a quick story? The BBC numbers weeks so that instead of planning for November 21, you can say Tuesday of week 47. Fine. Makes a lot of sense if you’re a TV or radio producer making, I don’t know, a six-parter: you can say it’s on weeks 10-15 or whatever. And it helps at Radio Times too.

Oooh, want to know a secret? Next time you see an issue of Radio Times, look at the barcode on the front. In the top corner there’ll be a two-digit number: it’s the BBC week number. You can’t believe how handy that is.

And I know I keep calling it a BBC week number when you’re thinking it’s a week, it’s numbered, it’s not a BBC invention. But just sometimes, it is. Week 1 is the first week of the year, right? What do you do if the first complete Saturday-Friday week begins on January 4th? I can’t remember the dates now but a couple of years ago when I was still doing TV reviews for BBC Ceefax, we had the situation where the BBC made one decision about what week 1 was, and the rest of the TV industry went the other. For an entire year I was lost: when they said a tape was for week 38, did they mean my week 38?

Er, that wasn’t the story. The story was this. BBC week numbers go from January to December. But my wife Angela works for the Health and Safety Executive and they also number their weeks.

From May to April.

After the first major holiday scheduling disaster, we’ve abandoned week numbers in my house.

William

PS. Week 50 is about three weeks away, we are in 47 now. 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.

I sat in on a recording for a DVD commentary yesterday: can’t tell you what the DVD is yet, not because I deliberately try to be awkward to you but I just promised. I’ll tell you when the DVD comes out and actually you’ll hear some of it, partly because I’m sure I’ll nick a few choice moments from the commentary track at that time, but also because the cast and crew answered my questions.

After I’d gone.

I went to this recording for a good dozen reasons, starting with how I wanted to meet the producer after we’d talked a lot, and because I really like the piece he’s working on. But there was also that the session was in the BBC’s Broadcasting House and I haven’t been there for work in a decade. Television Centre and BH, I don’t know what it is about them but they’re special: they’ve got that simultaneous feel of being alive now, of working to the future and of being steeped in the past. Er, so maybe I do know what’s special about them.

I know I’m an anorak here but I also know I’m not alone. However they did it, the BBC has made BH terribly important and just getting lost in the corridors again was fun.

So that was me, that was all I was after, but this ‘ere producer, ably demonstrating why he’s a producer, was determined to get me an interview with the writer of the DVD title. I wanted it too, I admire the guy’s writing, but there was a lot of work going on there yesterday: if I ended up being just a lemon earwigging the commentary from the control room, I’d be happy.

And in the end things did, inevitably, take longer than expected and typically for the best of reasons: it was a group commentary track and it sounds fantastic. I can’t wait to hear the ones for segments that I didn’t hear.

But I also can’t wait to hear my answers. I left in the afternoon but this producer suggested I leave a couple of questions for the writer and he’d get the answers recorded if there was time. I left there thinking this was a nice bloke who had no chance of getting them recorded: obviously his DVD comes first, there was also a limit on the studio time, and nobody in this world can read my handwriting.

Only, I just got an email from him. He did get the writer to answer my questions and what’s more, the whole group chimed in with the answers. Hopefully I’ll have the recordings soon and while parts relate solely to the project that was recorded this week, I might be able to steal some of it and get it to you in one of the next couple of UK DVD Review podcasts.

It’s just, well, eerie. The way it went, I said hello and goodbye practically simultaneously to most of the group who cannot have had any clue who was looming over them like that. And then while I was forlornly and, for a while, fruitlessly looking for the BBC Shuttle Bus outside BH, they were effectively talking to me.

I wonder if I’m being rash saying I’ll play you the bits of the tape I can. I haven’t heard it, I wasn’t there, maybe I’m going to get some beautifully recorded dialogue full of whispers saying “Who was that guy anyway?”,”Does his wife let him out looking like that?” “He has a wife?”

William

One day I’ll remember my username and password to get on to this thing.

If I could’ve remembered it yesterday, I’d have told you that the site I mentioned the other week, BBC Good Food, is up and running in every sense: I’ve seen the stats for the first few days and it’s just boomed into life. Please add to their good fortune by having a look at BBCgoodfood.com, especially if you’re a foodie.

There was a launch party for it in London last night, lots of drink, lots of food and – you’re already wondering this, I was wondering it, everybody else on the list was wondering it – yes, the food was indeed good.

But I also wanted to talk to you about the Radio Times feature I mentioned without actually saying what it was. I’ve delivered it and it was one of those that’s so much fun you hate handing it over, but I think by not saying what it was about I either looked coy or grandiose. That or rude, I’m havering. But it’s habit, sorry, a longterm habit that comes from how you never know what will happen to a piece.

For instance, I was commissioned for a magazine feature in summer 2005, wrote it, got paid quite nicely, and it’s never run. I was asked to update it this summer but fortunately it didn’t run then either because I completely blew the assignment.

And it happens. You haven’t told me what you do: is this the same for you? It’s rare that the piece vanishes, it’s more often that you get chucked off it – though that’s only happened to me twice and I found it much, much rougher when I was an editor and had to fire a writer – but it’s routine that something changes. With this latest one, for instance, that’s for Radio Times and it’s tied to one specific episode of a series so if BBC2 bumps that episode to January, my feature goes with it. (And BBC2 has been making an amazing number of schedule changes lately; the delay for production on Top Gear set cats amongst pigeons.)

Plus, if that show does air in January, it might be up against bigger shows and my feature shrinks to a paragraph. I expect I’ll have a byline on this one but there’s plenty in RT that I do which doesn’t; I think now that I’ve finished with it but even today there was a call about a detail so I never regard it as really finished until it’s on the shelf at WH Smith’s.

And I never, ever say what I’m writing about.

Except now. You read this far, how am I at tantalising? The BBC2 programme is an edition of Imagine… celebrating the 70th anniversary of television and I’ve honestly forgotten when it’s supposed to air but it’s soon. And RT is currently intending to run a feature about how Radio Times has covered TV since the start. That’s it.

But, grief, I had a good time doing it, most especially when I found a little unexpected connection. You think Radio Times came before television, because radio came before television, and, er, you’d be right, but wait till you see what I found.

William

…what else you find on the way. I’m doing a feature for Radio Times that’s involved researching back issues far, far further back than I’m normally supposed to for the On This Day column and it’s, well, it’s weird. The paper stock they used in the 1920s feels wrong, it’s sometimes glossier than you’d expect yet the printing, the actual text on the page, sometimes looks like it was done on a typewriter.

And the attitudes, the assumptions that plainly went without saying then but are mysteries now or hopelessly innocent. There’s going to be plenty of this in the final feature but I also kept finding things that are off the brief and though I can’t use them, there is one I really want you to see.

The Radio Times: April 18, 1924 issue, p149, col 2
“Amongst Bournmouth’s distinguished listeners is Mr Thomas Hardy, O.M., the great Wessex novelist, who has not hesitated to give helpful advice concerning the station programmes.”

Isn’t that fantastic? Thomas Hardy alive and being a right pain in the backside to BBC Radio Bournmouth, or whatever it was called then.

What’s “O.M.”?

William