I wouldn’t have been able to tell you it was a decade ago, and even now I doubt myself, but this week I found evidence of when I went to the single worst writing group in existence. I want to tell you now that the evidence has delighted me, except it’s also a punch in the face.

Follow. This group was so bad that it was funny. I spent a day with them and one of my clearest memories, clearest visual memories of a moment there, was when I was standing up across the buffet table from the organiser at lunchtime. And in my head I was saying to her, “Fuck you.”

The conceit in her and the room, it was grating and yet amusing. If I’ve told you before about one woman saying I should make my story be magical realism because she likes magical realism — and my replying that, well, I like chocolate — then I was telling you about this day. I don’t think I’ve mentioned how there was a schoolroom feel and that when I offered that I wouldn’t feel I had anything useful to say about a poet’s work, I was literally told off. That’s not how we do things, William. You have to wait your turn and then you must comment.

I waited my turn and then told the poet his work was shit.

Okay, I didn’t, and at this distance I don’t even remember whether it was or not. Even at this distance I’m still no more capable of offering any useful comment on poetry. I might like it, I might love it, but it is beyond me to be able to say why or to somehow offer suggestions for improvement. Write it better, I could say that. Make it less shit.

I could go on and on, this really was a whole day so there were hours of this stuff. But let me tell you one more incident because it directly relates to the evidence I found this week.

Another rule, William, is that when we are discussing your writing, you cannot say a word and I will thank you to remember that. Everyone discusses the piece, then decides on it, passes judgement or whatever, and only then may you comment in any way.

I got very fidgety during this segment, but I did as I was told and kept quiet until they pronounced their instructions for what I should change, what I should do next. Chief amongst these was that there was one woman character in my piece that they deigned to like fractionally more than the rest of these rubbish characters, and so I must develop her. I must. No argument, no disagreement, they had laid down the rule that I must concentrate the story on this character.

Which was unquestionably the best moment in the entire day because when I finally got to comment, I was able to ask them: “Do you mean the woman who died on page one?”

I can still see their faces. I’ve forgotten their names, but I can see their faces when I asked this. I don’t know how they missed this fact, but the character is referred to a lot after the first page. Maybe I had written it so poorly that no one could tell she died. Or maybe this group was just in fact an entourage for the organiser who needed her fans and as an outsider, I wasn’t one of them in any sense.

Okay, one more thing — I’m getting off the point, but this made me laugh aloud. That organiser phoned me the next day to inform me that, despite what I’d been told, I hadn’t joined the group, they had instead been auditioning me. And they had decided I wasn’t good enough, they’d got someone better. I think she started to say that she understood this was disappointing but that is the point when I was laughing.

Months later she phoned again to say this other person hadn’t worked out, so they were willing to let me join. Obviously I didn’t, but I can’t remember now at this distance whether I laughed again or actually said aloud “fuck you”. I can only hope that I chose the right one.

But here’s the thing. The group was ridiculous, fine, there is no question about it. Some of their comments to me were useful and I used them right there in the room, I actually changed the manuscript on my iPad in front of them, but most of it was borderline absurd.

And yet it got into me.

I went to them, when invited to, because I’d been told they rip the skin off your arms and that’s what I was used to with BBC News, that’s what I thought I needed. None of them, not one, would last a day in any newsroom, and while I liked some of their advice and thought some of the people were nicer than others, there wasn’t a soul there whose advice I would tell you I’d take on board.

Yet I did.

For years now, if I’ve told you about this day, I’ve also had to admit that I cannot remember what the story was that I showed them. And I’ve had to admit to myself that I abandoned it. Because of them.

I think you know where this is going.

Yes. I found that manuscript this week.

And I enjoyed reading it.

It’s 13,000 words of the start of a novel and right now, talking to you this minute, I really like it. I don’t know yet how to climb back into the story, and I do of course know that there is much I want to change. It needs more magic realism and chocolate, obviously.

But for the short time it took me to reread it after all these years, I was into it. Then I noticed the date on the file: it was ten years ago. A truly hilariously yet powerfully awful day slapped that manuscript out of my hands, out of my head, and has delayed me finishing it for a decade.

I want to finish it. I want to get back inside that story with these characters. I am unlikely to dedicate the finished novel to this group.

This is wrong of me, I have not one single pixel of doubt over it. I am wrong. Whenever any show is cancelled, regardless of what you thought of it, that cancellation means people are out of work. It means that a startling amount of effort from so many people is over.

And yet when I heard that the reboot of Frasier has been cancelled, I actually said “good” aloud.

To be strictly accurate, the show is gone from whatever streamer it was on and is now being shopped around to others. Shows have been picked up this way, but it’s rare. “Hello, our show was a total failure on Network X, it will be a hit for you.” Okay.

Plus when a show moves networks there are rights issues. Maybe the new network can’t get rights to those episodes shown before, so its set is incomplete and it will struggle to sell the show on in physical media or other territories. And maybe the originating network figures that if it’s going to get egg on its face when the show is a hit somewhere else, it had better not be cut out of the profits.

That’s for any show, and Frasier isn’t any show. The rights on the title character go back four decades and now across three series. They must have been untangled for the reboot, but that doesn’t mean they’re sorted for further use.

So Frasier is being shopped, and I should wish it luck, but good. Because this reboot was an ordinary, quite old-fashioned sitcom. Setup, punch line, reaction shot of Frasier or another character. Jokes felt like they happened on the beat, that each page of the script had spots for five jokes equally spaced through it.

It doesn’t, I’ve read the script, but I re-read it earlier this week and I wasn’t exactly stone-faced throughout, yet even today I cannot tell you a joke from it that made me laugh. Whereas I also re-read the pilot script to the original Frasier and I can’t count how many times this very old and most of all very familiar script has made me happy.

And that’s despite this. The original Frasier opens with absolutely on-the-nose exposition. Frasier tells us, in so many words, exactly what the situation is with his character since he was on Cheers. He literally tells us. Then, too, we’ll get a line that sets up the fact he has a brother, and the screen actually shows a title card saying “The Brother”.

In comparison, the Frasier reboot has characters asking Frasier what’s happened, how he is, all of that.

By the textbook rules of writing, the Frasier reboot is better.

Except it doesn’t even come close.

Those characters in the reboot are asking Frasier things they should already know and have no earthly reason to hear again.”Weren’t you travelling with your nephew?” asks this character as he picks up Frasier at the airport. “Niles and Daphne’s son?”

In the original, Frasier’s speech about his life is dead on the nose, could not be plainer, and it works entirely. He’s now the host of a radio psychiatry show and a caller has said they are depressed. “Let me use myself as an example,” begins Frasier, and we get a tight potted history of him. Plus we get a line I have remembered from when this show first aired. “Six months ago I was living in Boston,” says Frasier. “My wife had left me, which was very painful. Then she came back, which was excruciating.”

I could wish to write as well as the writers behind the Frasier reboot. But for that original pilot script and countless more, I can only dream of writing as well as the 1990s show’s writers.

It’s so long ago that I started this blog that I no longer have one thin clue why I called it Self Distract — except that I like the title and I’m a sucker for what I think is a good name. Today, though, if you would indulge me, I want to distract myself.

I’m in an aircraft about to fly to Dublin. Now that’s a subject I can talk to you about with ease: where I’m ultimately going on this trip, there is an airport vastly closer and more convenient. It’s Knock Airport and that place as the most absorbing history: it’s the first airport you come to when you fly from the US to Europe. That used to mean everyone had to stop there, it was as if that was as far as planes could fly — because it was as far as planes could fly. Knock is the tiniest of places and yet it had the biggest and most crucial of airports.

Now, all it’s got is that history and a new reputation for being unreliable. That may not be fair, but however few times it may have cancelled flights on what seem to be economic rather than technical or safety grounds, it’s been too many. It’s alleged that you can’t risk booking a flight to Knock any more, not if it matters what day you arrive. And Knock airport staff or some Friends of Knock Airport fan club would and maybe could prove otherwise, but the reputation is such that around ten of us are flying to Dublin instead. It’s as un-green as you can get: at least three hire cars driving across Ireland and then back again.

Necessity is the mother of having to be un-green and I really would rather I hadn’t said the word mother there. I’m going — we’re going — to my mother’s funeral.

And on that note, the fasten seatbelts and shut up your iPads sign came on, and was followed by 45 minutes in which I slept to make up for how few hours I got last night, plus how many miles I was going to have to drive.

I’m now where I’m going, we’ve had one set of family gathering, and as I write this, the funeral is tomorrow. Today I learned that coffins are extraordinarily heavy. And also, related, that priests make pallbearers wait with it on their shoulders while a rather long prayer is read.

Today I’ve realised that I ascribe locations to people. So for example, over the last twenty years or more, every time I’ve gone to Stratford-on-Avon, I’ve felt like I was stepping on a particular friend’s turf. I’ve felt rude for not telling her I was coming, I’ve felt guilty for crossing into her land.

And I’ve got the same thing now. After all of the parts of the funeral are done, I’ve got an hour in which I’ll meet an old friend for the first time. Writer Ken Armstrong lives near the hotel I’m in so of course I’ve got to take this chance to meet him, but again, I feel I’m on his turf. Driving in, I was struck by how these unfamiliar roads must be so familiar to him.

The roads themselves have no meaning, but the people who use them imbue them with familiarity and unfamiliarity.

I just keep knowing that my mother would have adored all this meeting up with family. She’d have been in her element. I’m in an element, too, but it doesn’t feel like mine.

Late at night on every Christmas Eve, I re-watch the film “Arrival”. I do so for many reasons but I suppose chiefly because it hits dead centre on things that matter to me the most, such as time and language. But I have now seen it ten times and I have read the script at least twice.

So there are some years when I wonder why I do it and I wonder enough that I come close to stopping. Now, as it happens, every single time I watch anyway and by the end of the film I am so into it again that I actually weep. Not because it’s a sad film, although there are desperately painful moments, but for a hundred reasons including how it is just right. You are taken to a point, you’re taken by writer Eric Heisserer to an ending that you then realise every frame was heading there, every moment was building to this ending and only this ending.

I suppose that’s true of every film but when it is done so well that you don’t realise how in control the story is, it is exceptionally satisfying.

But.

The film opens with what feels like a practically ludicrous number of production company animated logos. It’s actually only five and I’ve become fond of them. But as they rattled away this Christmas Eve just before midnight, I had that doubt over why I do this, and it was a greater doubt than ever.

Because Christmas Eve was eight days after my mom died in hospital. Part of me was dreading the opening of the film because of this — it’s a deeply and immediately involving but stabbingly upsetting sequence that involves a hospital — but also I felt silly. This is what you do with your time, I thought. You’re actually going to try distracting yourself from what’s happened.

I’m not sure why I carried on this time, but I did. Maybe it took me longer to get into it than usual because of all this, but the film was distracting, it was involving, it was rich a film as it always has been.

Only, I saw something new.

It’s always been there, I’ve always seen it, but I saw it with different eyes this time. If you haven’t seen the film then I am about to spoil it – and anyway I talk about it so much that perhaps I’ll wear you down into watching but definitely I’ll send you in with such expectations that maybe it won’t work for you. One reason for it having punched me so very hard was that I knew literally nothing about it when I went to the cinema that first time. I’m not certain I even knew the title.

But if you haven’t seen it, I hope you will and that it becomes as important to you as it is to me. So let me just say that this time its themes helped me about my mother, and let me just ask you to stop reading before I spoil it.

Here’s the thing. Of all that’s happened, the absolute anvil for me has been seeing a photo of my mother as a young girl. Somehow I’ve not seen it before, and it drove a sob out of me over seeing her there with her whole life yet to come. Seeing her while I know all that would follow for her, good and bad. Seeing her then while I know how her life ends. I’ve seen the end of any and all hopes that young woman had. The one moment captured in that photo represented a lifetime and a life that is now over.

The context in Arrival is very different but there is this key moment about seeing, truly seeing every moment of a person’s life. Seeing it in its entirety with all the good and bad. Seeing it not as something episodic that begins with that photo and ends in a hospital bed, but seeing it as one whole and appreciating it all.

Then the line that has somehow helped me, even as it makes me cry just telling you, is just this:

“Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it and I welcome every moment.”

There must have been a day, one specific day, when I stopped taking in quite so much new music. And while it will have been a different specific day, I suspect there must have been one for you, too.

Look, I don’t believe that the best music was written and created during my teenage years, but it’s still clearly the case that where I used to absorb a huge amount of new music, these days it’s more of a trickle. At best.

It’s also now oddly limited. I recently became quite obsessed with “Useless Desires” by Patty Griffin, yet only that one song, not even the whole album it came from. Similarly, the “There She Goes” cover by Sixpence None the Richer, but nothing else of theirs. Beth Orton‘s “Sweetest Decline“, but not even the rest of its album. With Deb Talen there’s a good four or five tracks from her “Lucky Girl” album, but it’s really only “Bring Water” I listen to repeatedly, and I haven’t even tried her half-dozen other albums.

Hang on. “Bring Water” was 2017, apparently, and that may be when I first heard it. “Useless Desires” was apparently 2004, but it’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve heard it and I vow that it’s the same with Sixpence, but apparently that comes from 1999.

Maybe 1999 was it for me.

For up to about then I was deeply into Bruce Springsteen, but after 1995’s “The Ghost of Tom Joad” there would be whole albums I simply didn’t notice were out. And even on that last album, it’s only the title track that sticks with me.

Similarly, Cyndi Lauper‘s last new album, for me, was “Sisters of Avalon” in 1996, although her kind of acoustically re-recorded greatest hits one, “The Body Acoustic“, was 2005 and I relish that. Oh! Dar Williams also did an acoustic greatest hits called “Many Great Companions” that I adore and that was 2005 as well.

There is hope for me still.

I was doing a thing recently where I realised there was no music for a week. Music was simply absent, like it was leeched from the environment or erased from time, and somehow even though I had my whole music library in my pocket, I wasn’t able to listen to any of it. I think I didn’t notice the absence until I left and driving home I had Mary Chapin Carpenter and Francisca Valenzuela in the car with me at full, vehicle-shaking volume.

We are music hunter-gatherers when we’re young and later it’s like there’s no time for it, no space for anything more. I think our sense of scale changes, too, and I was trying to avoid repeating the word time there, our sense of time, and instead I may have attempted a musical joke. I promise not to do that again. Anyway. Our sense of time: I still think of Francisca Valenzuela as new to me, but I’ve apparently been a fan since her 2007 album “Muérdete La Lengua“. Or Regina Spektor, but I found her through 2009’s “(500) Days of Summer” film by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber.

(Although god, “Spacetime Fairytale” from her 2022 album “Home, Before and After” is amazing.)

All of this music is in my head now. But in as near to literally as makes no odds, all music is in our phones and on our computers. All of it. We can randomly name a track and hear it immediately. Pretty much.

All of that music, devalued down to a monthly subscription price, and we don’t use it, we aren’t stocking up our every second with new artists, new albums. We’re just queuing for Oasis.

I want to be walking across Los Angeles late at night, as I did a few years ago, and being reduced to tears by then new-to-me Brandi Carlile track, “The Mother“. I want to catch up on what appear to be the last nine albums by Sheryl Crow that I’ve missed. I’m up to date with Suzanne Vega, but it’s still only her first seven albums that I keep coming back to.

And look, I know I’m being really specific about what music I happen to like and you must have your own, there must be music that matters to you that I’ve literally never heard of.

But then there’s this. I’ve linked every track I’ve mentioned, you could click to listen to at least a portion of any of it. Yet I doubt you will. We have a world of music available to us instantly, and I think we need that, I just think that at least after a certain age, after a certain day, we no longer absorb so much of it.

We’re no longer changed so much by it.

I don’t know, this thought just stops me in my tracks.

I do believe with every pixel of my being that the sole way to become a better writer is to bleedin’ well write. I’ve had advice and of course I’ve been inspired to the point of rage, but it’s backside on the chair, one word after another, that’s what gets it done.

And one measure, for me, of how I have genuinely progressed as a writer is that something no longer happens. Follow. I can’t count, I can’t even really imagine, how many books I’ve read or shows I’ve seen and heard and read that have been beyond what I will ever be capable of writing.

But there was a really key, formative patch for me where I would watch a 45-minute Doctor Who episode and for about 44 minutes I would entirely in the show, totally at its mercy and relishing the ride.

Then on minute 45 I would truly crash through the floor with depression that this was writing I couldn’t begin to match. Let me stress that even in the very deepest depressions about it, I was bloodyminded enough to know that nothing would or will stop me trying.

But we progress, we mature, and since those now long-ago days, I can look back at it all and appreciate how I have not had that same crashing depression from Doctor Who. Not even close.

Until I watched last week’s episode, “73 Yards” by Russell T Davies.

Buggersticks.

If you’ve not seen it, don’t let me sound as if it’s spectacular or earth-shaking. And apparently some people disliked it, but you can’t help them. And as much as I’ve been quite merrily enjoying recent episodes, with this one it was back to being totally owned by the story for however many minutes it was. Completely in it, utterly removed from reality, and then dropped back into my living room with the sense of the show knowing it had done a good job.

There was an important difference, though.

This time I wasn’t depressed, at least not so I’d admit it out loud, I was exultant. I believe that the one-hour television drama is the perfect storytelling form — okay, yesterday I read the script to the film “The Banshees Of Inisherin” by Martin McDonagh and that was exceptionally absorbing too. But, truly, no, one-hour TV, it is as precious and special to me as the three-minute pop song is to so many.

I keep thinking that, I keep saying it, and when you get something that — to me — proves it, it’s fantastic.

Funny thing, though. The finale to this season of Doctor Who is being shown in cinemas and I wasn’t fussed. Fine. Great. But this one episode takes me by the heart and ten minutes after it, I was booking a ticket.

Sometimes it just takes one thing, one piece of writing, to make drama that is alive and on its feet.

I’d best go write one then, hadn’t I?

I think about this a lot, but let me think about it quickly. A long time ago now, I was at Radio Times, reading a book in a break and when I looked up from the page, everything changed. I was at Radio Times, where I had so wanted to be, but now, one page later, one paragraph later, I was at Radio Times and for all I liked it there, it was no longer where I wanted to be.

The book was The Writer’s Tale by Russell T Davies and Benjamin Cook — a Radio Times writer at the time, as it happens — and the paragraph was a mention of some casting decision in Doctor Who. The punch for me was that I had written a news story for RT about that casting decision but from the dates in the book, I knew that I’d done this more or less exactly one year after the choice had been made. I no longer wanted to be writing about other people’s writing, I needed to be at the point when those decisions are made.

All of which is on my mind because it is so very often on my mind, but particularly today because it’s just happened again. And again it was because of Doctor Who.

Follow. You will know that there was a very good Christmas Special this year and that it was the first story for the 15th Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa. After it aired, there was a flurry of fan activity over one character who had two lines of dialogue, but made infinitely more observant viewers than me catch their breath. This character was played by Susan Twist who was also featured in “Wild Blue Yonder”, two episodes before. She played a seemingly different character, Mrs Merridew, and was certainly in a different time.

As I say, smarter people than I spotted this and, whumph, conspiracy theories ignited. This wasn’t chance casting, this was A Clue about future stories in the show. Amusingly, for me, you can read all about it in this article — on Radio Times.

But now.

Some 225 Doctor Who and Doctor Who-related scripts have been released online and one of them is for that Christmas Special, “The Church on Ruby Road”. Which was previously, as you learn from the script, going to be called “The Bridge”. Anyway, there it is, scene 3, page 6:

A WOMAN in the CROWD – a woman we’ve seen as Mrs Merridew in Special 2, a woman we’ll see a lot more of – YELLS:

I’d like to be as observant as viewers who spotted this, but I need to be writing, creating, making.

I need to write betterer.

I’m not 100% convinced that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences knows how films are made. Yes, I am thinking of how Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie have not been nominated in their main categories. (Gerwig was shut out of Best Director and Robbie out of Best Actress, but the “Barbie” film they created – Gerwig co-wrote it and Robbie created the project — are nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.)

Oddly, that bit about Best Adapted versus Best Original Screenplay gets questioned a lot and it’s one of the few really clear rules. If it’s based on any existing property, it’s adapted. So admittedly it’s unusual that the source material for “Barbie” is a doll instead of a book or play, but there’s no question that it’s in the correct screenwriting category. Even if it is easily the most original script I’ve read in such a long time.

I’ve worked on awards and I know there’s no such thing as a lock, a given, not when countless people are voting. But if something is a candidate for Best Picture there is something wrong when the director isn’t in contention for Best Director. I’m not sure that it’s the same for best actor or actress, but I do think that Margot Robbie was extraordinary as Barbie.

Where I am sure is over the writing categories. Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach deserve their Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. They won’t win: they’re up against Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan, for which I can only presume he’s made the dialogue audible this time.

My longer-standing problem and where I question the Academy’s concept of filmmaking, is in the history of the Oscars. To date, there have been 95 ceremonies and so 95 Best Picture winners. (It is confusing: there were two winners in the very first Oscars, covering 1927-1928, in slightly differently-named awards. Somehow it still adds up to 95 even though this year’s Oscars are the 96th.)

Assuming I haven’t cocked up the spreadsheet, out of 95 Best Picture winners, only 16 also won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and another 16 won for Best Adapted. That means only 32.68% of what the Academy says are the greatest movies ever made, also won any award for their writers.

That’s the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences saying that it doesn’t matter what the story is, doesn’t matter what any character says, really doesn’t matter about the characters at all, a film can still be the best without any of those.

I can just about see how Best Production Design or Best Makeup and Hairstyling could be done without the script, except no, I can’t: as talented as any film department is, they have to start with the script. The script says it’s set in a desert, the script says there are three women, two men, and a kid, and describes them.

It’s not all there on the page, I am not in any way trying to reduce anyone else’s contribution to a film, but none of it is there at all without the script. None of it.

So the Oscars thinking the script doesn’t matter two thirds of the time, yes, it makes me question how they think films are made.

But then at least the Oscars have always recognised that films are written. The British Academy of Film and Television Awards didn’t notice writers for the first 19 years of the BAFTAs. I’m not joking.

I don’t know how long we’re going to have to suffer through the hype years of AI, but we’re definitely there now and I can only wish that it will be over soon. I use AI apps for transcription of interviews and videos and audios, it’s fantastic how much better all of that is now that I don’t have to be the one manually winding back a tape a syllable or two at a time. And ultimately, that’s where we’re heading because that’s where we’ve already been: AI was the word of 2023, but AI was already behind at least many years of technology development that we already enjoy.

So when your iPhone suggests the correct spelling of Beiderbecke, or remembers that when you email me you usually also email these two other people so it offers you their names, that’s AI. When your iPhone offers you news headlines in the morning, it’s because it’s spotted that you regularly look up news headlines in the morning.

You didn’t once think it was AI, nor even Machine Learning as Apple has been calling it since at least 2016, you just accepted the suggested names if they were right and ignored them if they were wrong.

Android or iPhone, these devices have been using AI or machine learning for ages and it’s all good, none of it threatens our work, most of it helps and none of it gets in our way.

And yet at the moment I see people claiming that writers will be replaced by AI, or that writers can use AI in order to spend less time writing. I do believe that such people are the same ones who will tell you they’ve got a great idea for a film, they just need you to write it and they’ll split the millions with you.

But more specifically, I am now thinking of one claim in particular, a course that advertised itself as being how to use AI as your co-writer and muse. The workshop has been taken down so I can’t check the details, but I remember it being something about how AI can free you up to spend your time doing things other than writing.

Listen. Nobody is forcing you to write.

And if you have a problem with the thousands of hours it takes to write anything, the answer is not AI. It’s tough shit.

I don’t doubt that AI will get better, In fact, I think it will become so very much more useful for everyone that at some point quite soon we are going to forget the term “AI” and just think of it has how things work, if we think of it at all.

But if AI really does somehow get so good that it forges in the smithy of its soul the uncreated consciousness of its race, then I still won’t care. If you can’t be arsed to write it, I fail to see why I should spend my time reading it.

Or to put it another way, go read the script to Barbie and tell me anything but talented people could — or would — write that ridiculous, joyous, moving screenplay.

For a long time now, I’ve found it hard to watch The West Wing or read any of its scripts because real-life politics has seemed infinitely and painfully separated from the fictional politics in the show. It still does. But a few weeks ago, I came across a West Wing script online.

Nothing about the last few weeks has narrowed the gap between that show and this world, and this week the Conservative Party Conference here in the UK has made me scared and queasy. Yet despite this, and despite the rather more prosaic reason that I’ve read the script before, on August 22, I re-read Aaron Sorkin’s pilot script to The West Wing.

It actually hurt to read the idealism and the cleverness and the wit. But admittedly it also hurt because that script is now 24 years old. It is a quarter of a century ago, and I am therefore a quarter of a century older than I was.

I haven’t got over that. But in the weeks since, I’ve read a further 14 West Wing scripts. Season 1, episode 5, The Crackpots and These Women still irritates the kidneys out of me for its closing moments of such patronising crap toward the women characters. And season 1, episode 11, Lord John Marbury makes me want to slap people.

But Celestial Navigation (s01e15), In This White House (s02e04), and Bartlet for America (s03e09, script not online) are superb. That’s the word I wrote next to each script in the little list I keep so that I can go back to good ones. No analysis, nothing in depth, I just write “superb” or anywhere from there down to “utter shite altogether”, which even Lord John Marbury wasn’t bad enough to earn.

Although next to The State Dinner (so1e07), very unusually, I did say a little more. “Excellent. And I don’t think I will ever write for television. 468.” (It was the 468th script I’ve read this year.)

Only, I didn’t intend to talk to you about aging or my writing failings, I want to talk to you about a line from The West Wing, a famous line, which goes: “Crime. Boy, I don’t know.”

It’s said by Governor Ritchie (James Brolin) to President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) in s03e21, Posse Comitatus by Aaron Sorkin. I can’t link you directly to it because it’s not one of the half dozen online, it’s one of the sixteen or so that were published in a couple of books. You can still get this script in the second volume, which Amazon has just told me I bought on February 7, 2005. I’m not convinced I was even alive that long ago.

But anyway, “Crime. Boy, I don’t know.” There’s been a situation in the episode, there have been a lot of situations, and Bartlet the Democrat is talking about them with Ritchie, the Republican. Ritchie is the one who says this line when asked what he thinks. It’s a telling line that we recognise means Ritchie isn’t up to the job of being the next President.

So on February 7, 2005, when I first read the script, or sometime very soon after the show’s first US airing on May 2, 2002, I read or heard that line and was appropriately informed. Sorkin leaves you no question whose side you’re on — he’s very good at putting opposing sides together and not weakening whichever one he disagrees with — but here, Bartlet yes, Ritchie, no.

And to drive it home, a few minutes later Bartlet concludes the conversation and the scene with this line to Ritchie: “In the future, if you’re wondering, ‘Crime. Boy, I don’t know,’ is when I decided to kick your ass.”

February 7, 2005, that line worked and I got it as intended. May 2, 2002 or so, I got that line as intended.

But when I read it just now on October 3, 2023, not so much.

What was considered shocking back then, what was a sufficient signal to tell us this Republican is not a good choice, is nothing now.

I know that audiences bring something to any show, but this is a quarter of a century of being an audience to some truly miserable politics, it’s having been an audience to corrupt children playing at politics.

Now, even “Crime. Boy, I don’t know if I should tell you about the 91 that I’m charged with,” wouldn’t be shocking.

Shows and scripts are nothing without the writer, but the audience does bring something, I know. I just hadn’t really thought about how time brings something too.