I’m on BBC Coventry and Warwickshire local radio today, talking about the closure of TVC. [UPDATE: Listen to the audio here.] And when they rang me about it yesterday, I was ecstatic because it means I get to pour out my grief and who else in the world would listen to me?

Um.

Hello.

I’m kinda hoping you will. Because there’s this building, right, and it is massively important to me. Or it was. Shortly it’ll be three condos and a deli that aren’t all that likely to be important to anyone.

Important is a funny word, though. I don’t think anyone would’ve died without TVC in the world but there’s surely no one in the UK who hasn’t been touched by something made there. Surely there is no one in the UK who wouldn’t recognise TVC. You’ve already pictured it. Describe to me what the equivalent ITV building is. It’s called Network Centre and it’s on the South Bank in London. I defy you to picture the place. You might do better with Channel 4’a offices in Horseferry Road, London but I’ve been there and all I can picture is a slice of the front glass entrance. It’s very nice. It’s not TVC.

We don’t need to know where television is made – I’m secretly convinced that Sky TV is based in a Brigadoon kind of mystical place no one enters and no one leaves and anyway it is only visible once a century, unless it’s raining – and it’s not even true that all BBC television came from TVC. But you can’t make a place be memorable, you can’t design an intangible excitement into a blueprint, there is no process to get you affection in the bricks. So when you have this, when you have a building that matters, you can’t throw it away.

The BBC has thrown TVC away.

Usually you think there are two sides to everything, at least two, and that there are always good reasons for decisions even if you don’t happen to know what they are. Even if you disagree with them, you expect that there are good reasons that have convinced someone.

Not this time.

No.

There’s money, naturally. And that’s a good reason for somebody in the deal but not the BBC and not us. There is something strange in the BBC property department these days. It used to just be that they’d lost their rulers and calculators. So every few years there’d be an announcement that all of BBC news, for instance, will move into TVC, White City or Broadcasting House, one of those. And fairly soon afterwards the staff would spot that these places are nowhere near big enough so only some go. I picture people walking in carrying packing crates, seeing the offices are smaller than expected, and doing a Scooby Doo doubletake.

But these days we have TVC being sold off for a Mars bar and we have the Mailbox in Birmingham which the BBC has on a long lease but it’s left there anyway. There’s a Campaign for Regional Broadcasting which has noticed that Birmingham and the Midlands contribute most to the licence fee and get the least back – by far – but foolishly they’re expecting the BBC to make television and radio. They’re not counting how much the Corporation must be spending on those empty Mailbox offices.

I love the network radio studio at the Mailbox. But I’ve not done much work there so perhaps I could never have the attachment I do to TVC.

I remember my first day in BBC Television Centre. Having lunch in the canteen and trying to look like I fitted in. Nodding sagely at my new colleagues and secretly going weeeeee because just below the window was the Blue Peter garden. Passing Clare Grogan in the corridor and going weak. Then going red because she’s so small she was much closer than I realised and had seen me whimper.

Watching studio recordings. The amazing sight of the scenery staff painting the studio floor so that it looked like wood for a set they’d put up later. Passing the TARDIS on my way to get preview VHS tapes. Eating the most gorgeous bacon sandwiches from a truck round the back of TC1. Seeing the doors of that huge studio open as you went by. Sleeping in a quiet office overnight. Watching the London fireworks with Angela on the roof of the TVC carpark as 1999 became 2000

Passing a drunk drama producer who yelled down the corridor that it wasn’t possible, that I just could not be as nice as I seem. I cherish that moment but do note I never got any work out of him. I’m going to try being nasty. Grr. How did I do?

I worked all over TVC and that work so often meant darting about everywhere else. I came around a corner once and found three editors talking about me: they were from very different parts of the BBC and while unexpectedly ending up on the same joint project had that moment unexpectedly learnt that I happened to work for each of them.

My first job of them all was at BBC Ceefax which, when I began in the 1990s sometime, was sharing an office with Newsround on the seventh floor. It was right at the top of the doughnut, the round area you can remember right now and may even have a memory of Roy Castle and a presumably record-breaking number of dancers in this circle.

For my first five or maybe even six months I would take the lift to the top floor, turn right and run the ridiculously long way to the Ceefax office. Then one day I went up there with a colleage and she turned left instead. Ceefax was just two doors down.

Well.

It was a warren. And if TVC seemed alive to me, I know it was barely an echo of what it once was. By the time I worked there it was being run down and studios were empty more often than not. So I can only imagine the heartbeat of the place in its heyday. Even in my day though, it still had a strong pulse.

The last time I was in BBC Television Centre was around August 2011. I interviewed James Bolam for my book about The Beiderbecke Affair there. Just the two of us having a cup of tea. It was in the audience reception, a big space that you were shown into if you came to see a recording. During the day it was also one of the many places there to eat. I watched BBC internal presentations about forthcoming drama in that space. A different drama producer completely forgot to meet me there. A friend whispered to me that she’d had an affair. And it was where the BBC shop was. You’re more interested in the affair now, I know, but I can only tell you about the books I bought in that shop.

Sitting there with James Bolam, I was pretty sure it was the last time I’d be in TVC. You don’t usually know these things but I did then and actually so did he. Maybe not so specifically, but he knew TVC was under threat and we talked about what a loss it would be.

It is a loss. It wasn’t perfect.

But it was perfect.

There. I’ve said it. I truly wish I’d written Veronica Mars. This glossy, sort-of teen drama, sort-of Nancy Drew and completely sort-of hardly known in the UK is a pinnacle of writing for me. I put writer/creator Rob Thomas right up there with the Aaron Sorkins of this world even though I’ve not seen anything else he’s done.

Is that a bit hyped, do you think? Little bit? Save yourself some time, skip me and just watch the show. It’s on Amazon UK here and I am ecstatic to see it’s finally on iTunes UK. I’ve just bought it again now on iTunes, partly to get the HD version, mostly because I can’t remember who I’ve loaned the DVD to. (It’s also on US iTunes and Amazon US.) Thank you for that: I only looked on iTunes for you and there it was. Wonderful.

So, anyway. I like this show. And you’ll have heard, not least because I will have bellowed it to you, that this week Rob Thomas launched a Kickstarter campaign to get funding for a Veronica Mars movie. I can’t imagine how scared he felt launching that: the campaign needed $2m. And I can’t imagine how he feels now that it has exceeded its target and done so faster than any other Kickstarter campaign ever. I spent Wednesday watching the total tick up: you have to suspect he was glued to it too. We could’ve held hands. I certainly crossed my fingers.

The first thing I did on Thursday morning was check the total. I’ve nothing to do with this show, I believe dramas get cancelled for a reason and I believe that it’s a mistake going back to old ideas, but still I checked that total sitting on the side of my bed at 5am. 

Shows go through a certain cycle, I think. When they start, when you first tune in, you’re actively giving it a go, you are choosing it and you’re hoping it will be good. You give it a few minutes, maybe a whole episode in order to win you over but it’s like when you go see a standup comic: at the start, everyone in the audience is willing them to be good. 

I do know someone who watched the entire run of The Wire hoping to get to like it. But usually, a show gets a few minutes, an episode, maybe an episode or two if there is enough in the first ones to at least get you to come back.

But if you do like the show, if it is good, something happens. If it’s good enough, if you like it enough, it stops having to convince you, it stops having to win you over. And it becomes your show. Doesn’t matter that you have zero to do with it. Your family starts saying things like “we can meet up after your programme”. 

It’s nonsense, of course. It’s not your programme. It’s mine.

I’m not sure why I tried the first episode back in 2004: the sort-of teen drama idea didn’t appeal, the sort-of Nancy Drew didn’t grab me. But I tried the pilot and it was fun in an oddly bleak way. A couple of weeks later, I caught episode two and yeah, enjoyed that.

I then watched episodes 3 to 21 in less than a week. 

There are actually 22 in the first run but that 21st was the very best penultimate episode I can remember seeing. And you know this: as the last episode of something has to do a lot of work resolving things, it’s common for the penultimate one to be the absolute screaming best. And for the actual last one to be a bit of a letdown.

It took me more than a month to get around to watching episode 22.

And it was better than 21.

Don’t listen to me, listen to Stephen King:

“Nancy Drew meets Philip Marlowe, and the result is pure nitro. Why is Veronica Mars so good? It bears little resemblance to life as I know it, but I can’t take my eyes off the damn thing.”

Listen to Joss Whedon too:

“Best. Show. Ever. Seriously, I’ve never gotten more wrapped up in a show I wasn’t making, and maybe even more than those. These guys know what they’re doing on a level that intimidates me. It’s the Harry Potter of shows.”

I was late to the show and all these quotes and all my watching happened after the first season had finished airing. So on the one hand I was able to watch the whole run in near-enough one go but on the other I was also immediately aware that the ratings had been wobbly and the show was in doubt.

I was on holiday at CentreParcs in Sherwood Forest that summer. Cycling around the place, having a great time, and twice a day stopping by the information centre to check the web for any news. (This was pre-iPhone. I know. Crazy.)  I can see where I was, exactly where I was, when I read online that it had been renewed for a second season. This is a show I have nothing to do with and yet its renewal made my holiday.

Something similar the next year: ratings, holiday, checking, phew. Veronica Mars got a third run.

Unfortunately something not quite similar enough the next year: ratings, holiday, check, damn. 

Veronica Mars was cancelled and that truly upset me.

I write Doctor Who, I am a Doctor Who fan – actually, there’s a Veronica in one of my Who stories and she is named after Mars – and when that show got cancelled in 1989, I shrugged. That’s not a popular reaction amongst fans who see the cancellation as the BBC’s greatest mistake but I was – well, I won’t say I was glad because they might hear me, but the show had lost its way a long time before the axe. It was still the fans’ show but it was only the fans show: you had to be one to get anything from it. That’s a case where a show becoming your programme didn’t help it.

A similar thing happened with Star Trek: Enterprise: Google it now and you will discover that its last season was when it finally got good, when they finally got that show right. Bollocks. Only fans were tuning in so Enterprise gave up on the rest of us and we gave up on it. No one counters the fans because no one watched any more and besides, it’s just amazingly irritating hearing fans going on about their favourite shows. It reaches a point where you will never watch the series because they go on about it so much and they urge you so much to watch it, you’ll love it, give it a few episodes, a season or two…

Anyway, about Veronica Mars, my favourite show, you must watch it. Give it a few episodes. A season or three.

Veronica Mars was cancelled and people learnt to avoid me that day. People who’d never heard of this show learnt to leave me alone while I got over it. I wonder now if they thought Veronica was someone I knew.

Actually, that might explain some things.

Such as the card.

Well.

Anyway, you won’t be surprised that I do urge you to give it a go. You won’t be surprised that I backed the Kickstarter campaign the instant I heard of it. It was on under $300,000 when I chipped in my $40 and I ignored all the various rewards for backing it: all I want is the film.

What might surprise you is that I’m not going to say what Veronica Mars is about. Well, it is a detective show and I do think that its setting is extraordinarily rich and compelling, but it becomes richer and it becomes ever more compelling as you get into it. And I want you to get into it.

You can’t come to the show cold any more. I’ve hyped it, Kickstarter fans are hyping it, the show is so praised now that I can’t imagine you being easily won over. Instead of coming to it like it’s a standup comic and you want it to be good, you’re inescapably going to come to Veronica Mars with a prove-it chip on your shoulder. 

I worry about that. I worry that I’m going to take you off my Christmas card list if you don’t like it. But I also envy you. For years now, I’ve envied anyone coming to the show new: imagine having Veronica Mars ahead of you. You’re going to have such a good time.

And finally, I can imagine something like that too, I have some Veronica Mars ahead of me. Next year, I’ll be in that cinema watching a new story. Isn’t it simply joyous that a drama can get you like this? That the promise of a drama can be the best news I’ve had all week? I am ridiculously happy and excited and for ‘ridiculous’, just read ‘very’ or ‘tremendously’ or ‘damn right’.

You shouldn’t ever come back to old ideas, you shouldn’t revive something if it’s died. Unless it’s Veronica Mars. You never know, but I’ll lay odds that next year I’ll be wishing I’d written this movie.

You probably know about this but you definitely shouldn’t have to: there are these things called smart quotes and dumb quotes. If you think a smart quote is –

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

and that a dumb quote is –

I can haz cheeseburger

then that’s the way it should be.

But because Microsoft wants you know how very, very clever it is, there is unfortunately more to it and back in 2000, it irritated me the way it irritated a lot of people. When you handwrite out a line, you automatically begin and end a quote with quotation marks that look like 66 and 99. You do this because you’re normal. When you write on a Mac, you tap the one quotation mark key but it knows when you mean 66 and it knows when you mean 99, because it would, because that’s what it should do.

Windows does it as well but, god, it makes such a fuss. If it could’ve done, 66 would’ve been patented as the Microsoft 66 Quotation Mark Extended Pro for Windows and the 99 would’ve been in a Windows Value Pack, sold separately.

As you typed away in Microsoft Word for Windows, it would scamper along chucking red underlines for spelling, green for grammar and letting you see two straight quote lines for just long enough that you notice Word changing them to 66 and 99. They’re just quote marks, the whole smart thing was only in the whizzy changing them and you could let Microsoft have its fun, except that I used to write text in Word that would eventually go onto a website that wouldn’t recognise these smart quotes.

It could, it could display the 66 and 99, but it had no clue what Word was on about. Same with the 6 and 9 of single quote marks. And apostrophes. For similar reasons, it was a right bugger writing a pound sign and to this day you will see “pounds Sterling” written out in full in online archives rather than “£”. Just because Word fiddles.

You could switch off a lot of this junk but then every letter you wrote would have straight quotes instead of 66 and 99 and somehow you didn’t feel like using a thousand quids’ worth of PC hardware and several hundred pounds of Microsoft Word in order to produce documents that looked worse than your old typewriter.

So instead you’d write what you were writing and when you were done, you’d schlep through doing a search and replace changing 6 and 66 to straight quote marks. Then with 9 and 99. Because Word called the curly quotes smart, the straight ones became known as dumb.

And I got so tired of doing this at the end of every article.

Consequently, one of the most useful things I’ve managed and easily the most successful piece of writing I’ve ever done is not a book or a drama or an article but a macro. I wrote a Word macro that just did all of these searches-and-replaces for you. It’s no different to doing them yourself, except when you’d written them down once, Word would do them all, in sequence. Finish writing an article, run the macro, watch it make the changes for you.

Since I was changing smart quotes into dumb ones that the website could handle, I thought it was making the smart ones a bit thick. So I called it Thickify. 

I added Thickify to a button in Word and probably used it a thousand times.

But the success came because someone saw it and wanted to borrow it. Then they used it a thousand times. And so did others. And others. And others.

Thickify spread throughout patches of BBC Worldwide. I never knew how widespread it got but friends would tell me with amusement that they’d be in meetings in other offices where someone would say “make sure you Thickify that text” and nobody else there had ever heard my name. I also heard from friends who’d moved to other companies and taken it with them. 

And then I met someone in BBC Worldwide who demanded it be installed for her and was livid that it wasn’t already on her copy of Word. She complained to IT: didn’t we know she had a website to run? How could she be expected to handle copy for freelancers if she couldn’t Thickify it?

Today I do see that it was flattering: she believed my macro was a function of Microsoft Word and that its absence was not that she needed a favour having it installed, but that Word had gone wrong without it. 

But that day I wanted to walk away and leave her to it: Thickify was something I wrote to help and it helped a lot, but she somehow managed to berate and to blank me. 

That was years ago and it’s some years since any form of Thickify was needed but I still think of it every time I see someone bitching on the App Store that an app they’ll use every day costs a whole 69p. There are people who pirate 69p apps. Professional reviewers now list a price of, say, £1.19, as being a reason not to buy. And if you have paid your 69p, there are then people who think app developers are somehow raking it in and should make gigantic updates for free. 

I think people forget that people write these things.

I spend my life now in other people’s apps. My most-used is OmniFocus – I must’ve spent £80 on that in its various versions and I would pay that again today – but now close behind that is Evernote. That’s a note-taking app which is hugely more useful than that sounds and it is free. But you can pay an annual subscription to get more features and I’m going to do that partly to get those and partly because I appreciate the work that’s gone into it.

We don’t value software as much as we did, as much as we should.

Good thing that isn’t the case with all writing today.

Well, they are, aren’t they? Cucumber sandwiches tell you to be quiet and behave, that you’re in polite company and it’s business, they’re asking if you’ve polished your shoes and they’re warning you not to drink too much. Bacon sandwiches are much better, they’re all about slamming a mug of tea on the table, they’re saying ravenous and parched and that you’ve worked for these.

Here’s the thing. There is a way to see this thought, the whole bacon-sandwiches-are-loud bit, as poetic. I understand, it’s a reach. You’re a generous soul but even you would need to really like me, probably for us to be related closely and very definitely for me to have recently loaned you an awful lot of money, but it could happen, you could say this, it is possible.

Obviously I’m only saying this to you while we’re chatting, I wouldn’t go saying it in public. And I recognise completely that it isn’t full-on poetic poetry as I am unfortunately not at home to Mr Rhyme and it remains true that Ms Meter won’t take my calls.

It’s also not poetry up there with, oh, say, Emily Dickinson. I’d quote ‘hope is the thing with feathers’ to you now but I would weep.

Bugger.

Anyway.

Something in my eye.

It’s fine.

It’s fine.

Gone now.

I am obsessed with words and I’ve long been conscious that this ought to mean obsessed with poetry: there is no stronger use of text, I think. Instead, I’m rather scared of it and I come a long way around via incessant noodling and now a bath in a poetry workshop.

I’ve talked to you about the noodling before. I get all hung up on writers who use the wrong words and yet in doing so create something better, richer than the strictly accurate or grammatically correct lines would. Dar Williams’ “I am the others”, for instance, or the peculiar tale of how Suzanne Vega and I collaborated on a song lyric without her knowing it. (Mondegreen with envy.)

She still doesn’t have a clue about this and let’s keep it that way. If she came up to us now and overheard, if I went into shuffling my feet and trying to smile weakly, I’d be stumbling off into how she’s written this incredible ouevre that I love and admire and cherish but that I’ve also spent twenty years or more thinking about one word that isn’t in it.

That’s being seriously obsessed with words. Quick aside? BBC 7, as BBC Radio 4 Extra once was, long ago did a series of straight poetry readings: just one poem after another, no big embellishments, no introductions, just poem after poem. It was quite mesmerising and I realised during one episode that some of the poems I was hearing were actually Suzanne Vega lyrics. Just recited instead of sung. And they worked. They worked marvellously. Switch off the music in your head, give yourself up to the text, and you heard a new rhythm, a new power in the undertow.

I write prose and fiction and drama for a living but I obsess about poetry like a sports fan. It’s been this thing that I cheer and that maybe I know I could do better than that, come on ref, you’re blind, Ee Aye Addio, skin him, skin him. But I’ve never played.

Not quite true. I wrote a song lyric in a script once and it killed the script, but it was a lyric.

A friend, Laura Cousins – you’d like her, I must introduce you – once challenged me to write a song after seeing something in my twitter style that doesn’t exist. I failed. Officially we’re still talking, but we started it eight thousand years ago now so our first album may be a ways off just yet.

But a few months ago I was interviewed on BBC Radio WM by Charlie Jordan. And around the same time I met Laura Yates. And kind of around the same time ish, I met Gary Longden. These are three people deeply involved in poetry in the West Midlands: all these years I’ve been living on the M1 to London, this is the kind of people I’ve been missing out on both in Birmingham and in London.

Laura Yates sent me a Facebook invitation to a poetry event. I scan-read it on the run and saw that she was organising it, that Gary and Charlie were (I thought) performing at it, and of course I fancied that. I’ve seen Gary perform, I’ve not heard Charlie’s poetry but I’ve heard her perform on radio, I’m there. Except it’s not them performing, it’s them running a poetry workshop.

I must’ve known this before I signed up but there was this long period where consciously I knew what I was getting into but unconsciously I was still thinking it was these fine folk performing a show. So I didn’t get the tight-throat worry until a few days before. I checked but nobody close enough to me had died, my hair was untidy and needed a cut but it was unquestionably already washed, I had to go.

I did not ask them to be gentle with me.

I did not.

Stop it.

Anyway, by odd, random coincidence, they were gentle with me.

Was it fifteen people? I’m not sure now, I just saw them at first as this wall of people who were at the very least experienced poets if they weren’t also professional, if they weren’t already making their living from poetry. I put away a verse I’d been working on about a young man from Nantucket and listened.

Alan Plater said once that poets write about themselves, dramatists write about everybody else. I was conscious during the workshop that I probably belong heart and soul to drama, then, as I find it incredibly hard and worthless to focus on myself and what I’m seeing, what I’m feeling, in order to write something that can convey anything to anyone else. I don’t really care about me, it’s like I know all about me, I was there at the time, I saw me do it, whereas, come on, you’re new, I don’t know what you’ve been doing, you’re much more interesting.

Now, I do write a blog, I’m obviously not shy about expressing myself, but I’ll say it again: I write to you, I don’t go around trying to write to the world. And these poets were instead finding immensely personal thoughts that came from far within themselves yet somehow also chimed universally.

I say somehow but the how that some of them did was work and thought and talent and skill. It was so impressive that you would long for them to all be bastards.

They let me down there.

Over lunch, bacon from a nearby café called to a few of us. At first, I’d say that these poets were quiet and reserved, I’d say that the bacon sandwiches were noticeably louder, but poetry and food and amazingly cold weather brought us together into a right huddle of nattering and sharing. I liked being with them, I liked visiting this world where people are as obsessed with words as I am but are actually doing something with their obsession. It’s a place where I feel like a tourist but the natives were so friendly I noodled about buying a timeshare there one day.

Back at the workshop, Charlie was particularly encouraging about my now deeply personal Nantucket poem. Laura Yates has since half-encouraged, half-goaded and all-challenged me to write more. (You’re wanted too, you’re not getting out of this: have a look at Write Down, Speak Up on Facebook.)

And because of them, because of the workshop, I’ve spent the last week thinking and thinking and obsessing. I have a poem. I have an actual poem.

Well, I say an actual poem. For once I will claim without any fear of disagreement that it has the finest rhyme I have ever done. Because so far it’s one line. There is nothing to rhyme with it yet.

It’s also currently three words long.

I do believe that it can take a week to write three words. I do believe that words can take that work, that they can be worth that work, that three words can be stronger than a thousand.

But unfortunately what I’m supposed to be doing this week is writing a book and my target was 10,000 words.

So, excuse me, it’s 5am on Friday morning and I have to go write 9,997 words really, really, really quickly.

Well. I might get breakfast first. You know what I want to eat now, don’t you?

Last Sunday I spoke at Birmingham’s Tell Me on a Sunday storytelling event at the Ikon Gallery. Eight speakers, 120-odd in the audience and Cat Weatherill specifying only that we had to tell a story, that it had to be a true one, and that it had to be a true story about a Strange Encounter.

I had such a good night. I wish you’d been there. Well, I do now: I was so nervous before it that I specifically wished you wouldn’t. But now it’s done and it went so well, I’m burning to tell you my tale.

Are you sitting down? Do you have a biscuit?

Photo by Joanne Penn, Writing West Midlands

Hello.

I need to tell you about a Strange Encounter… of the Third Kind. My true story has aliens in it. It’s the story of a night that has stayed with me – well, it would, wouldn’t it? It has aliens in it.

I was 16 years old in 1981. I don’t think that when you’re 16 you actually make choices but it’s that time in your life when choices come together so if you’re going to be a sporting person, you are, you will be then. If you’re going to go Goth, there’s no better time. In 1981, there weren’t a lot of choices. I rejected sport, rejected Goth, considered New Romantic. What I went for, what I chose to be was… a fan of science fiction.

It wasn’t the most fashionable thing at the time.

But what we had here in 1981, we had the Birmingham Science Fiction Group. Actually, it’s still running. It’s big now, websites, conventions I think, and even when I was there it had been going ten years and it was very serious, very respectable. And it used to have meetings in the Ivy Bush pub on Hagley Road.

Now, there’s one thing you have to allow me some licence with. I am a journalist and I have got to be accurate but I’ve not been back in that pub since this night and while I promise you this is a true story, the one thing I can’t quite hold in my head is the geography of this pub. It’s a small corner one, I remember it feeling bigger on the inside. I just can’t remember and if you know that it’s smaller than I make it sound, just keep in mind that to a 16-year-old it was very daunting.

A black, icy-cold winter’s evening. Stepping into the very warm, very busy pub. So many people. All sitting in groups. And I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me until then but I had no idea what anybody from the Birmingham Science Fiction Group looked like. You wouldn’t. No websites, no Google image search. I think I’d written them a letter. Maybe they’d written back. Maybe I phoned one of them. But all I knew was the time and the pub.

This is one specific lesson I learnt that night: if you don’t know something, ask. I realise that sounds obvious, but an awful lot of men never learn it.

So I went right up to the nearest table. I was so young, I can feel the nervousness, but, really, what were they going to do?

“Excuse me,” I said. “Are you the Birmingham Science Fiction Group?”

They raised their glasses to me and as one said “Sod off, geek.”

Okay.

Next table.

And this one, thank god, this one said “Yes”.

They budged up too, eight men at this table squeezed me on at the end. I can see every face to this day. They seemed so old. Looking at them now, closing my eyes and going round that table, I know there was nobody there over 19.

But they seemed so old, it seemed so serious and big. The world is a very different place now but then, 1981, being in a pub felt very adult. I’m in a pub meeting and I feel very big. Also worried that I’ll have to buy a round when I haven’t much money.

Lenny was talking. He wasn’t like a leader of the group but he was in the middle of telling them all a story.

No, actually, that’s the wrong word. He wasn’t telling them science fiction, he wasn’t telling them fiction at all. He was recounting something that actually happened to him the night before.

The night before. When he met aliens.

You were wondering when the aliens would come in to this. In 1981, I was wondering why aliens came into this.

But all these people, all these old men, whatever Lenny had said to them before I got there – whatever he’d shown them, maybe – they were sold. They believed. This was real. They were leaning in really intensely. So I leant in, really intensely.

And Lenny really quickly gave me a catch-up, a Previously. The night before, he’d left work  –

– Lenny had a job! I was so impressed –

He’d left work and driven –

– Lenny had a car!

He’d left work and driven up to the top of the Clent Hills

– I wasn’t that fussed about the Clent Hills

He’d left work and driven up to the top of the Clent Hills with his girlfriend.

– wow.

And they’d gone to do something. I wasn’t really clear what. But at some point during the… er… proceedings… the Earth moved.

The Earth moved and the car shook and where it had been a pitch-black, ice-cold winter evening, suddenly it was as if it were warm daylight.

They got out of the car. And overhead, over the Clent Hills, was this shining, glowing disc. It was spinning slightly and Lenny said that as it span you could feel it somehow. Feel it running through you. It felt like alien engines working to keep that spinning disc completely still and level right there in the very bottom of Earth’s gravity well.

– Lenny knew words like gravity well. This was so real.

He and his girlfriend held hands. And after a moment, she starts tugging at him, she wants to run away. You can’t run away from this, he’s thinking, why would you leave this? He angrily shakes her hand free. But she wasn’t trying to pull him away.

She was holding on to him as something was pulling her up.

And when he let go, she started zooming up into the air.

He should have grabbed her hand.

Her waist.

Her ankle.

He should have done something. But he let his girlfriend be abducted.

And I think he deserved the fact that she had the car keys.

So he’s got no choice now, he’s got to run. Now, I don’t know if you know the Clent Hills but they’re not very steep, at the top there it’s quite a gentle long slope. But it’s not as if he’s running, it’s more as if he’s falling forward, scrabbling, tumbling and he’s going down faster and faster when – whump. There’s a fist-sized punch in the centre of his back.

It should have sent him flying. But instead it held him. Grabbed him. And began pulling him back.

He’s reaching out for branches to grab onto but this is the roadway, there are no branches.  Nothing to hold on to. He’s trying to scrabble in the dirt and all the little stones are being kicked up – until suddenly they’re not. His feet aren’t connecting with the ground at all. He’s been picked up into the air and he’s being pulled back up the hill.

As he gets back up there, tugged back to the very top of the hill, this thing, this thing that had grabbed him, wrenches his body around so that he’s facing the glowing, floating alien ship. Where a small black square opened.

Now, the next night in the pub, he’s trying to explain what that was and the best he can tell us is that it was like it was a speaker. But it wasn’t making sound, that wasn’t where the sound was coming from. Somehow the sound was coming out of him. Alien voices were coming out of him. Trying to come out of him. It was as if aliens had read all about vocal chords and the larynx but it was their first time trying to use them. Lenny said blood came out alongside the rasp of words.

Sitting in the pub, he’s gone pale, he’s started to sweat. Forget all the other groups in the Ivy Bush that night, every single person in that crowded pub was listening to Lenny. Riveted.

His hand went to his throat as he described the feeling of it being used, being taken over by alien forces.

And Lenny started to rise.

Right there in the pub, right there in front of us, he starts to rise.

And suddenly his eyes roll back in his head.

This isn’t Lenny anymore.

This was alien.

And it spoke.

It spoke.

That rasping, horrible, agonising voice.

It spoke to us.

And it said.

“William. You’re at the wrong table. The geeks are over there.”

You’ve got this image of me as the rogueishly handsome, witty, athletic sort and I don’t blame you, that’s just the way it is. But for me, I really don’t like mentally slotting anyone into a type. In fact, I don’t even like to think that there are types of people.

But there are.

I used to work at Radio Times magazine and on their website. Until a couple of years ago, Radio Times was part of the BBC. And I don’t know what it is but the BBC attracts an awful lot of intense young women who are always named Charlotte.

They’re always very clever, very quick, tend to have good broadcasting voices, just really smart people who are very switched on and aware of their whole careers. They’re also always poorly paid so they pull off a very inexpensive fashion style, making a lot out of a little. Very arty.

Clever, arty, talented. This is exactly why I pursued Angela for so long. Um. I’m starting to regret where this story is going now. If you’re reading, Angela, we’ll talk it through later.

So.

Charlotte.

There was this woman named Charlotte.

Look, she was in the Art Department at Radio Times, okay? Arty, clever, so clever. Art and talent and cleverness, very sexy. And I am a man, it helped that Charlotte looked very good.

Now, it’s not like I was hoping to do something. I was very luckily married. But there are just people who you would like to like you. You feel great when someone smart likes you. And talented and sexy.

And Charlotte seemed to like me. Let’s be really clear here, you know she didn’t fancy me, I want you to know that I knew that. Nothing like that, stop thinking that. This is a family show.

But we met in some production meeting, shook hands, I was actually a little knocked back by her. I mean, yes, I’ll say it. Beauty. Kind of a verve, a vibrance. And I can’t remember what the meeting was but I went in thinking some particular thing and I came out thinking another. She’d changed my mind about something. I love that. Inexpressibly great.

So the next day, I’m in the kitchen. At this point Radio Times was in a long, modern building. Did you watch The Thick of It? That was filmed in the Radio Times offices.

Open plan, long lines. If I stood up at my desk I could see one way up through the whole magazine, I could see right into the kitchen the other way.

So the next day, I’m in the kitchen.

And she comes in.

I start telling her how much I enjoyed the meeting.

And she said it.

It’s not like I was asking her out, but she acted as if I were and – this was no act, this was heartfelt – as if that would be a shudderingly upsetting concept. Please remember that this is the day after I’d first met her and the day after she’d made such an impression me. And injecting disgust into every syllable, she said: “Who are you?”

I mumbled something, I don’t know what, I was very stung. Slapped, actually.

A month goes by.

We’re in the same office but we haven’t had another meeting, thank god, and without any effort on my part, we’ve just not happened to cross paths.

Until…

I’m back in the kitchen.

And she comes in.

Smiles at me.

Asks me something.

I have no idea what.

I just remember blinking.

Okay.

Okay.

Don’t understand.

But it’s better.

Except, I must’ve said something really stupid then because later that same week, she was coming down a corridor toward me and stepped into an office rather than meet me.

I wasn’t imagining this. Really, wasn’t.

Remember the meeting? And the thing I was supposed to have an opinion about? That she changed? She’d still changed my mind, she was right, I was wrong, but now I was actually having to do whatever it was. Really can’t remember. Something on the website. Something big. No clue. I’ve forgotten the work, I just remember the people.

And the last day of me and Charlotte. I remember the last day really well.

Mid-afternoon.

I finish. I hit the Publish button on the website.

And I stood up. Stood up at my desk to stretch. Looked up the room. And there she was. Charlotte. It was like that Pizza Hut advert or maybe Stardust Memories when all the Good People are over there, having a great time, and you’re outside it all, watching. forever separated.

And I thought, bollocks to this. I don’t understand how she’s making me feel like a schoolboy, but she is and it ends today. Let it go, William, forget it. Enough is enough.

I took a breath, I looked at Charlotte one last time, and then I turned my back on her.

Turned my back on her, turned my back on the Art Department, turned my back on the whole thing.

And I stood there, facing the kitchen instead.

Where Charlotte was making tea.

A friend calls this ‘The William Gallagher Method’ and I have yet to forgive her. She called it that to my face and she called it that when she sent notes to someone who had missed my talk at the Birmingham PowWow LitFest last year.

Her notes state that I get up at 5am to work every day.

And she bases that claim solely on the tiny fact that I said so on stage.

But, look, I was asked what my writing schedule was and at that time I’d just finished a Doctor Who (which comes out later this month, by the way). It’d had a short deadline, I was already doing other things, I just meant that every now and again I’d had to be up that early to get this finished.

But this friend – let’s call her Anna Lawrence Pietroni and mention that she has a rather beautiful and absorbing novel available now on Amazon – what was I saying? This friend Anna wrote down my 5am lark, told people about it and, worst of all, gave it a title. And it has crippled me with guilt that the one person you would reasonably imagine would use The William Gallagher Method has been doing anything but.

Until.

Entirely because of this guilt and not at all because I’ve so much work to do, I now follow The William Gallagher Method faithfully. I get up every day at 5am and with a banana in my hand, a pint of water on my desk and a song in my headphones, I work through to 7am or maybe 8am before stopping for breakfast. I’ve been doing this for five or six weeks now and it is with the very greatest of regrets that I have to tell you that it sodding works. I write better, I write more, when I do this. For God’s sake, why? Why is my 5am writing better than when I start at 7am? Or I’m freelance, why isn’t my noon writing good enough?

There is some trickery involved.

Every weekday morning that I do get up at 5am, I put a one pound coin in a pot.

So far, so what?

That’s not the trick of it.

The trick is if I don’t get up at 5am.

You’re thinking that I don’t put a pound coin in or maybe, if you’re very cruel, that I have to take one pound coin out as a kind of punishment. You’re very harsh.

But not, as it happens, harsh enough.

If I fail to get up and be working at 5am on a weekday, I take out all of the coins I’ve ever put in. Empty that pot completely and start again from nothing.

It hasn’t happened yet.

Every weekday, the pot grows and makes the thought of giving it all up for one lie-in just harder and harder.

Do you know, I have only this very instant thought to wonder: did Anna only write down The William Gallagher Method or does she actually do it?

Sorry, that popped into my head there and distracted me. Did you ever see Up? There’s that moment when the dog thinks there’s a squirrel and its concentration is snapped to the left.

Hello. That was me, a moment ago.

So what was I saying? I get up at 5am, yeah, yeah, brutal, show off, who cares. There. That’s a kind of ‘previously on this blog entry’ description.

Here’s the thing. As you can imagine, I don’t see midnight much any more. (This kills me. Going to bed before midnight is just wrong. Wrong.) But sometimes I do. Such as Thursday last week when I nipped to London for a thing and nipped back, getting home around maybe 1am. That was a 5am to 1am working day. Fine.

But I couldn’t sleep. Time was ticking by.

And I was really tempted.

Not to put the alarm back a few hours, this had nothing to do with getting up: I was still going to get up at 5am, no question, no doubt, surprisingly little hesitation, but I was seriously tempted to stay up longer to hear about the debut of OmniFocus 2.  That was coming at 6pm Eastern Standard or 2am William Standard Time.

Notice I said the debut. Not the launch. Not the sale. Just the first unveiling of what this software will look a bit like. Not even a lot like: this was the first viewing of a software you’ve never heard of and which will be released later this year looking at least a bit like this and with these features but many more.

And, god, I was tempted. I did a blog about the original OmniFocus last year and it was surprisingly popular. I thought I was the only one who got excited about this To Do application. Or any To Do applications. My one thimble of an excuse is that I wrote about them for a Mac magazine a while ago. And I recommended OmniFocus. I said something like “First it will destroy your mind, then it will own your soul”.

If you have an iPad, just go get OmniFocus. If you have an iPhone, just have a very good think about getting OmniFocus. If you have a Mac, wait a second. (Find out about them all at the Omni Group site.)

I have and use all three and they are transformative. My wife Angela says I am lighter because of this software. And that’s despite my taking on far more work than before.

But it’s fair to say that the iPad one is gorgeously powerful and easy to use, the iPhone one is powerful enough and good to use, but the Mac one is sock-knockingly powerful yet hard to grasp. OmniFocus 2 is promised to take a lot of the gorgeousness of the iPad version and bring it back to the Mac. It’s not that there is going to be a lot of new functionality but there will be bits and it should all be easier to work with.

It is ridiculous how tempted I was to stay up to find out.

And it’s not at all ridiculous that even as I was in bed, thinking about all this, it was suddenly 5am and I had to get up.

I’m glad now that I didn’t stay up because while the event was at 2am WG Standard time, actual news from it didn’t start surfacing for a good six to eight hours afterwards. And the video of the event was released last night, exactly a week later. I’ve been watching for it, now I’ve been watching it.

But two things. First, just because I really like this: Omni Group makes a lot of software that I have no use for, things like OmniOutliner, OmniPlanner, OmniGraffle. (Every now and again I look up what in the world OmniGraffle does, then I go oh, right, and seconds later have forgotten again.) But now the company is launching a product called OmniPresence.

I don’t care what it does. I just like the name.

Here’s the other thing. I thought I was alone in this and I’m looking at you now thinking you’re looking at me like that and maybe I should’ve shut up when I still sounded all virtuous and righteous for getting up early. But when one particular feature of OmniFocus 2 for Mac was revealed at the debut, writer David Sparks was there and says on the video that it made him pee a little. And I understood. Yes.

There’s not enough time. Getting up at 5am helps, living in OmniFocus helps a lot. And do you know what it helps with most? Not the working, not the getting everything done on time, but with the relaxing afterwards. Right this moment, I know where I am with everything, I know exactly what I’ll have to attend to next and I also know that I can relax here with you, that we can talk.

Mind you, it is 5:30am and getting up this morning was especially easy since I haven’t been to bed yet.

Maybe I should write about falling asleep at 5:31am.

Maybe I could’ve picked a better topic than peeing about software, but.

Anyway. Join me. Join me. And start here with the firm’s news blog about OmniFocus 2 for Mac.

LONDON, UK – In the greatest single transformation of the British political system since its inception, the country’s government is to become a charity run by volunteers. Current Prime Minister David Cameron announced what would previously have been called a green paper but he insists be referred to instead as a “done deal”.

“Decentralisation, devolution and empowerment are naturally part of a Conservative approach to government,” he said. “We’re replacing the military with brave volunteers in the Territorial Army, we’re encouraging more unpaid special constables in the police by a vigorous programme of cutting back on all forces and services. I’m personally determined to get rid of all social workers, retail staff, doctors and other scroungers who are pulling our nation down. To all the sports people who were so great at the Olympics I say thank you, done that, we don’t need to fund you anymore, look at the games makers. They didn’t whinge.

“This government will now become a charity. This is the natural next step in bringing power back to the people, it is the next step in securing Britain’s bright future, it is the ultimate step in our Big Society.”

Work on transitioning to volunteer charity status has reportedly already begun and the entire system will be in place by May 6, 2015. “I know that cynics will be looking for some significance in the timing of what I am calling the Great British Charity, but it is simply and only because this is a vital process and we want to help people to be ready for it, to know when it is happening. So purely to help, I have set the final switchover for the day before what would have been the next general election.

“There will be no more general elections. We know because the people have told us that general elections are a waste of time, that you can vote for the party you want but nobody wants the one that gets in. Completely inefficient system. I mean, there have been periods when we were not in power. Clearly that’s not a democratic political system working the way it should. So, from now on, nobody in the cabinet will be voted in and everyone in the cabinet will be a volunteer.

“I freely admit that mistakes have been made by the previous government. It’s time to move forward. Britain is great and what makes it great is its people so that’s who should be in charge. Now, I accept completely that this is a huge change and that it will take time to get used to. I accept that it raises questions. And of course I accept that it has never been done before and is certain to be disastrous for the country. I accept all of this but to you doubters with your evidence and your irrefutable statistical economic proof, I say “Same old, same old, tell me something I don’t know.”

“What I am going to do, what I promise today to each and every person in the British Isles, is that your new charity government will be formed with great care. Yes, we have to avoid women and yes, of course the British government cannot be run by people who have chosen to be gay or who happen to be black through no fault of their own.

“But these security issues, as important as they are, are already done for us. They’re already done by the boarding schools that every one of us went to. And I tell you now, if you went to a good school and you are independently wealthy enough to be able to survive in London just on MP’s expenses, you are the kind of volunteer this nation needs. You are the kind of open-minded volunteer with a diverse range of experience right the way from Eton to Harrow that our nation will get.”

Acknowledging the concerns of journalists at the announcement, Cameron concluded his speech by saying: “I vow to you, as a Conservative, that the public can be assured: there will be no change to frontline services. The Great British Charity government will continue to provide smugness, ignorant disregard for the effects of policies on anyone not actually in the cabinet and there will be no decrease in any of our periodic scandals. You can trust me on that one at least.”

Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg was at the press conference, probably, and would’ve been saying something about how the Liberal Democrats were ready to form a coalition with the Great British Charity volunteers or something.

ENDS

Downton Abbey beat Doctor Who and Sherlock to the prize of Best Drama at the National Television Awards this week and the odds are that you know that. Skyfall was snubbed at this year’s Baftas and that made the news too. Lincoln looks a shoo-in for a Best Picture Oscar even though Les Mis probably deserves it.

But name last year’s NTA drama winner. Or Bafta. Or Oscar.

I used to know this stuff. I worked for Radio Times, I worked for BBC News Online’s entertainment section, I had this stuff at my fingertips and it was important. Today I can’t tell you without cheating – and I don’t only mean searching Google for last year’s winners. I just had to search for this year’s nominees too.

In 2010 or 2011, I cut a short promo video for Radio Times that had Dermot O’Leary calling for us all to vote in the NTA Awards. The script was funny and clever, he delivered it very well but I knew I wouldn’t vote. I studied that video almost frame by frame: it was the first time I’d replaced green screen with a new background and the studio’s green backdrop was crinkly, sometimes a shard of green poked through the video. So even now I can bring to mind every gesticulation, every beaming smile, every joke of that video. But I still wasn’t persuaded to even watch that year’s NTA.

I’ve stopped watching the Baftas. Haven’t seen the Oscars in a century. For a while I did regularly take part in a twitter fashion critique where a huge number of people and this one straight man discussed the Oscar frocks in the red-carpet coverage. But I’d switch off after that, only partly driven away by how the banality of the red-carpet presenters make you ashamed for your species.

It’s not as if presenters of the main awards shows are all that much better, except when they are: I would’ve stayed up for the Golden Globes this year if I’d realised how great Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were going to be.

But this is the good stuff you can check out on YouTube the day after. Someone else does the watching of the show and someone else does the compiling of the good bits. Everyone else, absolutely everyone else lists the winners and talks about what a significant and great result it is or isn’t for Britain, about how it does or doesn’t send a signal about what will do well at the Oscars.

I’m not exactly on my own in awards disinterest: ratings for TV coverage is trending lower each year. But you wouldn’t know that from the number and length of news reports so I feel as if I stand alone.

I can’t help that. Maybe it’s because the voting is always the same. I wasn’t very keen on Skyfall but you knew its Oscar buzz was nonsense: no Bond film will ever win Best Picture. I am very keen on Safety Not Guaranteed but even as it moved me and I’d surely call it tremendous, it didn’t even occur to me that it would be in with a chance at a Best Picture Oscar. It wasn’t.

Maybe it’s because the voting can never be anything else. Even among the type of films that tend to get nominated, the winners feel the same each time. Our culture does laud actors but an acting performance stands on the shoulders of the script, the direction and the whole production. So comparing Denzel Washington with Bradley Cooper (I cheated and looked it up) is as much comparing their films, Flight and Silver Linings Playbook.

You do suspect that the Academy and maybe all awards organisers have yet to twig that. Otherwise you’d never get the ridiculous situation where a film wins Best Picture but the script isn’t even nominated. Actors make it all up, plainly, and for me that undermines the whole concept of awards being a genuine celebration of film and TV.

You can’t compare two actors beyond whether you enjoyed one film more than another. Maybe if you had two actors playing the same role in two otherwise identical films you could actually measure and rank acting skill. We might be able to compare Michael J Fox with Eric Stoltz if the latter’s Back to the Future performance were released. But otherwise, it doesn’t happen because it won’t happen because it can’t happen.

Equally, you can’t really compare Citizen Kane with The Maltese Falcon but the Academy tried to in 1941. (I relished them both but the Academy preferred How Green Was My Valley. Thank you, Wikipedia.)

So when a ceremony declares this film or that actor to be the best, the actual best, the really best of the whole year, it simply is not true. It simply can’t ever be actually true. You can’t measure so you can’t rank so there can’t be a winner. Best Picture, Best Actor and the rest are only We Really Liked This. You’re thinking now about voting bias and favouritism and giving a director an award for this film because he didn’t get one when he or she should have. You’re wrong: it’s never a she.

Even if voting was always pure, the kicker for me is that winning an Oscar has no bearing on whether I’ll enjoy the film. It used to have a bearing on whether I’d go see a film but I’m afraid now I doubt I’ll even remember to watch a movie called Silver Linings Playbook regardless of how it fares.

No award makes me see a film. Actually, no actor makes me see one either: I think Jodie Foster is a fascinating talent – listen to her on the commentary track for Contact where she is just so interesting – but that doesn’t guarantee I’ll go see her every movie. Writers might do it to me: I will eventually check out all Aaron Sorkin movies and for a long time I used to go see see every Woody Allen one.

But I’m persuaded more by the story than who’s in it. Until there’s an Oscar for Best Interesting Story or Supporting Idea for a Film, awards won’t mean a thing to me anymore. Best Trailer, that’d be a good one: trailer-making is an enormous and fascinating skill but of course it never gets any time in the spotlight.

Whereas it’s all spotlight for the Oscar winners even though there is truly only a finite amount of genuine news you can get from one film being picked for an Oscar out of nine nominees.

But you wouldn’t know that from how much news coverage the winner will get.

Until next year when it’s forgotten by the news and by you. Join me ahead of the curve: get in early and forget them before you ever knew them. Ignore what wins and what’s nominated and instead ask your friends what’s good instead. Go see Safety Not Guaranteed, would you? Got any recommendations for me?

Nobody liked Annabel. But that was okay because she didn’t like anybody. They were all stuck up and so what if she whistled a lot? Didn’t hurt anyone. Gran liked her whistling, she always said so.

But gran had died. Annabel sat in class, quietly whistling while Mrs Sawbones told her off for not paying attention. She got sent to the headmaster – but as she walked out of class, she decided to keep on walking. She walked out of school.

She walked out of town. Passed her housing estate, passed the train station, out as far as she’d ever been.

It was cold and a bit scary. She tried whistling to keep her spirits up but she couldn’t hear herself over the sound of lorries on the main road.

So she kept on walking.

Her phone rang but she ignored it and its whistling ringtone.

She walked on.

It was much further than she’d thought. She’d been in her mum’s car last time and was sure it wasn’t as far then.

Hours and hours went by. Annabel was tired and her dad kept phoning but she didn’t want to talk to him. She wanted to talk to her gran.

By late afternoon, she found somewhere she recognised. The car had turned here. She was sure.

So she turned too and began to walk down a hill and away from all the traffic. Soon all the sound of cars seemed to vanish behind her and she could hear only birds. They sounded like they were whistling and she whistled back.

The sun came out exactly as Annabel saw the big tree at the far end of the cemetery. And saw her gran’s grave with the cross on it.

Annabel sat at the grave. She pulled away at some weeds that had already begun growing by it. She tidied away some litter that the wind had blown. And she talked to her gran. And talked and talked.

She talked about rotten Mrs Sawbones. She talked about how horrible everyone was at school and how she had no friends.

Her gran listened.

And when Annabel had finished, her gran just kept listening. Waiting. Until Annabel said “Alright, well, maybe they’re not all completely bad. There’s Sydney. She asked about you. And Paul in the year above me, I like him.”

Her gran listened some more.

“But it’s not the same. Nobody listens like you do.”

“I do,” said her mum.

Annabel’s mother stood behind her. “If I don’t listen, how did I know where you’d go?”

Annabel tried to whistle a kind of shrugging I-don’t-care whistle but her mum kept talking and the birds kept whistling so much better than she did.

“Annabel.” Her mum knelt down by the grave. “Your gran is my mum. I come here every week but I was sure you weren’t interested. I’ll bring you. Okay?”

“Okay,” smiled Annabel.

“But next time, we drive. Promise?”

“Yes, mum.”

“And next time you never skip school again, okay?”