A church priest asks a local celebrity to open its fete

The priest reports this in the church’s parish newsletter

The church puts it on its parish website

A local events portal site picks this event up and lists it

A blogger who fancies the celebrity tweets about the event

A local news website features it in its weekend preview

A local radio producer reads the website and regurgitates the story with a clever new angle that is entirely invisible to anyone outside the station

A local newspaper editor hears the radio

That local newspaper editor is the entire staff of the local newspaper and thinks this will fill up another page or two so runs it immediately

Local newspaper’s website puts that copy online

The celebrity’s Google Alert tells him or her it’s up

Celebrity tweets a link

Celebrity’s fans retweet

A lot

Celebrity’s detractors make sarky comments about the parish fete

Two sarky comments make a newsworthy controversy, apparently

Local radio runs phone-in debate: Twitter – Any Better or Worse Since This Time Yesterday?

Regional television wants to interview the celebrity, settles for the priest

National television gets the celebrity

National newspapers see the broadcast and use story as excuse for photo spread

Newsnight sees the spread and plans feature but drops it on editorial grounds

National newspapers decry Newsnight’s decision and prove it is BBC bias

The Sun demands BBC Sex Licence Fee be scrapped

Conservatives threaten BBC

BBC appoints special correspondent for parish fetes

ITV says BBC using unfair advantage

ITN realises it can just announce a special correspondent – who’s ever going to check?

On the day of the event, BBC Breakfast and The One Show come live from the parish

BBC News 24 has a reporter on scene who reminds us it hasn’t been called News 24 since 2008 but still nobody listens

Newspapers devote five pages to slamming the media for the cost of all this coverage

Three radio writers separately come up with the same idea for a radio play set at the fete but BBC Radio 4 isn’t sure it’s really for their audience

Seventeen TV writers separately come up with the same idea

Before noon, Andrew Davies is commissioned to write it for ITV

The celebrity appears at the fete and says maybe thirty words, half of which you couldn’t catch

Twitter, Facebook and all entertainment blogs agree it was a speech right up there with the Declaration of Independence and that thing Beyoncé said that time

Twitter, Facebook and all entertainment blogs say it was a calamity right up there with that thing by the place where Katie Holmes went that time

Conservatives say it’s proof that people can raise money for themselves and that they’ll match the donations

The fete raises £37 from the public

The cash box is stolen before the end of the afternoon

Conservatives say this is proof that plebs can’t be trusted and consequently there’s no point matching any donations or providing health care or a national police service

The fete raises £1,912 from journalists drinking afterwards

The fete raises £9,177 from Young Conservatives drinking afterwards

That evening’s episode of The Archers includes two specially-recorded sentences about the fete that sound exactly as if they were two specially-recorded sentences

The News Quiz makes a great crack about the fete the next day

Mock the Week makes a fair gag about it in the next series two months later

The parish puts the money toward replacing the lead stolen from the church

The new lead is stolen from the church

Four hundred online fan fiction writers retell the story of the fete with themselves now a terribly important part of it

The fete features in an end-of-year roundup on Five

In the new year, ITV runs an expose of the celebrity’s past

Immediately after transmission, the BBC apologises unreservedly for the ITV documentary

On the first anniversary, ITV screens its drama version, now reworked as “Fete!”, a period drama written by Julian Fellowes

On the second anniversary nobody does anything

On the fifth anniversary, the parish priest writes a Was It Really Five Years Ago? sermon

On the ninth anniversary, nobody does anything because, come on, it’s the ninth

On the tenth anniversary, celebrities rush to be filmed talking about that great day

Local radio fails to get people to re-enact the events but tries to make it sound on air like it was a success

On the twentieth anniversary, the celebrity dies

Tributes to the celebrity centre on that time when there was, like, this fete and everything

The parish priest’s successor decides to cash in on the story and asks another local celebrity to open its next fete

William Gallagher

In the late 1980s, when Angela and I were on one of our very earliest dates, we drove to Wales. I worked at a radio station then and had access to the kind of music library you could only dream of. Today you can dream of it and just glance up at your own iTunes collection. But at the time, this meant I could ask Angela to list her favourite 50 or maybe even 100 songs and know that I could get them all for her.

I did my own list too and that’s what I got: not a tape of her favourites, but four or five cassettes filled with music that alternated between hers and mine. Whatever you thought of the current song, you knew one of your utter favourites was next.

It was a good idea and a nice day. But over the years, much as we played them, those tapes did slowly vanish in various house moves or when Angela’s car was nicked. The original lists we wrote vanished even sooner. Neither of us have any idea what was on any of those tapes.

But when I say they vanished, actually one survived.

But when I say survive, I’m being generous. It has floated back into view every few years as we’ve moved or I’ve done some big rearrangement of my office furniture. I’ve always liked coming across it but it’s been a moment of nostalgia rather than anything I can actually use: you’ve already guessed that we don’t have anything that could possibly play a tape cassette. But there is also the more permanent fact that the tape broke very many years ago. At least fifteen years ago.

I spent four hours this week disassembling that cassette and attempting to get it to work again.

To be completely honest, I thought it would be easy. I used to work in a radio station. I must’ve cut tape thousands of times; I’ve edited music on reel to reel tapes where you physically find the beat and slice through that part with a razor blade. Right in front of my office Mac is a radio cutting block that I used to use for that sole purpose.

But the reel tape is wider than cassette tape and also stronger. I did undo all the plastic and get out the reels, I found the break in the tape and I laid it all out in the cutting block but it wouldn’t bleedin’ stay in long enough for me to do much.

Hours I spent getting to this stage. And when I had it down to just one break, I put some Sellotape over the join. You used to mark out where you wanted an edit by making a line with a yellow Chinagraph pencil and then you’d razor the bits apart and splice them back together with a very thin piece of white tape. That tape was exactly the width of the reel tape and you put it on lengthways.

I didn’t have splicing tape. I do have Chinagraph pencils but I can’t find them. So I did it by eye and I stuck down Sellotape lengthways, going across the join and then – I didn’t have a bare razor either – trimming the tape with scissors.

You know how small C90 audio cassettes were, I now know they are incredibly fiddly. I also knew that it was going to be impossible to trim that Sellotape closely enough, there was always going to be tiny extra width where the join was. And I also knew that Sellotape is substantially thicker in depth than splicing tape so as I’d thread it all back onto the cassette’s wee take-up spool, there was going to be a bump. It might be enough to throw the tape off the reel, it’d definitely be enough to cause a hiccup, and it might bend the little pieces of metal and plastic that are meant to hold the tape against the playhead.

There was no possibility that this tape would be properly repaired but hours of surgery should mean that I would be able to play it – once. Just play it once and get the track list off there.

I borrowed a tape player from my mom. She hasn’t used it in decades and it was dustier than archaelogy but it did power up. She loaned me the speakers too but – um, she’s not reading this, is she? – I wasn’t entirely sure where they were. Plus, I was doing this in the middle of the night before Angela and I went away on holiday so to be quiet, I plugged headphones in.

It was unintelligible.

Like music being played backwards. I’ve heard that often enough, you used to wind tape by hand to get to the exact point you needed plus you’d rock it back and forth over a bit when you were judging the right moment to cut, so I knew what I was listening to. I just didn’t know why.

And I still don’t. Because even as I tried figuring out how I could’ve reversed the tape somehow, it managed to right itself after I’d held down fast-forward and play.

Well, I say it righted itself… Really it was just playing in the correct direction. You couldn’t hear it well enough to enjoy it, but you could make out the songs. Most of them.

Alright, some of them. For a few of mine and for very many of Angela’s, I had to use Shazam. Picture me in my office at 1:30am with one earpiece in my ear and the other pressed against my iPhone’s microphone.

I don’t want to tell you what the tracks were because I’d rather you imagined what you would’ve put on. But I will tell you that Shazam was convinced I’d chosen Liebe Fängt Im Herzen An by Nicole Freytag when actually it was Eric Clapton and Michael Kamen’s main theme from Edge of Darkness.

That went on the list. As I nursed the tape through to the end and then realised, er, I had to now nurse it through again on the other side, I wrote down each track. I’d never go use Angela’s computers without her knowing – it’d feel like going through her handbag – but our iTunes libraries use home sharing: if her Mac is on, my iTunes shows her entire library as a playlist and hers shows mine. So I could search across both our iTunes without giving the game away.

There were two tracks of mine that I didn’t have. Plenty I didn’t still listen to, but two I didn’t have. There were six she didn’t. I spent about a fiver on the iTunes Store getting hers and 79p getting one of mine. Amazing how those 79p and 99p amounts add up.

Edge of Darkness wasn’t available anywhere. It doesn’t appear to be available to buy in any format: you can sometimes get a vinyl EP on eBay but I already have that, that’s what I taped it off in the first place. So I used an alternative means of acquisition.

Moving on.

This morning, as I write this, I got into the car with Angela and handed her my old iPhone 4 – looking like this.

That’s an app which just plays whatever is on your iPhone’s music library but displays a moving cassette and a “handwritten” title. I rigged it so that instead of it being many songs in a playlist and therefore the title would be just whatever the first song was, it said “Wales Tape Side A”.

I wish we still had the original lists. I wish I hadn’t chosen The Eve of the War from War of the Worlds. I wish I’d dragged the original version of Suzanne Vega’s Solitude Standing instead of her recent acoustic one (look, it was 2am and I was trying to be quiet, I saw that title and figured I know that one, that’s easy, just drag it over and get back to trying to figure out who on Earth John Foxx is).

But by the time we reached Lancaster for lunch, we had driven through 1989, we were peeking back through the walls since then and reliving both a special Wales day and how we had met in another music library back at BHBN hospital radio.

You’ve gathered that Angela didn’t know I was going to do this. Debbie, a friend online equally late at night, heard about it at length because I had to tell someone when I’d finally got it all working. Mark, a soundtrack fan who’s really brought me back to the form after years away, worked with me on the Edge of Darkness lark though did not in any way consult or consort with alternative methods of provision.

And now you know too.

Prometheus has been released on DVD and the ads are trumpeting that you can watch an alternative beginning – and also an alternative ending. I chose an alternative middle and watched a different film altogether.

(ALL: “A different film.”)

I suppose that in one sense it all worked out very well indeed: I’m not a Ridley Scott fan. But this concept of slotting in new beginnings and new endings, it’s just wrong.

Periodically someone will announce a new drama where the audience votes for the ending. Similarly, you do still get some books that say “if you want to kill the monster, turn to page 94; to eat a nice supper with the monster and reminisce about old times, turn to page 17” but they are dying out faster than normal books.

There’s a reason for this.

Giving the audience a choice of endings or requiring them to make their own way through your story is bollocks.

The desire to do this kind of audience participation is invariably made by people who can’t write and wish they could. It’s also praised as a great new idea by people who think we’re so thick we won’t remember when it was tried last week. And by people who are themselves so thick that they don’t remember when it failed last week.

If you want alternative endings to work, click here.

If you want them to never be attempted again, please God, then click here.

If you’re undecided or only halfway through your biscuit, read on.

There’s a seventy percent chance that you didn’t click anywhere, that you just read on. And a 34 percent chance that you did so because who can be bothered to go clicking away?

Each click, each jump to page 94, each voting breaks the story: it takes you out of it and needs you to make a decision before then plunging back in. It is very, very hard to get anyone into any story so deliberately throwing them out and hoping they’ll come back is on the doomed side of foolish.

But my aggravation and my conviction that this is an impossible concept is because that stopping is as permanently disruptive and damaging for the writer. Now, the writer is paid to get back in there but the fact that they have to means to me that the story is shot through with bullet holes. If you’re not scooped up and carried along by the story and neither is the writer, there just is no story.

There are also no characters.

None.

Follow. Let’s say that there’s been a murder, that I’m a rogueishly handsome detective, you are a suspect and let’s say that bit about me again because I liked it. Let’s say that this actual proper drama that in every way bar the aforementioned hunky me is in fact Columbo.Right from the top the watching audience knows whodunnit and right from about twenty minutes in, Columbo suspects whodunnit. For the next seventy to ninety minutes, it’s you and me. Toe to toe. Question to answer. Accusation to alibi. Move to counter move. You have to be a hell of a great character to keep us for the whole show.

Compare and contrast.

We’re now in Murder Most Randomly Selected. Britain’s Got Murderers. The X Ending.

There’s still been a dramatic murder. I am still good-looking. You are still a suspect. But now you are one of five suspects and not only could any of them have done it, every single one of them has done it –in one of the five alternative endings.

The murderer is instantaneously one fifth as interesting a character. They get less time on screen so they need less character so they have less character. Each of the five has to have all the setup to explain how – only cursorily why but always in detail how – they did the deed. So the murderer has one fifth of the plot too.

I think it’s even less than that, though. If anyone can have done the murder, anyone did and it doesn’t really matter. It’s just a puzzle to solve – where any answer is as good as any other.

Stories are not puzzles. They are not games. They can be both, they can be either, but if that’s all they are then they are not stories. Stories are about characters and if a character has one fifth as good a motive for killing as they should or murder – surely the most profoundly dramatic moment in their life – is instead just any old five to one shot, it’s not a story.

If it’s hard to get an audience into a story and it’s arithmetically harder to keep them there, then it is geometrically harder to create compelling or even just interesting characters. Anyone who believes one-fifth of a character is good enough is someone who can’t create full characters.

Two very good films would seem to give the lie to this, but hang on. Raiders of the Lost Ark was actually a series of terrific ideas for set-piece moments all strung together. The Bourne Identity had an alternative start and ending filmed.

But a writer strung those Raiders ideas together and the writer, director and producers planned and ultimately decided against the alternative Bourne.

It wasn’t the audience voting in the cinema to say they want the bit with the rolling boulder next, please.

You don’t have to like the choices the writer made but if they want the audience to make up the story they should hire them.

Not that I feel strongly about this, by the way.

I would like to propose a small alteration. Instead of:

“When you eliminate the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”

let us have:

“When you eliminate the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, means you haven’t got the whole picture yet”

The Sherlock Holmes line works for him exclusively because he is fiction and written in a world conjured to fit only him. No one but Holmes is allowed to spot a clue, no one but him is allowed to correctly deduce anything. And the only clues that exist are precisely the ones that will lead him to the villainous criminal.

If there’s a spot of blood on a wall, for instance, it’s to do with this case. It cannot ever be that there was another unrelated gang killing in the same spot twenty minutes before.

Similarly, in the latest retelling of the tales, Elementary, Holmes (Jonny Lee Miller) correctly spots that shards on the kitchen floor come from two wine glasses and that therefore the victim knew her assailant.

The deduction is correct only because Holmes made it. I deduce instead that, say, the victim saw it was wine o’clock, started knocking back a jar or two of the old vino until she was heading toward being legless and managed to smash her first glass. “Oh, well,” she says, throwing her arms wide with drunken abandon, “I’ve got another one just like that.” And off she goes, drinking from a new glass until the cycle would’ve repeated but for how she was murdered.

This is absolutely not possible, it is an entirely wrong deduction. But solely because Holmes didn’t make it.

This is the case with all fiction, it’s just that sometimes it’s taken to extremes. Sherlock Holmes is the world’s greatest detective primarily because he says so. I don’t know why people believe him – and yet they believe him to the degree that folk around the world really do write to this fictional detective asking for his help on real crimes.

You know that. You’ve heard that. I’ve never heard what those crimes are. You’ve got to suspect that they’re probably not on a par with his usual cases. I mean, they immediately lose some sense of urgency just since people are writing from overseas. They are also writing to a fictional character who by definition never lived but just to be sure was also killed off in 1893 but never mind that, focus on the overseas bit. Something that makes you write overseas for help is either going to be such a gigantic case that the police can’t help you or it’s going to be so piddling small that the police won’t help you.

It’s piddling small, isn’t it? Maybe it’s a variant on Occam’s Razor, but I would offer that if something is either epic and earth-shattering or dull as ditchwater, it is always going to be ditchwatertastic.

So.

The greatest detective in the world gets asked for help finding lost poodles instead of hounds. He also, lest we forget, doesn’t exist. From this, he gets his reputation.

I have had friends I liked very much, and even admired, to whom you could say: “A Study in Scarlet, page 63” and they would tell you what was on the page. It’s a kind of religious devotion in that it has the same remarkable accuracy of the devoted the same willingness to ignore elephants. Fans speak of Holmes’s brilliance yet even with all the clues laid out for him – only for him and only the right clues – still Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has to cheat over some plot points.

The Sherlock Holmes short stories don’t hold me. I have enjoyed the novels much more but they have left me blinking at plot chasms and that niggles at me, it gnaws at me, actually it flat-out maims my interest.

Just not because I like plots.

The more I write, the less I am interested in plots. It’s character that matters to me and actually dialogue. Have I said this to you before? Were we in a pub at the time? If I don’t believe what a character is saying, I don’t believe the character. If I don’t believe the character, I don’t care what happens to them. Have a fantastic plot, I’m already gone.

Always, always, I just want to be scooped up by the characters and into the world of the story. Without question, I’ve utterly missed plot holes because I’m caught up in the tale. I’m fine with that. I’m more than fine with that. I might wonder about it technically if you point it out to me afterwards, but whatever you get away with in a film is fine by me.

I’m plainly just not that taken with the character of Sherlock Holmes or I wouldn’t mind, I wouldn’t notice failings in the tales or their retellings.

You know I’m right. You just also know that I haven’t written anything that’s lasted 125 years, been filmed over 200 times and has one high-profile and very successful British TV version plus a very high-profile and at least initially quite successful American TV version at the same time.

I think it was about November 10, 2010 when I looked at my watch, saw I was late leaving my office and yet as I stood up to go, still thinking, what the hell, make one more phone call. I rang the British Film Institute, as you do, and proposed a book.

It’s September 28, 2012 now and that book is on sale: BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair.

This is true: I am shouting about the book’s release everywhere I can and I’m doing it obviously because I want the book to be a success but also this is about The Beiderbecke Affair and, stuff me and my involvement, if I hadn’t written it I would today be buying it to read. So I take every opportunity to tell everyone who might be as interested as I would be.

But not this time. Not this particular time. Listen, it’s just you and me here, I will add all the links to the book and the videos and the podcasts that I’ve produced but I’d like to just talk to you about what all this means to me. One book is very much like another and if I find revelatory insider details to tell you, well, they are probably revelatory insider details you already knew. In which case, the question is less why I’m telling you and more why you didn’t tell me.

I guarantee that you don’t know that I am writing to you from the tearoom at Winterbourne. Bugger. You know now.

It’s just a rather strange day. Yesterday I hadn’t written a book, today I have. That’s obviously not how it works but it’s how it feels and I am surprised to say that it’s only on publication that I’m realising the difference between this and most things I’ve done. Up until this book and my Doctor Who work, everything I’ve done has been ephemeral.

Follow. My favourite gig at Radio Times was On This Day, a piece in the daily listings about the history of television as reported in RT and it was very much as if I would bound up to you with a new morsel of information. I vividly remember going to look up The Glittering Prizes, an especially famous drama from 1976 and discovering that it began on the same day as Kizzy. Turning that page, seeing that listing, I was right back in 1976.

I hoped then and I still hope now that maybe you got the same or a similar rush from seeing something that I brought to your attention. But I didn’t do it today. I can’t remember when that gig finished but if you wanted to read any of it now you’d have to go to some trouble looking up eBay listings for old Radio Times. Many, many people buy and sell old Radio Times copies and not one of them does it to get their hands on one of my On These Days.

Similarly, all my Ceefax work was gone the day it was done. You can still look up BBC News Online pieces but why would you?

Whereas, for good or bad, my book is here. It will go out of print but even when that happens, it has queered the pitch for anyone else wanting to write about The Beiderbecke Affair. It’s me or it’s nothing. I was aware of that when I originally phoned the BFI, I was aware of it as I wrote – of course you want to get things right but you have to, you have to, you have to since nobody else is going to cover the same topic – but I think I only really felt it now.

Shirley Rubinstein, Beiderbecke writer Alan Plater’s widow, told me that I am now forever bound up with Beiderbecke. I am not bound up with One Direction or whoever I last wrote about on RadioTimes.com. I’m okay with that. I gulped a bit when she told me because it’s true. Whether my book is good or bad, it is the only book on this topic. If you Google the words “Beiderbecke Affair” you do get me.

Wait. Let me try it. I’m writing on my iPad, newly, freshly tethered over my iPhone in a way that lets me think I’m online but actually takes just long enough to connect to anywhere that every page becomes an exciting, tantalising, cliffhanging mystery as it sloooooowly appears.

Google: “The Beiderbecke Affair”

I am there. But I’m ninth in the search results and that’s way below the fold, you would never scroll down past eight other fully Beiderbecke references feeling somehow dissatisfied until you reached me.

So that’s alright then.

What am I worrying about?

Alan Plater was a friend. Shirley Rubinstein is. The Beiderbecke Affair made a big difference to my career: my very first big magazine article was about it. Actually, my book is about The Beiderbecke Affair, it’s about Alan Plater and it’s published by the British Film Institute and that very first article was too. It was about Alan and Beiderbecke, it was published by the BFI.

I actually think that Beiderbecke becomes personal to anyone who watches it. Or at least anyone who watches and enjoys it. That first one, especially. Without anything really seeming to happen, huge things go on and the Beiderbecke world is warmly enveloping. I have a habit of picking up lines from dramas and finding that they are in my everyday speech, my own ideolect, and there are plenty of Beiderbeckeisms that have come tripping out of me over the years.

This is all unconscious and I never know why it’s happening, I routinely say something I know is a quote but I can’t place it. But I am conscious of one line in particular. It’s not from Beiderbecke but it is an Alan Plater line and I used it in the book most deliberately.

I used it in the dedication: “This is dedicated to Angela, Alan, Shirley and all passing by – as am I.”

—

Buy BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair
Watch the Author Video about the book
Subscribe free to the Beiderbecke podcast on iTunes

Standing in the cold and being jeered at just so you can pay some outfit hundreds of pounds for rubbish even though they rip you off every year by making some pathetic tiny change to, I don’t know, a colour or something. It is beyond me why anyone goes to football matches.

It has been said – often and loudly and forcibly – that queuing outside an Apple Store to buy a new iPhone on launch day is silly. It is. But as silly things go, I mean if you were looking to be right daft, if you yearned for world-record breaking silliness, it’s not really up there with voting Republican or LibDem. It’s pretty mild silliness, really.

Maybe you could feel sillier by pointing out that Apple is laughing all the way to the bank. But then banks are laughing all the way to themselves. There’s a lot of jollity out there. Not a great deal of it seems to be reaching us individually but in a time when things are rather hard, the fact that anyone both wants to and can go queue to spend dosh, well, it is silly but I think it’s a lot of other things first.

Especially since we all give companies money every day and at least this way has some theatre to it. Some style. I met a guy this morning who said he wouldn’t queue even if they were giving the iPhone 5 away – but he was the owner of a mobile phone shop and there was a bewildered longing in his voice as he watched hundreds of people walk past his store.

And there were hundreds in Birmingham today.

Usually when I go through the city at that time of the morning, it’s probably a cold and quiet place but I’m so three-quarters-asleep that I don’t notice. Today at 05:45 it was alive. Still bleedin’ cold, but alive.

Some years ago I queued for an iPhone at an O2 store on New Street. It was a blast. There must’ve been a hundred people and we gassed away. Met such interesting folk I’d never normally come in contact with. Promised to stay in touch. But I was talking about this with a friend today and had been about to say something about that time we queued there when I realised that we hadn’t. I’d queued in Birmingham’s New Street, he’d queued somewhere else. But he and I had nattered on the phone in the queue, many of my hundred were nattering equally to the people around them and on phones. It was just a buzzing, happy, shared experience.

With a hundred people.

I can tell you that times have changed. Back then, whenever it was, I fancied a new iPhone. Today, I need one. (Need is a relative term, but.) With my new unexpectedly financially savvy head on, I schlepped through all the maths about tariffs and handset costs and total-cost-of-ownership. And the other year, I also worked out how often I actually use my iPhone. I counted. On one day. It was 230 times.

So over the two-year contract, I used it 167,900 times.

It’s still such an integral part of my work that as I have it in my left hand looking up emails, I’ve often found myself reaching into the pocket to get it out to do something else too.

Unfortunately, one of the things I’ve done repeatedly and very successfully is drop the poor thing. It is now a bruised and limping iPhone. Hardly a scratch on it, but the innards are wobbly and I somehow broke the Home button.

So trust me, I need a new one. Forget NFC, if you even know what that is, the killer features I needed in the iPhone 5 were: availability and my being out of contract.

Consequently, today, this morning, getting up at my sometimes usual time of 05:00, I decided to do it. I could’ve just ordered online and had a chat with the postman in eleven to eighteen days time, but instead I went in to Birmingham city centre to have a great time with one hundred people and come back with something I actually know will be a part of my every working second for the next couple of years.

Only.

It’s 05:45.

Birmingham city centre.

And there are not 100 people queuing, there are 1,600. If you know the city, let me explain that the line stretched up out of the Bullring, around the statue of the Bull which is an unacknowledged and actually a bit bowdlerised ripoff of the one in New York’s Bowling Green area, then up New Street toward Corporation Street and lastly take a left up the ramp to the train station.

I did a fast estimate, realised that even if this were the greatest crowd of people in the world to talk to, there was physically no possibility that I could queue here for an iPhone 5 and get back to my office in time for a scheduled Skype interview.

It is not silly to queue up with a group of strangers, it is fun. It is not silly to buy an iPhone, it’s my business. I’m not even going to say that it’s silly to take the entire day to do it, but I am going to say that it wasn’t possible. Not for me.

So instead I am at home in my office and actually I’m writing this to you while I wait for that Skype interview which is currently two hours late and feels unlikely to be happening. Thank you for being my distraction.

One thing occurs to me. You will not have to look far to find people saying that folk who buy Apple products are fans who have been taken in by the advertising. It’s a child’s argument and especially so as it comes with a concomitant suggestion that by not buying an Apple iPhone you are in some way superior. Gosh. If only I were as brave as you.

Yet think about what it would mean if it were true. What it would feel like if Apple did this, if Apple got 1,600 people queuing outside just one of its shops purely because it did a nice ad campaign. You’d have to feel pretty good about yourself if you were Apple. But you don’t have to buy your iPhone from them at all.

That guy who wouldn’t queue if they were free knows that they aren’t free because he sells them too. You could buy an iPhone from his shop. In sight of his window, there were 1,600 customers that keen to buy an iPhone and precisely 1 queuing outside his shop.

Where was the marketing magic for him?

More, think about what it would feel like if your business did have this magical advertising and it did work for you, it did get crowds coming to your door with open credit cards – and then you lost them all.  For as I walked up that line of 1,600 people, I passed the same O2 shop I’d queued at last time and there was no one there.

You can hype all you want and you might even get phenomenal business out of it – but you’ll only get that once. If you keep getting queues and today’s is sixteen times longer than the last one you got, you’re doing something better than choosing a nice photo for your posters.

Sent from my bruised old iPhone 4

UPDATE: Try as I might, I can’t make that video look as shiny as it does here on my Mac where I’ve been editing it. But I can make it look better: would you watch it on my Facebook author page, please? Head right this way.

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I really should be promoting my own book here – listen, it’s BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair and it’s out on 28 September in the UK – but I’ve also got to urge you to buy the Network DVD release of The Beiderbecke Affair. I couldn’t recommend that more if they were paying me. Though actually, Network was a great help to me with the book: they couldn’t have been more help if I’d been paying them.

Network DVD is a UK firm so I presume you can’t usefully buy that in the States or Canada but fortunately you can get my book everywhere. It’s out 30 October in America and in Canada too.

Before all of that, I’m going to be speaking at the PowWow LitFest in Birmingham on 23 September swapping live on stage between a Beiderbecke hat and a Doctor Who script writing one.

Other events and much more Beiderbecke to follow but, seriously, that’s enough linking for one day.

Funny. By the time the book comes out in the US, it will have been near enough two years since I phoned the British Film Institute with the idea to write it. I can see me standing up by my desk, needing to get out to a meeting but thinking I’d just try them while it was on my mind.

And I do very clearly remember weighing up whether to pitch the idea at all. If you’re going to do a book about something, you have to love it enough to be willing to hate it. To accept that by the end of the process, you will scream if you ever hear the title again. It’s inevitable: so much goes into your head during the researching and the writing; plus no project is ever straightforward so there will be many times when you wonder if it’s bleedin’ worth the trouble.

Or so I thought.

I suspect now that The Beiderbecke Affair may be the very best introduction to book writing that I could’ve had. The BFI is great to work with, everybody I spoke to about Beiderbecke was enthusiastic and informative and charming. I cannot draw to mind a moment that didn’t work as planned – that didn’t work exactly as hoped.

Certainly, there were problems getting everything in and getting everything done to deadline. There was the moment when I got to read every script of the show bar the last ten pages of episode four which have somehow vanished from the archives. There was the moment when I was conflicted: I’d either already written or had extremely thoroughly allotted every chapter, every section, practically every word but I’d also now just found a previously unpublished Beiderbecke short story by Alan Plater.

It was murder cramming that in. Also rather a new experience for me: I’ve commissioned hundreds of thousands of words of journalism from all sorts of writers but not once before had I ever had to negotiate rights to publish someone’s fiction. I’m writing this to you in my living room and I remember making the first phone calls about that story while hovering around the window and looking out at the rain.

Actually, if you want to build a picture here, I’m sitting in the seat I bounded out of when Diana Dunn phoned me. Did I tell you this already? Complicated story. She ended up phoning me because of someone else I’d been tracking down for the book and she honestly did not expect me to even know who she was. “DIANA DUNN!” I said calmly.

I’ve probably seen The Beiderbecke Affair thirty times now, and only twenty of them over the last two years. The other ten were spread out since it first aired in the 1980s and long before I even imagined writing a book. And each time I’d catch an episode, I’d see Diana’s name on the credits for having designed that terrific title sequence.

I’m sure I’ve told you that. I’m sure I should be telling you all this kind of thing in about two weeks when the book actually comes out. But you’ve just got that kind of face, I feel I can tell you anything.

TRACY ISLAND – I’ve complained about the swimming pool again. It’s forever drained and, god, it’s a health and safety nightmare the way they just leave this massive hole in the ground. The whole island is a disaster. I got hit by a palm tree yesterday.

And I don’t know where this island is – literally, it’s a secret, that’s its big selling point on TripAdvisor – but wherever it is, it’s on one hell of a flight path. I was having afternoon tea in this lovely elevated building, a circular restaurant with the most gorgeous views, when the whole place shook from a jet’s sonic boom. I tell you, it was so loud I would’ve believed you if you’d said the jet had taken off underneath me.

As it was, at least five windows shattered. You’d think they’d do something about that but the one guy here who seems approachable has this almighty twitch. They call him Brains, which I think must be a cruel joke, he’s probably a bit, you know, and they dumped him here. I suppose he can just about cope with serving cream teas but plainly he’s not got it in him to phone up the airport and complain.

I should probably help him there. But, dammit, I’m on holiday. My first holiday in seven years. Can’t say I’d planned to take one just yet, some of my patients really need me right now, but the practice did insist. They’re paying for everything, too. It’s a really generous firm.

They’re so generous that I feel a bit bad wondering if there is more to this than they said. I keep passing people who plainly need some therapy but maybe that’s the curse of the job. Give it a few more days here in the sun, and I’ll stop thinking of everyone as a patient.

It would help a lot if there were more than one bar here, though. I could murder a drink now but he’ll be in there again. General Scarlet.

I bought the line last night, I asked the question he wanted me to: “How did you get that name?”

“Started as Captain, rose through the ranks.”

Fine. A comedian. He did have a good taste in Scotch and I didn’t spot it was going on my tab. So we drank on and he does tell some terrific stories. Really wild things, like war stories but with a hell of a twist. I asked if he’d been in Iraq but no. I couldn’t place his uniform. NATO in Afghanistan? “Sometimes,” he said. “My fight is not with other humans.”

I was starting to like him then: here’s a military man with a humanitarian outlook. I was going to stand him dinner when – seriously, you can’t make this up – he got out a razor blade and ran it over his hand. Cool as you like. And not kidding. Not a trick. He meant to cut and he did it. Blood everywhere.

“Are you mad?” I yelled.

“I self-harm,” he said.

“Apparently so.” I reached over the bar, grabbed a towel rag and tried to bandage him up. “Why would you do that?”

“If you’d seen the things I’d seen, done the things I’d done -“

“Yeah, right, yeah, lots of army guys have problems. Don’t worry, the bleeding’s stopped. We’ll get you to a doctor.”

“Plus, I’m indestructible.”

Well, I ask you. I think I nodded encouragingly, maybe said “that’s the spirit”, you know the kind of thing. And I got him to the island’s sickbay before getting the hell out of there. I feel for him, but these weirdos can suck you down.

I had a slew of deliciously unexpected reactions to last week’s piece about actors who claim to rewrite their scripts and alongside online comments, emails, tweets and Facebook updates there were conversations in pubs. Imagine that. Rockin’ it old-school.

And as the evening would wear on and we’d all had maybe a little bit too much of the Pepsi Max nectar, I got asked about this one point. I had said in my blog that it was hard to describe what actors actually do. Let me be specific, I said this:

…what an actor does boils down to, mathematically reduces down to is that they read the script and they say the words. That does not convey a scintilla of the task, but it completely describes the job.

Okay, said my slurry friends, by the same mathematical reduction, all writers do is type. Give us a better description of writing or this round is on you.

I instantly replied – for ‘instantly’ read ‘one week later’ and for ‘replied’ read ‘am writing a new blog’ – with an answer.

This is what writers do. This is what writing is like. Follow.

First, please forget all about writing. Just for a moment.

Imagine instead that it’s this morning. You’re in the bathroom, listening to the radio as you get ready for your day. And someone cracks a gag on the Today programme. John Humphrys or some politician says something so funny that you choke on your toothpaste.

It really makes your day. One terrific joke and you leave for work happy. You’re especially happy because tonight’s the night you go for a few jars of lemonade and you can’t wait to tell everybody this brilliant joke.

That evening, all those hours after the joke, it’s still so funny to you that actually you struggle to get it out without laughing. But you manage it, you give it your all and you can even see yourself as a standup comic with the way you’re delivering this joke so well.

Nothing.

Silence.

No reaction.

Eventually one of your friends goes: “Right. Yeah. Good one. Really… good one. So, anyone see The Bourne Legacy yet?”

You’ve heard that writing is rewriting. So rewrite the above, write it thisaway:

Version 2

It’s this morning. You are in the bathroom, you are getting ready, you don’t have the radio on. Instead, from out of nowhere, you think of this really funny joke.

It’s so funny, you have to stop to wonder: was that something Milton Jones already said? Did someone tell you it?

But no, it’s yours. All yours. You have thought of something so funny that you choked on your toothpaste, that your whole day is brighter and that it is going to bring the house down when you tell it to your hard-drinking lemonade crowd tonight.

Nothing.

Silence.

No reaction.

Eventually one of your friends goes: “Right. Yeah. Good one. Really… good one. You should be on radio.”

One more rewrite. A shorter one.

Version 3

You’re not in the bathroom.

You haven’t thought of a joke.

You’re not going out tonight.

You’re not going to see your friends, they aren’t going to be drinking.

Instead, you’re going to a meeting where the other people are expecting you to have a terrific joke. They are waiting for it. It is the reason you are there. Not because you’re funny, not because they just fancy a gag to brighten their day, but because they hired you to do it.

Nothing.

Silence.

No reaction.

That’s what it’s like being a writer. Or at least a writer with a mortgage. You can feel it now, can’t you? And you can feel what it’s like when they do laugh, when the stuff in your head does work out there in the real world.

It’s the best job in the world. And I can tell you right now – stuff modesty – I am a great, great typist.

I didn’t want to mislead you there with a Betteridge/Marr style headline so let me first emphasise that, no, I don’t know why star actors tell journalists that they rewrite scripts when everyone in the production knows they do not.

Let me say second that Betteridge/Marr is a new term coined about forty words ago. This has been called Betteridge’s Law: if a headline is a question, the answer is no. Apparently Ian Betteridge said that in 2009 but now others are pointing out that Andrew Marr said it five years earlier. So. Betteridge/Marr. You read it here first.

But now, third, I do have an idea about actors and why they do this.

It’s not very common; this topic is only in the news this week because of an interview the New Tricks cast gave to Radio Times saying this – and then writers said hang on a mo about it.

And actually I remember the last time RT covered the start of a New Tricks series and the cast said the same then. I’m not sure why it’s got more coverage now: maybe we just all thought they were kidding at first.

Slightly less high profile was an unrelated Yorkshire Post article this week which was about actor Conrad Nelson in which he said:

“The most important thing I do as an actor is attempt to get out of the way. My job is to not impede the path between the words the author has written and the audience. All I’m trying to do is release the play. I go down the road and the only thing I really control is the number on the speed signs.”

Remember when Lenny Henry played Othello and got deservedly high praise? Nelson played Iago in that run. Now, I’ll admit this: usually Iago is played as a bit of a moustache-twirling villain but Conrad Nelson frightened me. I know the man a little, I know him enough to meet for a natter after the performance, but this is how good his Iago was: when I saw him ten minutes later, I found it harder to shake his performance than he did. I was still a little scared while he was right back to his typical charming, funny self.

So don’t ever imagine I am not impressed with actors. There are good and bad as there are in anything, I just don’t understand how they do it.

And that, I think, is at the heart of all this.

It’s very hard to explain what an actor does. You can point at the end result, but the end result is an immense collaboration: drama is collaboration, that’s one of the reasons I love writing it, that I love – truly love – the discussions and the debates and the sense of everyone wanting the best result and everyone having something to contribute. I also rather love the tight feeling in my chest as I try to step up and contribute as much. I’m a better writer through this process and it’s an improvement I take with me back to books and prose.

One of the contributors is the actor. It’s traditionally a hard thing for a writer to accept, but by the end of the process, a good actor will know their character better than you do. I don’t see how that can happen when the speed of production means getting the script as you step in front of the cameras, but it is what is meant to happen and it is an important part of making drama work.

You get this idea but can you or I really describe it? (No. Is no the answer to every question? Yes.) In the end, I think all description of what an actor does boils down to, mathematically reduces down to is that they read the script and they say the words. That does not convey a scintilla of the task, but it completely describes the job.

It doesn’t make for a very exciting interview. New Tricks has been running for nine series: would anyone really say, and would anyone really read, that they still read the script and still say the words?

Series are special. I love TV drama series: the one-hour TV drama is to me as the three-minute pop song is to so many. The form is just terrific and the things you can do: one idea of bliss for me is being scooped up by watching a TV drama that so takes me away that I forget everything else going on in my life and then it plots me down somewhere new at the very end of the hour. To have gone somewhere with the story, with the characters. It’s all I care about: whether I am engrossed in the story.

Yet series are special because they are different. Actors can spend years upon years playing the same role in a series and there, if they truly have no input into the stories at all, you’re wasting their talent and they’re wasting their time. Plenty of actors write, plenty of actors direct, but even if your star solely acts, they have spent such a long time in deep with their character that they are a resource. You do get actors who say “My character wouldn’t say this” and you do get times when what they really mean is “I don’t want to” but I think more often you get actors who are like every single other person in the production and they want the best for the show.

There’s a rather detailed blog about Leverage by creator/writer John Rogers which routinely talks of how involved the cast are with that fun series. What interests me is that it’s also routine to see questions on that blog from fans who want to know if this or that actor ad libbed a particular line. (Usually no. Sometimes yes.)

Why do people want to think the actors made it up? It used to be that viewers quite commonly believed characters and shows were real: you can mock the idea that people would genuinely apply for jobs at the Crossroads Motel but many did. We are ever more sophisticated and television-literate now: is this desire for the actors to have written what they say just an evolution of that?

I think I’d like the answer to be no. But I think it might be a maybe.

I also think that alongside our increasing literacy in television – our collective knowledge of the form such that you can spot a soap plot three weeks out, how you instinctively know when a scene is ending, how you know when the adbreak is coming – there is an increasing feeding of our interest.

Radio Times interviews actors all the time. It doesn’t often interview writers or directors. Nowhere does. It’s always actors and they are the obvious ones to go for because they are in our faces on screen and they do also tend to be marginally more attractive than even rogueishly handsome writers like me. (Let me have that one.)

So actors are feted and because they are feted, to consciously or unconsciously justify giving them all the attention, actors are specifically feted as being the most important part of any production. Which means everyone else is not the most important. You may well expect me and everyone other non-actor in drama to complain about that being unfair. I think it’s boring. But I also think it’s ultimately very damaging to actors. It diminishes their genuine accomplishment. Because if it’s hard to describe what they do, it doesn’t matter: nobody asks them now anyway.

I sat in a round-robin interview on the set of Holby City, way back when that started, and each actor had their turn sitting in one chair faced by a semi-circle of maybe 15 journalists. Each one of us got our turn in sequence and I was something like number 7, so I watched six of my peers – and actually six far more experienced journalists than I was – asking their questions.

It was excruciating.

George Irving was up first and he was playing a curmudgeonly heart surgeon named Anton Meyer. The six people ahead of me all asked exactly the same question with the most minuscule differences:

“Did you ever want to be a heart surgeon yourself?”

“Did you, yourself, ever want to be a heart surgeon?”

“Did yourself, you, a heart surgeon ever want to be?”

You will not be surprised to know that the answer was no. What were the odds?  Irving was a pro: I can’t remember how he answered but he found six different ways to say no, yet he has always had great admiration for heart surgeons and now that he’d watched operations in preparation for his role, he admired them even more. Things like that. Six things like that.

Then it was my turn.

“Anton Meyer is a clear curmudgeon, an authority figure who uses disdain and arrogance to get what he wants. Do you think there’s a risk that, as fresh as that seems now, it could become a one-note type of character that’s hard to develop over the series?”

I’m afraid I can’t remember his answer. I know it began with “No”. But what I remember very vividly, like it’s video in my head, is how he changed. He sat up straight, his eyes did that slight flicker you see when someone is trying to think, and he actually thought. Every answer to that point had been as easy as batting back a ball, but here he thought. And gave me a considered, smart, really interesting answer.

And then it was number 8’s turn.

“Do you want to become a heart surgeon?”

Irving settled back into that relaxed, easy pose and batted back a line about no, but he had always admired heart surgeons immensely and now he’d watched some in preparation for his new role as Anton Meyer in Holby City, starts 12 January on BBC1, he admired them even more.

A few minutes later I got an extra interview with another member of the cast who was playing a nurse. She went through the same semi-circle of dread but with a twist:

“Did you ever want to be a nurse yourself?”

“Tell us about the breakup with your boyfriend. Did you cry?”

After that, she and I got whisked off to a side room for a follow up. Can’t remember why. But as we walked there, I confessed I wasn’t going to ask about her boyfriend. That I really didn’t care about her boyfriend. It was like a little tap being released: “I know!” she said. “Who the fuck cares whether I’ve got a boyfriend or not?”

Apparently everybody.

And it’s a problem. You can really only talk about the mechanics of drama: the shoot gets immense coverage even though it’s the last and arguably easiest part, because it’s visual. Nobody’s going to photograph me pulling my hair out at the keyboard. Nobody’s going to film a producer managing to sell the script. Nobody’s going to interview a TV commissioner about how they do their job. But if you act, you’re interviewed.

Even if there weren’t a inbuilt prurient interest in actors as celebrities, eventually we’d get there anyway because there is a physical, statistical limit to how often you can rearrange the words in a sentence about being a heart surgeon. There are even fewer ways to say “No” in new and different ways.

So actors get asked about how they get on with their co-stars. Shock: everybody was lovely! Okay, so, tell me about the production. It filmed in this place or that. Great. Got anything else?

“If we felt that a story didn’t work, or that bits of the story could be improved, then – if the writer wasn’t around – we would set about rewriting it ourselves” – Alun Armstrong 

“You have to remind yourself that people aren’t as stupid as writers think” – Dennis Waterman

I’m not defending this. If you haven’t read the rebuttals and don’t know, or can’t guess, this sums up the reaction the cast have got from their comments:

“A New Tricks I wrote and directed airs on Monday. I can tell you EXACTLY how much of it the actors wrote: not a fucking comma.The following week, Sarah Pinborough’s episode is on. I directed that too. Cast contribution to script? Big fat zero” – Julian Simpson

Of course you know he means they didn’t contribute to the writing, that there is nothing in the script that they changed or added or proposed. But they did perform the script and that is a gigantic contribution. The genuine, real-life and at times immensely admirable contribution actors bring to a drama is ignored or at most trivialised.

The New Tricks cast brought this specific incident on themselves. I am agog that they would say this and specifically describe their own series as “bland” when they were promoting the series.

But are there reasons they and other actors have come to claim that they contribute beyond their acting?

Yes.

Is there a good excuse for them claiming to be writers?