I would never call you normal. I hope you know that. But I do have this image of you as being sensible. A little. So, for instance, I don’t picture you having one of your RSS feeds devoted to news about Apple.

I mean, who would do that?

You also wouldn’t queue up from five in the morning to buy an iPhone but there I’m going to have to tell you that I have done exactly that. And it was a blast. Such a good time. It was five in the morning so maybe I won’t rush to do it again, but I definitely now understand how delicious it is rabbiting on with people you’ve never met before and will never meet again. The things people tell me.

There was no great need to use the word ‘iPhone’ in that last. You knew it was Apple. Partly because you know me but also because people do this with Apple releases.

Microsoft could have the same thing. But it tends to do these huge midnight openings to shift world-changing software that we’ve already got. You do get more of a will-it/won’t-it excitement with Microsoft as you plug the thing in and surely this time it’ll work. Somehow I’m immune to that. Can’t understand why.

If you get it, you get it, and if you don’t, you don’t. It’d be dull if everybody agreed on everything. (I once told Alan Plater that I thanked God I didn’t share even a fraction of his interest in football because otherwise we agreed on absolutely everything.) But forget that it’s Apple and forget that it happens: I have thought a lot about this as drama. Apple’s producing products rather than stories but it’s getting an audience.

You’d imagine it must be harder to get an audience excited about a piece of aluminium than it is, I don’t know, a theatre piece or a film. Certainly there aren’t many firms that manage it and most don’t manage it for long: you are unlikely to be fussed now about Sony’s next offering. (Though, really, that’s their own fault: they showed me a demo of the House of the Future once and I had to tell them, I already lived there. And my house works.)

The problem with building this audience is that you build expectation too. Each new Apple release must be not just as transformative as the iPhone, the Mac, the iPod, the iPad and the iTunes Store but be unexpectedly as transformative. 

There’s an Apple event next week, the Worldwide Developers Conference, WWDC. By volume, the event is meant for the developers in its title: if you are one, you get to learn about APIs that matter to you and talk to Apple engineers about what API stands for. But I think the event runs for the week and all that anyone really cares about anymore is the opening 90 minutes.

It’s where Steve Jobs used to make a lot of his presentations. It helped that he was a fascinating presenter in an industry which doesn’t have that many of them. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer is a Del Boy yard sale caricature, for instance. And it helped that he used to often do a Columbo-like “One more thing” at the end of the 90 minutes and introduce something big.

You can learn a lot of stagecraft from those presentations and if I ever write a theatre piece that’s a one-person monologue with a product at the end and a turtleneck throughout, I’m sorted.

There is no Steve Jobs at next week’s WWDC and there is no information whatsoever about what Apple will release or announce. (Those do tend to be synonyms with Apple: where Microsoft will often boast about how great it’s products are going to be next year, in five years, in ten years, Apple just loves ending a presentation with the words “available today”.)

Apple never says what it’s going to announce. But if you were to just happen to have an RSS feed on Apple news, you would be reading hundreds of articles revealing exactly what is coming and what it will all look like. The articles are predominantly bollocks, though some are persuasively written, and they routinely feature Photoshopped images of what the new Apple products will look like.

Like this, for instance. I knocked this up just now.

On the left, the current as-of-today 27in iMac. On the right, the new one that will definitely, definitely, definitely perhaps be announced next week and look exactly, exactly, exactly maybe like that. If you can’t see the difference, you plainly aren’t used to Apple fan sites that show you pixel- and millimetre-differences between items and I am shocked at you.

I will tell you this: I am in the market for an iMac and I won’t buy one until after next Monday’s announcements. But beyond that, I’m not expecting any particular thing and I’m trying to ignore the news.

Looking at this as a writer, though, I think there is something new this time. We should all have Apple’s problems of living up to audience expectations, but I believe the company has tried something new.

About ten days ago, these unofficial Apple sites were proving that there will be a new iMac that costs 4 pence and comes with a 50-foot Retina display. That there would be MacBook Airs that wrote your scripts for you. That the next iPhone would have an optional teleport add-on. They’ll run Windows too but Windows as you’ve never seen it. Working.

And then someone leaked a shot of a box.

Someone in the big, remarkably secretive Apple supply chain, released a photo of the specs written on the back of a MacBook box. The world gasped.

Well.

The world of unofficial Apple news sites gasped.

Because the specs had no interplanetary features, nothing was made of absurdium, lives would not be saved by what amounted to a little speed bump since the last MacBook release.

I think Apple leaked it.

I’ve no justification, I’ve no secret source, I just think it. Last year there was an extremely successful launch of the iPhone 4S yet the perception is that the event was a disappointment. Again, no teleportation. I’m surprised to say I was disappointed too. If I hadn’t still been in contract I would’ve bought the 4S but mostly because it would be better than the rather damaged little iPhone 4 I’ve been limping along with. 

But the iPhone 4S looks the same as the iPhone 4. I think it’s a bit depressing when news outlets believe people only buy a new iPhone so that they can show off that they have it but that’s what a consensus was: why would you buy a new one if it doesn’t look different?

This is about more than the audience leaving the launch show shrugging. Apple’s stock was damaged by it. Given that Apple has more money than the US government, it can cope. But it intrigues me that unfounded expectations (and the rise of click-bait headlines in news articles that contain no news) leads directly to noticeable, measurable consequences.

So this time, out pops this Apple MacBook image with barely any change to the specifications. For a good hour, that was it: this year’s WWDC was no longer going to be where we get alien first contact, it was going to be rubbish.

Suddenly anything Apple did launch next week would be better than expectations. It was a terrific move.

Except they probably did it too early. Because now everybody’s back with absolute proof of new Apple gear. I believe some of it. But everything is so lost in opinion pieces, er, like this one, with mockup shots of products, er, like this one.

But this is the only one that looked at the expectation from a drama point of view. I think it’s also the only one to have clickbait in the title so you knew what you were getting. 

It is definitely not the only one that gives you no information, has no value and exists only to ask whether you fancy queuing up outside the WWDC hall at five o’clock next Monday morning.

It has taken 41 years but this week, the script to the first episode of Columbo leaked onto the internet. Have a very good time and lose at least hours, probably weeks, with all the many scripts collected on Lee Thomson’s TV website or if you’re happy with a barebones file list, nab a few Columbos in this part of the site.

This is important: you should grab this script right now. Now. Go. This minute. Seriously. I’ll wait. For wherever they’re posted, scripts tend to get pulled down again quite quickly and I remain crestfallen that I didn’t get the final script to Sports Night in time.

Oh, and just one more thing. This first episode of Columbo isn’t the first episode. Not really. It’s the first from when the show went to series.

Except the show didn’t go to series. Not really.

It’s a little deliciously appropriate for Columbo that even something what came first has a couple of twists. It’s also especially appropriate that nothing is quite what it seems. In the show, Lt Columbo always got his man or woman by appearing to be anything but the incredibly sharp mind he was. Similarly, if you don’t know, then you may have the idea that Columbo is a faintly comedic, insubstantial, series akin to Murder She Wrote. You are certainly aware of the image of the lieutenant with his raincoat, his cigar, his “just one more thing”, the whole act.

The character of Columbo and the performance of him by Peter Falk is so easily caricatured that for the very best example of a bad impersonation, see the later episodes of Columbo. In various ways, Columbo ran originally from 1967 to 1978. Anything you see from that period will vary from inconsequential right through to compellingly brilliant and it averages out as being absorbingly interesting.

After the show died, it was revived in 1989 with the contractual proviso that every episode be as bad as it possibly can be. I’ve only made it all the way through one, Columbo Goes to College, and it was an immensely aggravating experience because it’s a rather good episode until the dreadful ending.

Endings were always a big problem in Columbo. But usually it was because of a failure at the start.

Let me explain. Take a biscuit.

Every episode of Columbo began with us witnessing a murder. When the body is discovered, the police arrive and shabby old Columbo spots the killer and fixates on him or her. Unusually, we know who the killer is. Very typically, we know the police hero character is going to get him or her in the end. With Columbo, everything is in the bit between. We often didn’t see the actual arrest because it didn’t matter. The pursuit was everything and all the drama was conjured out of people talking.

At it’s best, and the script that was leaked this week is one of the very best, it is extraordinarily satisfying and interesting. You don’t have a gaggle of suspects, you have one for the whole 90 minutes or two hours and direct upshot of this is that the one character has to be mightily interesting. They have to be the equal of Lt Columbo in tenacity and intelligence otherwise the fight is over.

So here you have two extremely strong characters, locked in absolute conflict, for up to two hours of screen time. It can be electrifying.

It can also be unsatisfying. Even in the original run, if the start wasn’t right, nothing was. It is extremely, but extremely hard to write a Columbo because you have to begin it with what appears to be the perfect murder yet you have to plant within that the perfect clue that will unravel it in the end. And you have to give Lt Columbo a genuine reason to latch on to the villain. And if it’s too obvious who the killer is, Columbo would just arrest him immediately.

Columbo is always held up as the crime show in which we see the murder but everything, all of its success and most of its failures, come down to the single moment after the murder and when Columbo first appears. Get that little nugget right and we are with Columbo as he delves – and we are with the murderer as he or she tries to avoid capture.

Isn’t it gorgeous?

I need to make sure you know about this whole which-came-first lark. You don’t need to know it. You only need to know to avoid anything from 1989 or afterwards. But I need to tell you. Columbo makes fans of us and we fans have to tell you.

Columbo was created by William Link and Richard Levinson. He began in Enough Rope, an episode of the TV anthology The Chevy Mystery Show in 1960 where Bert Freed played him. That same story became the stage play Prescription Murder in 1962 where Columbo was portrayed by Thomas Mitchell. Then in 1967, that same story came to TV as a one-off movie where Peter Falk began as the lieutenant. Watch it now and it has a period-typical psychedelic title sequence but otherwise plays very well as a strong, even archetypal Columbo story.

Two years later, America’s NBC television network wanted a series. But despite having already had an aired Prescription: Murder, they wanted a pilot episode first. So we got another one-off movie, Ransom for a Dead Man, written by Dean Hargrove from a story by Link and Levinson. It’s good and the series was taken up.

Except it wasn’t a series. Columbo used to run one episode every few weeks, rotating through the month with other detective shows such as McMillan and Wife. That was called a wheel format and it’s why even though it ran in this series form for seven years, there are only 43 episodes (plus the 2 pilots). A typical series of that period and running for the same length would have exceeded 150 episodes.

So there were two pilots and then a kind-of series. But the first episode of that kind-of series was Murder by the Book, written by the then unknown Steve Bochco and directed by the then unknown Steven Spielberg.

It is one of the finest-crafted crime dramas you may ever see.

Except there’s just one more thing.

I must’ve seen this episode for the first time 30 years ago and every time it comes round, the opening scene narks me to high heaven. Murder by the Book is about two detective novelists and here’s why I was narked.

A novelist does not type out a manuscript in all uppercase. Not even if there is some poor sod at the publisher who is going to have to set each page out in hot metal.

And now after all these years, I can finally see that it was not Bochco’s fault. His script is very specific about the typing and reeks of having been written by someone who uses typewriters every day. It reads:

No, it isn’t wonderful detective novel prose but it is from a good script and it is written in mixed upper and lower case. So I don’t know whether it was Spielberg or a production designer who had it be done in all caps. Maybe it was the actor. But the thing is that it wasn’t the writer.

It wasn’t Steve Bochco. He can be my hero again.

I’ll even defend his Cop Rock now.

When you get intrigued by Columbo enough to watch, just accept that you will go from there to fan and want the set. I’ve not been able to devise an Amazon search that gets Columbo but excludes the 1989-onwards shows, so be careful. This is what Amazon US has, this is what Amazon UK has.

I launched my new website yesterday, www.williamgallagher.com, and blogged about it. If you’re going to make an announcement, you should make it and then shut up. You shouldn’t blurt on to a totally unrelated point before anyone can have read your promo piece.

Except.

I have to talk to you about this. So bollocks to waiting a decent interval for another blog.

Here’s the thing.

There are certain lines that make me weep. Emily Dickinson’s “hope is the thing with feathers”, for instance. Of course the power is always in the meaning and in the context, of course it’s the same whether I read those words in a poem or I hear Dar Williams’s beautiful You’re Aging Well. And of course it is never, say, the actual shapes of the letters on the page or on the screen.

Except.

Bruce Springsteen has today released a video for Rocky Ground. This song will always mean empty highways to me, far more than his songs that are famously set there – listen to The Ghost of Tom Joad for a moving, despairing description of a highway – because that’s where I was when I heard it. I was moved by the song, it’s the reason I bought the album Wrecking Ball even having not been impressed with the other tracks.

Videos are meant to sell the song, sometimes in every sense, and I’ve already bought so I might not have watched but look around: this video is getting huge coverage online. It’s not the first single from the album, it’s not as if the album is still new, but I’ve no idea what other videos have been made because none of them are this strong.

Springsteen isn’t in it. It’s a stark, monochrome film overlaid throughout with someone handwriting the lyrics to the song. Rolling Stone: “Mixed with the song’s steady beat and soaring gospel chorus, and of course Springsteen’s own pained howls, the clip never loses its power.”

I’ve not spotted this before today but there is now a little genre of pop videos that use the physical shape of lyrics. I know the one you’re thinking of and I suspect you’re right, surely this started it all.

Pardon? You were expecting something else?

The first one that really arrested me, though, was Dar Williams’s As Cool As I Am. If you’ve known me longer than a biscuit then you know I’m a fan of hers. I’d say I admire Williams’s work but that sounds quite detached; it sounds as if I rate her technically or something. I do, but that somehow hides how much I just love her music. I’ve said it before: I wouldn’t kill to write like Dar Williams – but I’d maim.

It all began here for me. I play you this and I can see me sitting in the house I lived in back in 1996 or so, watching this on our even-then ancient TV that was later to explode. Presumably with excitement.

Notice that word ‘falling’ which literally falls at 1’40” or so. It’s not a lyric yet it’s right. Then toward the end there’s a lyric that feels as if it’s surely wrong: she sings ‘I am the others’. But it’s a perfect example of the wrong word (or maybe plural in this case) being exactly the right one. I don’t think I could’ve written that and this is a weakness in my work.

I interviewed Dar a few years after this and she mentioned wishing she could re-record her older albums now that, she felt, her voice was stronger and she’d performed the songs that much more. Also because she was just that much more experienced in the studio.

So she did.

As Cool As I Am is redone on her live album (iTunes UK, iTunes US), then again on her particularly fine Many Great Companions (iTunes UK, iTunes US). Off the back of that last version, she released a video that I think has an especially strong version of the song – but it doesn’t have lyrics on screen or projected. I’d still like you to see it.

That newer video is in black and white. All of these have been in black and white. I could wonder whether it’s not letterforms that I’m finding striking, it’s the monochromatic bleakness that speaks to my soul. That happens a lot: one of my favourite albums is Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and I swear he wrote it in black and white.

Plus of course, all these songs have been in English: if I couldn’t read this language, you have to wonder whether they’d have any impact at all.

But then text is generally black on white, isn’t it? Plus here’s a video in colour and whose strength comes from the burnt-in text subtitles – and I’d say the non-English lines are the most powerful.

I’m not sure, to be fair. The subtitles are replete with powerful lines and that they so quickly break away from the lyrics to become a separate yet connecting story mesmerises me. I wish the font were a touch stronger; it looks video-generated and a bit weedy. But you can’t take your eyes off it.

I know I’ve said before about Emily Dickinson making me weep – once, at a cancer awareness event, that hope line was read out and I shook; I’m shaking now – and I’ve obviously said numerous times that Dar Williams can’t half write.  I must’ve mentioned Rocky Ground before too. But I don’t think I’ve ever blathered on entirely about music.

And I’m not going to now, either. Not entirely. Because there’s this film.

The Hotel New Hampshire is a 1984 film adapted from John Irving’s novel by writer/director Tony Richardson. (The film isn’t on iTunes. You can get a DVD from Amazon UK, Amazon US. And the book is on Amazon UK, Amazon US too.)

The film is fine. I remember it being quite deftly written; I think I remember it being well performed. But I know exactly which sole moment really worked. A character has typed one single line of text and for a moment, for several frames, it’s the only thing on the screen.

The line itself is important and we’ve heard it before, building to this moment. But seeing it as text is a slap. We’ve not seen text on screen since the credits, we don’t often see text in movies anyway. The shape of the letters and how they’re written on a typewriter speaks to what we know of the character who wrote it. And we are the characters who are reading it.

Film is a visual medium. Pop videos are surely an entirely visual medium: the images can overwhelm the music. But just once in a while, it’s text and the actual letterforms that pull us in more.

I’m trying to squeeze something extra into my book about The Beiderbecke Affair. But that comes out 28 September and so things are a little far along and I may not be able to. Just in case, let me share it with you here instead.

As all enterprising writers would, I did include my email address in the book’s acknowledgements. But I’m trying to change that from an email to a new website URL and so I’ve asked that we add a line that goes this away:

It really does. You won’t find much there today but it works and by publication there’ll be some extras like unused extracts from interviews with Barbara Flynn and more. Not a great deal, to be honest, because I managed to pack a huge amount of that in. But everyone I talked to for the book was so interesting and Barbara gave me an utterly golden trove of photographs and cuttings. I scanned everything and handed this giant parcel back with all the scans on the teeniest of USB sticks. I’m sure she’ll be fine with me showing you some of the material.

But the reason there’s not much of it on there today is that I only just got the idea this week while producing a new website for myself. That was partly prompted by the book, partly by people asking where they could get it, partly by my finding out that it’s even going on sale in Japan and so mostly and consequently because my ego is currently overwhelming.

Plus Apple kicked me out.

I’ve been a MobileMe user since before it was MobileMe and that Apple service hosted my website but they’re taking it down and they were gonna take me with it if I didn’t do something. It’s all because MobileMe has been replaced by iCloud and that’s fine because iCloud is rather spectacularly great – when it works.

Nonetheless, this ‘ere iCloud don’t take kindly to strangers, you hear, so my site and everyone else’s sites on there had to move.

I’m still on www.williamgallagher.com but that tent is now pitched on A Small Orange. I’d never heard of this hosting site before but I can’t stop talking about them now: a real human being from their support team replied with a solution to a problem less than 90 seconds after I sent it. Love ’em.

With a need to move comes a desire to spring clean. Besides, my mother has never understood what I do for a living and now I can just point here to the site. Once I convince her to get online.

When she does, you can bet the first thing she’ll say to me is that oi, those scoundrels at 123-reg sell you subdomains like scandal.williamgallagher.com for a tenner but you can get them for free. And do you know, she’s right? Over the years I have paid for subdomains to stand up particular projects. Most of them I can’t tell you because they’re still in play but, for instance, I did once have a radio.williamgallagher.com. I liked that. Radio William Gallagher.

What was I saying about my ego?

As part of the process of pulling up sticks and headin’ on outta town to A Small Orange, I learned this about free subdomains and that’s when the penny dropped about having beiderbecke.williamgallagher.com.

I am sure that by 28 September that and its easier-to-spell counterpart jazz.williamgallagher.com are going to be well worth you having a look.

But for today, I’m rather pleased with how my own main site has turned out. Do please have a look at www.williamgallagher.com when you can. Right now I think it is just the way I want it, I think it has just the things I need.

Except I’ll tell you the truth: I had a problem with an image on the front page. It’s supposed to change randomly between me looking serious, me looking sexy* (*delete as wishful thinking) and my very most embarrassing photo ever.

Other pages have these rotating images but I’m plainly getting something wrong so you only get the serious one. There is no sexy one. You knew that. But fortunately the embarrassing one will never accidentally make it onto this blog.

William

Angela Gallagher, my wife, has earned herself a place on a Birmingham Rep theatre writing programme. I am beside myself with excitement: I get nervous when she goes to it, I watch the clock until she’s back, I gobble up everything she can tell me about it. And at the moment, we’re talkin’ character.

We’ve always talked drama but somehow it feels richer at the moment because she’s devoting all this time to pursuing her ideas while I’m over here in the corner pursuing mine. Feels all the more active. And we get into right debates.

Which is where character comes in. Or where character will. Character is the next subject in the Rep’s programme and I will earwig everything I can from what Angela gets to discuss with them. But until then, we sit here, she and I, with a different volume of opinions. I have a lot to say about character. She could say a lot but she’s waiting to talk about it at the Rep.

I really, really don’t want to pummel my opinions away at her: I like it best when she disagrees and can change my mind. This is especially true right now because I am about to pontificate on a certain issue to do with characters and I know I am wrong.

I also know I am very serious and that I have benefited from this opinion. But it is wrong. Probably.

Follow.

I have a friend who loves creating characters in her scripts. I’ve pointed out to her that if her lead character needs to know the time, she will for preference have him meet a blind dwarf watchmaker with 11 sons, 8 daughters and sure an’ they’ll all have a tale to tell. Whereas I’ll give him a bloody watch.

Her way is perhaps more filmic. Certainly more imaginative. My way is very cost-conscious and practical. I think the right thing is probably somewhere in the middle. Don’t be daft with characters but don’t limit yourself either.

With her approach, I’d argue that the characters are so many that they must remain ciphers. But with my approach, you know every character is extremely important. If they appear to pop into a scene and vanish again, you know dollars to doughnuts that they’re coming back later. I don’t like this in me.

But let me tell you a Doctor Who story. There’s a character in the last one I wrote, Wirrn Isle, called Dare. In the first draft, she was the best character you never saw. She was so vivid that you reached the end of the draft script and were certain that she’d been in it. Yet she hadn’t.

Dare – a quick aside; the names in Wirrn Isle were all generational things, it was a whole socio-economic thing, I can bore you on demand – and where was I? Dare. Dare was a throwaway line, she was a character who ran something or other and had said this or that. I can’t remember now but whatever it was, it began as an unimportant aside. And it just grew and grew in the not-telling.

Alan Barnes at Big Finish read this and pointed out that Dare was a little bit too interesting to not even feature in the drama. Between him and Dare herself, I was convinced. She boomed into the second draft and became not just important, but one of my favourites of my own characters.

Partly for this reason. There’s a little exchange in Wirrn Isle and I liked it so much on hearing the final audio that I wondered whether I’d written it or if it had been an edit. I so wanted it to be mine that I wouldn’t look up the script, just in case. But even if I can lie to myself, I can’t lie to you. So just in order to give you the right credit, I have now read the draft script.

And the line is mine.

I love you.

It’s just this: Dare’s boss asks her how she can possibly be so stupid as to believe a particular thing and she replies:

DARE: I started with the evidence and worked backwards, sir.

Call me daft, but I like that line (of mine) and actor Helen Goldwyn delivered it just so. But here’s a thing. I’ve never met Helen Goldwyn. I actually had no clue what she even looked like until right now, at this point in this sentence, when I broke off to go find a photo for us.

Now that I have, I also see that she has credits as long as you like, both for acting and writing. I’m not sure how I can be daunted after the fact, but I am.

The reason I didn’t meet her, though, is because I was doing this thing that meant I could only get to one of the studio days for Wirrn Isle. As a writer, I don’t have to think about who gets booked to do what role when: that’s the producer and the director. I know David Richardson cast at least most of Wirrn Isle because I thanked him for it on my studio day: this whole set of actors were terrific and made me sound great.

Nonetheless, I’ve got a point lurking here somewhere and it is this. Even though I didn’t have to think about whose scenes could be recorded on which day, I did have to think about how many people I used. How many characters in total.

Of course there’s a budget issue: I don’t know the figures for Wirrn Isle but no radio production can keep adding actors on a whim. But budget is just one of many practical concerns with characters: I only had two hours of story and I have to juggle so that everybody always had something to do. In radio, especially, if a character doesn’t speak for a page or two, they are effectively gone. Vanished from the listeners’ mind.

Which happens to fit my natural approach of writing as few characters as conceivably possible.

Characters are a right bugger to create. You come up with one and the next thing you know, you have to create another one just so the first has someone to talk to. Bastards.

If the Birmingham Rep gives Angela any insights into character, I will steal them for myself and never tell you. It’s not personal.

It’s in my character.

This is a complicated thing to explain to you just to stand up the image there, but follow.

I am a freelance writer. However, through a budget requirement and/or a clerical error years ago, I went on staff for a couple of days a week at at Radio Times. I shrugged: what difference did it make?

It made a lot of difference to my accountant who had to periodically phone me up to ask why this bit of work was staff and taxed but this bit wasn’t.

He’s happier now because I am back to being entirely freelance. But this time, I didn’t shrug. Instead, I crossed my fingers.

Because I’ve been there long enough to know that some people, some times, get a remarkable gift when they come off the books at Radio Times.

You’re looking at it. I mean, they gave me a terrific send off in every way but the bit I want to tell you about, the bit I really hoped would happen, is this cover.

I can’t tell you that it’s a Radio Times tradition, because I don’t think it is. Not everyone gets it or the art department wouldn’t have time to do the real magazine cover. I really don’t know how they had time to do this one.

I feel honoured. Seriously: this is Radio Times, the only magazine I know whose covers are so famous that they get republished in books, that have had art exhibitions devoted to them, and which each year are the excuse for the all-star celebrity Radio Times Covers party.

But I don’t think these fake covers are well known outside the magazine so I wanted to tell you about it. And to boast, frankly to preen a bit here as there is no measure to how big my head is today, but also just to tell you.

If you can’t guess and you don’t happen to have an instant-recall memory of every Radio Times cover, what happens is that they take a genuine old cover, Photoshop you into it and then rewrite all the cover lines to chide/mock/belittle/kid* you (*delete as applicable).

You’ve got three questions now, I can tell. The answer to the first is yes, I’m getting this framed for my office. The second is that, go on then, here’s the original version of that cover.

It’s from 2008’s cover for the Doctor Who special, The Next Doctor, starring David Tennant and me. I mean, David Morrissey.

As to your third question, well, I don’t know, it’s a very good point. A very good question. Hard to say. Very hard to say.

But I wondered too. Does this mean I’ll be invited to next year’s Covers Party?

I’ve just this minute discovered that my iPad knows the word Wirrn. It’s obviously learnt this from the number of times I’ve written it, unless my iPad is sneaking off to watch Doctor Who without telling me. But from now on, whenever I’m asked how I wrote Wirrn Isle, I will tell the truth: my iPad autocompleted it for me.

Doctor Who: Wirrn Isle came out over a month ago now and at first it was a right treat reading reviews and online chatter. Writers often say they don’t read reviews of their work: I thought it was through some arty reasoning, or maybe just fear, but it’s possible that it’s only because there are so many. I set a Google Alert on the word Wirrn and got swamped with references to my work, with one-liners, with full-blown reviews, criticism, praise…

…and with pirated versions. Hmm.

You know people download films, I just never knew how many pirate sites there are. Some pirate users appeared to be eagerly waiting for Wirrn Isle, so I suppose that’s a good thing.

If you want to be on the legal side of the angels, here’s where you can get it properly on CD and online. You can also get it through some outfit that seems to be doing well; a place called Amazon. Wirrn Isle is on both Amazon UK and Amazon US.

Oh! Can I tell you this? Just between us? The other week, I went to Amazon UK to order a couple of copies to send to some radio producers and I got what is now my absolute favourite warning to read online anywhere: “Only 1 left in stock”.

I needed two, actually, so I was fully justified in buying that last one. I didn’t have to wait long before they restocked and I could buy for the second producer, but this means I was officially and certainly sold out at Amazon.

I’ve been called a sell-out before, but never in a good way.

Right, I’m off to see what other Doctor Who-y words my iPad knows.

(Cough. My new Doctor Who, Wirrn Isle, came out today but I’m not ready: I was planning a proper piece about that for its official release date at the end of the month. I’m new at this. But while I go off pondering that, I have been writing the following and wanted to share it with you.

That’s all. Carry on.)

When I went freelance as a writer, people said the reality of it all would hit me on that first day I would be my own boss and would no longer have to go into an office. Nope. I sat there in my own office, fielding calls from six bosses instead. But it hit me last week as I did some drama work in New York and some business in Florida.

This is the first time I’ve worked in the States and I know that’s not actually a big deal but it feels it to me. On the one hand, I feel great that I’m doing something that requires me to be thousands of miles from home and which just happens to include New York. But on the other, I don’t half feel the pressure that the trip has to fund itself.

I don’t know what it is in me that prefers working: it is better to be crew than passenger, I deeply feel that. So despite spending some days entirely in my motel working, and maybe because I’ve not even glanced at Disneyworld or Legoland or Harry Potter Country or Kennedy Space Planet, this trip feels very new and quite odd. Enough so that I’ve noticed what a difference it makes not being a tourist.

Follow:

You just don’t look like a tourist

Everybody knows. Everybody knows you’re not a tourist. I got some time off in New York and went to a museum where on the way in, the staff were greeting everyone with “Hi! Welcome to New York! And where are you folks from?”. Until I reached the desk and they just said “What’s your ZIP code?”

(Since you ask, I said it’s 10017. That’s where my US iTunes account is registered.)

The museum exhibit was about the street grid plan of Manhattan. I’ve written about this before, I’ve written drama about it, and a few months ago I heard a exhibition was opening. I preordered the accompanying book on Amazon. And then thought, sod it, why not just go to the museum? It’s the Museum of the City of New York and the exhibition is The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011. Runs until July 15.

Anyway, so, one thing that I’d written about was how the streets were planned long before there were enough people in Manhattan to live on them. Long before they were as flat as they are now. I specifically wrote about John Randel Jr marking out the streets and avenues with wooden posts. Now I learn that he did that at first but people kept pulling them out. So instead, he began using heavy masonry. And one was found just a few years ago.

Picture New York as hilly terrain – Manhattan means “Island of Many Hills” – with just a few streets down near the harbour where the Hudson and East rivers cross. Less than a fifth of the island had streets then but it’s a small island, it was filling up. So the council divided the rest of the land into what then became 12 avenues and 155 streets: getting the maximum room possible for the most number of people.

Rocky, wild, hilly countryside and then these stone markers, spaced out at precisely calculated points. That photo at the top of this is of the marker post that was found. The very post that John Randel Jr banged into place to mark the crossing of 4th Avenue and 26th Street, back in the 1810s and 1820s when there just wasn’t a 3rd Avenue or a 25th Street. There wasn’t anything.

And just to show you, here’s what that spot looks like now. 

It’s now 26th and Lexington: the 4th Avenue is now broken up into chunks with names like this one, Lexington. Just as the 6th is officially the Avenue of the Americas, even if nobody calls it that unless it’s their address.

It was very strange and personal seeing that marker post. It felt like the last time I was in the States and I saw a bit of the Titanic’s hull in an exhibition. I was naughty then and touched it but I was good now and didn’t press on the post.

Made me think. And I’m not even sure what it made me think. But may I throw some thoughts at you?

After New York I went to do some work in Florida and the car rental firm says I drove around the state for 730 miles. Normally that means I haven’t found a car park.

But this time it meant I had quite a lot of time to think. And because I was in Florida, there wasn’t a lot to distract me. New York feels real and dirty and kind of like it was built on purpose. Florida towns feel like they were just spilt there.

So.

Collected thoughts from a travelling bloke

Man cannot live by Domino’s Pizza. But it’s only a two-minute drive.

In New York, the kindest thing you could say about me is that I look very English. But in Florida, I look slim. Now trying to work out where I could go to look hot.

Speaking of hot, it is a rule: you cannot switch on air conditioning too quickly.

Just got served by a guy whose tag says his name is Ishmael. “Call me,” I said. On the good side, he actually had not heard that before. On the bad, I appear to have a date for the evening.

The poorer an area, the more churches it has.

E Street Radio really does not play anything except Bruce Springsteen music. He’s done some tremendous stuff. But he’s not half done some duffers too. Enough duffers are on his new album, Wrecking Ball, that I wasn’t going to buy it. But it became the accidental soundtrack to my driving on this trip, so I did. Rocky Ground is a good song. I keep calling it Rocky Road.

Sirius XM, the satellite radio service that includes E Street Radio and The Coffeehouse, sounds fantastic. It plays tracks I’ve owned for years and makes me wonder if they are new recordings, sometimes even new arrangements.

At my sleazy Florida motel where I was to be for most of a week, the desk clerk looked me over and asked: “Will one key be enough, sir?” I promise you he winked.  In New York, the desk clerk looked at me too. I was one man, staying one night, in one room. He didn’t ask. Just gave me two keys.

Just one more thing


Everything is easier once you’ve done it.  So why do we ever wait?

Back in June 2010, I really wanted to know whether Apple’s then-new iPad was genuinely useful for writers or whether I just fancied getting one. Nobody seemed to have written about exactly the things I wanted to know, so I selflessly bought one to find out and tell you.

Now I’m bemused that it was only June 2010. Just as with my iPhone, this iPad has become so much a part of my every day work that I don’t understand that I’ve only had it a short time.

But about two or three weeks ago when I was booking flights for a trip, I really wanted to know whether I could get by only taking my iPad. This time there are many articles out there about replacing your MacBook or your PC with an iPad but that’s not quite what I was thinking. Forget what I would normally have used or normally would’ve taken, given the jobs I needed to do, could my iPad cut it?

I have selflessly gone on a ten-day trip the States to find out for you. I’m about halfway through and writing to you from a film noir-style motel that looks right out of Veronica Mars to me. It’s all business in Florida with a completely accidental stopover in New York. Both ways. And within which I’ve managed to arrange some drama meetings.

So there are two things for you right there: Florida business and New York drama. It was impossible to do the work without taking something, and I gambled on taking just my iPad. Ten days is right on the edge of how much clothing you can pack, even though I could cut that down because I knew I’d have washing facilities. If I added my MacBook Pro then as small as it is, that’s another chunk of packing and then there’s the mains cable. There is no possibility that I’m going to let my MacBook Pro get chucked in the hold so adding that one thing would automatically mean two bags instead of one.

Which means everything taking longer. And since my time in New York, especially, is very tight, it made a difference. With multiple bags, I’d have taken a cab from JFK. With only carry-on luggage, I skipped baggage reclaim and was on the New York City subway system at lightspeed.

All of which is great if my iPad did what I needed.

Pretty much, yes. There’ve been some problems. Yesterday I thought I needed to print out some legal documents and I was able to use my iPad to connect remotely to my office Mac in England and email myself the forms, but there proved no way to print them out here. If I were staying in a fancier hotel, it might be different.

Oddly, this blog has been the hardest part to write: for some reason Google insists I want to write it in HTML and never want, for instance, to press Return when I could type me some line break tag instead.

And I did hit a Flash problem. If you know what Flash is, you know that it’s a problem. Even when it works, it’s a problem. But it was flavour of the minute once and I can tell you now that certain official US corporate websites require Flash for no very good reason. Just to enter account numbers into a form, they need Flash. This smacks of a bored web designer to me.

But iPads will not play nice with Flash so I did remote-control my office Mac again and fill out the form there, some 4,000 miles away from me.

Then iPads kind of make you do one thing at a time. You read books on them, or you email, or you write, or you watch films, you don’t tend to skip about between them. And I had to do more of that than usual: I’d look up a tiny detail of some PDF legal form here and need to research another detail about it on a US business website there. Business means financial too so I was checking online banking, moving funds around, recording everything and that meant swapping from the Numbers spreadsheet to the web browser and back and to and back and to.

Two days ago that was fine: I zipped back and forth like nobody’s business. Today, not so much.

If you do something that uses up an iPad’s RAM then when you swap back to, say, the web browser Safari, it won’t have been able to hold the page in memory and so must get it again. That’s fine, but with online banking that’s seen as your logging out of the secure system so today I was re-logging in.

And a similar thing happened with Numbers: when I went back to that spreadsheet, the document had closed.

I get it and it’s not a gigantic deal, but I don’t get how it was happening today when I was in a hurry and not yesterday when I was also in a hurry. You thought the word hurry was key, didn’t you?

There was one difference. Today I was typing standing up as I ran around, yesterday I was typing at the desk and also using my iPad to play music.

Typing. That’s one thing I forgot. I have written thousands of words on my iPad without getting an extra, external keyboard. Thousands of words typed directly on the glass. But it is slower and my fingers do blunt a bit, so shortly before I left the UK I bought an external keyboard. A Logitech Tablet Keyboard for iPad. Quite often it gives me a double character when I first start typing, but otherwise it’s so good that it is transformational.

While we’ve been talking, my iPad has been downloading a film off iTunes for me. Angela is away on holiday and mentioned that she’d watched The Third Man last night: call me daft, but I want to watch it with her, so to speak. So I rented it off iTunes and will watch it in a mo.

This one piece of metal, glass and plastic has been how I’ve run my business for this trip. It’s how I’ve kept in touch with people. Perhaps madly, it’s how I’ve been arranging drama meetings back in London. And it’s been entertainment. I’ve read books, I’ve read scripts, I’ve watched many TV episodes, I’ve watched a film or two and I’ve listened to music a lot.

This would be an ad for iPads except for one thing.

As I write this, it’s Tuesday evening Eastern Standard Time and a new iPad will be announced tomorrow. Plainly, I’m not writing on that new iPad tonight but I’m also not writing on the previous one, the iPad 2.

This is the same iPad I bought right back in June 2010. I’ve sat with friends who have iPad 2s and those are clearly enormously faster. I know that business with Safari pages and Numbers spreadsheets closing does not happen with iPad 2. And the iPad 2 does have cameras to let you use FaceTime. No question, iPad 2 is very good. One presumes iPad 3 is going to be better still, though search me how.

But I’ve no reason to buy it. Except fancying it, obviously. As much as I’ve grown accustomed to having my original iPad with me everywhere, this trip has made me appreciate it even more.

Mind you, if you fancied buying an original, nay, classic iPad… one careful if very constant user… You’d have to tear it out of my hands but I’d throw in the original box on my way to the Apple Store…

Very quickly: any chance you’re around London tomorrow? I’m going to be signing autographs at Big Finish Day 2 in Barking. The full details are yours for just a tap of a finger or a click of a mouse.