“It’s never too early to start panicking on this show,” said Len and with that we’re instantly back into Strictly: lapping up the atmosphere, being aghast at the frocks, pitying Anton and automatically tuning out Alesha Dixon.

We’ve just never been away. Yet this does feel like a shaken up Strictly. “This is the best lineup ever,” said Len, this time reading from his contract. Yet there is some truth in it: this is the first series in years where the celebrities are better known than the professional dancers. Then the new graphics are more nicely Hollywood than Shepherds Bush and the redesigned set is smart.

Plus of course, the whole idea of a launch show is new – to Strictly, at least. The format of the launch show is very familiar if you remember sports day at school or you’ve ever spent quality time at a meat market.

There wasn’t the promised tension and excitement over who was paired with whom, not when you could guess most with one squint at their respective heights. But we did have the little frisson over who is genuinely pleased, who is truly appalled and who had comments that were well enough prepared to make you suspect a fix.

There was a fix. Strictly is always cast as carefully as a drama and there is no random shuffle on who got whom but Anton got the joke: forget that Ann Widdecombe has been hired as the new John Sergeant, just look at the sixteen feet height difference. “If you are a politician of course you’re going to say what you think,” said Widdecombe during an interview recorded before we watched her and Anton pretending to be pleased with each other. That was rather sweet, her demonstrating the same grasp of reality she applies to Catholicism.

“That was seriously quite good,” said Bruce as the hour came quite quickly to an end. That was the best part – not that it ended but that it seemed to fly by. It’s easy to criticise the show but it does still have atmosphere, its artifice is balanced by fun and just often enough there are dances that lift you.

Not tonight, unfortunately, but you know they’re coming and you know you’ll be watching. Waddya say, round my place for a Strictly party on Friday 1 October?

Last year, someone dropped out of Strictly Come Dancing with about a biscuit and a half to go before all the celebrities were due to be announced. Nobody’s saying who it was, but it’s because of them that we got to see the hips and the moves of Richard Dunwoody.

So that was a success all round.

The Mystery Celebrity tried it out, thought long and hard about how very much they prefer a game of soldiers and vanished with only the production team and the professional dancer knowing who that masked man was.

It’s happened before, you could’ve bet that it would happen again but it can’t now. The reveal of who this year’s celebrities are to be was originally going to come out this Saturday night in the new launch show. Given that it’s being recorded today at BBC Television Centre, someone had a Damascus moment and realised they weren’t going to be able to keep it out of tomorrow’s papers.

So instead, the celebrities were leaked and the officially announced late last night – and the new twist is that neither we nor the celebrities know who the professional dancers will be. If that’s entirely true, the first time the celebrities meet their partner and have a good go is sometime this morning.

Maybe the people who got tickets to today’s recording aren’t as lucky as they thought.

But if there’s no cooling off period for celebrities to change their mind and run away this year, that’s really more a problem for them than for us. We’ll get to see the ones who are truly suffering, and you are very cruel for thinking of that.

It’s a questionable move and it’ll be interesting to see if the launch show idea is repeated next year, but you do have the sense that things are being shaken up that needed to be shaken up. This year you’ve heard of at least most of the celebrities, for one thing. And Alesha Dixon is back judging.

So there’s swings and roundabouts.

There’s also some very, very odd photography. Last year the official Strictly photos were done under tight security and at the last minute but almost all of them were very strikingly well done shots. This year, all the official ones are truly dreadful: they look like they were taken on a phone and they’ve ramped up the cheesiness to a degree one can only hope the show does not follow.

Roll up, roll up: see for yourself Patsy Kensit trying to hold her stomach in, Peter Shilton looking like you’ve just ordered the wrong wine and Paul Daniels rather resembling Golum.

That’s a link to the official BBC Strictly Come Dancing site. You can also get news of the show on Radio Times but note that unfortunately there won’t be an RT Strictly blog this year.

William

I first met Alan Plater in the mid-1980s and if you can ever pull it off, this is the way to meet someone who’s going to become a friend: I interviewed him. It was for a long piece in the BFI’s television magazine, Primetime, and it was thirty ways exciting: my first long piece, my first writing about drama, actually one of my first pieces of journalism, and certainly the first time interviewing someone I was a fan of.

That doesn’t always go well, mentioning no names Trevor Eve, but it did then. I was a little bit starstruck. I remember right now this moment, talking to you, that I was drawn then to the walls of bookshelves he and his wife Shirley Rubinstein had in the flat they lived in at the time. And I realise right now, just glancing up, that I went the same way, that I got the shelves and I got the books and they mean everything to me.

Never got a dog, though. I can picture Shirley bringing Alan and I a cup of tea and being surprised that we’d got down to the interview so nervously fast. And her not being surprised that their dog, the Duke, had plonked himself across my feet, pinning me down and just being so warm that it was lovely.

It’s perhaps too obvious to say that the whole afternoon was much the same but I’ll say it anyway. The Duke was very heavy. The interview was not. The peg for the piece was that The Beiderbecke Connection was due shortly on ITV, the third and final of Alan’s four tales about a woodwork teacher and an English one. If you’ve seen the Beiderbecke trilogy until your off-air tapes have worn out, get the DVD: it includes Get Lost!, a precursor to the show you remember.

I learnt all this on that day and, really, next time you meet someone, interview them. Somehow the brief for the piece ranged very wide and I pumped this nice guy for details of everything, his entire career and life. Yet still we had time to meander off onto other topics. He was adamant that he’d never change from a typewriter to a word processor, adamant. Also remarkably persuasive: I was then a nascent version of the geek I am today and even I could see his arguments.

The next time I saw him he’d bought a PC. I helped him onto a Mac later but never got him onto an iPhone. Shirley secretly fancies an iPad, I can tell you that.

I don’t remember anything else about the second time we met. But it was dark when I was leaving their flat that first afternoon and it must’ve been December because I can still picture Shirley at their door, asking if I minded popping a pile of Christmas cards into the postbox downstairs. I can picture the corridor outside their flat, I can just about picture the cards. I can’t see the postbox so clearly. I’m suddenly worrying about that.

The article had two mistakes in it. All these years later, I remember the mistakes. But then that’s little to do with Alan and Shirley, I just remember mistakes and berate myself in the middle of the night for errors ten years in the past. You can’t believe the cockups I did once or twice at BBC Ceefax; I can see my editor there, the dear and tremendous Lucie Maguire, gently starting to tell me what I’d done and I can feel my legs going the way they did.

I see a lot, don’t I? Remember a lot. Strikingly clearly, sometimes. Not always over important things, not always for an understandable reason. But certainly over people and times that matter to me.

Such as the handwriting on the letter that so sweetly told me I’d made those mistakes: Shirley and Alan having no interest in whether I got something right or wrong about them, but keen to make sure I knew my jazz history. If you ever find the BFI piece online and read it, let me know so I can tell you what I got wrong about Ellington.

Strange to think of handwriting and letters when it feels now as if Alan, Shirley and I have always emailed a lot. That letter’s long gone, I’m not one to keep mementoes and anyway what would’ve felt like one then doesn’t now: at some point and quickly, Alan went from an interviewee to a friend.

He read my first ever stab at a script, a piece called The Strawberry Thief. Still a good title. Still a rubbish script. And he said so. But he said so in such a way that I was inevitably going to pick myself up and have another go. He told me then that the stage directions I’d written had often made him laugh out loud and that I should get that into the dialogue where viewers would see it. When I did, he told me it was a great step for writerkind.

It is to my now permanent regret that I didn’t get further with my writing while he could see it. I can point to a hundred things I’ve done, including television like Crossroads, certainly to all the journalism and stage pieces – years later Alan and Shirley came up to Birmingham to see my very first one, came during a busy time, came for just about exactly the two hours it took to see my play and get back to the train – and not only can I point to these things, but I do and I will. Still I’ve not achieved what I wanted, what I think he wanted for me, what I sometimes like to think he expected. You didn’t have to say much on the day he died to make me choke, but a text from a friend did it and does it still: Andrea Gibb told me to go get drama work in his memory.

I will. I should tell you immediately that for all regret and all hope for the future, it is to my permanent and cherished and unshakeable pride that I am a better writer because of Alan Plater.

After my brother died, I took my mother to Leeds to see a play of Alan’s and to finally meet him and Shirley. While I was at the bar, they talked to her about writing and writers and how there are some people who have it, who are writers, and there are those who just don’t and never will. They told my mother that I had it, that I was a writer.

As much as that means to me, it also amuses me that I know because they very soon blabbed to me that they’d said this and my mother eventually mentioned it too. There were other things going on, other things rather monopolising thoughts but I also think she was processing it. I am too.

A quick, unexpected memory. I once gave Alan a lift from a talk he had given, one of the myriad talks he gave to writers everywhere, and the conversation became unexpectedly awkward, I felt for a second like I was right back to being the fan interviewing a hero. And I realised why: we had such similar views on whatever the conversation was about, doubtlessly drama, that I sounded sycophantic. “Thank God I don’t like football,” I told him, “because otherwise we agree on everything.”

The last time I saw Alan he was trying to watch the World Cup and to explain something or other to me about football, again. I promise I waited until the little men with the ball thing had finished, though I’m not always sure what’s a highlight, a repeat or just the same boring patch of grass. Might’ve been a goal. Then while he paid as little attention to ITV1’s presenters as everyone else, we meandered again.

For some reason, and I do not remember why, we meandered onto the topic of Misterioso. I knew and you know that Alan wrote a stunning amount, that his body of work is incredible. I knew that then and I was still surprised to hear at the funeral how little I knew of it all. Hundreds of pieces of TV, stage, film, books, music. Any single one piece of which you’d be exultant to have written yourself. And when, inevitably, there is debate over what was his best, the contenders are lined up from here to the Mexican border.

I can’t tell you if Misterioso is his best, it’s probably not: the version that means so much to me is the original novel and that’s a quiet, soft, gentle piece I’ve only read twenty times since it came out. “Bless you,” said Alan on that last time I saw him, “I haven’t read it since I wrote it.” I informed him then that it wasn’t his any more, it was mine. Tough. It’s long felt like that: I know I can hear his voice in the writing but it’s that story and that way of telling it with these characters that make this a book I hold close to me. I’ve probably recommended it to you already, that’s how much I like it. And you’ve probably been disappointed because it’s not been in print for years and you’re never getting my hardback.

Nor has the TV version been released on DVD. Alan and Shirley got me a copy a few years ago and it is at this moment on my iPad. At the time they were both disappointed that the project had become a one-off instead of the serial they’d intended and I should have been disappointed because this was a TV adaptation of a book I loved. That rarely works out but here it’s as if I have two Misteriosos, one a dear book and one a dear TV film. Come round my place some time, with all its books and bookshelves, and I’ll show it to you.

Bring lunch. You’ll have to watch The Beiderbecke Affair too. And Fortunes of War, the joyously beautifully perfect Fortunes of War. The last lines of which made me cry then and do today, do right this second as I remember them: not because they’re sad, not because they’re a weepie melodrama, but because they are right.

I told you I’m not one for mementoes. I told you that Alan Plater became a friend, became family really, and so much so that it’s hard to remember just being a fan all those years ago. But there is a memento, just one.

The watch I was wearing that day I met Alan broke a short while afterwards but I kept it anyway. Because I’d worn it that day. I wore it again last Monday at his funeral.

William

People are telling me this with a straight face: yes, England lost 4-1 to Germany or whichever team it was, but if one goal hadn’t been disallowed, England would’ve won. People had been telling me with only slightly less of a straight face that, the other day, America beat some team 2-2.

Alan Plater wrote a stage play called Confessions of a City Supporter in which characters, fans of Hull City FC, would regularly insist a defeat was a moral victory: “We smashed ’em, nil-two.”

Football maths. I love this, just love it, because it feels like a collision between math and drama. In drama people lie and misunderstand and don’t know and don’t realise what they know, it’s a seething mass of contradiction. Whereas the beauty of math is that it’s right. You can debate whether it was really Pythagoras who spotted what triangles get up to and there are gorgeous stories of lying bastards who got glory for other people’s brilliant mathematics – but the math is correct. Triangles, hypotenuse, you know how it goes, it’s true and it will always be true.

Seriously, always.

Science is about asking questions, it’s about figuring something out then testing, testing, testing until it looks pretty solid. And yet it will forever be questioned, forever tested and the moment it breaks, science will drop it. Scientific method: it seems to be misunderstood these days, newspapers seem to believe today’s science is absolute and that boffins – they’re always boffins; if you’ve read a book, you’re a boffin – think they know everything.

If a science experiment demonstrates that something happens 99 times out of 100, that’s fair enough, that’s a good, working, practical conclusion and science will use it until it breaks. Writers, on the other hand, work with issues and feelings and topics that actually do not make any sense at all, except that they make every sense.

Then mathematicians work in proof. That 99 out of 100? Not good enough. Not even close to being good enough. The math behind the security of every credit card transaction in the world is based on something that so far has not been proved. How many billion transactions happen every day? How crucial is this math to the world? Actually, it’s crucial enough that banks hire mathematicians and pay them very, very well to try either proving or breaking it. Billions of pounds are spent relying on this math, millions are spent trying to break it before anyone else does and before they take down practically our entire economy.

But because it’s not proved, this math is stubbornly called a theory. It’s the Riemann Hypothesis. I am no mathematician but when it’s explained as well as, say, Marcus du Sautoy does in The Music of the Primes book (UK edition, US edition) then I can see some of the sheer beauty of it. Enough that I wish I’d been a better student at school.

Quick example of how rigorous math is? This is one of my favourite jokes. Actually, it might come from that du Sautoy book. Not sure now. Anyway, are you ready?

A writer, a scientist and a mathematician are on a train travelling from England to Scotland. As they cross the border, the writer looks out and exclaims: “Look! Sheep are black in Scotland!” The scientist takes a look and says no: “In Scotland,” he insists, “there is one sheep who is black.”

The mathematician peeks over their shoulders and says no. “In Scotland, there is one sheep, one side of which is black.”

William

This is the kind of thing I wanted to know before I bought an iPad and it’s what I’ve found after about a week’s moderate use of it. So it’s about the keyboard, it’s about the apps and it’s also about disappointments and the odd surprise.

You zoomed in on that word “disappointments”, didn’t you? Let’s start there then.

Disappointments with the iPad

There have been two. First, I unthinkingly expected the box to include the wee little dock, the iPad equivalent of what comes with the iPhone. Apple’s quite clear that it doesn’t and I’m fine with how it doesn’t come with headphones, so I shouldn’t have been disappointed but I was. (You get a mains plug and a cable that attaches either to that or to your computer for docking.)

More seriously, the keyboard. This is an odd one because on the whole I’m so pleased with it as to be relieved, surprised and delighted. I will not be buying an external keyboard for it – though I think I’ve got a kludgy old keyboard somewhere that will connect wirelessly to it, maybe I’ll give it a try some time.

Yet there were disappointments with the keyboard and it is what you, as a writer, spend most of your time on. I found the size and shape of the keys good, but the layout, not so much. It appears firstly, for instance, that there is no apostrophe on the main keyboard: you have to press a button marked .?123 which changes the QWERTY letters to 1234… numbers and includes punctuation. There is a secondly, though, which makes this better. Press and hold the comma button for an instant and the apostrophe appears.

So that’s good. Except that I now find it easier to go to that numbers screen for it rather than hold up my writing for even that brief instant you have to wait. Plus, the iPad is even better at inserting apostrophes for you as you type than the iPhone is. That’s great and and I did just type “thats”, letting it correct me. But I type well, I like typing, so I’m having to train myself to let it have its way.

This kind of intelligent interference causes me problems with capitals. The iPad, especially in the excellent Pages app (£5.99 UK, $10 US) assumes quite rightly that every sentence begins with a capital letter. I hold this to be self-evident but that means I go to do it too: I tap the shift key, thinking I need it. Since Pages has already pressed shift, so to speak, I find I’m really un-pressing it and my sentences begin with a lowercase letter.

For some reason my fingers can’t get used to where the wee little shift keys are either, so I find I’m pausing to find them and then pausing to go back to correct this uppercase/lowercase issue.

But that said, the automatic correction is rather impressive. I loathe predictive text on phones but here it’s more what-you-really-meant. Very nicely, the iPad is good at spotting when the mistake is that you’ve left out a space: it’s smart at recognising when one mistyped word is really two correctly-typed ones run together.

And the whole feel of typing on glass is very, very good. I should say I am in the minority who likes the iPhone keyboard even for protracted typing so maybe your mileage will vary. I also wonder if it will be as good for women or anyone who doesn’t have a nervous fingernail issue.

Last, you do need to prop the iPad up to type on. Well, you don’t. It’s flat in front of me now but that means your hands tend to hide some of what you’re typing. I bought Apple’s iPad case (£30 from Apple Stores) and it’s mixed, leaning toward good, and works very well as a stand that tilts the iPad to a good angle for typing. Also for reading: I’ve found I leave it propped up at that angle even when I’m actually using another computer. I tend to refer to the iPad for my calendar, for Twitter, for reading books in stolen moments.

Apps for writers

Buy Pages. I bought it before I bought the iPad. It’s a good, strong word processor and is preposterously cheap. I thought the desktop Mac version was preposterously cheap but this is under a tenner.

Pages will read and write Microsoft Word documents though I expect not very complex ones. Getting documents in and out of Pages is not great: you end up emailing them around and thereby getting a bit in a tangle over which is the latest version of what document. You can copy your documents to and from your computer using iTunes but I’ve yet to even try, it’s sufficiently inelegant. You can share your documents over iWork.com but I’ve not even looked at that.

If you can think of Word as just the thing you need to send documents to people, if you don’t think of Pages as trying to be a Word clone, you will like Apple’s word processor. More: you’ll be impressed. And when you go back to Word on your Mac or PC, you’ll find yourself poking a finger at the screen.

That’s how good Pages is and also how good the iPad’s touch screen is. Using a mouse and proper keyboard do very quickly feel archaic, even wrong.

I did find it hard to see how to name the documents you create in Pages: turns out when you have the list of documents open (it looks a little like Cover Flow) then pressing and holding on the name lets you set it.

Once you’ve bought Pages

There are writing tools on the iPad app store, some of which are exactly the worthless distraction we seek but a few are close to essential.

For most writers, I’d say that in includes Evernote (free). The app lets you jot down anything, stray lines, ideas, images even and then later examine them right there in the app or on any computer that you can point at Evernote.com. I have a problem with some of the graphics, just aesthetically, and they happen to be one of the few bits you can’t customise. So I recommend Evernote but am still looking around

Reading

I thought I wanted an iPad for iBooks, for being able to read a lot.

Damn right.

For all that I write on the iPad, watch a lot of TV and video on it, listen to a lot of music and radio programmes, and spend far too much time on Twitter with it, by far the thing that has given me most pleasure is reading.

What I didn’t expect was that iBooks isn’t the only game in town.

There are three.

By far the best to use for straight reading and for buying books too, Apple’s iBooks could be all you need. But there aren’t that many books yet on the iBooks Store. Whereas there are many, many times more books downloadable from Amazon for its Kindle and Barnes and Noble for its Nook device.

Fortunately, both companies make free iPad and iPhone apps. Both are fine, leaning toward very good, though iBooks wins because buying books is much more obviously easy and simple in that. Dangerously so.

You may be thinking that I’ve sequed away from the topic of iPad for writers. But you can’t write if you don’t also read and reading on the iPad is a joy.

Plus, it’s possible if a little tricky to get your own books into your copy of iTunes and iBooks. I did a pitch recently that reworked 10,000 words and reading it again on the iPad was a bit of a treat.

I’m not certain I’ll write the next 10,000 words on it. But I’ve written all of this blog entry on my iPad: I think I’ve done it more slowly than I would’ve done on a full keyboard but I also think part of that is how I still need to get used to the keyboard layout differences.

Apple’s iPad is available from online and real Apple Stores. Other tablet computers are available – apparently – but if they were any good, you’d not have read this far about iPads.

I’ve a colleague who watched all of The Wire, every season, every episode, because she hoped she’d get to like it. I’m a hard, hard man: I want everything to be fantastic but if episode 1 doesn’t hold me in some way, in any way, I’m off. And I think I’m wrong: this is the prejudice of the title, the rather less socially significant but since we’re writers who want our work to keep people’s attention, still important prejudice.

Follow. Back in the mid-1990s I saw the movie Stargate and didn’t happen to like it. Consequently I saw only the odd channel-hopping sliver of its TV follow-up, Stargate: SG-1. Didn’t watch a single frame of that show’s follow up, Stargate Atlantis. Until checking this out before talking to you, I had never even heard of Stargate Infinity.

But now I’d probably call myself a fan, certainly an addict, of the latest series, Stargate Universe. That’s happy for me. Only, as well as just enjoying the drama, I am agog at the differences between this and previous series: differences that are led by how the new show is written. I’m so agog that I’ve gone nipping back into the other Stargates, sampling this, trying that, running away again from the film. Some of it can be exciting, some of it can be funny and I’m not knocking the shows at all, I’m just saying they’re not my kind of drama.

All the previous Stargate shows were science fiction adventure tales about fairly square-jawed hero types who usually spoke in one-liners when they weren’t reciting technobabble. They were fast-paced shows, high-stakes, high explosions, big, epic, aliens, wooo, all of that.

Stargate Universe, on the other hand, is serious, it’s about very real people under pressure and their problems are not resolved by the end of the hour, they go on week to week, getting worse week to week. This is my cup of tea. I enjoy it so much, I look forward to it so much each week that I want to thank Daniel Hardy: he listens and has contributed to the UK DVD Review podcast I do and it was solely on his recommendation that I gave this new show a go.

It’s entirely my own fault that I’ve gone poking about the other series.

What I’ve found is that these other Stargate series are made by the same company, they share broadly the same premise in that they have these Stargate things. They share storylines, they share some characters and actors. And they are written by much the same people.

So have a look and see if you’re as startled by the differences as I am.

First up, Stargate SG-1. Nip along to 3’50 in this and watch a typical “Gentlemen, there is a crack in the world” type of sci-fi scene. It’s also a key scene for the Hero, Richard Dean Anderson as Jack O’Neill and Amanda Tapping as Sam Carter. I watched through my hand.

Next, the opening to the pilot episode of Stargate Universe.

I’l bet money your first thought is the money. Stargate Universe looks much more expensive. I believe it is, too. I worry that your thought after that is how slow the beginning is. Watching it with you now on YouTube with the wee little screen, it doesn’t have the strong, arresting, intriguing, feature-film-like feel at first but is that true or is it just that I’ve seen it before? Not knowing what’s going on, I think you’re curious and as the show zooms in on the ship and through its broken corridors, maybe it builds some nice tension. It did with me on my telly.

I admire the opening for how completely still it is and then how completely the quietness is punctured by the arrival of that first character, Lt. Scott. And then the mayhem. So quickly you go from this utter stillness to a very human fear and panic.

I’m also going to bet money that you are more tempted to carry on watching Stargate Universe than you are Stargate SG-1, just based on these excerpts. So why not? The show is on Sky1 on Tuesday nights in the UK, it’s on Syfy in the US on Fridays – though in both cases it’s about to reach the end of its first season. I’d recommend starting at the beginning which I’m sure will loop around again on Sky and Syfy but is out on DVD shortly and on iTunes now.

I recommend it so thoroughly that I’m surprised I’ve forgotten to mention Robert Carlyle stars in it. I recommend it so thoroughly despite having learnt that every single atom of the show that I enjoy this much is detested by fans of the old SG-1 series.

There are people who long for this series to be cancelled and their favourite SG-1 to be revived. Fortunately, as well as being a bit unlikely anyway, these vocal voices appear to belong to an intense but small group of fans who need to let go.

Or to go live in what I’ve been dying all day to call a stargated community.

William

If you buy a PC, you’ve just bought a PC. If you buy a Mac, somehow you’re a Machead, a cultist, an Apple fanboy or girl, you’ve joined a religion, you worship Steve Jobs and Jonny Ive, you’ve been fooled by the hype, you’re trying to be cool, you think shiny is good, the list goes on.

You hear much the same degree of jeering between football fans but at least with that there are fans on both sides. Who’s actually fan of Windows PCs? But okay, if Apple is a religion, it’s the Church of the One That Works.

If Microsoft comes out with something, I’ll probably hear about it at some point. I don’t follow many of the techie news sites I used to when I worked in computers but I’ll hear eventually. Mostly because it takes so long: a pretty standard spiel from Microsoft is that our new product will kill Apple/Google/Everybody as soon as it’s launched in three to four years. And it’s cheaper too, so there. Will be cheaper.

There was a nice-looking tablet computer they did this about: if you saw the articles, you quite fancied this. It was a wee way off, they said, and now the other day they cancelled it entirely.

In comparison, Apple loves making big announcements about fancy technology and ending with the words “Available today”. I’m not sure whether you’d call that smug or gleeful, but I think they earn whichever it is. The famous Apple secrecy up to the launch of a product has some unpleasant sides but ultimately where so many firms talk about what they’re going to do, Apple tends to just do it first.

Seriously first, too. They nicked the idea for a graphical computer back when there used to be any other sort. Microsoft nicked it from the same place an hour later. But where Apple took Xerox PARC’s idea and made it commercially practical, commercially available, Microsoft Windows has been copying the Mac for nearly thirty years and it’s still not there.

You have a mouse. You wouldn’t have if Apple hadn’t done it first, or at least if someone hadn’t, because Microsoft came late to mice. If you’ve got a laptop, it has the keyboard pushed to the back so you can type comfortably and it’s got a slick touchpad. Because of Apple. I was at the UK launch of their first PowerBook with that touchpad and they crowed about how they had patented it.

Apple patents are plainly rubbish, but there you go.

When Apple does come out with something new, I hear about it much, much faster because these days I’m looking. I’ve got a couple of Mac sites on my iPhone’s newsreader and I’ll read them not through fervour, not because they happen to update while I’m bowing toward Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino.

I read them because of Apple’s track record and how the firm thinks things through.

One example. I hope this has changed in Windows 7 but it lasted for the first twenty years of Windows so it’s a fair illustration of how the technology doesn’t matter, it’s the people behind it. Copy some documents to a floppy disk, if you can find a floppy disk.

Windows gives you a nice, pretty graphic of paper airplanes flying between an icon of your hard disk and an icon of your floppy one. Until suddenly the floppy is full and it panics. “Error!” it screams. I can’t remember the unmemorably techie error message but its meaning is very clear: it’s your fault. You’ve got it wrong, not Windows.

Do the same thing on a Mac and it looks first. Tells you there’s not going to be enough room on the floppy.

That’s it, it’s just sayin’.

Microsoft did the pretty icon fine, it just thinks that pretty is enough. Well, sort of. Windows XP has a very Fisher Price kind of look but Windows 7 is prettier. It’s just that pretty is as pretty does, I think: Apple products have a shine to them at least in very great part because they work and work so well. Before the iPhone, no phone looked anything like it. Since the iPhone, no phone has been released that hasn’t tried to copy it. That’s design, that’s thinking brilliantly.

That’s not trying to make a long list of features, that’s trying to make the things useful.

Not long ago I recommended that a friend did not switch to Macs because I felt he was so wedded to Windows and had so many applications that changing was a giant deal. He changed anyway. I’m very persuasive. And for weeks afterwards he’d phone me up laughing. Because he’d buy some new software, new hardware, something, and he’d read out the six pages of instructions for how you install them under Windows before delivering the punchline. For Mac, the instructions were always “Plug it in.” The End.

I used to actually like computers. I enjoyed fiddling, I even had a fair enough career in computer magazines though I always felt I was a magazine guy more than I was a computing one. And all the friends I still have from there are nodding now. Possibly also nodding off, but.

Today all I want is to work on a machine that works. Someone asked me recently how I could possibly enjoy computers so much. I had just repaired a ridiculous problem with his Windows Vista laptop but I swear we stared at each other as if across a gulf. I don’t like computers, I like that I can talk to you like this, I love that I can do my work wherever I am in the world, I adore that right now I’ve got music playing, that in a short while my Mac will record the Afternoon Play so I can listen in the car later. That BBC News channel is open on my right. That Twitter is updating in front of me. That the film I’m buying off iTunes will be ready to watch in a second or two.

And obviously I write. But for every advantage this Mac gives me for writing, it does offer a thousand distractions.

It’s just that I’m not distracted struggling to find a DLL, whatever in the hell that is, I’m not interrupted by WARNING! VIRUS! YOUR FAULT! messages. And when my disk is full, I know I’ve just been talking too much.

Easy one first: name a great woman actor. Got one? Got a hundred? It’s a doddle. Straight off the top of my head, I immensely admire Jodie Foster, Judi Dench, Emily Watson, Barbara Flynn, Emily Mortimer, Allison Janney, Helen Hunt, Alison Pill, if I say any more I’ll itch to sort them into alphabetical order. And anyway, you’ve got your own list.

But now name a great role for a woman. You can do it, each of these women has had a least one tremendous role or I wouldn’t know to admire them, wouldn’t know they are as talented as they are.

Yet most of the time the woman’s role is as nothing more than being the unattainable object for the hero, who attains her by the end anyway. For instance, I just watched Se7en for a thriller-writing course run by Script in the West Midlands and, watching it as a writer, I kept wondering why Gwyneth Paltrow took the part she did. It’s a great film and the parts for the leads, Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman are tremendous, but Paltrow is a big name and it’s a tiny part.

How did Kim Basinger get an Oscar for LA Confidential? I’m not saying she was poor, but what did she actually have to do in the film? How did Judi Dench get an Oscar for thirty seconds of screen time in Shakespeare in Love?

Those two films are exceptions for me because both parts were fine, they just didn’t have much to them. Whereas the majority of time, I find that as a viewer, I am prone to slapping my forehead. Particularly when the hero says he’s going “to get the girl”. I can’t help it: I immediately hear him saying that today he’s got to pick up the laundry, wash the car, get to the post office before 3pm and, oh, yes, collect the girl. Whoever she is in the story, she’s not a person, she’s not a character, she’s a UPS parcel.

Yes, I’m pro-feminist. I think it’s embarrassing that there’s only one woman in the new British Government cabinet. It’s bad that I can’t bear her, but embarrassing too. But I don’t slap my forehead from some ideological idea, I do it because this accepted norm of the woman as “the girl” to get is crippling to drama.

Follow. The hero falls for a “perfect” woman. Already she’s boring me, but still, let’s go with it. The hero is someone this woman would never look at and yet without him actually changing into someone worth being glanced over, she is required to change her mind by the end of the story. Usually this involves the hero doing something for 90 minutes when she isn’t even in the room. We know nothing about her, we care nothing about her, she isn’t actually anything: certainly not a character of any low number of dimensions. There’s a good chance she’s blonde. I wouldn’t count on her wearing much in the way of a costume.

But if you don’t care about this unattainable object that the hero is striving to attain, it’s hard to keep your mind on the hero’s striving. Hard to get behind a hero who’s so shallow that this empty life-size poster of a woman is his ultimate goal.

So a will-they/won’t-they tale rapidly becomes, for me, a will-he/why-would-she story. Then it’s a who-is-she story, penultimately a who-is-he tale, then a what’s-on-the-other-side-kind-of-drama.

There’s always something on the other side. I’m just grumbling at you today because so much of it appears to be like this and I can’t understand how all drama, all writers, all producers aren’t grabbing talent. I actually can’t understand why there are so many talented women actors when this is what’s on offer for them.

Except, of course, when everything works. I only recently saw Emily Mortimer and Gerard Butler in Dear Frankie: a beautiful gem of a film by Andrea Gibb with real women, real men, real characters.

I can well see why women would want to act in drama like that. Because I want to write drama like that.

William

Nuts to me, my writing, even to the brilliance of Red Planet and the single most energising, invigorating, exhilarating day in my scribbling career to date (I may be underselling that). Instead, look at this gorgeous, glorious thing.

So, first off, I have a new website. It’s very like the old one in that it’s plainly an expression of my wanton ego – I have a website, a blog, I’m on Facebook, Twitter and occasionally the phone – that I’m trying to come to terms with. And it’s also at the same address, www.williamgallagher.com.