“Writing In Treatment” is a bit of a come-on title, it’s as if I’ve found some news for you and will be linking like crazy to insightful interviewers. And it is a little like that.

Here’s the Los Angeles Times reviewing the new second season of In Treatment and saying “the stories are even better than they were last season and that’s saying something”. And The Boston Globe has a good piece about both the original Israeli series and the American adaptation.

But what that Boston Globe piece does that I’m trying to do today and really rather failed to do last time is talk about the writers. Perhaps chiefly because I want to enthuse about them but also because I think there are signs for the future here, both good and bad signs.

Last time I spoke of the writing, I didn’t speak of the writers. I think I was a bit awash with writers at the time: I’d just seen 43 episodes over 14 days, most of which had individual writers but some were team-written, and 42 of them were direct translation/adaptations of the Israeli originals by more writers.

Then there was a showrunner on the US version who wrote the first five episodes to set the style and doubtlessly worked at least in part on all the other episodes. That was Rodrigo Garcia but there was also a showrunner/writer on the Israeli show, Be’Tipul and he created the whole thing: Hagai Levi.

I watched the show for the same reason you watch anything: it sounded good, I thought I’d like it. Then I really, really liked it and it was a can’t-stuff-your-face-fast-enough race to the end of the season.

Now I’m watching it again. But as a writer. And I’m slicing it a different way. Rather than one episode of Laura’s therapy sessions, then Alex’s, then Sophie’s, then Jake and Amy, then Paul’s, rinse, repeat, I’m watching all of Sophie’s. And by focusing on the one, and I’ll admit aided by a handy writer list on the DVD box that I hadn’t noticed before, I’m seeing that Sarah Treem wrote the last eight of the nine Sophie episodes. (Garcia did the first of this one as well.) That link is to her IMDb list, as are most of the links here, but in her case don’t bother: it just lists In Treatment. Instead, try the New York Times which has a review of A Feminine Ending, a stage play of hers. But it also has audio of Treem herself talking about that play. Then The Village Voice talks about how Treem and other new writers made up the whole of the 2007/8 season for the Playwrights Horizons company. That company claims to always champion new writing but for that year, it did nothing else and – this is not directly stated but it’s only barely hidden – it was because its regular writers were rubbish.

That’s a little harsh.

I don’t know much yet about any of the other writers on In Treatment but even if Sarah Treem is the only newcomer, isn’t that marvellous? In Treatment was a fairly chancy commission for HBO and it wasn’t like they dabbled in it. There was apparently a five-part pilot made, which presumably makes up week 1 of the series, but still you can’t imagine ITV1 commissioning 40-odd episodes of anything new. If they ever did, if any major British television company did risk commissioning that many episodes of a non-soap drama, can you imagine them ever trying new writers on it?

Yes.

Life on Mars did. One episode of that was to be written by a new writer to television, I don’t know who, I only know it was a man. Something happened, again I don’t know what, and his script was not used but there was that willingness to take a chance. Similarly, Ashes to Ashes was the first producing job for Beth Willis and look at her now: she’s the new co-exec producer on Doctor Who.

It’s called taking a chance for a reason, though. You chance your arm, you try your hand, you sometimes burn your fingers. If a brand new writer fails to deliver a filmable script of The Bill – um, bad example, sorry. If a brand new writer fails to deliver a filmable episode of Hustle, that’s a gigantic production machine derailed. You’ve got to believe they’ll deliver the goods, they’ve got to be as much of a safe pair of hands as you can manage. I’ve felt precisely this when I’ve commissioned new writers on magazines and I’ve had bad experiences from that. Also some good, actually, and that keeps you doing it, but a lot of bad. And a bad experience for me means having to write an emergency article in a couple of hours, that’s substantially easier than writing an hour’s television over a weekend.

This is the reason we’re all guided to soaps: they can be derailed too but they’re hardy little buggers and they can cope better. And it’s fair enough: if you’ve written 100 episodes of a soap, you’re someone who delivers. When you cannot have a blank screen, that’s a very tempting and very practical thing to look for in a new writer.

I think it’s a calamitous side-effect that soaps have become seen as the only route through and moreover that because such a proportion of new writers and producers come through the soap route that it’s seen as the right way to do drama. People who don’t write soaps are very dismissive of the genre, but fortunately people who do write soaps believe they’re already writing every type of drama so the general wrongness just balances out. Funnily enough, there is huge, rich drama in the gap between: when drama writers try soap and soap writers try drama.

Anyway, In Treatment, just to yank this back to the topic, is not a soap. It’s far more painful than that and if a story is about someone fancying someone, it cuts truer than the soap version would. It’s willing to go down areas that might end the story early. It does end the story early. More than one patient does not last the whole nine weeks of the series. And then it sees what happens next, what’s underlying everything, what’s deeper. Rather like therapy, actually. Apparently the original Israeli series had a therapist advising the writers and he or she did complain a lot: not about inaccuracy but about how the scripts didn’t dig deep enough. So then they did.

There’s a lot of hyperbole about the original show, about how it’s the greatest drama Israeli television has ever produced. It’s certainly the only one I’ve heard of, so maybe that’s true. But there is also the harsh, practical fact that it may well be the cheapest.

It’s certainly, surely, HBO’s cheapest-ever drama. Some sources say each episode took two days to film, others say it was only one. It is only half an hour per episode, but compare that to a ten-day shoot for a typical one-hour US drama and it’s probably cheaper than even reality TV.

I don’t want to see British television drama budgets cut. But they’re being cut. I think it’s a preposterously short-sighted notion: notice how ITV1 is in trouble but ITV3 is doing very well – because it’s showing all the dramas ITV used to make. You can’t repeat Britain’s Got Talent, you can and they do repeat successfully repeat Thunderbirds over and over.

If there’s any good to come from lower budgets, it’s that we may see things like In Treatment. BBC4 is already making cheap dramas that are punching well above their weight: think of the dramatisations of the lives of people like Hughie Green. Trevor Eve received the greatest share of the praise for that, and his performance was superb, he managed to convey not only a tremendous impression of Hughie Green but all the nuances and the strengths of the script. It’s just that it was the writer, Tony Basgallop who put those nuances and those strengths in there.

Fast-cutting scenes, action and stupendous locations cost money: tight, tense, intimate writing, not so much. Unfortunately, the type of writing that keeps you compelled without any eye candy, that involves you in characters without melodrama, that’s cripplingly hard to do. The rewards are richer, for the viewer, but the gamble is higher for the writer. And it’s a harsh and unpalatable fact that being given the chance to write this type of work is not even a remote guarantee that you’re capable of it.

If drama budgets are cut, we’re going to see an awful lot of crap. But we might see things like In Treatment and they might bring us new writers, new voices.

I’m obviously arguing with my writing hat on: I said as much at the top. But I’m a drama nut and as a viewer I just want to be in the story, whatever it is and however much it cost. As a writer, mind, I should tell you I’m available. I’m here through Thursday, two-drink minimum, see your waitress for details.

William

I’m so tired. It’s 2am, but I’ve got to talk to you. I’ve got to Talk Things Through.

Previously… the Red Planet Prize could’ve been made for me – but it wasn’t. Not this year, anyway. I got to the finals, which was without question the single most affirming thing that’s happened in my writing career. I mean, stage plays, yes, Radio Times, no doubt. But Red Planet wanted one-hour TV drama and that’s my bag. That is the reason I am a writer at all. (qv Lou Grant.)

“The way I work generally is I figure a code, a general measuring stick parameter. A thirty scene thing means that each scene is going to be around four pages long… I have a tendency to work rather mathematically about all this stuff. As I build this up, you’ll see it’s done vaguely by the numbers.”

Aren’t you rushing to see the movie this fella is planning?  I think you knew it was a man. But it’s George Lucas and he’s speaking privately in the first of five story conferences, five nine-hour story conferences about Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1978. He’s spitballing away with Steven Spielberg, briefing  screenwriter Laurence Kasdan.

Fancy reading the whole thing? A transcript of the entire thing is available right here in PDF.

I think I’ve said before that a reason the latest Indiana Jones film was so poor was that it was just a series of stunts with some bits to string them together. There were other reasons too, but that was one and it’s a failing of a lot of films. But as I’d thought I’d heard and now know for sure, it’s precisely how Raiders of the Lost Ark was done.

More, the stunt scenes they couldn’t fit in went on to become the next couple of films.

So maybe George Lucas has a point.

Nah.

Mathematical screenwriting? What’s that line of Aaron Sorkin’s? I can’t find my copy of his book but it was a crack about network TV executives saying you can’t have politics on TV, can’t have people with moustaches… Sorking said something along the lines of: “People make up rules  because it’s considerably easier than learning the real ones.”

Blimey. From Lucas to Sorkin in one blog. There is actually a chance these two fellas have never been talked about in the same breath.

But anyway, I was fascinated by the Raiders documents: the torrent of ideas, for one thing, but more how we know so very well how Kasdan absorbed all this and wrote something so very good.

William

I’ve had some wonderful nights in theatre and I’m going to admit to you that up to now the best have really been when it’s been my own material on stage. Sitting in an audience, feeling them laugh and choke, knowing that an idea you had in your head is now working. Does it honestly get better?

Yes.

On Saturday night I was at the Carriageworks Theatre in Leeds where my wife Angela Gallagher’s first-ever play, Rainwatching was performed.

You can’t imagine how good it was. It went down a hurricane. Rainwatching closed out the whole festival of new writing and when the lights came up, the audience was in tears. There was a writer/actor/audience discussion panel right after it and most of the other plays were skipped over in seconds but Angela’s was all anyone wanted to discuss. I may be biased there, but still.

The piece is a very raw, apparently simple but truly rich and very powerful monologue about a cancer patient with a right git of a husband. And during the panel discussion, the theatre announced to the audience that Rainwatching was to be restaged over the summer – in a trilogy including a monologue for the git husband.

I’ve written that. And I’ve written the final part of the trilogy, a piece about another character in both the first two monologues. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written.

It’s funny but one of the strongest reactions on Saturday night was about this husband character, Len, who we only hear about, we never see in Angela’s Rainwatching. And another strong reaction was to the idea of seeing him in mine: everybody wants to see him, everybody wants to hear his side. But women who had been cheery with me until this point, positively turned on me: challenging me, I mean really threateningly challenging me, to try justifying this git. The look in their eyes!

I’ve never had such a good night – and nothing of mine was actually performed. But the power of Angela’s piece, it was wonderfully affirming to see an audience reacting the way I believed they would.

What I didn’t expect was the reaction after the show. Because of the panel, the audience knew what Angela looked like so they kept seeking her out in the bar. When we were leaving, people abandoned their conversations in mid-word to come over to her: not just to congratulate her, but to actually thank her for writing it.

And to give me a funny look about the sequel.

Wish you could’ve been there. I’ll let you know when dates for the trilogy are announced – and in the meantime, fancy seeing what the fabulous writer Angela Gallagher looks like? Stop by her Breast Cancer Walk donations page and say Mr Angela sent you.

William

Listen, sorry in advance: I’m about to not tell you something. But it’s fantastic.

Remember your careers teachers telling you that interviewers are going to ask you what your weaknesses are? And that you should say “Well, perhaps I can be too much of a perfectionist”?

Such bollocks. And yet, it was prescient bollocks because it foresaw the world of the writer’s blog: obviously one writes in order to communicate precisely how huge our egos are but, still, there’s at the very least a frisson of self-advertising in doing it. I don’t think I’ve got any work through talking to you like this but I can immediately think of times when an editor has read what I’ve written so I’m aware that this cannot be the entirely relaxed, artless chat that one would like.

So when Piers picks up a meme from Lara, and others before her, asking for us all to say what we’re good and bad at in writing, I’m going to go out on limbs and say the Good just might be emphasised over the bad. Even down to initial capital letters.

And why not? I hear the challenge and I dive in with gusto:

WHAT I’M FANTASTIC AT
Dialogue, characters and pace that mean my material has life and verve right there on the page.

what i’m bad at
Well, perhaps I can be too much of a perfectionist.

William

On the Mac in my office, there’s a half-written review of my 2008. I made some notes on my iPhone too. But here, sitting in front of my PowerBook, I realise one thing: I have too many computers.

And I’ll delete all of it because I also realise that there really is only one thing to say: Angela’s breast cancer has been treated and, so far as you can ever get anything like an all-clear, the treatment has done its job.

So, see you in 2009?

Okay, well. This time last year I wrote a huge amount about quite a little; it was all success, success and three times success but primarily so that I could then slap you with the news of Angela’s diagnosis. I like a punchline. When I thought about the year ahead, rather than just day-to-day and appointment-to-appointment, it was to mentally write the whole of 2008 off. But it’s been a stubborn bugger of a year and a great deal of it seems to have been rather successful again, almost as if it’s in spite of me.

Well, I say that and I don’t believe it: this year I have obviously looked after Angela before anything else yet still I’ve had three stage play productions, worked on two new magazines, become a finalist in one contest. Plus the annual dance around BBC Radio 4 just seemed to be more fun this time. I won a spot on an invitation-only BBC Writers’ Room course.  I did a Doctor Who blog that became the most popular read on the RadioTimes.com website. I shot short films for Radio Times, worked on commercial DVDs, I’ve had an overwhelming worldwide reaction to a casual aside I made that I might give up doing the UK DVD Review podcast.

And it’s all come from pitching every day. Every working day for the year.

It might not have been much: I counted meetings, phone calls, emails, script submissions, contest entries, all sorts of things as being the pitch for the day but I did it. Well, I have one more to do but I suspect I’ll manage.

If I’m to be 100% honest, I should tell you that I have also managed to lose a lot of work this year: quite a bit of Radio Times magazine work went away – all for quite fine reasons, all very amicable and fine, but still I do miss some of it. But then you compare the loss of On This Day to the time I had to hold Angela upright in the chair at the GP surgery. How she had a bad allergic reaction to one of the chemotherapy drugs and because I raised the alarm, the entire medical staff ran to her with a crash-cart. You can live without On This Day.

Still, it’s been tremendous having readers complain to RT. One woman from Sussex, I think, phoned the reader services department to say she’d seen I wasn’t writing the feature and wanted to ask if I were okay.

I used to think that work was everything and, well, I still do. But we’re writers, we can handle contradictions: I simultaneously think that people are everything. I said I pitched every day; sometimes I’d forget that was what I was doing. The people on Doctor Who Adventures magazine, for instance, are just so nice I amble over to see them when I can and probably I ought to be bringing ideas, I ought to have had a Pitch In Mind. Often enough I have, I suppose, but usually it’s an amble. Similarly with Radio 4, I think: there are producers in R4 whose work is fantastic and I just enjoy talking with them. Radio’s a funny world: I did have a proper pitch meeting with a radio producer and it looks like I will get the work I was after, but the best bit was nattering about radio in general. For a couple of hours.

Which is what I’ll end up doing with you if I don’t shut up. I did just write you a few hundred more words about all the great things that have happened with my work this year, but let me skip: in so many ways, and for so many obvious reasons, I’m ready to move on from 2008.

But some years won’t let you go easily. Like 1983. Follow: I went to the Longleat Doctor Who thing in 1983 and this week I learn from a DVD feature about it that there were 70,000 people over the two days of the event. If you don’t know about this event, Who writer Paul Cornell described it only mildly-jokingly as Doctor Who’s Woodstock.

Now of those 35,000 each day, I’m on the 25th Anniversary DVD of Doctor Who: The Five Doctors. Imagine my jaw flapping about as I watched this DVD a few days ago. Have a look:

I have rarely had so much hair. Or a duffel coat.

Normally, I’ve got to tell you, I don’t like photographs from that long ago. I’m not keen on one taken 20 minutes back. But seeing myself at Longleat like that, so unexpectedly, I don’t know: I’m just sure that the me back then would be pleased at the me I am now.

Though if we could’ve just had a natter, I’d have told me to tell me to hurry up. And to get Angela’s breast examined earlier.

That’s the reason I’m glad to be done with 2008. But I’m also looking forward to 2009 for all the work that’s ahead of me – and because I’m going back to New York City in May.

Have a good new year,
William

PS I figured out Blogger’s location-aware bits. And how to make it lie.

I’m in a cottage that would suit Wuthering Heights – well, bar the wireless broadband, the Sky Freesat and a kitchen to dine for – but otherwise, Bronte territory. Well, I say her territory, it’s actually the Lake District.

Okay, I’m in a place called Stone Cottage but whirling around outside is a storm the like of which Cathy would feel at home. The view out of the window is the same as the view inside: the night is so dark the windows are like mirrors. And they got that dark around 4pm this afternoon.

It’s only December 15 but since I’m on a holiday that has been planned all year, that is something Angela has been looking forward to all year, and since it’s been a chemotherapy-laden year, I’m now so relaxed that I feel 2008 is over. It helps that I just did an end-of-year edition of UK DVD Review.

For which I’ve got to thank all the listeners who came on: I’ve thanked them personally but they’re so good on the show, they should be shouted about here. Have a listen to them all in the best edition I’ve done all year.

What’s great for me is that while you only hear a minute or two of each person, I got to have a great blather with them all. In each case I could’ve played out twice as much as I did, it was difficult to slice in and out to keep the show flying.

In one such conversation, Richard Smith brought up the topic of how I apparently sound as if I’m talking just to you, not to some large group. I think that’s the greatest compliment I can remember: it’s how I believe radio should be done, it’s how I think it’s best and why radio is so great, and it’s of course what I always aim for.

Can’t bear the zoo format where a presenter has a posse and we’re blessed to be listening in. Even when there is a pair of presenters, it’s rarely good for me. In the eighties there was suddenly a fashion for TV shows to be fronted by two hosts who, basically, told each other what was going on. I could never watch that without thinking the other fella should’ve paid more attention in rehearsals.

Anyway, I slugged this entry Location Aware. Do you know the term? Obviously you understand it but it happens to be what iPhone applications are called when they do something that requires them to know where you are. The great Vicinity, for instance, uses GPS to check where you are and then offers you lists of the nearest banks, restaurants, hotels, endless other things.

And now Blogger is location aware. Hang on, I have to press a button.

Oh. I pressed it. Has anything happened? I’m in Patterdale, Cumbria, and you may or may not see a map of this. I’m not excited yet.

This relaxing lark is so complicated.

William