Brace yourself for a metaphor.

It goes like this. We have a back garden that I rarely go into. It is for want of trying. But we also have a greenhouse in there and one evening this week my wife and I stood watching a bee trying to get out of it.

The door was open, it had been opened wider to encourage the bee, and that bee was clearly struggling in the heat of a greenhouse in the heat of a hot day. We tried being inside the greenhouse waving our arms at it, we tried being on the outside and tapping on the glass to encourage it to move toward where not only was there a door, but there now seemed to be a draught. A breeze. A big clue that this way lies freedom, that way lies glass.

But while that bee did keep on edging closer to the way out, it would also keep on turning back around and trying to walk up this metal support frame or burrow into that green plant thing. (I’m not big on plants. See above re gardens.)

Eventually we gave up and walked away, the very last option being that maybe the bee was self-conscious and without us watching, it would wipe its brow, pick up its bags and walk out of there just fine.

I hope it did and now I hope this isn’t too obvious, but even if I hadn’t primed you about an impending metaphor, you would have already figured out that I am seeing myself in that bee.

Unless I thought I was the greenhouse. Trying to grow on the inside, completely transparent from the outside. It could’ve been that.

But no, it was the bee, it was the bee’s determination to escape being thwarted by its own inability to see the obvious way out or to not keep repeating the same mistakes.

Only, okay, there I am that evening wishing that it would escape and there I am identifying with the little thing, yet the afternoon was the opposite. That afternoon, I pitched for a commission and was so confident in my ability to do it that I was borderline cocky. I know what this work needs, I told them, I know that I know how to do it.

If you ask me what I think of my writing, no stopwatch is fast enough to measure the speed of which I can change that subject. Yet here I was being asked why I thought I could do this work and they could barely shut me up about it. Afterwards I even wondered if I’d just talked them out of commissioning me.

But in the moment, being asked to justify my being commissioned, nope. Total confidence. There are elements of the brief that I don’t understand yet, that I have no experience in, but overall, here’s a project, it needs this, this and that, and I can do these things, that’s me.

Look, doubtlessly you could do this commission too, I’m not claiming some unique brilliance and, actually, while I appear to have got the work, it isn’t confirmed yet so I can’t presume I have. But total certainty that I could do it, not one pixel’s doubt, that felt uniquely brilliant.

I tell you, it was a buzz.

Normally it’s people who I’d say influenced me the most, but that’s possibly in aggregate. A truly enormous single influence has been Doctor Who, and I don’t truly grasp why — but it turns out I can pin down when that influencing me happened.

For I could only really call myself a Doctor Who fan from about August 1978 to somewhere around January 1984, and even working that out now I am surprised it was as long as it was. I sidled into the show in time for when it now seems Tom Baker had lost interest, and I faded away just before the end of Peter Davison’s era.

Yet that show is part of me. I did end up writing a few Big Finish editions of Doctor Who and that was special, that remains a rather towering highlight for me. But if the candle really burned for only a short time, I seem to have used that time and that candlelight learning about the show.

I do not believe, for instance, that there is a single Doctor Who story from 1963 to 1989 that I wouldn’t always have recognised by title or plot, certainly companion, and probably writer. I’m afraid it’s also a little impossible that I wouldn’t also have an opinion about any story you name: I hope that would be because because I’d seen it, but I’d more likely read the book, and I certainly knew what the general consensus of Doctor Who fans was.

But ’63 to ’89 is 26 years, or 159 stories, or precisely 700 episodes. And it was surprising to me how very many of those 700 I hadn’t seen, how many truly famous Doctor Who stories I had not watched.

Until now.

As of last night, I’ve seen them all. Or at least, all of the surviving ones, which works out to somewhere around 600 episodes. On 24 April 2022, I started watching the lot on Britbox, initially one episode per day, and apart from a month’s break while I was on holiday, the only thing that changed was that I moved to watching them on ITVX.

At first, I was rigid about that business watching one episode per day, but while I haven’t skipped any day other than over that holiday, during the Jon Pertwee years I started watching two or more in a row. I was feeling ill one evening, it was late at night, I was on my own, I watched two or three and having done so, that somehow freed me to keep doing it. I watched all of the final three-part story last night, for instance.

So as I say, I haven’t missed a day, and quite often I’d watch more than one edition. Sometimes that was because I was enjoying them, as you might hope, but sometimes it was also just to get them over with.

There are some low points.

Actually, I was surprised just how many low points there were. A couple of times I came within a pixel of giving up, I’d been through such a bad run, such a poor season, and it was only momentum plus knowing a famous one was coming, that kept me going.

Then of course there would be the good stories, the ones where you start to realise why you like this show but then forget that you’re even wondering that and are instead just into it all.

You do also have to factor in time, which I feel is ironic given what this show is about. Certainly the world and television drama has changed a lot since that first-ever episode in 1963, and certainly the show itself did not change along with it. Or at least it didn’t change to keep up very quickly, or at least not until the revival in 2005 where Doctor Who just burst out of the screen.

But even allowing for the Sixties, and the Seventies, and possibly most especially the Eighties, I don’t know why I like the show.

It’s been so important to me that I would like to know. The usual answer, if you ask a fan, is that because of its format, Doctor Who can do anything. It can go anywhere, it can go anywhen, it can be a farce or a thriller as it sees fit.

Except having watched it all now, I don’t think classic Doctor Who actually goes very far at all. So it can’t be the boundless possibilities because more than brilliant imagination being thwarted by inadequate budgets, the show didn’t seem to try bounding all that often.

Yet it has something. After watching Survival, part 3, by Rona Monro, last night, I went back to rewatch An Unearthly Child by Anthony Coburn, the very first story. I have now seen literally hundreds of episodes, yet that first sight of the police box, that first sight of the bigger insides, and that first sound of the TARDIS taking off, I think it was actually magical.

I’d like to understand but maybe I don’t have to and maybe I don’t have a choice. I do know that I feel I’ve accomplished something with this unbroken marathon viewing, but then I also know that’s a bit daft of me.

Let it be daft.

Let me not understand.

Whatever it is about Doctor Who that so got into me, it got so far into me and it has lasted so long that it has itself made me impervious to its worst moments. I have not one single clue how it did that, but for all its faults, for all its sometimes excruciating episodes, Doctor Who still owns me.

It was a small and flawed and cheap show, but it had an influence that was far bigger once you got into it.

Actor Rebecca Ferguson mentioned in an interview recently that the Mission: Impossible films do not have a script. She said, more or less, that they are made up as they go.

With all respect to Ferguson, I heard this and thought aye, aye, another actor. I have heard similar claims about Mission before, but this sounded so like the time the New Tricks cast claimed that they rewrote all that show’s scripts. If you don’t happen to remember the two times the whole cast — and such a good cast — said this bollocks, it was bollocks.

Okay, that’s true but unhelpful. The cast of the BBC series said this, the crew said “prove it”. Show us one comma difference between the scripts as the writers delivered them and the lines that this cast then delivered.

There wasn’t one single pixel difference and you knew there wouldn’t be. Or I’m suddenly minded again of Lisa Kudrow going on at some length about all the work she’d done to create her Friends character — and the interviewee finally giving up and pointing out that everything she’d said was already there in the bloody script.

Only…

Ferguson was fully and completely correct. Since reading her saying that, I’ve heard two specific examples to prove it, and to make me choke on a biscuit.

First, if you have seen any of the promotion for the forthcoming seventh Mission: Impossible film, you’ve seen Tom Cruise riding a motorbike off the edge of a cliff.

We’ve all done that.

But apparently, when they shot that sequence, they didn’t actually know why his character was doing this.

And then during the protracted, COVID-delayed shoot, an apparently significant new character was added late in the day – and not named.

I don’t know if she had completed filming before the character was given a name, but it was close.

All of which is enough to make my writer-brain stumble — and especially so because it works. Well, to be clear, these examples are from Mission 7 and that’s not out yet, but the last few films have apparently been done the same way and they work very well.

(The first Mission: Impossible is excellent, and was also properly written in advance. I’ve read the script. Mission 2 is dreadful, Mission 3 is weirdly almost-good-yet-not, and then all the others since have been very good and, I believe, getting progressively better.)

So.

I have always believed that whatever gets you to the finishing line in writing a script is fine. Plan everything or wing it, outline everything or just make it up as you go, it doesn’t matter. As long as the final script works, whatever it took to get there is fine.

But I do mean the script. I mean the work to get that document done. Mission: Impossible skips all of that writing and just heads out there to fantastic locations with great cameras.

Except.

It really does bother me that this can be true, and it really does seem to me that it works.

Plus I like very much that there is an attention to detail in these films, it doesn’t end up as slapdash as it sounds like it could do. For just one instance that actually made me happy, there is a two-second long moment in the Mission 7 trailer that precisely re-enacts a shot from the first film. It’s at 24 seconds in, where Kittridge (Henry Czerny) and Hunt (Cruise) make the same distinctive head movements and are shot from the same angles as in a key scene from 1996. It’s done for no reason other than it’s right, and that sings out “writer” to me.

And.

Just in talking to you, just in thinking about this excessively and then unburdening myself to you, I think I understand. By which I mean I can reconcile the difference between writing a script and just filming things until they work.

The makers of Mission: Impossible are writing the film in exactly the same way a screenwriter might. When you’re writing, you might try out characters, you of course think of ways to improve them. You can have a great idea for a sequence and then spend ages figuring out how best to fit it in.

It’s just that the Mission people are doing all of this on location, they’re doing it on film. They’re also spending a mere $290 million to do it in.

But at least they save on not having to buy a copy of Final Draft.

I’m not 100% sure where I’m going with this, but please bear with me. I think there’s a writing thing at the heart of what’s in my head – the heart of what’s in my head. Going out on a limb, shouldering the responsibility… I’m chancing my arm, trying my hand and burning my fingers.

Anyway.

This line was put back in my head last week: “Why look for the way out when you know the way in?” It’s from an episode of The New Avengers by Terence Feely and Brian Clemens, which means I’ve had that line lurking around my noggin’ since 1977.

The context is that baddies are trapping people in a maze — look, it was the 1970s — and the only one who survives is the one who just waits where he was put in.

I think sometimes you and I — okay, maybe I’m projecting, maybe this is just me — look for ways out for our characters in our plots when really the answer is to leave them right there.

For some reason, I keep coming back to a moment decades ago where two people were telling me about their mobile phones. They recounted how they had sat side by side in a car and phoned each other, and then consequently found there was no sound difference compared to when they were phoning across town.

They thought that mobile or cellphones were site-to-site, that they worked like walkie-talkies and so there should be better reception when close up. I won’t fault anyone for not knowing how something works, and if I know that the signal from one mobile went to the nearest cell tower and then to the other phone, that’s about all I do know.

But they had gone to some thought constructing this little experiment in the car and comparing it to previous results. And they had no possible way of being right, because they had fundamentally not understood what they were trying to test.

I think of this when I have a character in a situation and the clear answer is to get then out of there and onto the next thing in the story. But not only might it be better to have them stayed locked up, or delayed, or whatever it is, maybe I am fundamentally failing to understand what my own story is about.

It’s just about forty years since I was a student living in Agard Street in Derby and for some reason this week, I went back there — in Google Maps. I want to say that Google Maps and Google Earth are a metaphor for our modern world, with their unimaginable brilliance in photographing every street in the world being marred only by Google’s unimaginably awful design.

But anyway, for some reason I looked up Agard Street this week and it turns out to be just about the perfect time to have done so. Take a look at what I saw first, please.

Actually what I really saw initially was way up the other end of the street but this was the point where I first recognised my old place. That building in the middle, it’s three small houses glued together and looking at it, I can picture maybe half the rooms inside. I can remember the party where I watched two men I’d never heard of standing in the back yard, drinking lager at the same time they were pissing into the drains. There was something about the flow of liquid in and out, much the same colour at either end, that made me fine with not knowing them.

But memory is faulty and so here’s Google Maps, showing me exactly how it really is. Until you look closer. Now, this is subtle, I don’t know that you’ll be able to spot the tiny difference that you get when you take one single click nearer to those buildings.

Told you, it’s a fine difference.

I’ve cropped in the images to just show you the house — or where the house used to be — but if you looked at this on Google Maps, you’d see that the two images were both taken in July 2022. House is there, house is gone. Same month. You’d have imagined the two shots would be taken seconds apart: this one spot in the whole city is not an obvious place for the map photographers to have packed it in for the day. And it’s not as if there’s a lot on Agard Street to distract them while my old house is demolished.

It’s also not as if I miss it. I can picture maybe five of the people I lived with, but I could name only two.

It is the startling surprise of destroying the place with a single click on Google Maps. It’s also the surprise of realising that this has just happened, that I have by chance chosen to look back only a couple of weeks after this part of my past was erased.

The entire world is just a click away, just a scroll away and at most just a desperate search for the right Google button away, too. The entire world is on the screen yet I choose to go where one photo has right now become a Before shot, while the very next is suddenly an After image.

You can imagine how I went wide-eyed as I made that last click to look closer at the house that isn’t there anymore. But I also felt it in my legs. I felt it the way you might when you’re standing on a building, the way there’s a sudden drop in front of you.

It was a house of no importance, no particularly special design, and not even what I’d say was all that significant to me. But still, I wish I could go touch its walls just once more.

I don’t know why I’m uncomfortable admitting any of this, but I am and yet I’m going to tell you anyway. Maybe it would help me if you keep in mind that this was thirty years ago and that like most people working for the BBC, I was less than well off at the time.

So far, so common, but while there was a long time when I lived in London, for a longer patch I was living in Birmingham and commuting. I’d go once or twice a week to London, I’d stay overnight there. Also keep in mind that the job meant working until about 11pm at BBC Ceefax and BBC News Online, then from 9am the next morning at Radio Times and BBC Worldwide.

I think you’re seeing where this is going. Or perhaps where it is staying.

There were hotels, although I’d get there around midnight having started out about 4am or 5am, so it was a case of two or three blinks before I’d have to get up again for work. London hotels are expensive, but they seem ever more so when you are in them for only a fraction longer than it takes to boil a kettle.

There was a BBC hotel, incidentally. The BBC World Service used to maintain a house where staff visiting London could stay. It was cheaper than paying for accommodation for producers and other staff from around the world, but there are fewer headlines to be made about fiscal responsibility than there are about private hotels, so it was closed down.

I can’t remember when it ended, but I do recall that at least a dozen times in the 1990s I would stay there. I’ve barely ever worked for the World Service but if there were a spare room, I definitely could book it at a greatly subsidised rate, I definitely was eligible because of being on staff at the BBC. Definitely. Sometimes it would take a bit of work persuading the reception desk security guard that this was true, which led to some wearily heart-stopping moments.

But wearily heart-stopping moments that were cheap. I can’t remember how cheap, I just remember what it felt like climbing seven flights of stairs at around midnight after a 4am start. It felt like bliss. Picture the cheapest place you’ve ever stayed and then downgrade it a few steps, except in cleanliness. The BBC’s hotel, and I just wish I could remember its name, was clean and bright and cheap and if the building creaked, I slept there too well to notice.

Even if the timings meant I’d turn on the room’s TV set and have to go back to work before the screen lit up.

And then there were the times that this hotel was full.

Or things were even tighter.

Then it’s time I started suggesting to you that this is enough, that I’ve shared enough.

Except, okay, there were many nights when I did absolutely and completely definitely stay at the BBC’s hotel, it’s just that the BBC didn’t know about it — and it was less a hotel, more BBC Television Centre. Or BBC Woodlands, where Radio Times and BBC Worldwide used to be based. Or BBC White City where BBC News Online was.

I remember working late at Woodlands, to sometime around 2am, and meeting one of the cleaners. It wasn’t as if she were a doctor in another country and now worked three cleaning jobs in London to support her family, but it was damn close. I can see me there, eyes like pinpricks I’m so tired, listening to this woman who is surely always infinitely more exhausted than I am.

I think that’s the night I found that there was a massage table in another office and that it was pretty good, if very narrow. Not sure why I didn’t use that more often. Conceivably I fell off.

If it were BBC News Online where I’d do all of this, then there was a particular server room I would go into. Grab some cushions off the office couch, line them up on the floor, and get into that room and lock the door before 10:45pm or you’d be caught by the security patrol. With dog.

Just once, I did get caught. Not in Woodlands or White City, but in BBC Television Centre.

There your best option was to find a disabled toilet — because those were much bigger, you could lie down — and probably on the fifth or sixth floors because the fewest people worked there late. Certainly it was the best option for when you would need the loo. Also TVC had a place called the Filling Station, where you could get food remarkably late into the evening.

Anyway, one night I was caught and I remember being escorted out of TVC by security, still half asleep. I’m guessing it was around 5am because I know I spent the rest of the night sleeping sitting up on the Circle Line, just going around and around until it was time to go to work.

As I say, I’m uncomfortable telling you this but actually its discomfort that has brought it all back. This week I’ve been so worn out from COVID that there have been moments I’ll grab ten minutes sleep on the couch and wake up sore and stiff. And for just one moment, I’d be back on the couch cushions at BBC White City, wondering if the canteen was open for breakfast yet.

One word at a time. That’s the answer. I suspect you might want more, and this is one of the times when I imagine me on a couch while you encourage me to open up, at least until the end of your 50-minute hour.

Plus you’re calming me down. I just now, I mean just right now, had an email purportedly asking my writing advice but really giving me some. It was chiefly about how brilliant a writer the sender is. He’s so brilliant that it doesn’t matter he’s telling the wrong person and he’s so brilliant that he didn’t get the message I sent him last time.

And if I think he’s over-selling his writing ability, he is at least talented at writing emails that truly piss you off. What this gets him other than blocked, I don’t know.

So he’s as antagonising as if he set out to be, but as it happens, he’s also about the sixth person to approach me in the last month. Five of them I liked. Either I already knew and liked them, or they were just likeable when they asked what they asked.

Maybe it’s a new year kind of thing, though it already feels like we’ve been in 2022 forever. Whatever reason so many asked my advice out of the blue like this, and whyever they asked me, their different issues were startlingly similar. So startlingly similar that I’ve slowly realised I’ve got the same issues and should listen to myself.

For instance, they and I both know we should be writing more. They and I feel guilty about not having written enough. They all told me how they are now determined to write more, and I want to tell you the same thing about me.

Two of them, by the way, have a lot of ideas and don’t know which to do. Two or three are planning to write for a certain amount of time on certain days. One wanted to know how to write a story that readers are interested in. And all of them guiltily referred to how they haven’t been writing.

I presume they’re asking everyone about this, not just me, but I believe I have some answers. For a start, there is nothing you can do about how you didn’t write yesterday, not a single thing you can do now about how you didn’t write last week.

But you can write today. And really, that’s all you can do.

That schedule idea isn’t bad. Isn’t necessarily good, but it isn’t bad. There’s an element of how if you set up your school exam revision timetable, you feel you’ve accomplished something even if what you’re really doing is postponing the moment you have to work.

And I know this for certain. If you plan to write for two hours every Tuesday and then when Tuesday comes and, for any reason, you don’t, you feel worse than you did before.

If you must feel worse at all, feel it about how if there were some other demand on your time that Tuesday, there is a bit of you that’s relieved. There’s a bit of you that agreed to help or to do something or to be somewhere, just a little bit more easily because it means you can’t write that day.

Sometimes, though, you simply aren’t capable of writing that day and it isn’t for want of trying. You cleared the time, you sat at the desk, and still nothing. Coming up with nothing or coming up only with writing that you immediately loathe, it’s very easily enough to turn these Tuesdays into a weekly demonstration that you’re right, you can’t write, it was stupid to think you could, everybody knows you’re wasting your time, that you’re a constant failure and disappointment who is just embarrassing yourself.

Doesn’t exactly make you rush to next Tuesday’s writing session.

Sometimes you have to walk away and write another day.

So yes, I am arguing that you need to get on with it, you need to be disciplined, I’m really arguing that you should write like this is a job, not a hobby. And at the same time, I am saying you need to be able to walk away – I’m saying you should not write like it’s a job.

I have no problem saying either, and not one single hesitation saying both.

I also have not the slightest little qualm about saying both that it’s great to have lots of ideas, and it isn’t. Ideas are easy, or at least the shiny idea you haven’t started writing yet is always infinitely easier than the one you’re currently tarnishing on the page or the screen.

If you do bounce between your different ideas, leaping off because the current one has reached a hard bit, you are writing, you are working, and you are wasting your time. Write bits of things and you have written nothing. You feel like you’ve put a lot of effort in, because you have, but the result is nothing.

And yet writing bits of your different ideas is practically ideal compared to the other problem when you have lots of ideas. That’s when you don’t write anything at all because you cannot decide which idea to do now, which idea you should be working on.

This is a case where if you have eight ideas, there is no right one, I believe that there are just seven wrong ones. Pick one idea, any one idea, pick it any way you like, then do that one.

Schedule your writing time, while not scheduling your writing time. Instead of vowing you will write for two hours every Tuesday evening, just write for an hour now.

Forget long term plans, ignore them as much as you forget the past where you weren’t writing. For the next one hour, write that one idea.

It’s always one word after another, one hour after another.

I don’t have the answers, but those are the answers.

Twice in the last week – once with you, once on BBC Radio Foyle – I got to natter about how my two current TV obsessions are preposterously different. They’re the current Only Murders in the Building and the fifty-year-old The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Only, Only Murders is only about a podcast, right? So it only took me six episodes of Only to realise that surely, surely there would be a podcast about the show. Lying in the bath last night, I listened to the first episode and its interview with Only Murder co-creator, co-writer and all-showrunner, John Hoffman.

Pretty much just as the motion-sensor lights in the bathroom switched off, I sat up, splashing water onto the iPhone and, as it happens, turning the lights back on.

Because Hoffman was describing the process of writing this Only Murders series and he said that every single night during it, he would watch two episodes of another show.

Yes.

It was The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

I suppose both are comedies, though the Mary show was straight sitcom and Only Murders is comedy drama. I suppose both are half hours, but Mary is 25 minutes and Only Murders can go up to 35 if it likes.

There’s no connection in the subject, the tone, the characters, and yet I get it. Hoffman watched all seven seasons of the Mary show, two episodes a night and it fed into writing Only Murders in the Building.

I am taken by this because of the odds that the two shows I look forward to are the same two for this man I don’t know, and especially since do you have the faintest clue how many sitcoms or comedy dramas or just television programmes there have been in the last half a century? Go pick your own, Hoffman, I’ve got this one.

But then there is also this. On Tuesday, I read a script I wrote about 20 years ago and let’s say it was shite altogether.

“It was shite.”

However, it was also unquestionably me. I could hear my voice, see my tone, recognise certain descriptions and actually also particular patterns and ways of describing things.

And I could also see what prompted most of the script. A character says “you’ve got my vote” and I know Grosse Pointe Blank was on my mind. A description of mine includes the phrase “certain-sure” and I like that, I like the rhythm of it, I like the amplification-by-tautology, but I don’t like how I believed I’d thought of it in a script earlier this year. It’s scary that I’ve just found it again in a Self Distract blog from 2015 where I appear to obsess over the word “bollocks.”

Everything you know, everything you feel, goes into writing and then it only bloody comes out again, too. I don’t think it should come out as baldly, overtly obvious as it is with my scripts, but I used to like how I believed I could adapt to any house style, fit in with any production or any publication’s writing and now I’m glad that I can’t. I found my voice and apparently can’t shut up.

A friend told me once that she could recognise my writing in a particular piece that didn’t have a byline, that wasn’t meant to be one person’s writing. I liked that very much.

Though I’m pretty sure that was the same friend who this week told me she never watches my 58keys YouTube channel and she never reads this Self Distract.

I told her I preferred you.