The Guardian says Jane Tranter is leaving. There doesn’t seem to have been a confirmation yet so this may just be yet another in the long chain of rumours about her going that we’ve seen this year. Yet the Guardian is confident enough that it talks about who’s likely to replace her as Controller, BBC Fiction.

I interviewed her once for something at BBC News, haven’t the faintest idea what it was about now, but I came out of her office very impressed. And as a drama nut, really quite happy. So she’s going to be tough to replace and the Guardian’s list is interesting: all very strong candidates, most of them women as it happens. I feel that’s a good thing but I do notice that I noticed: if the majority had been men, would I have thought to mention it?

But, anyway, I am so certain about this. So certain. Nobody’s even hinted at it, and I have asked some of the people involved but they all deny it, yet I will bet you money that Jane Tranter will be replaced by Julie Gardner.

I think this will be good news too, though I also think it’s great that there are so many genuinely strong candidates. Isn’t British TV drama in good shape?

But it will be Julie Gardner.

Please place your bets and come back when I am made a fool of or I start typing very smugly.

William

Previously: my one-act thriller, Innocence, was to be staged at the Rose Theatre in Kidderminster 25-27 September. You’ve already seen the past tense, now read on.

The whole thing’s been cancelled: both plays in the double bill, the entire thing. I don’t know all the details and some of those I do I’m not really able to tell you here, but it’s gone and I’m inappropriately fine about it. A production is a production, I wanted it on my CV, but I’m sure the organisers will understand my telling you that I wasn’t at all happy about how it was going.

In the end, neither was the theatre. Innocence and another thriller were being produced by a group that works with the Rose Theatre but isn’t entirely part of it. And I’m told it was the theatre management who pulled the plug.

I do have one regret. I had to write a bio of myself for the programme and that’ll now never be printed. (The posters were, including the mistake with my name. You have to feel for the organisers: money spent like this. And I don’t know what’s happening with tickets. If you bought any, let me know: I’ll refund you and get the money from them.)

But it occurs to me that the bio was fun to write and here’s a platform for it. So, I don’t know if it’s possible for a blog to get any more egotistical, but let’s have a good go: here’s my bio from the Theatre Programme That Never Was.

William

WILLIAM GALLAGHER is a writer and journalist from the Midlands. He writes the daily TV history column On This Day plus radio and TV reviews and drama features for Radio Times magazine. He’s freelanced for newspapers such as The Independent, the Birmingham Post and The Los Angeles Times and magazines from Doctor Who Adventures to Sewing Today.

He’s been a journalist and columnist for BBC News and BBC Ceefax, editor for education and computing magazines, interviewed people from Stephen Fry to Maureen Lipman and spent one crazy day having afternoon tea in the mess room on a Russian nuclear submarine. He’d tell you more about that but he’s not honestly sure how it happened and regrets calling the place a dive.

He’s produced for BBC Radio 4, researched for the BBC World Service and reported for BBC 5 Live, BBC Radio WM and BBC Hereford & Worcester.

Scriptwriting includes ITV1’s Crossroads, the UK DVD Review podcast and radio adverts. Theatre writing includes Manhattanhenge at the Carriageworks Theatre’s new writing festival in Leeds earlier this year and Time and the Conway Twitty Appreciation Society at the Patrick Centre in the Birmingham Hippodrome in 2007.

William’s portrait and jewellery photography has been published in magazines and books in the UK and America and he’s filmed “Making Of” videos for BBC Worldwide. He’s now doing voiceover work for DVD documentaries, developing radio drama projects with BBC Birmingham and independent production companies. His literary agent is currently pitching William’s first novel to publishers.

It’s quite a moment. As I’ve told you often enough now – you’re very patient with me, thank you – my Innocence play is being staged 25-27 September at the Rose Theatre, Kidderminster. But now, for the very first time in my career, here’s the poster:

Click it for a larger version. The theatre’s website has details of both plays in this double bill and, go on, you know you’re wondering about the other one. “Married to the Moby” by Martin Drury. Details of both are right here where you can also buy tickets.

I really enjoyed writing that last bit. Buy early, buy often!

William

I’ve just filed my last On This Day copy with Radio Times magazine. I couldn’t have left on better terms, I couldn’t be handing over to better people, but it’s a sad time for me.

But I’ll tell you one shock: the amount of time it’s freeing up. I used to spend over the odds on it each week simply because I enjoyed it so much. When you add it all up, though, it’s startling: I can actually afford to pitch for a book project I’ve been wanting to do.

Still, it’s been a favourite gig. Hopefully On This Day will go from strength to strength and readers will no more remember me than they do the fella before.

Last entry will be on the Radio Times listings pages for Friday 26 September.

William

How’s this for a thought? The Salem Witch Trials were not about religion or fear or superstition, they were about soil.

Seriously. If you didn’t already think this, and it hadn’t ever occurred to me in my most geo-cynical mood*, then you are forever going to think it now because you just know it’s true. Burn a widow as a witch and there’s nobody left to stop you taking her land.

I love this kind of thing: the one starkly simple idea that’s new yet feels so right that you must always have known it. And I didn’t get this information – notice how it’s already changed from a thought to information – from a documentary or a script or a novel. I also, despite the title of this piece, didn’t get it from a song lyric. Not yet.

For Dar Williams has a new album coming, Promised Land, due September 9 in the US and hopefully the same day or sooner here. And there’s an interview with Dar about it on YouTube. In it, she talks about having this same Damascus moment when a friend suggested this Witch Trial point to her. Now I believe she’s done a song about it.

Funny: saying that feels trivial. Cor, there’s this powerful notion, let’s sing a song, let’s put the show on right here. But I tell you, as I have told many before you, that while I wouldn’t kill to write like Dar Williams, I would consider maiming.

If you don’t know her work, I envy the fun of what’s ahead of you, but if you do then you’ll know that she has this huge range of material but generally it’s always immensely memorable and catchy musically, and the lyrics are pounding with more thought than you might see in a novel.

Now, I’m a scriptwriter and in a script you have to carry an awful lot of information in dialogue. You’re only doing it right when everyone still sounds natural. (“Whisky, eh? That’s a strange drink for an attractive auburn-haired girl of twenty-nine.”**) In a song it doesn’t really seem to matter: if it did, if people listened to lyrics, how could anyone think Born in the USA was pro-American?

Yet here’s Dar Williams, packing every song out with really pin-sharp puncturing ideas but doing it in such a way that you just unconsciously end up humming entire paragraphs as easily as you do the main chorus line of any chart song. She’ll make you smile, she will make you laugh, and there are songs of hers that make me weep, I think they’re so perfectly done.

She finds these truths, she conveys them with such intelligence and concise precision: Dar Williams doesn’t write scripts, so far as I know, but she’d still be on my list if you were foolish enough to ask me to list my favourite scriptwriters.

William

*Honest, I get geo-cynical. Can you tell me how Gerry Mander managed to get *both* of his names immortalised? These are the things that keep me awake.

**That’s from Timothy West’s deliberately bad radio play. This Gun That I Have In My Right Hand Is Loaded. I told a friend I’d look out my copy for him, but that’d mean loaning a book so I’m compromising and releasing one sentence per blog entry.

I do like internet memes, even if I don’t know how to pronounce that and am not 100% sure that it’s the correct plural of meme. You couldn’t put me straight, could you?

But of all these interest-of-the-moment ideas that float around blogs and to which everyone contributes their version, I’ve rarely been bothered – or at least, I’ve rarely been bothered in time. Bits about writing, bits about TV drama, I’ve had my opinions and I’ve kept my counsel primarily because I’ve just not been quick enough to slip into the zeitgeisty feel of it all.

I’m not any faster today.

But what I admit I’ve lost in speed, by God I’m going to make up for in enthusiasm. I am so enthusiastic about this one that I positively begged Piers Beckley to tag me in this meme lark so I could gush at you. It’s the now probably long-forgotten meme about where we all work; the spaces we make for ourselves and our writing. You’ve got one, everyone’s got one, I’ve probably seen yours on your blog too, but now it’s me.

And I’d like to tell you for why.

I’m arrested by this whole meme because a simple desk in a corner becomes so important. Very, very good days flow through this – and so do very, very bad ones. When I’m up against deadlines so much that it’s fraught and if I don’t take five minutes out I will fry, the place I escape to from my keyboard is my keyboard. I lean back from Word or Photoshop and watch a bit of the news, or play some music, maybe flick through some of the hundreds of hours of TV drama I’ve got on my Mac.

It’s like the way I am fascinated by keyboards. Partly it’s a technical thing and an overhang from my computer magazine days when I’d use so many of them that I was very aware of the differences. I’m on my third keyboard for this Mac not because I needed to or that I’d worn out the earlier ones (though it is true, I have bled over my keyboards) but because I wanted to try new ones. Right now I’m using Apple’s latest slimline thing, which observant people usually described with more pejorative words than “observant” will have seen used a lot in the Doctor Who story Silence in the Library. (Honest: I bought mine a year before that. Honest.)

But as well as the technical aspect, there’s also the fact that writing feels right to me on a keyboard, much more so than with pen and paper. This is undoubtedly because my handwriting is shudderingly bad. But Aaron Sorkin had a Sports Night character say once that “writing is a tactile experience” for him and he meant using the keyboard. I really recognise that.

And what goes through our minds while we type? As I wrote that last paragraph, an email came through: my fingers never left the keys and my mind never really left the thought but I went from typing text to pressing Apple-tab to skip to my Mail programme, I hit Apple-R to do a Reply, wrote text in that message, clicked Send then right back to this. Practically uninterrupted, certainly very smoothly, and yet I’m treating the keyboard in such different ways throughout. I’d even forgotten this: I also tapped a key that set iTunes playing a new Dar Williams track.

I get similarly anoraksic about offices and workspaces. So much so that the real reason I’m a month behind everyone else on this meme is that I thought, right, I’m going to tidy this bloody place up for once. For years I’ve had bookshelves around me with everything wedged on wherever it would fit. So, as if you were about to pop by, I tidied it up. I mean, I really worked on this. And all the way through I had this notion of precisely the photograph I could take that would show you how this office is a kind of nest, how it really does echo my personality as I believe all offices do of their creators.

But I took that photo just now and it’s appallingly bad. Instead, and I would underline that I’ve spent a month tidying this place, this is the photo that best shows where I work. And you can’t see a bloody shelf in it. I even hoovered.

The toast is gone. The tea is a bit cold. But while you can’t see it, there’s a fox outside that window now. (Er, in the garden. I don’t mean he’s pawing at my first-floor window like a thing possessed and craving toast.) That is a BBC2 metal logo originally from a BBC press launch but given to me by a favourite friend. That is a Blake’s 7 teleport bracelet behind it but I feel no urge to discuss that any further. And there’s that keyboard. It’s very good. In between the keyboard and the BBC2 logo is a cutting block: from back in the day when you used to cut tape to edit it, when anyone did that, you used a block like this. There’s a central channel where you lay the tape, marked up with chinagraph pencil, and there are three slits for running your razor blade through. It always surprised me that colleagues didn’t know why there were three of them: they’re at progressively sharper angles and it changes how the edit sounds.

The image on the two monitors is mine: it’s a closeup photograph I took of a discarded piece of glass at a glass factory.

But, ah, go on, if you’ve read this far, you want to see the naff photograph, don’t you? And I appear to burn to show you. So:

There aren’t usually cars outside the window: that’s my neighbours’ garden and they’re repairing both of those. From where I sit I can see five gardens, though I’ve never yet figured out how to get out to my own. It’s for want of trying.

I’ve also never once been able to straighten out that blind. But the clock the right side of it is managing to hide from me is a Rugby one: a clock tuned in to the Rugby transmitters. You should see it when the clocks change: it’s almost worth being up working that late to see the hands suddenly whiz around by themselves.

And just for completeness, if you sit in that great Captain’s Chair (that’s its name, I promise you) and look back to where I took the photo, this is what you see:

What you can’t see is that the bookshelves extend quite far either side: apart from the window and a small patch of wall where my Rugby clock is, this room is floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Some of those shelves are of my own cunning design: look at the rows of folders on the very top: I’ve extended the bookshelves out with those planks of MDF in order to fit them all on. They’re still very disorganised but they amount to around 20 years of Radio Times issues that I use for my On This Day research. They’re broadly the 1980s and 1990s, which is the period Birmingham Central Library’s collection has the most gaps so it is a very great thing that I’ve got these.

Up in the corner there, where you can see two of my precarious new MDF shelves sticking out, there’s a BBC Newsroom Entrance sign. I like the idea that the rest of the world outside my office is a newsroom. But I also nicked the sign from BBC Pebble Mill when it was being redecorated. I don’t know why they bothered, really, since they’ve demolished the entire building since then.

One more picture? Just saying that about Radio Times reminds me. On the wall directly behind me there’s a gorgeously-bound set of RT issues from 1999 onwards for a couple of years.

The curving on the left side of the shot is just because of the lens I happened to have on. But the curving under that shelf of the RT volumes is real and entirely down to the weight.

We’ll see who breaks first – the shelf, my resolve to keep this place as tidy as it is today, or you and whether you managed to get this far.

Love this stuff,
William

Angela’s just had the all-clear from the hospital: her hundred years of chemotherapy have worked, the bastard cancer is no more.

Been a bit preoccupied with this lately, since about last September. Thanks for your emails, they’ve been a help.

William “Off to celebrate” Gallagher

If you’re keeping track – presumably only so you can divine between the different William Gallaghers I mentioned – then I should say I’m in the new issue of MacFormat magazine.

I decided to get on top of my email usage; looking into rules and folders and whatever the other thing is, and I did it in part by writing about the same thing for MacFormat. It’s a fun, good magazine and I learnt something doing the article, I hope if you read it you will to. Got to tell you now, best to let you down gentle like, if you’re a PC user then my feature will teach you bugger all.

But, hey, I’m in so many magazines at the moment… Okay, that was boastful. But it was nice doing the shopping today and meandering past the shelves of magazines thinking I’m in that one, I’m in that one, I’m working for that one – and, ooh, Doctor Who Monthly’s covermount is an old Who novel. I bought the Marco Polo one. It’s not very good.

But the magazine is. I just am not 100% sure how I started off boasting at you that I was in all these magazines and end up recommending you read one I’m not.

William

A friend is just after saying that he avoids writing blog entries about rejections, he chooses instead to focus on the successes he has. I couldn’t fault that in the slightest, I’ve no doubt you see his point entirely: whatever else a blog is, or whatever else you claim it is when you’re excusing the time you spend on it, a blog is an advert for you.

That may be a bit harsh: call it a promotion. I’m a professional writer so maybe it’s more apparent with folks of my ilk (I sell my writing, here’s some writing I do, I’m available through Thursday, rates on request, that kind of thing). But anyone’s blog paints a picture of them for us all to see, just as all writing is terribly revealing of the writer.

So, successes.

Trouble is, you get me talking and I feel more comfortable talking about rejections. I’ve got more practice. Plus, I should say that there are successes I cannot tell you about: projects that have gone well financially, for instance, but otherwise don’t have a lot of material to show for themselves. I’m sure I’ll tell you about them some time, you’re certain I’ll never spill the beans about the beans they pay me.

(Just as an aside. There’s a William Gallagher who used to edit Doctor Who fanzines. It isn’t me. But once I stumbled across an internet discussion about him/me, lambasting my writing and being jealous of his incredible earnings. Even being one of the William Gallaghers involved, it was hard to unpick their confusion except that I’m guessing the incredible earnings are his. That would mean the lambasting was mine, but if I can’t tell from your writing who you’re talking about or what he’s done, I think there’s it’s a fair bet it’s not my writing you should be focusing on first.)

(Another aside. There is another William Gallagher. There are loads of him. But there’s a new one, a new William Gallagher has started a blog. I can’t read it, I don’t even recognise the language for sure, but somehow Google’s references to it are in English and he appears to be greatly concerned about internet dating. If you’re here looking for advice on New Zealand dating practices, I thank you for your patience in reading this far and direct you please to this fella.

Now after all that, I’ve run out of time. Okay. Can’t tell you about cash, can’t tell you about contracts, can tell you I’ve had a great, great week. Three days on RadioTimes.com, two days on Doctor Who Adventures, five mornings and five evenings on Doctor Who Adventures, one day on Radio Times magazine. I realise this adds up to more than five days but that’s because it did. It has. Er, it was. It’s continuing to be.

Doctor Who Adventures is a delight: instantly liked everybody, instantly relished the work. Can’t get enough of it.

Then that short play of mine has been kicking up some dust for me. If you’d asked, I’d say you were mad to write a piece that short but it is doing surprisingly well for me. And right now it’s doing well on its own: I don’t even have to tend it, I just hear positive noises every now and again.

Speaking of plays and scripts, I’m doing a thing in the gaps this week that is definitely one of the best ideas I’ve ever had. Not 100% sure I’m getting it down as well as I could but it’s getting down and it’s working.

And speaking of working, you’d be surprised how many people ask me to read their scripts. Hardly any. It used to come up a lot and I’ve even been a professional script reader for real money but a few months ago I had someone’s piece in front of me and I just had enough. I truly believe it when producers say there are very few good scripts around because I don’t see any either.

So I’ve stopped agreeing to read things. But I agreed last night and read something through that was a treat. Bit scary for my wimpy tastes, but dialogue that was alive on the page. Sounds so simple, but it’s so rare.

As is my gushing. Sorry, I went off on one: it’s really been a bouncy, great week and I just had to bubble at you for a time.

Did I mention how good Doctor Who Adventures is?

William

I’m a freelance writer but my most reliable gig is a part-time staff writer position at BBC Worldwide where I currently work three days a week on RadioTimes.com. My freelance work includes a lot for Radio Times magazine, so things get a bit confusing but that’s another story. Today’s story is the Return of Wednesday.

Those three days for RT.com vary enormously; I’m forever telling friends that I will always and only be in London on Thursdays but then they point out I’m standing there in a London pub saying this on a Tuesday. And I say it’s three days, it can be four, it’s been five.

When my wife Angela began having chemotherapy a thousand years ago, I decided to just simplify things as much as I could: I told Radio Times I wouldn’t ever work for them on Wednesdays. Angela’s clinic days were always Wednesdays, usually about three weeks apart, so I could’ve worked at least two Wednesdays out of every three, but it was messy. Just because Radio Times was being fantastic about my taking time out to look after Angela, there was no need to make it impossible for them to work out when I’d be where.

And as it happens, all those Wednesdays that weren’t clinic days did get filled very quickly. Sometimes I’d go to the clinic for prescriptions, oftentimes I’d just help Angela. Once in a long while, she’d be well enough that we could take the day off and go out for lunch.

All that’s over, and for the best of reasons: last Wednesday was the last Wednesday. Twelve sessions of devil drugs done and gone.

One odd thing. Many, many people assume that’s it. Apparently even chemotherapy patients have been known to assume this: you’ve had your last chemo session, shouldn’t you be feeling better? Well, er, no. Chemotherapy is such a variable beast that it’s impossible to generalise but nonetheless, I’m going to generalise: chemo sessions take place every three weeks. And it’s not because of NHS resources, it’s for the very practical purpose that your body can only take so much. Remember white cells? Forget ’em. Every cell you own is smashed, pummelled, hung, drawn and quartered in every chemo session and you cannot have any more until the good cells have recovered sufficiently.

Have a guess how long that takes.

So you’re not getting chemo sessions when it suits the hospital, you’re getting them as fast on each other’s heels as it is physically possible for you to have. And countless things can prolong the problems: in fact, you don’t recover between sessions, you just recover enough. Angela was apparently unusual in how she made it through all 12 in exactly the time hoped for, without any reason to abandon the treatment at any stage. Though she did discover that she’s allergic to yew trees. Seriously: the strongest, foulest, devil’s brew drug, taxotere, is based in part on the bark of a yew tree (aren’t you picturing three witches stirring a cauldron right now?) and Angela, like so many others, had an allergic reaction to it. That wasn’t what you’d rank as a highlight in the treatment: me grabbing staff, crash-cart teams racing over to Angela.

Your mileage may vary, by the way. Got to say that. Even if you had precisely the same breast cancer as Angela, I mean precisely the same – frankly, if you were even Angela herself, you’d best not bet on needing or getting the same treatment. It’s that variable, that different from person to person. And each person reacts all but immeasurably differently. So if you ever need taxotere, you may fly through it. I hope so, obviously.

Anyway, Angela’s had her final session. But where so many people assume that’s it, that on Thursday she’ll be skipping, the truth is that of course she has at least three weeks in which she’ll be recovering from the final session. We don’t know how long it will take: every previous session has been capped by the next one coming through, so the odds are it won’t be three weeks to the day. I have to tell you that some patients, a significant number, report feeling bone-tired for another year. And bone-tired is the right description: this stuff knackers your bone marrow.

Pleasant stuff, isn’t it? But there are good things. All this violent medication gets rid of the cancer, so I do think of taxotere as the devil drug from heaven.

And right now Angela has booked a holiday in the Lake District. We’ve just come back from one, one we had during a lull in the cycle, and she’s going again next month. The month after that, we’re off for a short break to the Lake District. And I’m buying her a birthday present of an iPhone 3G and a Christmas break in the Lake District.

Did I mention she likes the Lake District? I’ve a feeling that’s come up.

But for all I’ve just told you quite straight about the effects of chemotherapy, the truth is that it is over, so things are getting better. And I’m working Wednesdays again.

Next week it gets very complicated as I juggle days in order to work half the week on Radio Times, half on Doctor Who Adventures magazine. But the return of Wednesdays, it’s a peculiar notion. I am stunningly lucky to have the job I do; I’ve always known this and I am reminded of it by getting a short gig on Doctor Who Adventures: I’m so looking forward to that work. It’s been a sobering boon to be able to drop all Wednesdays for the last eight months or so; I know many or even most people cannot do it, but that and the ability to work at home 80% of the week, I’m very grateful for it.

So. I’ve got working Wednesdays now. If only I could get sleep back next.