There is a pretty good chance that the words “Christmas double issue” mean something to you. Possibly they even mean a lot. If they do then you’re thinking of Radio Times for certain, maybe also TVTimes and if they don’t then you’re thinking eh?

For the past 46 years, Radio Times magazine has produced a double issue of television and radio listings covering Christmas and New Year fortnight. Anything that lasts that many years, and looks set to continue forever, is going to build up a certain history but RT was at the heart of Christmas. It’s not unreasonable to say that Christmas wasn’t Christmas without Radio Times. I don’t think it is so special or important any more, I think the fondness we have for this issue is momentum from when it was usually the best and sometimes the only way to know what was on TV.

It’s the biggest-selling issue of the year by far and certain planning for it begins in January. That’s logistical planning to do with the print runs and the distribution. Editorial planning begins much later and I’ve completely forgotten when.

Even though I spent many years at Radio Times, chiefly on the website but also often writing for the magazine, I can’t remember when it all begins. I just remember that there is a stretch of weeks when you’re working on the regular weekly magazine plus the Christmas one. It’s known as pickup and I do not know why. Because you have to pick up the pace? I don’t know.

Pickup is exhausting and I’m thinking of all this now partly because the 2015 one should be out this weekend but also because there was a photo on Facebook of RT people working late into the night. I’d forgotten the exhaustion. Not that I ever truly experienced it to the extent the full time staff did.

But when I was writing their On This Day television history column, there was a point around late November when I would have to deliver five weeks’ worth in one go to meet all the various deadlines. That wasn’t easy.

Then – I can look back at this fondly because it was a long time ago but actually I was quite fond of it at the time – the Radio Times website used to have its own pickup period. Being online, the site’s pickup period used to begin the moment the magazine’s one finished. And for a couple of rather glorious years, I used to work on the magazine’s pickup and then immediately swap over the site’s one. Loved it.

I’d have to ask before I could tell you with any confidence when I left Radio Times but it has to be a lot of years ago now. And yet if you get the Christmas Double Issue and you look very, very hard, you will find my name and an entire 100 words I wrote.

I’ll take that. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas for me if I weren’t in the Double Issue.

Damn him, he was right. At midnight on my 21st birthday, this fella sat me down in front of him, crouched very close and told me that because he was doing this, I would always remember that moment, I would always remember him.

It felt a bit invasive, really, and I have some small pleasure in telling you that I remember the moment, I remember the room, the house, the woman next door I had a crush on, I remember everything except who in the hell he was. I can’t quite recall his face, can’t quite forget it either. So he’s in my head but as if with one foot in my noggin, one foot not.

I can’t decide if that’s better than my 30th of which I can’t remember a single thing. I’ve been pretty good ageing one year a time and in the right sequence but if you told me I’d skipped my 30th, I’d believe you.

My 40th is easy: I was in shock. Not because of the age, I’m not one of these people who get bothered by a number, but because of my wife Angela Gallagher. My teenage self would be startled that I was married, my sophisticated 40-year-old self was agog that she was still with me, but that wasn’t the shock. The true, honestly put-me-into-trauma-shock was that she surprised me with a trip to New York City. It’s my favourite place in the world and I did not see that coming.

Listen, I think you see where this is going and I think you see full well that actually I am one of those people who get bothered by a number. I wasn’t. But I am now. As I write this, I’m 49 and when you read it, I will be at least 50. Could be older if you’re a slow reader or if all that survives of the 21st century is this chat with you. But at least 50.

I have found it hard. I am finding it hard. I could do you a CV and it would sound okay. I can tell you that I am half the writer I wanted to be but, truly, I’ll take that – so long as this isn’t the end and my writing is still in progress.

It’s not even as if I simply feel old. I do, though. I was working with a school recently when an 8-year-old called me a ‘random unfamous guy with no dress sense’. I’ve also recently been described as a looking like an English teacher or ‘everybody’s favourite Geography teacher’. One guy thought I was a professor and didn’t mean it as an insult, I think he even fancied me. (Still got it, eh? I’m asking you seriously: I can’t tell. Can never tell.)

And none of these things are bad plus the fact that people have descriptions of me is profoundly flattering. Even the bad opinions, it means I am somehow in people’s heads. Briefly, no doubt, but there. Considering that I just assume that when I’ve left a room, I am gone from people’s minds, I am warmed by all this. Warmed by English or Geography, warmed by it all.

Only, they’re wrong. How can they be so wrong? I’m not a professor or a lecturer or an adult: I am 17 and I haven’t done anything yet.

That is a big, recurring thing with me that does not need a 50th birthday to be in my mind: the sense that I have only just started, that I have so much to do and, yes, not a giant amount of time left in which to do it.

So clearly I should get on with it, shouldn’t I? Except I wanted to tell you something. On my birthday I will be in Paris, my other favourite place in the world and while I get that these are not great times for the city, the time and the space means a lot to me.

And so does this. When I remember my 50th, it will be a memory of me crouching down to look you in the face and telling me that I will always remember talking to you right here.

So I was using the new iPad Pro the other day and was handed the new Apple Pencil. I thought this was a sily name for a stylus but no, it’s the right name. Maybe because it was handed to me before I asked, maybe because my mind was on trying out the Smart Keyboard instead, I said thank you and scribbled something on the iPad’s screen. That’s nice. And then took a moment and a blink realise that it wasn’t paper and I wasn’t holding an actual pencil. This new device is that transparant, is that natural and normal. Immediately.

You know how parcel delivery firms get to sign your name on their touch screen devices and the entire world recognises that no one will ever recognise that scrawl as being yours or anyone else’s? I wrote my signature and it was my signature. It was terrible and awful and embarrassing, but it was precisely my signature.

It’s just that somehow this makes me want to confess to you something about the terrible and the awful handwriting. It makes me want to get something off my chest and maybe even atone for it. Maybe it’s doing that writing on the iPad Pro, maybe it’s the news of Terry Wogan having to miss Children in Need for the first time since the 1980s, but I minded today of my handwriting.

Specifically of my handwriting during Children in Need. I can’t remember the year now but the odds are that it was late 1980s or early 1990s and I got invited to work on Children in Need at BBC Pebble Mill. Can you imagine the thrill of being included at the heart of this in the MIdlands? I was giddy.

All I did was sit in Pebble Mill taking pledge calls. I can’t remember where in the building, I can’t picture any detail, except I can hear the voice of a caller saying she’d pledge £10 if someone would publish her book. There’s a thing with the BBC that everyone pays the licence fee so everyone pays for this service so you can’t be rude or even curt with anyone. But on Children in Need night, she was taking up time that another caller could’ve been using to give us their credit card numbers.

Or in theory they could. My other memory of that first night, apart from a great sense of becoming bone tired by the end of it, is of a producer taking me to one side. Oh, this is decades ago now and the agony of telling you this.

She patiently explained that if we can’t read the credit card numbers, we can’t get money from them. And she patiently explained getting money was the entire point of the charity night. You could bristle at her patiently explaining, you could resent being treated as an imbecile – but I couldn’t disagree that my handwriting was that bad and I deserved every syllable.

There you go. My handwriting cost the BBC some money. Let’s go further: my handwriting lowered the total, stopped Children in Need doing all it hoped. Let’s not go so far as to say that lives could’ve been saved if I my 9 was decipherable from my 7. Please.

I was asked back the next year but they kept me off the phones. Anyway. To donate to Children in Need without risking your credit card to me or any other scribbler, go online here.

Last week I had a lifetime ambition fulfilled when drama I wrote was aired on BBC Radio. What I didn’t realise when I told you this was that there was a second ambition fulfilled – and that it throws me back to an ambition I had in the 1990s.

Specifically this. I can picture myself walking down a street reading the latest issue of Radio Times which had The Simpsons on the cover and a feature on the inside about the new RT website. I was deeply, gratingly self-kickingly disappointed: given what I knew and what I was doing, that was the website I should’ve been working on and I’d missed it. That was 1996 and as it happens, the website missed its launch date by a week. The things you remember, eh?

Within a year, I think, certainly not much more than that, I was working on that website. That meant working with the website team but also with the magazine: I can very clearly picture the first editorial meeting I sat in. It was in a boardroom that no longer exists – wait, I worked in BBC Pebble Mill and they knocked it down, I worked in BBC Television Centre and they knocked it down. This was BBC Woodlands and it was demolished years ago.

I’m not going to think about that. Woodlands was the one that deserved to be demolished. Leave it at that. But before the wrecking balls came, there were these regular meetings in a board room that had glass cabinets holding all of Radio Times. All of it. Bound copies going back to 1923. It was a marvellous little meeting room. Not an exciting one really, have a look for yourself.

I have no idea whose water bottle that is. Looks far too healthy to be mine. And the room looks small and dark. But then it was. Nothing special, except for that collection which extends past the camera to maybe six or seven cases, and for the people who’d meet in there. I thought I knew my television drama but, whoa, I had no candles to hold next to this lot.

As part of the work I did get to write bits that went in the magazine, the odd line, I can’t even remember what but nothing that earned me a byline. Until the issue of 25 September – 1 October 1999. I’d written a short piece about websites or something and I can remember sitting on a coach in Victoria Station when I got the call. My then website editor Rebecca phoned to tell me I was getting a byline. She knew how important this was to me.

Still is. I can tell you that date because I have the issue still, sixteen years later. I just turned around at my desk and took it off the shelf to check. That was the first time my name was in Radio Times and it wasn’t the last. Far from it. My most recent was about two weeks ago, I think, so all these years on I still get in there. I’ve been trying to work it out and I can account for at least a thousand bylines over those years.

Lots of things I’m proud to have written, many things that were just ordinary, pedestrian, required-but-not-special, and a few things I’d like to rewrite now.

I just have to say that I’ve got a bit used to having bylines in this magazine, I am used to seeing my name there. Until last week.

Last week it was an enormous, enormous jolt seeing my name. Because for the first time, my name wasn’t next to a Radio Times article I’d written, it was in the description of a programme in the magazine’s listings pages. Doctor Who: Doing Time got a little paragraph in the radio pages and there I am.

Here I am.

I didn’t expect that. As comprehensive as Radio Times is – show me any other magazine that covers all these channels in such detail, especially the radio ones – my Doctor Who was airing on a digital-only station. I didn’t think about it but if I had done, I’d have reckoned the listing would read “18:00 Doctor Who” and that would be that. Instead, I got that full paragraph.

Alan Plater once said in an interview that it was a big moment getting his name in Radio Times. He said it was a big psychological moment for all writers, it meant something. All these years later, and in a rather smaller way than Alan ever did, I got listed in RT for my drama and yes. It means something big to me.

So does this. The magazine is of course very pressed for space but they chose to give room for this listing and they chose to because it was me. I emailed to say how gigantic a moment this was for me and they wrote back saying they’d been thrilled I had a radio drama on. Laurence Joyce, David Oppedisano and Jane Anderson. They told me this and I put my hand to my chest. So touched.

I’m a scriptwriter, I’m a radio man and I am a drama nut. The grail for me is writing drama for BBC Radio and I have been trying to do this for a very long time. You can’t believe how close I’ve come and I can well believe how far I’ve come in my writing through every single attempt.

And now as I write this to you, it’s happening tomorrow.

William Gallagher’s Doctor Who: Doing Time on BBC Radio 4 Extra

Doctor Who: Doing Time on BBC Radio 4 Extra. Saturday 24 October 2015 at 18:00 and then again at midnight.

Forget for a moment how much this means to me, I am tickled red that it is all a very Doctor Who timey-wimey kind of thing. For the piece that will be broadcast for the first time tomorrow was made five years ago. It is now the very first drama I have on BBC Radio and back then it was the very first audio drama I’d done. Doctor Who: Doing Time is a Big Finish production and I went from this one to a series of two-hour long audio stories that have become my favourite writing job.

Big Finish makes Doctor Who under licence from the BBC and though the stories are made for CD and download, they often then go on to BBC Radio 4 Extra. This is just the first time it’s happened with one of mine.

Five years ago the download version of Doing Time was released very late one night. Angela and I listened to it here with the lights off and the sound pouring into my soul. Tomorrow I’ll be tuning in to BBC Radio 4 Extra at 18:00 and quite possibly again at midnight for the repeat. My first-ever BBC Radio repeat.

It is not three years since my first book came out, it is not. T’isn’t. And it is therefore not three years since I got its cover framed. But it’s very close to three years and that’s why this week I finally put it up on the wall. I did put it up there to mark that I was finally doing things I’d intended to ages ago – both literally in terms of banging that picture hook into the wall like I said I would in 2012 and figuratively in that I’ve just finished my seventh book.

But you can do things and not realise what you’ve done until you step back and look at it. Or in this case, when you step back and look just a little bit to the left.

My first book was BFI TV Classics: The Beiderbecke Affair and was a non-fiction piece about Alan Plater’s famous, even beloved TV drama. I proposed the book to the British Film Institute a few months after Alan died in 2010 and though I meant what I told them about why The Beiderbecke Affair warranted coverage, I did also have in mind that I wanted to write it for Alan. I could never do a biography of the man, but I could do a biography of this particular show.

The Beiderbecke Affair means a lot to many people and for me it’s special because it’s how I got to meet Alan and his wife Shirley Rubinstein. But Alan wrote an astonishing number of TV shows, stage plays, radio drama, films and novels and there are many special titles in that career. I’ve re-read his simple, quiet, strong novel Misterioso twenty times since it came out in the 1980s. And if that whole book and the entirety of The Beiderbecke Affair mean a lot to me, there is a single moment in another of his works that always makes me cry.

It isn’t sad. I might well cry at a sad thing, I’m not saying I definitely wouldn’t, but there are just little pixels of perfection in drama that affect me down to my core.

Alan Plater adapted Olivia Manning’s excellent Fortunes of War books into what was at the time the most expensive BBC television drama ever made. It’s the one where Emma Thompson met Kenneth Branagh. It’s the one where Ronald Pickup played Prince Yakimov while waiting to star as the baddie in a Doctor Who radio drama of mine 25 years later.

You need to see the entire series to be taken to the right spot for this key moment but the key moment is the final exchange of dialogue between the characters Harriet and Guy Pringle. It moved me in the 1980s, it moved me when I read the books, it has moved me every time since. And during my research for The Beiderbecke Affair, I found Alan’s scripts plus his notes on Fortunes of War.

He set out his stall not only of how he intended to dramatise the novels but specifically why. He wanted to keep in the forefront of his mind and the minds of everyone involved in the production exactly why this story was worth doing. And that reason came down to one single line in the novels. It’s the same line.

I like that he was as affected by that line as I was. I like the idea of him crafting hours upon hours of television drama all to take us to the same moment that moved him in the books.

I like this so much that even while I was still deep in the research for my book, I photographed that final page of his Fortunes of War script. Photographed it, blew it up to A1 size, had it framed and immediately put it on my wall. I then photographed that photograph and put it on Facebook, as you do.

You can’t make out the text, can you? Here’s the photo I took on my iPhone while in the Hull History Archives and their collection of Plater documents. The world being how it is now, I can tell you that I read that page and took this shot at 15:16 on 11 July 2011.

That’s the page of script that has stood up there on my living room wall for many years. Want to see how it turned out in the show? I can’t embed the clip but have a look at this final scene – and then go buy the whole series to get to that end moment the way you should.

Now look what I did this week. Unthinkingly. I actually hung up several pictures of various things that I’ve been meaning to for ages and I promise that they are neatly, aesthetically arranged and balanced and it is all very nice – but look what I did.

I put my Beiderbecke book cover up on the wall next to Alan’s Fortunes of War script. I did it because it was the right spot for it – I just didn’t 100% understand that it really was the right spot. I did not realise what I’d done until I stepped back to check it was even and then registered the two framed pictures together.

Yes, I may have had a little damp-eyed moment there.

I do quite a lot of work in schools now and I realise today that I have been lying pretty much every time I’ve gone in. Because at some point when I’m talking to the teachers, occasionally when I’m talking with the pupils, I will recount the reason I do this.

Which goes thisaway. When I was at school, my careers teacher laughed at me for wanting to be a writer. I’ve said this before, in case you’ve come to this through some strange Google search that has got you all my mentions of this instead of whatever career laughing advice you were actually looking for.

This fella, whoever he was, laughed at me and got the class to laugh too. It did damage.

What would’ve countered that was if the school had got a writer in to talk to us. Any writer. Even me. Seeing that writing is something possible as a job, that would’ve made a big difference. That’s why I go in. Also, I get paid.

So far, so true, not a word of a lie. The lie comes from how I then explain I went the wrong way instead. I went into computers and actually I still usually think it was the wrong way but it wasn’t half a handy wrong way to go. I worked hard to get out of computers, I got into writing about computers and then I worked hard to get out of writing about computers. Come on, one grey box after another. I’m asleep at the thought.

Flash forward a lot of years and there is nothing grey, nothing boring and if I’m falling asleep it is because I am so bleedin’ tired. But there is computing. Again.

For the past month or so I’ve been writing software reviews for MacNN.com, the Macintosh News Network. I’ve done some sixty pieces for them and I’ve had a ball. Old computing muscles come back and they join new writing ones: I don’t know if you’d like my review writing but I get to do things that are important to me. Specifically this: MacNN feels the same way I do about why one reviews things. There’s never going to be a geek-out analysis where I conclude that X is better than Y because it’s a pixel faster or a megabyte bigger.

Instead, MacNN is all about what does the bloody software do, is it any good at it, and who precisely will benefit? That attitude permeates the entire process starting with what gets picked to review. I should’ve made notes about this but at a guess, I’d say maybe 70% of my reviews have been positive because 70% of them were of software that did something well and useful. Might be a really obscure thing, might not be anything I have the slightest interest in myself, but they do something good for someone.

The key is someone. I think that thinking about people is more interesting than thinking about computers. Thinking who something would be for is certainly like marketing but I think that it’s also like drama. I don’t want to draw too contorted a conclusion here but the best software I’ve used has been really clear about who its audience is.

Just as with drama, when that audience happens to be me, I don’t just like the software, it grabs me. I become evangelical about it. It matters to me.

And the fact that some one or some few people working somewhere in the world can make something, can create something that matters to others, that is drama.

Despite all the other things I’m doing now, not one of which I’d trade you for, there is a certain portion of my week that is back being devoted to computers and computing and software. I have been wondering why I don’t feel like it’s a regression since I previously associated software with my very earliest writing days. The reason is that while the role and the importance of software hasn’t changed since I used to do this, I have. I’ve changed a lot.

The fact that I went into computers does not mean I went the wrong way. I just went a certain way. And in a Mobius-strip like fashion, it has led me on to drama in human and computer form.

You can go back, you just aren’t the same you when you get there.